Whatever

Love stories, politics, yodeling, and more: Frameline 34 short takes

Sue Vaughan
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2
Love stories, politics, yodeling, and more: Frameline 34 short takes

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (James Kent, UK, 2010) A BBC production set in the northern English countryside of the early 19th century, James Kent’s The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister depicts the amatory adventures of a gentlewoman landowner (Maxine Peake) in search of a “female companion” with whom to live out her days. The narrative is somewhat breathless, the seductions equally so and yet a bit anemic, and our strong-willed, fearless heroine is admirable without being entirely engaging. Still, besides tapping into the Jane Austen slash fiction demographic, this tale of pre-Victorian bodice ripping and skirt lifting among the female gentry offers the considerable thrill of being adapted from the actual secret diaries of the titular Miss Lister, decoded by a biographer 150 years after her death. A documentary in the festival, Matthew Hill’s The Real Anne Lister, offers a complementary version of her story. Thurs/17, 7 p.m., Castro. (Lynn Rapoport)

I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2009) The title I Killed My Mother suggests a different kind of movie from what it actually is. But that’s OK: though not a crime thriller, the film is still a tightly wound, high stakes drama. Writer-director Xavier Dolan stars as Hubert, the angsty son of the titular mother. When you consider that Dolan’s script is autobiographical — and that he was only 20 when the film was made — his performance becomes all the more impressive. As the mother, Chantale, Anne Dorval is also a force to be reckoned with. Despite its presence as part of a queer film festival, I Killed My Mother is not all that “gay” in the traditional “gay movie” sense. Hubert’s relationship with Antonin (François Arnaud) is secondary — what’s important is how his refusal to share it with his mother affects her. That helps make the movie a refreshing alternative to many more mainstream offerings. Sat/19, 6:45 p.m., Castro. (Louis Peitzman)

The Owls (Cheryl Dunye, USA, 2010) Expectations are high for The Owls: writer-director Cheryl Dunye again collaborates with Guinevere Turner, V.S. Brodie, and other notable queer performers — you can’t not think of classics like Go Fish (1994) and The Watermelon Woman (1996). The Owls isn’t quite at that level, but it’s a fairly thought-provoking piece. Four middle-aged lesbians — played by Dunye, Turner, Brodie, and Lisa Gornick — accidentally kill a younger lesbian and try to cover up the murder. Their ages are central: the fear of getting older is a major thematic concern. So, too, ideas of gender identity, with the introduction of androgynous Skye (Skyler Cooper). But Dunye breaks the fourth wall, staging her film as a pseudo-mockumentary with both the characters and the actors offering commentary. At just over an hour, The Owls can’t sustain all the back-and-forth, and too many intriguing ideas are left unfinished. Fri/18, 7 p.m., Castro. (Peitzman)

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls (Leanne Pooley, New Zealand, 2009) It’s hard to name an American equivalent of New Zealand’s Topp Twins — a folk-singing, comedy-slinging, cross-dressing duo who’re the biggest Kiwi stars you’ve never heard of (but may be just as beloved as, say, Peter Jackson in their homeland). Recent inductees in the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, the fiftysomething Jools and Lynda, both lesbians, sing country-tinged tunes that slide easily from broad and goofy (with an array of costumed personas) to extremely political, sounding off on LGBT and Maori rights, among other topics. Even if you’re not a fan of their musical style, it’s undeniable that their identical voices make for some stirring harmonies, and their optimism, even when a serious illness strikes, is inspiring. This doc — which combines interviews, home movies, and performance footage — will surely earn them scores of new stateside fans. Sun/20, 3:45 p.m., Castro. (Cheryl Eddy)

Out of the Blue (Alain Tasma, France, 2007) Wearily preparing for a dinner party on a day they’ve both forgotten is their anniversary, Marion (Mireille Perrier) suddenly realizes her 22-year-marriage to Paul (Robin Renucci) is dead. Her decision to end it, however, comes as an infuriating surprise to him and a destabilizing one to their teenage daughter Justine (Chloé Coulloud). They all get quite a surprise when Marion’s new friendship with younger, flamenco-dancing female antiques dealer Claude (Rachida Brakni) turns into something more. This latest in a long line of very good French made-for-TV dramas at Frameline typically handles its complex load of familial and sexual issues with grace and intelligence, if with an occasional excess of high dramatics. Sun/20, 9:30 p.m., Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

The Consul of Sodom (Sigfrid Monleón, Spain, 2009) Late Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma was many things: an intellectual, aesthete, hedonist, bohemian, discotheque owner, Communist sympathizer (though the Party wouldn’t have him), publisher, more-or-less out gay man, and an occasional lover of flamboyant women like Bel (played by pop singer Bimba Bose). Sheltered by wealth and privilege — to the extent possible in Franco’s Spain — he dabbled in ghetto flesh, sometimes on trips abroad for his family’s tobacco family. As portrayed by actor Jordi Mollá and director Sigfrid Monleon, he’s a mixture of arrogance,
compassion, self-destruction, and shark-like perpetual motion. Seldom missing a chance to drop some full-frontal nudity or a kitschy period song (from 1950s to 80s), this biographical drama — which has been decried as overly sensationalized by some Spanish cultural watchdogs, including a few of the subject’s surviving cronies — is a shamelessly flamboyant and entertaining portrait of a life lived large. Sun/20, 9:30 p.m., Castro. (Harvey)

Dzi Croquettes (Tatiana Issa and Raphael Alvarez, Brazil, 2009) Whatever magic fairy dust fuelled the Cockettes’ glitter-covered hippy drag must’ve drifted down south to Brazil to inspire the similarly named Dzi Croquettes. Of course, that’s not the real origin of the equally colorful cabaret troupe, whose fantastic story is told in Raphael Alvarez and Tatiana Issa’s riveting and rollicking documentary. Blending Ziegfeld Follies-style glamour with agitprop, Dzi Croquettes were more polished and more overtly political than their North American sisters; something which frequently landed the group in hot water with José Sarney’s dictatorship. Finding an unlikely and unexpected advocate in Liza Minnelli, Dzi Croquettes fled their homeland in the mid 70s, becoming the unexpected toast of Europe until AIDS began to take its toll. Filled with delightful archival footage and insightful interviews with alumni, Dzi Croquettes is a joyful affirmation of the power of art (and a feathered boa or two) to effect positive change. Mon/21, 11 a.m., Castro. (Matt Sussman)

Brotherhood (Nicolo Donato, Denmark, 2009) It’s hard to feel much sympathy for neo-Nazis. Perhaps that goes without saying, but Danish film Brotherhood asks us to do just that: Lars (Thure Lindhardt) and Jimmy (David Dencik) meet in the service of Hitler’s ideals, then find themselves drawn to each other. As they struggle to come to terms with their attraction, we’re supposed to care. Fat chance. Although Lars initially disproves of the neo-Nazis, he becomes quickly (read: unrealistically) interested in their cause. Soon, he’s writing his own anti-Pakistani propaganda. And Jimmy is devoted to the movement from the get-go, even condemning “faggots” despite his own same-sex attraction. Maybe I’d feel differently if either Lars showed any sign of internal conflict. Neither displays a sense of regret over being a racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic asshole. They’re down with the gay but only in relation to each other. Who gives a crap if these two make it work? Mon/21, 9:30 p.m., Castro. (Peitzman)

Plan B (Marco Berger, Argentina, 2009) It’s the oldest story in the book: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy seduces girl’s new boyfriend. OK, maybe not, but the set-up isn’t entirely unheard of either. It’s a credit to Plan B’s sharp aesthetic and strong performances that it still feels fresh. The Argentinean export stars Manuel Vignau as Bruno. When his girlfriend Laura (Mercedes Quinteros) breaks up with him, he decides to get revenge by making his move on Laura’s supposedly bisexual boyfriend Pablo (Lucas Ferraro). If you’ve seen any romantic comedy ever, you know that what begins as a game for Bruno becomes true love. But Plan B doesn’t go the comedy route, and instead offers a compelling, somewhat subtle drama. The love affair is slow but well-paced, so that the inevitable conclusion feels earned and completely satisfying. Mon/21, 9:30 p.m., Elmwood; June 24, 6:30 p.m., Victoria. (Peitzman)

Undertow (Javier Fuentes-León, Peru, 2009) This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret, passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land- and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point one character dies, and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow’s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. Tues/22, 7 p.m., Castro. (Harvey)

Children of God (Kareem J. Mortimer, Bahamas, 2009) Likely the first gay-themed film not just shot in but produced by the Bahamas, Kareem J. Mortimer’s first feature is an occasionally heavy-handed but consistently engrossing mix of romance, religion, and homophobia. Johnny (Johnny Ferro) is a withdrawn Nassau art student who’s a target of gay taunts and bashers. A teacher who says his paintings lack emotion gives him keys to her cottage on the “ultimate landscape” of isle Eleuthera, where he promptly meets the aggressively friendly and inquisitive Romeo (Stephen Tyrone Williams). Also headed here is Lena (Margaret Laurena Kemp), righteous wife of pastor Ralph (Ralph Ford), with whom she shares a strong penchant to publicly denounce the moral threat of “the gays.” She has, however, just left her husband after he furiously denied giving her VD — to confess might reveal that he is, in fact, playing around on the downlow. That’s just the starting point for a complicated, perhaps over-ambitious but sometimes powerfully sensual and poignant film that is definitely amongst this year’s Frameline highlights. June 23, 9:30 p.m., Castro. (Harvey)

Spring Fever (Lou Ye, China, 2009) Shot surreptitiously and chock full of gay sex, Chinese director Lou Ye’s latest film isn’t likely to earn him any additional slack from Chinese government censors (his 2006 film, Summer Palace, got him banned from filmmaking for five years after he failed to preview it before it screened at Cannes). Using hand-held cameras, public settings, and natural lighting, Lou follows Wang Ping (Wu Wei), who’s been having a passionate, messy affair with travel agent Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao). Things get more complicated when the snoop Wang’s wife hires to follow her closeted husband winds up pursuing the two men in ways he never imagined. What Spring Fever lacks in continuity and psychological depth, it makes up for with sexual candor and a genuine frisson of risk, given the secretive conditions under which it was made. That thrill doesn’t quite last through the film’s duration, but as a document of defiance Spring Fever is commendable. June 24, 9:30 p.m., Castro. (Sussman)

The String (Medhi Ben Attia, France/Belgium, 2010) The cross-cultural coming out drama is a perennial at LGBT film festivals, but Medhi Ben Attia’s assured debut feature presents a familiar tale in new surroundings with flashes of charm. Handsome architect Malik (Antonin Stahly) returns to his posh, Tunisian homestead from France to lay his father to rest, fully intent on coming out to his overly doting, oblivious mother (former Fellini muse Claudia Cardinale). But when he falls for hunky house-boy Bilal (Salim Kechiouche), he finds that the truth has a way of outing itself. Although Attia unspools his film’s titular metaphor rather quickly (having hid his true feelings for so long, Malik feels continuously “tied-up” by a piece of imaginary string), he deserves credit for his nuanced portrayal of gay life in the Maghreb and his inspired casting of Cardinale, who can’t help but radiate an Auntie Mame-ish joie de vivre even when the script calls for “disappointed” over “daffy.” June 25, 7 p.m., Victoria. (Sussman)

Hideaway (Francois Ozon, France, 2009) The very French insouciance with which Francois Ozon usually treats his characters and narratives sometimes makes a film seem perilously slight — yet more often than not he manages to pull off a surprising climactic resonance. Which is the case with this latest. When they both overdose on heroin, Mousse (Isabelle Carré) wakes up pregnant in the hospital — but her boyfriend doesn’t wake at all. Declining his mother’s offer to pay for an abortion, she retreats to a friend’s empty seaside chateau. There she gets an unexpected visitor in Raul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), her late lover’s surviving sibling. Their prickly interplay (and his affair with a local handyman) sometimes seems to be drifting pleasantly nowhere in particular — yet it does end up somewhere, rather poignantly. June 25, 9:30 p.m., Castro. (Harvey)

From Beginning to End (Aluízio Abranches, Brazil/Argentina/Spain, 2009) Just about the definition of upscale gay male softcore, this “big brother” fantasy has nothing to do with George Orwell. Its protagonists are inseparable Brazilian half-brothers (played as adults by Joao Gabriel Vasconcellos and Rafael Cardoso) whose bond caves in to the physical once parental boundaries are removed by mom’s death. This over-the-top kinship is tested when the younger bro is invited to train as a swimmer in the Olympics … in Russia. Near-plotless and borderline senseless, this shamelessly sexy tale from The Three Marias (2002) director Aluízio Abranches succeeds as a guilty pleasure on the sheer, convincing ardor he and his actors bring to their “taboo” love story. June 26, 6 p.m., Castro. (Harvey)

Howl (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, USA, 2010) Beatniks get the Mad Men treatment — with a cast that includes that AMC hit’s Jon Hamm, playing the lawyer who defended the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s quintessential rebel yell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, against obscenity charges in San Francisco’s most celebrated trial of the 1950s. It’s fun to see that anally nostalgic aesthetic translated to ramshackle North Beach apartments and sophomoric, filthy-mouthed literary heroes. Not so much fun: the overly literal animation chosen by the directors (famed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman). Yes, parts of “Howl,” the poem, are animated — unfortunately in a style that calls to mind bad 1980s French Canadian pseudo-spiritual arthouse schlock. Still, this brief slice of beats is juicy, confined to the trial and the tale of Ginsberg’s poetic and sexual awakening. James Franco is wonderful as the young, self-obsessed, epically needy yet still irresistible crank. It was the first time I found myself wishing to see more of Ginsberg naked. June 27, 7:30 p.m., Castro. (Marke B.)

Frameline34: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival
June 17-27, most shows $8-15
Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk
www.frameline.org

Frameline short takes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Frameline short takes

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (James Kent, UK, 2010) A BBC production set in the northern English countryside of the early 19th century, James Kent’s The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister depicts the amatory adventures of a gentlewoman landowner (Maxine Peake) in search of a “female companion” with whom to live out her days. The narrative is somewhat breathless, the seductions equally so and yet a bit anemic, and our strong-willed, fearless heroine is admirable without being entirely engaging. Still, besides tapping into the Jane Austen slash fiction demographic, this tale of pre-Victorian bodice ripping and skirt lifting among the female gentry offers the considerable thrill of being adapted from the actual secret diaries of the titular Miss Lister, decoded by a biographer 150 years after her death. A documentary in the festival, Matthew Hill’s The Real Anne Lister, offers a complementary version of her story. Thurs/17, 7 p.m., Castro. (Lynn Rapoport)

The Owls (Cheryl Dunye, USA, 2010) Expectations are high for The Owls: writer-director Cheryl Dunye again collaborates with Guinevere Turner, V.S. Brodie, and other notable queer performers —compels you to think of classics like Go Fish (1994) and The Watermelon Woman (1996). The Owls isn’t quite at that level, but it’s a fairly thought-provoking piece. Four middle-aged lesbians — played by Dunye, Turner, Brodie, and Lisa Gornick — accidentally kill a younger lesbian and try to cover up the murder. Their ages are central: the fear of getting older is a major thematic concern. So, too, ideas of gender identity, with the introduction of androgynous Skye (Skyler Cooper). But Dunye breaks the fourth wall, staging her film as a pseudo-mockumentary with both the characters and the actors offering commentary. At just over an hour, The Owls can’t sustain all the back-and-forth, and too many intriguing ideas are left unfinished. Fri/18, 7 p.m., Castro. (Louis Peitzman)

Dzi Croquettes (Tatiana Issa and Raphael Alvarez, Brazil, 2009) Whatever magic fairy dust fuelled The Cockettes’ glitter-covered hippy drag must’ve drifted down south to Brazil to inspire the similarly named Dzi Croquettes. Of course, that’s not the real origin of the equally colorful cabaret troupe, whose fantastic story is told in Raphael Alvarez and Tatiana Issa’s riveting and rollicking documentary. Blending Ziegfeld Follies-style glamour with agitprop, Dzi Croquettes were more polished and more overtly political than their North American sisters; something which frequently landed the group in hot water with José Sarney’s dictatorship. Finding an unlikely and unexpected advocate in Liza Minnelli, Dzi Croquettes fled their homeland in the mid 1970s, becoming the unexpected toast of Europe until AIDS began to take its toll. Filled with delightful archival footage and insightful interviews with alumni, Dzi Croquettes is a joyful affirmation of the power of art (and a feathered boa or two) to effect positive change. Mon/21, 11 a.m., Castro. (Matt Sussman)

Undertow (Javier Fuentes-León, Peru, 2009) This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point, one character dies and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow‘s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. Tues/22, 7 p.m., Castro. (Dennis Harvey)

Howl (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, USA, 2010) Beatniks get the Mad Men treatment — with a cast that includes that AMC hit’s Jon Hamm, playing the lawyer who defended the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s quintessential rebel yell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, against obscenity charges in San Francisco’s most celebrated trial of the 1950s. It’s fun to see that anally nostalgic aesthetic translated to ramshackle North Beach apartments and sophomoric, filthy-mouthed literary heroes. Not so much fun: the overly literal animation chosen by the directors (famed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman). Yes, parts of “Howl,” the poem, are animated — unfortunately in a style that calls to mind bad 1980s French Canadian pseudospiritual arthouse schlock. Still, this brief slice of beats is juicy, confined to the trial and the tale of Ginsberg’s poetic and sexual awakening. James Franco is wonderful as the young, self-obsessed, epically needy yet still irresistible crank. It was the first time I found myself wishing to see more of Ginsberg naked. June 27, 7:30 p.m., Castro. (Marke B.)

FRAMELINE34: SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL

June 17–27, most shows $8–$15

Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk.

www.frameline.org

Film listings

David Talbot
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0

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

FRAMELINE34

The 34th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 17-27 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $8-15) can be purchased at www.frameline.org. All times pm unless otherwise noted.

THURS/17

Castro The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister 7. Off World 10.

FRI/18

Castro The Real Anne Lister noon. "Curious Thing" (shorts program) 1:45. Sasha 4:30. The Owls 7. Grown Up Movie Star 9:30.

Roxie "Hustlers and Exhibitionists: Andy Warhol Retrospective" 7. "Bi Request" (shorts program) 9:30.

Victoria 8: The Mormon Proposition 7. Open 9:30.

SAT/19

Castro "Fun in Boys’ Shorts" (shorts program) 11am. "Fun in Girls’ Shorts" (shorts program) 1:30. Elvis and Madona 4. I Killed My Mother 6:45. A Marine Story 9:30.

Roxie Mississippi Queen 11am. On These Shoulders We Stand 1:30. Postcard to Daddy 4. Hooters 6:30. "Sex, Leather Jackets, and Hustlers: Andy Warhol Retrospective" 9:30.

Victoria "Trans Francisco" (shorts program) 11am. The Adonis Factor 2. "Gay Aesthetics and Iconography in the Films of Andy Warhol" (illustrated talk) 4:15. Arias With a Twist 6:30. The Man Who Loved Yngve 9:30.

SUN/20

Castro "Dottie’s Magic Pockets Live!" 11am. We Were Here: Voices From the AIDS Years in San Francisco 1. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls 3:45. The Four Faced Liar 6:30. The Consul of Sodom 9:30.

Roxie Mountains That Take Wing 11am. "Skinnyfat" (shorts program) 1:45. "Generations: Youth and Elders Making Movies" (shorts program) 4:15. Bear Nation 6:45. Out of the Blue 9:30.

Victoria Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride 11am. Paulista 1:30. "F**king Traditional Values: Queer Women of Color Shorts" (shorts program) 4:15. William S. Burroughs: The Man Within 7. The Queer X Show 9:30.

MON/21

Castro Dzi Croquettes 11am. Swimming with Lesbians 2. Off World 4. The Last Summer of La Boyita 7. Brotherhood 9:30.

Roxie New York Memories 7. "Are You Krazy?" (shorts program) 9:30.

Victoria Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance 7. My Normal 9:30.

Elmwood The Sea Purple 7. Plan B 9:30.

TUES/22

Castro The Motionless 11am. Sex in an Epidemic 1:15. Is It Just Me? 3:45. Undertow 7. Baby Jane? 9:45.

Roxie Gayby 7. One Night 9:30.

Victoria The Sisters 7. Eyes Wide Open 9:30.

Elmwood William S. Burroughs: The Man Within 7. The Fish Child 9:30.

OPENING

Bluebeard Writer-director Catherine Breillat returns to her 2001 Fat Girl‘s motifs of troubled sisterhood and the adolescent female imagination in this stealthy adaptation of Charles Perrault’s pathological fairy tale. Bluebeard‘s parable of murder coiled around marriage resonates rather obviously with Breillat’s own signature themes, but she avoids obviousness by serving the punishing logic of Perrault’s story chilled. That Breillat is concerned with how the fairy tale is experienced, and specifically the adolescent desires it awakens, is clear from the frame narrative in which two sisters (named autobiographically) ritualistically read "Bluebeard," both of them knowing it (and each other’s reactions) by heart. Their dualities mirror those of the sisters trapped inside the story, the younger of whom, prone to romantic fantasies of castles and marooned by her father’s death, joins Bluebeard in unholy matrimony. Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) may be a sprite next to the titular ogre (Dominique Thomas), but never underestimate the appetite of a younger sibling. Breillat’s visual style is unassuming in its tableaus, but her mastery of point-of-view and restricted narration brings great insight to the mechanisms of the fairy tale. Créton conjures the younger girl’s familiar mix of confidence and innocence with something like joy, while Thomas plays Bluebeard as a tender foil. He appears nearly forlorn when he uncovers his young wife’s fateful act of disobedience and realizes he will now and forever carry out the terrible deed we expect of him. A sharp turn provides a different moral than we might expect, and while it’s not so self-consciously shocking an ending as Fat Girl‘s, it inscribes the birth of a storyteller named Catherine with far greater piquancy.(1:20) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Goldberg)

*Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky Revered for the innovative fashion house that set the bar for style and was always knocked off but never cut prices for the real deal (and still sniffs at online clothing sales), Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel gets her second biopic, as an artist on par with composer Igor Stravinsky in this rhapsodically sensuous love letter to an unlikely romance. It opens with the designer and future branding legend (depicted with burning eyes and pantherine mystery by Anna Mouglalis) attending the controversial, riot-starting 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Paris. Recognizing Stravinsky (a viral avant-garde stud-muffin in the hands of Mads Mikkelsen, last in deadlocks and warrior face in Clash of the Titans) as a simpatico radical spirit, Chanel lends her house to the composer. He comes with considerable baggage: a slew of children and a consumptive wife, Katarina (Elena Morozova). Morozova’s performance as the angel-faced earth mother scorned, so blatantly disrespected by the rad lovers madly getting down on the music-room carpet, almost steals the show, but then the house-porn fabulosity of the recreated Chanel villa in Garches — a symbol of their hermetic attraction and shot like a seductive, claustrophobic, black-and-white deco womb — takes over, and we’re back in the thick of CoGor’s somewhat inexplicable affair once again. (1:55) Shattuck. (Chun)

Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then Before it was torn down by a new landowner, multimedia artist Brent Green went to visit the house built by late Kentucky hardware store clerk Leonard Wood — a poor man’s Winchester Mystery House, endlessly elaborated with newly knocked-down walls and weird handmade detailing. This obsessive one-man construction effort was commenced as a hopeful "healing machine" for its other resident, his beloved wife Mary, and continued after her death from cancer. Green built his own backyard replica of the house for this experimental first feature, a sort of live-action stop motion movie whose characters like move like puppets in stuttering frame jumps, with animation, dubbed occasional dialogue, crude intertitles, and some gently fantastical imagery adding to its dreamlike aura. Mary (played by Donna K.) makes a curious living breeding and selling wild bird eggs; Leonard (Michael McGinley), among his other callings, composes and records droning minimalist "church music." They met, purportedly, in a car crash. Green’s strangle-voiced blank verse narration and filmic folk-art affectations can sometimes make Gravity just sit there — certainly it feels longer than its 75 minutes. But it also has an off-center lyricism that in the end serves honorably this story of profound love between two very odd people. The director (who currently has an installation across the street at the Berkeley Art Museum) will appear at this one-night Pacific Film Archive screening. (1:20) Pacific Film Archive. (Harvey)

Jonah Hex Josh Brolin and Megan Fox star in this Wild West-set graphic novel adaptation. (1:81) Elmwood.

Lovers of Hate Living out of his car after being dumped by Diana (Heather Kafka), perpetually dour Rudy (Chris Doubek) can hardly find a place to take a shower. In stark contrast to his desperate situation, Rudy’s brother Paul (Alex Karpovsky) is a successful children’s fantasy writer, holed up in a borrowed mansion in Utah to work on his next book. Rudy decides to pay his bro an unwelcome surprise visit, but he arrives just behind Diana, who has come to have a serious chat (and also some sex) with Paul. Still in love with Diana, Rudy skulks unnoticed through the tremendous house, playing vengeful voyeur to the new couple’s already rather weird relationship. Lovers of Hate‘s central trinity are not especially nice people, but neither are any of them evil; writer-director Bryan Poyser balances pity and disgust at their painfully human actions, without necessarily making a case for why we care. (1:33) Roxie. (Sam Stander)

*The Oath Laura Poitras’ disturbing documentary is a portrait of two men closely bound to al Qaeda, though only one is interviewed. That would be Abu Jandal, a husband, father, current Yemen taxi driver, erstwhile jihadist operating from Bosnia to Afghanistan, and former chief bodyguard to Osama bin Laden. The off-camera one is his brother-in-law Salim Hamdan, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner from late 2001 whom he’d recruited as bin Laden’s driver-mechanic. Was Salim merely a for-hire worker with no knowledge of the 9/11 conspiracy or other terrorist actions? Was his lengthy imprisonment an example of the War on Terror’s flaunting of legal conventions? (After Hamdan won a Supreme Court victory, Congress invented a whole new kind of charge — "material support to terrorism" — to keep him in custody.) These are questions more pondered than answered here. We do, however, get a big close-up dose of Jandal, who laments the harm he might have done his bro-in-law while still counseling young Muslim Yemenites and his own barely-past-toddler son in jihadist righteousness, not excluding justification of killing Western civilians. He comes off as dangerous and charming, a hustler and braggart. Offering further insight into what makes up (or sculpts) a terrorist mindset is a pre-9/11 clip of an elegant, prissy bin Laden — a salt pillar of airless judgment
sure he’s channeling the intentions of Allah. (1:36) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Sun Behind the Clouds In this doc, the Dalai Lama comments on the 2008 Tibetan demonstrations against Chinese rule. (1:19) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

Toy Story 3 Somehow, it’s terrifying that in this installment, the toy-owning kid is heading off to college. (1:49) Cerrito, Marina.

*Winter’s Bone See "True Grit." (1:40) California, Embarcadero.

ONGOING

The A-Team Why was the original A-Team the most popular band of mercenaries on TV? The estimable chemistry and comedic skills of Mr. T; legit Breakfast at Tiffany‘s star George Peppard; conservative commentator Dwight Schultz; and Dirk Benedict, fresh from his role as the original Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, played a major part, as did the quasi-anti-authoritarian, boyish, blow-’em-up-real-good tone, making it more of a cartoonishly violent kin to MASH than First Blood (1982). The cheeky humor and snappy writing were the real key to The A-Team‘s popularity — the reason impressionable protein units like yours truly tuned in. Director Joe Carnahan (2006’s Smokin’ Aces) and cast seem to have sussed out a bit of that magic, especially when the sun-roasted Bradley Cooper as Faceman and Sharlto Copley as Murdock roll with the what-the-hell non-sequiturs (less sure is the star of last year’s District 9‘s grip on exactly what accent he’s been charged with). But the cinematic version won’t be rehabbing the public’s view of guns-for-hire like Blackwater anytime soon. Liam Neeson lacks the cigar-chomping paternal bravado of Peppard, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson is tasked with the unenviable job of following T time, and the script, complete with the ludicrously elaborate plans and a spark-challenged romance between Cooper and Jessica Biel, is just a rough excuse to watch boys and their toys. (1:57) Cerrito, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

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

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

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

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

*The Full Picture The unusually high proportion of non-native San Franciscans not only underlines our living in a "destination" city, but also suggests that many of us were eager to leave something behind. Certainly it’s no accident The Full Picture’s fraternal protagonists both chose to live here. Yes, it’s a lovely place. It also happens to be 3,000 insulating miles from where they were raised, and where the dragon still dwells. Unfortunately, she can fly: sensible heels clacking militaristically across airport tarmac first clue us to the personality of monster-mother Gretchen Foster (Bettina Devin), who sweetly announces she’s off to visit "my boys" in SF, then breathes fire when that charm fails to secure a first class upgrade. Clearly it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Jon Bowden’s first feature is based on his original play, and this screen incarnation doesn’t entirely leave the whiff of stagecraft behind. It’s smart, fluid, funny, and biting, as well as a nice addition to the roster of movies that really do convey something about living here. (1:20) Roxie. (Harvey)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) Empire, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peter Galvin)

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

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

Holy Rollers Holy Rollers isn’t a movie — it’s a headline stretched out to 90 minutes. Yes, the set-up is worthy of adaptation: Hassidic Jewish kid begins importing ecstasy from Amsterdam. And it’s based on a true story! But the film is far too matter-of-fact, never delving into the important questions that might elevate it past a glorified reenactment. That’s not to say the performances aren’t good. Jesse Eisenberg continues to prove he can do well in leading roles, while supporting actors Justin Bartha and Ari Graynor are both charming, in their own ways. The problem is the material. What is Holy Rollers saying about the war on drugs, or organized religion, or the desire to live above one’s means? Nothing, really. The tone is equally problematic, as it repeatedly fails to find the right blend of comedy and drama. The movie’s major selling point is that it will make you want to visit Amsterdam — you know, if you didn’t already. (1:29) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

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

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

The Karate Kid The most baffling thing about The Karate Kid is its title: little Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) never actually learns karate. He practices kung-fu, an entirely different form of martial arts — you know, from a different country. There’s something obnoxious and absurd about the misnomer: the film seems to suggest that if you’ve seen one Asian culture, you’ve seen them all. That aside, it’s not a bad movie. Smith is mostly pretty likeable, and there’s a definite satisfaction to seeing him grow from bullied weakling to kung-fu star. And Jackie Chan gets to exercise his dramatic chops — he even gets a crying scene! But Karate Kid is a "reboot," the preferred term for the endless stream of unnecessary remakes Hollywood keeps churning out. You can’t help but think about the superior 1984 version. Jaden Smith is no Ralph Macchio, Jackie Chan is no Pat Morita, and kung-fu is no karate. Don’t even get me started on the "jacket on, jacket off" crap. Which, if you say it quickly, sounds a little adult for a PG movie. (2:20) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Killers (1:40) 1000 Van Ness.

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

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

Marmaduke (1:27) 1000 Van Ness.

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve." It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

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

*Ondine You want to believe in mermaids, leprechauns, tooth fairies, and Father Christmas — and director Neil Jordan plays with those hopes, and fears, in this unabashedly romantic fable set in a Irish fishing village. Mullet-ed fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell), dubbed "Circus," thanks to his days as a drinking fool, is the butt of everyone’s jokes till he happens to catch a mysterious girl (Alicja Bachleda) in his net. She calls herself Ondine, shies away from people, and sings in an unknown tongue to the sea, drawing salmon, lobster, and fortune to the fisherman otherwise down on his luck. His precocious daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), is in need of a kidney transplant — and a measure of hope — and she grows convinced that her father’s hidden-away water baby is a selkie, a mythical Celtic sea creature that can shed its seal skin, bond with humans, and make wishes come true. Unfortunately believing in magic doesn’t always make it so, though Ondine gracefully limns that space between belief and reality, squeezing small moments of pleasure and humor from its rough, albeit attractive, characters and absolutely stunning landscapes in scenes beautifully lensed by onetime Wong Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle. (1:43) Albany, Piedmont, Opera Plaza. (Chun)

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

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time It takes serious effort to make a movie with a story dumber than the video game it’s based on. Director Mike Newell somehow accomplishes this feat with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Disneyfied flop that flails clumsily in the PG-13 demilitarized zone, delivering sanitized violence, chaste romance, and dreary drama. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, an urchin boy — one jump, ahead of the bread line — adopted by the king and raised to be the wise-cracking black sheep in a family of feuding princes. He’s got Middle East ninja skills — one swing, ahead of the sword — and his infiltration of a sacred city nets him the magical Dagger of Time, a gilded rewind button coveted by his evil uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), who wants to use it for, well, evil, and Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who’s sworn to protect it. Pressing a button on the dagger’s hilt allows its wielder to undo past events. If you have the misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll want one for yourself. (2:10) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Richardson)

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

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

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be "one of the girls" — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the "new Middle East" women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not "cheating" if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) Castro, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

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

Solitary Man Consider this another chapter in a larger recession-era cinematic narrative: a kind of corollary to Up in the Air and another dispatch from the flip side of the American dream — namely, American failure. Wheeling, dealing, disgusting, and charming in turns, Michael Douglas manages the dubious achievement of making a hungry and lecherous BMW dealership honcho compelling, even as we roll our eyeballs in disgust. His Ben Kalmen was once at the top of the world, a fairy-tale self-made star whose luxury auto commercials were all over TV, a sharp-tongued wife (Susan Sarandon) and tenderly tolerant daughter (Jenna Fischer) by his side. After his career lands in the crapper, Ben begins a long climb up, trading favors with his girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker) and taking her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to his alma mater for her college interview. During this trip down memory lane he renews his ties with old pal Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and befriends budding schlub Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), all while making some very bad, reflexively womanizing choices. If you can stomach its morally bereft, perpetually backsliding yet endearingly honest protagonist, you’ll be rewarded with on-point dialogue and a clear-eyed yet empathetic character study concerning the free fall of a self-sabotaging, old-enough-to-know-better prick, individualistic to the core and even more. Is Ben as worthy of a bailout, or a second chance, as the American auto industry? The answer remains up in the air. (1:30) Empire, Piedmont, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Splice "If we don’t use human DNA now, someone else will," declares Elsa (Sarah Polley), the brash young genetic scientist bent on defying the orders of her benign corporate benefactors in Vincenzo Natali’s pseudo-cautionary hybrid love child, Splice. From that moment on, it’s pretty clear that any ethical conundrums the movie raises aren’t really worthy of debate: what Elsa wants to do in the name of scientific progress — splice human DNA into gooey muscle masses to provide said corporation with proteins for gene therapy — is, you know, deranged. Elsa bucks both corporate policy and sound moral judgment and does it anyway, much to the horror of her husband and fellow hotshot research scientist, Clive (Adrien Brody). Her genetic tinkering soon results in the dramatic birth of something akin to a homicidal fetal chick crossed with a skinned bunny. It grows at an alarming rate, and when human characteristics become apparent, Elsa clings to it with the instinctual vigor of a tigress protecting her cub. When Elsa and Clive are forced to hide their creation at Elsa’s abandoned family farmhouse to escape detection from prying corporate eyes, Splice evolves into another kind of hybrid: a genetically engineered Scenes from a Marriage (1973) crossed with the DNA of The Omen (1976) and grafted onto the most very special My So-Called Life episode ever. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Splice may be a ludicrous, cut-rate exercise in Brood-era David Cronenberg — but it’s a damned entertaining one. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Devereaux)

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

Women Without Men Potent imagery has always been at the forefront of photographer and installation artist Shirin Neshat’s explorations of gender in Islamic society, and her debut feature Women Without Men certainly has its share. Loosely based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, the film follows four Iranian women (down from the novel’s original five) — Fakhri, an upper-class military wife who longs to reconnect with an old lover; Zarin, a traumatized prostitute who escapes captivity; Munis, a housebound young woman reborn as a political dissident; and her friend, Faezeh, who longs to marry Munis’ domineering brother — in the days leading up to the 1953 coup d’etat that overturned democracy and restored the Shah to power. From the suicidal leap — filmed so as to suggest flight as much as falling — which opens the film, to the mist-shrouded groves of a rural orchard that becomes a refuge for the women, each shot is as striking for its beauty as it is uneven in conveying the allegorical significance behind all the lushness. The casts’ largely stilted performances don’t help much in this regard either. "All that we wanted to was to find a new form, a new way," says Munis in voiceover. As a creative act of mourning for Iran’s short-lived experiment in democracy — a moment, Neshat acknowledges in the film’s postscript, that clearly resonated with last year’s Green revolution — Women Without Men ambitiously attempts, albeit with mixed success, to envision just that. (1:35) Elmwood. (Sussman)

The Daily Blurgh: Pissed librarians, neighborhood art, zoo babies

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The Daily Blurgh: Pissed librarians, neighborhood art, zoo babies

Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

I want my LGBTV! Prop 8 Trial closing arguments will not be televised.

*****

Andrei Tarkovsky made a whole lotta gorgeous films. He also took a whole lotta gorgeous Polaroids.  (Thanks Boing Boing).

*****

Mea Culpa: Sirron Norris offers this sincere, respectful open letter in regard to the mural dispute at 22nd and Mission. Whatever your opinion of his art, there is no denying that the man is all class.

*****

On the radar: The Bay Citizen previews the new, new media arts fest, City Centered, which kicks off in the Tenderloin starting tomorrow.

*****

UC librarians to Nature Publishing Group: We aren’t gonna take it!

*****

Speaking of libraries, the British Library has acquired all the papers of the late, great SF author J.G. Ballard. Lucky them.

*****

Cute overlords: Baby animals at the SF Zoo!

*****
“Oh, I’m a singer/ You’re a whore!” (NSFW, duh):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ-2e5CyJgg

The Brown/Whitman debates

Zelda Bronstein
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7
The Brown/Whitman debates

Jerry Brown’s the official frontrunner now, after Meg Whitman endured Steve Poizner’s assault and saw her positives knocked way back. And typically the frontrunner in a campaign tries to avoid direct debates; they can’t help and, with a mistake or two, they can wind up hurting.


But Jerry being Jerry, he’s already challenging Whitman to a series of ten debates, and Whitman is already ducking. That’s because Whitman wants this entire campaign to be about TV ads — the only area in which she has a clear, indisputable advantage.


Brown’s a little unpredictable in debates. He’s smart and can be charming and is certainly experienced — but he can also veer off on tangents and make some remarkable statements, not all of which are good sound bites. Whitman would be carefully, perfectly scripted. But in the end, it would force her to deal directly with journalists and her opponent — and she doesn’t want to do that.


What Whitman plans to do is start right away, tomorrow, airing a blizzard of ads attacking Brown — as too liberal, too flakey, too inconsistent — whatever she can get away with. She’s been knocked down in the polls, and now she wants to knock him down, too.


She can’t get too far with ads promoting herself — California has seen those ads, over and over, and people are getting sick of them. We know her line; she’s gotten about all the positive impressions she’s ever going to get. And she’s not breaking 50 percent in the polling.


The only way she can win is to tarnish Brown — and in the end, he’s going to have to swing back and attack her. It’s going to be a long, ugly summer.


 


 

Passionate progressive people prevail

Sasha Cuttler
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3
Passionate progressive people prevail

At risk of being overly alliterative, this primary election was about the power of progressive principles pushed by passionate people, as several politicos told me last night. That was evident in the success of the progressive slate for the Democratic County Central Committee and in the defeat of Propositions 16 and 17 despite about $70 million in corporate spending.

Money used to define the debates in San Francisco and throughout California, but the dominant narratives are now being written by the coalition of tenants, environmentalists, workers, social justice advocates, and others who backed the Bay Guardian’s slate of DCCC candidates, which took 18 of the 24 seats on a body that makes policy and funding decisions for the local Democratic Party.

“This time, it was the coalition that really made the difference,” DCCC winner Michael Bornstein told me last night. “Frankly, our people worked harder.”

Board of Supervisor President David Chiu agreed, telling me, “For the Central Committee, the message is people power wins.”

Despite the post-election punditry by the Chron’s CW Nevius that “moderates” just didn’t rise up like he had hoped, the most obvious reality is this election demonstrated the power of progressives who embrace San Francisco values – from valuing diversity and the environment to believing in economic justice – and the potential for success when we really stand up for them. One reason why even our would-be exports, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, prevailed last night could be that liberal San Francisco just isn’t widely viewed with the same scorn felt by Nevius and the so-called “moderates,” who want to “take back” the city from progressives.

“In an environment where it was about hundreds of millions of dollars from PG&E and Meg Whitman and Chris Kelly outspending us, we showed that San Francisco is San Francisco and we support San Francisco values,” DCCC chair Aaron Peskin told me last night.

On the statewide level, the bold and expensive deceptions pushed by PG&E and Mercury Insurance were countered only by a handful of super committed activists and a broad cross-section of newspaper editorials, yet because the basically progressive message was so consistent – don’t let powerful corporations fool you into giving up your rights and protections – the Proposition 16 and 17 campaigns turned into epic failures that will feed distrust of corporations.

“California voters proved once again that they can’t be fooled by tens of millions of dollars in deceptive advertising by insurance companies,” Harvey Rosenfield of Consumer Watchdog said today of Prop. 17.

And that failure could feed and empower an ascendant progressive movement. The local Sierra Club’s John Rizzo told me at the DCCC slate party last night that PG&E will be hurt by its overreaching: “The $50 million they spent on this is totally backfiring. Whatever environmental reputation they had has now been totally trashed.”

As it should be. The lesson from last night is that people are starting to get wise to corporate deceptions, and they’re realizing that with hard work and smart coalition-building, the people can still prevail.

The NY Times discovers illegal church parking

Zelda Bronstein
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7
The NY Times discovers illegal church parking

The Bay Citizen-New York Times partnership is already jazzing up the quality of what was a very weak Northern California section in the Times. And now the pair have discovered one of the dirty little secrets of San Francisco Sundays — illegal parking by church-goers who just leave their cars in the middle of the street.


This is one of my favorite crusades, and I’ve been on it for quite a while. The Times/Bay Citizen story tries to sort out what the rules are and why this is allowed to happen. The SF Appeal tried to figure it out, too. But when you talk to the cops on the beat in the Mission, here’s what they’ll tell you: There are no rules. There is no law. The church-goers have no legal right to park in the middle of the damn street. It’s just a tradition that goes back so long that nobody wants to defy it.


And whatever the cops and the MTA say, it’s not a public service for community events. It’s about religious gatherings. If you want to go to a secular gathering — say, a Yoga class — and park in the streets Sunday morning, you get a ticket. In fact, I know somone who tried that; she said a cop on the scene asked where she was going, and she said yoga, and the cop said she couldn’t park there. It’s only “for church services.”


I’m all in favor of closing streets to traffic, but turning them into parking lots — and allowing private institutions to use city property, at no cost, to promote religious events is not only a violation of church and state. It’s wrong.

Everyone hates PG&E

Zelda Bronstein
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5
Everyone hates PG&E

Well, maybe not everyone, but the results from last night’s election are fascinating. A $50 million campaign, with the opposition struggling to come up with $100,000 — and PG&E still lost. Calitics has a fun comparison that makes one of the key points: The company lost most heavily in its own service areas. People who have to deal with PG&E — and its high rates, poor service, blackouts, botched smart-meter program and financial greed — voted strongly against allowing the company to further entrench its monopoly power. In essence, PG&E lost at home.


A couple of other interesting factors: The results show, I think, that whatever you say about the decline of newspapers, their endorsements still matter. Every major newspaper in the state opposed Prop. 16, and that clearly had an impact. The No on 16 campaign didn’t have the money for any media buys; the press coverage and strong anti-PG&E endorsements had to carry the message.


TURN, Ross Mirkarmi, Mark Leno, Tom Ammiano and consultant Gail Kaufman deserve credit for raising what little money they could and leveraging it into a stunning statewide victory. Considering that the turnout skewed heavily Republican, the defeat of Prop. 16 will go down as one of the great progressive victories in California history.


The local numbers were astounding: In San Francisco, Prop. 16 went down 2-1, with 67 percent of the voters rejecting PG&E’s ploy. That’s the strongest mandate for public power I’ve ever seen. Same for the rest of the Bay Area: Alameda County, 64 percent No. San Mateo County, 60 percent No. Marin County, 61 percent No. Mayor Gavin Newsom ought to take a look at the map on the Secretary of State’s website; it shows that the voters he needs to get elected lieutenant governor have rejected PG&E and want a public-power option.


The collapse of PG&E’s attempt to buy democracy in California gives San Francisco some breathing room on its community choice aggregation contract, which is excellent news. The supervisors can now take some time to go over the details — and prepare for the next major battle, the marketing campaign to education local residents about the value of community-controlled green energy.


PG&E is clearly on the run — CEO Peter Darbee has driven the company to a point where it has no friends left. Could be a great era for public power efforts.

Film listings

David Talbot
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0

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

OPENING

The A-Team Is nothing sacred? (1:57) Presidio.

The Full Picture See "Mama Drama." (1:20) Roxie.

Holy Rollers Holy Rollers isn’t a movie — it’s a headline stretched out to 90 minutes. Yes, the set-up is worthy of adaptation: Hassidic Jewish kid begins importing ecstasy from Amsterdam. And it’s based on a true story! But the film is far too matter-of-fact, never delving into the important questions that might elevate it past a glorified reenactment. That’s not to say the performances aren’t good. Jesse Eisenberg continues to prove he can do well in leading roles, while supporting actors Justin Bartha and Ari Graynor are both charming, in their own ways. The problem is the material. What is Holy Rollers saying about the war on drugs, or organized religion, or the desire to live above one’s means? Nothing, really. The tone is equally problematic, as it repeatedly fails to find the right blend of comedy and drama. The movie’s major selling point is that it will make you want to visit Amsterdam — you know, if you didn’t already. (1:29) Contemporary Jewish Museum, Lumiere, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

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

The Karate Kid Is nothing sacred? (2:20)

Kinatay See Trash. (1:45) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

9500 Liberty 9500 Liberty spins off co-directors Eric Byler and Annabel Park’s YouTube series of "interactive documentary" footage surrounding a recent immigration policy struggle in Prince William County, Virginia. The Board of County Supervisors passed a resolution in 2007 mandating that police perform an immigration status check on any individual they had "probable cause" to believe was an illegal alien. The filmmakers emphasize the significance of new media in this local battle, as both sides mobilize through aggressive blogging. And you heard the part about how this movie is based on YouTube videos, right? The filmmakers’ sympathies are clear, as they reveal the hateful rhetoric of the anti-illegal immigration forces, but their emotional appeal hardly seems irresponsible — it serves to highlight the humanity often obscured by reductive xenophobia. The film apparently predates the recent Arizona immigration strife, but as the story unfolds, the parallels are both eerie and hopeful. (1:21) Lumiere. (Sam Stander)

*Ondine You want to believe in mermaids, leprechauns, tooth fairies, and Father Christmas — and director Neil Jordan plays with those hopes, and fears, in this unabashedly romantic fable set in a Irish fishing village. Mullet-ed fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell), dubbed "Circus," thanks to his days as a drinking fool, is the butt of everyone’s jokes till he happens to catch a mysterious girl (Alicja Bachleda) in his net. She calls herself Ondine, shies away from people, and sings in an unknown tongue to the sea, drawing salmon, lobster, and fortune to the fisherman otherwise down on his luck. His precocious daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), is in need of a kidney transplant — and a measure of hope — and she grows convinced that her father’s hidden-away water baby is a selkie, a mythical Celtic sea creature that can shed its seal skin, bond with humans, and make wishes come true. Unfortunately believing in magic doesn’t always make it so, though Ondine gracefully limns that space between belief and reality, squeezing small moments of pleasure and humor from its rough, albeit attractive, characters and absolutely stunning landscapes in scenes beautifully lensed by onetime Wong Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle. (1:43) Albany, Clay, Piedmont. (Chun)

*Perrier’s Bounty Not about sparkling water, director Ian Fitzgibbon and writer Mark O’Rowe’s giddy Irish crime tale is this year’s In Bruges (2008): a crass, self-consciously clever, amusingly characterful, and twisty take on Brit gangster tropes, with double-plus good actors and very scenic widescreen photography. Cillian Murphy — convincingly scruffy now that he’s aging out of excessive prettiness — plays a Dublin reprobate whose debt to some shady types is overdue. His attempts to neutralize that situation rapidly envelope the best-friend neighbor he’s secretly sweet on (Jodie Whittaker, Peter O’Toole’s protégée in 2006’s Venus) and the coke addict father (Jim Broadbent) he’s generally estranged from. Perrier’s Bounty
remains crafty and jaunty even as foretold "brutal and tragic events" unfold. Of course it’s contrived — but well contrived, with performances (including Brendan Gleeson as the titular crime boss) and piled-up incidents alike quite enjoyable. (1:28) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

ONGOING

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

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

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

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

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) Empire, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peter Galvin)

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

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

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

Killers (1:40) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness.

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

Living in Emergency Filmmakers follow four volunteers of Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) in Liberia and the Congo, from the initial shock of a first-timer to the overwhelming exhaustion of a veteran. Morally ambiguous decisions have left many of them arrogant and bitter and it’s apparent that these people are not the inflated heroes that we might wish, but normal people who were drawn to test themselves in circumstances of little hope. Some fail. Living in Emergency is an interesting glimpse into a provocative world, and the morally icky stuff is sometimes worse than the blood and death on screen. But a glimpse is all it is. The filmmakers clearly have an agenda that doesn’t include time for exploring the lives of any of the doctors, patients or procedures, and they leave the audience wondering whether there might be more lurking beneath the surface. (1:33) Opera Plaza. (Galvin)

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

Marmaduke (1:27) 1000 Van Ness.

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve." It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

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

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

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time It takes serious effort to make a movie with a story dumber than the video game it’s based on. Director Mike Newell somehow accomplishes this feat with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Disneyfied flop that flails clumsily in the PG-13 demilitarized zone, delivering sanitized violence, chaste romance, and dreary drama. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, an urchin boy — one jump, ahead of the bread line — adopted by the king and raised to be the wise-cracking black sheep in a family of feuding princes. He’s got Middle East ninja skills — one swing, ahead of the sword — and his infiltration of a sacred city nets him the magical Dagger of Time, a gilded rewind button coveted by his evil uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), who wants to use it for, well, evil, and Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who’s sworn to protect it. Pressing a button on the dagger’s hilt allows its wielder to undo past events. If you have the misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll want one for yourself. (2:10) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Richardson)

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

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

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be "one of the girls" — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the "new Middle East" women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not "cheating" if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) Castro, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

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

Solitary Man Consider this another chapter in a larger recession-era cinematic narrative: a kind of corollary to Up in the Air and another dispatch from the flip side of the American dream — namely, American failure. Wheeling, dealing, disgusting, and charming in turns, Michael Douglas manages the dubious achievement of making a hungry and lecherous BMW dealership honcho compelling, even as we roll our eyeballs in disgust. His Ben Kalmen was once at the top of the world, a fairy-tale self-made star whose luxury auto commercials were all over TV, a sharp-tongued wife (Susan Sarandon) and tenderly tolerant daughter (Jenna Fischer) by his side. After his career lands in the crapper, Ben begins a long climb up, trading favors with his girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker) and taking her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to his alma mater for her college interview. During this trip down memory lane he renews his ties with old pal Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and befriends budding schlub Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), all while making some very bad, reflexively womanizing choices. If you can stomach its morally bereft, perpetually backsliding yet endearingly honest protagonist, you’ll be rewarded with on-point dialogue and a clear-eyed yet empathetic character study concerning the free fall of a self-sabotaging, old-enough-to-know-better prick, individualistic to the core and even more. Is Ben as worthy of a bailout, or a second chance, as the American auto industry? The answer remains up in the air. (1:30) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Splice "If we don’t use human DNA now, someone else will," declares Elsa (Sarah Polley), the brash young genetic scientist bent on defying the orders of her benign corporate benefactors in Vincenzo Natali’s pseudo-cautionary hybrid love child, Splice. From that moment on, it’s pretty clear that any ethical conundrums the movie raises aren’t really worthy of debate: what Elsa wants to do in the name of scientific progress — splice human DNA into gooey muscle masses to provide said corporation with proteins for gene therapy — is, you know, deranged. Elsa bucks both corporate policy and sound moral judgment and does it anyway, much to the horror of her husband and fellow hotshot research scientist, Clive (Adrien Brody). Her genetic tinkering soon results in the dramatic birth of something akin to a homicidal fetal chick crossed with a skinned bunny. It grows at an alarming rate, and when human characteristics become apparent, Elsa clings to it with the instinctual vigor of a tigress protecting her cub. When Elsa and Clive are forced to hide their creation at Elsa’s abandoned family farmhouse to escape detection from prying corporate eyes, Splice evolves into another kind of hybrid: a genetically engineered Scenes from a Marriage (1973) crossed with the DNA of The Omen (1976) and grafted onto the most very special My So-Called Life episode ever. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Splice may be a ludicrous, cut-rate exercise in Brood-era David Cronenberg — but it’s a damned entertaining one. (1:45) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Devereaux)

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

Women Without Men Potent imagery has always been at the forefront of photographer and installation artist Shirin Neshat’s explorations of gender in Islamic society, and her debut feature Women Without Men certainly has its share. Loosely based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, the film follows four Iranian women (down from the novel’s original five) — Fakhri, an upper-class military wife who longs to reconnect with an old lover; Zarin, a traumatized prostitute who escapes captivity; Munis, a housebound young woman reborn as a political dissident; and her friend, Faezeh, who longs to marry Munis’ domineering brother — in the days leading up to the 1953 coup d’etat that overturned democracy and restored the Shah to power. From the suicidal leap — filmed so as to suggest flight as much as falling — which opens the film, to the mist-shrouded groves of a rural orchard that becomes a refuge for the women, each shot is as striking for its beauty as it is uneven in conveying the allegorical significance behind all the lushness. The casts’ largely stilted performances don’t help much in this regard either. "All that we wanted to was to find a new form, a new way," says Munis in voiceover. As a creative act of mourning for Iran’s short-lived experiment in democracy — a moment, Neshat acknowledges in the film’s postscript, that clearly resonated with last year’s Green revolution — Women Without Men ambitiously attempts, albeit with mixed success, to envision just that. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)<\!s>

Shock it to ya

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Shock it to ya

El boogie, my love of loves

7 & 11 belong together

Please set free your G

Love & Bravery on forever — Shock-G

After our recent interview, Shock-G — frontman and producer of now-disbanded rap legends Digital Underground, discoverer of 2Pac, and alter ego of the Groucho-nosed Humpty Hump — e-mails the poem printed above. “I need you to put this in,” he writes. “It’s my thank you to fans for letting me move on after DU.” Plus, he adds mysteriously, “it has many meanings.”

It’s a characteristically offbeat request. Eight years on from meeting Shock, it’s still hard to anticipate his moves. The occasion of our phone conversation is a new disc of Digital Underground rarities, The Greenlight EP (Jake Records). The 2008 Jake Records release Cuz a DU Party Don’t Stop — a similarly miscellaneous collection misleadingly marketed as “the final DU studio album” — lacked the coherence of classics like Sex Packets (Tommy Boy, 1989) and was panned by critics, so Shock wants to make the status of Greenlight clear.

“I don’t want to give the public the idea like, ‘Yo, we just made a slammin’ new album,'” he says. “DU’s not my purpose right now. It’s more like, ‘I’m cleaning out the closet, look what we discovered.'”

A 7-song EP, Greenlight benefits from its tighter focus. DU completists may recognize obscure gems like “Used 2B a Sperm” — a sci-fi story of Shock as a sperm cell journeying to the egg. Other tracks like “Purplebrainhurrycainhabit,” produced by a then-unknown David Banner, emerge for the first time. 2Pac appears on a bonus 1991 live version of “Same Song.”

But Shock would rather dwell in the present, which is among the reasons he finally disbanded the group. Much of his conversation concerns his whole-food diet, a difficult pursuit when spending 200 nights a year on tour.

“It requires more thought than most people care to put into it,” he says. “What you eat is so important to your future health and clarity of mind. I’m actually in better shape than I was in my 20s and 30s.”

This lifestyle change dovetails with his other reason for ending DU: the increasingly heavy drug use. Motivated by his health consciousness, Shock’s new sobriety is also an artistic decision. In the 1990s, DU performances were theatrical shows, Shock running the group like a band, in a way that gradually lapsed in the new millennium

Yet live performances led to his latest venture, the Shock-G3 Trio. A collaboration with DU’s original DJ, Fuze, on turntables, and early member PeeWee on guitar, the Trio unites what Shock calls DU’s “core musicians,” responsible for most of 2Pac’s first LP, 2Pacalypse Now (Priority, 1991). The format allows Shock to stretch out on keys, as the group jams on the DU/2Pac repertoire, as well as funk, jazz, and whatever else Shock gets in his head.

“The thing about working sober is the small eye signals on stage and PeeWee and Fuze catch them,” Shock enthuses. “Like the audience wants us to go a few bars longer. Or if they’re not feeling it, backing out of those songs. It keeps the shows tight.”

Bongtastic!

Andrew Lam
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Bongtastic!

Science: it brought us non-stick saute pans, the Internet, timed traffic lights — and now, once again, it is making our lives better through the advancement of empirical knowledge. Of course, I’m referring to the findings enclosed in the new publication from Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press, Bongology.

Author Chris Stone is hardly one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, he has made significant contributions to the world of science, art, and culinary wisdom. The fruits of his endeavors can easily be referenced by his three publications; Spliffgami, Bongology, and the upcoming Baked: Marijuana Munchies to Make and Bake. A true renaissance man, a man for our time.

In honor of his achievements, I’ve assembled here a top ten list of his most illustrious designs for the scientifically correct consumption of herbals. You too, can be a scientist. By making bongs, people, lots of bongs. (*Insert golf claps)

  1. “Mini Liquor Bottle Vaporizer”: Airplane people, you tell me I can’t bring my pipe on the plane. So, whatever, that’s cool. I’m just gonna smoke out of your in flight service refreshments. Thanks, Dr. Stone! Ba-bam!

  2. “The Party Hookah”: What to do when the entire party wants to get high at once? Emily Post, to my knowledge, has never codified etiquette for the situation. The smart hostess will have at least one of these homemade beauties on hand, which can accommodate five super buddies at once.

  3. “Office Bong”: Again, big ups Doc Stone, this time for helping me understand the world around me. I finally grok the “caffeine addiction” of my Guardian editors. (No one in particular, mind you. Cough Marke B. cough.) This little gem of creativity needs only your standard to-go coffee cup, some everyday office supplies, and a healthy regard for creativity in the workplace.

  4. “Jam Jar Hookah”: God I love precious things. This has immense potential to be, scientifically speaking, the cutest fucking thing ever.

  5. “Earth Pipe”: Dude, I love the Earth. Wanna smoke out of it? No lie people, Dr. Stone (his real name, fancy!) has pioneered a way to use the very dirt beneath your feet to get lifted.

  6. “The Lung”: Actually, the illustration of the finished product of this particular model makes my stomach turn a little. But a large plastic bag inflating and collapsing into a liter bottle is just… so… sciencey — it makes the top ten!

  7. “Teapot Bong”: Granny will love it! I hear this is how they smoke in England.

  8. “Backyard Bong”: Finally, put those watering cans to use! I hear this is how they smoke in Berkeley.

  9. “Recorder Pipe”: Everyone was required to learn “Three Blind Mice” on their recorder in fifth grade. Didn’t they know that music is a gateway drug?    

  10. “The Bathroom Bong”: Don’t get squeamish on me now, people! We’re just delving deep into the realms of science. The first step to deployment of this specimen requires making your toilet cistern air tight. And that’s all I’m authorized to release.  

aaaand my least favorite: “The Mask”: No, no, no! I refuse to put a gas mask on my face and fill it with weed. I don’t care what cutting commentary it is on the futility of war, it’s just freaky and vaguely unsafe.

Newsom doesn’t read the Guardian!

Zelda Bronstein
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13
Newsom doesn’t read the Guardian!

 


Gav was on KQED this morning, talking about his run for Lite Guv, and he started right off by saying how he doesn’t ever — ever — read the Bay Guardian


Michael Krasny started off by asking why Newsom refused to appear on the radio in a debate with Janice Hahn. “She agreed, you didn’t.” Krasny asked. “Why?”


Newsom’s comment: Gee, I didn’t have time for a debate. Too busy running the city, and trying to balance a budget– “the most complex budget in city history.” He insisted that he’d solved a $522 million deficit without laying off police or firefighters, while protecting the soc sev safety net and investing in homeless service and universal health care.


Krasny: “So the Guardian can’t beat you up any more?”


Gav: “Honestly, I haven’t read it in years, with all due respect to Tim Redmond and Brugmann and whatever the team is over there.”


Krasny, politely, tried to bring up the idea that a no-new-taxes budget means fewer jobs, but Newsom had none of it: “They seem to have a tax first policy,” he said (although he doesn’t read us, so he doesn’t know. He complained that San Franciscans are already paying 10 percent in sales tax — “a regressive tax,” and that “they (presumably the Guardian) consistently support it, I don’t.”


Read our paper, Mr. Mayor. The Guardian has consistently, for many years, argued that sales taxes are regressive, and we’ve consistently, for years, argued that there are far better options, ways the city can reclaim money from the wealthy. And we’ve argued that Newsom’s no-new-taxes policy is bad for the economy.


Oh, and by the way: You talked over and over about universal health care in San Francisco, and how proud you were of that policy. But if you were reading the Bay Guardian, you might recall that it wasn’t your policy. That initiative came from then-Sup. Tom Ammiano, and you opposed the key employer mandates that fund it. Hey, you could even pick that up by reading the Chron:


 

Spirit of LCD

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Spirit of LCD

By Peter Galvin

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC It’s getting more and more difficult to talk about new music without comparing it with the work of some other band, or to whichever Stones song the guitar reminds you of. It’s useful to be able to pick a reference point and say “It sounds like that,” but you’re walking a slippery slope when you imply that all music is directly derivative. James Murphy is probably incredibly aware of this tendency to make comparisons. As LCD Soundsystem, Murphy crafts intricate, dense dance music, but a quick peek into his record bin likely indicates where his true passion lies. It is a bin well-stocked with records from Bowie, Eno, Talking Heads, and other 1970s rock icons. It is not so strange that Murphy, 40 years young, would be a fan of ’70s rock. But he does seem an unlikely figure to emerge as a 21st-century musician who not-so-subtly melds the music of his formative years into contemporary dance hits.

Murphy’s transformation into indie icon happened almost overnight. First single “Losing My Edge” on Murphy’s own DFA records was one of the most buzzed-about songs of 2002. But in the years leading up to its self-titled album in 2005, LCD Soundsystem soon found itself caught between two futures: solid, if silly, dance music and intricate explorations of genre. In those days, Murphy tended to ad lib goofy lyrics over his tracks well after the musical parts were recorded, inadvertently threatening to sabotage dancefloor-fillers like “Yeah” and “Daft Punk is Playing at My House” with self-conscious sarcasms. It wasn’t until LCD’s second album, Sound of Silver, that Murphy proved how seriously he takes his craft, displaying a happy medium between his urges for humor and reference, and allowing his songs to create their own happy personalities.

This is Happening is LCD Soundsystem’s third album and it’s all happy personality, marking it as the best representation of Murphy’s signature mix of dance and ’70s rock. The album cover showcases Murphy in a suit and tie that recalls Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” work, or perhaps riffs on the poster for Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads performance film Stop Making Sense. Though the cover is an urgent reference to those other works, it announces Happening as the album where Murphy fully directs his self-awareness toward creating music that recalls and riffs on, but never replicates. For every track on Happening, there is a clear ’70s counterpart (the official tally heavily favors the production of Brian Eno and the vocal affectations of David Byrne), but they all surge with freshness and originality.

Opening track “Dance Yrself Clean” exhibits mumble-mouthed vocals and a drum/bass combo that wouldn’t be out of place with the low-key meditations from Murphy’s recent Greenberg soundtrack, at least until the three-minute mark, when the song explodes with sound. If it were possible to live within a song, I’d live here, in the reverberation of drums and synths that keep the song rolling another five minutes. “All I Want” is a direct homage to Bowie’s Berlin era; Eno guitar fuzz swirls around the refrain “All I want/Is your pity” before laser show synths create the impression that the vinyl is literally melting as it spins. “One Touch” and “Pow Pow” have Murphy doing his best Talking Heads and “You Wanted a Hit” is the album’s one concession to Murphy’s meta-humor, as he snottily expounds on the band’s unwillingness to conform to expectations, but the result is a song so layered and catchy that it hardly takes away from the album’s consistent pacing.

Pacing is a big factor in This is Happening‘s success, and many of Happening‘s nine songs would not fare as well apart from the album experience. On its release in March, “Drunk Girls” struck me as a particularly hackneyed stand-alone single, one that threatened to turn off as many listeners as “North American Scum” did from 2007’s Sound of Silver. So it comes as a surprise to hear how fitting the song is within the context of the album itself. The chanty back and forth of “drunk girls” and “drunk boys,” interrupted by the silver-tongued chorus “I believe in waking up together/So that means making eyes across the room,” is likely to score the trailer for whatever terrible dating show MTV comes up with this summer. But the song doesn’t deserve that grim fate. It’s part of a tangible tone and feel that makes Happening that rare dance record that’s best enjoyed as an album rather than as a collection of singles.

It may be all the rage to reference ’70s and ’80s music these days, but Murphy isn’t that ironic hipster mashing up dance beats with dad-rock, or that London band mimicking the Clash. Playing “spot the influences” in This is Happening is easy, but I don’t believe Murphy intentionally sets out to replicate the records he grew up with — they’re an integral a part of who he is. In a 2005 Pitchfork interview, Murphy admitted, “I’m not wandering under a banner of originality or a myth of no influences. There’s no purity in what I’m doing.” But Happening emerges as an undeniably pure-sounding album anyway. Drawing from the familiar sounds of an era, Murphy has gone beyond recapturing a spark that was already there. He’s created a whole new reference point.

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

Thurs/3, 9 p.m., $35

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

“Beach, fun, drinks, girls, and a good time”: Chico Trujillo is your Memorial hangover cure

Andrew Lam
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0

Thank you holiday weekend, you have memorialized whatever brain cells and desire to integrate into the everyday world of not being drunk by 2 p.m. I still had left. I suppose it was a fair trade for all the lovely memories that I of course won’t remember. Shall we turn then, to something fun that’s happening this upcoming weekend (Fri/4 La Peña Cultural Center) to keep us going? A lovely South American cumbia party that goes by the name of Chico Trujillo? Hurry, before sobriety catches you, cue the mp3 and hold on for the interview! 

Click here, then proceed.

Now that the tunes are swirling through those alcohol and sunshine wasted synapses — a note of historical significance. For those who have never ratcheted their hips to a sensual beat on a cobblestone colonial street, cumbia originated in the wilds of Colombia. It was originally played for courtship rituals by the area’s enslaved African population. Throughout the years, cumbia’s rolling stone gathered snippets of the culture around it, rhythms from the indigenous Colombians, the use of European instruments, etc, etc. Let’s just say it was adept at bringing people together to party.

Chico Trujillo (who are good old chicos from Chile), inherited this mish-mash legacy, and saw it the addition of ska — a fact which imparts an evident swagger to their most recent release, Chico de Oro. Although on the whole, Chilean cumbia’s been ceding its popularity to the ear drum exploding beats of reggaeton, Chico Trujillo’s gigs still get crazy and light roofs on fire, I guess symbolically speaking. 

Heartened by how cool it’s proven itself to be in the homeland, Chico’s now taking its show to Gringolandia — they’ll be rocking the stage at La Peña Cultural Center as part of that East Bay progressive organization’s 35th anniversary party. I chatted with the band recently via email, and their responses, I guarantee, will make that first day back on your grind a little smoother to jibe with.

 

San Francisco Bay Guardian: I’ve heard that most of your shows in Chile sell out. They sound like amazing parties. What makes a good party, in your opinion? 

Chico Trujillo: In Chile, a good party means the best loud music, best drinks, nicest women (and men, I guess), and everybody dancing and singing. But I think that is a good party anywhere. And yes, all of our shows sell out.

 

SFBG: Oh my. What makes cumbia so awesome?

CT: Its simplicity, and its hypnotizing effect on the people. Once we start, the people just can’t stop, and neither can we.

 

SFBG: Tell us about the social issues you touch on in your music. Do you consider yourselves activists?

CT: As human beings, we consider ourselves activists, and are very concerned with social issues happening in Chile. Although we may not always agree with the “left” all the time (and almost never with the “right”), we do actively participate in events that we feel are important. [There’s] a lot of things concerning the environment in Chile, the native people’s rights there, etc. We just arrived in the US, and have seen non-stop on the TV things about the oil spill.  We would love to do something, anything to help that out. But as for our lyrics, and the music of Chico Trujillo, well, they speak more to the utopian ideals that we have of beach, fun, drinks, girls, and a good time, a break from the real world – [which is] the only things people should think about when we hit the stage. If everyone lived by the lyrics of Chico Trujillo, the world would be a better place…

Chico Trujillo feat. Tokezon

8-10 p.m., $15-18

La Peña Cultural Center

3105 Shattuck, Berkl. 

(510) 849-2568

www.lapena.org

Psychic Dream Astrology

David Talbot
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0

June 2-8

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Put your money where your mouth is, Aries. By taking full responsibility for what you are and are not doing this week, you can make better choices about what comes next. This is a great time for beginnings.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

We all have to be able to handle distress and upsets sometimes. Drum up inspiration for some good old- fashioned goal-setting, Taurus. Things in your present direction are played out; its time to try something new.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

You have got to figure out what you really think and stop trying on different theories, already! This week engage in heart to hearts that allow for the truth to be put squarely on the table. Whatever follows is what ya need.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Be careful not to overwork the things that matter most this week. Now is the time to maintain your foundations, not complete the whole project. Focus on the basics and allow for a healthy learning curve, Moonchild.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Impulsively pushing for changes just transfers your problems around — it doesn’t actually solve anything! Be humble enough to slow your shit down, and tough enough to hold your ground for best results this week.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Take time to earn your reputation for being an introspective, analytical type this week, Virgo. The more high quality self-reflection you engage in, the closer you will be to that ever-elusive perfection you are seeking!

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Don’t alienate your old friends when you feel awesome, Libra. Make sure to share the good vibes and excitement in your life with those you turn to in the rough times, too. Pace yourself though relationships this week.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Make coping with uncertainty and anxiety your No. 1 priority. If you let yourself be in a constant stream of reacting to others, you’ll never be present enough to figure out what works for you! Be here now.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Feeling the sads is unavoidable sometimes; the trick is to not freak yourself out about every bad feeling you have. Be courageous in the face of your inner complexities, Sag. Take tender care of your heart this week.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

No matter how much you feel like you’ve got things under control, avoid adding anything new to your inbox. Emotions have a pesky way of getting in the mix of things and slowing down progress. Budget for it this week.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Ah, the honeymoon phase, when your brand new shoes have no scuffs and your rent hasn’t been deducted from your paycheck yet! It’s just a phase, Aquarius, so enjoy it without getting too attached.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Embody the shifts you want to see take shape in your life by finding your center and acting from that place. Yeah, it may be a little hippie-esque, but it’ll help you get (and hold onto!) what you want.

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

Hot sexy events May 26-June 1

Andrew Lam
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0

In 1995, when Clinton administration US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was fired due to comments she made about teaching masturbation as part of safer sex education, Good Vibrations announced May to be Masturbation Month, bringing us the worldwide phenomenon of the Masturbate-a-thon. Today, the a-thons have blessed the world with a whole passel of global records (from most orgasms, to most time masturbating, to accuracy and range of ejaculation), and also raised a whole bunch of money for sex education and sexual safety. Come on, join a good cause! Participants can choose between exhibitionist raised platforms in the middle of the room, closed-to-press masturbation rooms, and simply being a voyeur to all the wanking off.

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One Minute Bondage

Jay Wiseman teaches you how to truss up your buddy in less time than it takes to nuke a bag of popcorn, and without that niggling chance of cancer because you’re standing too close to the glass. If you gots ’em, bring ’em; pieces of rope six, twelve, eighteen, and twenty four feet long. Just whatever you have lying around the house, really.

Wed/28 8-10 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations

603 Valencia, SF

(415) 522-5460

www.goodvibes.com

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Mystique Pre Party

Join owners RoseWhite and Psychokat, plus Mystique domme Chey for a chance to get all caffinated in your fetish wear prior to the Citadel party. Chey’s happy to answer any questions you have regarding what lies ahead – and Wicked Ground’s the perfect spot to fuel up on sandwiches and dildos, should you be lacking either at that time.

Fri/28 7-8 p.m., free

Wicked Grounds

289 8th St., SF

(415) 503-0405 

www.wickedgrounds.com

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Mystique

The 5,700 plus square footage of SF Citadel rolls out the red carpet for female dominants at this recurring party, where house slaves and light refreshment will be provided. Or, you are welcome to bring your own (slave, not refreshment – what do you think this is, people?) Join the party as a lone submissive as well, all orientations are welcome, and flashy attire is encouraged — although dungeon black is always a safe choice for this scene.

Fri/28 8 p.m.-1 a.m., $25-50

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-1746

www.mystiqueparty.com

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The People’s Choice Bondage Tie-Up/Tie-Down Tie-Off

The Society of Janus brings back its popular bondage fashion show (which benefits their AIDS Walk team) – only this year, you get to see the gear in action. Voyeurs get the chance to vote on their favorite scene and players in such categories as most restrictive bondage, most unusual bondage, best suspension, best non-rope bondage, and group bondage. Plus, the Citadel’s standard play party accoutrements are available to those that need no such designations to enjoy their kink. 

Sat/29 8 p.m.-1 a.m., $25

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-1746

www.sfcitadel.com

——————————————-

Nina Hartley and Ira Levine: Must Porn Suck?

Holler back at Hartley and hubby Levine, two behemoths in the arena of porn that’s not awful: “It isn’t predestined that 99% of all porn must suck, but for it to do otherwise, everyone in the chain of production, right down to the consumer, has to start taking it seriously and step up to what must be done so that it does not suck forever and ever amen.” And just what is it that needs to be done, sir and madam? Find out at this lecture.

Sat/29 8 p.m., $20-40

Center for Sex and Culture

1519 Mission, SF

(415) 552-7399 

www.masturbate-a-thon.com

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Masturbate-a-thon

Guest hosts sure to rub you the right way include Nina Hartley, Courtney Trouble, Dr. Carol Queen and Jiz Lee. For first time public pleasurers, practice at the Lusty Lady is suggested and encouraged. 

Sun/30 voyeur seating 4 – 11 p.m., (record setters arrive at 10:30 a.m.), $25 for voyeur seating

Center for Sex and Culture

1519 Mission, SF

(415) 552-7399 

www.masturbate-a-thon.com

——————————————-

CSC Benefit

You haven’t had enough, have you? All the wanking, rubbing, yelping – you need more charity! Luckily, The Eagle is happy to oblige. They’ve got Blow, and Sister Kitty of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence coming through to spice up all the drinks you’ll be having on the back patio with all the burly leathermen. Money goes to the same goodness over at Center for Sex and Culture what that Masturbate-a-thon’s dough does. Donate to a good sex cause while starting one of your own, perhaps?

Sun/30 3-6 p.m., donations

The Eagle Tavern

398 12th St., SF 

(415) 626-0880  

www.sfeagle.com

——————————————-

Joystick Secrets: How to Thrill a Man

After all the self pleasuring you did on Sunday, isn’t it time to give to those around you? International sex educator-about-town, Midori, gives a run-down on how to suck-down your man. Interesting little tidbit; fruit will be involved. Wait, maybe just as a stand-in cock. Shoots, I thought we were getting really creative over here. Oh yeah, and all those really looking to thrill a man; follow up the cunnilingus with a shot of Maker’s, and an It’s It. Now that’s pleasure.

Tues/1 8-10 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0400

 www.goodvibes.com 

——————————————-

Formerly Known As…

Can a full length solo show by Suppositori Spelling tempt you into an art exhibit for once? Put down that lube and get all culture with it, boys and girls – for the Queer Arts Festival has assembled a dozen of the very most talented male sex workers to put on display what it is they do best (or second best, depending on their personal priorities). Also featured will be 85 year old playwright George Birimisa, and bright young hustler Cyd Nova. 

Tues/1 7:30 p.m., $12-20

SF LGBT Community Center

1800 Market, SF

(415) 865-5555 

www.queerculturalcenter.org

 

A public power landmark — and the battle to come

David Talbot
-
0

CCA allows communities to offer an alternative — to buy cleaner power in bulk and resell it at comparable or cheaper rates to residents and businesses

EDITORIAL It’s been 97 years since Congress passed a landmark law mandating public power in San Francisco, 67 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the city was violating the law by allowing Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to operate a private monopoly in town, and 42 years since the Guardian first broke the story of the Raker Act scandal and launched a campaign to bring public power to the city. And now, even operating under a tight PG&E-imposed deadline, the San Francisco is moving very close to establishing a modest type of public power.

Community choice aggregation (CCA) isn’t what John Edward Raker and his supporters had in mind in 1913 when they allowed San Francisco to build a dam in Yosemite National Park, breaking John Muir’s heart. The idea — which the city explicitly accepted in a formal written agreement — was to use the dam not just for water but for electricity, specifically to create a public power beachhead in Northern California that would prevent any private company, specifically PG&E, from getting control of the electricity grid.

CCA leaves PG&E’s private grid in place and allows the investor-owned utility to continue to sell power in the region. But it also allows communities to offer an alternative — to buy cleaner power in bulk and resell it at comparable or cheaper rates to residents and businesses.

Since 2002, when the state Legislature passed a bill authorizing CCAs, the concept has slowly started to take hold. Marin County launched its CCA this spring. San Francisco last week reached an agreement with PowerChoice LLC, a vendor that will oversee the procurement of electricity, to begin service here, and the contract is headed to the SF Public Utilities Commission and the Board of Supervisors for approval.

That’s a huge step forward for public power — but the city faces a tight deadline. PG&E has placed Proposition 16 on the June 8 ballot, which would require a two-thirds vote before any local agency could get into the electricity business. That’s an almost impossible threshold (see: the state Legislature). Prop. 16 may still go down to defeat, despite PG&E’s $45 million campaign to pass it.

But even if it passes, any existing agency — that is, any community that has its CCA in place before the election is certified — will be grandfathered in.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera argues, with good authority, that San Francisco is already protected from Prop. 16. The city already has taken enough steps to implement CCA (the implementation plan has been approved by the supervisors) that the inevitable lawsuit by PG&E will probably fail. But every step the city takes to bring the process closer to completion provides more protection, and the stakes could not be higher.

With CCA, the city will have control of its own energy future, be able to offer power that doesn’t contribute to global warming — and be able, at long last, to take a step toward complying with the Raker Act. (And remember: the law says, and the Supreme Court confirmed, that the federal government can move at any time to seize the Hetch Hetchy dam and uproot the city’s entire water system for failure to comply with the 1913 agreement.)

It seems almost certain that by June 8 the city will have a contract with a vendor and state certification that defines San Francisco as a CCA. Then, whatever the outcome of Prop. 16, the city needs to move forward with the program. And if PG&E sues to block it, then every official in San Francisco will have to be prepared to wage the legal and political battle of all time. PG&E can and probably will take the city to court — and the city can immediately start talking about breaking the 1930s-era franchise agreement that gives PG&E a low franchise fee in perpetuity, and enforcing the Raker Act, and taking the corrupt utility to task on every possible front.

A public power landmark — and the battle to come

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
A public power landmark — and the battle to come

EDITORIAL It’s been 97 years since Congress passed a landmark law mandating public power in San Francisco, 67 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the city was violating the law by allowing Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to operate a private monopoly in town, and 42 years since the Guardian first broke the story of the Raker Act scandal and launched a campaign to bring public power to the city. And now, even operating under a tight PG&E-imposed deadline, the San Francisco is moving very close to establishing a modest type of public power.

Community choice aggregation (CCA) isn’t what John Edward Raker and his supporters had in mind in 1913 when they allowed San Francisco to build a dam in Yosemite National Park, breaking John Muir’s heart. The idea — which the city explicitly accepted in a formal written agreement — was to use the dam not just for water but for electricity, specifically to create a public power beachhead in Northern California that would prevent any private company, specifically PG&E, from getting control of the electricity grid.

CCA leaves PG&E’s private grid in place and allows the investor-owned utility to continue to sell power in the region. But it also allows communities to offer an alternative — to buy cleaner power in bulk and resell it at comparable or cheaper rates to residents and businesses.

Since 2002, when the state Legislature passed a bill authorizing CCAs, the concept has slowly started to take hold. Marin County launched its CCA this spring. San Francisco last week reached an agreement with PowerChoice LLC, a vendor that will oversee the procurement of electricity, to begin service here, and the contract is headed to the SF Public Utilities Commission and the Board of Supervisors for approval.

That’s a huge step forward for public power — but the city faces a tight deadline. PG&E has placed Proposition 16 on the June 8 ballot, which would require a two-thirds vote before any local agency could get into the electricity business. That’s an almost impossible threshold (see: the state Legislature). Prop. 16 may still go down to defeat, despite PG&E’s $45 million campaign to pass it.

But even if it passes, any existing agency — that is, any community that has its CCA in place before the election is certified — will be grandfathered in.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera argues, with good authority, that San Francisco is already protected from Prop. 16. The city already has taken enough steps to implement CCA (the implementation plan has been approved by the supervisors) that the inevitable lawsuit by PG&E will probably fail. But every step the city takes to bring the process closer to completion provides more protection, and the stakes could not be higher.

With CCA, the city will have control of its own energy future, be able to offer power that doesn’t contribute to global warming — and be able, at long last, to take a step toward complying with the Raker Act. (And remember: the law says, and the Supreme Court confirmed, that the federal government can move at any time to seize the Hetch Hetchy dam and uproot the city’s entire water system for failure to comply with the 1913 agreement.)

It seems almost certain that by June 8 the city will have a contract with a vendor and state certification that defines San Francisco as a CCA. Then, whatever the outcome of Prop. 16, the city needs to move forward with the program. And if PG&E sues to block it, then every official in San Francisco will have to be prepared to wage the legal and political battle of all time. PG&E can and probably will take the city to court — and the city can immediately start talking about breaking the 1930s-era franchise agreement that gives PG&E a low franchise fee in perpetuity, and enforcing the Raker Act, and taking the corrupt utility to task on every possible front.

Psychic Dream Astrology

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

May 26-June 1

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Burning off karma sounds fabulous until you get into it and realize that it means that you get hella tested! Bring out your A game and kick your inhibitions to the curb, Aries. Be brave in the face of uncertainty.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

It’s hard to gage when you’ve taken a wrong turn, because the unexpected can produce the greatest results at times. Handle things with as much grace as you can muster while situations play themselves out.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Do not attempt to jump back in time, Gem. Cease all sweating to the oldies you are engaged in and find a nouveau beat to make you move. Take responsibility for creating the future you crave by making it happen now.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Develop a better relationship to waiting, or things are going to feel a lot worse. Waiting doesn’t have to be a passive process. Delays require you to accept that development takes time — what will you do with your moment?

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Avoidance will bring you new troubles this week, and your old problems won’t go away, either. Find whatever you can to help clarify and strengthen your creative thinking, Leo. You have more options than you realize.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Learn to see your old stucknesses in fresh and new ways, Virgo. Be willing to stop your martyr shtick so fresh perspectives can come through. Letting go will bring you greater security this week.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

If you’re ready to move on, then you should know a couple of things, Libra. First, things will get better. But before they do, they may suck ass. Be willing to go through some crap now so you can get to the other side.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Don’t let your fear of loss and pain drive you, Scorpio. Pursue things with an open heart and cultivate the strength and vision vying to break free. Take life one step at a time.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Bad vibes are a lot like bunnies: they multiply quicker than you think. You are standing perilously close to the edge of terrible fretting. Don’t convince yourself that the sky is falling.! Even if it is, all that stress won’t help a lick.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Stop being so repressed! Feelings were made to be felt, like air was meant to be breathed. You don’t stop breathing just ’cause of a little pollution, do you? Then don’t block feelings that are a little murky, pal.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Love is an altering force; it illuminates paths you’d otherwise miss. Cultivate, nurture, and protect the love in your life! Notice how much more resilient you feel when you are in the light, and remember to seek it out.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

There is no better tool for you than optimism this week, Pisces. Allow yourself to dream and dream big. But don’t bite off more than you can chew! Think like an athlete and stretch before you run off into the future. *

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

Media experiments

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
Media experiments

news@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insecure Sanctuary

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9
Insecure Sanctuary

Sarah@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors is urging San Francisco officials not to participate in Secure Communities, a controversial federal-local fingerprinting collaboration set to be activated June 1. But opting out of a program that threatens to make debates over “sanctuary city” protections of immigrants irrelevant may not be easy.

Speaking at a May 18 rally, Sup. Eric Mar warned that the use of Secure Communities by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could cause the deportation of innocent residents and destroy local community policing efforts. “The police-ICE entanglement will hurt our communities and many people accused of minor crimes will see families torn apart,” Mar warned, as he urged the city to opt out of the Department of Homeland Security initiative, which identifies immigrants who are sitting in U.S. jails and may be deportable under federal immigration laws.

Cosponsored by Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, David Chiu, Chris Daly, Bevan Dufty, Sophie Maxwell, and Ross Mirkarimi, Mar’s resolution was scheduled for a May 25 vote that would make San Francisco the first jurisdiction in the nation to pursue withdrawing from the system.

“The shadow of Arizona is starting to cover other cities,” Mar said, referring to Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation, SB 1070. “We can’t let Arizona come to San Francisco.”

ICE spokesperson Virginia Kice said the program’s focus is on criminal aliens. “These are folks who have been charged with or found guilty of felonies and have ignored deportation orders,” Kice said.

But ICE statistics show that the program mostly deports those with minor offenses. Between October 2008 and March 2010, Secure Communities submitted 1.9 million sets of digital fingerprints and deported 33,326 people nationwide. Fifteen percent of those deported (4,903 people) had criminal histories that included major drug and violent offenses such as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and kidnapping (Level 1 crimes). The other 85 percent (28,423 people) were deported for less serious drug and property offenses (Level 2 crimes) and other minor charges (Level 3 crimes).

Kice admits that Level 2 and 3 offenders constitute the largest percentage of SC cases. “That’s because representatively more people are arrested for Level 2 and 3 offenses than Level 1,” she said. “That’s probably fortunate, because Level 1 crimes are very serious.”

But American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Joanne Lin warns that Secure Communities allows the federal government to circumvent local sanctuary policies and fast-track deportation. “It allows the Department of Homeland Security to identifty everyone who is booked, whether they are here lawfully or their charges are subsequently dropped or dismissed,” Lin said.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said he has no reservations about the program, which the Bush administration first announced in March 2008. “Sanctuary city policies were never meant to protect criminal behavior,” mayoral spokesperson Tony Winnicker said May 7, when San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey blew the whistle on the federal-local fingerprinting collaboration. “At the end of the day, federal officials should enforce immigration laws. We report — we don’t deport.”

The program links local law enforcement databases to the Department of Homeland Security’s biometric system through interoperability agreements with states, allowing instantaneous information-sharing among local jails, ICE, and the FBI.

ICE implemented the program in North Carolina and Texas in October 2008. Under President Obama, the program has been activated in 169 jurisdictions in 20 states. ICE plans to have a Secure Communities presence in each state by 2011, and in each of the 3,100 state and local jails nationwide by 2013, according to its Web site.

Under the program, participating jails submit fingerprints of arrestees to immigration and criminal databases, thereby giving ICE a technological presence in prisons and jails. An overview conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan National Immigration Law Center observes that “the critical element” of the program is that, during booking in jail, arrestees’ fingerprints will be checked against DHS databases, rather than just against FBI criminal databases.

“ICE asserts that the purpose of the Secure Communities program is to target violent criminals for removal,” NILC observed. “Advocates had criticized the program’s operation because it took place at the beginning of the criminal process and therefore indiscriminately targeted persons arrested for crimes of all magnitudes, rather than persons convicted of serious crimes.”

“The underlying purpose may be to lay the groundwork for real immigration reform,” NILC concludes. “But the mechanisms put in place will be difficult to dismantle, and the civil rights violations they produce cannot be undone.”

Scott Lorigan of the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Criminal Identification and Information signed an interoperability agreement with ICE’s John P. Torres in April 2009. Since then, the system has been activated in Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Imperial, Los Angeles, Monterey, Orange, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus, and Ventura counties. Now it’s set to get switched on in San Francisco.

Campos thanks Hennessey for blowing the whistle, and lays the blame at Obama’s door. “None of us would have known this was happening,” Campos said. “This is the time for all San Francisco’s elected officials to stand up in support of the principles that led us to establish a sanctuary city. It’s not just the board, but also the mayor who needs to step up and say what just happened is not acceptable. This program eviscerates sanctuary city.”

Hennessey has written to California Attorney General Jerry Brown asking for assistance in opting out of the ICE program. Brown’s office is reviewing his request. “The California Department of Justice manages the statewide database of fingerprints that are essential to solving crimes, but we have no direct role in enforcing federal immigration laws,” Brown’s press secretary Christine Gasparac clarified. “We were informed by ICE that they will work with counties to opt out of their program. Because that is a process directly between the county and ICE, we’re advising local authorities who want to opt out to contact ICE directly.”

But it’s not clear what opting out will achieve. ICE’s Kice said jurisdictions can choose not to receive the immigration-related information on individuals who are fingerprinted, but that information will still be provided to ICE, which can act on it. Kice said that after an arrestee’s biometrics are forwarded to the feds, the information is bounced off FBI and DHS databases, and the information that comes back says if they have a record.

“What comes out is a recap of whatever relevant information is in the database,” she said. “For example, whether there has been a prior formal deportation or a prior arrest. It also shows if they have an adjusted status — whether they have legal permanent status. It will indicate if they are naturalized, in which case they are not subject to removal. That’s the information the community could cut off.”

“ICE always did these checks, but it was only available to local law enforcement agencies if they queried the system themselves, which required them to take a couple of extra steps,” Kice continued. “And it was name based. And that could be problematic, given duplicate names in system. That’s what fingerprints eliminate. Our concern is that municipalities are dependent to a large extent on information provided by the individual at the moment of arrest. We think the use of biometrics will ensure that folks who provide false information to local law enforcement officials don’t escape detection.”

Kice acknowledged that not everyone in the database is a violator. “The fact of having a record does not mean that you are a deportable alien,” she said. “And we understand that someone may get arrested and may not get convicted on their current charges. But what about a prior history? We know that folks have eluded detection, escaped, or been released from custody. So the individual may be someone who has other prior convictions. It’s the totality of their record that we are talking about here.”

At present, the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department only reports noncitizens who are booked on felony charges. Hennessey expressed concerns about the unintended consequences of ICE technology interfacing with that of the Department of Justice’s fingerprint database.

He also warned that the 2,000 or so ICE referrals his office makes annually could explode. “We’ll be fingerprinting 35,000-40,000 persons annually,” Hennessey claimed. “And ICE has a record of secrecy. They won’t tell me what happened to folks they pick up. They won’t say if they are still in custody, been released or deported. The basis of sanctuary city is to protect immigrants who are not doing anything wrong or serious. When ICE grabs someone who failed to pay a traffic ticket and that person is supporting a family, I don’t think those crimes should rise to the level of deportation.”

May the tastiest critter-friendly cupcake win

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
May the tastiest critter-friendly cupcake win

Your chops sink into the rich, sweet fluff and your lips are left with a coat of luscious frosting; cupcakes are the things dreams are made of and especially the dozens that will be up for tasting this weekend at the Rock Paper Scissors Collective‘s 2nd Annual Vegan Cupcake Bake-off. No butter, no eggs people– all that delicious and they’re animal friendly…pretty sure that will be my excuse for chomping well over five cups.

This bake-off isn’t meant for observation– four bucks gets you a napkin, fork, plate, and a chance to nimble and snack on a the tantalizing entries of frosted vegan treats. Try them all and then vote for your poison. Will it be chocolate drizzle or peachy keen? Oh, the choices we must make.

vegan cupcakes

Last year’s winner, Laurie Ellen, dazzled taste buds with her vegan strawberry-lemonade cupcakes and earned not the typical loads of ridiculous fame and fortune, but a sweet sense of local pride and a good, sugary feeling on her insides. Yum! The taste testing, the baking and more taste testing– I’m guessing the labor of a baker is quite hard to bear and if only I were best friends with one of these candied cooks, I could surely help out.

This baker’s triumph needed to be further explained and luckily Ellen was up for hinting at a couple of her yummy secrets. 

 

SFBG: Tell me about the crafting of your Strawberry-Lemonade recipe? 

Laurie: The recipe last year came out of a last minute dinner at a friends house. I decided to make some cupcakes using lemons from the meyer lemon tree in my backyard that had been fruiting gloriously and some strawberries a coworker brought into work which I had recently made into preserves. It was a union between making something seasonally relevant and making something with items in my pantry.

SFBG: How many cupcakes did you eat in preparation?

Laurie: Well, I usually eat one from every batch and I made about 6 batches leading up to and including the competition, so 6, at least.

SFBG: Who else ate them?

Laurie: Friends, coworkers, strangers, anyone who wanted one, I was itching for feedback.

SFBG: What was the best part about your winning cupcake last year?

Laurie: The people that came up to me after the competition telling me it was the first vegan baked good they had eaten and that it really surprised and challenged the notion of what they thought a cupcake was or could be.

SFBG: What drink would pair best with the strawberry lemonade cakes? Vodka? Milk? 

Laurie: An icy cold Arnold Palmer.

SFBG: Do you always bake vegan?

Laurie: About half the time. Although I am not vegan I have friends and family in my life who have a variety of dietary differences and if I am making something, especially dessert, I want everyone to be able to enjoy it. I think it has come in pretty handy and people are surprised and excited when they realize that they can enjoy dessert too.

SFBG: Any hints as to what you’ve whipped up for this year’s contest?

Laurie: You’ll have to come out to RPSC to check it out, it is a refreshing summer cupcake, I hope people will enjoy it.

 

Besides the bake-sale itself, Paper Rock Scissors will have a bunch of crazy-cupcaked themed events, good for distracting sugar teeth from the pans of goodies. A cookbook of all the vegan treat recipes will be for sale, meaning you can attempt to replicate your favorites. Bring-Your-Own-Tee shirt/totebag or whatever and get it branded with a lovely screen printed cupcake or grin with your mouth full in the cupcake photo-booth. 

 

2nd Annual Vegan Cupcake Bake-off!

Sat/22, 2-5pm, $4

Rock Paper Scissors Collective

2278 Telegraph, Oakland

www.rpscollective.com

 

Hot sexy events May 19-25

Andrew Lam
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0

Original Plumbing is the new thing on the ‘zine scene — a local publication dedicated to exploring the panorama of beauty in the transexual male, which we first covered back in March (the magazine, not the beauty, we’ve been liking that for awhile now). They highlight all kinds of models; whatever your weight, hair placement, surgery status, it’s all gravy to Rocco Kayiatos and Amos Mac, the editors of OP. In addition, they’re tackling the political issues of the day, and their first issue included info on “how to be a man for free.“ Affordable, always sexy! Join up with Original Plumbing in the showers and spas of Eros this week at the release party for the the third issue of its glossy pages.

 

Original Plumbing Party

Celebrate the SF’s magazine’s health and safer sex issue at this sexy soirée — at the workplace of Niko, one of the models featured. Door prizes, wine, and the brains behind the mag will be in attendance.

Wed/19 7-9 p.m., free

Eros 

2051 Market, SF

(415) 255-4921

www.erossf.com

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Non Monogamy for the Novice

M. Makael Newby discusses breaking down the societal ties that bind us to form a more perfect, three person or more, loving relationship. Figure out the difference between non-monogamy and just being a dirt bag to your partner, plus examine what’s up with physical versus emotional multi-partnering.

Wed/19 8-10 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations

603 Valencia, SF

(415) 522-5460

www.goodvibes.com

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Fight Back!: Resistance Play and Kinky Wrestling

Stefano (of Stefano and Chey, hosts of Bent and long time sex educators) brings his experience getting bite marks out of leather to the topic of “illusion of force,” that popular, yet difficult to achieve fantasy of BDSM. In this class, he’ll teach about the physical techniques of a partner who feigns non-compliance, as well as the psychological processes at work.

Thurs/20 8-10 p.m., $15-20

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-1746

www.sfcitadel.org

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Light Heart, Heavy Hands: Sadistic Humor in Sex Play

Tee hee. Giggle giggle. Ha! How can you transform your sex play through the power of laughter? This class teaches ways to integrate a good guffaw into your kink for increased connection with your top, bottom, baby sitter, cell mate, schoolgirl… The list goes on. Just remember though, the women’s BDSM group Exiles’ monthly classes (of which this one is a part) are open only to those who do not identify as male.

Fri/21 8-10 p.m., $8 for members, $10 non members

Women’s Building

4543 18th St., SF

www.theexiles.org

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Wet

Kinky Salon has put out a list of acceptable outfits for the undersea theme party they’re sponsoring this week at Mission Control. Here’s a truncated version. Ahem: scuba divers, clam jousters, Captain Nemo, manatees, sea lions, mermaids, kelp, krill, plankton, sea nymphs, and of course, the giant squid. With all that and more to choose from, you can’t help but dive into the sex-positive exploration at hand. Plus, the Lusty Ladies will be there!

Sat/22 10 p.m., $25-30

Mission Control

2519 Mission, SF

www.kinkysalon.com

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Ride

You know you were born, born, born to be wild! Prove it to yourself at this big, hairy romp, where if you bring in your helmet, American Motorcycle Association card, or your club colors you can go ahead and get ready to get adored. It’s the leathermen affinity night at Eros. Rubber down and rubber on!

Mon/24 4-12 p.m., $7-17

Eros 

2051 Market, SF

(415) 255-4921

www.erossf.com

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Wake Up Your Pelvic Floor

Physical therapist and Feldenkrais practitioner Deborah Bowes moves beyond Kegels to show women what more they can do to improve their sex lives through exercise. So relax that pelvic floor, strengthen that pelvic floor, learn to enjoy health… in a whole different way. It’s a great time to firm it up — next week’s the annual Masturbate-a-thon, hurrah!

Tues/25 8-10 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations 

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0400

www.goodvibes.com 

 

Global movement

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Global movement

Albert Einstein said that “dancers are the athletes of God.” He didn’t say which god he had in mind, nor has the quote made all that much sense. What’s so hot about being in sports? Martha Graham tried to explain it by saying dancers achieved that exalted status through the practice and discipline of their daily work. But couldn’t that be said for any artist? Still, looking at the lineup of dancers at this year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival makes me think Einstein had a point after all.

Dancers are a breed not quite of this world. They certainly are among the most unpractical people roaming this wobbly universe. What they make doesn’t last. It can’t be bought, pawned, hung on the wall, or reproduced to bring in royalties. Their careers are short. Except for the very few, they can’t support themselves with their work, and every time they practice their craft they risk one limb or another. Fortunately for the rest of us, they know what they are in for, and they learn to live on air and love. What dancers also appreciate is a good floor — no splinters, not too slippery, not too sticky. And, yes please, some decent lights.

That — and the till — is what the San Francisco International Arts Festival can offer its dancers, who come from as far away as Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo; Vevey, Switzerland; and Berlin. They also come from Boston, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area. Additionally, the festival, now in its seventh year and still a shoestring operation, assists with the intricacies of individual fundraising — and acquiring visas — but the responsibility for production costs and traveling remains up to the invited artists. This is not the way it’s supposed to work. Whoever said that the biggest supporters of the arts are the artists hit it closer than Einstein did.

But in these parlous times, we take what we can get. The offerings this year certainly look intriguing. What’s not to like in these double bills and single program evenings?

Dana Lawton Dances with Studio Rue Dance For Who is She?, Lawton and three colleagues choreograph famous women on each other; Lawton will be Marilyn Monroe, by Jia Wu — who had previously never heard of the blond bombshell. Perception also shaped Studio Rue Dance’s Byb Chanel Bibene’s solo, Clinic. On leaving the Congo, he had to learn the hard way that whatever he did, he was first seen as “black” and only then as a “man.”

Christian Burns and Anthony Discenza with Company Prototype Status Rarely do visuals and dance support each other as effectively as in the Burns/Discenza Beneath Your Sheltering Hand which looks at how the media messes with our psyche. The Swiss Company Prototype’s Marvin — watch an android come to life — will also be performed (with two other solos) on their own individual program.

Erica Essner Performance Co-op with Gretchen Garnett and Dancers Ten years ago the Erica Essner Performance Co-op moved to New York. Now they are back because Essner wants us to see “her astounding dancers” in two recent pieces. Last year Gretchen Garnett and Dancers performed as part of SFIAF’s Mash — wild, wooly, and worthwhile — Union Square series. This year they have an indoor spot.

Single slots are taken by Amy Seiwert/im’ijre and motion sensor wizard Frieder Weiss‘ world premiere, White Noise, a collaboration Seiwert loved because it pushed her outside her comfort zone. Boston’s Collage will bring East European music and dance. The Bay Area’s The Foundry isn’t asking you to come to see its Please Love Me in a theater. They’ll come to you, perhaps in a bar, park, or parking lot. 

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

May 19–31

Various venues, most shows $25

1-800-838-3006

www.sfiaf.org

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