youth Archives — Page 15 of 67 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

On the Cheap listings

Andrew Lam

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April 2, 2013

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

WEDNESDAY 3

The Great Debate: Should marijuana be legalized? Commonwealth Club, 595 Market, second floor, SF. www.commonwealthclub.org. 11:30am-1pm, $20. Tonight Kevin Sabet, a drug researcher who has served on the Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations, will debate Clint Werner, author of Marijuana Gateway to Health. The two will discuss the potential impact of marijuana on youth, driving laws, mental health, and medical industry.

THURSDAY 4

“The Art of Baseball” George Krevsky Gallery, 77 Geary No. 205, SF. www.georgekrevskygallery.com. Through May 25. Opening reception: 5:30-7:30pm. See America’s favorite pastime depicted by more than 40 artists from across the country in this exhibit at the George Krevsky Gallery’s 16th annual “Art of Baseball” exhibition. Head over tonight for the opening reception and come back May 2 for a night of poetry, literature, music, and short films inspired by the game.

Free rock wall climbing class Lombardi Sports, 1600 Jackson, SF. www.outdooradventureclub.com. 6-7:45pm, free. RSVP required. Take a break from your usual gym routine and give the 25-foot climbing wall at Lombardi Sports a go. The free class is put on by the Outdoor Adventure Club, which provides expert instruction and gear to new and seasoned climbers.

FRIDAY 5

“Hand to Mouth Comedy” The Dark Room Theater, 2263 Mission, SF. 10pm, $5–$8. A unique comedy show that asks comedians to write and perform all new material on a specific social, cultural, or political issue. This month’s topic: crime. Local comedians Bucky Sinister, Kevin Munroe, Clare O’Kane, and more will add a humorous spin to a felonious topic. The evening will also include a performance by bluegrass band The Creak and a burlesque routine by Rosey Booticelli.

SF Ballet School Rotunda Dance Series SF City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton Goodlett, SF. Noon, free. Take a lunch break and peek into City Hall for a free lunchtime performance presented by the San Francisco Ballet trainee program. The event is part of the Rotunda Dance series, put on by the Dancers’ Group, an organization dedicated to helping artists produce work, build audiences, and connect with the community. World Arts West, which has supported and presented world dance artists throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, also had a hand in the afternoon’s creation.

Guardian Presents: Another World deYoung Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, SF. www.famsf.org. 5-9pm, free. Check out our ode to the peacemaking power of drag, in homage to the “Eye Level in Iraq” photography exhibit on display at the deYoung. Radical queens Lil’ Miss Hot Mess, Phatima and the League of Burnt Children, Miss Rahni, Rheal Tea, Mother Chucka, and more bring their fabulous freaky view of social change to the stage. Plus, a craft table and a panel discussion by the photogs whose work is on display in the museum.

SATURDAY 6

Yellowbike Project’s Upcycle Ball SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF. www.sfyellowbike.org. 6pm-midnight, $10 door, presale available online. The second annual Upcycle Ball will rally cyclists from across the Bay Area to support local bicycle culture and nonprofit organizations. The evening will begin with a silent auction and workshops and finish out with a dance social with DJ Jays One.

Eileen Fisher Fashion Tips Macy’s, 170 O’Farrell, SF. www.macys.com/flowershow. As part of Macy’s annual flower show, fashion designer Eileen Fisher will be hosting a fashion show and behind-the-scenes event. Sip on refreshments and enjoy some snacks while you check out what’s in store for fall style.

SUNDAY 7

Fierce Fat Girls book signing Curvy Girl Lingerie, 1535 Meridian, San Jose. www.curvygirlinc.com. 2-4pm, $15. RSVP required. Plus-size lingerie company Curvy Girl celebrates the grand opening of its Willow Glen location with author of Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love, and Fashion Virgie Tovar. The author and sex educator will speak with guests while signing copies of her book.

Free hot dog day at Frankenart Mart Gallery Frankenart Mart Gallery, 515 Balboa, SF. www.frankenartmart.com. 1-6pm, free. Art and free food collide today as part of the quirky gallery’s monthly tradition. Check out some sweet interactive art projects currently on display at the 200 square foot gallery and chow down on either a beef or veggie dog.

MONDAY 8

The Shout: Life’s True Stories Grand Lake Coffee House, 440 Grand, Oakl. www.theshoutstorytelling.com. $5-20 donation accepted. The Shout is a monthly event where invited storytellers tell amazing but true 10-minute stories plucked from their daily lives. Audience members have the opportunity to put their name in a hat in hopes of being picked for a six-minute wild-card turn. Head over to the coffeehouse to hear stories about anything from a soft-core pore actress who stared in a sexy version of Don Quixote to a young man’s discovery that he was part of the witness protection program as a child.

TUESDAY 9

Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. When author Caroline Paul and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton lost their kitty Tibia they thought she was gone for good. Five weeks later she came home. The two became curious as to where their cat was spending her days so they turned to technology. Join Paul and MacNaughton as they share their brief stint in the pet detective business.

Film Trivia Pub Quiz The New Parkway, 474 24th St., Oakl. www.thenewparkway.com. 7-9pm, free. Head over to New Parkway for a pub quiz that’s not actually in a pub but a movie theater. Test your knowledge of movie history, famous characters, and classic film titles. Those with the highest cinema IQ will win prizes like free beer and movie passes.

The art of staying put

Andrew Lam

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April 2, 2013

11

On a sunny Thursday afternoon, the sound of whirring power tools floats down to Market and Golden Gate as office renovations surge ahead in the building next to the Warfield, which looks as if it had been shrink-wrapped in white plastic to control the dust. Before long, several tech startups and a venture capital firm will occupy three floors there.

The newcomers will be following a trend: Twitter and Zendesk, beneficiaries of a payroll-tax exclusion zone created to attract growing businesses, already have offices nearby. Further down the street, a glossy sidewalk-level billboard walls off a stretch of empty storefronts. “This is the Place,” the message proclaims. “250,000 square feet of retail space, opening 2015.”

San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood is changing fast. But this growth comes at a cost. It’s driving up rents for nonprofits and small businesses — and it may scuttle the long-promised ambitious plans to create an arts center with affordable space for small performance groups at 950 Market Street.

Mayor Ed Lee, who pushed for the tax breaks and lauds the changes in mid-Market, also wants the arts center, and has asked potential developers who are bidding on the site to consider that use. But it’s not the most profitable use — that would be tech offices — and there’s nothing mandating that a private company comply with the wishes of the mayor, at a potential loss of millions of dollars.

Instead, the city is discussing a possible incentive package — that is, special zoning or city financing schemes to help get developers interested in the project.

BEYOND THE MILLIONAIRES

Mid-Market is still home to many people who are not bent on achieving tech millionaire status. Some are merely focused on finding their next meal, and might even dig through the trash for it. There are wheelchair-bound veterans, drug addicts, street merchants, and people living with AIDS. There are artists, actors, small business owners, serious sidewalk chess players, SRO dwellers, and nonprofit service providers. An economic development study determined that a full 31 percent of the households in the densely populated area earn less than $15,000 a year, making the neighborhood three times as poor as the citywide average.

The city’s been trying for years to formulate a strategy for the economically and racially diverse, centralized, transit-connected neighborhood, which is just a stone’s throw from City Hall. In recent years, community stakeholder meetings have been convened, email lists fired up, neighborhood surveys commissioned, pedestrian habits tracked, official reports generated. In November 2011, the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development unveiled its Central Market Economic Strategy, which charted a course for the Market area stretch roughly bracketed by Fifth and Tenth streets.

The report opens with a set of “guiding principles” that residents said ought to inform any future revitalization efforts. Priority No. 1: “Promote the development of a healthy, economically functional low-income neighborhood.” Priority No. 2: “Prevent displacement of existing residents and businesses.”

A great deal of emphasis has also been placed on bolstering the area’s art scene, and the report acknowledges that efforts should be taken to “stabilize” low-income communities so they aren’t forced out through gentrification catalyzed by art. The strategy “also includes an action item for the creation of artist housing,” Christine Falvey, Mayor Lee’s press secretary, told us, but “community feedback on the strategy directed the city to prioritize non-housing arts space in the first year of implementation.”

The goals expressed in OEWD’s report hint at some of San Francisco’s most pressing issues — homeless families unable to sustain high housing costs are increasingly flocking to overwhelmed service providers in San Francisco; nonprofits are vanishing in the face of impossibly overpriced rents; artists are moving to Oakland.

And the fate of 950 Market could be a pivotal moment when the city learns if it’s actually possible to bring high-end economic development to the area without displacement.

The 950 Center for Art and Education represents a multi-layered community planning effort many months in the making. Described as “the first multi-tenant, multi-use arts and education center in San Francisco,” it came out of a desire to create a permanently affordable complex to house existing art, education and nonprofit organizations in Central Market and the Tenderloin, many of which are finding it harder to remain in San Francisco. In addition to dedicated arts facilities, the complex could provide 20,000 square feet of nonprofit office space.

“The mayor has been very clear with the development community that he thinks arts and cultural facilities are a good fit for this site,” Falvey noted. “He communicated this point at a breakfast meeting which he convened along with Supervisor Kim, to developers on Central Market and those looking at property in the area.”

Invitations to the breakfast, held Jan. 30, were extended to all interested bidders, as well as area developers. City officials treated the real-estate heavyweights to a power point presentation about local arts organizations, and representatives from a couple prominent foundations were on hand to show philanthropic support for the concept.

IT’S UP TO TEXAS

Lone Star, a Texas-based hedge fund, is selling the complex that would house the center, and was expected to receive final bids earlier this month. Sup. Jane Kim, whose District 6 includes mid-Market, said she was hopeful that the developer would go along with the vision for an arts space — but at this point, that’s not the city’s decision.

After all, city officials haven’t established binding requirements to use the space in a particular way, and turning it into commercial office space or market-rate housing would be far more lucrative. Lone Star declined to comment for this story.

Kim stressed that there are other shuttered properties in the area — the Hibernia Bank, for example — that could eventually house arts groups if this opportunity is lost. But that means going back to the drawing board, even as tech startups eagerly anticipate the completion of their own office renovations.

City officials have also been contemplating a way to sweeten the deal with “a package of incentives to make the project pencil out for the developers,” Kim said. This could take the form of an infrastructure finance district, or building height bonuses, she said.

But even with accommodations for wealthy real estate speculators on the table, the plans could still go up in smoke, given Mid-Market’s new identity as a tech hotspot. “I’m very concerned about that,” Kim said. “The last thing any of us hoped to see is just office space development.”

Plans for the 950 Center aim to support economic diversity by placing anchor tenants in long-term leases, then incorporating shared facilities at affordable rates for part-time users in need of lower rent. The idea is to promote stability by sharing resources.

Among those who’ve expressed interest in moving into the 950 Center is the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, a prominent African American theater group founded in 1981 that lost its performance space but still maintains an office in the neighborhood.

“As a community, we can’t allow ourselves to lose Lorraine Hansberry Theatre,” Tenderloin Economic Development Project executive director Elvin Padilla wrote in a recent blog post. “I can’t think of a more meaningful place for its historic name and presence to be seen and felt.” Padilla has been integral in crafting 950 Center plans, but did not return calls seeking an interview for this story.

Youth Speaks, an arts organization that exposes Bay Area youth to spoken word, theatre, and poetry with a focus on kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods, has also expressed interest. “Our rent just doubled,” explained James Kass, the organization’s executive director. “It’s a typical nonprofit thing. We move in and then Yelp, or Zynga, or Twitter moves in, and the rent goes up.”

Kass added, “A lot of us are fighting to stay in San Francisco … but rent is cheaper in Oakland.” While he was hopeful that Youth Speaks would get an opportunity to move into the 950 Center, he wasn’t convinced that it would come to pass. “With the rapid growth, all of a sudden it’s a hotspot for redevelopment. It’s too bad there wasn’t something put down on paper awhile ago,” guaranteeing an art use, he said.

Shortly after Kim and Lee hosted the breakfast for Mid-Market developers, they succeeded in convincing Lone Star to include language in its Offering Memorandum asking prospective buyers “to help provide input into possible developer incentives for arts uses.”

At the end of the day, longtime arts and community-oriented groups fighting to keep their toeholds in San Francisco haven’t been promised anything, despite years of stakeholder meetings convened by the city emphasizing art as a central focus. Yet Padilla, clearly keeping his eye on the prize, lauded Kim and Lee for inventing perks to entice developers to support art over profit. “While this is indeed a major victory, the mention of a ‘potential arts component’ does not translate into a done deal for the 950 Project,” he wrote in a blog post. “Speculative bidders with billions of dollars in their arsenal will still try to avoid addressing this issue and test the resolve of City Hall and the local community. This means the hard work of advocacy … must continue.”

Major Lazer showers the Independent with cash, vuvuzelas, dead memes, and a giant bubble

Tony Robles

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April 2, 2013

1

It comes as a surprise to me that Diplo didn’t at least have a cameo in Spring Breakers — the film that takes place in his home state of Florida – considering his penchant for egregious hedonism.

His quest for indulgent nirvana was on full display last Thursday at the Independent, when he and his Major Lazer crew lead a 90-minute uber-bash of trap, electro, dancehall, moombahton, and dubstep.

A Major Lazer concert could arguably be labeled a “glorified DJ set,” due to the lack of a frontperson, the fact that all the instrumentals come from turntables, and because the duo spins other artists’ songs. But despite possessing most of the characteristics of your basic DJ set, Major Lazer’s show had the crowd way more pumped than a standard concert.

The show began with – you guessed it! — two DJ sets from Mad Decent creative director-Diplo’s labelmate Paul Devro and DJ-producer Lunice, who also serves as one half of trap outfit TNGHT, with Hudson Mohawke. Devro and Lunice warmed up the relatively sparse crowd (a good portion of the audience arrived in between Lunice and Major Lazer) with a solid sampling of tracks typically featured on most up-to-date DJ mixes. Major Lazer fans, get your shit together, showing up fashionably late is so passe, just pre-game an hour earlier if you have to. You missed quality openers.

Major Lazer was up next. At Diplo’s side were producers-DJs Jillionaire and Walshy Fire of Black Chiney fame (Major Lazer started as a collaboration between Diplo and Switch, but Switch split in 2011). And this should come as no surprise to those familiar with Diplo, there also was a lone dancer on stage, getting her express yourself on the whole time.

Express yourself isn’t just a music video but also a meme where young women tweet pictures of themselves doing handstands against a wall to Diplo’s music. Even though its novelty wore off within a month, that hasn’t stopped Diplo from cluttering his followers’ Twitter feeds with constant retweets of young, barely-clothed upside down women. (He’ll throw in a guy or two once every thousand retweets.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKaL7WL-onI

From the opening horn sounds to the closing hoots, Major Lazer effortlessly orchestrated a wildly raucous party. Before Diplo even yelled out the requisite “whassup San Francisco” shout-out, the DJ-superproducer-rapscallion, clad in a suit straight from GQ, was standing on top of the elaborate sound system, towering over his bass-hungry subjects.

And after hopping down from his perch, he proceeded to shower the crowd in bills, though your concert reviewer was unfortunately unable to verify the denominations of said bills. But then came the showering of the vuvuzelas! Pretty much anyone who wanted one, got one. And right after that, Diplo got into an eight-foot diameter air bubble and rolled on top of the audience, a move that surely stopped the hearts of the Independent’s management.

But the music was beckoning, and Diplo and crew got to work thrusting the throbbing bass and eclectic grooves of hits such as “Original Don” (Flosstradamus remix), “Listen to your Heart” by Hot Chip (Major Lazer remix), and Major Lazer’s latest single “Get Free” amid a blitzkrieg of neon lights.

After a while, Diplo was back to his old antics. He invited a lucky bro up on stage to have him document a live-action Harlem Shake video (I told you Diplo indulges in dead memes). But the crowd didn’t mind and gleefully engaged in one last Harlem Shake. (Hopefully.)

The biggest non-surprise of them all came when Diplo hand-picked five lucky ladies to come on stage to express the hell out of themselves. He later invited another female audience member up because, why the eff not? This gimmick went on for at least five minutes too long, especially when two of the women looked cravenly exhausted from doing this drunken dancing handstand.

All night long Diplo was unabashedly bathing in the unfettered hedonism of sweat, drink, and bass, and when the set was over, he immediately jet-setted two miles east to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, where another throng of beat-thirsty youth was waiting for him.

I survived the “Real World: San Francisco” marathon

Sue Vaughan

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March 27, 2013

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I survived the “Real World: San Francisco” marathon

The 28th season of The Real World premieres tonight, and the trailer features some crying bros and a lot of slapping in Portland, Ore. To remind us of the show’s less … well, shitty origins, MTV ran a “retro marathon” of its first three seasons last weekend.

Before the Teen Mom franchise, before Jersey Shore (and its ever-multiplying spin-offs), and before something called Buckwild that I don’t feel like researching, there were true stories of seven strangers picked to live in houses in New York and Los Angeles. And then in 1994, some strangers came to the wonderful city of San Francisco. The third season, last weekend’s grand finale, often gets credited with sparking the show’s popularity and indirectly launching the reality TV craze. It almost lives up to its reputation.

Usually, watching a reality television show after it’s finished airing presents a predicament; the knowledge that the cast has returned to the world outside the screen takes away the precept — flimsy as it is to begin with — that we are seeing reality unfold. Watching the San Francisco season is a different experience. The 19 years of distance, a huge cultural gap (OMG, no smartphones!), makes the show a historical document.

The Real World: San Francisco is a fascinating record of 20-something life in the mid-90s (OMG, no texting!). And because at that time, the channel dealt with issues besides teen pregnancy, it’s also a depiction of an earlier era of gay rights, of a different political climate, and of a time when an AIDS educator had to reassure his peers that they did not need to fear sharing a bathroom with someone HIV-positive.

Pedro Zamora, one of the first openly gay and HIV-positive men on TV, has been tasked with the responsibility of giving a face to history (the use of B-roll that supplements parts of his story, such as his emigration from Cuba, adds to the sense of his role in the show as documentary). Bill Clinton, who took up the cause of honoring Zamora, believed his stint on The Real World made giant strides in the effort to humanize the struggle with HIV/AIDS and that lends great historical weight to the show.

So, counter to the typical experience of re-watching reality TV, our awareness of events after San Francisco heightens the drama. Knowledge of Pedro’s death right after the season’s premier gives his plotline — for lack of a better term — an eery poignancy. On a happier note, Pam Ling and Judd Winick’s marriage in 2001 their season makes us look for clues in their innocent beginnings as friends during taping. The show becomes primary source material for their romance. Less pleasant is the tale of Puck (David Rainey), the roommate kicked out of the house, whose life after the show comes as no surprise at all. (Don’t worry, he got out of jail in time to film this interview before the marathon.)

How can any reality show claim to show an authentic view of history, though? It probably can’t, but It’s worth noting that The Real World‘s claim to be a social experiment had some legitimacy back then; people didn’t sign up for reality TV to achieve the same fame that they do today because the cult of the reality TV star had not yet exploded (in 1994, Kim Kardashian was still in the early stages of puberty). As a result, most of the cast was intelligent and had real goals that made them compelling and seemingly genuine. (We do, however, find a proto-reality TV star in Rachel Campos, the pretty girl who gave up dreams of academia when she met her husband on Road Rules: All Stars. For a while, she occasionally guest-hosted The View, and her Wikipedia page lists her occupation as “television personality.”)

Much of what makes The Real World: San Francisco entertaining nearly two decades later, though, are the things that make all ‘90s artifacts entertaining. It is a history of those fun outdated cultural signs that make “Buzzfeed Rewind” slide shows so heartwarming for millennials. Look at the low resolution! Note the light wash high-waisted jeans worn by men and women alike! Everyone’s rollerblading! Remember pagers?

And don’t worry, there are the requisite black-and-white confessionals, a comically suggestive musical score, and some drama, too — yelling, making out (and subsequent regret), and name-calling. But a word of warning for fans of Bad Girls Club and Tila Tequila: the name-calling doesn’t get much worse than “brat.”

Which brings me to a final point that, yes, the show mostly lives up to its reputation; The Real World: San Francisco is compelling as a historical record and nostalgia machine, but I have to admit that overall, I found it a little bland. The cast has a good time together, argues about house cleanliness over the dinner table, and learns from each other, but the fact that one of the few drunken escapades happens as a ladies’ night in floral pajamas made the whole day-to-day feel a little too charming.

It’s official: today’s television has ruined me. I don’t want to see interesting people with ambitious goals or downtrodden youth with the passion to make society more tolerant. I don’t want a document of reality at all, but an absurd heightening of it.

Even so, I think I’ll probably skip The Real World: Portland.

Oh, and if you want your own fix of retro reality, you can stream the complete San Francisco season here.

LGBT youth law, ignored

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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March 27, 2013

26

Thirteen years ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted an ordinance designed to make city services more accessible to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth. Under Chapter 12N of the San Francisco Administrative Code, city departments must provide LGBT sensitivity training “to any employee or volunteer who has direct contact with youth.” It also applies to any collaborative youth service providers who receive $50,000 or more in city funding.

Fueled with great intentions, 12N is the letter of the law in a city known for its tolerance and forward-thinking, progressive values. “San Francisco is committed to ensuring that LGBTQ youth receive the same level of dignity and respect as granted to all residents when encountering city services and programs,” a statement on the Human Rights Commission website reads.

There’s only one problem. With the exception of one department, 12N has never actually been implemented.

Last week, Paul Monge-Rodriguez, a 23-year-old appointee to the San Francisco Youth Commission, approached the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club to point out that 12N has never been put into practice.

“To this day, there’s only one city department in compliance, and that’s the Department of Public Health,” Monge-Rodriguez explained in an interview with the Guardian. Other major service providers include the Human Services Agency, the Department of Children Youth & their Families, and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

An effort to push implementation, led by the Youth Commission, the Human Rights Commission and LYRIC — a nonprofit organization addressing issues facing LGBT youth — is gaining traction. Sup. John Avalos called for a hearing; following Monge-Rodriguez’s presentation, the Milk Club voted to formally support the effort.

“We pass these laws, but then when it comes to putting it in action, we don’t always live up to the legislation,” Avalos told the Guardian. “Basically, the city hasn’t implemented the program in terms of providing training for city staff.”

Jodi Schwartz, executive director of LYRIC, argues that 12N implementation should involve collection of sexual orientation and transgender identity data so as to better inform agencies about the populations they serve. The San Francisco Unified School District is the only district nationwide that collects sexual orientation and gender identity data when studying risk behavior for middle and high school students — and the results of a 2011 SFUSD anonymous survey revealed an alarming number of suicide attempts reported among queer youth.

According to SFUSD’s suicide indicators analysis, more than a third of high school students and nearly half of middle school students who self-identified as transgender reported having attempted suicide at some point; meanwhile, about a third of middle school students and about 17 percent of high school students who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual also reported having attempted suicide.

The data is based on extrapolations and assumes no overlap between transgender and LGB populations, and concrete data in this realm is generally difficult to obtain. But based on the SFUSD data, LYRIC estimated that more than 1,000 LGBT students in middle and high school had reported attempting suicide. It’s a disturbing figure to say the least. If other agencies begin collecting such data, Schwartz argues, “they’ll use it to inform their priorities as an institution.”

Youth Commissioner Mia Tu Mutch, 22, helped create a training video that was shown to city staff at the Department of Public Health as part of a pilot program to initiate the sensitivity training mandated under 12N.

“Some of the stories talked about trans people feeling unsafe or unwelcome by service providers,” she explained when asked about the video, which was not made publicly available. “One featured a gender-queer young person who felt more comfortable using gender-neutral terms, but the intake person went out of their way to use the wrong pronoun.”

Tu Mutch worked with LYRIC to create a Tumblr site, entitled 12N Now or Never, featuring photographs of queer youth holding up signs asking for immediate 12N implementation. Her own sign reads, “I need 12N because youth shouldn’t have to educate adults.” Another message, posted by a young person named Vincent, reads, “I need 12N because I don’t want my kids to be judged like I was.”

“I think it just speaks to the bureaucratic process,” David Miree, spokesperson for the Human Rights Commission, responded when asked about the long delay. “The great intentions were there to put it into an ordinance. But what had to happen was, there had to be someone, or some community, or some agency” to step in and make it happen.

Schwartz takes a different view on why so little has been done. “There’s a lack of political will,” she says, “to invest the resources to do the transformation that’s necessary.”

Rep Clock

Andrew Lam

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March 26, 2013

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Schedules are for Wed/27-Tue/2 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6.66. “Other Cinema: Secret Societies,” Sat, 8:30. Works by Adam Parfrey and more.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $10-15. Beauty and the Beast (Wise, 1991), Wed-Sun and April 3-5, 7 (also Sat-Sun, 2:30). Presented sing-along style; advance tickets at www.ticketweb.com.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. A Fierce Green Fire (Kitchell, 2012), call for dates and times. Ginger and Rosa (Potter, 2012), call for dates and times. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), call for dates and times. On the Road (Salles, 2012), call for dates and times. Quartet (Hoffman, 2012), call for dates and times. “World Ballet on the Big Screen:” Youth America Grand Prix Gala, Sun, 1; Tue, 6:30.

CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. “Midnight Movies:” The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975), Sat, midnight. With the Bawdy Caste performing live.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. Anima Mundi: Permaculture, Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Soul of the World (Downey, 2011), Wed, 7:30.

NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6-10. “New Parkway Classics:” A Scanner Darkly (Linklater, 2006), Thu, 9pm. “New Parkway Family Classics:” Sita Sings the Blues (Paley, 2008), Fri, 4; Sat, 11am. “Late Night:” The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981) Fri, 11:30; Labyrinth (Henson, 1986), 11:30; . “Thrillville:” Night of the Lepus (Claxton, 1972), Sun, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “And God Created Jean-Louis Trintignant:” Il sorpasso (Risi, 1962), Thu, 7; Le combat dans l’ile (Cavalier, 1962), Thu, 9; My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer, 1969), Fri, 8:45; A Man and a Woman (Lelouch, 1966), Sat, 6. “The Spanish Mirth: The Comedic Films of Luis García Berlanga:” ¡Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall! (1953), Fri, 7; The Rocket from Calabuch (1956), Sun, 3. “Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:” “Lecture by Stefan Drössler: Schroeter’s Beginnings as a Filmmaker,” Sat, 8; “Johannas Traum and Rare Early Work,” Sun, 5. “Documentary Voices:” Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2011), Tue, 7.

PARISOMA 169 11th St, SF; www.salon97.org. Free. Pianomania (Franck, 2009), Wed, 7:30.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. Daylight Savings (Boyle, 2012), Wed, 7:30. Somebody Up There Likes Me (Byington, 2012), Wed-Thu, 7, 9:30. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), Wed, 9. K-11 (Stewart, 2012), Thu, 7, 9. “Food and Farm Film Fest:” Trattoria (Wolos, 2012), Fri, 7; Ratatouille (Bird and Pinkava, 2007), Sat, 1; “Food, Justice, and Art: A Shorts Program,” Sat, 4; Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (Blank, 1990), Sat, 7; Betting the Farm (Pingree and Mann, 2012), Sun, 4; The Last Shepherd (Bonfanti, 2012), Sun, 7. More more info visit www.foodandfarmfilms.com. Wrong (Dupieux, 2012), March 29-April 4, 7, 9:15 (also Sat-Sun, 3, 5).

VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $8-10. “HitchCult 1/AphrodesiaCriminality:” To Catch a Thief (1954), Wed, 7:30. Event also includes a screening of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode (“Hitch Hike”), plus short films, musical entertainment, and more. “Super Secret Ninja Sunday:” •The Ninja Mission (Helge, 1984), Sun, 7; Ninja Terminator (Ho, 1985), Sun, 8:30; and Ninja III: The Domination (Firstenberg, 1984), Sun, 10.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. “Human Rights Watch International Film Festival:” Reportero (Ruiz, 2011), Thu, 7:30.

Film listings

Andrew Lam

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March 26, 2013

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

From Up on Poppy Hill Hayao (dad, who co-wrote) and Goro (son, who directed) Miyazaki collaborate on this tale of two high-school kids — Umi, who does all the cooking at her grandmother’s boarding house, and Shun, a rabble-rouser who runs the school newspaper — in idyllic seaside Yokohama. Plans for the 1964 Olympics earmark a beloved historic clubhouse for demolition, and the budding couple unites behind the cause. The building offers a symbolic nod to Japanese history, while rehabbing it speaks to hopes for a brighter post-war future. But the past keeps interfering: conflict arises when Shun’s memories are triggered by a photo of Umi’s father, presumed lost at sea in the Korean War. There are no whimsical talking animals in this Studio Ghibli release, which investigates some darker-than-usual themes, though the animation is vivid and sparkling per usual. Hollywood types lending their voices to the English-language version include Jamie Lee Curtis, Christina Hendricks, Ron Howard, and Gilllian Anderson. (1:31) California, Embarcadero. (Eddy)

GI Joe: Retaliation Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson, and Channing Tatum star in this sequel to the 2009 toy-spawned action hit. (1:50) Marina.

The Host Twilight author Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi novel gets the big-screen treatment, with a cast headed up by Saoirse Ronan (2011’s Hanna). (2:01) Presidio.

Mental Toni Collette is a batshit Mary Poppins in this side-splitting comedy about one family and Australia’s identity as the world’s Island of Misfit Toys. According to Shaz (Collette), she and her pit bull Ripper (pronounced “Reippah”) came to the town of Dolphin Head to fulfill their destiny. It’s there philandering Mayor Moochmore (a brilliant Anthony LaPaglia) employs her informally as a “babysitter” (the film’s biggest plot hole). Moochmore’s a pathetic excuse for a dad but he needs someone to take care of his five daughters, since he’s finally pushed his wife into nervous-breakdown mode. Everything in Dolphin Head exists on a fulcrum: when Shaz takes the girls to climb a mountain one asks, “What’s the point of climbing to the top?”, and Shaz answers, “Not being at the bottom.” Mental is not a far cry from the director’s last big import, Muriel’s Wedding, the 1994 film that made Collette a star. Everyone’s nuts here, the message goes, but if we’re confident enough in ourselves, we can sway the rest into seeing how our insanity is better than theirs — or at least strong enough to withstand sharks, knife fights, and pit bulls. Good times, mate, good times. (1:56) Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

The Sapphires The civil rights injustices suffered by these dream girls may be unique to Aboriginal Australians, but they’ll strike a chord with viewers throughout the world — at right about the same spot stoked by the sweet soul music of Motown. Co-written by Tony Briggs, the son of a singer in a real-life Aboriginal girl group, this unrepentant feel-gooder aims to make the lessons of history go down with the good humor and up-from-the-underdog triumph of films like The Full Monty (1997) — the crucial difference in this fun if flawed comedy-romance is that it tells the story of women of color, finding their voices and discovering, yes, their groove. It’s all in the family for these would-be soul sisters, or rather country cousins, bred on Merle Haggard and folk tunes: there’s the charmless and tough Gail (Deborah Mailman), the soulful single mom Julie (Jessica Mauboy, an Australian Idol runner-up), the flirty Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), and the pale-skinned Kay (Shari Sebbens), the latter passing as white after being forcibly “assimilated” by the government. Their dream is to get off the farm, even if that means entertaining the troops in Vietnam, and the person to help them realize that checkered goal is dissolute piano player Dave (Chris O’Dowd). And O’Dowd is the breakout star to watch here — he adds an loose, erratic energy to an otherwise heavily worked story arc. So when romance sparks for all Sapphires — and the racial tension simmering beneath the sequins rumbles to the surface — the easy pleasures generated by O’Dowd and the music (despite head-scratching inclusions like 1970’s “Run Through the Jungle” in this 1968-set yarn), along with the gently handled lessons in identity politics learned, obliterate any lingering questions left sucking Saigon dust as the narrative plunges forward. They keep you hanging on. (1:38) (Chun)

The Silence See “Alternative Medicine.” (1:59) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

The Spanish Mirth: The Comedic Films of Luis Garcia Berlanga Noted for his dexterity in outwitting the vigilant censors of Franco’s regime while getting away with subversive themes, Berlanga’s long career outlasted the despot’s by several decades. His social satires are showcased in this Pacific Film Archive retrospective of seven features that run a gamut from parodies of Spanish cultural stereotypes (as when villagers hungry for postwar economic-incentive dough try to look like the essence of tourist-friendly quaintness in 1953’s Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall!) to literal gallows humor (1964’s The Executioner) and kinky black comedy (Michel Piccoli as a mild-mannered dentist carrying on an “affair” with a realistic sex doll in Tamano Natural, a.k.a. Life Size). Once Franco finally kicked the bucket, the frequently prize-winning filmmaker let loose with 1978’s anarchic La Escopeta Nacional, a.k.a. The National Shotgun, leaving no formerly sacred cow unmilked. He remained active until a few years before his 2010 death at age 89. The PFA series (running March 29-April 17) offers archival 35mm prints of these movies that remain esteemed at home but are relatively little-known today abroad. Pacific Film Archive. (Harvey)

Starbuck See “Alternative Medicine.” (1:48) Embarcadero.

Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor This is a PG-13 movie with the tag line “Seduction is the devil’s playground.” (2:06) Shattuck.

Wrong See “Mind-Doggling.” (1:34) Roxie.

ONGOING

Admission Tina Fey exposes the irritating underbelly of the Ivy League application process as Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan. When her school falls to number two in U.S. News and World Report‘s annual ranking, Portia and her colleagues are tasked by their boss (Wallace Shawn) with boosting application numbers to bring the university back into the lead. Alterna-school headmaster John Pressman (Paul Rudd) has one more applicant to add to the pile: a charmingly gawky autodidact named Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), who John is convinced is the child Portia gave up for adoption back when they were both students at Dartmouth. Stuck in a dreary 10-year relationship with an English professor (Michael Sheen) whose bedtime endearments consist of absentmindedly patting her on the head while reading aloud from The Canterbury Tales, and seeming less than thrilled with the prospect of another season of sifting through the files of legacies and overachievers, Portia is clearly ripe for some sort of purgative crisis. When it arrives, the results are fairly innocuous, if ethically questionable. Directed by Paul Weitz, the man responsible for bringing Little Fockers (2010) into the world, but About a Boy (2002) as well, Admission is sweet and sometimes funny but unmemorable, even with Lily Tomlin playing Portia’s surly, iconoclast mother. (1:50) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Amour Arriving in local theaters atop a tidal wave of critical hosannas, Amour now seeks to tempt popular acclaim — though actually liking this perfectly crafted, intensely depressing film (from Austrian director Michael Haneke) may be nigh impossible for most audience members. Eightysomething former music teachers Georges and Anne (the flawless Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are living out their days in their spacious Paris apartment, going to classical concerts and enjoying the comfort of their relationship. Early in the film, someone tries to break into their flat — and the rest of Amour unfolds with a series of invasions, with Anne’s declining health the most distressing, though there are also unwanted visits from the couple’s only daughter (an appropriately self-involved Isabelle Huppert), an inept nurse who disrespects Anne and curses out Georges, and even a rogue pigeon that wanders in more than once. As Anne fades into a hollow, twisted, babbling version of her former self, Georges also becomes hollow and twisted, taking care of her while grimly awaiting the inevitable. Of course, the movie’s called Amour, so there’s some tenderness involved. But if you seek heartwarming hope and last-act uplift, look anywhere but here. (2:07) Four Star. (Eddy)

Barbara The titular figure (Nina Hoss) looks the very picture of blonde Teutonic ice princess when she arrives — exiled from better prospects by some unspecified, politically ill-advised conduct — in at a rural 1980 East German hospital far from East Berlin’s relative glamour. She’s a pill, too, stiffly formal in dealings with curious locals and fellow staff including the disarmingly rumpled, gently amorous chief physician Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld). Yet her stern prowess as a pediatric doctor is softened by atypically protective behavior toward teen Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a frequent escapee from prison-like juvenile care facilities. Barbara has secrets, however, and her juggling personal, ethical, and Stasi-fearing priorities will force some uncomfortable choices. It is evidently the moment for German writer-director Christian Petzold to get international recognition after nearly 20 years of equally fine, terse, revealing work in both big-screen and broadcast media (much with Hoss as his prime on-screen collaborator). This intelligent, dispassionate, eventually moving character study isn’t necessarily his best. But it is a compelling introduction. (1:45) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives When Ina May Gaskin had her first child, the hospital doctor used forceps (against her wishes) and her baby was sequestered for 24 hours immediately after birth. “When they brought her to me, I thought she was someone else’s,” Gaskin recalls in Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore’s documentary. Gaskin was understandably flummoxed that her first experience with the most natural act a female body can endure was as inhuman as the subject of an Eric Schlosser exposé. A few years later, she met Stephen Gaskin, a professor who became her second husband, and the man who’d go on to co-found the Farm, America’s largest intentional community, in 1971. On the Farm, women had children, and in those confines, far from the iron fist of insurance companies, Gaskin discovered midwifery as her calling. She recruited others, and dedicated herself to preserving an art that dwindles as the medical industry strives to treat women’s bodies like profit machines. Her message is intended for a larger audience than granola-eating moms-to-be: we’re losing touch with our bodies. Lamm and Wigmore bravely cram a handful of live births into the film; footage of a breech birth implies this doc could go on to be a useful teaching tool for others interested in midwifery. (1:33) New Parkway, Roxie. (Vizcarrondo)

The Call (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, SF Center.

The Croods (1:38) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Dead Man Down Pee. Yew. This Dead Man reeks, though surveying the cast list and judging from the big honking success of director Niels Arden Oplev’s previous film, 2009’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, one would hope the stench wouldn’t be quite so crippling. Crime boss (Terrence Howard) is running panic-stricken after a series of spooky mail-art threats — and it isn’t long before we realize why: his most handy henchman Victor (Colin Farrell) is the one out to destroy him after the death of his wife and daughter. The wrinkle in the plot is the moody, beautiful, and scarred French girl Beatrice (Noomi Rapace) who lives across the way from Victor’s apartment with her deaf mom (Isabelle Huppert) and has plans to extract her own kind of vengeance. Despite Rapace’s brooding performance (Oplev obviously hopes she’ll pull a Lisbeth Salander and miraculously hack this mess — unsure about whether it’s a shoot-’em-up revenge exercise or a Rear Window-ish misfit love story — into something worthwhile) and cameos by actors like Dominic Cooper and F. Murray Abraham, they can’t compensate for the weak writing and muddled direction, the fact that Victor conveniently dithers instead of putting an end to his victim’s (and our) agony, and that the entire mis-en-scene with its Czechs, Albanians, et al, which reads like a Central European blood feud played out in Grand Central Station — just a few components as to why Dead Man stinks. (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Emperor This ponderously old-fashioned historical drama focuses on the negotiations around Japan’s surrender after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While many on the Allied side want the nation’s “Supreme Commander” Emperor Hirohito to pay for war crimes with his life, experts like bilingual Gen. Bonners Fellers (Matthew Fox) argue that the transition to peace can be achieved not by punishing but using this “living god” to wean the population off its ideological fanaticism. Fellers must ultimately sway gruff General MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) to the wisdom of this approach, while personally preoccupied with finding the onetime exchange-student love (Kaori Momoi) denied him by cultural divisions and escalating war rhetoric. Covering (albeit from the U.S. side) more or less the same events as Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2005 The Sun, Peter Webber’s movie is very different from that flawed effort, but also a lot worse. The corny Romeo and Juliet romance, the simplistic approach to explaining Japan’s “ancient warrior tradition” and anything else (via dialogue routinely as flat as “Things in Japan are not black and white!”), plus Alex Heffes’ bombastic old-school orchestral score, are all as banal as can be. Even the reliable Jones offers little more than conventional crustiness — as opposed to the inspired kind he does in Lincoln. (1:46) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet San Franciscan Mark Kitchell (1990’s Berkeley in the Sixties) directs this thorough, gracefully-edited history of the environmental movement, beginning with the earliest stirrings of the Audubon Society and Aldo Leopold. Pretty much every major cause and group gets the vintage-footage, contemporary-interview treatment: the Sierra Club, Earth Day, Silent Spring, Love Canal, the pursuit of alternative energy, Greenpeace, Chico Mendes and the Amazon rainforests, the greenhouse effect and climate change, the pursuit of sustainable living, and so on. But if its scope is perhaps overly broad, A Fierce Green Fire still offers a valuable overview of a movement that’s remained determined for decades, even as governments and corporations do their best to stomp it out. Celebrity narrators Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, and Meryl Streep add additional heft to the message, though the raw material condensed here would be powerful enough without them. (1:50) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Gatekeepers Coming hard on the heels of The Law in These Parts, which gave a dispassionate forum to the lawmakers who’ve shaped — some might say in pretzel form — the military legal system that’s been applied by Israelis to Palestinians for decades, Dror Moreh’s documentary provides another key insiders’ viewpoint on that endless occupation. His interviewees are six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service. Their top-secret decisions shaped the nation’s attempts to control terrorist sects and attacks, as seen in a nearly half-century parade of news clips showing violence and negotiation on both sides. Unlike the subjects of Law, who spoke a cool, often evasive legalese to avoid any awkward ethical issues, these men are at times frankly — and surprisingly — doubtful about the wisdom of some individual decisions, let alone about the seemingly ever-receding prospect of a diplomatic peace. They even advocate for a two-state solution, an idea the government they served no longer seems seriously interested in advancing. The Gatekeepers is an important document that offers recent history examined head-on by the hitherto generally close-mouthed people who were in a prime position to direct its course. (1:37) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Ginger and Rosa It’s the 1960s, nuclear war is a real possibility, and nuclear-family war is an absolute certainty, at least in the London house occupied by Ginger (Elle Fanning), her emotionally wounded mother (Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks), and her narcissistic-intellectual father (Alessandro Nivola). In this downbeat coming-of-age tale from Sally Potter (1992’s Orlando), Ginger’s teenage rebellion quickly morphs into angst when her BFF Rosa (Beautiful Creatures‘ Alice Englert) wedges her sexed-up neediness between Ginger’s parents. Hendricks (playing the accordion — just like Joan!) and Annette Bening (as an American activist who encourages Ginger’s political-protest leanings) are strong, but Fanning’s powerhouse performance is the main focus — though even she’s occasionally overshadowed by her artificially scarlet hair. For an interview with writer-director Potter, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:30) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

A Good Day to Die Hard A Good Day to Die Hard did me wrong. How did I miss the signs? Badass daddy rescues son. Perps cover up ’80s era misdeeds. They’re in Russia&ldots;Die Hard has become Taken. All it needs is someone to kidnap Bonnie Bedelia or deflower Jai Courtney and the transformation will be complete. What’s more, A Good Day is so obviously made for export it’s almost not trying to court the American audience for which the franchise is a staple. In a desperate reach for brand loyalty director John Moore (2001’s Behind Enemy Lines) has loaded the film with slight allusions to McClane’s past adventures. The McClanes shoot the ceiling and litter the floor with glass. John escapes a helicopter by leaping into a skyscraper window from the outside. John’s ringtone plays “Ode to Joy.” The glib rejoinders are all there but they’re smeared by crap direction and odd pacing that gives ample time to military vehicles tumbling down the highway but absolutely no time for Bruce’s declarations of “I’m on VACATION!” Which may be just as well — it’s no “Yipee kay yay, motherfucker.” When Willis says that in A Good Day, all the love’s gone out of it. I guess every romance has to end. (1:37) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga The ever-intrepid Werner Herzog, with co-director Dmitry Vasyukov, pursues his fascination with extreme landscapes by chronicling a year deep within the Siberian Taiga. True to form, he doesn’t spend much time in the 300-inhabitant town nestled amid “endless wilderness,” accessible only by helicopter or boat (and only during the warmer seasons); instead, he seeks the most isolated environment possible, venturing into the frozen forest with fur trappers who augment their passed-down-over-generations job skills with the occasional modern assist (chainsaws and snowmobiles are key). Gorgeous cinematography and a curious, respectful tone elevate Happy People from mere ethnographic-film status, though that’s essentially what it is, as it records the men carving canoes, bear-proofing their cabins, interacting with their dogs, and generally being incredibly self-reliant amid some of the most rugged conditions imaginable. And since it’s Herzog, you know there’ll be a few gently bizarre moments, as when a politician’s summer campaign cruise brings a musical revue to town, or the director himself refers to “vodka — vicious as jet fuel” in his trademark droll voice over. (1:34) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Identity Thief America is made up of asshole winners and nice guy losers — or at least that’s the thesis of Identity Thief, a comedy about a crying-clown credit card bandit (Melissa McCarthy) and the sweet sucker (Jason Bateman) she lures into her web of chaos. Bateman plays Sandy, a typical middle-class dude with a wife, two kids, and a third on the way. He’s always struggling to break even and just when it seems like his ship’s come in, Diana (McCarthy) jacks his identity — a crime that requires just five minutes in a dark room with Sandy’s social security number. Suddenly, his good name is contaminated with her prior arrests, drug-dealer entanglements, and mounting debt; it’s like the capitalist version of VD. But as the “kind of person who has no friends,” Diana is as tragic as she is comic, providing McCarthy an acting opportunity no one saw coming when she was dispensing romantic advice on The Gilmore Girls. Director Seth Gordon (2011’s Horrible Bosses) treats this comedy like an action movie — as breakneck as slapstick gets — and he relies so heavily on discomfort humor that the film doesn’t just prompt laughs, it pokes you in the ribs until you laugh, man, LAUGH! While Identity Thief has a few complex moments about how defeating “sticking it to the man” can be (mostly because only middle men get hurt), it’s mostly as subtle as a pratfall and just as (un-)rewarding. (1:25) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Steve Carell dips into the men-at-work comic genre so associated with Will Ferrell: he’s Burt Wonderstone, who starts out as a picked-on kid discovering his powers via a kit by Las Vegas magician Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin). The ensuing years have not been kind to Burt, a relatively decent guy struggling to shed the douchey buildup of ego, corn, and dated moves à la David Copperfield (ta-da, who magically appears), while working for benevolently threatening casino boss Doug Munny (James Gandolfini) with his childhood best friend Anton (Steve Buscemi, reviving the naifitude of The Big Lebowski‘s Donny) and side fox Jane (Olivia Wilde). The shot of adrenalin to the moribund heart of Burt and Anton’s act: Jim Carrey’s “Brain Rapist,” who aims to ream his colleagues by cutting playing cards from his flesh and going to bed on fiery coals. How can the old-schoolers remain relevant? Hard work is key for Carell, who rolls out the straight-man sweetness that seem to make him a fit for romantic comedies — though his earnestness and need to be liked, as usual, err on the side of convention, while taking for granted the not-quite-there chemistry with, in this instance, Wilde. Fortunately whatever edge is lacking materializes whenever Carrey’s ridiculously ombré-tressed daredevil is on screen. Using his now-battered, still-malleable features to full effect, he’s a whole different ball of cheese, lampooning those who will go to any lengths — gouging, searing, and maiming — to entertain. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Vogue. (Chun)

Jack the Giant Slayer (1:55) Metreon.

K-11 As her daughter’s middling On the Road adaptation cruises into theaters (see review, below), Jules Stewart’s directorial debut rolls out at the Roxie; it’s a high-camp-but-with-horrifying-rape-scenes drama set in a Los Angeles jail unit reserved for gay and transgender prisoners. The top bitch in the joint is Mousey (Kate del Castillo, one of several women-playing-men-playing-women), who struts around with Divine-style eyebrows, hurling threats (“You play with me, you get uglier“) through her heavily-lined lips. There’s also a sadistic guard with a Hitler haircut (D.B. Sweeney) who controls the prisoners’ much-needed drug supply; a massive bully (Tommy “What Bike?” Lister); a sinewy hustler (Kevin Smith pal Jason Mewes); and a baby-voiced innocent who calls herself Butterfly (Portia Doubleday). Into this lurid set-up stumbles Raymond (Goran Visnijc), who is straight, but is also coked-out and maybe a murderer, so perhaps that’s why he lands there — it’s never really clear. Nothing’s really clear here, not least how a movie that’s so unpleasant most of the time manages also to be puzzlingly entertaining some of the time. Props go to del Castillo, I suppose, for attacking her role with nothing less than Nomi Malone levels of commitment. (1:30) Roxie. (Eddy)

Life of Pi Several filmmakers including Alfonso Cuarón, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and M. Night Shyamalan had a crack at Yann Martel’s “unfilmable” novel over the last decade, without success. That turns out to have been a very good thing, since Ang Lee and scenarist David Magee have made probably the best movie possible from the material — arguably even an improvement on it. Framed as the adult protagonist’s (Irrfan Khan) lengthy reminiscence to an interested writer (Rafe Spall) it chronicles his youthful experience accompanying his family and animals from their just shuttered zoo on a cargo ship voyage from India to Canada. But a storm capsizes the vessel, stranding teenaged Pi (Suraj Sharma) on a lifeboat with a mini menagerie — albeit one swiftly reduced by the food chain in action to one Richard Parker, a whimsically named Bengal tiger. This uneasy forced cohabitation between Hindu vegetarian and instinctual carnivore is an object lesson in survival as well as a fable about the existence of God, among other things. Shot in 3D, the movie has plenty of enchanted, original imagery, though its outstanding technical accomplishment may lie more in the application of CGI (rather than stereoscopic photography) to something reasonably intelligent for a change. First-time actor Sharma is a natural, while his costar gives the most remarkable performance by a wild animal this side of Joaquin Phoenix in The Master. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a charmed, lovely experience. (2:00) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Lincoln Distinguished subject matter and an A+ production team (Steven Spielberg directing, Daniel Day-Lewis starring, Tony Kushner adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Williams scoring every emotion juuust so) mean Lincoln delivers about what you’d expect: a compelling (if verbose), emotionally resonant (and somehow suspenseful) dramatization of President Lincoln’s push to get the 13th amendment passed before the start of his second term. America’s neck-deep in the Civil War, and Congress, though now without Southern representation, is profoundly divided on the issue of abolition. Spielberg recreates 1865 Washington as a vibrant, exciting place, albeit one filled with so many recognizable stars it’s almost distracting wondering who’ll pop up in the next scene: Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant! Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Lincoln! Lena Dunham’s shirtless boyfriend on Girls (Adam Driver) as a soldier! Most notable among the huge cast are John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and a daffy James Spader as a trio of lobbyists; Sally Field as the troubled First Lady; and likely Oscar contenders Tommy Lee Jones (as winningly cranky Rep. Thaddeus Stevens) and Day-Lewis, who does a reliably great job of disappearing into his iconic role. (2:30) New Parkway. (Eddy)

No Long before the Arab Spring, a people’s revolution went down in Chile when a 1988 referendum toppled the country’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, thanks in part to an ad exec who dared to sell the dream to his countrymen and women — using the relentlessly upbeat, cheesy language of a Pepsi Generation. In No‘s dramatization of this true story, ad man Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) is approached by the opposition to Pinochet’s regime to help them on their campaign to encourage Chile’s people to vote “no” to eight more years under the brutal strongman. Rene’s well-aware of the horrors of the dictatorship; not only are the disappeared common knowledge, his activist ex (Antonia Zegers) has been beaten and jailed with seeming regularity. Going up against his boss (Alfredo Castro), who’s overseeing the Pinochet campaign, Rene takes the brilliant tact in the opposition’s TV programs of selling hope — sound familiar? — promising “Chile, happiness is coming!” amid corny mimes, dancers, and the like. Director-producer Pablo Larrain turns out to be just as genius, shooting with a grainy U-matic ’80s video camera to match his footage with 1988 archival imagery, including the original TV spots, in this invigorating spiritual kin of both 2012’s Argo and 1997’s Wag the Dog. (1:50) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Chun)

Olympus Has Fallen Overstuffed with slo-mo shots of the flag rippling (in breezes likely caused by all the hot air puffing up from the script), this gleefully ham-fisted tribute to America Fuck Yeah estimates the intelligence of its target audience thusly: an establishing shot clearly depicting both the Washington Monument and the US Capitol is tagged “Washington, DC.” Wait, how can you tell? This wannabe Die Hard: The White House follows the one-man-army crusade of secret service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), the last friendly left standing when the President (Aaron Eckhart) and assorted cabinet members are taken hostage by North Korean terrorists. The plot is to ridiculous to recap beyond that, though I will note that Morgan Freeman (as the Speaker of the House) gets to deliver the line “They’ve just opened the gates of hell!” — the high point in a performance that otherwise requires him to sit at a table and look concerned for two hours. With a few more over-the-top scenes or slightly more adventurous casting, Olympus Has Fallen could’ve ascended to action-camp heights. Alas, it’s mostly just mildly amusing, though all that caked-on patriotism is good for a smattering of heartier guffaws. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

On the Road Walter Salles (2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries) engages Diaries screenwriter Jose Rivera to adapt Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic; it’s translated to the screen in a streamlined version, albeit one rife with parties, drugs, jazz, danger, reckless driving, sex, philosophical conversations, soul-searching, and “kicks” galore. Brit Sam Riley (2007’s Control) plays Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise, observing (and scribbling down) his gritty adventures as they unfold. Most of those adventures come courtesy of charismatic, freewheeling Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund of 2010’s Tron: Legacy), who blows in and out of Sal’s life (and a lot of other people’s lives, too, including wives played by Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst). Beautifully shot, with careful attention to period detail and reverential treatment of the Beat ethos, the film is an admirable effort but a little too shapeless, maybe simply due to the peripatetic nature of its iconic source material, to be completely satisfying. Among the performances, erstwhile teen dream Stewart is an uninhibited standout. (2:03) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Oz: The Great and Powerful Providing a backstory for the man behind the curtain, director Sam Raimi gives us a prequel of sorts to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Herein we follow the adventures of a Depression-era Kansas circus magician named Oscar (James Franco) — Oz to his friends — as he cons, philanders, bickers with his behind-the-scenes assistant Frank (Zach Braff), and eventually sails away in a twister, bound for a Technicolor land of massively proportioned flora, talking fauna, and witches ranging from dazzlingly good to treacherously wicked. From one of them, Theodora (Mila Kunis), he learns that his arrival — in Oz, just to clarify — has set in motion the fulfillment of a prophecy: that a great wizard, also named Oz, will bring about the downfall of a malevolent witch (Rachel Weisz), saving the kingdom and its cheery, goodhearted inhabitants. Unfortunately for this deserving populace, Oz spent his last pre-twister moments with the Baum Bros. Circus (the name a tribute to L. Frank Baum, writer of the Oz children’s books) demonstrating a banged-up moral compass and an undependable streak and proclaiming that he would rather be a great man than a good man. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this theme is revisited ad nauseam as Oz and the oppressively beneficent witch Glinda (Michelle Williams) — whose magic appears to consist mainly of nice soft things like bubbles and fog — stand around debating whether he’s the right man for the task. When the fog clears, though, the view is undeniably pretty. While en route to and from the Emerald City, Oz and his companions — among them a non-evil flying monkey (voiced by Braff) and a rather adorable china doll (Joey King) — wander through a deliriously arresting, Fantasia-esque landscape whose intricate, inventive construction helps distract from the plodding, saccharine rhetoric and unappealing story line. (2:07) Balboa, California, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Quartet Every year there’s at least one: the adorable-old-cootfest, usually British, that proves harmless and reassuring and lightly tear/laughter producing enough to convince a certain demographic that it’s safe to go to the movies again. The last months have seen two, both starring Maggie Smith (who’s also queen of that audience’s home viewing via Downton Abbey). Last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Smith played a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself in India, has already filled the slot. It was formulaic, cute, and sentimental, yes, but it also practiced more restraint than one expected. Now here’s Quartet, which is basically the same flower arrangement with quite a bit more dust on it. Smith plays a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself forced into spending her twilight years at a home for the elderly. It’s not just any such home, however, but Beecham House, whose residents are retired professional musicians. Gingerly peeking out from her room after a few days’ retreat from public gaze, Smith’s Jean Horton — a famed English soprano — spies a roomful of codgers rolling their hips to Afropop in a dance class. “This is not a retirement home — this is a madhouse!” she pronounces. Oh, the shitty lines that lazy writers have long depended on Smith to make sparkle. Quartet is full of such bunk, adapted with loving fidelity, no doubt, from his own 1999 play by Ronald Harwood, who as a scenarist has done some good adaptations of other people’s work (2002’s The Pianist). But as a generator of original material for about a half-century, he’s mostly proven that it is possible to prosper that long while being in entirely the wrong half-century. Making his directorial debut: 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman, which ought to have yielded a more interesting final product. But with its workmanlike gloss and head-on take on the script’s very predictable beats, Quartet could as well have been directed by any BBC veteran of no particular distinction. (1:38) Albany, Four Star, Clay, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Side Effects Though on the surface Channing Tatum appears to be his current muse, Steven Soderbergh seems to have gotten his smart, topical groove back, the one that spurred him to kick off his feature filmmaking career with the on-point Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and went missing with the fun, featherweight Ocean’s franchise. (Alas, he’s been making claims that Side Effects will be his last feature film.) Here, trendy designer antidepressants are the draw — mixed with the heady intoxicants of a murder mystery with a nice hard twist that would have intrigued either Hitchcock or Chabrol. As Side Effects opens, the waifish Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), whose inside-trading hubby (Tatum) has just been released from prison, looks like a big-eyed little basket of nerves ready to combust — internally, it seems, when she drives her car into a wall. Therapist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who begins to treat her after her hospital stay, seems to care about her, but nevertheless reflexively prescribes the latest anti-anxiety med of the day, on the advice of her former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Where does his responsibility for Emily’s subsequent actions begin and end? Soderbergh and his very able cast fill out the issues admirably, with the urgency that was missing from the more clinical Contagion (2011) and the, ahem, meaty intelligence that was lacking in all but the more ingenious strip scenes of last year’s Magic Mike. (1:30) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Silver Linings Playbook After guiding two actors to Best Supporting Oscars in 2010’s The Fighter, director David O. Russell returns (adapting his script from Matthew Quick’s novel) with another darkly comedic film about a complicated family that will probably earn some gold of its own. Though he’s obviously not ready to face the outside world, Pat (Bradley Cooper) checks out of the state institution he’s been court-ordered to spend eight months in after displaying some serious anger-management issues. He moves home with his football-obsessed father (Robert De Niro) and worrywart mother (Jacki Weaver of 2010’s Animal Kingdom), where he plunges into a plan to win back his estranged wife. Cooper plays Pat as a man vibrating with troubled energy — always in danger of flying into a rage, even as he pursues his forced-upbeat “silver linings” philosophy. But the movie belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, who proves the chops she showcased (pre-Hunger Games megafame) in 2010’s Winter’s Bone were no fluke. As the damaged-but-determined Tiffany, she’s the left-field element that jolts Pat out of his crazytown funk; she’s also the only reason Playbook‘s dance-competition subplot doesn’t feel eye-rollingly clichéd. The film’s not perfect, but Lawrence’s layered performance — emotional, demanding, bitchy, tough-yet-secretly-tender — damn near is. (2:01) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Somebody Up There Likes Me A textbook illustration of what’s so frequently right and wrong with Amerindie comedies today, Bob Byington’s feature starts out near-brilliantly in a familiar, heightened Napoleon Dynamite-type milieu of ostensibly normal people as self-absorbed, socially hapless satellites revolving around an existential hole at the center in the universe. The three main ones meet working at a suburban steakhouse: Emotionally nerve-deadened youth Max (Keith Poulson), the even more crassly insensitive Sal (Nick Offerman), and contrastly nice but still weird Lyla (Teeth‘s estimable Jess Weixler). All is well until the film starts skipping ahead five years at a time, growing more smugly misanthropic and pointless as time and some drastic shifts in fortune do nothing to change (or deepen) the characters. Still, the performers are intermittently hilarious throughout. (1:24) Roxie. (Harvey)

Spring Breakers The idea of enfant terrible emeritus Harmony Korine — 1997’s Gummo, 2007’s Mister Lonely, 2009’s Trash Humpers — directing something so utterly common as a spring break movie is head-scratching enough, even moreso compounded by the casting of teen dreams Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and Ashley Benson as bikini-clad girls gone wild. James Franco co-stars as drug dealer Alien, all platinum teeth and cornrows and shitty tattoos, who befriends the lasses after they’re busted by the fun police. “Are you being serious?” Gomez’s character asks Alien, soon after meeting him. “What do you think?” he grins back. Unschooled filmgoers who stumble into the theater to see their favorite starlets might be shocked by Breakers‘ hard-R hijinks. But Korine fans will understand that this neon-lit, Skrillex-scored tale of debauchery and dirty menace is not to be taken at face value. The subject matter, the cast, the Britney Spears songs, the deliberately lurid camerawork — all carefully-constructed elements in a film that takes not-taking-itself-seriously, very seriously indeed. Korine has said he prefers his films to make “perfect nonsense” instead of perfect sense. The sublime Spring Breakers makes perfect nonsense, and it also makes nonsense perfect. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Stoker None of the characters in Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut, Stoker, devour a full plate of still-squirming octopus. (For that, see Park’s international breakthrough, 2003’s Oldboy; chances are the meal won’t be duplicated in the Spike Lee remake due later this year.) But that’s not to say Stoker — with its Hitchcockian script by Wentworth Miller — isn’t full of unsettling, cringe-inducing moments, as the titular family (Nicole Kidman as Evelyn, the dotty mom; Mia Wasikowska as India, the moody high-schooler) faces the sudden death of husband-father Richard (Dermot Mulroney, glimpsed in flashbacks) and the equally suddenly arrival of sleek, sinister Uncle Charles (Matthew Goode). Lensed with an eerie elegance and an exquisite attention to creepy details, this tale of dysfunctional ties that bind leads to a rather insane conclusion; whether that bugs you or not depends on how willing you are to surrender to its madness. (1:38) California, Metreon, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

21 and Over (1:33) Metreon.

Warm Bodies A decade and a half of torrid, tormented vampire-human entanglements has left us accustomed to rooting for romances involving the undead and the still-alive. Some might argue, however, that no amount of pop-cultural prepping could be sufficient to get us behind a human-zombie love story for the ages. Is guzzling human blood really measurably less gross than making a meal of someone’s brains and other body parts? Somehow, yes. Recognizing this perceptual hurdle, writer-director Jonathan Levine (2011’s 50/50, 2008’s The Wackness) secures our sympathies at the outset of Warm Bodies by situating us inside the surprisingly active brain of the film’s zombie protagonist. Zombies, it turns out, have internal monologues. R (Nicholas Hoult) can only remember the first letter of his former name, but as he shambles and shuffles and slumps his way through the terminals of a postapocalyptic airport overrun by his fellow corpses (as they’re called by the film’s human population), he fills us in as best he can on the global catastrophe that’s occurred and his own ensuing existential crisis. By the time he meets not-so-cute with Julie (Teresa Palmer), a young woman whose father (John Malkovich) is commander-in-chief of the human survivors living in a walled-off city center, we’ve learned that he collects vinyl, that he has a zombie best friend, and that he doesn’t want to be like this. We may still be flinching at the thought of his and Julie’s first kiss, but we’re also kind of rooting for him. The plot gapes in places, where a tenuous logic gets trampled and gives way, but Levine’s script, adapted from a novel by Isaac Marion, is full of funny riffs on the zombie condition, which Hoult invests with a comic sweetness as his character staggers toward the land of the living. (1:37) Metreon, New Parkway. (Rapoport)

Zero Dark Thirty The extent to which torture was actually used in the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin may never be known, though popular opinion will surely be shaped by this film, as it’s produced with the same kind of “realness” that made Kathryn Bigelow’s previous film, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008), so potent. Zero Dark Thirty incorporates torture early in its chronology — which begins in 2003, after a brief opening that captures the terror of September 11, 2001 using only 911 phone calls — but the practice is discarded after 2008, a sea-change year marked by the sight of Obama on TV insisting that “America does not torture.” (The “any more” goes unspoken.) Most of Zero Dark Thirty is set in Pakistan and/or “CIA black sites” in undisclosed locations; it’s a suspenseful procedural that manages to make well-documented events (the July 2005 London bombings; the September 2008 Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing) seem shocking and unexpected. Even the raid on Bin Ladin’s HQ is nail-bitingly intense. The film immerses the viewer in the clandestine world, tossing out abbreviations (“KSM” for al-Qaeda bigwig Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) and jargon (“tradecraft”) without pausing for a breath. It is thrilling, emotional, engrossing — the smartest, most tightly-constructed action film of the year. At the center of it all: a character allegedly based on a real person whose actual identity is kept top-secret by necessity. She’s interpreted here in the form of a steely CIA operative named Maya, played to likely Oscar-winning perfection by Jessica Chastain. No matter the film’s divisive subject matter, there’s no denying that this is a powerful performance. “Washington says she’s a killer,” a character remarks after meeting this seemingly delicate creature, and he’s proven right long before Bin Ladin goes down. Some critics have argued that character is underdeveloped, but anyone who says that isn’t watching closely enough. Maya may not be given a traditional backstory, but there’s plenty of interior life there, and it comes through in quick, vulnerable flashes — leading up to the payoff of the film’s devastating final shot. (2:39) New Parkway. (Eddy)

Music listings

Andrew Lam

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March 26, 2013

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Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 27

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Joey Bada$$ and Pro Era: Beast Coastal Tour Slim’s. 9pm, $16. With Flatbush Zombies, Underachievers, DJ Statik Selektah.

Castle, Occulation, Borrowed Time Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Guido vs Joel Nelson Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

Head-Boggle, Forest Friends, Take Up Serpents Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $6.

Living Colour Fillmore. 8pm, $27.50.

Jason Marion Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Jake Miller, Kalin and Myles, J. Lately Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 6pm, $16-$35.

Night Riots, Beta State, Young Science, New Beat Fund Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Poolside, Astronauts etc., Ginger and the Ghost Independent. 9pm, $15.

White Magic, Kria Brekkan, Rio En Medio Cafe Du Nord. 8:30pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Big Bones Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Quinn Deveaux Rite Spot Cafe. 8:30pm.

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Terry Disley’s Mini-Experience Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

Jacqui Naylor Rrazz Room, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.liveattherrazz.com. 8pm.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 6:30pm, $5.

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Cafe Divine, 1600 Stockton, SF; www.cafedivinesf.com.7-9pm, free.

Yamanaka Trio Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $20.

DANCE CLUBS

Bodyshock Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $7. With Youth Code (live), DJ Blk Rainbow, DJ Crackwhore.

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita MORE! and Joshua J host this dance party.

Cash IV Gold Double Dutch, 3192 16th St, SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 9pm, free.

Coo-Yah! Slate Bar, 2925 16th St, SF; www.slate-sf.com. 10pm, free. With Vinyl Ambassador, DJ Silverback, DJs Green B and Daneekah.

Full-Step! Tunnel Top. 10pm, free. Hip-hop, reggae, soul, and funk with DJs Kung Fu Chris and Bizzi Wonda.

Hardcore Humpday Happy Hour RKRL, 52 Sixth St, SF; (415) 658-5506. 6pm, $3.

Martini Lounge John Colins, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 7pm. With DJ Mark Divita.

THURSDAY 28

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Matt Alber and the Cello Street Quartet, Feona Jones Swedish American Hall. 7:30pm, $20.

Anthrax, Exodus, High On Fire, Municipal Waste, Holy Grail Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $32.

Blasted Canyons, Useless Eaters, Nightmare Boyzzz Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

John Elliot, Nels Andrews Amnesia. 7pm, $8.

Everyone is Dirty, Love Dimension, Brasil, Feather Bright Cafe Du Nord. 9pm, $8.

Flume, Houses, Blende, popscene DJs Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $15-$17.

Fol Chen, Royal Canoe, Sands Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Haberdasher Witness, Kerry Wing Amnesia. 9:30pm, $7

John Lawton Trio Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Steve Kimock feat. Bernie Worrell, Wally Ingram, and Andy Hess Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $30.

Kingdom Crumbs, DJ Harrison, Javi Santiago, Tamara Davidson Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 6pm, $7-$10.

Railroad Earth, Poor Man’s Whiskey Fillmore. 9pm, $25.

JC Rockit vs Guido Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

Ted Savareses and the Tedtones feat. Ralph Carney Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapesf.com. 8pm, free.

Sekta Core, 132, Los Pornos Thee Parkside. 8:30pm, $13.

Woolen Men, Swiftumz Knockout. 10pm.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Holes Lab, 2948 16 St., SF; www.thelab.org. 9pm, $5-$10.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $10.

Jacqui Naylor Rrazz Room, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.liveattherrazz.com. 8pm.

Sam Peoples feat. Jacore Baptiste Chez Spencer, 82 14th St., SF; www.chezspencer.net. 7:30pm.

SFJazz Collective SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $20-$40.

Chris Siebert Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Katy Stephan Rite Spot Cafe. 8:30pm.

Tim Hockenberry Trio Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $25.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Accordion Babes El Rio. 9pm, $7.

KC Turner, Obstacle Course, Pieces, Alex Jimenez 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.localmusicvibe.com. 7pm, free.

Craig Ventresco Cafe Divine, 1600 Stockton, SF; www.cafedivinesf.com. 7pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8. With Derek Hena, Pleasuremaker, and Oz.

All 80s Thursday Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). The best of ’80s mainstream and underground.

Gridlok, Bachelors of Science, Jamal Monarch. 9:30pm, $5.

Ritual Temple. 10pm-3am, $5. Two rooms of dubstep, glitch, and trap music.

Tropicana Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, free. Salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, and more with DJs Don Bustamante, Apocolypto, Sr. Saen, Santero, and Mr. E.

FRIDAY 29

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Amor de Dias, Jessica Pratt, Honeycrisp Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapesf.com. 9pm, $12-$15.

B. Hamilton, Eight Belles, Joel Robinow Amnesia. 9pm, $7-$10.

Hightower, Walken, Rock Bottom Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

King Dude, Natural Child, Of the Wand and the Moon, Cool Ghouls Elbo Room. 8pm, $12.

Last Bison, Kris Orlowski, Jon Gunton Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10.

Old Firm Casuals, Pressure Point, Let It Burn, Plead the Fifth Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Planet Booty, Super Adventure Club, Spirit Animal Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $12.

Randy, Greg Zema and Nathan Temby Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

Seshen, Le Vice, Karyn Paige Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10-$15.

Vonda Shepard Rrazz Room, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.liveattherrazz.com. 9:15pm.

Texas is the Reason, Jealous Sound Bimbo’s. 9pm, $20.

Jane Woodman, Foxtail Somersault, Bears! Bears! Bears! Cafe Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

X-Static Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 9pm, $10.

Rita Coolidge Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $36; 10pm, $26.

Hammond Organ Soul, Jazz, Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Allison Lovejoy Rite Spot Cafe. 8:30pm.

Jacqui Naylor Rrazz Room, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.liveattherrazz.com. 8pm.

SFJazz Collective SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-$60.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Richard Bean and Sapo Slim’s. 8pm, $16. Celebrating 40 years of Suavecito.

BeRn Dolores Park Cafe, 501 Dolores, SF; facebook.com/getberned. 7:30pm.

Borinquen Cigar Bar and Grill, 850 Montgomery, SF; www.cigarbarandgrill.com. 10pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Dancing Ghosts Cat Club, 9:30pm, $3-$7. Darkwave dance party.

DJ Audio1 715 Harrison, SF; www.djaudio1.com. 10pm, $10.

Joe Lookout, 3600 16th St.,SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Eight rotating DJs, shirt-off drink specials.

Old School JAMZ El Rio. 9pm. Fruit Stand DJs spinning old school funk, hip-hop, and R&B.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Pow Pow: Bonus Round DNA Lounge. 8pm, $5-$11. 8bitSF with Derris-Kharlan, Doctor Popular, Decktonic, Space Town Savior.

Third Party: G-Stav Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF; www.vesselsf.com. 10pm, $20-$30.

Trap and Bass DNA Lounge. 9pm, $20. With Loudpvck, Tone Sol, Akuma, Collin Whitaker.

SATURDAY 30

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Back Pages Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Fungo Mungo, Victims Family, Gretchen Menn Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $12.

Future Space and Time, Couches, Pony Village, Li Xi Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Heartless Bastards, Jonny Fritz Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $23.

Hopi Astronaut Riptide Tavern. 9pm, free.

Matt Jaffe and the Distractions, Cheating Daylight, Empire Slim, Paradox Labryinth Slim’s. 6:30pm, $15.

Once and Future Band, Shotgun Brautigan, Freddie and the Aztecs Cafe Du Nord. 9:30pm, $12.

Point of View, Bad Friend, Voided Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Quaaludes, Grandma’s Boyfriend, Adam Healton Brainwash Cafe, 1122 Folsom, SF; www.brainwash.com. 8pm, free.

“Radio Valencia Listener Appreciation Party” Speakeasy, 1195 Evans, SF; www.radiovalencia.fm. Noon-6pm, free. With Sweat Lodge, Maurice Tani, Atom Age.

Sevendust, Coal Chamber, Lacuna Coil, Candlelight Red Regency Ballroom. 7pm, $32.

Vonda Shepard Rrazz Room, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.liveattherrazz.com. 9:15pm.

Sister Sprarrow and the Dirty Birds, Alan Evans Trio Independent. 9pm, $16.

Wax Idols, Mallard, Chasms, DJ Nako Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $8-$11.

White Fence, Meg Baird, Assemble Head In Sunburst Cloud, Muscle Drum Amnesia. 9pm,$10.

Greg Zema, Jason Marion, Chris A. Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Rita Coolidge Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $36; 10pm, $26.

Hammond Organ Soul, Jazz, Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Mr. Lucky and the Cocktail Party Rite Spot Cafe. 9pm.

Jacqui Naylor Rrazz Room, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.liveattherrazz.com. 8pm.

SFJazz Collective SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-$65.

Luciana Souza Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfperformances.org 8pm, $25-$55.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF: DJs From Mars DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-$20. With Entyme, Keri Hanna, Brass Tax.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs.

“Soul Clap and Dance-Off feat. DJ Jonathan Toubin” Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $8. With DJ Primo.

Sweater Funk Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. K-Maxx Record Release Dance Party.

SUNDAY 31

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bambu, Power Struggle, Rey Resurreccion, Odessa Kane, 6Fingers Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $7-$10.

Daedelus, Two Fresh, Ryan Hemsworth, Samo Sound Independent. 8pm, $18.

Date Palms, Danny Grody, Chuck Johnson Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $7.

Deleyaman 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 8pm.

Graves at Sea, Aldebaran, Dispirit, Larvae DNA Lounge. 8pm, $12.

Grief Counselors, Roland Finn Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

John Lawton Trio Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Parkway Drive, World Alive, Veil of Maya, While She Sleeps Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $22.50.

Tropics, Wave Comission, Wild Ass Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

White Fence, Culture Kids, Break Arts Amnesia. 9pm,$10.

Widowspeak Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapesf.com. 9pm, $10-$12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Jealousy, Centre, A White Hunter, Brian Ang, Sam Weinert Lab, 2948 16 St., SF; www.thelab.org. 9pm, $5-$10.

Marcus Johnson Yoshi’s SF. 6pm, $16; 8pm, $24.

SFJazz Collective SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-$60.

Lavay Smith Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Beats for Brunch Thee Parkside. 11am, free.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. With DJ Sep, Maneesh the Twister, and guest Selecta I.E.

Jock Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 3pm, $2.

MONDAY 1

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Contortionist, Within the Ruins, I Declare War, Reflections, City in the Sea DNA Lounge. 6:30pm, $15.

Damir Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

JAN, Static People, Secret Secretaries Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Kingdom Crumbs, DJ Harrison Javi Santiago, Tamara Davidson Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Ecstatic Music Band, John Davis, Matt Ingalls, J. Collin Lab, 2948 16 St., SF; www.thelab.org. 8pm, $7-$10.

Noah Peterson Coffee Adventures, 1331 Columbus, SF; www.coffeeadventurescafe.com. 11am, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Front Country Amnesia. 9pm,free.

DANCE CLUBS

Crazy Mondays Beauty Bar, 2299 Mission, SF; www.thebeautybar.com. 10pm, free. Hip-hop and other stuff.

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-$5. With Decay, Joe Radio, Melting Girl.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. DJs Timoteo Gigante, Gordo Cabeza, and Chris Phlek playing all Motown every Monday.

Soul Cafe John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. R&B, Hip-Hop, Neosoul, reggae, dancehall, and more with DJ Jerry Ross.

Vibes’N’Stuff El Amigo Bar, 3355 Mission, SF; (415) 852-0092. 10pm, free. Conscious jazz and hip-hop with DJs Luce Lucy, Vinnie Esparza, and more.

TUESDAY 2

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Ryan Leslie, Nima Fadavi (DJ set), Anya and the Get Down Slim’s. 8:30pm, $26-$31.

Stan Erhart Band Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Titan Ups Amnesia. 9pm.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Terry Disley’s Mini-Experience Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Pendulum Elbo Room. 10pm, $5.

Our Weekly Picks: March 20-26, 2013

Andrew Lam

-

March 19, 2013

0

WEDNESDAY 20

Mr. Marina Competition

Why would you pay $50 for an hour of hosted Skyy vodka and Peronis? Why, when it’s preceding what may well be the most self-aware (we hope) SF bro moment of the year: the two-year-old Mr. Marina competition. The winner among 10 brah-ly contestants will become VIP at various Marina businesses for 2013 and will be proud that he slapped cancer, as goes the moniker for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society booster club through which this event’s proceeds are donated to fighting disease. Swimwear competition, talent portion, and impromptu question fielded in stereotypically “Marina” outfits will help judges pick a dude-gem. (Caitlin Donohue)

7pm-11pm, $50

Ruby Skye

420 Mason, SF

mrmarina-fb.eventbrite.com

www.slapcancer.org

Chelsea Light Moving

Kim Gordon’s new band, Body/Head, was just here for a Noise pop show, so….let’s just get this out of the way: yes, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is the guitarist-vocalist-songwriter behind Chelsea Light Moving. And no, Sonic Youth does not have plans to reunite. Chelsea Light Moving is now on its first official tour, in support of its self-titled debut album, which came out March 5 on Matador Records, and has the bloggers buzzing. The post-rock foursome, named for an actual moving company run by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, maintains Moore’s jagged guitar work and tendency towards the fuzz, but some tracks hold a quieter calm, and lean more toward pop than Sonic Youth ever did, which is an interesting departure. San Francisco’s harmonious post-punk trio Grass Widow opens. (Emily Savage)

With Grass Widow

8pm, $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.slimspresents.com

THURSDAY 21

“Growing Pains: Business of Cannabis”

Where have the federal intervention of past years and the more recent steps forward in legalizing marijuana across the country left us in the fair city of San Francisco? At this talk, hear thoughts from long-haired news contributor to fellow SF Newspaper Company-owned publication SF Examiner, Chris Roberts, and ex-marijuana grower Heather Donahue who yes, also starred in the swervy shots of 1999’s Blair Witch Project. More relevant for the purpose of this blurb, Donahue wrote a book about her experience in small town NorCal weed country, and coupled with Roberts’ knowledge of Bay Area weed businesses, their thoughts should make interesting discussion. If you’ve already got a burning question for the duo, send it in advance of the event to growingpains@sfappeal.com. (Donohue)

6:30-7:30pm, free

RSVP recommended at info@ybcd.org

San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR)

645 Mission, SF

www.visityerbabuena.org

Shen Wei Dance Arts: “Undivided Divided”

The Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics presented stunning artistic spectacles (minus that whole unfortunate thing with the lip-syncing scandal), and Shen Wei, their choreographer, played a large role. The Ceremonies offers a good example of the artist’s work, which is known for its bridging of cultures and melding of the traditions of dance with innovative contemporary techniques. Shen Wei comes to YBCA with a long list of credentials — including a MacArthur Award and Guggenheim Fellowship — and a spectacular performance, “Undivided Divided,” that involves dancers moving in grids of different mediums such as sculpture and paint. (Laura Kerry)

Through March 24

8pm, $25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

Mohani

“Chillwave” or “chill-vibe” music. Are those terms en vogue or just plain nauseating? Whatever your opinion, there’s no escaping the fact that this Mashi Mashi Presents show will be an evening of electronic, dream-pop, and synth. When Mohani (Oakland’s own Donghoon Han) unleashes his own brand of K-Pop meets Joe Meek’s version of outer space, the soundscape will in fact leave you mellowed out. (This is his album release show.) Deliciously, atmospheric synth blips will rule this night featuring some truly emerging artists, while a good hook for the sake of song structure will not be forgotten. Keep your ears tuned in between acts as the DJ interweaves some carefully selected tracks to keep things moody. (Andre Torrez)

With Li Xi, THEMAYS, DJ Mashi Mashi

9pm, $7 Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

(415) 550-6994

www.theknockoutsf.com

FRIDAY 22

Murs

This ubiquitous LA-based rapper has eight solo albums out, one in the mix, and a hand in half a dozen side projects and collectives, often featuring in three or four different albums per year. Whether he’s going solo, rapping with Atmosphere’s Slug in their duo Felt, or getting indie-licious with Living Legends, Murs’ smart and surefooted rhymes stand out. He recently stirred up some controversy in the hip-hop community for featuring a gay kiss in one of his videos to highlight his support of marriage equality, a bold move both atypical of rappers and extremely fitting of Murs. He seems to have taken his own advice to heart when he raps on “Everything”, “Be original/Be different/Be the one to stand up and shock this system.” (Haley Zaremba)

With Prof, Fashawn, Black Cloud

9pm, $21

Slim’s

333 11th St, SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com

Ducktails

Ducktails produces summery rock. The band’s third album, The Flower Lane, released this past January, could span a lazy day at the beach; the low-key but bright album opener, “Ivy Covered House,” provides the soundtrack to a short drive with windows down, while the breezy love song, “Letter of Intent,” underscores the last embers of nighttime bonfire. The side project of Real Estate’s Matt Mondanile, what started as a solo act has developed into a tight band that performs upbeat pop songs to full audiences. Ducktails brings to these, along with a bit of premature summer, to the Chapel tonight. (Kerry)

With Mark McGuire

9pm, $15

Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-5157

www.thechapelsf.com

SATURDAY 23

The Specials

Let’s begin with pick-it-up, pick-it-up songs “A Message to You, Rudy,” and “Nite Klub,” and upbeat haunter “Ghost Town” — British two-tone legends the Specials released now-classic ska gems early in their career, beginning in ’79 with their self-titled debut. The band inched up through the early ’80s with followup, More Specials and more danceable two-tone tracks like anti-work anthem “Rat Race” and foggy “Stereotype/Stereotypes, Pt. 2.” Over the decades the band has broken up, gotten back together, gained and lost members, experience shiny revival popularity, and remained that of checkerboard legend. See the Specials live now, while you still have the joint strength to skank in the pit. (Savage)

With Little Hurricane, DJ Harry Duncan

Warfield

928 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

Christopher Owens

For most singer-songwriters who break big, life becomes a wild ride. For Christopher Owens, the critical and commercial success of his band Girls was just another event in a lifetime of crazy trips. He’s been, among other things, a cult member, a drug addict, a knife salesman, and a punk rocker. With such experiences, he has enough material for a lifetime of therapeutic songwriting. But Owens only seems to be able to write about one thing — love. While Girls tried their hardest to perfect the indie love song, Owens’ new solo album Lysandre tries harder. The record itself is one huge love story about a girl he met while on tour with Girls in France, and the duo’s subsequent rise and fall. The music and the lyrics are earnest, simple, and heart-achingly relatable. While the loss of Girls is a blow to the San Francisco music scene, one listen to Lysandre certainly eases the pain. (Zaremba)

8pm, $25

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 567-6642

www.apeconcerts.com

MONDAY 25

Half the Sky

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s best-selling book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide inspired many of its readers to become activists. Its message has been further shared thanks to a four-hour PBS documentary highlighting international women’s rights issues, with a little celebrity help from Diane Lane, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union, and others. In honor of Women’s History Month, the Guardian’s own Caitlin Donohue hosts an abridged screening of this important film, followed by what’s sure to be a lively discussion about San Francisco’s role in advancing women’s rights worldwide. (Cheryl Eddy)

7pm, free

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.atasite.org

Iceage

This band of young ruffians out of Copenhagen has had a whirlwind adolescence. After two albums and international acclaim, the gents in Iceage are still teenagers at 19-years-old. 2011’s New Brigade and this year’s You’re Nothing add up to one searing hour of punk rock fueled by the sort of unbridled, unfiltered fury that only coming of age can produce. Their particular sound mashes in elements of post-punk, hardcore, and industrial to create a delicious sonic mess. The group recently came under fire after a blogger posted a conspiracy theory-esque article about Iceage’s “chic racism.” Though the claims were unfounded and the research woefully incomplete, the allegations just won’t disappear. But hey, the rage and confusion stemming from this sort of injustice and abuse of modern forms of communication seems like a recipe for a great follow-up album. (Zaremba)

With Merchandise, Wet Hair, DJ Omar

8pm, $12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

TUESDAY 26

Caveman

It’s not just that Caveman’s music is dreamy, but it also shares qualities with dreams. The band’s first album, CoCo Beware (2011) simultaneously sounds close and ambiently distant. Caveman’s self-titled second album, released April 2, will build on these effects, which have produced compelling performances and earned the band impressive recognition in the past couple of years. With beautifully pure vocals and beats that are funkier than expected, the band plays folk-pop with a vividness of a daydream or the last images before waking. Get swept up in the momentum of Caveman’s reverie at the Independent. (Kerry)

With Pure Bathing Culture

8pm, $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(617) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian, 225 Bush, 17th Flr., SF, CA 94105; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Film listings

Andrew Lam

-

March 19, 2013

0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Admission Paul Weitz directs Tina Fey in this comedy about a Princeton admissions officer who tracks down the son she gave up for adoption years before. (1:50) Marina.

The Croods DreamWorks’ latest animated tale is about prehistoric cave-people, with the requisite array of celebrity voices (Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, etc.) (1:38) Balboa, Presidio.

Ginger and Rosa It’s the 1960s, nuclear war is a real possibility, and nuclear-family war is an absolute certainty, at least in the London house occupied by Ginger (Elle Fanning), her emotionally wounded mother (Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks), and her narcissistic-intellectual father (Alessandro Nivola). In this downbeat coming-of-age tale from Sally Potter (1992’s Orlando), Ginger’s teenage rebellion quickly morphs into angst when her BFF Rosa (Beautiful Creatures‘ Alice Englert) wedges her sexed-up neediness between Ginger’s parents. Hendricks (playing the accordion — just like Joan!) and Annette Bening (as an American activist who encourages Ginger’s political-protest leanings) are strong, but Fanning’s powerhouse performance is the main focus — though even she’s occasionally overshadowed by her artificially scarlet hair. For an interview with writer-director Potter, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:30) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Hitler’s Children What’s in a name? A lot, when it’s Himmler, Goering, Hoess, or Goeth. Chanoch Ze’evi’s doc — comprised of interviews with direct descendants of high-ranking Nazis, all of whom condemn the actions of their relatives — unearths universally strong emotions and plenty of psychological baggage. Various coping mechanisms abound: Hermann Goering’s great-niece moved to rural New Mexico and casually remarks that both she and her brother voluntarily sterilized themselves, so there’d be "no more Goerings." Amon Goeth’s daughter recalls being kept in the dark about her father’s true role in the Holocaust — until she went to see Schindler’s List (1993), and realized he’d been a sadistic monster. The film’s most stirring sequence follows Rainer Hoess, look-alike grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf, as he nervously journeys to the concentration camp-turned-museum for the first time. There, he encounters an elderly Auschwitz survivor who assures him, "You didn’t do it." But Hitler’s Children — which offers a unique, inspired angle on World War II — doesn’t allow itself a tidy last act. Hoess’ travel companion, a journalist who (like filmmaker Ze’evi) is a third-generation Holocaust survivor, remarks to the camera that he doesn’t believe there can be ever be closure to Hoess’ story, or by extension any of these stories — too much history, too much horror. (1:23) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Eddy)

K-11 As her daughter’s middling On the Road adaptation cruises into theaters (see review, below), Jules Stewart’s directorial debut rolls out at the Roxie; it’s a high-camp-but-with-horrifying-rape-scenes drama set in a Los Angeles jail unit reserved for gay and transgender prisoners. The top bitch in the joint is Mousey (Kate del Castillo, one of several women-playing-men-playing-women), who struts around with Divine-style eyebrows, hurling threats ("You play with me, you get uglier") through her heavily-lined lips. There’s also a sadistic guard with a Hitler haircut (D.B. Sweeney) who controls the prisoners’ much-needed drug supply; a massive bully (Tommy "What Bike?" Lister); a sinewy hustler (Kevin Smith pal Jason Mewes); and a baby-voiced innocent who calls herself Butterfly (Portia Doubleday). Into this lurid set-up stumbles Raymond (Goran Visnijc), who is straight, but is also coked-out and maybe a murderer, so perhaps that’s why he lands there — it’s never really clear. Nothing’s really clear here, not least how a movie that’s so unpleasant most of the time manages also to be puzzlingly entertaining some of the time. Props go to del Castillo, I suppose, for attacking her role with nothing less than Nomi Malone levels of commitment. (1:30) Roxie. (Eddy)

The Manson Family See "The Devil’s Business." (1:35) Clay.

Olympus Has Fallen Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, and Aaron Eckhart (as the POTUS) star in this action thriller set amid White House intrigue. (2:00) Presidio.

On the Road Walter Salles (2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries) engages Diaries screenwriter Jose Rivera to adapt Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic; it’s translated to the screen in a streamlined version, albeit one rife with parties, drugs, jazz, danger, reckless driving, sex, philosophical conversations, soul-searching, and "kicks" galore. Brit Sam Riley (2007’s Control) plays Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise, observing (and scribbling down) his gritty adventures as they unfold. Most of those adventures come courtesy of charismatic, freewheeling Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund of 2010’s Tron: Legacy), who blows in and out of Sal’s life (and a lot of other people’s lives, too, including wives played by Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst). Beautifully shot, with careful attention to period detail and reverential treatment of the Beat ethos, the film is an admirable effort but a little too shapeless, maybe simply due to the peripatetic nature of its iconic source material, to be completely satisfying. Among the performances, erstwhile teen dream Stewart is an uninhibited standout. (2:03) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Somebody Up There Likes Me A textbook illustration of what’s so frequently right and wrong with Amerindie comedies today, Bob Byington’s feature starts out near-brilliantly in a familiar, heightened Napoleon Dynamite-type milieu of ostensibly normal people as self-absorbed, socially hapless satellites revolving around an existential hole at the center in the universe. The three main ones meet working at a suburban steakhouse: Emotionally nerve-deadened youth Max (Keith Poulson), the even more crassly insensitive Sal (Nick Offerman), and contrastly nice but still weird Lyla (Teeth‘s estimable Jess Weixler). All is well until the film starts skipping ahead five years at a time, growing more smugly misanthropic and pointless as time and some drastic shifts in fortune do nothing to change (or deepen) the characters. Still, the performers are intermittently hilarious throughout. (1:24) Roxie. (Harvey)

Spring Breakers See "The Devil’s Business." (1:34) Shattuck.

The We and the I See "Emotion in Motion." (1:43) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

ONGOING

Amour Arriving in local theaters atop a tidal wave of critical hosannas, Amour now seeks to tempt popular acclaim — though actually liking this perfectly crafted, intensely depressing film (from Austrian director Michael Haneke) may be nigh impossible for most audience members. Eightysomething former music teachers Georges and Anne (the flawless Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are living out their days in their spacious Paris apartment, going to classical concerts and enjoying the comfort of their relationship. Early in the film, someone tries to break into their flat — and the rest of Amour unfolds with a series of invasions, with Anne’s declining health the most distressing, though there are also unwanted visits from the couple’s only daughter (an appropriately self-involved Isabelle Huppert), an inept nurse who disrespects Anne and curses out Georges, and even a rogue pigeon that wanders in more than once. As Anne fades into a hollow, twisted, babbling version of her former self, Georges also becomes hollow and twisted, taking care of her while grimly awaiting the inevitable. Of course, the movie’s called Amour, so there’s some tenderness involved. But if you seek heartwarming hope and last-act uplift, look anywhere but here. (2:07) Four Star, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Barbara The titular figure (Nina Hoss) looks the very picture of blonde Teutonic ice princess when she arrives — exiled from better prospects by some unspecified, politically ill-advised conduct — in at a rural 1980 East German hospital far from East Berlin’s relative glamour. She’s a pill, too, stiffly formal in dealings with curious locals and fellow staff including the disarmingly rumpled, gently amorous chief physician Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld). Yet her stern prowess as a pediatric doctor is softened by atypically protective behavior toward teen Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a frequent escapee from prison-like juvenile care facilities. Barbara has secrets, however, and her juggling personal, ethical, and Stasi-fearing priorities will force some uncomfortable choices. It is evidently the moment for German writer-director Christian Petzold to get international recognition after nearly 20 years of equally fine, terse, revealing work in both big-screen and broadcast media (much with Hoss as his prime on-screen collaborator). This intelligent, dispassionate, eventually moving character study isn’t necessarily his best. But it is a compelling introduction. (1:45) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives When Ina May Gaskin had her first child, the hospital doctor used forceps (against her wishes) and her baby was sequestered for 24 hours immediately after birth. "When they brought her to me, I thought she was someone else’s," Gaskin recalls in Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore’s documentary. Gaskin was understandably flummoxed that her first experience with the most natural act a female body can endure was as inhuman as the subject of an Eric Schlosser exposé. A few years later, she met Stephen Gaskin, a professor who became her second husband, and the man who’d go on to co-found the Farm, America’s largest intentional community, in 1971. On the Farm, women had children, and in those confines, far from the iron fist of insurance companies, Gaskin discovered midwifery as her calling. She recruited others, and dedicated herself to preserving an art that dwindles as the medical industry strives to treat women’s bodies like profit machines. Her message is intended for a larger audience than granola-eating moms-to-be: we’re losing touch with our bodies. Lamm and Wigmore bravely cram a handful of live births into the film; footage of a breech birth implies this doc could go on to be a useful teaching tool for others interested in midwifery. (1:33) New Parkway, Roxie. (Vizcarrondo)

The Call (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, SF Center.

Dead Man Down Pee. Yew. This Dead Man reeks, though surveying the cast list and judging from the big honking success of director Niels Arden Oplev’s previous film, 2009’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, one would hope the stench wouldn’t be quite so crippling. Crime boss (Terrence Howard) is running panic-stricken after a series of spooky mail-art threats — and it isn’t long before we realize why: his most handy henchman Victor (Colin Farrell) is the one out to destroy him after the death of his wife and daughter. The wrinkle in the plot is the moody, beautiful, and scarred French girl Beatrice (Noomi Rapace) who lives across the way from Victor’s apartment with her deaf mom (Isabelle Huppert) and has plans to extract her own kind of vengeance. Despite Rapace’s brooding performance (Oplev obviously hopes she’ll pull a Lisbeth Salander and miraculously hack this mess — unsure about whether it’s a shoot-’em-up revenge exercise or a Rear Window-ish misfit love story — into something worthwhile) and cameos by actors like Dominic Cooper and F. Murray Abraham, they can’t compensate for the weak writing and muddled direction, the fact that Victor conveniently dithers instead of putting an end to his victim’s (and our) agony, and that the entire mis-en-scene with its Czechs, Albanians, et al, which reads like a Central European blood feud played out in Grand Central Station — just a few components as to why Dead Man stinks. (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Django Unchained Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti western homage features a cameo by the original Django (Franco Nero, star of the 1966 film), and solid performances by a meticulously assembled cast, including Jamie Foxx as the titular former slave who becomes a badass bounty hunter under the tutelage of Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Waltz, who won an Oscar for playing the evil yet befuddlingly delightful Nazi Hans Landa in Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds, is just as memorable (and here, you can feel good about liking him) as a quick-witted, quick-drawing wayward German dentist. There are no Nazis in Django, of course, but Tarantino’s taboo du jour (slavery) more than supplies motivation for the filmmaker’s favorite theme (revenge). Once Django joins forces with Schultz, the natural-born partners hatch a scheme to rescue Django’s still-enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), whose German-language skills are as unlikely as they are convenient. Along the way (and it’s a long way; the movie runs 165 minutes), they encounter a cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose main passion is the offensive, shocking "sport" of "Mandingo fighting," and his right-hand man, played by Tarantino muse Samuel L. Jackson in a transcendently scandalous performance. And amid all the violence and racist language and Foxx vengeance-making, there are many moments of screaming hilarity, as when a character with the Old South 101 name of Big Daddy (Don Johnson) argues with the posse he’s rounded up over the proper construction of vigilante hoods. It’s a classic Tarantino moment: pausing the action so characters can blather on about something trivial before an epic scene of violence. Mr. Pink would approve. (2:45) Metreon. (Eddy)

Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey The director of 2003’s Imelda returns with this portrait of a way more sympathetic Filipino celebrity: Arnel Pineda, plucked from obscurity via YouTube after Journey’s Neil Schon spotted him singing with a Manila-based cover band. Don’t Stop Believin‘ follows Pineda, who openly admits past struggles with homelessness and addiction, from audition to 20,000-seat arena success as Journey’s charismatic new front man (he faces insta-success with an endearing combination of nervousness and fanboy thrill). He’s also up-front about feeling homesick, and the pressures that come with replacing one of the most famous voices in rock (Steve Perry doesn’t appear in the film, other than in vintage footage). Especially fun to see is how Pineda invigorates the rest of Journey; as the tour progresses, all involved — even the band’s veteran members, who’ve no doubt played "Open Arms" ten million times — radiate with excitement. (1:45) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Emperor This ponderously old-fashioned historical drama focuses on the negotiations around Japan’s surrender after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While many on the Allied side want the nation’s "Supreme Commander" Emperor Hirohito to pay for war crimes with his life, experts like bilingual Gen. Bonners Fellers (Matthew Fox) argue that the transition to peace can be achieved not by punishing but using this "living god" to wean the population off its ideological fanaticism. Fellers must ultimately sway gruff General MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) to the wisdom of this approach, while personally preoccupied with finding the onetime exchange-student love (Kaori Momoi) denied him by cultural divisions and escalating war rhetoric. Covering (albeit from the U.S. side) more or less the same events as Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2005 The Sun, Peter Webber’s movie is very different from that flawed effort, but also a lot worse. The corny Romeo and Juliet romance, the simplistic approach to explaining Japan’s "ancient warrior tradition" and anything else (via dialogue routinely as flat as "Things in Japan are not black and white!"), plus Alex Heffes’ bombastic old-school orchestral score, are all as banal as can be. Even the reliable Jones offers little more than conventional crustiness — as opposed to the inspired kind he does in Lincoln. (1:46) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Escape from Planet Earth (1:35) Metreon.

A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet San Franciscan Mark Kitchell (1990’s Berkeley in the Sixties) directs this thorough, gracefully-edited history of the environmental movement, beginning with the earliest stirrings of the Audubon Society and Aldo Leopold. Pretty much every major cause and group gets the vintage-footage, contemporary-interview treatment: the Sierra Club, Earth Day, Silent Spring, Love Canal, the pursuit of alternative energy, Greenpeace, Chico Mendes and the Amazon rainforests, the greenhouse effect and climate change, the pursuit of sustainable living, and so on. But if its scope is perhaps overly broad, A Fierce Green Fire still offers a valuable overview of a movement that’s remained determined for decades, even as governments and corporations do their best to stomp it out. Celebrity narrators Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, and Meryl Streep add additional heft to the message, though the raw material condensed here would be powerful enough without them. (1:50) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

56 Up The world may be going to shit, but some things can be relied upon, like Michael Apted’s beloved series that’s traced the lives of 14 disparate Brits every seven years since original BBC documentary 7 Up in 1964. More happily still, this latest installment finds nearly all the participants shuffling toward the end of middle-age in more settled and contented form than ever before. There are exceptions: Jackie is surrounded by health and financial woes; special-needs librarian Lynn has been hit hard by the economic downturn; everybody’s favorite undiagnosed mental case, the formerly homeless Neil, is never going to fully comfortable in his own skin or in too close proximity to others. But for the most part, life is good. Back after 28 years is Peter, who’d quit being filmed when his anti-Thatcher comments provoked "malicious" responses, even if he’s returned mostly to promote his successful folk trio the Good Intentions. Particularly admirable and evidently fulfilling is the path that’s been taken by Symon, the only person of color here. Raised in government care, he and his wife have by now fostered 65 children — with near-infinite love and generosity, from all appearances. If you’re new to the Up series, you’ll be best off doing a Netflix retrospective as preparation for this chapter, starting with 28 Up. (2:24) Magick Lantern. (Harvey)

The Gatekeepers Coming hard on the heels of The Law in These Parts, which gave a dispassionate forum to the lawmakers who’ve shaped — some might say in pretzel form — the military legal system that’s been applied by Israelis to Palestinians for decades, Dror Moreh’s documentary provides another key insiders’ viewpoint on that endless occupation. His interviewees are six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service. Their top-secret decisions shaped the nation’s attempts to control terrorist sects and attacks, as seen in a nearly half-century parade of news clips showing violence and negotiation on both sides. Unlike the subjects of Law, who spoke a cool, often evasive legalese to avoid any awkward ethical issues, these men are at times frankly — and surprisingly — doubtful about the wisdom of some individual decisions, let alone about the seemingly ever-receding prospect of a diplomatic peace. They even advocate for a two-state solution, an idea the government they served no longer seems seriously interested in advancing. The Gatekeepers is an important document that offers recent history examined head-on by the hitherto generally close-mouthed people who were in a prime position to direct its course. (1:37) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

A Good Day to Die Hard A Good Day to Die Hard did me wrong. How did I miss the signs? Badass daddy rescues son. Perps cover up ’80s era misdeeds. They’re in Russia&ldots;Die Hard has become Taken. All it needs is someone to kidnap Bonnie Bedelia or deflower Jai Courtney and the transformation will be complete. What’s more, A Good Day is so obviously made for export it’s almost not trying to court the American audience for which the franchise is a staple. In a desperate reach for brand loyalty director John Moore (2001’s Behind Enemy Lines) has loaded the film with slight allusions to McClane’s past adventures. The McClanes shoot the ceiling and litter the floor with glass. John escapes a helicopter by leaping into a skyscraper window from the outside. John’s ringtone plays "Ode to Joy." The glib rejoinders are all there but they’re smeared by crap direction and odd pacing that gives ample time to military vehicles tumbling down the highway but absolutely no time for Bruce’s declarations of "I’m on VACATION!" Which may be just as well — it’s no "Yipee kay yay, motherfucker." When Willis says that in A Good Day, all the love’s gone out of it. I guess every romance has to end. (1:37) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga The ever-intrepid Werner Herzog, with co-director Dmitry Vasyukov, pursues his fascination with extreme landscapes by chronicling a year deep within the Siberian Taiga. True to form, he doesn’t spend much time in the 300-inhabitant town nestled amid "endless wilderness," accessible only by helicopter or boat (and only during the warmer seasons); instead, he seeks the most isolated environment possible, venturing into the frozen forest with fur trappers who augment their passed-down-over-generations job skills with the occasional modern assist (chainsaws and snowmobiles are key). Gorgeous cinematography and a curious, respectful tone elevate Happy People from mere ethnographic-film status, though that’s essentially what it is, as it records the men carving canoes, bear-proofing their cabins, interacting with their dogs, and generally being incredibly self-reliant amid some of the most rugged conditions imaginable. And since it’s Herzog, you know there’ll be a few gently bizarre moments, as when a politician’s summer campaign cruise brings a musical revue to town, or the director himself refers to "vodka — vicious as jet fuel" in his trademark droll voice over. (1:34) Magick Lantern, Roxie, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Identity Thief America is made up of asshole winners and nice guy losers — or at least that’s the thesis of Identity Thief, a comedy about a crying-clown credit card bandit (Melissa McCarthy) and the sweet sucker (Jason Bateman) she lures into her web of chaos. Bateman plays Sandy, a typical middle-class dude with a wife, two kids, and a third on the way. He’s always struggling to break even and just when it seems like his ship’s come in, Diana (McCarthy) jacks his identity — a crime that requires just five minutes in a dark room with Sandy’s social security number. Suddenly, his good name is contaminated with her prior arrests, drug-dealer entanglements, and mounting debt; it’s like the capitalist version of VD. But as the "kind of person who has no friends," Diana is as tragic as she is comic, providing McCarthy an acting opportunity no one saw coming when she was dispensing romantic advice on The Gilmore Girls. Director Seth Gordon (2011’s Horrible Bosses) treats this comedy like an action movie — as breakneck as slapstick gets — and he relies so heavily on discomfort humor that the film doesn’t just prompt laughs, it pokes you in the ribs until you laugh, man, LAUGH! While Identity Thief has a few complex moments about how defeating "sticking it to the man" can be (mostly because only middle men get hurt), it’s mostly as subtle as a pratfall and just as (un-)rewarding. (1:25) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Vizcarrondo)

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Steve Carell dips into the men-at-work comic genre so associated with Will Ferrell: he’s Burt Wonderstone, who starts out as a picked-on kid discovering his powers via a kit by Las Vegas magician Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin). The ensuing years have not been kind to Burt, a relatively decent guy struggling to shed the douchey buildup of ego, corn, and dated moves à la David Copperfield (ta-da, who magically appears), while working for benevolently threatening casino boss Doug Munny (James Gandolfini) with his childhood best friend Anton (Steve Buscemi, reviving the naifitude of The Big Lebowski‘s Donny) and side fox Jane (Olivia Wilde). The shot of adrenalin to the moribund heart of Burt and Anton’s act: Jim Carrey’s "Brain Rapist," who aims to ream his colleagues by cutting playing cards from his flesh and going to bed on fiery coals. How can the old-schoolers remain relevant? Hard work is key for Carell, who rolls out the straight-man sweetness that seem to make him a fit for romantic comedies — though his earnestness and need to be liked, as usual, err on the side of convention, while taking for granted the not-quite-there chemistry with, in this instance, Wilde. Fortunately whatever edge is lacking materializes whenever Carrey’s ridiculously ombré-tressed daredevil is on screen. Using his now-battered, still-malleable features to full effect, he’s a whole different ball of cheese, lampooning those who will go to any lengths — gouging, searing, and maiming — to entertain. (1:40) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Vogue. (Chun)

Jack the Giant Slayer (1:55) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Life of Pi Several filmmakers including Alfonso Cuarón, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and M. Night Shyamalan had a crack at Yann Martel’s "unfilmable" novel over the last decade, without success. That turns out to have been a very good thing, since Ang Lee and scenarist David Magee have made probably the best movie possible from the material — arguably even an improvement on it. Framed as the adult protagonist’s (Irrfan Khan) lengthy reminiscence to an interested writer (Rafe Spall) it chronicles his youthful experience accompanying his family and animals from their just shuttered zoo on a cargo ship voyage from India to Canada. But a storm capsizes the vessel, stranding teenaged Pi (Suraj Sharma) on a lifeboat with a mini menagerie — albeit one swiftly reduced by the food chain in action to one Richard Parker, a whimsically named Bengal tiger. This uneasy forced cohabitation between Hindu vegetarian and instinctual carnivore is an object lesson in survival as well as a fable about the existence of God, among other things. Shot in 3D, the movie has plenty of enchanted, original imagery, though its outstanding technical accomplishment may lie more in the application of CGI (rather than stereoscopic photography) to something reasonably intelligent for a change. First-time actor Sharma is a natural, while his costar gives the most remarkable performance by a wild animal this side of Joaquin Phoenix in The Master. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a charmed, lovely experience. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Like Someone in Love A student apparently moonlighting as an escort, Akiko (Rin Takanashi) doesn’t seem to like her night job, and likes even less the fact that she’s forced into seeing a client while the doting, oblivious grandmother she’s been avoiding waits for her at the train station. But upon arriving at the apartment of the john, she finds sociology professor Takashi (Tadashi Okuno) courtly and distracted, uninterested in getting her in bed even when she climbs into it of her own volition. Their "date" extends into the next day, introducing him to the possessive, suspicious boyfriend she’s having problems with (Ryo Kase), who mistakes the prof for her grandfather. As with Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature to be shot outside his native Iran — the extraordinary European coproduction Certified Copy (2010) — this Japan set second lets its protagonists first play at being having different identities, then teases us with the notion that they are, in fact, those other people. It’s also another talk fest that might seem a little too nothing-happening, too idle-intellectual gamesmanship at a casual first glance, but could also grow increasingly fascinating and profound with repeat viewings. (1:49) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Lincoln Distinguished subject matter and an A+ production team (Steven Spielberg directing, Daniel Day-Lewis starring, Tony Kushner adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Williams scoring every emotion juuust so) mean Lincoln delivers about what you’d expect: a compelling (if verbose), emotionally resonant (and somehow suspenseful) dramatization of President Lincoln’s push to get the 13th amendment passed before the start of his second term. America’s neck-deep in the Civil War, and Congress, though now without Southern representation, is profoundly divided on the issue of abolition. Spielberg recreates 1865 Washington as a vibrant, exciting place, albeit one filled with so many recognizable stars it’s almost distracting wondering who’ll pop up in the next scene: Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant! Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Lincoln! Lena Dunham’s shirtless boyfriend on Girls (Adam Driver) as a soldier! Most notable among the huge cast are John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and a daffy James Spader as a trio of lobbyists; Sally Field as the troubled First Lady; and likely Oscar contenders Tommy Lee Jones (as winningly cranky Rep. Thaddeus Stevens) and Day-Lewis, who does a reliably great job of disappearing into his iconic role. (2:30) Metreon, New Parkway. (Eddy)

No Long before the Arab Spring, a people’s revolution went down in Chile when a 1988 referendum toppled the country’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, thanks in part to an ad exec who dared to sell the dream to his countrymen and women — using the relentlessly upbeat, cheesy language of a Pepsi Generation. In No‘s dramatization of this true story, ad man Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) is approached by the opposition to Pinochet’s regime to help them on their campaign to encourage Chile’s people to vote "no" to eight more years under the brutal strongman. Rene’s well-aware of the horrors of the dictatorship; not only are the disappeared common knowledge, his activist ex (Antonia Zegers) has been beaten and jailed with seeming regularity. Going up against his boss (Alfredo Castro), who’s overseeing the Pinochet campaign, Rene takes the brilliant tact in the opposition’s TV programs of selling hope — sound familiar? — promising "Chile, happiness is coming!" amid corny mimes, dancers, and the like. Director-producer Pablo Larrain turns out to be just as genius, shooting with a grainy U-matic ’80s video camera to match his footage with 1988 archival imagery, including the original TV spots, in this invigorating spiritual kin of both 2012’s Argo and 1997’s Wag the Dog. (1:50) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Chun)

Oz: The Great and Powerful Providing a backstory for the man behind the curtain, director Sam Raimi gives us a prequel of sorts to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Herein we follow the adventures of a Depression-era Kansas circus magician named Oscar (James Franco) — Oz to his friends — as he cons, philanders, bickers with his behind-the-scenes assistant Frank (Zach Braff), and eventually sails away in a twister, bound for a Technicolor land of massively proportioned flora, talking fauna, and witches ranging from dazzlingly good to treacherously wicked. From one of them, Theodora (Mila Kunis), he learns that his arrival — in Oz, just to clarify — has set in motion the fulfillment of a prophecy: that a great wizard, also named Oz, will bring about the downfall of a malevolent witch (Rachel Weisz), saving the kingdom and its cheery, goodhearted inhabitants. Unfortunately for this deserving populace, Oz spent his last pre-twister moments with the Baum Bros. Circus (the name a tribute to L. Frank Baum, writer of the Oz children’s books) demonstrating a banged-up moral compass and an undependable streak and proclaiming that he would rather be a great man than a good man. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this theme is revisited ad nauseam as Oz and the oppressively beneficent witch Glinda (Michelle Williams) — whose magic appears to consist mainly of nice soft things like bubbles and fog — stand around debating whether he’s the right man for the task. When the fog clears, though, the view is undeniably pretty. While en route to and from the Emerald City, Oz and his companions — among them a non-evil flying monkey (voiced by Braff) and a rather adorable china doll (Joey King) — wander through a deliriously arresting, Fantasia-esque landscape whose intricate, inventive construction helps distract from the plodding, saccharine rhetoric and unappealing story line. (2:07) Balboa, California, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Quartet Every year there’s at least one: the adorable-old-cootfest, usually British, that proves harmless and reassuring and lightly tear/laughter producing enough to convince a certain demographic that it’s safe to go to the movies again. The last months have seen two, both starring Maggie Smith (who’s also queen of that audience’s home viewing via Downton Abbey). Last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Smith played a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself in India, has already filled the slot. It was formulaic, cute, and sentimental, yes, but it also practiced more restraint than one expected. Now here’s Quartet, which is basically the same flower arrangement with quite a bit more dust on it. Smith plays a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself forced into spending her twilight years at a home for the elderly. It’s not just any such home, however, but Beecham House, whose residents are retired professional musicians. Gingerly peeking out from her room after a few days’ retreat from public gaze, Smith’s Jean Horton — a famed English soprano — spies a roomful of codgers rolling their hips to Afropop in a dance class. "This is not a retirement home — this is a madhouse!" she pronounces. Oh, the shitty lines that lazy writers have long depended on Smith to make sparkle. Quartet is full of such bunk, adapted with loving fidelity, no doubt, from his own 1999 play by Ronald Harwood, who as a scenarist has done some good adaptations of other people’s work (2002’s The Pianist). But as a generator of original material for about a half-century, he’s mostly proven that it is possible to prosper that long while being in entirely the wrong half-century. Making his directorial debut: 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman, which ought to have yielded a more interesting final product. But with its workmanlike gloss and head-on take on the script’s very predictable beats, Quartet could as well have been directed by any BBC veteran of no particular distinction. (1:38) Albany, Four Star, Clay, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Side Effects Though on the surface Channing Tatum appears to be his current muse, Steven Soderbergh seems to have gotten his smart, topical groove back, the one that spurred him to kick off his feature filmmaking career with the on-point Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and went missing with the fun, featherweight Ocean’s franchise. (Alas, he’s been making claims that Side Effects will be his last feature film.) Here, trendy designer antidepressants are the draw — mixed with the heady intoxicants of a murder mystery with a nice hard twist that would have intrigued either Hitchcock or Chabrol. As Side Effects opens, the waifish Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), whose inside-trading hubby (Tatum) has just been released from prison, looks like a big-eyed little basket of nerves ready to combust — internally, it seems, when she drives her car into a wall. Therapist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who begins to treat her after her hospital stay, seems to care about her, but nevertheless reflexively prescribes the latest anti-anxiety med of the day, on the advice of her former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Where does his responsibility for Emily’s subsequent actions begin and end? Soderbergh and his very able cast fill out the issues admirably, with the urgency that was missing from the more clinical Contagion (2011) and the, ahem, meaty intelligence that was lacking in all but the more ingenious strip scenes of last year’s Magic Mike. (1:30) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Silver Linings Playbook After guiding two actors to Best Supporting Oscars in 2010’s The Fighter, director David O. Russell returns (adapting his script from Matthew Quick’s novel) with another darkly comedic film about a complicated family that will probably earn some gold of its own. Though he’s obviously not ready to face the outside world, Pat (Bradley Cooper) checks out of the state institution he’s been court-ordered to spend eight months in after displaying some serious anger-management issues. He moves home with his football-obsessed father (Robert De Niro) and worrywart mother (Jacki Weaver of 2010’s Animal Kingdom), where he plunges into a plan to win back his estranged wife. Cooper plays Pat as a man vibrating with troubled energy — always in danger of flying into a rage, even as he pursues his forced-upbeat "silver linings" philosophy. But the movie belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, who proves the chops she showcased (pre-Hunger Games megafame) in 2010’s Winter’s Bone were no fluke. As the damaged-but-determined Tiffany, she’s the left-field element that jolts Pat out of his crazytown funk; she’s also the only reason Playbook‘s dance-competition subplot doesn’t feel eye-rollingly clichéd. The film’s not perfect, but Lawrence’s layered performance — emotional, demanding, bitchy, tough-yet-secretly-tender — damn near is. (2:01) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Stoker None of the characters in Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut, Stoker, devour a full plate of still-squirming octopus. (For that, see Park’s international breakthrough, 2003’s Oldboy; chances are the meal won’t be duplicated in the Spike Lee remake due later this year.) But that’s not to say Stoker — with its Hitchcockian script by Wentworth Miller — isn’t full of unsettling, cringe-inducing moments, as the titular family (Nicole Kidman as Evelyn, the dotty mom; Mia Wasikowska as India, the moody high-schooler) faces the sudden death of husband-father Richard (Dermot Mulroney, glimpsed in flashbacks) and the equally suddenly arrival of sleek, sinister Uncle Charles (Matthew Goode). Lensed with an eerie elegance and an exquisite attention to creepy details, this tale of dysfunctional ties that bind leads to a rather insane conclusion; whether that bugs you or not depends on how willing you are to surrender to its madness. (1:38) California, Metreon, Piedmont. (Eddy)

21 and Over (1:33) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Upside Down This sci-fi romance from Argentine-French director Juan Solanas is one of those movies that would look brilliant as a coffee-table photo book — nearly every shot is some striking mix of production design, CGI, color grading, and whatnot. Too bad, though, that it has to open its mouth and ruin everything. Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst play star-crossed lovers who live on adjacent twin planets with their own opposing gravitational forces. Nonetheless, they somehow manage to groove on one another until the authorities — miscegenation between the prosperous residents of "Up Top" and the exploited peasants of "Down Below" being forbidden — interfere, resulting in a ten-year separation and one case of amnesia. But the course of true love cannot be stopped by evil energy conglomerates, at least in the movies. Sturgess’ breathless narration starts things off with "The universe…full of wonders!" and ends with "Our love would change the entire course of history," so you know Solanas has absolutely no cliché-detecting skills. He does have a great eye — but after a certain point, that isn’t enough to compensate for his awful dialogue, flat pacing, and disinterest in exploring any nuances of plot or character. Dunst is stuck playing a part that might as well simply be called the Girl; Sturgess is encouraged to overact, but his ham is prosciutto beside the thick-cut slabs of thespian pigmeat offered by Timothy Spall as the designated excruciating comic relief. If the fact that our lovers are called "Adam" and "Eden" doesn’t make you groan, you just might buy this ostentatiously gorgeous but gray-matter-challenged eye candy. If you think Tarsem is a genius and 1998’s What Dreams May Come one of the great movie romances, you will love, love, love Upside Down. (1:53) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

War Witch They should give out second-place Oscars. Like, made of silver instead of gold. In that alternate-universe scenario, Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen’s vivid, Democratic Republic of the Congo-shot drama might’ve picked up some hardware (beyond its many film-fest accolades) to go with its Best Foreign Language Film nomination. War Witch couldn’t stop the march of Amour, but it’s deeply moving in its own way — the story of Komona (played by first-time actor Rachel Mwanza), kidnapped from her village at 12 and forced to join the rebel army that roams the forests of her unnamed African country. Her first task: machine-gunning her own parents. Her ability to see ghosts (portrayed by actors in eerie body paint) elevates her to the status of "war witch," and she’s tasked with using her sixth sense to aid the rebel general’s attacks against the government army. But even this elevated position can’t quell the physical and spiritual unease of her situation; idyllic love with a fellow teenage soldier (Serge Kanyinda) proves all too brief, and as months pass, Komona remains haunted by her past. The end result is a brutal yet poetic film, elevated by Mwanza’s thoughtful performance. (1:30) Roxie. (Eddy)

Warm Bodies A decade and a half of torrid, tormented vampire-human entanglements has left us accustomed to rooting for romances involving the undead and the still-alive. Some might argue, however, that no amount of pop-cultural prepping could be sufficient to get us behind a human-zombie love story for the ages. Is guzzling human blood really measurably less gross than making a meal of someone’s brains and other body parts? Somehow, yes. Recognizing this perceptual hurdle, writer-director Jonathan Levine (2011’s 50/50, 2008’s The Wackness) secures our sympathies at the outset of Warm Bodies by situating us inside the surprisingly active brain of the film’s zombie protagonist. Zombies, it turns out, have internal monologues. R (Nicholas Hoult) can only remember the first letter of his former name, but as he shambles and shuffles and slumps his way through the terminals of a postapocalyptic airport overrun by his fellow corpses (as they’re called by the film’s human population), he fills us in as best he can on the global catastrophe that’s occurred and his own ensuing existential crisis. By the time he meets not-so-cute with Julie (Teresa Palmer), a young woman whose father (John Malkovich) is commander-in-chief of the human survivors living in a walled-off city center, we’ve learned that he collects vinyl, that he has a zombie best friend, and that he doesn’t want to be like this. We may still be flinching at the thought of his and Julie’s first kiss, but we’re also kind of rooting for him. The plot gapes in places, where a tenuous logic gets trampled and gives way, but Levine’s script, adapted from a novel by Isaac Marion, is full of funny riffs on the zombie condition, which Hoult invests with a comic sweetness as his character staggers toward the land of the living. (1:37) Metreon, New Parkway, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Zero Dark Thirty The extent to which torture was actually used in the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin may never be known, though popular opinion will surely be shaped by this film, as it’s produced with the same kind of "realness" that made Kathryn Bigelow’s previous film, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008), so potent. Zero Dark Thirty incorporates torture early in its chronology — which begins in 2003, after a brief opening that captures the terror of September 11, 2001 using only 911 phone calls — but the practice is discarded after 2008, a sea-change year marked by the sight of Obama on TV insisting that "America does not torture." (The "any more" goes unspoken.) Most of Zero Dark Thirty is set in Pakistan and/or "CIA black sites" in undisclosed locations; it’s a suspenseful procedural that manages to make well-documented events (the July 2005 London bombings; the September 2008 Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing) seem shocking and unexpected. Even the raid on Bin Ladin’s HQ is nail-bitingly intense. The film immerses the viewer in the clandestine world, tossing out abbreviations ("KSM" for al-Qaeda bigwig Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) and jargon ("tradecraft") without pausing for a breath. It is thrilling, emotional, engrossing — the smartest, most tightly-constructed action film of the year. At the center of it all: a character allegedly based on a real person whose actual identity is kept top-secret by necessity. She’s interpreted here in the form of a steely CIA operative named Maya, played to likely Oscar-winning perfection by Jessica Chastain. No matter the film’s divisive subject matter, there’s no denying that this is a powerful performance. "Washington says she’s a killer," a character remarks after meeting this seemingly delicate creature, and he’s proven right long before Bin Ladin goes down. Some critics have argued that character is underdeveloped, but anyone who says that isn’t watching closely enough. Maya may not be given a traditional backstory, but there’s plenty of interior life there, and it comes through in quick, vulnerable flashes — leading up to the payoff of the film’s devastating final shot. (2:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Live Shots: The Hush Sound at Great American Music Hall

Tony Robles

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March 14, 2013

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I was introduced to the Hush Sound in high school, when a girlfriend burned “Like Vines” onto a mix CD for me. It was love at first listen. The awkward, adorably fumbling song structures and whimsical lyrics of the Like Vines album were the perfect mirror to my gawky teenage soul. Goodbye Blues, the last album the band released before going on hiatus, showed more advanced songwriting technique and much better production. It was a tragedy. Growing up had made the Hush Sound lose its charm. I kept burning old Hush Sound songs onto mix CDs for a couple of years, and then slowly forgot about it.

You can imagine my surprise when, walking into the Great American last Friday night for a Hush Sound reunion show, I found myself in a nearly sold-out venue. As it turns out, other people had also restlessly waited through the five-year hiatus for this opportunity to relive their youth.

The crowd was predominantly early-20s females — my people. All around me I saw old, faded Hush Sound T-shirts several sizes too small and excited faces screaming at every advancement of set up: drum kit, scream, mic check, scream.

As the Hush Sound took the stage, the energy in the venue was through the roof. To my — and apparently everyone else’s —delight, the first song was “Like Vines.” The floor shook with bouncing bodies and the band nearly drowned out by hundreds of people singing along with every word.

As the set progressed, the audience’s energy plunged ahead undaunted. It screamed for every song, every interlude, and every very bad joke. The band itself was no match for us. Old, beloved songs seemed limp and lifeless. The band seemed tired, and the banter between Greta and Bob was stiff and painfully unfunny.

While the audience clearly had not outgrown its love for the Hush Sound, it seemed as though the band itself has moved on. When the group introduced a few new songs, however, its renewed energy and interest was palpable. Brand new songs like “Scavengers” had a great groove, awesome sing-along vocals, and the kind of enthusiasm that had been missing from the rest of the show.

For the encore, we fans were asked to show out requests. When “Crawling Toward the Sun” was selected, the crowd roared in excitement, to the bands apparent disbelief. As it plunged into one of its oldest songs, everything came together for a brief moment.

The band seemed to enjoy it and the audience was absolutely ecstatic as it sang in chorus and swayed with nostalgia.
This joyful moment was a relief to me. It proved that the Hush Sound is still capable of capturing such moments. I am hopeful that the band’s next album is a return to the simple, earnest melodies its fans will always love it for.

Magic, madness, witches, and holdin’ on to that feeeeeling: new movies!

Sue Vaughan

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March 14, 2013

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Magic, madness, witches, and holdin’ on to that feeeeeling: new movies!

The newly-renamed CAAMfest (the film festival formerly known as the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival) opens tonight with its own slice of March Madness: basketball-themed doc Linsanity. For more on that film and other CAAMfest documentaries, go here. You’ll find a rundown of films focusing on troubled family ties here.

Also this week: Park Chan-wook’s first English-language film, Stoker, opens tomorrow — it’s a creepy delight, and I spoke with Park about Hitchcock and more in this interview.

For those so inclined, Hollywood rolls out Halle Berry thriller The Call (make your own “phoning in her performance” joke here) and Steves Carell and Buscemi, plus Jim Carrey, as battling magicians in comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.

Read on for short takes on a new horror omnibus, a stirring tale from Romania, the Oscar-nominated War Witch, two music docs (Journey + Snoop Lion), and more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiZr4VFmcpk

The ABCs of Death Variety is the spice of life, yet this international omnibus with 26 directors contributing elaborate micro-shorts on various methods of death — one per alphabetical letter — is like eating dried dill or cilantro for two-plus hours. It’s pungent, but what might color a complex stew proves insufferable in this narrow one. Just why it seems narrow is anyone’s guess — this should have been a genius idea. Yet there are almost no outstanding or memorable contributions, despite the wide-open invitation to extreme content. Filmmakers include Jorge Michel Grau (2010’s We Are What We Are), Simon Rumley (of brilliant 2006 feature The Living and the Dead), Srdjan Spasojevic (2010’s A Serbian Film), cult-favorite actress Angela Bettis, and many more. Nearly all seem to have spent far more than their allotted $5000 budget. There are segments parodying exploitation cinema and video games; offering hyperbolic Terminator-style sci-fi; line-drawing and claymation segments; plus plenty of gross-out narratives. Yet it’s all surprisingly crappy (not least an episode called “Toilet”), with precious few more than halfway decent episodes. The sum impact is of a mean-spirited project that brings out the vacuously shock-value prone worst in everyone involved. (2:03) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiJRGbCKCu0

Beyond the Hills Cristian Mungiu — one of the main reasons everyone’s all excited about the Romanian New Wave — follows up his Palme d’Or winner, 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with another stark look at a troubled friendship between two women. Beyond the Hills‘ Voichita and Alina (Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur, who shared the Best Actress prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival; for his part, Mungiu won Best Screenplay) were BFFs and, we slowly realize, lovers while growing up at a Romanian orphanage. When they aged out of the facility, the reserved Voichita moved to a rural monastery to become a nun, and the outburst-prone Alina pinballed around, doing a stint as a barmaid in Germany before turning up in Voichita’s village, lugging emotional baggage of the jealous, needy, possibly mentally ill, and definitely misunderstood variety. It can’t end well for anyone, as all involved — dismissive local doctors, Alina’s no-longer-accomodating foster family, the priest (Valeriu Andriuta), and the other nuns — would rather not spend any time or energy caring for a troubled, destitute outsider. Even Voichita can only look on helplessly as an exorcism, a brutal and cruel procedure, is decided upon as Alina’s last, best hope. Based on a real 2005 incident in Moldavia, Mungiu’s unsettling film is a masterpiece of exquisitely composed shots, harsh themes, and naturalistic performances. Check out an interview with Mungiu here. (2:30) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0cIj3OPM2k

Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey The director of 2003’s Imelda returns with this portrait of a way more sympathetic Filipino celebrity: Arnel Pineda, plucked from obscurity via YouTube after Journey’s Neil Schon spotted him singing with a Manila-based cover band. Don’t Stop Believin’ follows Pineda, who openly admits past struggles with homelessness and addiction, from audition to 20,000-seat arena success as Journey’s charismatic new frontman (he faces insta-success with an endearing combination of nervousness and fanboy thrill). He’s also up-front about feeling homesick, and the pressures that come with replacing one of the most famous voices in rock (Steve Perry doesn’t appear in the film, other than in vintage footage). Especially fun to see is how Pineda invigorates the rest of Journey; as the tour progresses, all involved — even the band’s veteran members, who’ve no doubt played “Open Arms” ten million times — radiate with excitement. (1:45) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94zbq5Vaod0

A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet San Franciscan Mark Kitchell (1990’s Berkeley in the Sixties) directs this thorough, gracefully-edited history of the environmental movement, beginning with the earliest stirrings of the Audubon Society and Aldo Leopold. Pretty much every major cause and group gets the vintage-footage, contemporary-interview treatment: the Sierra Club, Earth Day, Silent Spring, Love Canal, the pursuit of alternative energy, Greenpeace, Chico Mendes and the Amazon rainforests, the greenhouse effect and climate change, the pursuit of sustainable living, and so on. But if its scope is perhaps overly broad, A Fierce Green Fire still offers a valuable overview of a movement that’s remained determined for decades, even as governments and corporations do their best to stomp it out. Celebrity narrators Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, and Meryl Streep add additional heft to the message, though the raw material condensed here would be powerful enough without them. (1:50) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTqyV5Kw9Ss

Reincarnated Reinvention is the name of the game for some mercurial, inventive pop artists, but for rapper Snoop Dogg, now going by the moniker Snoop Lion — you get the scoop on the name change in this doc — transformation turns out to be unexpectedly serious, earnest business. Flirting with Cheech and Chong travelogue comedy, Reincarnated ostensibly spins off the making of the hip-hop artist’s forthcoming 12th album of the same name in Jamaica, with smokin’ production help from Diplo’s Major Lazer gang. The camera is there for many standard behind-the-music moments — sessions with family and adulation in the musical-fertile Trenchtown — along with many not-quite-ready-for-prime-times spent lighting up with other musicians, growers up in the mountains, and reggae forebears like Bunny Wailer. But there’s more going on beneath the billowing smoke: providing the context for today’s high times and ultimately chronicling the rhyme-slinger’s life and times and his path to Jamaica, reggae, and Rastafari spirituality and culture, Vice Films director Andy Capper lays the foundation for Snoop’s shift from rap to Rastafari by revisiting his gangster youth, the rise and fall of Death Row Records, the passing of 2Pac and Nate Dogg, and the music that made the man’s name —and continues to give us a reason to care. The easy, sexy charisma that made Snoop a star is on full display here, and doubtless his latest experiences on reality TV have made Capp’s job that much easier when it came to digging deeper, while the clouds of herb, Cali and Jamaican alike, give viewers a taste of the fun, and possibly healing, attendant with life with the Doggfather. (1:36) (Kimberly Chun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtixqUXid9A

Upside Down This sci-fi romance from Argentine-French director Juan Solanas is one of those movies that would look brilliant as a coffee-table photo book — nearly every shot is some striking mix of production design, CGI, color grading, and whatnot. Too bad, though, that it has to open its mouth and ruin everything. Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst play star-crossed lovers who live on adjacent twin planets with their own opposing gravitational forces. Nonetheless, they somehow manage to groove on one another until the authorities — miscegenation between the prosperous residents of “Up Top” and the exploited peasants of “Down Below” being forbidden — interfere, resulting in a ten-year separation and one case of amnesia. But the course of true love cannot be stopped by evil energy conglomerates, at least in the movies. Sturgess’ breathless narration starts things off with “The universe…full of wonders!” and ends with “Our love would change the entire course of history,” so you know Solanas has absolutely no cliché-detecting skills. He does have a great eye — but after a certain point, that isn’t enough to compensate for his awful dialogue, flat pacing, and disinterest in exploring any nuances of plot or character. Dunst is stuck playing a part that might as well simply be called the Girl; Sturgess is encouraged to overact, but his ham is prosciutto beside the thick-cut slabs of thespian pigmeat offered by Timothy Spall as the designated excruciating comic relief. If the fact that our lovers are called “Adam” and “Eden” doesn’t make you groan, you just might buy this ostentatiously gorgeous but grey-matter-challenged eye candy. If you think Tarsem is a genius and 1998’s What Dreams May Come one of the great movie romances, you will love, love, love Upside Down. (1:53) (Dennis Harvey)

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

War Witch They should give out second-place Oscars. Like, made of silver instead of gold. In that alternate-universe scenario, Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen’s vivid, Democratic Republic of the Congo-shot drama might’ve picked up some hardware (beyond its many film-fest accolades) to go with its Best Foreign Language Film nomination. War Witch couldn’t stop the march of Amour, but it’s deeply moving in its own way — the story of Komona (played by first-time actor Rachel Mwanza), kidnapped from her village at 12 and forced to join the rebel army that roams the forests of her unnamed African country. Her first task: machine-gunning her own parents. Her ability to see ghosts (portrayed by actors in eerie body paint) elevates her to the status of “war witch,” and she’s tasked with using her sixth sense to aid the rebel general’s attacks against the government army. But even this elevated position can’t quell the physical and spiritual unease of her situation; idyllic love with a fellow teenage soldier (Serge Kanyinda) proves all too brief, and as months pass, Komona remains haunted by her past. The end result is a brutal yet poetic film, elevated by Mwanza’s thoughtful performance. (1:30) (Cheryl Eddy)

Film Listings

Andrew Lam

-

March 12, 2013

0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

CAAMFEST

The Center for Asian American Media Fest runs March 14-24. Venues include the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Great Star Theater, 636 Jackson, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most films $12) and complete schedule, visit www.caamedia.org. For commentary, see "Truth and Daring" and "In the Blood."

OPENING

The ABCs of Death Variety is the spice of life, yet this international omnibus with 26 directors contributing elaborate micro-shorts on various methods of death — one per alphabetical letter — is like eating dried dill or cilantro for two-plus hours. It’s pungent, but what might color a complex stew proves insufferable in this narrow one. Just why it seems narrow is anyone’s guess — this should have been a genius idea. Yet there are almost no outstanding or memorable contributions, despite the wide-open invitation to extreme content. Filmmakers include Jorge Michel Grau (2010’s We Are What We Are), Simon Rumley (of brilliant 2006 feature The Living and the Dead), Srdjan Spasojevic (2010’s A Serbian Film), cult-favorite actress Angela Bettis, and many more. Nearly all seem to have spent far more than their allotted $5000 budget. There are segments parodying exploitation cinema and video games; offering hyperbolic Terminator-style sci-fi; line-drawing and claymation segments; plus plenty of gross-out narratives. Yet it’s all surprisingly crappy (not least an episode called "Toilet"), with precious few more than halfway decent episodes. The sum impact is of a mean-spirited project that brings out the vacuously shock-value prone worst in everyone involved. (2:03) Clay. (Harvey)

Beyond the Hills Cristian Mungiu — one of the main reasons everyone’s all excited about the Romanian New Wave — follows up his Palme d’Or winner, 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with another stark look at a troubled friendship between two women. Beyond the Hills‘ Voichita and Alina (Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur, who shared the Best Actress prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival; for his part, Mungiu won Best Screenplay) were BFFs and, we slowly realize, lovers while growing up at a Romanian orphanage. When they aged out of the facility, the reserved Voichita moved to a rural monastery to become a nun, and the outburst-prone Alina pinballed around, doing a stint as a barmaid in Germany before turning up in Voichita’s village, lugging emotional baggage of the jealous, needy, possibly mentally ill, and definitely misunderstood variety. It can’t end well for anyone, as all involved — dismissive local doctors, Alina’s no-longer-accommodating foster family, the priest (Valeriu Andriuta), and the other nuns — would rather not spend any time or energy caring for a troubled, destitute outsider. Even Voichita can only look on helplessly as an exorcism, a brutal and cruel procedure, is decided upon as Alina’s last, best hope. Based on a real 2005 incident in Moldavia, Mungiu’s unsettling film is a masterpiece of exquisitely composed shots, harsh themes, and naturalistic performances. For an interview with Mungiu, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:30) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Call Brad Anderson (2004’s The Machinist) directs Halle Berry as a 911 operator who has to save a girl (Abigail Breslin) from a killer. (1:34) Shattuck.

Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey The director of 2003’s Imelda returns with this portrait of a way more sympathetic Filipino celebrity: Arnel Pineda, plucked from obscurity via YouTube after Journey’s Neil Schon spotted him singing with a Manila-based cover band. Don’t Stop Believin‘ follows Pineda, who openly admits past struggles with homelessness and addiction, from audition to 20,000-seat arena success as Journey’s charismatic new front man (he faces insta-success with an endearing combination of nervousness and fanboy thrill). He’s also up-front about feeling homesick, and the pressures that come with replacing one of the most famous voices in rock (Steve Perry doesn’t appear in the film, other than in vintage footage). Especially fun to see is how Pineda invigorates the rest of Journey; as the tour progresses, all involved — even the band’s veteran members, who’ve no doubt played "Open Arms" ten million times — radiate with excitement. (1:45) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet San Franciscan Mark Kitchell (1990’s Berkeley in the Sixties) directs this thorough, gracefully-edited history of the environmental movement, beginning with the earliest stirrings of the Audubon Society and Aldo Leopold. Pretty much every major cause and group gets the vintage-footage, contemporary-interview treatment: the Sierra Club, Earth Day, Silent Spring, Love Canal, the pursuit of alternative energy, Greenpeace, Chico Mendes and the Amazon rainforests, the greenhouse effect and climate change, the pursuit of sustainable living, and so on. But if its scope is perhaps overly broad, A Fierce Green Fire still offers a valuable overview of a movement that’s remained determined for decades, even as governments and corporations do their best to stomp it out. Celebrity narrators Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, and Meryl Streep add additional heft to the message, though the raw material condensed here would be powerful enough without them. (1:50) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Carrey star in this comedy about rival Las Vegas magicians. (1:40) Presidio.

Reincarnated Reinvention is the name of the game for some mercurial, inventive pop artists, but for rapper Snoop Dogg, now going by the moniker Snoop Lion — you get the scoop on the name change in this doc — transformation turns out to be unexpectedly serious, earnest business. Flirting with Cheech and Chong travelogue comedy, Reincarnated ostensibly spins off the making of the hip-hop artist’s forthcoming 12th album of the same name in Jamaica, with smokin’ production help from Diplo’s Major Lazer gang. The camera is there for many standard behind-the-music moments — sessions with family and adulation in the musical-fertile Trenchtown — along with many not-quite-ready-for-prime-times spent lighting up with other musicians, growers up in the mountains, and reggae forebears like Bunny Wailer. But there’s more going on beneath the billowing smoke: providing the context for today’s high times and ultimately chronicling the rhyme-slinger’s life and times and his path to Jamaica, reggae, and Rastafarian spirituality and culture, Vice Films director Andy Capper lays the foundation for Snoop’s shift from rap to Rastafari by revisiting his gangster youth, the rise and fall of Death Row Records, the passing of 2Pac and Nate Dogg, and the music that made the man’s name —and continues to give us a reason to care. The easy, sexy charisma that made Snoop a star is on full display here, and doubtless his latest experiences on reality TV have made Capp’s job that much easier when it came to digging deeper, while the clouds of herb, Cali and Jamaican alike, give viewers a taste of the fun, and possibly healing, attendant with life with the Doggfather. (1:36) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Stoker See "Family Plot." (1:38) California.
Upside Down This sci-fi romance from Argentine-French director Juan Solanas is one of those movies that would look brilliant as a coffee-table photo book — nearly every shot is some striking mix of production design, CGI, color grading, and whatnot. Too bad, though, that it has to open its mouth and ruin everything. Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst play star-crossed lovers who live on adjacent twin planets with their own opposing gravitational forces. Nonetheless, they somehow manage to groove on one another until the authorities — miscegenation between the prosperous residents of "Up Top" and the exploited peasants of "Down Below" being forbidden — interfere, resulting in a ten-year separation and one case of amnesia. But the course of true love cannot be stopped by evil energy conglomerates, at least in the movies. Sturgess’ breathless narration starts things off with "The universe…full of wonders!" and ends with "Our love would change the entire course of history," so you know Solanas has absolutely no cliché-detecting skills. He does have a great eye — but after a certain point, that isn’t enough to compensate for his awful dialogue, flat pacing, and disinterest in exploring any nuances of plot or character. Dunst is stuck playing a part that might as well simply be called the Girl; Sturgess is encouraged to overact, but his ham is prosciutto beside the thick-cut slabs of thespian pigmeat offered by Timothy Spall as the designated excruciating comic relief. If the fact that our lovers are called "Adam" and "Eden" doesn’t make you groan, you just might buy this ostentatiously gorgeous but gray-matter-challenged eye candy. If you think Tarsem is a genius and 1998’s What Dreams May Come one of the great movie romances, you will love, love, love Upside Down. (1:53) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

War Witch They should give out second-place Oscars. Like, made of silver instead of gold. In that alternate-universe scenario, Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen’s vivid, Democratic Republic of the Congo-shot drama might’ve picked up some hardware (beyond its many film-fest accolades) to go with its Best Foreign Language Film nomination. War Witch couldn’t stop the march of Amour, but it’s deeply moving in its own way — the story of Komona (played by first-time actor Rachel Mwanza), kidnapped from her village at 12 and forced to join the rebel army that roams the forests of her unnamed African country. Her first task: machine-gunning her own parents. Her ability to see ghosts (portrayed by actors in eerie body paint) elevates her to the status of "war witch," and she’s tasked with using her sixth sense to aid the rebel general’s attacks against the government army. But even this elevated position can’t quell the physical and spiritual unease of her situation; idyllic love with a fellow teenage soldier (Serge Kanyinda) proves all too brief, and as months pass, Komona remains haunted by her past. The end result is a brutal yet poetic film, elevated by Mwanza’s thoughtful performance. (1:30) Elmwood, Roxie. (Eddy)

ONGOING

Adventures of Serial Buddies (1:31) 1000 Van Ness.

Amour Arriving in local theaters atop a tidal wave of critical hosannas, Amour now seeks to tempt popular acclaim — though actually liking this perfectly crafted, intensely depressing film (from Austrian director Michael Haneke) may be nigh impossible for most audience members. Eightysomething former music teachers Georges and Anne (the flawless Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are living out their days in their spacious Paris apartment, going to classical concerts and enjoying the comfort of their relationship. Early in the film, someone tries to break into their flat — and the rest of Amour unfolds with a series of invasions, with Anne’s declining health the most distressing, though there are also unwanted visits from the couple’s only daughter (an appropriately self-involved Isabelle Huppert), an inept nurse who disrespects Anne and curses out Georges, and even a rogue pigeon that wanders in more than once. As Anne fades into a hollow, twisted, babbling version of her former self, Georges also becomes hollow and twisted, taking care of her while grimly awaiting the inevitable. Of course, the movie’s called Amour, so there’s some tenderness involved. But if you seek heartwarming hope and last-act uplift, look anywhere but here. (2:07) Four Star, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Argo If you didn’t know the particulars of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, you won’t be an expert after Argo, but the film does a good job of capturing America’s fearful reaction to the events that followed it — particularly the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran. Argo zeroes in on the fate of six embassy staffers who managed to escape the building and flee to the home of the sympathetic Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). Back in Washington, short-tempered CIA agents (including a top-notch Bryan Cranston) cast about for ways to rescue them. Enter Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck, who also directs), exfil specialist and father to a youngster wrapped up in the era’s sci-fi craze. While watching 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Tony comes up with what Cranston’s character calls "the best bad idea we have:" the CIA will fund a phony Canadian movie production (corny, intergalactic, and titled Argo) and pretend the six are part of the crew, visiting Iran for a few days on a location shoot. Tony will sneak in, deliver the necessary fake-ID documents, and escort them out. Neither his superiors, nor the six in hiding, have much faith in the idea. ("Is this the part where we say, ‘It’s so crazy it just might work?’" someone asks, beating the cliché to the punch.) Argo never lets you forget that lives are at stake; every painstakingly forged form, every bluff past a checkpoint official increases the anxiety (to the point of being laid on a bit thick by the end). But though Affleck builds the needed suspense with gusto, Argo comes alive in its Hollywood scenes. As the show-biz veterans who mull over Tony’s plan with a mix of Tinseltown cynicism and patiotic duty, John Goodman and Alan Arkin practically burst with in-joke brio. I could have watched an entire movie just about those two. (2:00) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Barbara The titular figure (Nina Hoss) looks the very picture of blonde Teutonic ice princess when she arrives — exiled from better prospects by some unspecified, politically ill-advised conduct — in at a rural 1980 East German hospital far from East Berlin’s relative glamour. She’s a pill, too, stiffly formal in dealings with curious locals and fellow staff including the disarmingly rumpled, gently amorous chief physician Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld). Yet her stern prowess as a pediatric doctor is softened by atypically protective behavior toward teen Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a frequent escapee from prison-like juvenile care facilities. Barbara has secrets, however, and her juggling personal, ethical, and Stasi-fearing priorities will force some uncomfortable choices. It is evidently the moment for German writer-director Christian Petzold to get international recognition after nearly 20 years of equally fine, terse, revealing work in both big-screen and broadcast media (much with Hoss as his prime on-screen collaborator). This intelligent, dispassionate, eventually moving character study isn’t necessarily his best. But it is a compelling introduction. (1:45) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives When Ina May Gaskin had her first child, the hospital doctor used forceps (against her wishes) and her baby was sequestered for 24 hours immediately after birth. "When they brought her to me, I thought she was someone else’s," Gaskin recalls in Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore’s documentary. Gaskin was understandably flummoxed that her first experience with the most natural act a female body can endure was as inhuman as the subject of an Eric Schlosser exposé. A few years later, she met Stephen Gaskin, a professor who became her second husband, and the man who’d go on to co-found the Farm, America’s largest intentional community, in 1971. On the Farm, women had children, and in those confines, far from the iron fist of insurance companies, Gaskin discovered midwifery as her calling. She recruited others, and dedicated herself to preserving an art that dwindles as the medical industry strives to treat women’s bodies like profit machines. Her message is intended for a larger audience than granola-eating moms-to-be: we’re losing touch with our bodies. Lamm and Wigmore bravely cram a handful of live births into the film; footage of a breech birth implies this doc could go on to be a useful teaching tool for others interested in midwifery. (1:33) New Parkway, Roxie. (Vizcarrondo)

Dead Man Down Pee. Yew. This Dead Man reeks, though surveying the cast list and judging from the big honking success of director Niels Arden Oplev’s previous film, 2009’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, one would hope the stench wouldn’t be quite so crippling. Crime boss (Terrence Howard) is running panic-stricken after a series of spooky mail-art threats — and it isn’t long before we realize why: his most handy henchman Victor (Colin Farrell) is the one out to destroy him after the death of his wife and daughter. The wrinkle in the plot is the moody, beautiful, and scarred French girl Beatrice (Noomi Rapace) who lives across the way from Victor’s apartment with her deaf mom (Isabelle Huppert) and has plans to extract her own kind of vengeance. Despite Rapace’s brooding performance (Oplev obviously hopes she’ll pull a Lisbeth Salander and miraculously hack this mess — unsure about whether it’s a shoot-’em-up revenge exercise or a Rear Window-ish misfit love story — into something worthwhile) and cameos by actors like Dominic Cooper and F. Murray Abraham, they can’t compensate for the weak writing and muddled direction, the fact that Victor conveniently dithers instead of putting an end to his victim’s (and our) agony, and that the entire mis-en-scene with its Czechs, Albanians, et al, which reads like a Central European blood feud played out in Grand Central Station — just a few components as to why Dead Man stinks. (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck. (Chun)

Django Unchained Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti western homage features a cameo by the original Django (Franco Nero, star of the 1966 film), and solid performances by a meticulously assembled cast, including Jamie Foxx as the titular former slave who becomes a badass bounty hunter under the tutelage of Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Waltz, who won an Oscar for playing the evil yet befuddlingly delightful Nazi Hans Landa in Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds, is just as memorable (and here, you can feel good about liking him) as a quick-witted, quick-drawing wayward German dentist. There are no Nazis in Django, of course, but Tarantino’s taboo du jour (slavery) more than supplies motivation for the filmmaker’s favorite theme (revenge). Once Django joins forces with Schultz, the natural-born partners hatch a scheme to rescue Django’s still-enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), whose German-language skills are as unlikely as they are convenient. Along the way (and it’s a long way; the movie runs 165 minutes), they encounter a cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose main passion is the offensive, shocking "sport" of "Mandingo fighting," and his right-hand man, played by Tarantino muse Samuel L. Jackson in a transcendently scandalous performance. And amid all the violence and racist language and Foxx vengeance-making, there are many moments of screaming hilarity, as when a character with the Old South 101 name of Big Daddy (Don Johnson) argues with the posse he’s rounded up over the proper construction of vigilante hoods. It’s a classic Tarantino moment: pausing the action so characters can blather on about something trivial before an epic scene of violence. Mr. Pink would approve. (2:45) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Emperor This ponderously old-fashioned historical drama focuses on the negotiations around Japan’s surrender after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While many on the Allied side want the nation’s "Supreme Commander" Emperor Hirohito to pay for war crimes with his life, experts like bilingual Gen. Bonners Fellers (Matthew Fox) argue that the transition to peace can be achieved not by punishing but using this "living god" to wean the population off its ideological fanaticism. Fellers must ultimately sway gruff General MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) to the wisdom of this approach, while personally preoccupied with finding the onetime exchange-student love (Kaori Momoi) denied him by cultural divisions and escalating war rhetoric. Covering (albeit from the U.S. side) more or less the same events as Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2005 The Sun, Peter Webber’s movie is very different from that flawed effort, but also a lot worse. The corny Romeo and Juliet romance, the simplistic approach to explaining Japan’s "ancient warrior tradition" and anything else (via dialogue routinely as flat as "Things in Japan are not black and white!"), plus Alex Heffes’ bombastic old-school orchestral score, are all as banal as can be. Even the reliable Jones offers little more than conventional crustiness — as opposed to the inspired kind he does in Lincoln. (1:46) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Escape from Planet Earth (1:35) Metreon.

56 Up The world may be going to shit, but some things can be relied upon, like Michael Apted’s beloved series that’s traced the lives of 14 disparate Brits every seven years since original BBC documentary 7 Up in 1964. More happily still, this latest installment finds nearly all the participants shuffling toward the end of middle-age in more settled and contented form than ever before. There are exceptions: Jackie is surrounded by health and financial woes; special-needs librarian Lynn has been hit hard by the economic downturn; everybody’s favorite undiagnosed mental case, the formerly homeless Neil, is never going to fully comfortable in his own skin or in too close proximity to others. But for the most part, life is good. Back after 28 years is Peter, who’d quit being filmed when his anti-Thatcher comments provoked "malicious" responses, even if he’s returned mostly to promote his successful folk trio the Good Intentions. Particularly admirable and evidently fulfilling is the path that’s been taken by Symon, the only person of color here. Raised in government care, he and his wife have by now fostered 65 children — with near-infinite love and generosity, from all appearances. If you’re new to the Up series, you’ll be best off doing a Netflix retrospective as preparation for this chapter, starting with 28 Up. (2:24) Magick Lantern, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Gatekeepers Coming hard on the heels of The Law in These Parts, which gave a dispassionate forum to the lawmakers who’ve shaped — some might say in pretzel form — the military legal system that’s been applied by Israelis to Palestinians for decades, Dror Moreh’s documentary provides another key insiders’ viewpoint on that endless occupation. His interviewees are six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service. Their top-secret decisions shaped the nation’s attempts to control terrorist sects and attacks, as seen in a nearly half-century parade of news clips showing violence and negotiation on both sides. Unlike the subjects of Law, who spoke a cool, often evasive legalese to avoid any awkward ethical issues, these men are at times frankly — and surprisingly — doubtful about the wisdom of some individual decisions, let alone about the seemingly ever-receding prospect of a diplomatic peace. They even advocate for a two-state solution, an idea the government they served no longer seems seriously interested in advancing. The Gatekeepers is an important document that offers recent history examined head-on by the hitherto generally close-mouthed people who were in a prime position to direct its course. (1:37) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

A Good Day to Die Hard A Good Day to Die Hard did me wrong. How did I miss the signs? Badass daddy rescues son. Perps cover up ’80s era misdeeds. They’re in Russia&ldots;Die Hard has become Taken. All it needs is someone to kidnap Bonnie Bedelia or deflower Jai Courtney and the transformation will be complete. What’s more, A Good Day is so obviously made for export it’s almost not trying to court the American audience for which the franchise is a staple. In a desperate reach for brand loyalty director John Moore (2001’s Behind Enemy Lines) has loaded the film with slight allusions to McClane’s past adventures. The McClanes shoot the ceiling and litter the floor with glass. John escapes a helicopter by leaping into a skyscraper window from the outside. John’s ringtone plays "Ode to Joy." The glib rejoinders are all there but they’re smeared by crap direction and odd pacing that gives ample time to military vehicles tumbling down the highway but absolutely no time for Bruce’s declarations of "I’m on VACATION!" Which may be just as well — it’s no "Yipee kay yay, motherfucker." When Willis says that in A Good Day, all the love’s gone out of it. I guess every romance has to end. (1:37) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga The ever-intrepid Werner Herzog, with co-director Dmitry Vasyukov, pursues his fascination with extreme landscapes by chronicling a year deep within the Siberian Taiga. True to form, he doesn’t spend much time in the 300-inhabitant town nestled amid "endless wilderness," accessible only by helicopter or boat (and only during the warmer seasons); instead, he seeks the most isolated environment possible, venturing into the frozen forest with fur trappers who augment their passed-down-over-generations job skills with the occasional modern assist (chainsaws and snowmobiles are key). Gorgeous cinematography and a curious, respectful tone elevate Happy People from mere ethnographic-film status, though that’s essentially what it is, as it records the men carving canoes, bear-proofing their cabins, interacting with their dogs, and generally being incredibly self-reliant amid some of the most rugged conditions imaginable. And since it’s Herzog, you know there’ll be a few gently bizarre moments, as when a politician’s summer campaign cruise brings a musical revue to town, or the director himself refers to "vodka — vicious as jet fuel" in his trademark droll voice over. (1:34) Magick Lantern, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Harvest of Empire This feature spin-off from Juan Gonzalez’s classic nonfiction tome aims to temper anti-immigration hysteria with evidence that the primarily Latino populations conservatives are so afraid of were largely invited or driven here by exploitative US policies toward Latin America. Dutifully marching through countries on a case-by-case basis, Peter Getzels and Eduardo Lopez’s documentary covers our annexing much of a neighboring country (Mexico) and using its citizens as a "reserve labor force;" encouraging mainland immigration elsewhere to strengthen a colonial bond (Puerto Rico); covertly funding overthrow of progressive governments and/or supporting repressive ones, creating floods of political asylum-seekers (Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador); and so on and so forth. Our government’s policies were often justified in the name of "fighting the spread of Communism," but usually had a more pragmatic basis in protecting US business interests. The movie also touches on NAFTA’s disastrous trickle-up effect on local economies (especially agricultural ones), and interviews a number of high achievers from immigrant families (ACLU chief Anthony Romero, Geraldo Rivera) as well as various activists and experts, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, while sampling recent years’ inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric. There’s a lot of important information here, though one might wish it were packaged in a documentary with a less primitive, classroom-ready episodic structure and less informercial-y style. (1:30) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Identity Thief America is made up of asshole winners and nice guy losers — or at least that’s the thesis of Identity Thief, a comedy about a crying-clown credit card bandit (Melissa McCarthy) and the sweet sucker (Jason Bateman) she lures into her web of chaos. Bateman plays Sandy, a typical middle-class dude with a wife, two kids, and a third on the way. He’s always struggling to break even and just when it seems like his ship’s come in, Diana (McCarthy) jacks his identity — a crime that requires just five minutes in a dark room with Sandy’s social security number. Suddenly, his good name is contaminated with her prior arrests, drug-dealer entanglements, and mounting debt; it’s like the capitalist version of VD. But as the "kind of person who has no friends," Diana is as tragic as she is comic, providing McCarthy an acting opportunity no one saw coming when she was dispensing romantic advice on The Gilmore Girls. Director Seth Gordon (2011’s Horrible Bosses) treats this comedy like an action movie — as breakneck as slapstick gets — and he relies so heavily on discomfort humor that the film doesn’t just prompt laughs, it pokes you in the ribs until you laugh, man, LAUGH! While Identity Thief has a few complex moments about how defeating "sticking it to the man" can be (mostly because only middle men get hurt), it’s mostly as subtle as a pratfall and just as (un-)rewarding. (1:25) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Vizcarrondo)

Jack the Giant Slayer (1:55) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

The Jeffrey Dahmer Files Chris James Thompson’s The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, a documentary with narrative re-enactments, is savvy to the fact that lurid outrageousness never gets old. It also plays off the contrast between Dahmer’s gruesome crimes and his seemingly mild-mannered personality; as real-life Dahmer neighbor Pamela Bass recalls here, the Jeff she knew ("kinda friendly, but introverted," Bass says) hardly seemed like a murdering cannibal. Though homicide detective Pat Kennedy and medical examiner Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen both share compelling details about the case, Bass’ participation is key. Not only did she have to deal with the revelation that she’d been living next to a killer ("I remember a stench, an odor"), she found herself surrounded by a media circus, harassed by gawkers, and blamed by strangers for "not doing anything." Even after she’d moved, the stigma of having been Dahmer’s neighbor lingered — lending a different meaning to the phrase "serial-killer victim." Essental viewing for true-crime fiends. (1:16) Roxie. (Eddy)

The Last Exorcism Part II When last we saw home-schooled rural Louisiana teen Nell (Ashley Bell), she had just given birth to a demon baby in an al fresco Satanic ritual that also saw the violent demise of her father and brother, not to mention the visiting preacher and film crew who’d hoped to debunk exorcisms by recording a fake one. (They were mistaken on many levels.) We meet her again now … about five minutes later, as a traumatized survivor placed in a New Orleans halfway house for girls in need of a "fresh start." Encouraged to view her recent past as the handywork of cult fanatics rather than supernatural forces, she’s soon adjusting surprisingly well to independence, secular humanism, and life in the big city. But of course malevolent spirit "Abalam" isn’t done with her yet. This sequel eschews the original’s found-footage conceit, stoking up a goodly fire of more traditional atmospherics and scares, albeit at the cost of simplified character and plot arcs. As PG-13 horror goes, it’s quite creepy — even if the finale paints this series into a corner from which it will require considerable future writing ingenuity to avoid pure silliness. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

Life of Pi Several filmmakers including Alfonso Cuarón, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and M. Night Shyamalan had a crack at Yann Martel’s "unfilmable" novel over the last decade, without success. That turns out to have been a very good thing, since Ang Lee and scenarist David Magee have made probably the best movie possible from the material — arguably even an improvement on it. Framed as the adult protagonist’s (Irrfan Khan) lengthy reminiscence to an interested writer (Rafe Spall) it chronicles his youthful experience accompanying his family and animals from their just shuttered zoo on a cargo ship voyage from India to Canada. But a storm capsizes the vessel, stranding teenaged Pi (Suraj Sharma) on a lifeboat with a mini menagerie — albeit one swiftly reduced by the food chain in action to one Richard Parker, a whimsically named Bengal tiger. This uneasy forced cohabitation between Hindu vegetarian and instinctual carnivore is an object lesson in survival as well as a fable about the existence of God, among other things. Shot in 3D, the movie has plenty of enchanted, original imagery, though its outstanding technical accomplishment may lie more in the application of CGI (rather than stereoscopic photography) to something reasonably intelligent for a change. First-time actor Sharma is a natural, while his costar gives the most remarkable performance by a wild animal this side of Joaquin Phoenix in The Master. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a charmed, lovely experience. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Like Someone in Love A student apparently moonlighting as an escort, Akiko (Rin Takanashi) doesn’t seem to like her night job, and likes even less the fact that she’s forced into seeing a client while the doting, oblivious grandmother she’s been avoiding waits for her at the train station. But upon arriving at the apartment of the john, she finds sociology professor Takashi (Tadashi Okuno) courtly and distracted, uninterested in getting her in bed even when she climbs into it of her own volition. Their "date" extends into the next day, introducing him to the possessive, suspicious boyfriend she’s having problems with (Ryo Kase), who mistakes the prof for her grandfather. As with Abbas Kiorostami’s first feature to be shot outside his native Iran — the extraordinary European coproduction Certified Copy (2010) — this Japan set second lets its protagonists first play at being having different identities, then teases us with the notion that they are, in fact, those other people. It’s also another talk fest that might seem a little too nothing-happening, too idle-intellectual gamesmanship at a casual first glance, but could also grow increasingly fascinating and profound with repeat viewings. (1:49) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Lincoln Distinguished subject matter and an A+ production team (Steven Spielberg directing, Daniel Day-Lewis starring, Tony Kushner adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Williams scoring every emotion juuust so) mean Lincoln delivers about what you’d expect: a compelling (if verbose), emotionally resonant (and somehow suspenseful) dramatization of President Lincoln’s push to get the 13th amendment passed before the start of his second term. America’s neck-deep in the Civil War, and Congress, though now without Southern representation, is profoundly divided on the issue of abolition. Spielberg recreates 1865 Washington as a vibrant, exciting place, albeit one filled with so many recognizable stars it’s almost distracting wondering who’ll pop up in the next scene: Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant! Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Lincoln! Lena Dunham’s shirtless boyfriend on Girls (Adam Driver) as a soldier! Most notable among the huge cast are John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and a daffy James Spader as a trio of lobbyists; Sally Field as the troubled First Lady; and likely Oscar contenders Tommy Lee Jones (as winningly cranky Rep. Thaddeus Stevens) and Day-Lewis, who does a reliably great job of disappearing into his iconic role. (2:30) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Lore Set in Germany amid the violent, chaotic aftermath of World War II, Lore levels some brutally frank lessons on its young protagonist. Pretty, smart 14-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is tasked with caring for her twin brothers, sister, and infant brother when her SS officer father (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and true-believer mother (Ursina Lardi) depart. Her seemingly hopeless mission is to get what’s left of her family across a topsy-turvy countryside to her grandmother’s house, a journey that’s less a fairy tale than a kind of inverted nightmare — yet another dystopic vision — as seen by children who must beg, barter, and scrounge to survive when they aren’t singing songs in praise of the Third Reich. Enter magnetic mystery man Thomas (Kai Malina), who offers Lore life lessons about the assumed enemy. Tarrying briefly to savor the sensual pleasure of a river bath or the beauty of a spring landscape, albeit one riddled with bodies, director and co-writer Cate Shortland rarely averts her eyes from the sexual and psychological dangers of her charges’ circumstances, making us not only care for her players but also imparting the dark magic of a world destroyed then born anew. (1:48) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Chun)

No Long before the Arab Spring, a people’s revolution went down in Chile when a 1988 referendum toppled the country’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, thanks in part to an ad exec who dared to sell the dream to his countrymen and women — using the relentlessly upbeat, cheesy language of a Pepsi Generation. In No‘s dramatization of this true story, ad man Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) is approached by the opposition to Pinochet’s regime to help them on their campaign to encourage Chile’s people to vote "no" to eight more years under the brutal strongman. Rene’s well-aware of the horrors of the dictatorship; not only are the disappeared common knowledge, his activist ex (Antonia Zegers) has been beaten and jailed with seeming regularity. Going up against his boss (Alfredo Castro), who’s overseeing the Pinochet campaign, Rene takes the brilliant tact in the opposition’s TV programs of selling hope — sound familiar? — promising "Chile, happiness is coming!" amid corny mimes, dancers, and the like. Director-producer Pablo Larrain turns out to be just as genius, shooting with a grainy U-matic ’80s video camera to match his footage with 1988 archival imagery, including the original TV spots, in this invigorating spiritual kin of both 2012’s Argo and 1997’s Wag the Dog. (1:50) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Chun)

Oz: The Great and Powerful Providing a backstory for the man behind the curtain, director Sam Raimi gives us a prequel of sorts to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Herein we follow the adventures of a Depression-era Kansas circus magician named Oscar (James Franco) — Oz to his friends — as he cons, philanders, bickers with his behind-the-scenes assistant Frank (Zach Braff), and eventually sails away in a twister, bound for a Technicolor land of massively proportioned flora, talking fauna, and witches ranging from dazzlingly good to treacherously wicked. From one of them, Theodora (Mila Kunis), he learns that his arrival — in Oz, just to clarify — has set in motion the fulfillment of a prophecy: that a great wizard, also named Oz, will bring about the downfall of a malevolent witch (Rachel Weisz), saving the kingdom and its cheery, goodhearted inhabitants. Unfortunately for this deserving populace, Oz spent his last pre-twister moments with the Baum Bros. Circus (the name a tribute to L. Frank Baum, writer of the Oz children’s books) demonstrating a banged-up moral compass and an undependable streak and proclaiming that he would rather be a great man than a good man. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this theme is revisited ad nauseam as Oz and the oppressively beneficent witch Glinda (Michelle Williams) — whose magic appears to consist mainly of nice soft things like bubbles and fog — stand around debating whether he’s the right man for the task. When the fog clears, though, the view is undeniably pretty. While en route to and from the Emerald City, Oz and his companions — among them a non-evil flying monkey (voiced by Braff) and a rather adorable china doll (Joey King) — wander through a deliriously arresting, Fantasia-esque landscape whose intricate, inventive construction helps distract from the plodding, saccharine rhetoric and unappealing story line. (2:07) California, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Quartet Every year there’s at least one: the adorable-old-cootfest, usually British, that proves harmless and reassuring and lightly tear/laughter producing enough to convince a certain demographic that it’s safe to go to the movies again. The last months have seen two, both starring Maggie Smith (who’s also queen of that audience’s home viewing via Downton Abbey). Last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Smith played a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself in India, has already filled the slot. It was formulaic, cute, and sentimental, yes, but it also practiced more restraint than one expected. Now here’s Quartet, which is basically the same flower arrangement with quite a bit more dust on it. Smith plays a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself forced into spending her twilight years at a home for the elderly. It’s not just any such home, however, but Beecham House, whose residents are retired professional musicians. Gingerly peeking out from her room after a few days’ retreat from public gaze, Smith’s Jean Horton — a famed English soprano — spies a roomful of codgers rolling their hips to Afropop in a dance class. "This is not a retirement home — this is a madhouse!" she pronounces. Oh, the shitty lines that lazy writers have long depended on Smith to make sparkle. Quartet is full of such bunk, adapted with loving fidelity, no doubt, from his own 1999 play by Ronald Harwood, who as a scenarist has done some good adaptations of other people’s work (2002’s The Pianist). But as a generator of original material for about a half-century, he’s mostly proven that it is possible to prosper that long while being in entirely the wrong half-century. Making his directorial debut: 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman, which ought to have yielded a more interesting final product. But with its workmanlike gloss and head-on take on the script’s very predictable beats, Quartet could as well have been directed by any BBC veteran of no particular distinction. (1:38) Albany, Clay, Marina, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Safe Haven Over a decade and a half, as one Nicholas Sparks novel after another has hit the shelves and inexorably been adapted for the big screen, we’ve come to expect a certain kind of end product: a romantic drama that manages, in its treacly messaging and relentless arc toward emotional resonance, to give us second thoughts about the redemptive power of love. The latest, Safe Haven, directed by Lasse Hallström (2011’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape), follows the formula fairly dutifully. Julianne Hough (2012’s Rock of Ages) plays Katie, a Boston woman on the run from the kind of terrifying event that causes a person to dye their hair platinum blond and board a Greyhound in the middle of the night, a trauma whose details are doled out to us in a series of flashbacks. Winding up in a small coastal town in North Carolina, she meets handsome widower and father of two Alex (Josh Duhamel), who runs the local general store and takes a shine to the unfriendly new girl. Viewers of last year’s Sparks adaptation The Lucky One will find some familiar elements (the healing balm of a good man’s love, cloying usage of the paranormal), as will viewers of 1991’s Sleeping with the Enemy, another film that presents the fantasy of a fresh start in Smalltown, U.S.A. (1:55) Metreon. (Rapoport)

Side Effects Though on the surface Channing Tatum appears to be his current muse, Steven Soderbergh seems to have gotten his smart, topical groove back, the one that spurred him to kick off his feature filmmaking career with the on-point Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and went missing with the fun, featherweight Ocean’s franchise. (Alas, he’s been making claims that Side Effects will be his last feature film.) Here, trendy designer antidepressants are the draw — mixed with the heady intoxicants of a murder mystery with a nice hard twist that would have intrigued either Hitchcock or Chabrol. As Side Effects opens, the waifish Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), whose inside-trading hubby (Tatum) has just been released from prison, looks like a big-eyed little basket of nerves ready to combust — internally, it seems, when she drives her car into a wall. Therapist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who begins to treat her after her hospital stay, seems to care about her, but nevertheless reflexively prescribes the latest anti-anxiety med of the day, on the advice of her former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Where does his responsibility for Emily’s subsequent actions begin and end? Soderbergh and his very able cast fill out the issues admirably, with the urgency that was missing from the more clinical Contagion (2011) and the, ahem, meaty intelligence that was lacking in all but the more ingenious strip scenes of last year’s Magic Mike. (1:30) Four Star, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Silver Linings Playbook After guiding two actors to Best Supporting Oscars in 2010’s The Fighter, director David O. Russell returns (adapting his script from Matthew Quick’s novel) with another darkly comedic film about a complicated family that will probably earn some gold of its own. Though he’s obviously not ready to face the outside world, Pat (Bradley Cooper) checks out of the state institution he’s been court-ordered to spend eight months in after displaying some serious anger-management issues. He moves home with his football-obsessed father (Robert De Niro) and worrywart mother (Jacki Weaver of 2010’s Animal Kingdom), where he plunges into a plan to win back his estranged wife. Cooper plays Pat as a man vibrating with troubled energy — always in danger of flying into a rage, even as he pursues his forced-upbeat "silver linings" philosophy. But the movie belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, who proves the chops she showcased (pre-Hunger Games megafame) in 2010’s Winter’s Bone were no fluke. As the damaged-but-determined Tiffany, she’s the left-field element that jolts Pat out of his crazytown funk; she’s also the only reason Playbook‘s dance-competition subplot doesn’t feel eye-rollingly clichéd. The film’s not perfect, but Lawrence’s layered performance — emotional, demanding, bitchy, tough-yet-secretly-tender — damn near is. (2:01) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Snitch (1:35) Metreon.

21 and Over (1:33) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Warm Bodies A decade and a half of torrid, tormented vampire-human entanglements has left us accustomed to rooting for romances involving the undead and the still-alive. Some might argue, however, that no amount of pop-cultural prepping could be sufficient to get us behind a human-zombie love story for the ages. Is guzzling human blood really measurably less gross than making a meal of someone’s brains and other body parts? Somehow, yes. Recognizing this perceptual hurdle, writer-director Jonathan Levine (2011’s 50/50, 2008’s The Wackness) secures our sympathies at the outset of Warm Bodies by situating us inside the surprisingly active brain of the film’s zombie protagonist. Zombies, it turns out, have internal monologues. R (Nicholas Hoult) can only remember the first letter of his former name, but as he shambles and shuffles and slumps his way through the terminals of a postapocalyptic airport overrun by his fellow corpses (as they’re called by the film’s human population), he fills us in as best he can on the global catastrophe that’s occurred and his own ensuing existential crisis. By the time he meets not-so-cute with Julie (Teresa Palmer), a young woman whose father (John Malkovich) is commander-in-chief of the human survivors living in a walled-off city center, we’ve learned that he collects vinyl, that he has a zombie best friend, and that he doesn’t want to be like this. We may still be flinching at the thought of his and Julie’s first kiss, but we’re also kind of rooting for him. The plot gapes in places, where a tenuous logic gets trampled and gives way, but Levine’s script, adapted from a novel by Isaac Marion, is full of funny riffs on the zombie condition, which Hoult invests with a comic sweetness as his character staggers toward the land of the living. (1:37) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Zero Dark Thirty The extent to which torture was actually used in the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin may never be known, though popular opinion will surely be shaped by this film, as it’s produced with the same kind of "realness" that made Kathryn Bigelow’s previous film, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008), so potent. Zero Dark Thirty incorporates torture early in its chronology — which begins in 2003, after a brief opening that captures the terror of September 11, 2001 using only 911 phone calls — but the practice is discarded after 2008, a sea-change year marked by the sight of Obama on TV insisting that "America does not torture." (The "any more" goes unspoken.) Most of Zero Dark Thirty is set in Pakistan and/or "CIA black sites" in undisclosed locations; it’s a suspenseful procedural that manages to make well-documented events (the July 2005 London bombings; the September 2008 Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing) seem shocking and unexpected. Even the raid on Bin Ladin’s HQ is nail-bitingly intense. The film immerses the viewer in the clandestine world, tossing out abbreviations ("KSM" for al-Qaeda bigwig Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) and jargon ("tradecraft") without pausing for a breath. It is thrilling, emotional, engrossing — the smartest, most tightly-constructed action film of the year. At the center of it all: a character allegedly based on a real person whose actual identity is kept top-secret by necessity. She’s interpreted here in the form of a steely CIA operative named Maya, played to likely Oscar-winning perfection by Jessica Chastain. No matter the film’s divisive subject matter, there’s no denying that this is a powerful performance. "Washington says she’s a killer," a character remarks after meeting this seemingly delicate creature, and he’s proven right long before Bin Ladin goes down. Some critics have argued that character is underdeveloped, but anyone who says that isn’t watching closely enough. Maya may not be given a traditional backstory, but there’s plenty of interior life there, and it comes through in quick, vulnerable flashes — leading up to the payoff of the film’s devastating final shot. (2:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

On a mission

Andrew Lam

-

March 12, 2013

15

tredmond@sfbg.com

Every gang member on the streets knows Cathey and Sands. They’re the cops. They’ve busted dozens of the young men who hang out in the Mission. They know every excuse, every trick, every way you can duck into an alley, hide in a doorway, ditch a weapon or cover up a crime.

But today, as they cruise around 24th Street in an unmarked car, Officers John Cathey and David Sands are not talking about putting bad guys in prison. They’ve been there, done that — and a year or two ago, they got so sick of seeing teenagers ruining their lives that the two tough cops decided to take another approach.

The officers pull their unmarked car into a side street, where two young men are walking together. They’re Norteños, Cathey explains, part of the gang that controls the southern part of the neighborhood, and they’ve got the telltale red colors all over them. Red shirts, red caps, red strips on their shoes.

Cathey approaches the young men and asks them what they’re doing. “Nothing,” they say.

They look at him as if they know what’s coming next, and chances are they do. It happens all the time these days in the world of the Mission District gangs. Cathey is about to give “The Speech.” The one that hundreds of gangbangers have heard, over and over. The one that’s already saved a few of their lives.

“You know what happened last night?” he asks. The kids feign ignorance. “Sure you do,” he continues. “A bunch of your guys got arrested. Your buddy just turned 18 and he got caught. He’s going to big-boy jail.”

The kids in red look at the ground.

“You want to wind up like that, you keep doing what you’re doing,” Cathey says. “You want to do something different, we can get you a job. A decent job, pays real money, in six months you get benefits. You know you don’t have to do this. You know we can help.”

For a second, one young man looks interested. “You come by the station, you leave your number for me, we’ll be in touch,” Cathey says. Then the moment’s over, the Nortenos walk away, and the two cops get back in the car.

“We might have a chance with him,” Cathey tells me. “I’m like water, I wear them down.”

********

Latino gangs — primarily two violent rival operations that run drugs and kill each other — have been a serious problem in the Mission for years. Kids as young as 11 or 12 are getting recruited into a life that typically leads to Juvenile Hall, state prison, or death. The city, and nonprofits that work with youth, have run all sorts of gang-prevention programs, with some success and a lot of failure.

While the Mission rapidly becomes a cool place for rich high-tech workers to live, the violence continues. In the past seven months, 10 people, most of them under 25, have been shot in gang-related incidents; three are dead.

But there’s a new, somewhat radical approach going on now — and it comes largely from two police officers who get paid to arrest gang members and instead are devoting their lives to keeping them out of jail.

Cathey and Sands, 11-year veterans, friends from their days in the Police Academy, have, pretty much on their own initiative, created a grassroots program that allows young men and women who want to get out of the gang life to go to work for the city, typically as landscapers, to earn a paycheck, find a new supportive community and leave The Life.

It doesn’t always work. Some try and don’t make it. The drop-out rate is high; it’s a constant struggle. But for the people who take, and keep, jobs in the program, the success rate is phenomenal.

“It’s pretty simple,” Cathey told me. “One hundred percent of the guys who get the jobs and go to work every day leave the gang life. One hundred percent of the ones who don’t show up for work, who don’t stick with it, go back to the gangs.”

It’s a tiny project right now, involving maybe 20 people. Cathey and Sands, with the support of the brass at Mission Station and Chief Greg Suhr, are trying to expand it to reach kids as early as middle school, before the gangs get to them. They’ve rounded up a construction contractor who spent half his adult life behind bars, an ex-gang member, a City College administrator, and Supervisor David Campos, and, mostly under the radar, are trying to do what all the academics and professionals say is the only effective approach to this kind of crime. They’re trying to stop it before it happens.

********

One day about 18 months ago, Campos was walking down 24th Street, on his way to get a burrito for lunch, when a police car pulled over and two plainclothes cops got out. Campos represents the Mission, and previously served on the Police Commission, but he had never met Cathey or Sands. “I was surprised to see these two tough guys come up to me,” the supervisor recalled recently.

“They just stopped me and said, ‘supervisor, we need your help,'” Campos said. “They said they were tired of the cycle of putting kids in jail and seeing them come back out and do the same thing again, and they wanted to find an alternative. They asked me if I could get some gang members jobs.”

What the officers explained was simple, if counterintuitive: “The young men on the street are smart,” Campos told me. “They have a lot of skills to live the way they do. If they could put that into something constructive, they could be very successful.”

Campos gave the cops his card, told them to call his office — and an unusual relationship between one of the most progressive supervisors and two gang cops was born.

“It was crazy when I told my staff that we were going to be working in the Mission with law enforcement,” Campos said. “I’ve had people stop me and say, ‘Campos, what are you doing with the cops?’ But these guys are great, and they’re doing something really important.”

What the gang cops had in mind was this: If the city could offer jobs — outdoor, hands-on, get-your-fingers-dirty jobs — and Cathey and Sands could convince gang members to step away from the life and try working, there might be a way to end the violence.

The program would be tightly controlled: The two officers would invite gang members to apply for jobs, would screen them, and keep on top of every applicant. People who missed work, or screwed up on the job, would get a visit; Cathey and Sands would watch the streets, follow everyone in the program, check in with families — and let everyone know that their lives and futures were on the line.

“We started with one kid they knew,” Campos said. “We decided to see if we could find him a job.”

Campos contacted the Public Utilities Commission, which hires workers to do landscaping, and convinced the general manager, Ed Harrington, to give it a try.

Cathey and Sands went looking for the young man who would kick off the program (let’s call him J.), and wound up at his house, talking to his mom and dad. That would become a central part of their MO, involving the parents of gang members and trying to bring together what are sometimes not the closest of families.

It wasn’t an easy sell — the family didn’t trust law enforcement. “Then they told the dad that they were working with Campos, and their guard went down,” the supervisor said.

J. started working with the PUC, doing gardening and landscaping work. “He was so successful, nobody could believe it,” Campos said. “We went to see him later, and his dad said his life had completely changed. It changed the whole family.

“When we saw that, we decided we needed to expand this.”

From the start, Mission Station Captain Greg Corrales — a no-nonsense cop who is not known as a starry-eyed liberal — saw the logic and got behind his two officers. Chief Suhr also came on board.

In the early days, Cathey and Sands had no resources at all — not even money to get the young workers Muni or BART tickets. Campos helped track down the funding, and worked with the officers on the next group of kids.

“I bring them into my office at City Hall,” he said. “I explain that there’s a real responsibility here. You are going to change your life.”

********

I am sitting in the community room at the Mission Police Station, talking to two young men who Cathey and Sands have brought into the program. They’ve had some problems — missing work, hanging out with their old gangs — and they’re at risk of losing their jobs. Cathey is blunt: Keep this up, and you’re done. Keep this up, and you’re going back to the streets, back to the life you wanted to leave.

I tell the men I’m not going to print their names, and they agree to talk to me. It’s a dangerous situation — the gangs don’t like members dropping out, and really don’t like to see them at the police station working with the cops.

“Just walking in this door is a hard thing to do,” Cathey says.

But the two officers make it clear to everyone they meet — on the streets, in the program, and everywhere else: These kids are not snitches. “We don’t ask them to tell on their friends,” Cathey said. “I don’t do that, and I don’t want any part of it. This isn’t about us finding out information about the gangs, and that’s not why people come and see us.”

I ask the two young men about what their lives were like before they started working. They’re not interested in talking. When I ask straight out if they were gang members, they shrug, and change the subject.

But they’re happy to talk about their jobs and what it means to be employed. They’re bringing home a paycheck. They can help out their families. They’re also up early in the morning and really tired at night; the idea of going out with their old friends isn’t that appealing.

The handful of people who are working, and not showing gang colors, hasn’t stopped the violence in the e Mission. One of the kids in the program was shot and killed a few months ago. “It was heartbreaking,” Campos said. “I went to see the parents, and they told me how proud their son had been, how he was bragging about being the first one in the house up in the morning, how he loved his job.”

On the other hand, Campos noted, “There normally would have been retaliation for that shooting, and more killing. But the ones who might have retaliated were in our program, so it didn’t happen.”

********

The tech workers from Google and Apple and Facebook who are flooding into the Mission don’t see the signs on the street. Upscale white people who think the neighborhood is cool don’t tend to notice what’s happening in front of their eyes. There are at least 200 active gang members in the small piece of land bounded by Cesar Chavez, Potrero, Castro and 16th. As Cathey and Sands drive around, they see the colors everywhere.

North of 19th Street, the young men and women wear blue. They’re Surenos, southerners; many of them are recent immigrants. Cross 19th and the colors turn red; the Nortenos, who sport the number 14, control the south Mission. They tend to be born in this country.

Back in the 1960s, the two gangs emerged out of the state prison system; Surenos lived south of Bakersfield, Nortenos north. But these days, the geographic lines aren’t always as clear. “They’re really the same guys on both sides of the line,” Cathey explains. “Other than this blind loyalty, they’d probably get along.”

The gangs make their money selling drugs, and much of it eventually goes back to a handful of leaders, many serving long prison terms. Since a lot of the members either die or wind up incarcerated before they get out of their 20s, recruiting is constant.

“They have recruiters outside the middle schools,” Cathey tells me. “Last night we arrested a 15-year-old for possession of a handgun. They older guys made him hold it. Now his life is about to be ruined.”

The two cops are opposites: Cathey is ebullient, outgoing, a former tech worker who is constantly talking, texting and emailing. Sands is quiet, more taciturn, a martial artist who walks the streets with the look of serious business.

But they’re fast friends and partners who can communicate with a quick nod or shake of the head, and nothing in the Mission gets by them.

We pull up at 16th and Mission. “Just watch, the block will clear,” Cathey says. And yes, the minute the gang car is spotted, a guy in a blue hoodie ducks down into the BART station.

There’s a girl who can’t be 16 yet sitting on the bench. Sands hangs back while Cathey approaches her. He asks what she’s doing, what’s going on; she shrugs and ignores him. Not interested.

Cathey speaks with a bit of resignation as we walk back to the car. “She’s already jumped in” — initiated into the gang — he says. It’s going to be hard to reach the girl; the gang members she hangs out with are violent, armed, “and will come down on you in a second.”

It’s hard not to feel the frustration that comes with the territory: Violent and dangerous, maybe — but still, she’s still just a little girl.

We head up to 24th Street, Norteno turf. Here, when you look for it, red is everywhere. “A lot of these kids are living in crowded situations, in relatives houses,” Cathey says. “The gangs tell the young ones that they shouldn’t trust their families, that the gang is their new family. That’s what we’re up against.”

Two young men duck into a jewelry store. Cathey throws the car into park and the officers get out, walking slowly toward the entrance. The men with the red jackets and red highlights on their shoes know the drill. A quick warrant check and they know they’re free to go — but not without listening to Cathey for a few minutes.

This time, “The Speech” is falling on deaf ears.

Later, Cathey shows me a video he’s captured off YouTube. It’s hard to find, hidden under gang names that only insiders would know. It shows some of the guys we’ve seen on the street, beating the living shit out of people. In one scene, a handful of gang members approach a man, punch him in until he falls to the ground, then kick his head until he’s unconscious.

“This is what they do,” Cathey says. “They terrorize the neighborhood.”

********

I am back in the community room at Mission Station. Cathey and Sands have invited me to an “intervention.” A boy and a girl, both of them in eighth grade, are coming in, with their parents, to talk about their flirtations with gang life.

A counselor at James Lick Middle School contacted the officers after seeing signs that the kids were showing gang colors and drifting away from their schoolwork and their families. Cathey and Sands were at Lick a few months earlier, running an assembly and talking about the dangers of gangs; the counselor got their phone numbers.

I have agreed to use no names or in any way identify the participants in the intervention. So I sit and watch as Cathey runs the show.

The boy appears painfully young, small and shy; it’s hard to believe he’s even in eighth grade. He wears a hoodie and makes little eye contact with anyone else in the room. The girl is taller, more self-assured.

I can’t fathom that kids this young – the age of my own son, who is still shedding the soft edge of youth, sliding slowly into adolescence — are already prey to the gang recruiters. But the evidence is clear.

When the parents and other family members are seated, Cathey starts asking the boy about gang life. “What color do the Sureños wear?” Blue, the boy says. “What about the Norteños?” Red. “Where does Norteño territory start?” 19th Street. “What number do the Norteños associate with?” Fourteen. “Can you give me the street names of some gang members?” The boy rattles off a few.

Cathey looks over at the boy’s dad. “He knows a lot, doesn’t he?” The dad is visibly startled. So are the girl’s family members as the officers run through a similar routine.

“We’re seeing younger and younger kids get dragged in,” Cathey tells me later. Often, parents and grandparents — working multiple jobs to pay the rent in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood — have little or no idea how far their kids have gone into the gang life.

Next up is Mike Bowen. He’s a soft-spoken guy whose face bears the scars of a hard life of substance abuse and jail time. In fact, he’s spent much of his adult life running from the law, winding up at one point jumping from a third-story window in a Tenderloin building to avoid arrest.

Two broken legs and months in the hospital put him on a path to sobriety — and a new life. “I used to think the money was in crime,” he tells the group. “Then I got myself together, went back to school, got my contractor’s license, and pretty soon I bought my first Lamborghini.”

That gets the young boy’s attention.

“You have so much going for you,” Bowen says. “You can make it.”

He turns to the boy’s mom, who speaks only Spanish, and asks her how it’s going. Not so great, she says; she just got laid off, and is having trouble finding a new job. Bowen reaches into his pocket and pulls out a stack of $100 bills. “Here, take this,” he says. “It will help until you find work.”

That really gets the boy’s attention.

Bowen’s been a key part of the two cops’ efforts, and they met entirely by chance. “I was driving down Folsom,” he told me. “I parked at a store and I saw these two cops, and I said hi and they wanted to check out my car, and we started to talk about my background. They told me what they were doing, and I said I’d love to help.”

Bowen offered money, which they needed, but that was just the start. “They brought me with them to James Lick,” he recalled. “I brought the Lamborghini. That got every one of the kids interested. I let them sit in it, then we talked.

“I told them that the gang members say the only way to get money is to join the gang. But I got out, went to school, and now I have a house and really nice car.”

When Bowen’s done with his talk, Cathey puts his cell phone on speaker and dials a number. The man on the other end is a former gang member. “He’s the real deal,” Cathey whispers to me. And indeed, for about ten minutes, he tells the two young people and their families exactly what their lives will be like if they follow the path he took at their age. By the end, the boy is shaken and the girl is crying.

Cathey’s not done yet. Guillermo Villanueva, a City College counselor, takes over and reads the families a pledge that Cathey and Sands have written. It’s all about family, about staying out of the gang life, but also respecting and taking care of each other. “Family and Education Forever” is the slogan, chosen because the gangs, who tell members that they are their new families, use “family forever.”

Yeah, the language in the pledge is a little bit hokey — but nobody’s laughing.

Cathey asks the boy what he wants from his parents. “I just wish my daddy had more time to play soccer with me,” he says. The officer looks at the father. “Every day, I’ll be there after work,” he says.

The pledge is on a plaque signed by Chief Suhr. Everyone signs it. By the end, there are tears and hugs all around.

“This is what we really need to be doing,” Cathey tells me. “Getting gang members to change is hard. If we can get them early enough, we have a much better chance.”

********

I’ve been a political reporter for 30 years. I write, mostly, about intractable social problems. I know that poverty and desperation lead to crime, that broken families and inadequate schools put young people at risk of falling into violence. I am under no illusions.

When I first heard about Cathey and Sands, I thought: They’re cops. Most of the time, cops aren’t the best answer to deep-seated social problems and the crime that results. And I’m not going to pretend that these guys are softies — you have a warrant out, you get caught in the act, they’ll pull you in, and it won’t necessarily be nice.

What they’re doing won’t end gang violence in San Francisco, not by itself. Everyone knows that. This is a huge issue, one that will become more and more pronounced as the crazy, ancient and pointless war between the Norteños and Sureños plays out in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

Cathey and Sands are by no means the only people fighting to end the carnage. Nonprofits, educators, social service agencies and others have spent years trying to break the gang cycle.

But there they are, every day, two guys with badges who see the blood and the pain on the streets, and are trying, with little bureaucracy or resources, to stop it. To save lives. One kid at a time.

“If we could get into all the middle schools, if we could expand this out, that’s what would really work,” Cathey told me. “That’s where we can have the biggest impact.

Crime would come down; it would have to.

“I’ve been trying to get a meeting with the mayor.” Paging Room 200, City Hall: Is anyone listening?

On the Om Front: Guys Wanted in the Yoga Room

Andrew Lam

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March 8, 2013

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On the Om Front: Guys Wanted in the Yoga Room

I teach a weekly employee yoga class at a hospital where my students are all women. Every week, a young man peers curiously into the classroom. I asked him once if he’d like to join us, and he said, “Yes, but what would my friends say? Yoga is for girls.”

This odd societal notion that yoga is an emasculating, status-reducing activity is bad enough. But to make matters worse, people like William J. Broad, the so-called New York Times science writer, have publically espoused that yoga is actually harmful to men. Why? Because, he says, men have a tendency to push themselves too hard, and their bigger muscles are more injury prone.

Wait … what?

Here’s the truth: The majority of the yoga poses that we do in the studio today were developed by men, not women. In fact, women had to fight for the right to take part in this practice in the first place. And I could spend days discussing the fallacies of Broad’s arguments (which are based on poor science and don’t at all credit men with the ability to take care of themselves), but we all have better things to do. The point is: When did yoga get deemed wussifying or, worse, a threat to one’s health?

I don’t live in a man’s body, but I do teach yoga to a lot of strong, masculine, and intelligent men, and I can tell you from what I see that yoga is every bit as beneficial to men as it is to women. It does not seem to have negatively affected anyone’s testosterone levels, nor do my male students get injured any more than my female students — if they practice intelligently. (If one practices unintelligently, regardless of gender, one will get injured.) In fact, despite the obvious anatomical disparities, I see very little difference between the male and female practitioners I know in terms of commitment to practice, injury rate, and advancement. The largest challenge for men is the message in Western society that yoga was not made for them.

As a response to the dearth of dudes in yoga class, an interesting movement to promote male-only yoga classes has come about. The national Broga program is one example of this trend, though it hasn’t yet caught on locally. While I love that this movement is encouraging more men into the classroom, the segregation aspect feels weird to me. This is yoga, not football. I’d prefer to see all of us — men, women, and trans folk — practicing in the same room, side by side. Together.

As a society, both men and women have suffered from countless years of gender segregation. The yoga room can be a place for us to be in community together. Sure, we have different bodies, but we’re all there for the same reason: to improve ourselves and develop a deeper sense of inner intelligence. I understand that there’s a comfort in being around people who look like you, and avoiding environments where the other gender dominates. But if women had let that fear deter us, we wouldn’t have gained the right to attend college, vote, or have our own bank accounts. Besides, yoga is actually about moving out of your comfort zone, and confronting the fears and insecurities that imprison you. What better place to push your boundaries?

I’m a fan of anything that gets more guys, straight or gay, into the yoga room — even boys-only yoga. But the beautiful thing about bringing the genders together in general, and particularly in the yoga room, is that we balance one another energetically. We can learn from, support, and better understand one another. I think the time is ripe now for us to come together in mindful community — in fact, I think our evolution as a species depends on it.

And a little secret for those men who’ve yet to take a yoga class because they think the women don’t want them there: We do.

Karen Macklin is a writer and yoga teacher in San Francisco — her On the Om Front column appears biweekly here on sfbg.com.

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Yoga and Spirituality Listings

By Joanne Greenstein

Restorative Yoga with Live Singing Bowls with Kevin Hibbit and Sam Jackson
Combining crystal bowl music, healing touch, poetry, and restorative yoga, this workshop will help attendees to slow down, relax and look within.
Sat/9, 6:30-9:30pm, $35, Mindful Body, 2876 California, SF

Naked Men’s Yoga
Check out these weekly classes for men that are aimed at offering community and more freedom for expression and movement. Clothing is not optional. Days and times and locations vary.

Therapeutics Workshop with John Friend
After a long hiatus from the yoga world, the founder of Anusara yoga is back in town. In this workshop, he will focus on common issues and injuries in the body, and how to overcome them using therapeutic postures based on principles of alignment.
Sat/9, 6:30-8:30pm, $50, Urban Flow Yoga, 1543 Mission, SF

Yoga Grad School
Laughing Lotus is offering several weekend workshops between now and the end of June on topics ranging from teaching yoga to at-risk youth to hands-on assisting. The workshops are appropriate for dedicated practitioners looking to deepen their practice as well as for those interested in earning credit toward advanced teacher certification. Price varies based on number of workshops taken.
Next up:
Lotus Fly: Advanced Asana and Sequencing with Sheri Celentano
March 16-17, 1-6pm, $199
Laughing Lotus, 3271 16th Street, SF

Healing the Heart – A Daylong Immersion in Bhakti Yoga with Jai Uttal, Nubia Teixeira, and Swami Ramananda
Immerse yourself in a day of devotional exploration. This daylong workshop integrates meditation, ceremony, breathing exercises, devotional dance, and chanting.
March 16, 10am-5pm, $100 ($90 by Mon/11); includes a vegetarian lunch
Integral Yoga Institute, 770 Dolores, SF

Yoga and Dance with Wendy Faith
Link two forms of movement in one in this workshop combining yoga and dance. Dance forms visited include Afro-Brazilian, salsa, tribal bellydance, Bhangra, West African and hip-hop.
March 17, 1-3:30pm, $35
Aha Yoga, 1892 Union, SF

It’s Pony Time!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 6, 2013

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emilysavage@sfbg.com

TOFU AND WHISKEY This week? It’s Pony Time. No, that doesn’t mean we’re taking you to Ikea for meatballs. I’m talking about the band, which will be traveling here soon, and given its predilection toward weird news and pop culture, I feel like it might enjoy the above reference.

Seattle’s Pony Time (www.facebook.com/ponytime) has songs with titles like “Hex on You,” “Lesbian Mayor” and simply, “Kathleen Hanna” (all of which are on recently released Per Se Records LP, Go Find Your Own). It also has cassette for sale called Pony Time Can Drink 100 Wine Coolers.

“We definitely try to be a good band and write cool songs,” says drummer-singer Stacey Peck, the female half of the duo, “but we don’t take ourselves very seriously. We just wanna shred and eat candy.” And with that, Pony Time stole my heart. It’ll have the opportunity to do the same for you, with a slot opening for Stickers and Creepers on Fri/8 at the Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF; www.hemlocktavern.com.

The poppy, garage punk twosome, made up of Peck and singer-baritone guitarist Luke Beetham, has been making fun, cool-but-not-serious music since it first got together in the chilly Pacific Northwest back in 2009, around the time Peck left her former band, Telepathic Liberation Army. And fun is the optimal word here — every song on Go Find Your Own is hand-clap worthy, particularly album opener, “What if You Caught Me.”

Most of the tracks are playful pokes at pop culture with broader reaching cultural references (such as the “Kathleen Hanna” song). The band says it takes musical inspiration from Fleetwood Mac, Sonic Youth, the Breeders, and Stickers. Though it is also claimed to be most interested in: Star Trek the Next Generation, LGBTQ rights, feminism, hair pomade, cats, and again, candy.

I asked Peck if Hanna has heard the song bearing her name, but Peck doubts it. The band did however recently get to play with another formative riot grrrl act, Team Dresch. “It was really fun, they are really cool people and continue to shred very hard,” Peck says of the show with her personal heroes at Chop Suey in Seattle a few months back. Peck went on to pen an article for Vice about the experience, in which she opened with, “I was invited to play this show by my ex-girlfriend’s new girlfriend for their new feminist organization (Nth Wave) as a benefit for marriage equality so it turns out I am one of the gayest people on earth.”

I asked what the Hemlock crowd can expect during Pony Time’s performance and Peck said, “Expect the drums to fall apart and Luke to look amazing.” Cute.

GREAT GHOSTS

Singer-songwriter (and former Geographer member) Kacey Johansing (www.kaceyjohansing.com) released her stunning sophomore album, Grand Ghosts, last week. And how grand it is. Lush, moody, and dreamy, too. There’s a welcome maturity to Johansing’s voice (oft favorably likened to that of Joni Mitchell), a confidence that glides over twinkling piano and subtle, far-away strings, in tracks such as album opener “River” and title track “Grand Ghosts.”

Johansing’s expert blend of classical, jazz, and folk influences comes together well on “Out to Sea,” with the subtle sound of fingers moving over downbeat acoustic guitar meeting Johansing’s melancholy, “I don’t want you to go/but I want you to be true/what’s best for me is not what’s best for you.” Even her harmonized “oh, oh, ohs,” sound emotive here, giving the sweetness a little gut-punch.

The haunting album as a whole pays tribute to loved ones that died during the making of the record (actual ghosts), along with her current Bay Area home, and her upbringing in Colorado (emotional ghosts), and features accompaniment by Robert Shelton (of DRMS) on keyboards, Andrew Maguire (Honeycomb) on vibraphone and percussion, James Riotto (the Moanin Dove) on bass, Jeremy Harris on guitar, pianos, and string arrangements, and Ezra Lipp on drums. The LP is available for purchase/download on her Bandcamp page

RANK/XEROX

Jittery San Francisco punk trio Rank/Xerox plays live far less as of late since one of its members moved down to LA, which is a damn shame, because the DIY band always puts on a good, loud show. With Violent Change, Pure Bliss.

Sat/9, 9pm, $7. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. www.elriosf.com

THE BRONX

You remember the Bronx, the hyped-up, hyper-masculine, swaggering LA punk band whose 2003 self-titled debut exploded with that cover of a blood-dripped mouth spelling out the band’s name (probably one of the last covers ingrained in your brain from the waning days of ye olde Virgin Megastore or Tower Records). The butch band returns this month with new album, IV, its first in five years — and yes, it’s just as blistering, and face-melting as ever. With Flogging Molly.

Sat/9, 7:30pm, $32.50. Fox Theater, 1807 Telegraph, Oakl. www.thefoxoakland.com

THE RELATIVES AND THE JAMES HUNTER SIX

And speaking of face-melting…fire-and-brimstone gospel-funk outfit the Relatives will be in the Bay this weekend too. This is an entirely different kind of melt though. The long-running Dallas, Texas act (which formed in 1970) just this year finally released its debut LP, The Electric Word. Never has five singers preaching the gospel sounded so psychedelic. The band opens for Grammy-award winning rhythm and blues act the James Hunter Six, which recently released third LP, Minute By Minute (GO Records/Fantasy).

Sat/9, 9pm, $25. Bimbo’s, 1025 Colombus, SF. www.bimbos365club.com.

The Nonconformist

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 6, 2013

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM Most observers of last week’s Oscar telecast assumed elegant 86-year-old Emmanuelle Riva was the star of the movie she’d gotten a Best Actress nomination for. Conspicuously absent — from that and most other awards events — was Amour‘s real performing lead, who’d gotten crowded out of the field by the usual surplus of major English-language roles for men. As the dignified elderly husband decreasingly able to care for a longtime spouse’s dignity-robbing failing health, Jean-Louis Trintignant grows more dominant in his character’s helplessness as Riva’s recedes into illness. It’s a powerful performance made all the more so by the simple shock of seeing him. Hasn’t he been, er, away a while? Or to put it bluntly: he’s still alive?!

The last time wide audiences would have seen him was in the large ensemble of Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. Already nearing 70 then, he remained somewhat active in theater while staying mostly off screen for the next 14 years. In honor of his return, the Pacific Film Archive is providing a retrospective that runs through April 21.

“And God Created Jean-Louis Trintignant” offers a mix of popular hits, agreed-upon masterpieces, and rarities that give fair measure of a long, prolific yet discriminating career. It’s surprising to see the wide range of films he’s played in, since Trintignant is so often the still center of them — he communicates such reserve, thoughtfulness, and economy of craft that it takes seeing numerous roles back-to-back like this to realize how very different his performances are. They’re just not flamboyantly different, in the way of a Daniel Day-Lewis or Meryl Streep. He’s said “The best actors in the world are those who feel the most and show the least,” a rule one could argue with — but it’s certainly true in his case.

Short, slight, handsome in a slightly nondescript way, he couldn’t have struck anyone at first as natural movie star material. But he did intrigue Roger Vadim, when the latter was looking for a newcomer to play off his female discovery in 1956’s …And God Created Woman. The woman was Brigitte Bardot, introduced completely nude (albeit laying on her stomach); it was Bardot and Vadim’s shared gift that though she spent the rest of the story clothed, one imagined with an indolent shrug those rags might tumble at any moment and she’d be starkers again. As the village lad who marries “that little slut” lest she be sent back to the orphanage (!), while she exerts a siren pull toward every other man around, Trintignant sounded a modest note in one of the most garishly silly yet influential films ever made. Yet the global sensation Bardot caused cast a public glare on anyone with a connection, let alone a purported inamorato. He voluntarily fled for military service.

When he returned — with rather less fanfare than Army-sprung Elvis — he set about building a serious actor’s resume with diverse projects and interesting directors. He was suddenly blond and uncharacteristically glamorous as a golden youth of Italy’s fascist elite in Valerio Zurlini’s Violent Summer (1959), so in love with an older woman (Eleanora Rossi Drago) they’re barely aware there’s a World War going on. But more typically he was creating anti-romantic characters typical of the 1960s — variably neurotic, eccentric, conflicted, always with more going on under the surface than one could fully grasp. One lesser-remembered PFA selection is Alain Cavalier’s 1962 New Wave triangle Le combat dans l’ile, in which his marital discord with Romy Schneider is eventually explained by his secretly belonging to a far-right terrorist cell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WQhJyse4hg

Trintignant was in two of the most wildly popular “art” export hits of the decade, Claude Lelouch’s gauzy swoonfest A Man and a Woman (1966) and Costa Gavras’ political thriller Z (1969). Yet his race-car driver in the former tempers its Eurokitsch atmosphere with impenetrable cool, while in the hyperbolic latter he’s almost monastically austere as the investigator who patiently picks apart an assassination cover-up. Perhaps his ultimate role as a man of decisive inaction was as The Conformist (1970), again as a Mussolini-era fascist — one who betrays his friends as ruthlessly and usefully as director Bertolucci does the original Moravia novel. Amid that film’s ravishing baroque excesses, he’s as reptilian, quease-making, and pitiable as a Gollum, if better-dressed.

While he continued to make the odd all-star purely commercial project — a good one being rare 1973 American foray The Outside Man — he usually chose riskier fare. Thus he was the first major star to work with Eric Rohmer (as the Catholic fussbudget sorta-seeking romance in 1969’s My Night at Maud’s), and an early ally to figures as disparate as Jacques Demy, Claude Chabrol, Tinto Brass, Umberto Lenzi, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and André Téchiné.

Barely slowing despite the transition to character support, he’d found perhaps a definitive pre-Amour farewell role (and chronological end to the PFA series) as the retired judge busy bending laws for his personal amusement in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy (and career) finale Red (1994). It might have served as a perfect capper — but you’ve got to hand it to any 83-year-old savvy enough to realize Michael Haneke was worth coming out of retirement for. *

“AND GOD CREATED JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT”

Through April 21

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Bay Area muralists trek to Bogotá and Cape Town in the name of water rights

Andrew Lam

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March 6, 2013

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The Bay is blessed with street artists who take seriously the responsibility that comes with painting on a surface thousands of people will see every day on their way to work and school. See: the Estria Foundation, which was started by graff legend Estria Miyashiro and just released this video of the group’s latest trip to Bogotá, Colombia as part of its #WaterWrites mural program.

Stop by Bissap Baobab on Thu/7 for a dinner presentation on the group’s trip to Bogotá and recent voyage to Cape Town, where it completed another mural that examined the issue of water rights.

You can check out more photos of the project on the collective’s Flickr page. Here’s what the Estria foundation sent us about the making of the Bogotá mural:

Our Executive Director, Erin Yoshi, recently returned from working on the #WaterWrites Mural Project in Bogota, Colombia. The 2000 square foot mural was created in collaboration with the APC Crew, one of the largest graff crews in the nation. It was painted next to a community center that hosts music and arts workshops for youth.

The mural is dedicated to raising awareness about the current water conditions in Colombia. It portrays nature and humanity joining forces to evict water polluters and exploiters of natural resources. Nature is painted as a character, surrounded by trees, flowers, life, and water. Animals, insects, and people are housed in the hair and along the body. The left arm directs the attention towards a barge in the river containing the impact of resource extracting industries; mining, fishing, logging, and plantation farming. Graffiti on the sides of the ship attest to the history of resistance it has met everywhere it has traveled.

#WaterWrites mural projects dinner and reports

Thu/6, 6:30-9:30pm, regularly priced dinner menu

Bissap Baobab

3388 19th St., SF

www.bissapbaobab.com

Girl gang

Andrew Lam

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March 5, 2013

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caitlin@sfbg.com

WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH There’s all of not much planned, officially speaking, for Women’s History Month this year in San Francisco. A March 6 ceremony honored a lady from each district in the Board of Supervisor’s chamber, a reception followed with refreshments and Ed Lee’s mustache proclaimed she who is Woman of the Year. (His selection hadn’t been announced by the time we went to press, but I’m pulling for a double honoree this year: fashion babe twins Marian and recently-deceased Vivian Brown.)

Truth is, not many people seem stoked on the commemorative month, which was officially created in 1987 and annually proclaimed by the President starting in 1994. The Atlantic ran a story last week that accused Women’s History Month as a symbol of irrelevant tokenism. Honestly, throughout the course of assembling this list I was surprised at just how few explicit Women’s History Month events are taking place in the Bay.

Maybe having a month doesn’t solve the problems that plague women these days, but in my book that doesn’t mean we should scrap the thing altogether. We have a proclamation, let’s use it!

Here’s some ways to do just that. Sure, little of the happenings on this page are so backwards-looking as to fit neatly into the “History Month” rubric. But the debut exhibition of an art collective on the rise (Black Salt Collective, March 17), a demonstration that’ll morph into cross-cultural performance in honor of domestic workers’ rights (Domestic Workers Bill of Rights demonstration and performance, Fri/8), a quilting show (SF Quilters Guild biennial show and sale, Sat/9-Sun/10) — the fact is, we’re making history every day. This month we just have extra encouragement to do so.

HER GIRL FRIDAY

This group from Brooklyn holds readings that promise salient takeaways for women in the media world, and its first West Coast event should be rad: editrix par excellence (who has mad Tumblr game, folks) Ann Friedman headlines, with chronicler of Latin America Martina Castro, multimedia journalist Katy Newton, and sex trade filmmaker Mimi Chakorova. One-time Guardian art director DJ Mirissa Neff will be posted up behind a mixer to soundtrack the thing, and: cocktails.

Thu/7, doors open 6pm, readings 7pm, free. 111 Minna, SF. facebook.com/hergirlfriday

“WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?”

A mother and Black Panther who emerged from incarceration to become a professor of sociology, Ericka Huggins seems well qualified to speak on the power of restorative justice. She teaches relaxation and resiliency workshops for schools and community groups, so this talk promises to be a feel-good look at the tough problem that is our justice system.

Thu/7, 7-9pm, $15. California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission, SF. www.ciis.edu

DOMESTIC WORKERS BILL OF RIGHTS DEMONSTRATION AND PERFORMANCE

Join the magically diverse coalition of women, people of color, and youth groups to celebrate AB 241, proposed legislation that would shore up the rights of domestic workers in the state of California. Speakers will hoist bullhorns in front of the Federal Building, then everyone is welcome to Sixth Street’s Filipino community center, where cross-cultural performances will celebrate International Women’s Day.

Fri/8, rally 5pm, SF Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate, SF. Performances 8pm, Bayanihan Community Center, 1010 Mission, SF. www.babaesf.org

OAKLAND INTERNATIONAL WOMYN’S DAY FESTIVAL

Start your day with an ashtanga yoga class at this fest, then stick around for a day of rad artists: Culture Shock’s hip-hop dance, neo-soul funkster Mama Crow, rapper-political science student Kaila Love, queer bluesperson Enajite Loicy Pela, and more. The day’s theme is raising awareness about violence against women, transfolks, people of color, everyone.

Sat/9, 11am-5pm, free. The Web, 355 12th St., Oakl. www.iwdfest.com

“SEVEN FLOWERS FOR SEVEN MURALISTS”

In honor of the original seven female muralists who created the breathtaking “MaestraPeace” work that covers the outside of this community center, the Women’s Building is inviting all comers to deck its sidewalk with chalk to create a massive bouquet of flowers.

Sat/9, 1-2pm, free. Women’s Building, 3543 18th St., SF. www.womensbuilding.org

STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN RALLY AND MARCH

From Ohio to India, we’re seeing so many attacks against women worldwide that something’s gotta be done. Anti-violence demonstrations and marches, like this one hosted by Women Organized to Resist and Defend (WORD) have seen great turnout of late, so go add your voice to its hue and cry.

Sat/9, noon, free. Dolores Park, 19th St. and Guerrero, SF. www.defendwomensrights.org

SF QUILTERS GUILD BIENNIAL SHOW AND SALE

From Gee’s Bend to knit graffiti posterchild Magda Sayeg, textile art has long been used by women trying to make a (needle)point. Not all the quilts at the SF Quilters Guild’s biennial showing will be militant, but they do speak to the mastery of what is often dismissed as “mere” folk art. Check out the impressive works of stitch, along with quilting challenges and demonstrations. Master quilt appraiser Nancy Bavor will also be on hand to evaluate any piece that you bring in, for a fee.

Sat/9, 10am-5pm; Sun/10, 10am-4pm, $9-10 two-day ticket. Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St., SF. www.sfquiltersguild.org

WOMEN WHO CODE MEET-UP

The tech community’s ability to throw successful happy hour networking events is unrivaled. Jump into the tide for Women’s Month with this group, which is open to all female-identified people hoping to fine-tune or share their coding skills. Bring a project, or jump in on one of the tutorials providing for all skill levels. Remember to register as a meet-up member and RSVP before you head over.

Tuesdays, 6:30pm, free. March 12 location: Apportable Inc., 371 Fifth St., SF. www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code

MAQUILAPOLIS

A documentary following women workers who refuse to take social injustice sitting down. One of the film’s stars is Carmen Durán, a maquiladora at one of Tijuana’s poverty wage-paying factories run by multinational corporations. When her company up and leaves for Indonesia’s even looser labor laws, Durán goes activista.

March 13, 7pm, $5-10 donation suggested. 2969 Mission, SF. www.answersf.org

VIVA LA VIDA

Indulge your Fridamania with this Spanish language play, which revolves around an intimate monologue delivered by Frida Kahlo herself, as the iconic Mexican artist preps a Dia de los Muertos party for Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and father of surrealism André Breton.

March 16, 7pm, $16. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF. www.missionculturalcenter.org

BLACK SALT COLLECTIVE LAUNCH SHOW

A jewelry maker raised in Bolivia, a painter who takes inspiration from her work with disabled adults, a multimedia artist set alit by the third eye, black soul, and the natural world — this is Black Salt Collective, which officially starts its journey with today’s exhibition. Pick up some art, sip some sangria, and reflect on what it means to represent “culture” — the stated goal of this all-female group is to express contemporary identity without the baggage of Western world anthropology tropes.

March 17, 1-7pm, free. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. blacksaltcollective.tumblr.com

“KNOW YOURSELF, LOVE YOURSELF: SEXUAL EMPOWERMENT FOR WOMEN”

Sex educators Jessi Fischer and Julianne Carroll want to help you untangle the mess of messages we get about what female sexuality is supposed to be. Madonna-whore, no more! After this workshop, hopefully that’ll be the case in your grey matter.

March 18, 6:30-8:30pm, $20-25. Good Vibrations, 1620 Polk, SF. www.goodvibes.com

LAS TRES MARIAS

Musicians Cynthia Alexander, Diana Gameros, and Radmilla Cody weave together their experiences as a border town Mexican, a Filipina, and a former Miss Navajo Nation to create musical works that explore migration and economic struggle.

March 22, 8pm, $20-25. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. www.lapena.org

HALF THE SKY

Based on a book by New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristhof, this documentary roams 10 countries (deploying the talents of Hollywood actresses like Eva Mendes, America Ferrara, and Gabrielle Union as hosts) to create a panoramic look at global women’s issues today. Full disclosure: the event is sponsored by the Guardian and Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center — and I’m hosting a post-screening discussion. Please note the cocktail half-hour before movie.

March 25, doors 6:30, screening 7pm, free. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. tinyurl.com/halftheskyscreening

SISTER SPIT: THE NEXT GENERATION READING

The queer, feminist, awesome Sister Spit collective has been making some serious moves of late. Ali Liebegott just published Cha-Ching! through City Lights Sister Spit imprint (it’ll be feted at that book store on March 27) and founder Michelle Tea’s young adult novel A Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (due out this spring) is amaze-balls — and we get to hear them read for free today? Lit history, folks, before your eyes.

March 31, 2pm, free. San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin, SF. www.sfpl.org

Our Weekly Picks: March 6-12

Andrew Lam

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March 5, 2013

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WEDNESDAY 6

Sixth Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show

These days, every smartphone-toting amateur can create his or her own hazy vignette to remind us of those groovy days before digital photography. But Instagram and its peers always stop short in their quest for that special quality that only real lo-fi technology — cameras constructed of plastic and the occasional piece of tape — can achieve. In its sixth Plastic Camera Show, RayKo Photo center will exhibit the best 90 photos chosen from thousands of international submissions, with a special focus on Los Angeles-based Thomas Alleman’s black-and-white images that his plastic camera manages to render in a mood that is both cinematic and sordid. Instagram has nothing on these photos. (Laura Kerry) Through April 22 6-8pm opening, free RayKo Photo Center

428 Third St., SF

(415) 495-3773

www.raykophoto.com

THURSDAY 7

University Dance Theatre

Student recitals are just one of a number of campus spring rituals. The University Dance Theatre’s at SF State University is no exception. This year’s program, besides showing new works by alumni, faculty, and advanced students, is very much worth trip out into the fog belt. KT Nelson, Co-Artistic Director of ODC/Dance, with whom State has an ongoing relationship, is setting her Transit on student performers. Transit is witty, wistful, and wondrous; sort of a love letter to harried urban lives. Max Chen’s fantastical, multipurpose bikes also pay tribute to the City’s favorite mode of transportation. Nelson knows that spectacular props can steal a show; she didn’t let it happen. Transit focuses its lively energy on where it belongs — the dancing. (Rita Felciano)

Through Sat/9, 8pm, $8–$15

San Francisco State University

Creative Arts Building

1600 Holloway Ave.

(415) 338-2467

creativestate.sfsu.edu

San Francisco International Ocean Film Festival

To celebrate its 10th year, the San Francisco International Ocean Film Festival is assembling the following: a Cousteau (Jean-Michel, son of Jacques, who will be a special guest at the opening-night gala); a documentary about the first lady of surfing (Brian Gillogly’s Accidental Icon: The Real Gidget); and a shark-themed program highlighted by Steve Dilaridan’s adorably-titled animated short I’m Going to Bite Someone. And that ain’t even taking into account the rest of the over 50 ocean-themed films from some 14 countries. Dive in! (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Sun/10, most films $8–$14 (opening gala, $150)

Bay Theater

Aquarium of the Bay

Pier 39, SF

www.oceanfilmfest.org

FRIDAY 8

The Hush Sound

Chicago’s the Hush Sound was “discovered” in 2005 by Pete Wentz via Panic! At the Disco’s Ryan Ross, but don’t hold that against it. The group’s simple boy-girl harmonies and catchy melodies are at once sincere and whimsical, creating a timeless, folk-tinged pop sound. When the band formed, core songwriters Greta Salpeter and Bob Morris were essentially still children, going to school and lifeguarding, respectively. In the years and three albums that followed, the band mercifully never lost its youthful nature. Now, after a five-year hiatus, the Hush Sound is finally back with a new album in the works — and its ready to relive its youth. (Haley Zaremba)

With the Last Royals, Sydney Wayser

8pm, $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

Pickwick

A Youtube comment on the song “Blackout” from Pickwick’s record, Myths Vol. 3, reads “these fucking albums are nowhere to be found.” Though one should usually ignore Youtube comments, in this case we say, Kamelbutiken, you have a point. For the past year, the band has sold out shows in its native Seattle and earned spots in notable festivals, gaining hype only through the release of a series of seven-inch vinyl records and online videos. It’s hard to believe that with all the recognition they’ve earned, March 12 marks the release of the band’s official debut album. While the soul-and-folk-infused rock the band makes is still nowhere to be found, find Pickwick live at the Independent. (Kerry)

With Radiation City, Sandy’s

9pm, $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

Melt! with Machinedrum

Futuristic beats producer Travis Stewart, a.k.a. Machinedrum, takes cues as much from hip-hop and jungle rhythms as from the current dubstep/wobble craze. The American-born Berlin resident has produced for rising Harlem star Azealia Banks and counts rhymesayer Theophilus London and UK-based dream-techno star Lone as collaborators. Machinedrum keeps his productions quick and tightly-woven, typically floating catchy melodies and some sonorous vocal samples alongside shuffling beats. The multi-faceted Stewart has also earned respect for his recent reinterpretations of giants in their respective genres, Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada and psychedelic jazzist Sun Ra. (Kevin Lee)

With French Fries, Dark Sky, and more

10pm, $17.50–$20

1015 Folsom, SF

(415) 431-1200

www.1015.com

SATURDAY 9

San Francisco Bulgarian Film Festival

With directors like Cristi Puiu (2005’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) and Cristian Mungiu (whose latest, Beyond the Hills, opens March 15) leading the charge, the Romanian New Wave is a well-established phenomenon. So it stands to reason that next-door neighbor Bulgaria would also be eager to come into its own, cinematically speaking — and the inaugural San Francisco Bulgarian Film Festival is here to share some of the country’s recent triumphs with local audiences. Included in the two-day fest are Bulgaria’s 2011 Oscar submission, Tilt, about friends who dream of opening a bar amid the country’s tumultuous early 1990s; and contemporary drama Love.Net, a hit at the 2011 Bulgarian National Film Festival. (Eddy)

Through Sun/10, $12

Brava Theater Center

2781 24th St, SF

sfbff.blogspot.com

Garry Winogrand retrospective

Legend has it that Garry Winogrand would shoot an entire roll of film in a single block, barely pausing or taking his eye away from his Leica camera’s viewfinder until he reached the end. As a result, his body of work presents barely mediated views of daily life in postwar America. And it presents a lot of them. Winogrand produced so many rolls of film that he never saw an estimated 250,000 images contained on them before his untimely death in 1984. In a retrospective that will travel the globe after leaving San Francisco, SFMOMA will display about 100 of these never-before-seen prints, adding to an already prolific and important collection. We’re lucky to get to see so many streets through Winogrand’s eyes. (Kerry)

Through June 2

$9–$18

SFMOMA

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Flogging Molly

Don’t let Flogging Molly fool you: everything about the band may seem wonderfully drunk and Irish, but like any other illusion, it actually hails from Los Angeles. Vocalist Dave King, however, is a bona fide Irishman, and his thick brogue is the perfect addition to Flogging Molly’s Celtic-flavored punk madness. Whether or not you want to listen to songs about drunken pirates and whiskey in your free time, its live show is a spectacle that anyone could and should enjoy. Though the band has been together and touring since the ’90s, it hasn’t slowed down one iota. That x-factor that makes some live shows over-the-top fun simply can’t be spoken for. Grab a bottle of Jameson and go see for yourself. You can thank me later. (Zaremba)

With Mariach El Bronx, Donots

7:30pm, $32.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakland

(510) 302-2250

www.thefoxoakland.com

MONDAY 11

Efterklang The Danish band Efterklang first gained international plaudits with its soaring 2007 LP Parades on the Leaf Label Ltd and such triumphant, symphonic battle cries as “Mirador” and “Caravan.” Since switching labels to 4AD Ltd., Efterklang has (somewhat regrettably) corralled that bright energy and fostered a more direct, intimate sound. Legend has it that the Danish trio wandered through an abandoned Norwegian coal mining settlement near the North Pole formerly operated by the Soviet Union. The band’s journey and field recordings became source material for last year’s Piramida, in which frontperson Clasper Clausen drops his voice an octave and embarks on mysterious stories of exploration and melancholy. (Lee)

With Nightlands

8pm, $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

San Francisco Moth StorySLAM: Secrets

The Moth: “True Stories Told Live.” Where else could we listen to strangers, alone on a stage with their words, telling fantastical-but-true personal stories of Jewish mobster uncles, family embezzlement, Montgomery Clift’s wishes from beyond the grave, the whiskey-soaked life of a rookie reporter, the cult of Radical Honesty, and sexual awakenings during midlife crises? The NY-born series — in which reading from notes is a major no-no — has been going strong since 1997, with monthly StorySLAMs (open mics) in LA, Chicago, Louisville, and Seattle, among other cities. The San Francisco Moth StorySLAM launches today at the Rickshaw Stop and will continue on the second Monday of every month. The first round’s theme is “secrets” so come prepared to divulge the dirt. And as podcast host Dan Kennedy always notes, “we hope you have a story-worthy week.” (Full of secrets you’re willing to share.) (Emily Savage)

7pm, $8

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian, 225 Bush, 17th Flr., SF, CA 94105; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

On the Cheap listings

Andrew Lam

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March 5, 2013

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

WEDNESDAY 6

RayKo’s sixth annual plastic camera show RayKo Photo Center, 428 Third St., SF. www.raykophoto.com. Through April 22. Opening reception: 6-8pm, free. You’d never these cameras’ non-pro status by the breathtaking images they are capable of creating. Highlighted in this year’s RayKo show is LA-based artist Thomas Alleman, who began using a Holga camera in 2001 to document the aftermath of 9/11. His dreamy, dramatic prints perfectly pinpoint the dysfunctional beauty of these toy cameras.

“Beyond THC: Cannabidiol and the future of medical marijuana” Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market, SF. www.commonwealthclub.org. 5:30pm, $12 members, $7 students, $20 nonmembers. Martin A. Lee, author of Smoke Signals — which focuses on the social history of cannabis — will be speaking about the benefits of cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive component of marijuana that lacks the “high” effect of THC and contains key medicinal benefits. Lee will discuss how the medical marijuana industry has responded to the discovery of CBD and sign copies of his book afterward.

THURSDAY 7

Robot NightLife California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, SF. www.calacademy.org. 6-10pm, $12. This beloved weekly museum soiree delves into sci-fi this evening with a focus on robots. Managing director of Silicon Valley Robotics will speak to the local innovation and commercialization of robots and Academy curator Gary Williams will show off footage of deep-sea corals from Pillar Point Harbor. A robotic performance by art group Survival Research Labs and exceptional designs by robot design studio BeatBots are also on tonight’s schedule.

“Art Star” Otis Lounge, 25 Maiden Lane, SF. www.otissf.com. 10pm-2am, free. If you’re looking to submerge yourself into the city’s art community, head over to Otis Lounge to meet and network with artsy individuals at this monthly first Thursday event. Whether you make, buy, sell, or just love art, all creatives are welcome.

Community dinner St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church, 2097 Turk, SF. www.saintcyprianssf.org. 7pm, free. Hungry, cash-strapped health nuts listen up. This free dinner created from USF’s garden and local farmers markets is open to everyone and anyone interested. The event lacks any motivation beyond a heartfelt effort to bring the community together through wholesome food.

Writerscorps Live with Tamim Ansary Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF. www.sfartscommission.org. 6:30-7:30pm, free. Award-winning youth writing program WritersCorps has partnered with the CJM for a multi-generational live reading. Author Tamim Ansary will read from his memoir West of Kabul, East of New York, based on his family’s immigration from Afghanistan to San Francisco. The reading will also showcase WritersCorps teaching artist Minna Dubin and students from Downtown High School, Aptos Middle School, Mission High School, and more.

First Thursday with OM Cocktails Hang Street Gallery, 567 Sutter, SF. www.hangart.com. 6-8pm, free. Organic mixology — premixed in the bottle? Will wonders never cease. Check out this brand’s coconut-lychee cocktails and more at Hang Street’s First Thursday reception.

FRIDAY 8

East Bay Bike Party, location TBA. 7:30, free. eastbaybikeparty.wordpress.com. It’s time to go green, literally. The theme of this month’s East Bay group rideout is the favored color of enviro-fans and Kermit the Frog alike. Whether you want to channel your inner leprechaun or bike around as giant pot leaf, the possibilities are endless. If you’re a Bike Party virgin make sure to also look over the code of conduct to help keep the event as community-friendly as possible.

SATURDAY 9

White Walls gallery 10th anniversary show White Walls, 886 Geary, SF. www.whitewallssf.com. Through April 6. Opening reception 7-11pm, free. Town’s best-known “urban art” gallery hosts this retrospective of a decade of boundary-breaking work within its wall (kind of — the gallery recently moved to a larger space on Geary Street). Check out works from Shepard Fairey, ROA, Apex, Ferris Plock, and of the best who have plied works there.

“Doctors on Board” Oakland Marriott City Center, 1001 Broadway, Oakl. www.pmfmd.com/doctors-on-board. 6am-6:30pm, free to students. Application required. The Physicians Medical Forum is hosting a day of workshops and skills training session helping African American students to attend medical school and residency programs. Prominent physicians will provide information about medical school preparation, medical specialties, and life as a physician.

“Quilt San Francisco” Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St., SF. www.sfquiltersguild.org Also Sun/10. 10am-4pm, $10 for two-day pass. This two-day exhibit, organized by the San Francisco Quilters Guild, vividly showcases the revitalization of the traditional art form. 400 quilts and special exhibits will shown the many artistic dimensions of wearable art and modern stitching. There will also be a children’s corner, where kids can get marching orders for a treasure hunt that will lead them to special quilts in the show.

Irish-American children’s hour of music, song and dance San Francisco Public Library, Fisher Children’s Center, 100 Larkin, SF. 11am, free. www.sfpl.org. Crossroads, an annual Irish-American festival timing to open up St. Patrick’s Day season, invites the kiddos to learn traditional Irish dance taught by instructors from the Brosnan School of Irish Dance.

Fourth annual World Naked Bike Ride Meet at Justin Herman Plaza, Market and Embarcadero, SF. www.worldnakedbikeride.org. 11am-4pm, free. Protest global dependency on oil and find out what its like to pedal through Fisherman’s Wharf in the buff. All are welcome to take part — even clothed riders — but those in the buff earn extra badass points, given the uncertain status of the ride under the city’s new anti-public nudity ordinance.

“Permutation Unfolding” Root Division, 3175 17th St., SF. www.rootdivision.org. Opening reception 7-10pm, free. Bring the kids to the opening of this group exhibition exploring the biomorphic formations that can spring from the artistic process (we’re not sure what that means either.) There will be an all-ages creativity station, a perfect place to craft while Markus Hawkins spins an auditory web in an 8pm performance.

SUNDAY 10

Exploratorium’s On the Move Fest Mission District location: Buena Vista Horace Mann School, 3351 23rd St., SF. 11am-4pm, free; Bayview location: Bayview Opera House Ruth Williams Memorial Theatre, 4705 Third St., SF. 11am-4pm; Embarcadero location: Pier 15, 11am-10pm. www.exploratorium.edu. All locations offer free admission. Everyone’s favorite on-hiatus science museum is sending 10 trucks tricked out with the kind of wacky, hands-on exhibits its know for to the Mission, Bayview, and the Embarcadero for a day of science, music, and food. In both Bayview and the Mission, enjoy itinerant filmmaking, projects that encourage attendees to sport costumes and act out a special script which will then be chopped, screwed, and shown to the public.

TUESDAY 12

“Stars of Stand-up Comedy” Neck of the Woods, 406 Clement, SF. www.dannydechi.com. 8pm, $10. Comedian and pencil musician (exactly what that means we are not quite sure, please report back if you go) Danny Delchi is hosting tonight’s show. Long-time Niners field announcer Bob Sarlatte and the quirky Mr. Mystic will be performing alongside a number of other top Bay Area comedians.

Persian New Year Festival Persian Center, 2029 Durant, Berk. www.anotherbullwinkelshow.com. What better way to welcome spring than to jump over a bonfire? Head over to the Persian Center to take part in this ritual that has been passed down since Zoroastrian times. Accompanying the fiery activity will be Persian food, music, and dancing.

Family of teen shot in Alice Griffith still waiting for Housing Authority help

Sasha Cuttler

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March 1, 2013

14

Aireez Taylor, a 15-year-old Mission High School student and a resident of the Alice Griffith public housing project in Bayview, was shot seven times on Dec. 29.

It happened around 6:30 p.m. She was with several friends at a house just a few blocks from her home in Alice Griffith, also known as Double Rock. They were standing on the porch talking, her mother, Marissa, told the Guardian. Then two men armed with guns hopped out of a parked car. One of Aireez’s friends, a 17-year-old boy who lived at the house with his family, saw them coming. He ran for the door and was shot once in the foot. Aireez, fleeing after him, was shot seven times.

Residents of Alice Griffith interviewed by the Guardian described an intensification in the violent crime at and around their community in recent months. Several attributed the violence to a conflict between African American and Samoan gang members. Whatever the cause, the shooting of a 15-year-old girl stands as evidence of the ongoing danger in San Francisco’s public housing developments. Aireez’s father, Roger Blalark, said that his daughter wasn’t the intended target of the shooting. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, he said.

But for Aireez, who survived the attack, the wrong place at the wrong time is her home in Alice Griffith. Her parents have applied for emergency relocation with the San Francisco Housing Authority, but after two months—and amid the recent scandal surrounding Director Henry Alvarez and federal reports that have rated the agency as one of the worst in California—they are still waiting for the agency to locate and repair a unit in a new housing development. In the meantime, Roger and Marissa continue to fear for their daughter’s life. “What if they find the guy and ask her to testify?” asked Roger.

Aireez made a steady recovery from the gunshot wounds inflicted upon her in the December attack. But the trauma of the event has not been as easily healed. She spent three weeks at San Francisco General Hospital. During that time, an unknown intruder tried to snap a photo of her as she lay in her hospital bed, Roger said. Later, a man claiming to be her father came to inquire about her, while Roger himself was at her bedside.

A police officer met with Roger and Marissa on the Monday following the attack. Aireez reportedly had not seen the shooters. An investigation is underway, though no arrests have been made and the police have no suspects, according to SFPD spokesperson Gordon Shyy.

The journey home from the hospital was a return to the place where she had nearly been killed, a community where the shooters presumably were still at large. “She gets shakes, every time she comes home,” said Roger. “She has to come by the corner where she got shot.”

SFPD Bayview District Captain Robert O’Sullivan said that relocation is an important part of protecting the victims of violent crimes. Ultimately, the choice to relocate a tenant rests with the Housing Authority. “There needs to be an assessment done when something like a shooting occurs in public housing,” said O’Sullivan. Alice Griffith, he pointed out, has a significant number of people in a relatively small space.

“It’s always something that is in the front of people’s mind, anyone that has a stake in this, in investigating or assisting—is this going to be a risk for this person or their family in continuing to stay here?” O’Sullivan said.

Marissa and Roger applied for an emergency transfer on Jan. 2. There was paperwork to fill out, then the Housing Authority had to search for a vacant unit that could accommodate a family of their size. Housing Authority spokesperson Rose Marie Dennis said that she could not give out confidential information regarding specific tenants, but confirmed that the majority of the Housing Authority’s holdings are studios, one-, or two-bedroom apartments.

Roger and Marissa needed something bigger. A unit that could accommodate their family was finally located in another housing development by the third week of January. Marissa was initially told that the unit would be ready in two weeks. But two weeks turned into five, and now six, and Marissa still doesn’t know the status of the unit or when it will be ready for move in.

Dennis told us the Housing Authority tries to accommodate all requests for relocation, and prioritizes tenants with emergencies. Victims of a violent crime that request a transfer are moved as soon as possible, she said. But the process of relocating a victim is often hindered by a variety of factors, including Housing Authority’s ability to allocate resources toward fixing up vacant units. The length of the wait is a matter of resources and cooperation between all the parties involved in preparing the new unit. Once a suitable place has been found, teams of custodians and craftsmen and women must work to clear, clean, and repair the unit. Preparing a unit for move in costs on average $12,000, she said.

The problem is not that there aren’t empty units. According to Dennis, vacant housing stock is in a constant state of flux, with the current occupancy rate estimated to be 96.3 percent. Since the Housing Authority manages a total of 6,476 units over 45 development projects, that would indicate that as many as 240 units now lie empty. Dennis said that some units are kept vacant by the Housing Authority for a variety of reasons, while many others are only made available as the agency finishes the repairs and renovations necessary to make the units livable by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) strict standards.

Roger and Marissa’s experiences would appear to dovetail with recent media scrutiny that suggests the Housing Authority has reached a critical state of dysfunction. The agency made the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s list of troubled agencies after it received a 54 out of 100 on their latest evaluation. Scandal has dogged the agency’s leadership—three lawsuits alleging discrimination and retaliation were recently filed against Alvarez, who was also accused in a lawsuit of steering contracts to political allies. And it’s long-term capital outlook is looking increasingly bleak, as buildings accumulate decades of wear and tear and infrastructure becomes obsolescent. Stuck with a federal budget that remains constant, the Housing Authority is put in the position of maintaining outdated infrastructure that would, in the long run, be more cost effective to replace, said Dennis.

But Dennis nevertheless assured the Guardian that the agency addresses emergencies as quickly as possible—irrespective of larger, structural financial deficits. “We get bogged down in anecdotes that aren’t reflective of what’s ahead of us,” said Dennis. “We don’t have time for politics, that really doesn’t add up to positive change.”

So what is positive change for the residents of San Francisco’s public housing? With Alvarez on leave, Mayor Ed Lee has stated his intention to revamp the agency’s leadership and has appointed five new commissioners to oversee the city’s public housing. “Being on a constant treadmill of troubled lists and repair backlogs that are structurally underfunded is not working for our residents or our City,” Lee said in a press release.

Lee spoke of a “better model” through HOPE SF, a massive redevelopment plan that began under former Mayor Gavin Newsom and which hinges on public-private partnerships. Alice Griffith is one among several sites that is being rebuilt as part of HOPE SF, with construction scheduled to begin in 2014. The plan is to create mixed-income neighborhoods where 256 new affordable rental units are interspersed in a larger community of market-rate homes.

But in the meantime, the day-to-day reality of the violence and dysfunction faced by tenants continues. “It’s not about tearing down the projects, you got to revitalize what’s already here,” said Roger.

Roger knows that a relocation won’t necessarily solve their problems. He worries about the persisting presence of gang members at the new housing development, about the fact that he will be trying to protect his family in a community that he is much less familiar with. At Alice Griffith, Roger has connections within the community. He helps direct the Run, Ball & Learn Program, which provides basketball and tutoring programs for community youth. So they wait.

“They’re gonna have their own process,” says Marissa. “In the meantime we’re still sitting here.”

The day in gay sports — very cool and very ugly

Zelda Bronstein

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March 1, 2013

19

The day in gay sports — very cool and very ugly

Three remarkable news stories today show the beautiful and the ugly side of LGBT issues in sports, and suggest that, despite the remaining bigotry, there’s hope.

We’ll start with the inspirational: The Chron reports on Gabrielle Ludwig, a 51-year-old trans woman who has fought her way to acceptance as a player on the Mission College women’s basketball team. She’s endured the sort of rotten, painful slurs that Jackie Robinson put up with as the first black player in Major League Baseball, but she’s won over her teammates and sent an important message to young people all over the world:

Since I decided to go out to the media, there’s been a larger purpose – to help the LGBT community and all those people who have lost children because they struggle with, ‘God, am I gay, am I straight, am I transgender? F- it, let’s put a rope around my neck and hang myself in the garage,’ ” Ludwig said. “If I can be a role model, and just let go of some of that burden, then what I do out here and the beating that I take from people in the stands … it’s worth it.”

Go Gabrielle.

And then we go to the NFL, where team execs at the “combine” — where scouts and coaches check out college players headed for the draft — are asking not-at-all-subtle questions about sexual orientation.

In a normal workplace (and the NFL isn’t remotely normal, as a workplace or anything else) asking a job applicant if he “likes girls” would be blatantly illegal. In pro football, it’s apparently tolerated, because the top brass in the NFL still can’t come to terms with their responsibility to prevent homophobia.

Everyone knows there are gay NFL players. And it’s only a matter of time before someone comes out. When that happens, the league has a repsonsibility to prevent the kind of shit that Gabrielle Ludwig is going through.So far, not so good.

Now for the hope: While everyone’s talking about the Obama administration’s amicus brief on same-sex marriage, an equally interesting brief has gotten lost. Two NFL players — yes, two players in the same league that is asking people if they like girls — have filed their own amicus brief, arguing that, as professional sports figures, they have a responsibility to stand up for the rights of all people to marry:

Under all the bad behavior that makes the news, male professional sports for far too long have harbored bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice—with respect to both race and sexual orientation,” the brief reads. “We are just beginning to see progress with regard to the issue of sexual orientation.

They say exactly what Ludwig says:

If a Pro Bowler treats a teammate as being an equal who is worthy of his friendship and respect because that other person is a good friend who places the team before himself, then high schoolers in Texas, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania,California, and Minnesota will not—cannot—miss that example. If that Pro Bowler speaks out publicly and kindly, kids will hear it and feel it. Kids who are already dealing with everything youth throws at them will know they can treat others as friends and equals, and those others will know they are equal and that, without question, it is better to be themselves than to be hurt.

So a handful of NFL players are supporting marriage equality and speaking out. They’ve opened the last closet door a crack. And, like the debate over same-sex marraige, this is only going in one direction.

Oakland school cop comes forward as a whistleblower

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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February 28, 2013

76

Two years after his involvement in a police shooting that took the life of a 20-year-old African American man, an Oakland School Police Department officer has come forward as a “whistleblower” in sworn testimony, making allegations of unethical behavior within a department that is already under the scrutiny of federal investigators.

In a deposition delivered earlier this month as part of a civil suit, police Sergeant Jonathan Bellusa gave a detailed account of what transpired just before his patrol partner, Sgt. Barhin Bhatt, fired several rounds and killed Raheim Brown as the youth was positioned in the passenger’s seat of a car outside a high school dance in January of 2011.

Bellusa gave testimony that in the months that followed, he came under retaliatory pressure from within the department and was “uncomfortable” with various aspects of how the investigation unfolded.

An unedited, uncertified transcript of Bellusa’s deposition, which contains some grammatical and punctuation errors because it was transcribed by an automated system, was made public Feb. 28 by a group of activists organized under a project called “Against Hired Guns.” The group sent a detailed summary and analysis of the deposition, as well as the unedited transcript, to reporters. The activists also posted the contents on a website, againsthiredguns.wordpress.com.

Asked who is behind Against Hired Guns, spokesperson Cat Brooks said they are Oakland activists “who have been doing this work either together on campaigns, or separately inside of our own groups, that see strength in numbers rather than apart. We in general are tired of having flashpoint reactions to police corruption or violence, and are interested in bringing as many people or groups together as possible to have a sustained campaign that is focused on eradicating police violence.”

Bellusa is currently on leave from employment at the Oakland school police department, and the Guardian was unable to reach him by phone on the number listed on the OUSD website. “He’s been gone for quite awhile,” OUSD spokesperson Troy Flint told the Guardian when reached by phone. Asked to comment on the myriad allegations raised in Bellusa’s testimony, Flint said, “We’re going to refrain from comment until we’ve seen the actual suit.”

The deposition was conducted by Attorney Adante Pointer of the Law Offices of John Burris, in connection with a civil rights suit that is being filed against OUSD by Brown’s mother, Lori Davis. Reached by phone, Pointer confirmed that he had taken Bellusa’s deposition several weeks ago, and was surprised that its contents had been made public, since it “is not complete yet.” He added, “I’m thinking to myself, who put that out there?” As of press time, Pointer had not returned a follow up phone call.

Brooks declined to answer questions about how the activists obtained a copy of the uncertified transcript.

Allegations of retaliation for whistleblowing

Roughly a month after the shooting incident, Bellusa said in his deposition, former OUSD Police Chief Pete Sarna let out “a boisterous yell with his [fist] up in the air” and seemed “excited” that “we as a department don’t have to worry about anything.” According to Bellusa’s testimony, Sarna had just received word that his “friend” Pete Peterson had “agreed to do the investigation” of the fatal shooting of Brown.

Asked if he felt pressured by supervisors to make statements consistent with Bhatt’s account of the shooting incident, Bellusa stated, “I have felt that if I gave statements that went against the district that I would be thrown in jail for perjury.”

In the months after the shooting, Bellusa testified that he filed a formal complaint alleging that Sarna drunkenly made racist remarks to an African American sergeant in July of 2011. Sarna resigned the following month.

Bellusa also testified that on an August morning in 2011, after he’d filed the complaint against Sarna for allegedly making racial slurs, he overheard a conversation between OUSD General Counsel Jacqueline Minor and Superintendent Tony Smith. “I over heard Jackie Minor… say they were not going to let John get away with this,” he stated.

In another incident, Bellusa testified that a different OUSD officer informed him that “Chief Sarna’s assistant, Jenny Wong, told a bunch of officers something like: ‘Don’t worry, Sarna is going to beat this case. He’s going to fire John [Bellusa].’”

After Sarna stepped down, Bhatt was briefly appointed interim police chief, unleashing an outcry from OUSD parents outraged that an officer would be promoted to the top post after shooting and killing Brown just months before. Alameda County prosecutors had since cleared Bhatt of any wrongdoing in the shooting that resulted in Brown’s death.

In response to the backlash, Bhatt was removed and replaced with Police Chief James Williams in September of 2011. The shooting of Brown, coupled with Sarna’s alleged use of racial slurs, prompted a federal grand jury investigation into the OUSD police force last year. Bellusa noted in his testimony that he had described his experience to federal investigators.

Taken as a whole, Bellusa’s testimony renders a disturbing internal portrait of the Oakland School Police Department, which consists of about a dozen officers and operates independently of the Oakland Police Department as a division of the school district.

The alarming account raises serious questions about internal operations of the department, particularly since it is an independent force operated by the school district at a time when funding cuts have placed the public school system under tremendous budgetary pressure, resulting in recent school closures.

Allegations of corruption

A detailed summary of the transcript provided by Against Hired Guns highlights more disturbing allegations made by Bellusa in the course of his testimony. Among them:

Bellusa asserted that he witnessed Bhatt pour Wild Turkey into a glass while he was on duty. He also said he felt concerned about Bhatt after observing him “clean his firearm for a long period of time.”

Bellusa testified that he “found out” that Sarna and Lou Silva, a former OUSD officer and current district-wide Campus Security and Safety Manager, were “sending their personal cars down to a shop on 16^th Avenue… [and] were overcharging the police cars,” apparently in order to have their personal cars repaired for free or at a deep discount.

Bellusa testified, “I found out that he [Sarna] called another officer [and] told him [not to report] what had happened in front of the African American who is a witness to the … racial slurs.”

Officer-involved shooting

Brown was shot and killed outside a dance at Oakland’s Skyline High School on Jan. 22, 2011. He was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a Honda with a friend, Tamisha Stewart, who was in the driver’s seat. Bellusa and Bhatt pulled up behind them in an unmarked patrol car after noticing the lights of the Honda were flashing. Bhatt made his way to the driver’s window, Bellusa testified, while he flanked the rear passenger’s side of the car.

As Bhatt began a verbal exchange with Stewart, Bellusa testified that he noticed Brown was “fidgety” rather than cooperative, which he interpreted as a “red flag.” He opened the passenger door, crouched into what he described as a “catcher’s stance,” and initiated a verbal exchange with Brown. Shortly after opening the door, Bellusa said he made observations that led him to conclude that the car had been stolen.

When Pointer asked him where his hands were at that point, Bellusa stated, “They were on his lap,” according to the transcript. “Were they holding anything?” Pointer asked. “No,” Bellusa responded. “And so did you ask him to step out of the car when you’re having this conversation with him?” Pointer asked. “Not at that time,” Bellusa answered.

Bellusa said Brown then grabbed a screwdriver and stuck into the ignition of the vehicle, directing Stewart to drive. This prompted a struggle between Brown and Bellusa. According to a summary of the transcript written by the group of activists:

“Bellusa lunged into the car, grabbing [Brown] from behind as Brown was leaned over toward the ignition. …Bellusa tried to hold Brown, and then grabbed him, pulling Brown’s shirt and ripping it. Bhatt, leaning in through the driver’s window, hit Brown with his flashlight. … Brown had not yet made any aggressive move toward anyone, according to Bellusa’s description of events.”

A struggle ensued, and Bellusa testified that at one point Brown bit Bellusa’s wrist, prompting Bellusa to pull his hand away and use his “hammer fist” to strike him. Brown then grabbed the screwdriver from the car’s ignition, and “I believe that the backside of the screwdriver [was what] he used at that point to strike me in the chest,” Bellusa testified.

“As the struggle ensued and neither fighter gave in,” activists wrote, “[Brown] turned the screwdriver around and tried to make contact with Bellusa.”

According to Bellusa’s sworn testimony, “I was afraid that I was going to get stabbed in the throat clear as day.” He told his partner to shoot Brown: “I just screamed shoot him, shoot him,” he testified.

The Against Hired Guns summary describes what happened next. “As Bellusa pulled himself out of the car, two shots were quickly fired through the driver’s open window … by Bhatt before his gun jammed. Raheim Brown, Jr. had two bullets lodged in his body. It took Sergeant Bhatt five to ten seconds to clear the chamber of his gun, during which time he said loudly: ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ By this time, Bellusa was out of the car and at a safe distance, he said in his deposition. When asked whether he thought Brown was still a risk after the first two shots, Bellusa replied plainly: ‘No,’ and said that by this point, he had his own gun out. When asked why he didn’t pull his trigger, he replied: ‘Just like I said my statement with OPD, I didn’t see a threat.’

‘Tell me … about the gun’

Bellusa explained in his deposition that he’d noticed a gun sitting in the side pocket of the vehicle during the incident, but did not alert Bhatt that the gun was there until after the shooting had occurred. When Pointer asked, “And prior to you screaming ‘shoot him, shoot him’ you hadn’t said anything related to the gun?” Bellusa responded: “No.”

Shortly after the shooting, Bellusa testified he had an interaction with Sarna, then-OUSD chief, and Smith, the OUSD superintendent. According to details included in the deposition, this conversation took place at Oakland Police Department (OPD) headquarters, after Bhatt and Bellusa had been separated, prior to any formal interview with OPD regarding the shooting.

According to Bellusa’s testimony, Smith questioned him directly. “He said specifically ‘John, tell me where the gun was. Tell me everything you can remember about the gun and what it looked like.’”

Penetrating the Thin Blue Line

An introductory statement from Against Hired Guns notes that Bellusa “will likely be considered a ‘good’ cop” for publicly airing these allegations and making an unusual break from the code of silence that typically binds police departments.

Yet the activists aren’t willing to let the sergeant off the hook so easily. Asked why they took steps to preempt release of this information, Brooks, the spokesperson for Against Hired Guns, told the Guardian, “We thought that it was important so that the debate could be framed as part of the larger context of police and violence in Oakland, as opposed to this cop has now done something good, which makes him a good cop. … He was still present the night Raheim was murdered.”

Against Hired Guns wrote in an analysis included in press materials, “It has now been over two years since Raheim’s family lost him to the violence of policing. They have relentlessly searched for justice and still do not know exactly what happened to him. At the very least, Bellusa or any of the people or agencies he spoke with, could have explained the context of Raheim’s killing to his family members, who continue to grieve and struggle with the loss of their son, father and lover.”

The activists’ summary frames the issue in this way: “Sergeant Bellusa has now penetrated the ‘thin blue line’ that shields corrupt, abusive, violent police officers and departments. We are releasing this information as part of … a series that places the statements of Bellusa’s testimony in the larger overall context of policing in our society [and] the ‘thin blue line’ that protects officers from any consequences.”