youth Archives — Page 39 of 67 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

The. Rent. Is. Too. Damn. High!

Andrew Lam

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October 26, 2010

As continued reports of unprecedented, record-breaking amounts of cash from corporate real estate developers and big landlords flood the Board of Supervisor races, the damaging impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is becoming more and more clear. But even worse, Thomas J. Coates, a far-right extremist Republican real estate developer and landlord, is trying to buy the Board of Supervisors so that he can end rent control. Last week, Coates made the largest donation to supervisors races in the 150-year history of San Francisco.

Who is Coates? He spent more than $1 million on Proposition 98 in 2008 trying to repeal rent control statewide. He was the largest single contributor to that campaign, which was so extreme that even Gov. Schwarzenegger and former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson opposed it. Coates gave the maximum contribution allowed by law to George Bush and Dick Cheney’s campaign and funded GOP candidates across the country. Now he’s spending more than $200,000 to elect anti rent control San Francisco supervisors: Mark Ferrell in District 2, Theresa Sparks in District 6, Scott Wiener in District 8, and Steve Moss in District 10.

With this one donation, the stakes in this election for every San Franciscan — especially renters and progressives — became even higher. By spending his fortune here, Thomas Coates hopes to erode San Francisco’s strong rent control laws by electing supervisors who are less sympathetic to renters. Through influencing the election of the supervisors, he also influences the selection of the interim mayor (since the supervisors will choose the next mayor by a majority vote if Gavin Newsom is elected lieutenant governor), which would result in an anti rent control mayor.

To make matters worse, workers and their families are already on the defense fighting Jeff Adachi’s anti-labor ballot initiative proposal (Proposition B), which would make city workers pay huge increases in their health care coverage. Adachi is mischaracterizing his initiative as pension reform even though the bulk of the cuts will come from forcing low-wage workers to pay for their children’s health care.

Wall Street speculators crashed the stock market, causing workers’ pension funds to lose billions and wiping out retirement savings. The losses require local and state governments to spend more to keep the funds solvent. So who do Gov. Schwarzenegger, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, and Adachi blame? The victims: the workers.

Renters and city workers aren’t the only ones under attack. Newsom’s cynical sit/lie initiative (Proposition L) demonizes young homeless kids. Many of these youth are queers who ran away to San Francisco because it is a queer haven, and others are abused kids who left home because it wasn’t safe. If Prop. L passes, for 12 hours a day these kids will be criminalized if they sit or lie on the sidewalk.

All this in one of the most progressive cities in America? If we are under attack from conservatives in San Francisco on some of the most fundamental issues of our city, it’s no wonder the Tea Party is raging in the rest of the country.

Now more than ever we need labor, progressives, and renters to come together to fight back by voting Tuesday, Nov. 2. Harvey Milk once said, “Give ’em hope.” Show us that hope on Election Day by voting for progressive supervisors, rejecting Adachi’s so-called pension reform, and opposing the so-called sit/lie ordinance. Remember to vote and vote for Debra Walker in District 6, Rafael Mandelman in District 8, No on B, No on K, No on L, and Yes on J and N.

Gabriel Haaland is a local queer labor activist.

Film

Andrew Lam

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October 26, 2010

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

OPENING

The Freebie See “The Good Shepard.” (1:20) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

*The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest If you enjoyed the first two films in the Millennium trilogy — 2009’sThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire — there’s a good chance you’ll also like The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Based on the final book in Stieg Larsson’s series, the film begins shortly after the violent events at the conclusion of the second movie. There are brief flashes of what happened — the cinematic equivalent of TV’s “previously on&ldots;” — but it’s likely an indecipherable jumble to Girl first-timers. Hornet’s Nest presents the trial of Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the much-abused, much-misunderstood, entirely kick-ass protagonist of the series. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and his sister Annika (Annika Hallin) as her lawyer, Lisbeth finally gets her day in court. The conspiracy that drives the story is somewhat convoluted, and while it all comes together in the end, Hornet’s Nest isn’t an easy film to digest. Still, it’s a well-made and satisfying conclusion to the trilogy — as long as you caught the beginning and middle, too. (2:28) Bridge, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

*Leaving Few beauties — French, English, French-English, or otherwise — have managed the transformation Kristin Scott Thomas has, in using her considerable beauty to convey unfathomable hunger. In this romantic thriller with a touch of Madame Bovary and more than a dab of noir, Scott Thomas is Suzanne, the efficient if somewhat taken-for-granted wife of a doctor (Yvan Attal, director of 2001’s My Wife Is an Actress and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s partner), whose marriage resembles a business arrangement more than a love match. The couple enlist Catalan ex-con Ivan (Sergi Lopez) to build an office for her budding physical therapy practice, and after a minor car accident, Ivan falls into Suzanne’s care, and as she grows to care more deeply about him, an affair begins. Director Catherine Corsini’s tough-eyed look at what follows — concerning the economics of marriage and the price of one woman’s individuation and passionate choices — calls to mind women’s melodramas of the ’40s and ’50s, though Corsini renders her oft-told tale of awakening with considerably less heavy-handedness and minimal condescension. That approach and Scott Thomas’ performance — the movie almost turns on the motionless, slowly evolving look in Suzanne’s eyes when she realizes what she must do — makes Leaving a departure from your average coming-of-liberation romance. (1:30) Albany, Clay. (Chun)

Saw 3D This is the seventh Saw movie, for those still keeping track. (runtime not available)

“United Nations Association Film Festival” Oliviero Toscani possesses two qualities that make a good documentary subject: conflict and character. A photographer known for merging humanitarianism and commerce in ad campaigns for the clothing manufacturer United Colors of Benetton, Toscani created controversy by placing confrontational images of AIDS, war, anorexia, and other decidedly non-glamorous subjects on billboards and in fashion magazines. InThe Rages of Images, part of the UNAFF 2010 International Documentary Film Festival, Toscani is put in front of the viewfinder to address critics and give some entry into his palatial, you-wish-it-was-yours life story. Animated and wildly impassioned, the photographer comes across with the energy of an aging, Italian Jack Black, defending work that threatened to co-opt suffering and was in banned in places. At 44 minutes, the documentary is straightforward with an irony that comes across in the soundtrack; Toscani is given free rein to speak from his high horse. Another UNAFF selection, Strange Birds of Paradise, follows a group of West Papuan refugees in Australia recording folk songs that are outlawed in their home country under Indonesian rule. It’s also a primer on the history of the occupation and suppression of indigenous culture in that region of the world. As though this were not enough material for the documentary, filmmaker Charlie Hill-Smith injects footage from his travels and encounters with freedom fighters and farmers. Heartfelt, occasionally amusing and absolutely sincere as it may be, the filmmaker’s presence does not help to structure the documentary, which jumps back and forth between a number of narratives and brief, unnecessary animated segments. Informative for the uninitiated, the politicizing message of the film is weighed down by the use of every possible documentary tool. Variety Screening Room. (Prendiville)

ONGOING

Cairo Time (1:29) Opera Plaza.

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

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

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

Hereafter Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort starts out with an unusually flashy (for him) but effective setpiece: Parisian TV journalist Marie (Cécile De France) is at the end of a beach resort vacation with producer/lover Didier (Thierry Neuvic) when a tsunami hits, turning the market street on which she’s shopping into a rapids of rushing water and crushing debris. Meanwhile, two inseparable young London twins (Frankie and George McLaren), already coping with social service workers who want to take them from their junkie mother (Lyndsey Marshal), get duly separated in a less anticipated, cruel-hand-of-fate manner. And in San Francisco, loner George (Matt Damon) struggles to forget his “curse” — since a childhood near-death incident he’s been able to communicate with the dead — while an insensitive brother (Jay Mohr) insists this “gift” is a surefire moneymaker. What our main protagonists have in common is an unwanted ability, or desperate need, to glimpse the “hereafter.” It takes a very long time for Peter Morgan’s script to orchestrate their inevitable, accidental (or is it…??) paths-crossing. You might conjecture that at age 80, Eastwood felt ready to deal with the subject of mortality in a gentler, more mystical fashion than before. Perhaps Morgan wanted a break from his excellent usual docudrama terrain (2009’s The Damned United, 2008’s Frost/Nixon, 2006’s The Queen) by doing something purely, even fancifully fictive. But nothing in the film’s execution (after that startling beginning) indicates the very literal-minded Eastwood feels comfortable with or even interested in this story’s supernatural gist — was he mostly attracted by the opportunity to shoot in three swell cities? While just possibly the screenplay might have worked in other hands (Peter Weir? Werner Herzog?), here it marches listlessly toward increasing implausibility and boredom. The performers do what they can, although in the case of the child actors that’s very little indeed, while Bryce Dallas Howard overacts horribly in a support role. As composer, Eastwood does what he does — which means blanketing this DOA dud, which so badly needs tension and atmosphere, in the kind of cocktail-lounge noodling best suited for waiting rooms and pre-operative sedation. (2:09) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Inside Job Inside Job is director Charles Ferguson’s second investigative documentary after his 2007 analysis of the Iraq War, No End in Sight, but it feels more like the follow-up to Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). Keeping with the law of sequels, more shit blows up the second time around. As with No End in Sight, Ferguson adeptly packages a broad overview of complex events in two hours, respecting the audience’s intelligence while making sure to explain securities exchanges, derivatives, and leveraging laws in clear English (doubly important when so many Wall Street executives hide behind the intricacy of markets). The revolving door between banks, government, and academia is the key to Inside Job‘s account of financial deregulation. At times borrowing heist-film conventions (it is called Inside Job, after all), Ferguson keeps the primary players in view throughout his history so that the eventual meltdown seems anything but an accident. The filmmaker’s relentless focus on the insiders isn’t foolproof; tarring Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner as “made” guys, for example, isn’t a substitute for evaluating their varied performances over the last two years. Inside Job makes it seem that the entire crisis was caused by the financial sector’s bad behavior, and this too is reductive. Furthermore, Ferguson does not come to terms with the politicized nature of the economic fallout. In Inside Job, there are only two kinds of people: those who get it and those who refuse to. The political reality is considerably more contentious. (2:00) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Goldberg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paranormal Activity 2 Taking a cue from the Paranormal Activity 2 audience member who called “Bullshit!” before the final credits rolled at a recent screening, I’m haunted by the many way the filmmakers (Tod Williams directs with original writer-director Oren Peli relegated to co-producer role) could have taken Paranormal to another level, while maintaining some of the original’s DIY 21st-century-video-folk-art charm and resourcefully low-budge creepiness. How about kicking off with a good body hurl at the camera — or two or six? Or turning up the horror the in the sequel’s haunted McMansion, beyond misbehaving cabinetry — I do know that if I have to look at that kitchen island one more time I’ll have to hurt the wall-to-wall beige carpeting. Or have the demonically possessed (yes, you have to see the first installment for part two to make a lick of sense) do something genuinely, messily nasty, or having something truly dreadful happen to the innocents, namely the baby and dog? After all Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Beyond (1981) provided the blueprint for Oedipal and pet owner horror several decades ago — but then that says something about the quickie cash-in quality of Paranormal 2, which mistakes the original’s minimal action and special-effects de-emphasis for banal shots of interiors and poor pacing. The writing never quite rises beyond the level of basic-cable scares — or threatens to add much to the source material. Yep, you still have the blinkered man, willfully ignoring the red flags of intuition; the women who hesitate to go there; the mediums or brujas who offer dire warnings; and the demonic force who shall remain nameless that likes to take a bite out of human ass. This time the prize is the first male born into the family of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Kristi (Sprague Grayden) in, er, quite a while — don’t bother the movie makers with the details. And considering how annoyingly clueless most men are in Paranormal‘s world, I’d say we’re better off letting the kid go. (1:45)California, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Events

Andrew Lam

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October 26, 2010

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Events listings are complied by Caitlin Donohue. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 21

Pecha Kucha 330 Ritch, SF; www.pecha-kucha.org/night/san-francisco. 8:20pm, $5 suggested donation. A potluck of art from divergent disciplines — industrial design, motion graphics, fashion, animation, and architecture, to name a few — that examines this month’s theme, “A la mode: how do we do/go/say/express the things we do?”

THURSDAY 28

Peace Pedalers welcome home benefit Park Chalet, 1000 Great Highway, SF; (415) 386-8439, www.parkchalet.com. 6pm, $5 suggested donation. After pedaling two-seater tandems through eight years and 81 countries, the cultural biking ambassadors are home — come check the sneak preview of the documentary made on their wanderings.

San Francisco Arts Market UN Plaza, Market and 8th St., SF; www.artsmarketsf.org. Noon-8pm, free. Handmade jewelry, locally printed books and posters, Tenderloin t-shirts, and other crafty holiday gifts await you at this weekly outdoor bazaar.

FRIDAY 29

City Hall Ghost Walk South Light Court (Polk Street entrance), City Hall, 401 Van Ness, SF; 6:30pm, free. www.sfcityguides.org. After hearing the spooky tales from watchmen and maintenance workers at City Hall, tour guide Rob Spoor started the annual walk of heebie-jeebies in the building.

Halloween Beer Hootenanny Speakeasy Brewery, 1195 Evans, SF; (415) 642-3371. 4-9pm, free. Live bluegrass tunes, a chance to sample Speakeasy’s Punkin’ Pie Payback Porter, Vanilla Bean Payback Porter, and more — even costumes contesting! — at Bayview’s favorite brewery.

Halloween in the Tenderloin Children’s Playground, 570 Ellis, SF; (650) 508-3770, www.facebook.com/NDNUBelmont. 4-7pm, free. Notre Dame de Namur University’s Streetwise Sociology class is creating this safe space for kids to trick-or-treat. Face-painting, pie-eating, pumpkin-carving, oh my!

Not-Too-Spooky Halloween Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk.; www.habitot.org. 9:30am-4:30pm, museum admission $9. Got a scaredy cat hanging with you this All Hallow’s Eve? Bring them to this boo-tiful family event for kids under 6. Mini golf and slime experiments await you!

Paris is Burning screening and discussion El/La Para TransLatinas, 2940 16th St., SF; (415) 305-9480. Watch and discuss this exploration of homophobia, gender, and racism in 1980s New York City — and absorb what’s its lessons means in terms of San Francisco’s fight for social change.

BAY AREA

BAY-Peace office warming party BAY-Peace, 610 16th St. #403, Oakl.; (510) 763-1737, www.baypeace.org. 5-8:30pm, free. Check out the film made about this group’s humanitarian mission to Cuba and learn about their work introducing alternatives to militarism to Oakland youth.

SATURDAY 30

Journey to the End of the Night Justin Herman Plaza, SF; www.totheendofthenight.com. 7:30pm, free. The city-hacker leisure game zeitgeist re-emerges for its Halloween spectacular — come one come all to this interactive SF-wide game of tag, just but be sure you bring your thinking hat to crack the clues that await.

Rally to Restore Sanity Civic Center Plaza, SF; www.sfsanityrally.com. 9am, free. Too broke to make it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s dueling marches in DC this weekend? All good — head down to SF’s satellite event and screw your ironic sense of civic engagement on tight.

Randall Museum’s Family Halloween Day Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, SF; (415) 554-9600, www.randallmuseum.org. 10am-2pm, free. If Jackie Jones with her musical saw and dancing cat aren’t enough impetus to truck the clan down to this day of ghoulish games and creepy crafts, you need a serious dose of Halloween heckling.

SUNDAY 31

Alley Cat Halloween Bike Race and Scavenger Hunt Golden Gate Park Polo Fields, SF; trickstertreat.blogspot.com. 2pm, $10. This fundraiser for Up on Top, an after school program in the Tenderloin, takes bikers on an informal bike race through the mean city streets. Finish line’s at Bender’s in the Mission — let’s say, loser buys the winner a beer? For the kids, of course.

TUESDAY 2

Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts Dia de los Muertos 2868 Mission, SF; (415) 821-1155, www.missionculturalcenter.org. 6-10pm, $5. “Death Becomes You/La Muerte Eres Tu” is the theme for the 43rd annual MCCLA Day of the Dead altar installations. Snack on some pan de muertos while you take part in mask-making, face-painting, and more.

Katherine Ellison BookShop West Portal, 80 West Portal, SF; (415) 564-8080. 7pm, free. An author reading from a foreign news correspondent cum mother of a boy with ADHD and their journey through medical and psychological treatments.

BAY AREA

Gourmet Ghetto’s Dia de los Muertos Celebration Shattuck and Cedar, Berk.; www.anotherbullwinkleshow.com. 6-9pm, free. A much needed altar to the bicyclists who’ve passed away this year from faulty road safety measures — a mobile diorama, in fact. Also, a sidewalk candle processional to mark the day the dead walk among us.

Steve Moss: the big duck

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October 25, 2010

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WORKING DOGGEDLY TO PIN DOWN THE EDITOR OF THE POTRERO VIEW WHO IS ALSO A CANDIDATE FOR SUPERVISOR FROM DISTRICT 10

We’ve been trying to pin Steve Moss down on some key questions. Over the weekend, I sent him some questions by email. He responded, but ducked or ignored the real points and never gave us any straight answers.

Here’s our exchange, my questions and his answers — unedited, followed by some comments from me as we doggedly try to make sense of where Steve Moss really stands on key issues in the district.

Dear Steve,

In your October, pre-election issue of the Potrero View, your signed column
compares the Guardian with Fox News and states that we are both “advocacy groups disguised as news purveyors” who “whip mostly anonymous commentators on their websites to call political candidates ‘weasle, lying, doucebags’ and worse.” You also state that “these same outlets barely take the time to edit–much less fact check–their stories.”

As you know, our reporter Sarah Phelan has done factual reporting on you and your campaign (http://www.sfbg.com/2010/09/14/five-things-you-should-know-about-steve-moss) and she and I have both checked with you to respond to our points before publication. We will continue our policy by submitting these email questions to you in advance of publication. Our deadline is 5 p.m. on Monday

l. What specific facts do you find inaccurate in our previous reporting on you and your campaign? (You mixed up a comment on a blog with Phelan’s actual story and reporting. Was this intentional?)

2. How much money have you and your various profit and nonprofit enterprises accepted from PG&E during this past year?

How much money have you accepted in total from PG&E during your many years of operating your profit and nonprofit enterprises? Why did you change the pro-public power View of Ruth Passen to a PG&E-friendly View under your ownership? (For example, Passen always supported public power but you as the new owner refused to support the last public power initiative and said it was “too contentious.”)

3. Campaign finance records show that Thomas Coates, a Republican who spent $l million trying to overturn rent control in California in 2008, has just dumped
$45,000 into the so-called Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth in support of your candidacy. Public records also show that you served a cure or quit notice
to a tenant in your rent-controlled building in District 8. Would you comment on this? And would you state whether you support or oppose rent control?

4. On the front page of the October View, your lead story reported on the troubles of the Neighborhood House under the headline, “NABE Reeling Under City Budget Cuts.” Your story noted that the Nabe had lost “nearly $400,000 in funding from the Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families” and that individual donations had dropped by 75 per cent. The result, your story noted, was that the NABE “has been forced to eliminate teen-focused programming, reduce elementary school offerings by 25 per cent, lay-off staff and impose pay cuts.”

Each year, the NABE sponsors the Potrero Hill festival as a benefit to raise much-needed funds. This year the benefit was more critical than ever to reduce its crippling deficit. Just as the View was going to press earlier this month, I got a call at the Guardian from a representative of the festival with a startling bit of information. I was told that you, as the owner and editor-publisher of the View, and a candidate for supervisor from our district, were refusing to run a full page ad for the festival, a key piece of the NABE’s promotion on the hill,if the ad contained the logo of the Guardian as a festival sponsor.

The representative was concerned that, if you wouldn’t run the NABE ad, that the Guardian as a media sponsor wouldn’t run a NABE ad in the Guardian.
(I told him not to worry, do what he had to do to get the ad in the View, and that the Guardian would run the ad and double up on its promotion for the festival. The Guardian logo did not appear on the Nabe ad in the View but did appear on all other NABE promotions.)

Why did you make this threat to the NABE and its festival benefit? Were you serious?

5. You said in your endorsement interview at the Guardian that, if you were elected supervisor, you would give up the View. Do you still plan to do that, if elected? If so, how would you do that?

Steve Moss responds:

1. The entire way you’ve covered the District 10 election has been slanted towards the candidate you prefer, and against the candidates you dislike. From this perspective the Guardian is not serving the role of a newspaper, but rather is acting as an independent expenditure committee on behalf of its chosen candidates and causes. I’d be happy to select a panel of five independent journalists — you pick two, I’ll pick two, and the four can pick one — to render an opinion about how you’ve run the Guardian during this election cycle, and how I’ve run the View.

2. In 2010 I believe SF Power has received less than $25,000 in payments related to the small business demand-response program it operates, as sanctioned by the California Public Utility Commission. I’ve already provided you and your reporter with multiple responses to your requests about SF Power’s successfull advocacy related to CPUC orders requiring PG&E to fund programs focusing on working families and small businesses, all of which, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, are a matter of public record.

The View has published several articles about community-based energy systems, and effective ways to achieve local control over the power grid, during my tenure as publisher. They are available on our website.

3. I read about Coats’ contribution in Bay Citizen. As you know, this donation was made to an independent expenditure committee over which I have no control and almost no knowledge. I have stated throughout the campaign, and directly to the Tenants Union, that I believe current rent control policy should remain unmolested.

4. I made no threat to the NABE. In fact, the festival was featured on the front page of the November issue, with a story inside, and a full page ad.

5. Yes. A new editor will be found to run the View if I’m elected to office.

Okay, You aren’t responsive. Let me try again, point by point:

l. I am not running for office. You are. Please tell me where we are factually wrong in any of our reporting on you and your campaign.

As you know, we have contacted you in advance of publication for comment. And you have written us twice with generalities but no specifics on inaccurate reporting.

2. You defend your PG&E payments on the basis that it’s actually money from the California Public Utilities Commission that PG&E is required by law to put up for energy efficiency projects. However, Loretta Lynch, former president of the CPUC, told me that PG&E decides who gets the money and that fund recipients that “cross PG&E” are in danger of getting their funds cut off.

In other words, if you want to continue to fund your organization with upwards of more than $l million over three years, you must avoid angering the utility. This may explain why the Potrero View under your ownership has switched from its historic position supporting public power under former owner Ruth Passen to going easy on PG&E and ducking a position on the most recent public power initiative (Proposition H).

The background: Your non profit collected $1,290,000 from the CPUC for energy efficiency projects over the past three years, according to SF Power’s annual revenues and estimated budgets from 2008 to 2010 as provided on its website.

The breakdown: $500,000 in 2008, $440,000 in 2009, $350,000 in 2010.

You also got $150,000 from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in 2008 and $125,000 in 2009. Your non profit also got $50,000 chunks each year from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman fund, where his wife Debbie Findling works. The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund kicked in $5,000 in 2008 and 2009. The Potrero View contributed $5,000 in 2008, $4,500 in 2009, and $5,000 in 2010. A footnote stated that SF Power “is also informally negotiating with the California Air Resources Board, San Francisco’s Office of the Mayor, Mirant Corporation, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company, among others, for project funding support.” Did you get any additional money from Mirant, PG&E, the Mayor, or anybody else? Are you still negotiating? If not, when did you stop?

Lynch explained that “all energy efficiency programs in California are funded by ratepayer dollars that are collected by the utilities as part of each ratepayer’s utility bill. Thus, California ratepayers, big and small, pay for all energy efficiency programs and each and every program is funded by ratepayers, not utilities.”

She said that the CPUC “sets broad parameters for each utility concerning the amount of overall energy efficiency savings to be achieved and in what customer classes (residential, small business, large business,etc.). But the utilities choose the program providers. The CPUC simply reviews the overall package provided by the utilities to check to see whether the energy efficiency savings targets are met.”

Thus, PG&E each year decides the amount of money going to SF Community Power. Lynch noted that some non profit people told her, when she was a commissioner, that “if you crossed PG&E, they would stop the funding.”

Lynch mentioned a meeting with you that showed PG&E’s influence on you, your non profit and the View. .
She said that, shortly after she was termed out as a CPUC commissioner in 2009, you asked her to meet with him at Farleys coffee shop and asked her to serve on the board of his nonprofit. “I thanked him and said that he should consider my relationship with PG&E before making that offer if he was funded through PG&E, as PG&E and I have a very contentious relationship, and that they would not be happy if I were on the board. He thanked me for telling him and agreed that I should not serve on the board.” Lynch lives on Potrero Hill.

3. I followed up my rent control question: “If state law were amended to allow it, would you support extending rent control to vacant apartments?” No answer.

4. I got a call from Keith Goldstein, president of the Potrero Hill Association of Merchants and Businesses and co-chair of the festival. He had gotten an email from you that read: “Please have the festival’s pr agent remove the Guardian’s logo from any complimentary ad the View is providing the festival in this month’s paper.” Why did you make such an unprofessional move? Would you have backed out of sponsoring this event if the Guardian logo had remained? Is that how you would behave as a supervisor?

5. If elected, do you plan to sell the View? Will you continue to operate your non profit and take chunks of money from PG&E? If elected, would your income from PG&E disquality you from voting on PG&E and energy issues? At what point would you sever your relations, if at all, with your non profit and PG&E?

6. If you lose, will you (as your wife suggested in an email to friends) move back to your house on Liberty St in Distict 8?

We anxiously await your response. B3

Creative forces unite against Prop. 23

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 22, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold onto yer Wiggs, change comin’ to Western Addy

Andrew Lam

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October 21, 2010

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Hold onto yer Wiggs, change comin’ to Western Addy

Morgan Fitzgibbons isn’t thinking small when it comes to goals for his Western Addition sustainability group, the Wigg Party. “We want to make our community a leader in the transformation in resilience,” he tells me during our coffee date to discuss the group’s upcoming anti-boycott “carrotmob” at Matching Half Cafe (Sat/23).

It’s no coincidence that his language sounds a little new age-y. The basis for Fitzgibbons’ vision for the Wigglers seems grounded in the PhD of Philosopy, Cosmology, and Consciousness he received at California Institute for Integral Studies. “We’re these sacred beings,” he tells me earnestly of his San Francisco community. “This is a sacred movement – I want people to look back in a hundred years and see that.”

Woo-woo? Well yeah, but hold your jaded mutterings until you hear what the guy’s done with his convictions in “cosmological evolution,” as he puts it. Fitzgibbons has assembled a core group of Western Addition residents who operate in four different arenas of turning the area around SF’s “Wiggle” (the well-trafficked bike route through the Panhandle and between the hills in Lower Haight and Duboce Triangle) into a leader in scaled-back, neighborhood-focused living.

Bicycling barristers: Morgan Fitzgibbons and Wigger Dave Bryson on a city-wide urban farms bike tour. Photo by Jenny Sherman

Their areas of attack, you ask? There’s a sustainable business group, who works on incentives for local outfits that find ways of greening their ways. For example, this Saturday’s carrotmob (you can read more about the nationally recognized concept here) is a concentrated effort to storm Matching Half’s doors with business in support of their pledge to buy a bike trailer to transport farmer’s market-purchased goods, switch to organic milk, and chuck the plastic wrap for reusable food containers.

There’s also a local food group who works with local markets to freecycle unpurchased produce at the neighborhood’s Hayes Valley Farm, a “rescaling” group focusing on ways to limit commercial consumption, and the Wiggle Transformers, who are collaborating with the SF Bike Coalition on the Wiggle portion of their Connecting the City Initiative, a comprehensive plan to improve bike passage throughout San Francisco.

Like I said, comprehensive. And most of the core group – which Fitzgibbons pegs at around 20 party members – are under 30 years old. Which is neat-o, and most likely made possible by the group’s party ethos when it comes to fighting for what they believe. I mean, I say fighting but I think I really mean loving, or something equally hippie. A bunch of them live in a place called the Sunshine Castle, for god’s sakes, where they throw “shenanigans” (according to Fitzgibbons) after-parties for their events, like the recent 10/10/10 day of action that saw the Wigglers conduct a 50-60 person bike tour of the city’s urban farms and a coordinated garden plant in collaboration with Kitchen Garden SF.

In the works are plans for a Bernal Bucks-esque local currency, which the group hopes will inspire Western Addition residents to patronize more heavily the wealth of small businesses along the Divisadero Corridor and surrounding areas (holler, happy hour at Bean Bag).

Fitzgibbons says the hyper-localism of the Wigg Party is perfectly suited for the history and relative youth of the Western Addition neighborhood.

The Wiggle itself provides a apt symbol for the group. The Wiggle Transformers’ work is making bike traffic better for everybody, but also a physical passage that Fitzgibbons hopes will say “you’re stepping into a different place now” to bikers entering the Western Addition.

“San Francisco has always been a seed of revolution,” he reflects. “Of the younger neighborhoods – the Mission and Western Addition – Western Addition is a lot less nihilistic. With University of San Francisco near the area, there’s always going to be a lot of young people living out here, and that’s who our message resonates with. It’s such a new community.”

This last comment raises a red flag in my mind. The parties, the bike tours, it all sounds grand, but given that all this is coming from a twenty-something guy with a complicated mullet and a hoody, how much does the Wigg Party truly represent the Western Addition, an area that’s been wracked by recurring waves of gentrification and is subject, like everywhere else in the city these days, to ever-increasing rent prices and displacement of long time residents? Despite the free food at Hayes Valley, are we being sustainable, or are we being hipster-sustainable?

“To be a truly successful movement, we’ll have to organize everybody,” Fitzgibbons says, who himself has lived in the neighborhood for three years. Among those that regularly attend Wigg meetings, there is but one long-time resident, he tells me, who plays an active role advising on how to better integrate with the neighborhood’s ongoing goals and activities. Past that, “there’s tacit support among the long-term residents, and we get a lot of family participation in our Wiggle events,” Fitzgibbons tells me.

But I trust that he’s learning as he goes. After all, in explaining his philosophy on activism to me, Fitzgibbons appropriates that sustainability champion himself: Socrates. “The only thing I know is I don’t know everything,” he smiles. “We don’t have to have all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, but we can whip up excitement and hopefully inspire people to do this in their communities. Create that showcase.” And if figuring it all out looks like a party in the streets, sayeth the Wigglers, so be it.

Wigg Party Carrotmob

Matching Half Cafe

Sat/23 3-6 p.m., free

1799 McAllister, SF

www.wiggparty.org

Addicted to the beat

Andrew Lam

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October 19, 2010

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arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC I’m bugging out. The evening has somehow melted into the early hours of the purple morning. Civilization II has sucked me into an imperialist warp zone on the buzzing computer screen. Pizza boxes litter the room. I’ve just started high school in Los Angeles and discovered the psychedelic powers of a magical herb that grew in Ziploc bags. My little spatio-temporal world has shifted.

On the radio, J.Rocc mixes Mos Def’s “Universal Magnetic” into Quasimoto’s “Come On Feet,” an otherworldly meditation on paranoia and the endlessly running human spirit. Come on feet/Cruise for me, wheezes a disembodied voice from Planet Helium. On the screen, my Egyptian chariots slaughter the Greeks. I don’t yet know that Madlib’s hypnotic sample for the Quas cut comes from the score of René Laloux’s 1973 animated film, Le Planete Sauvage — a story about tiny, heartfelt humanoids who wage a revolution against an oppressive, hyperrational alien species. The vocals trace back to 1971, when Melvin Van Peebles shattered sterile genre lines with his film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, in which a charismatic black male protagonist tries to escape from the forces of parasitic white authority. History reinvents itself. I feel dizzy. One of my chariots lost in battle; I click undo. J.Rocc blurts out: The World Famous Beat Junkiiiiieeees. Was everyone some sort of addict gone ballistic?

“The radio programs Friday Night Flavas and the Wake Up Show were influenced by KDAY,” Rhettmatic — one of the original members of the Junkies — tells me 10 years later, over the phone. “They were the ancestors of KDAY.” During the mid-1980s, Los Angeles youth (perhaps adults too), across the far reaches of the monstrous city, would climb their roofs and position radio antennas to catch the fuzzy frequency of 1580AM. It was the only dial on the West Coast championing hip-hop. The KDAY mixmasters, from Dr. Dre to Joe Cooley, would get down for extended traffic jam mixes, showing off their skills by scratching and blending poly-percussive electro jams with vintage soul and new school raps. A new generation of multilayered street style and consciousness was born.

By the late ’80s AM radio gave way to the stronger frequency modulation (FM), and the MC slowly pushed the DJ into the background. KDAY disappeared and N.W.A. introduced the world to a hyperbolic Compton. “When KDAY went off the air and the mixmasters disbanded, there was no all-star DJ crew,” says Rhettmatic. “J.Rocc wanted a crew of all-star cats, and we were all already friends, so that’s how it came about.” The year was 1992, and the World Famous Beat Junkies, not so famous yet, emerged from the backwaters of Orange County, the fairy tale hotbed of conservatism, known to most for Disneyland and surfing more so than the avant-garde.

For the next decade, the Junkies combined forces with Bay Area mix wizards, giving the group more members to push the craft of DJing over and beyond. They competed on the battle circuit and helped carve out the aesthetics of turntablism, the technical art of DJ battling. “We combined styles,” Rhettmatic says. “The East Coast’s X-Ecutioners had a funky style with beat juggles and body tricks. San Francisco, with the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, was doing crazy fast scratches. We took both of them and created our own hybrid style.” The Junkies also pivoted the DJ back to the center of the hip-hop group: Rhettmatic DJed and produced head-nodding beats for the Visionaries, while Babu anchored Dilated Peoples. Sales of Ziploc bags skyrocketed. And the Junkies helped shape, in turn, a unique underground style of California hip-hop, where street smarts did windmills around a surreal tableau of cosmic imagery.

Every Californian obsessed with hip-hop of the age remembers when the three volumes of Beat Junkie mixes dropped in the late ’90s. Minds were blown. Heads got knocked. Boomboxes short-circuited. And so on. Each volume mirrors a radio show, influenced by KDAY programming as much as New York Mister Magic broadcasts and Red Alert tapes. “The mixes were done on analog cassette four-tracks,” Rhettmatic says. “They have that pop and hiss feel.” The radio program format glued together the off-the-cuff style of the underground to a decidedly patchwork narrative structure. Dirty drums carried spontaneous flows while blunted bass pushed intoxicating rhyme schemes. When the lyrics faded away, the beat would kill it.

The Junkies took on the role of hosts as much as curators — placing new artists like Slum Village and Jurassic 5 within the momentum of the tradition. All the while, they stamped the mixes with individuating styles, and reconfigured the tradition through a cipher approach to blending and scratching records, samples, vocals cuts, and loops. “We come from a generation where you have to be original and stand out,” Rhettmatic says. What emerged was frenetic and unbounded, both a testament to the creativity of the collage and the groundwork for the instrumental hip-hop, and its mutated progeny, popularized today.

The Junkies have since focused on numerous individual projects — from Rhettmatic’s duo record with Michigan-based MC Buff1 to J.Rocc’s much-anticipated solo debut on Stones Throw — which make the opportunity to see them collaborate together on six turntables and four mixers this Saturday at Mighty a truly rare one. “A lot of people know us as turntablists, but we are all around DJs,” Rhemttmatic says. “For us, DJs had to do everything.” You can call DJ love a habit. But I’ll leave it to Lord Zen from the Visionaries to close with a verse from “Blessings”: You can’t get this dope without a prescription/Over-the-counter versions fell prey to addiction.

FREQUENCY: A BEAT JUNKIE TAKEOVER

Rhettmatic, J.Rocc, Babu, and Shortkut with Mr. E

Sat/23, 10 p.m., $10

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

www.mighty119.com

On the margins

Andrew Lam

-

October 19, 2010

3

Sarah@sfbg.com

Franklin is a 20-something computer programmer who shares an apartment with 10 other people around his age, an arrangement that helps him and his housemates come up with $3,500 each month for rent in the Mission, a rapidly gentrifying part of town.

“Everyone is pretty much working, but they are in and out at different times so the house isn’t ever really empty. But there’s usually only three or four of us at a time, ” Franklin told the Guardian, speaking on his cell phone as he rode his bike to work.

But how does an apartment that officially has only one bedroom sleep 10 people? Franklin said there are other rooms in the house — including a dining room and a double parlor that splits into two with sliding doors — and that each of these spaces has a couple sleeping in it. “And there is one person sleeping in a closet and another sleeping in a space atop the bathroom.”

While overcrowding has been a problem in immigrant communities in San Francisco, it’s reaching a new area: young people who have for generations flocked to the city to escape uncomfortable home lives, find a supportive community, and make a new start in life.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, said at least 1,250 housing units annually were lost to condominium and tenancy-in-common conversions in the dot.com and housing bubble years, a loss rate that has slowed only slightly since then.

“Right now, it’s about 1,000 units a year,” he said.

It’s become more common for young people to struggle to pay rent in a town where well-paying jobs are scarce and educational programs have been cut — a triple whammy that means youth with additional challenges are at risk of becoming homeless and getting trapped in vicious cycle of abuse and incarceration.

COMPOUNDING THE PROBLEM

Sherilyn Adams, executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services, which provides housing, medical, social, and educational services to at-risk homeless and runaway youth, says all young people in San Francisco face the same basic challenges.

“And if, in addition, these youth are part of a group like LGBTQ youth, or are youth of color, or immigrant youth, documented or not, then the circumstances and barriers are much more exacerbated,” she said.

Adams said San Francisco has done a lot to add resources for transitional age youth, a group that traditionally has been defined as ages 12 to 24. “But there is still a significant gap in resources, especially for the more disenfranchised groups, because the longer you’ve been on the street, the more complex your issues in terms of substance abuse and mental health.”

Civic leaders, including California Assembly member Tom Ammiano, recently held a rally and candlelight march to raise awareness of the tragic rise in homelessness and suicides among LGBTQ youth. Shortly after, Adams told us, “Youth who came here escaping homophobia in their family or city then face the harsh reality of San Francisco.”

Adams understands that some people see Proposition L, legislation on the November ballot to criminalize sitting or lying on city sidewalks, as a way to address disruptive and aggressive behavior on the streets. “But it becomes part of the larger divide, because youth who come here and are on the street are mostly there because they have no other place. So penalizing them in the absence of services, housing, and education is ineffective at best and really harmful at worst,” Adams said.

Many young people on the brink of homelessness are “somewhat invisible,” and therefore at high risk, she said. “Youth will double, triple up. They will couch surf as a way to be off the streets. And we hear the stories where youth are faced with a Sophie’s choice: Do you sleep on the street, or do you barter with what you have available so as to get shelter? And LGBTQ youth are at particular risk because the more disenfranchised and disconnected you are, the more you have to make impossible choices to survive.”

Jodi Schwartz, executive director at Lyric, an SF nonprofit that focuses on building community and inspiring change in LGBTQ youth, said the group serves 500 youth and reaches out to 800 to 1,000 more each year. “We go into classrooms and talk about hate speech, putting it in the context of racism and other forms of oppression,” she said.

“There’s a misconception that because we live in San Francisco and have a lot more dialogue and interaction with the LGBTQ community, that young people’s experience here is so much better. It may be different, but I wouldn’t say it’s better,” Schwartz said, noting that harassment levels, especially for transgendered youth in local schools, are very high.

HELPING THOSE IN NEED

Young women are another at-risk group, especially if they are pregnant, have kids, or are in the foster or juvenile justice system.

As executive director of the Center for Young Women’s Development in San Francisco’s gritty SoMa district, Marlene Sanchez tries to stabilize at-risk young women, then engage them in policy work so they can advocate for other young people they know.

“We work with young women who are involved in the underground street economies, doing prostitution, drug sales, and selling stolen goods like clothes,” Sanchez said. “We try to reach them on the streets and inside Juvenile Hall, so we take an inside-outside approach.”

Leajay Harper, who coordinates CYWD’s Young Mothers United program, works with young pregnant women inside Juvenile Hall.

“We have all experienced poverty, parents on drugs, and having to take care of younger siblings,” Harper said. “When young moms get incarcerated, they are at risk of having their children taken away at much higher rates. So we started parenting classes that are age and culturally relevant.”

City records show that while only about 12 percent of Juvenile Hall detainees are female, they are twice as likely as their male counterparts to land back in custody for probation violations.

“There are lots of young women with felonies struggling to pay their bills and feed their kids who look out the window and see they can sell drugs. And that often seems like the only option,” Sanchez explained.

City statistics also show that of the overwhelmingly male population at Juvenile Hall, almost half is African American, and that many are inside for what appear to be gang-related offenses.

Easop Winston, a 35-year-old local musician, church pastor, and member of the Visitacion Valley Peacekeepers, regularly visits young men inside Juvenile Hall, where gangs are a topic of discussion every week.

“The same guys that they have been fighting with, they are now incarcerated with,” Winston observed. “So one of the approaches I try to take is rehabilitating how they think about their neighbor. You are killing/fighting with someone who lives one block over. It’s plain genocide”

He credits the juvenile justice system for doing its best, but worries that it fails to rehabilitate youthful offenders with jobs skills, education, and counseling before sending them back into society.

He blames the churches for not doing a better job of making youth feel welcome. “Churches are part of the fabric of our community,” he said. “They need to do more outreach and not have so many rules. They need to accept youth as they are, with their tattoos, piercings, and styles of clothing.”

Winston believes politicians need to do a better job of making sure community-based organizations deliver on their promises to help working class communities of color. At the same time, as he acknowledges, “We can’t cure the world in one day.”

“Over the last five to 10 years, the African American population in SF has shrunk,” he observed. “Everybody is moving to Antioch and Fairfield because people can’t afford to live here. People are losing their jobs. And San Francisco has almost become impossible to live in unless you have a college degree. A lot of what I hear from youth is about economics. They want jobs. They want to be trained.”

PUSHING THEM OUT

Political disputes over the city’s sanctuary city policies on undocumented immigrants — which have left in limbo the question of whether arrested immigrants will get their days in court before being turned over to the federal government for possible deportation — have also been a source of instability for immigrant teens, many of whom are homeless and/or LGBTQ.

Police Commissioner Angela Chan, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, decried Mayor Gavin Newsom for refusing to implement Sup. David Campos’ due process legislation, which the board approved in November 2009.

“It’s been a little bit upsetting for the many groups that took the democratic process seriously. But these groups are still very committed to these kids,” Chan said. “We are hoping to work with the new U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag to clarify this issue and explain that the top priority of the Obama administration is not to deport undocumented youth.”

Other so-called tough-on-crime initiatives also threaten local at-risk young people. In September, City Attorney Dennis Herrera secured an injunction against 41 alleged gang members in Visitacion Valley, a strategy that progressives fear will accelerate the ongoing displacement of the African American community.

Court documents show that 66 percent of the men named in the injunction are 18 to 25 years old and that many have children in public housing, where lease holders are predominantly women of color.

San Francisco City College Trustee Chris Jackson, 27, is running for the District 10 seat on the Board of Supervisors. Noting that the southeast SF district has some of the highest numbers of poor people and children citywide, Jackson said that youth issues are similar to challenges that other voters face.

“But the context is different,” said Jackson, who previously served on the San Francisco Youth Commission. “Young people care about safe streets because it’s us or our friends who are on them. We care about schools because we are in them and want to go to college. And we are concerned about the future of employment because how do you tell folks to go to school if there are no jobs?”

Jackson notes that in the Bayview-Hunters Point, home to the city’s largest remaining African American community, kids don’t come back if they leave for college. “We see a brain drain. It’s really difficult to retain young people, so it’s important to first make sure that youth’s housing needs are met. And they also need access to careers so that when they graduate, they know there is a job in the city. But right now, youth can’t even find a summer job because of the recession.”

He called for city policies that are based on the needs of current city residents rather than developers’ profits or the desires of well-off outsiders to move here.

“San Francisco is more of an opportunity for Silicon Valley residents than for youth who were born and raised here. And part of the problem is city policies, ineffective programs, and a failure to provide job opportunities for youth,” he said. “Everything for youth has been gutted.”

And those evaporating opportunities are compounded by punitive policies like Prop. L, Jackson said, further alienating young people. “It comes down to how much money you have,” Jackson observes. “If you are rich, you can enjoy the parks, the clubs, the transit. But if you are low-income, especially low-income youth of color, it’s very hard to take advantage of everything the city has to offer.”

Noting that both City College and the San Francisco Unified School District canceled their summer school program, Jackson said, “it doesn’t look like youth are prioritized.”

Jackson was recently at Double Rock (a.k.a. the Alice Griffith Public Housing Project) and he saw four kids under 10 who were at home while their parents were at work. “Why aren’t they in school or in child care? And don’t give me the line that these are hard to serve communities. We have to serve them.”

N’tanya Lee, executive director of Coleman Advocates, agrees that while all young people are struggling in the city, African American children and youth are having one of the worst times.

“We don’t need 5,000 different strategies and initiatives when 90 percent of these kids live in extreme poverty, mostly concentrated in public housing, and you could fit the city’s entire black high school student population into one auditorium,” Lee said.

She wants the city to create a database of these youth and develop specific strategies to help this population before it’s too late.

“No one in city government feels accountable for the outcomes for black children and youth,” she said. “Instead you have one group who are about young people and another who are about economic development — and they have nothing to do with each other. Meanwhile, we’ve lost half of all black families with children in this city in the past 20 years.”

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Rebecca Bowe on ageing out of the foster care system, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Tim Redmond’s editorial on the issues facing our rising generation

The soul of the city

Andrew Lam

-

October 19, 2010

23

tredmond@sfbg.com

44th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL We all arrived in San Francisco broke: Paulo and me in the ’73 Capri, crawling over Donner Pass with a blown valve and three cylinders firing; Tracy and Craig in the back of a VW van, behind in the payments and on the run from the repo men; Tom and Sharon hitching across the Southwest after Tom, who could bullshit with the best, talked himself out a jail cell in New Orleans. Moak showed up in a rusty Datsun with the wheels falling off. Jane and Danny came on the old hippie bus, the Green Tortoise, $69 across the country.

But we all had a friend who knew a friend where you could crash for a little while. And in the early 1980s you got food stamps the first day and it only took a couple of weeks to get a job waiting tables or canvassing or selling trinkets on the Wharf. And once you’d scraped together a couple hundred dollars — maybe two weeks’ work — you could get a place to live. My first room in a flat in the Western Addition was $120 a month.

We did art and politics and writing and music. After a while, some of us went to law school, some of us became journalists, some of us went into government and education. A few of us fled, and Paulo died in the plague (dammit). But in the end, a lot of us were — and are — San Franciscans, part of a city that welcomed us and gave us a chance.

It was a very different time to be young in San Francisco.

I’m not here to get all nostalgic, really I’m not. There were serious problems in 1982 — raging gentrification was creating clashes in the Mission and the Haight and south of Market that were more violent than anything going on today. And frankly, broke as we were, most of my friends were from middle class homes and were college educated and had a leg up. We weren’t going to starve; we didn’t have to make really ugly choices to eat.

Most of the stories in this special anniversary issue are about marginalized youth — young people trying to survive and make their way against all odds in an increasingly hostile city and a bitter, harsh economy.

But there’s an important difference about San Francisco today, something earlier generations of immigrants didn’t face. The cost of housing, always high, has so outstripped the entry-level and nonprofit wage scale that it’s almost impossible for young people to survive in this town — much less have the time to add to its artistic and creative culture.

I met the 21-year-old daughter of a college friend the other day. She’s as idealistic as we all were. She wants to move to San Francisco for the same reasons we did and you did — except maybe she won’t. Because she felt as if she had to come visit first, to use her dad’s network, see if she could line up a job and figure out if her likely earnings would cover the cost of living. When I mentioned that I’d just up and left the East Coast and headed west, planning to figure it out when I got here, she gave me a look that was part amazement and part sadness. You just can’t do that anymore.

The odds are pretty good that San Francisco won’t get her — her talent and energy will go somewhere else, somewhere that’s not so harsh on young people. I wondered, as I do every once in a while when I’m feeling halfway between an angry political writer and an old curmudgeon: would I come to San Francisco today?

Would Harvey Milk? Would Jello Biafra? Would Dave Eggers? Would you?

If you were born here, would you stay?

Are we squandering this city’s greatest resource — its ability to attract and retain creative people?

The two people who started the Bay Guardian 44 years ago were young arrivals from the Midwest. Bruce Brugmann looked around the city room at the Milwaukee Journal, where he worked as a reporter, and realized there wasn’t any job he wanted there in 10 years. With two young kids and a dream of starting a weekly newspaper in one of the world’s most exciting cities, Bruce and his wife, Jean Dibble, settled in a $130-a-month flat. The Guardian’s first office was a desk in the printers shop. When they paper could finally afford its own space, Bruce and Jean moved the staff into a $60-a-month four-room place on Ninth and Bryant streets.

From the start, the paper was a “preservationist” publication — both in terms of environmental issues like saving the bay and in the larger political sense. The San Francisco Bay Guardian was out to save San Francisco.

The city was under assault — by the developers who were making fast money tossing high-rises into downtown; the speculators making fast money flipping property, ducking taxes, and driving up rents; the unscrupulous landlords who were letting their buildings fall apart while they charged ever higher rent. For the Guardian, fighting this urbicide meant protecting San Francisco values, preserving the best of the city from what Bruce liked to call “the radicals at the Chamber of Commerce.”

For the Guardian, progress wasn’t measured in the number of new buildings constructed, but in the ability of the city to remain a place where artists and writers and community organizers and hell-raisers — and the young people who were always bringing new life to the city — could survive. We supported rent control, and growth limits, and affordable housing policies, and limits on condo conversions, and minimum-wage and sanctuary city laws — and a long list of other things that together amounted to a progressive agenda.

And in 2010, the assault on the young, the poor, the nonconformists, the immigrants, is still on, at full force. The mayor and his allies are pushing a ballot measure that would make it illegal just to sit on the sidewalk. He’s also turning the local juvenile authorities into immigration cops, breaking up families in the process. He’s cut funding for youth services, and wants to make it easier for speculators to evict tenants, take affordable rental housing (especially the flats that young people share to save money) off the market, and create high-priced condos. Virtually all of the new housing he’s pushing is for rich people. He’s shutting down parties and arresting DJs and, in effect, declaring a War on Fun.

What he’s doing — and what the downtown forces want — is the transformation of San Francisco from a welcoming city where the weird is the normal, where the young and the crazy and the brilliant and the broke can be part of (or even drivers of) the culture, to one where profit and property values are all that matter. And that’s a recipe for urban doom.

Richard Florida’s 2004 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class shook up political thinking by pointing out that cities thrive with iconoclasts, not organization people. Everyone likes to talk about that now, even Mayor Gavin Newsom. But the missing piece, from a policy perspective, is that the creative class — particularly the young people who are going to be the next generation of the creative class — needs space to grow. And that means the most important thing a creative city can do is nurture the very people Newsom and his allies want to drive away.

If Prop. L, the “sit-lie” law, passes, if the rental flats in the Mission that have been home to several generations of young artists, writers, musicians and future civic leaders vanish in the name of condo conversions, if 85 percent of all the new housing in San Francisco is affordable only to millionaires, if the money that helps foster kids and runaways and at-risk youth dries up because this rich city won’t raise taxes, if nightlife becomes an annoyance to be stifled…then we’re in danger of losing San Francisco.

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Sarah Phelan on SF’s disadvantaged youth, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Rebecca Bowe’s look at ageing out of the foster care system

How they’re sitting

Andrew Lam

-

October 19, 2010

182

caitlin@sfbg.com

I’ve been hanging out with the Haight Street kids. Over the course of a week or so, I smoked weed, drank malt liquor, witnessed nasty run-ins with police officers — all events that anyone who has walked down the sidewalks of that legendary street would expect. But I also met people who’d give away their last dollar to a friend, people who know a thing or two about community, and people who don’t see sidewalks only as thoroughfares to commerce.

Ironically, though the homeless kids on Haight are the explicit inspiration for Proposition L, the sit-lie measure on the Nov. 2 ballot, their voices have been significantly absent from the vitriolic debate on its merits and faults. Ironic because of all people, it’s these young men and women — and the citizens of San Francisco who interact humanely with them — who could teach us the most about what public space in San Francisco could be.

I didn’t just stand with a notebook, fire questions, and walk away. I took a seat and spent time with the kids, to see for myself whether its true that they’re harassing people, letting their dogs run amok, and generally ruining everyone’s lives as much as sit-lie supporters say they are. That it turned out to be uplifting was an added bonus. I got to see what many don’t on their way to shop for souvenir bongs, retro dresses, and designer skateboards — the reason young people from around the country come to the neighborhood.

It doesn’t have anything to do with fancy Victorians and boutiques, which may explain the disconnect between the street kids and their detractors. They come for the legacy of individuals brave enough to slough off social mores that Haight-Ashbury residents are so ostensibly proud of — not to mention the companionship of others who are comfortable with their rejection of and by society. They come to share stories and pipes and encouragement, and it was cool to watch a streetscape in San Francisco that wasn’t geared solely to commerce.

And while the young people I talked to told me how much they liked to travel, to live free of convention and without ties to the workday world, after a while most acknowledged that they had left behind families who couldn’t or didn’t care for them, home situations that were uncomfortable enough to make life on the streets seem like a better alternative.

Although violent incidents, uncivil behavior, and threatening dogs are well-documented by other news sources, I didn’t see any of that when I was hanging out on Haight. That doesn’t mean that these things don’t exist — but it might suggest that some of the strident supporters of Prop. L are seeing what they want to see.

SPANGING

Steven, who asked us not to use his full name, is 20 and homeless. He grew up in Stockton, became a welder after high school, then decided he “didn’t want the hassle” of staying put for a wage job. His fingernails play host to an ungodly amount of dirt, but his tight blonde curls, pretty golden eyes (“they look like a lion’s!” says one friend in amazement) and mellow, generous demeanor make him a popular hub among his homeless peers.

It doesn’t hurt that he sells weed, small amounts at a time to passing tourists and acquaintances. He silently passes a pipe around to his companions with the slightest provocation. Steven approached me on the street before he knew I was a journalist, a fact that seemed to make little difference to him.

He says he came to the Haight “for the people,” for the area’s reputation of open souls and unconventional artists that originated in the glory days of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. Like most of the kids I talked to, he eschewed the often dangerous shelter scene to sleep in Golden Gate Park or nearby Buena Vista Park despite the police surveillance that could result in spendy fines for park camping.

Although Steven’s worldly possessions fit into the large camping backpack he carries with him 24 hours a day, and even though he’s been living on Haight less than nine months — broken by a jaunt to Eugene, Ore., where he found it “too rainy” to join the town’s expansive street kid community — he doesn’t plan on being homeless forever. It’s just that nothing about this economic climate inspires him to sell his freedom for a paycheck. He plans to go to a four-year college eventually. He sees an education as the only way to get a “real” job. “But until then, why not do this?” he asks. I’m not sure if he’s waiting for my answer.

“This” is sit on Haight Street and “spange,” the term used for “flying a sign” and asking shoppers and neighbors walking by for money, often in a creative way. Of the many crimes street kids are guilty of in the eyes of supporters, spanging is the only one Prop. L would effect.

If Francisco voters approve it, anyone who sits or reclines on the sidewalk (with exceptions for the handicapped and those with permits — but not for the tired, workers on breaks, or people waiting for buses) will be subject to a fine of $50 to $100 for the first offense and $300 to $500, or a maximum of 10 days in jail, for someone found guilty twice within 24 hours of unduly supporting his or her body on the sidewalk between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. Similar laws can be found up and down the West Coast — although Portland’s was pulled from the books last year after being found unconstitutional because it targeted the homeless.

I ask street kid after street kid why they’ve chosen this lifestyle. Many wouldn’t have it any other way. “Why do people want us off the street?” says Oz, a 21 year old from upstate New York who deals alongside Steven. “Probably because they can’t do this themselves.”

Though I’m skeptical at first, after a while I see why the unconventional group of “travelers” on Haight choose to spend their time spanging. Conversations get struck up with the most unusual people — the old hippie who bought a new Mad Hatter cap for the weekend, the suburban woman who might or might not like to buy some weed (she can’t decide). When a few businesses ask us to move so they can sweep the sidewalk or clear a doorway, the street kids I’m watching relocate with little protest. Many who walk past Steven seemed to find humor in his sign, which that day reads “Are you one paycheck away from having this be your job too?” He says he likes to switch his message daily. “Keep it fresh.”

By hanging out with the spangers, I get to see a Haight Street with human interaction at its core. People walk by, often dropping off surprisingly generous gifts: a ex-Grateful Dead roadie with a massive beard who lives in Fairfax and stopped by the neighborhood for a quick lunch with his daughter parks in front of Steven’s group and approaches them. “You kids hungry? You look like you could use a pizza.”

He emerges a half-hour later with a large cheese pie and drives away after chatting for a few minutes about the old days, to the glee of the group (many of the street kids are Dead Heads). The kids eat their fill, then start handing out the remaining pizza to people walking by, a comic role reversal. “I like to support the community — they get back all the money they get sucked out of them,” Steven tells me.

“NARCOTIC FUELED, ANTISOCIAL THUGS”

The campaign to put a sit-lie ordinance into effect in San Francisco kicked into gear with a Saturday morning stroll. As San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius — who regularly publicizes complaints against the Haight street kid culture — reported Feb. 27, Mayor Gavin Newsom recently relocated to the neighborhood and saw evidence of drug use on the main stretch of Haight where he was walking with his infant daughter. “As God as my witness, there’s a guy on the sidewalk smoking crack,” Newsom reportedly said.

The mayor threw his support behind a sentiment already being voiced by the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, a resident-merchant alliance in the area. HAIA sees the street kids as disruptive outsiders. “These are not the flower children of the 1960s. It’s narcotic fueled, antisocial thugs who act like a quasi-gang,” Ted Loewenberg, president of the association, was quoted as saying in Business Week.

Adds the Prop L website: ” … the Haight-Ashbury district — once synonymous with peace and love — this corridor is now a hot spot for street bullies, pit bulls, and drug abuse.” It’s a deft cultural lobotomy that dissociates drugs from the Summer of Love, and a devious one that implies that street kids weren’t major players in that social revolution.

As for the bullies, I didn’t see any violence from the street kids in the days and nights I spent out on Haight Street.

I couldn’t get cops to talk to me about it, either. There were two police officers on foot traversing Haight’s main strip and I introduced myself when they stood chatting with a coffee shop owner in the afternoon sunshine and asked them about the sort of neighborhood complaints they regularly received about the street kids.

“No comment,” Cop No. 1 told me. Okay, Cop No. 2, your thoughts? “I don’t speak English.”

To my requests that they share their view of crime on Haight, I could get one response: “It’s complicated.” Later, when I returned to write down their badge numbers, they were standing silently, staring at a lone young man sitting against a wall next to his skateboard. The kid was looking at the ground. Eventually they handcuffed him and put him in a police car while he pleaded meekly about it “only being a little bit of weed — and I was only skateboarding on the sidewalk.”

The most aggression I witnessed from any party took place while I was tapping my feet to a group of traveling bluegrass musicians performing around 10 p.m. on a Thursday. Their cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway” had inspired an older homeless man to strike up a curiously graceful stomp dance on the sidewalk. He was so drunk and fully immersed in the music that the bottle of Jim Beam in his flailing hand didn’t even register when the police officer approached him and asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

The musicians began to pack up. “I could have told you this would happen 20 minutes ago,” one tells me, nodding toward the old man. “Don’t say a word or I’ll fucking take you in,” said the cop, who poured out the half-full bottle and wrote a ticket for the older man, who had made a few feeble protests that ended abruptly with the cop’s obscenity.

The officer said he’d received a complaint about the music, a line I heard from each cop I came into contact with on Haight — including one officer who cautioned a family with a toddler to pack up the bracelets they were selling to pay the towing charges on their van. “People don’t like to see people with kids out here, you better move it along,” the cop said.

“I’ve seen aggression because people start shit,” Steven tells me when I ask him about his experience with street violence. A man has just walked by chanting “dirty, dirty” in Steven’s and his friends’ faces. “They don’t like to see people sit on the ground.”

“There are people who come down here just to make themselves look better,” chimes in Oz. “Like ‘ha ha ha, I have air conditioning.’ All kinds of people start shit”

I asked if they knew they were the focus of a massive political debate in San Francisco. “No, what debate?” asked Steven.

“You mean sit-lie?” Oz asks. “It probably has to do with tourism. I don’t see why else they would do that.”

Even the most well-known recent case of Haight Street violence — which was reported June 11 by New York Times reporter Scott James as having “inspired a grass roots movement” that propelled Prop. L, seems to be a question of mutual aggression on the two sides of the street kids issue.

The story goes that a man named Thomas was hosing down the sidewalk in front of his house — a practice that is growing more common in the Haight to make property inhospitable to the homeless. He found himself “surrounded and engaged in a heated confrontation,” as James reports. Thomas reportedly shouted “Do you want a piece of me?” and a scuffle erupted between him and Chad Potter, a 26-year old homeless man, culminating with Potter being arrested and set free the next day. Thomas says Potter and friends continued to harass him after the incident.

James Orr, 24, is busking with his flute when I meet him sitting by a store that sells flowing hippie skirts and bumper stickers that command future tailgaters to “Coexist.” He’s looking to trade his wind instrument for a banjo, which he plays in addition to guitar. A rolling stone, Orr is in town for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival that weekend — he travels the country going to festivals, and even scored a job recently at upstate New York’s Mountain Jam for the event’s blog site, taking photos with a borrowed camera of performances by (ex-member of The Band) Levon Helm and Michael Franti.

Orr’s quite erudite and eager to “say something articulate” about the situation of the street kids and travelers on Haight. He tells me that yeah, he’s seen aggression go down here on occasion. But he resents those situations leading to laws against sitting on the street.

“It’s another example of the few that do mess up casting a bad light on everyone else. Most of us just want to make some money, put a smile on someone’s face.” As a busker, he finds it baffling that people who are against the presence of the homeless would want him to stop plying his trade by making sitting illegal. “You should point out also that it’s how we make money!” he exclaims.

THE PIT BULLS

Snarling ruffians on frayed rope leashes stalking the city streets! As evidenced by the Civil Sidewalks campaign, dogs — specifically pit bulls — are another source of controversy on the pavement. Last December, SFist identified a C.W. Nevius tirade against the breed as example of its ongoing feature “Pit Bull Hate Watch.” The paper has pointed out that the demonized dogs can make great members of society and are often the subject of a media smear campaign.

But for many homeless youth, their dogs aren’t the means of imposing chaos on the gentry. They keep them for the same reasons we do: friendship, protection, love — and during the days I spent on Haight, it was a pleasure to pat the doggies while interviewing their owners. Most were as gentle and laid back as the kids they sprawled next to, a reasonably expected result from the 24 hours a day of socialization with humans that the homeless lifestyle affords.

Smiley is an inveterate street kid unlikely to go indoors anytime soon. “I don’t know how to do anything else,” she tells me. Now in her early 20s with a shock of magenta, purple, and dirty blonde hair and fanciful purple ear plugs that pierce her lobes before spiraling nearly to her shoulders, she’s been traveling since she was 12 — “a Bohemian by blood,” as she puts it. Not only did her parents move their household regularly throughout her childhood, but their heritage is Romani, from the traveling tribes of Eastern Europe.

For Smiley, travel outside the bounds of business trips and weekend vacations is her life’s norm, and Haight Street’s legacy resounds in her nomadic soul. “Most of the people that travelers idolize were here,” she tells me.

Smiley has a year-old behemoth black mutt with droopy eyes. He obliges her as she leans into him holding her spanging sign, which tells the world the pup needs Benadryl for an upcoming van ride to Southern California. “He’s carsick,” she tells me sheepishly. She admits that the dog can limit her mobility on public transportation, but his benefits outweigh his cost. He keeps her warm at night — and, more important for a young woman who is often on her own, he protects her. For a moment breaking out of tough girl mode, she tell me, “oh yeah, I don’t have to worry about anything when he’s around.”

We talk about the perceived threat of dogs on Haight Street. “They want us to leash them, which I guess I understand — but look at that!” A well-dressed woman in her 40s has her Chihuahua off its leash and it has run into the busy street, with her in hot pursuit. “That dog’s out of control,” Smiley smiles.

PISS

Sitting against a mural on a wall where Haight meets Clayton, I watch Piss, an outgoing, gangly guy in his early 20s with a curly blonde mohawk in a growing-out stage. I ask him where he got his unusual moniker. “I like to get drunk and piss on things,” he says.

Well. Originally from Billings, Mont., Piss has been traveling since his mid-teens. “Let’s just say me and my family don’t get along,” he tells me.

His answers to my questions about why he’s on the streets follow a path I see with many of the younger homeless youth: they insist that the lure of the open road was too hard to ignore, but eventually reveal that their parents kicked them out or were unable to care for them at a young age. Many, like Juju, another small-time weed dealer I met, bounced from family member to family member until frictions with them and their significant others left no recourse but the street.

Piss says he’s been to every state in the country, plus Canada and Mexico. With so many years on the road, he is, as they say, letting his freak flag fly. Piss has a blue, vaguely tribal tattoo that curls around his right eye. He’s wearing white tube socks on the dirty pavement. At first glance, he could be crazy — and maybe he is. Whatever his motivation for travel, it’s not to blend in with the locals.

Piss is also actively spanging passersby in a manner that oscillates between off-putting and charming. “You got some money for some crack and ice cream?” he inquires of a passing trio of young women. They shake their head, but before they’re gone completely he continues “I’m just kidding! I don’t like ice cream! Hey miss, you have a nice ass … day!”

Over the course of the hour that I watch him a stand up routine emerges. Beneath the grime, he’s a charismatic kid with an enviable sense of comedic timing.

As he ranges up and down a 20-foot stretch of sidewalk, belly laughs are elicited from a few targets, dollars surfacing here and there. One man carrying an accordion and wearing an expensive-looking pair of leather Chaco sandals donates a handful of strawberries to Piss and to those of us acting as his entourage.

But Piss’ play is a little rough — like a big puppy — and he’s alienating the people who don’t crack up over crack. A couple of people walk away quickly from his petitions shaking their heads over one of the zingers, their suspicions confirmed about those rowdy Haight Street kids.

He’s not doing anything more than what young travelers do all over the world. Thousands of families bid see you later to young adults en route to Prague, Peru, and Perth each year, where they lug their dirty backpacks through the world’s most wondrous towns.

Of course, these kids aren’t sleeping in the public parks of Cuzco — but in countries with plenty of cheap travelers’ hostels, you don’t have to. And though international flights cost more than the van rides and freight train hops that brought in most of the Haight Street kids, backpackers abroad do the same things: take fewer showers and flaunt social norms — not because they want to cause a problem for the natives of the lands they pass through, but because they are young, and discovering themselves for the first time, and can’t see much past that. Piss isn’t being violent, but he has lost the language to deal with “normies” and he’s seen as unpredictable to the not-traveling, not-disenfranchised around him. Which to those who see public space as a place that should be predictable, mean he’s a threat.

The clash between the settled and transient in the Haight is not new. Indeed, it’s what made the neighborhood famous. As far back as the mid-1960s, officials have been simultaneously fighting and publicizing the Haight’s worldwide reputation as a traveler’s meeting place, a place with a culture of loosened societal moorings and enlightenment through free love, drugs, and art.

Businesses claim that the omnipresent homeless drive away paying customers from Haight Street. It a curious claim in an area where the vagrant hippie culture made the place the tourist attraction it is today, and one that is belied by the entry of Whole Foods, which plans to open a branch this year at a lot at Haight and Stanyan vacant since 2006. When contrasted with the Tenderloin — another neighborhood with a visible street community — and its chronic problems attracting a grocery store, the Haight street kids’ effect on local commerce doesn’t seem to be all that grave.

They certainly aren’t making the place any less desirable of a neighborhood to live in for the wealthy. Real estate website Trulia.com puts the median listing price for homes in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood at $962,264.

The Haight Street kids I spoke could all too easily see what sit-lie would mean for San Francisco. When you control public space, you control who is in public space — and they have no illusions about whether or not they’re included in the perfect world of those who push the measure. If it’s enacted, the subculture that made Haight famous — part of which still survives today in a different form — would be gone, leaving it sterile and safe for the head shops and clothing boutiques, an even less authentic version of the ’60s love fest their patrons come to the street for. One wonders if a scrubbed-clean Haight is even what the residents and business owners who have thrown their lot behind sit-lie truly want, or if they’ve been duped into sit-lie’s efficacy by the same forces that on a national level have convinced us that curtailing civil liberties will lead to freedom for the real Americans. It comes down to this: What do we want Haight Street to be? Do we want to capitalize and benefit from the accepting, messy, wildly creative legacy the 20th century endowed our streets, or do we want a clean, friendly, outdoor mall? The powers of homogenization and gentrification can demonize the little heathens on Haight Street all they want, but they’ve miscalculated if they think that they don’t belong in San Francisco — after all, Haight created them, not the other way around.

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Sarah Phelan on SF’s disadvantaged youth, Rebecca Bowe’s look at ageing out of the foster care system, and Tim Redmond’s editorial on the issues facing our rising generation

On the edge

Andrew Lam

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October 19, 2010

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

It’s a strange and daunting time for anyone just starting out, but youth who age out of foster care are up against particularly harsh challenges.

In July, the national unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds reached a staggering 51 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A recent article in The New York Times Magazine described how, in the face of a bleak job market, 20-somethings today are far more likely than those in past generations to go back to school, travel, volunteer, or complete unpaid internships — extending a phase of impermanence and financial dependency for years beyond what used to be considered the norm. Studies show that nearly half of youth between ages 18 and 25 move back home with their parents at least once.

But young people aging out of the foster care system typically have to face this world of churning uncertainty without the benefit of a safety net. Many post-foster care youth don’t have the luxury of “failing to launch,” embarking on an early career path without pay, or landing back home if nothing else pans out. Foster youth lose their support base at 18, when the state ceases to be their legal guardian. For these young people, who are often the least equipped to achieve financial self-sufficiency, becoming emancipated as a legal adult is no cause for celebration; rather, it’s a source of anxiety.

Most foster youth lack the skills, connections, and resources they would need to transition to independence at age 18 — a prospect that would be difficult even for youth with greater access to resources and no major family history problems. Studies measuring the outcomes for this population paint a grim picture: many wind up homeless, incarcerated, or at risk of losing children of their own by the time they reach their early 20s.

There’s a growing awareness that many of the approximately 5,000 youth who age out of foster care in California every year are slipping through the cracks. Local and state programs have been initiated to improve their chances of achieving independence, but efforts on both fronts have run up against obstacles.

In Sacramento, Assembly Bill 12 — which extends key services for foster youth to age 21 — was signed into law several weeks ago, but the intentions behind it were undermined when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a line-item veto of $80 million in funding for child welfare programs. In San Francisco, a housing facility designed for youth at risk of homelessness seems to hold promise as an effective model, yet it has encountered resistance from local neighborhood organizations.

The plight of these young people is both a measure of our compassion and potentially a harbinger of larger societal problems to come.

HIGH STAKES

Kirsten Johnson-Bell is an emancipated youth who turned 18 in January. She has six siblings still in foster care in the East Bay, and she says she has been in more than 20 foster care placements since 2007.

Johnson-Bell told the Guardian that she has housing assistance that will last for 18 months — but she’s already beginning to wonder what will happen after that. “Where am I supposed to go?” Johnson-Bell wondered. If the experience of her peers who’ve exited the system is any indication, her concern is well founded.

Nationwide, nearly 40 percent of post-foster-care youth have been homeless at some point by the time they turn 24, according to survey results released by the University of Chicago and Partners for Our Children at the University of Washington. Just 6 percent had completed college degrees by that age, and only 48 percent were working — mostly in low-wage jobs. More than half of the young men had been convicted of crimes, and roughly three-quarters of the young women had received government benefits to meet basic needs. Teen pregnancy is statistically higher among young women exiting foster care.

Most youth in foster care aren’t housed continuously with a single caregiver, but bounce from place to place, making it tough to form long-lasting relationships. “It’s a fairly rare experience that youth stay in one home, and that means moving schools and moving friends,” notes Rachel Antrobus, executive director of Transitional Age Youth San Francisco (TAY SF), a city-funded nonprofit. Many foster kids take medication for behavioral problems, and it’s common for them to experience emotional upheaval.

“It’s practically inevitable that they’re going to have long-term emotional impacts,” Antrobus said, noting many bear the long-term scars of abuse, neglect, or forced separation from their families for some other reason. “It’s a much longer road, and they have to do it with deeper wounds. Even the kids that are the most together … will likely experience some really dark places in their 20s.”

In San Francisco, there are 1,400 young people in the foster care system, and all but about 500 are in placements outside the city. Lynette Davis, who turned 18 this year, moved from San Francisco to Oakland when she first entered foster care in the eighth grade. Davis acknowledges that she was one of the lucky ones. Rather than move in with a stranger, she went to live with her godmother and remained there until her 18th birthday.

Davis is now living with her boyfriend and his family in Oakland — and the household was in the process of moving when the Guardian spoke with her. Her godmother offered to continue housing her after she turned 18, Davis noted. “But she’s got her own kids. I felt like I should be able to go off and do my own thing.” The requirement in either housing situation is that she must work, go to school, or both, Davis said. She’s attending classes at Oakland’s Merritt College. In the meantime, she’s mired in the frustrating exercise of applying for job after job.

“It’s been pretty ridiculous,” Davis said of her fruitless job hunt. “Sometimes it makes me want to stop and give up. But as long as you’ve got people around you who care about you, it’s okay.”

Many foster kids who didn’t have the support network that Davis did are up against alarmingly high stakes as they age out. “Some people are mothers and they have to pay rent and are looking for more than two jobs,” she said. Asked what she thought were the greatest challenges facing foster youth in San Francisco, she mentioned poverty, gangs, and a lack of job opportunities.

“To be successful, you have to be financially stable,” she said. “With some youth, that’s hard. They don’t have jobs, or they can’t get jobs. They want to find an easy way out.” That’s when they become more susceptible to gangs or drugs, she said. Davis says she was a “rebellious youth” at a younger age, but now she’s focused on her goal of obtaining a degree in psychology so that one day she can go into counseling. When she became a member of California Youth Connections, which aids youth with transitional support, she met other foster youth and realized she could really have an impact.

HELP OR HARM?

The difference between ages 18 and 21 can be critical, so foster youth advocates throughout the state cheered Sept. 30 when AB12, California’s Fostering Connections to Success Act, was signed into law. It allows California to make use of federal matching funds to provide transitional support for qualifying foster youth until age 21. It also authorizes the state to take advantage of a federal subsidy for an existing guardianship program for relatives of foster youth who want to become caregivers. Many foster youth advocates have thrown support behind the kin caregiver model — it can be less traumatic for youth to move in with a grandparent than being suddenly dropped into a strange place.

A major sponsor of A 12 was the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes, and policy director Amy Lemley hailed its passage as “the biggest child-welfare improvement in 20 years.” Studies show that youth who receive support beyond 18 are 200 percent more likely to be working toward completion of a high school diploma, 65 percent less likely to have been arrested, and 54 percent less likely to have been incarcerated than those who exit with no support. The benefits could also generate savings by reducing the number of people in prison, on welfare, or in need of publicly funded health and human services. The law will be implemented in 2012.

The law also will provide new housing options. The federal government will chip in to cover more placements in the Transitional Housing Program Plus — nearly axed during the last budget cycle — which offers supervised transitional housing for emancipated youth. Youth may also receive a rent subsidy that could apply in a dorm, a shared-living situation, or another arrangement that fits the youth’s needs. This flexibility is a positive change, Lemley noted. “We’re not telling young people ‘it’s our way or the highway,'<0x2009>” she said.

“If a state like California can do this in the context of its current fiscal deficit, it sends a strong signal to other states,” Lemley said. However, an unexpected line-item veto put a damper on the landmark achievement. Schwarzenegger dealt a blow to the child-welfare system by cutting $80 million in funding for programs the California Legislature had restored, which actually amounts to more like $133 million due to the loss of federal matching funds.

“It’s really just a schizophrenic policy on the governor’s part,” Lemley said. “We were hoping he would have a legacy of the foster care governor, but now it doesn’t seem as if he will have that legacy at all.”

While the deep budget cut isn’t aimed at AB12 directly, Lemley said, it erodes funding for child-welfare workers and forces counties to make painful funding cuts. The overarching effect is that abuse and neglect may go undetected more often, and youth in the system will have fewer available resources once they’re placed.

ANOTHER CHANCE

Of all the challenges facing foster youth who age out of the system, housing is among the most critical, particularly in San Francisco. A partnership between the city, Larkin Street Youth Services, and nonprofit developer Community Housing Partnership (CHP) aims to address this by providing a space for transitional-age youth who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford housing in the city. Located at the King Edward II Inn near Cow Hollow and the Marina district, the facility would house 24 young people, ages 18 to 24, who are at risk of homelessness.

“By definition, that includes youth aging out of foster care,” explains David Schnur of CHP. The nonprofits are working in tandem with the city’s Human Services Agency and Mayor’s Office of Housing.

Youth housed at Edward II would have access to physical and mental health care, substance abuse and HIV-related services, education and job training, coaching in basic life skills such as budgeting and personal hygiene, and case management, Schnur said. They would be required to contribute a portion of their income, whatever the amount, toward rent.

However, an organized force of opposition has already surfaced from the surrounding community, which comprises one of San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhoods. “I think people are just nervous about what it means to have a building of this type in the neighborhood,” Schnur noted. To assuage neighborhood concerns, the nonprofits have set up a project advisory committee in hopes of talking it out and bringing everyone on board.

Patricia Vaughey, with the Marina-Cow Hollow Neighbors, is actively opposed to the project but insists that it isn’t out of NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) concerns. “We are not NIMBYs,” she told the Guardian. “We want to find a location that’s suitable. We want to make sure those kids are safe.” She said that criminal activity in the neighborhood made the inn a poor choice. Yet advocates insist that for the youth, the program could mean the difference between a lifetime of hardship and a chance to get their lives on track at a crucial age. “The safety net for these young people is so thin,” Lemley noted. “You might have one person, you might have another. But then the winds of change blow and suddenly the bloom falls off the rose.”

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Sarah Phelan on SF’s disadvantaged youth, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Tim Redmond’s editorial on the issues facing our rising generation

Film listings

David Talbot

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October 19, 2010

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

SF DOCFEST

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

OPENING

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

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

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

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

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

ONGOING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 20th annual Potero Hill Festival

Andrew Lam

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October 15, 2010

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It’s the little festival with a big view. Potrero Hill, the home of the Guardian, is hosting the 20^th annual festival with of a “New Orleans” Style Brunch created by the California Culinary Academy and an exciting street fair on 20^th Street between Missouri & Wisconson Streets. Enjoy music, food, crafts and activities for the young and old alike.

Potrero Hill Festival
Date: October 16, 2010, 11am-4pm
Location: 20th Street Between Missouri & Wisconson Streets

New Orleans Jazz Brunch
Location: Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, 953 De Haro Street
Date: October 16, 2010, 9:00am-1:00pm

Before the Festival, join the Festival Committee and the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House for an annual tradition – a lavish and delicious brunch catered by the California Culinary Academy featuring Dixieland music and superb bay views.

Festival Performances & Activities

Main and Side Stage including performances by some of the area’s most exciting performers.
Kids Area including bouncy house, petting zoo, pony rides, performer stage and more
Snack the Hill: A variety of food from Potrero Hill restaurateurs and more
Over 40 Potrero Hill and local artists, merchants & nonprofit organizations

Marketing

Collectible Posters will be posted on Potrero Hill and beyond
Advertising in Potrero View & the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Online campaign including a website, social marketing and email campaign

Attendance

Festival has an expected attendance of over 7,500 Potrero Hill & San Francisco Residents
New Orleans Jazz Brunch will be attended by as many as 500 Potrero Hill and San Francisco Residents

Benefits the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House

The Potrero Hill Festival will support the programs of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House (NABE). The NABE is an invaluable community resource that provides important programs for the community, including youth and senior nutrition, employment and supplemental education programs and programs for developmentally disabled adults.

Go see Kathy Griffin, the parking’s better

Andrew Lam

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October 13, 2010

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Is Kathy Griffin as irritating as oil stains on a pelican’s plumage or does she just play it as such on TV? After speaking with the comedian in anticipation of her live show this weekend at the Zellerbach Auditorium (Sat/17), this much is clear: Griffin is certainly committed to her character.

One would expect no less of a woman who has ridden a red-headed whorl of derision-abrasion from a Suddenly Susan sidekick gig to a six-season and counting reality TV show (My Life on the D-List) – not to mention sold out gigs at Madison Square Garden and a memoir entitled Official Book Club Selection that people appear to be liking. Sure, Stephen Baldwin and Dr. Phil have independently sought to strangle her, but they did so in front of her audience. She’s like, the most popular unpopular girl ever, Rodney Dangerfield had he dropped the hangdog and set up a RSS feed straight to TMZ. Read on for our scuffle over philanthropy and sailor-style swearing.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Where are you right now?

Kathy Griffin: I’m looking at an email I got from Gloria Vanderbilt.

SFBG: Uh-huh.

KG: And um… that doesn’t dazzle you, period? Don’t act like you’ve ever gotten an email from Gloria Vanderbilt, because you haven’t. So Gloria Vanderbilt is going to have me over for my birthday to her apartment in New York.

SFBG: You know her?

KG: Yeah. I do know her. But still every time I get an email from her that just says Gloria Vanderbilt, I get a little excited.

SFBG: I hear that. So at what point do you stop being D-list?

KG: When I get to go to fucking Gloria Vanderbilt’s house for my birthday!

SFBG: Is that the moment?

KG: I mean that’s a fucking moment, are you kidding me? Thank you for getting how fucking awesome that is. By the way, I still will not be talking about that at my Berkeley show because my audience will be like we don’ t give a shit, we want to hear about Britney Spears. But I just wanted to tell you as a journalist because I knew you would enjoy it. Okay, now is there anything I need to know about Berkeley when I play there as opposed to when I play San Francisco?

SFBG: More white people.

KG: More white people? Oh boy, well there goes the neighborhood, lemme tell ya.

SFBG: No I don’t know, there will probably be a lot of college people there.

KG: That’s good, college audiences are smart, if they go to that school. Or a nearby community college.

SFBG: Parking might be better.

KG: So you’re saying the number one reason to come isn’t because I have a New York Times number one best seller, it’s because the parking’s better. Honey I will take whatever I can get, if you want to title this article go see Kathy Griffin: the parking’s better – whatever gets there, I can twat it on my Twitter, please follow me at @kathygriffin – I swear to god that’s something I would put on there, hey I hear the parking’s better in Berkeley. And I’d probably get, like 4,000 people to go, oh in that case I’ll go.

SFBG: What is your income breakdown like these days? Where are you making your money, is it from the reality show?

KG: I make the majority of my money from touring, I do not make it from My Life on the D-list, and also I end up spending a certain amount of money, for example I’m going to donate my entire salary to The Trevor Project. So there’s another freebie. But anyway, it’s a great organization.

SFBG: So you’re going to donate all the money you’ve made for the year? What does that mean?

KG: It means my entire salary from one night, which is more than you make in a year. So show some fucking respect because I’m giving a lot of money and don’t even give me shade like oh, part of your salary? Yeah, I employ people, I have a lot of overhead, and it’s a large, large chunk of money that I’m happily giving to The Trevor Project. It’s a great place where they have a 24-hour hotline that is nationwide. Because if you saw me on Larry King the other night, the teen suicide epidemic is extremely upsetting. Okay, I digress, because the show in Berkeley is going to be fun, fun, fun. But just know behind the scenes I’m working with The Trevor Project.

SFBG: A lot of people give you a lot of crap–

KG: Yeah. You just did. “You’re donating your whole salary?” Yeah, I’m donating my whole salary and I’m going to live in a youth hostel. How much are you donating? Oh my god! I’m donating more than anybody and you’re like is that your whole salary, big deal. It’s a lot of money, more than anyone you’re going to interview is donating. I’m a busy girl. But not too busy to talk about the Lohan! Not too busy to talk about the kids on Jersey Shore! Just know that every time I make fun of Snooki or The Situation in some way it’s helping veterans or suicidal gay teens.

SFBG: Have you met the kids from Jersey Shore?

KG: Oh hell yeah, I’ve met them several times.

SFBG: And what are they like in person?

KG: Well they smell bad because they’re so into the tanning, but they’re not into the showering. I guess they feel like they can wash off their filth, and I don’t think they can.

SFBG: I guess GTL has nothing to do with showering.

KG: I’m trying to get them to add the “S” to the GTL. Did you ever fuck a guy that actually leaves your sheets greasy? Cuz I have and I’m like bye, thanks, ew. If I ever fucked The Situation, I’m not kidding you, I would use rubber sheets. Can that be the title of your article? I’m sure that’s going to go down really well with your editor. If he’s gay I have a tiny shot.

SFBG: I was talking to my friends about what I should ask you last night and we came up with a few questions. If you were a cut of meat, what would you be?

KG: Filet mignon, super well done, no pink at all, totally grey. With a bearnaise sauce.

Kathy Griffin

Sun/17 7 p.m., $57.60-$96

Zellerbach Hall

101 Zellerbach #4800, Berk.

(800) 345-3000

www.livenation.com

Our Weekly Picks: October 13-19

Andrew Lam

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October 12, 2010

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WEDNESDAY 13

MUSIC

Vader

Vader’s history stretches back almost 30 years. Borrowing Darth’s moniker might not have been the world’s most original idea, but they were likely among the first to have done it. The Polish death metal stalwarts formed in 1983 in Olstzyn, deep behind the Iron Curtain. Successful demo recordings got them hooked with Earache Records, and the band has been pillaging the world’s stages ever since. Guitarist-singer Piotr Wiwczarek is the only original member left in the fold, but the band’s anthemic music is as potent as ever, mixing impossibly thick blast beats with heavy slabs of neoclassical melody. Their upcoming album Return to the Morbid Reich is a nod to the 1990 demo that made their name; this tour, they’re inviting you along for the ride. (Ben Richardson)

With Immolation, Abigail Williams, Lecherous Nocturne, and Pathology

6:30 p.m., $22

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

THURSDAY 14

DANCE

Lines Ballet

The story of Scheherazade and her 1,001 nights of tales to postpone her beheading by the Persian king has intrigued and captivated audiences for ages. Choreographer Alonzo King’s dance adaptation Scheherazade delves beyond the story to explore themes ranging from the symbolism of abused women to the transformative power imbued in the tales. The company of chiseled titans dance alongside tabla master Zakir Hussain’s score, which incorporates traditional Persian instrumentation into the original classical composition by Rimsky-Korsakov. The piece premiered in Monaco last December; San Franciscans can now experience King’s artistic rendering of Scheherazade’s classic tale for themselves. (Emmaly Wiederholt)

Through Oct. 24

Thurs/14, 7 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.;

Sun., 5 p.m.; Oct. 20–21, 7:30 p.m., $25–$75

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Novellus Theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.linesballet.org

FILM

“Jim Henson and Friends: Inside the Sesame Street Vault”

Consider the Muppet. Made of foam and googly eyes, set atop spindly legs under a mop of primary-color hair, these brave figures have become our children’s teachers on a level unparalleled in the world of infotainment. We’re talking street, of course — Sesame Street, which since its 1969 debut has won 97 Emmy awards, more than any other show. Yerba Buena Center for the Art is running a series of Sesame clip collections, and today’s viewing pays homage to the contributions of the show’s early creative team, with a special furry hug to creator Jim Henson, and little-seen guest appearances from the show’s early days. (Caitlin Donohue)

7:30 p.m. (also Sat/16, 2 p.m.), $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

DANCE

“CounterPULSE’s Performing Diaspora: Sri Susilowati”

Stripping world dance of its trappings is quite the rage these days. But few have done it so radically as Indonesian classical dancer did Sri Susilowati at last year’s Performing Diaspora festival. Yet this was the same artist who, only a few months before at the Ethnic Dance Festival, had performed an exquisite, contemporary Javanese mourning dance. Now she is back, having been invited to expand on her 2009 piece. Susilowati may look one of those ethereal dance creatures whose bodies are so stylized that it’s difficult to think of them having earthly passions. Yet they do. Hint on Susilowati: food. Another Indonesian dancer, Prumsodun Ok, opens the show for her. (Rita Felciano)

Thurs/14–Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 3 p.m., $24

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission St./SF

(415) 626-2060

www.brownpapertickets.com

MUSIC

Fresh and Onlys and Kelley Stoltz

San Francisco-based artists the Fresh and Onlys and Kelley Stoltz will both have new albums on hand at this double CD release blowout. The new Fresh and Onlys disc, Play It Strange, showcases the band’s garage-rocky spin on 1960s pop, and was recorded for the first time outside of a DIY studio setup with Comets on Fire producer Tim Green. Stoltz releases his newest batch of throwbacks to the Beatles’ and Beach Boys’ style of sunny pop with To Dreamers. This is a perfect night to come out and support local music. (Landon Moblad)

With Carletta Sue Kay

9:30 p.m., $12

Café Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

FRIDAY 15

DANCE

Dandelion Dancetheater

Known for its loud, provocative works merging dance, drama, and music, Dandelion Dancetheater turns its attention to motherhood in MamaLOVE: Seeds of Winter. The seven-women cast explores mom-related themes by diffusing fairy tales, myths, and lullabies to discover the context and relevance of the cultural archetypes and stereotypes surrounding motherhood. Each evening brings a rotating roster of guest mama-choreographers: Mary Carbonara, Tammy Cheney, Laura Elaine Ellis, Suzanne Gallo, Dana Lawton, Laura Renaud-Wilson, and Chingchi Yu. Directed by Kimiko Guthrie, the show promises to be haunting, hilarious, and not to be missed as the mom-artists address the complexities of love, loss, connection, and independence. (Wiederholt)

Though Oct. 24

Fri-Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 7 p.m. (also Oct. 24, 3 p.m.), $12-15

Shawl Anderson Dance Center

2704 Alcatraz, Berk.

(510) 654-5921

www.dandeliondancetheater.org

SATURDAY 16

MUSIC

“Longplayer San Francisco: 1,000 Years in Three Simultaneous Acts”

As a founding member of legendary rabble-rousers the Pogues, Jem Finer helped the band deconstruct traditional Irish music and create a new musical creature out of its varied influences. Taking this willingness to experiment with different sounds and ideas and bringing it to another level, Finer composed Longplayer, a piece designed to last 1,000 years and played on instruments such as Tibetan bowl gongs. Today’s special performance will be a 1,000-minute excerpt performed by 18 musicians on a custom-built, 60-foot-wide circular “instrument” — so slow down and take some time to absorb some art that goes against today’s faster-is-better mentality. (Sean McCourt)

7 a.m.–11:40 p.m., $25–$28

Yerba Buena Center For The Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

EVENT

“ODC Theater’s JumpstART”

Several years and millions of bucks in the making, ODC is at last ready to unveil its new state-of-the-art “cultural campus” in the Mission in a celebratory free day of “dance, theater, performance, and community.” With more than 20 performers and organizations participating, there will be something for everybody — yes, even clogging — at this one-of-a-kind public offering. A glance at the roster includes such names as Scott Wells and Dancers, Robert Moses’ Kin, Killing My Lobster, Youth Speaks, and of course ODC/Dance, all curated by ODC Theater director Rob Bailis in collaboration with the likes of choreographer Joe Goode, world music expert Lilly Kharrazi, and playwright-director Mark Jackson. (Robert Avila)

Noon–11 p.m., free (tickets available one hour prior to each performance)

ODC Theater

3153 17th St, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org

DANCE

Trolley Dances

I still wish they’d call them Street Car Dances instead of Trolley Dances, because that’s what they are, but the name is a registered trademark and has its origins in San Diego (where they actually have trolleys). However, there is nothing else I would change on these annual easy-rider events. They are pure fun, and curator Kim Epifano always comes up with an intriguing lineup of entertainers. This year you’ll see, among others, dancers from Joe Goode Performance Group, Sara Shelton Mann, Ensohza Minyoshu (traditional Japanese folk music and dance), and Sunset Chinese Folk Dance Group. And do look out for a special treat on Ninth Ave for our animal friends, courtesy of brilliant maskmaker Mike Stasiuk. Boarding takes place at Duboce Park. (Felciano)

Through Sun/17

11 a.m. (runs every 45 minutes until 2:45 p.m.), free with Muni fare ($2)

Duboce at Scott, SF

(415) 226-1139

www.epiphanydance.org

EVENT

ArtSpan Open Studios

Do you ever want to stroll into other people’s homes simply from sweet curiosity? Perhaps you covet thy neighbor’s art, or maybe just appreciate light and shadow and like talking with the peeps who represent it? Do all three at the largest and oldest open studios event in the country. The self-guided art tour is ongoing through October, but this weekend doors will open in the artsy northern and eastern neighborhoods. From the nude drawings of Derriere Guard (ahem, Beavis) to the ultraviolet photos of South African succulents, it’s the best opportunity to get to know your local artists. And maybe take home a derriere or two. (Kat Renz)

Through Oct. 31

Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–-6 p.m., free

Bayview, Excelsior, Financial District, North Beach, Potrero, Russian Hill, SoMa,Tenderloin

(415) 861-9838

www.artspan.org

SUNDAY 17

MUSIC

BATUSIS

Featuring two of the founding architects of punk rock — guitarists Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls and Cheetah Chrome from the Dead Boys — Batusis already has its street cred and headliner status firmly in place. Taking its name from the groovy dance that Adam West performed in the campy 1960s Batman TV show, the band came together and released a new self-titled EP earlier this year that’s steeped in the sounds that earned these six string slingers their place in the punk pantheon in the first place. This dynamic duo may not be so young anymore, but they’re sure as hell just as loud and snotty. (McCourt)

With Re-Volts

8 p.m., $12–$15

Thee Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 252-1330

www.theeparkside.com

MONDAY 18

MUSIC

David Bazan

Previously known for fronting the popular indie-rock project Pedro the Lion, David Bazan has returned to working under his own name. His most recent solo album, Curse Your Branches, covers some religious-themed lyrical ground that fans should be familiar with by now, like the tales of sinners losing their way and Bazan grappling with his own faith. But it also presents itself in a much more upbeat, poppier setting than we’re used to, often at odds with the reflective and sometimes dark themes of the songs. Moody, country-tinged Baltimore duo Wye Oak opens. (Moblad)

8 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 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 Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. 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

David Talbot

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October 12, 2010

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

SF DOCFEST

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

THURS/14

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

FRI/15

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

SAT/16

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

SUN/17

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

MON/18

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

TUES/19

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

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

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

OPENING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONGOING

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

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

Case 39 (1:49) 1000 Van Ness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alerts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 12, 2010

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alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 13

Commune and resist

Dubbed the Community and Resistance Tour, this two-hour event seeks to connect the BP oil spill, expressions of racism in Jena, La., and organizing women in prison. Come hear Jordan Flaherty and other speakers discuss these and other struggles for justice and liberation. The event is sponsored by Left Turn Magazine and other radical and independent media projects.

7 p.m.–9 p.m., free

Station 40

3030-B 16th St., SF

www.communityandresistance.wordpress.com

THURSDAY, OCT. 14

Get radical for our schools

Sisters Organized for Public Education hosts a community meeting to develop strategies for opposing further cuts to the public school system. Come beforehand and get to know people at the buffet with vegetarian options.

7 p.m. lecture, free;

6:15 buffet, $7.50 donation New Valencia Hall

625 Larkin, Suite 202, SF

415-864-1278

Food sovereignty for Haiti

Discussion focused on how food justice and sovereignty are working on the ground in Haiti, here in the Bay Area, and elsewhere. The lively event is hosted by Weyland Southon of KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio and features keynote speaker Pierre Labossiere, a Haitian activist with HaitiAction Committee, and performances by Tacuma King and Bay Area youth Arts.

7 p.m., $10

Humanist Hall

390 27th St., Oakl.

510-548-2220, ext 233

FRIDAY, OCT. 15

Turn a New Leaf

Gay Shame San Francisco holds this community meeting to discuss the closing of the New Leaf LGBTQ Counseling Center and what it calls the medicalization of life, criminalization of illness, and growth of the prison-military-medical-nonprofit-industrial complex.

11:30 a.m., free

Market and Ninth streets, SF

www.gayshamesf.org

SATURDAY, OCT. 16

Our planet, ourselves

“Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement To Save the Planet” is a daylong event designed to highlight the dire threat that reckless industrialization poses to the planet and build a resistance movement around possible solutions. Host Derrick Jensen interviews 10 people who each hold an impassioned critique of overindustrialized civilization and who offer solutions.

9 a.m.–5 p.m., free

Seven Hills Conference Center

San Francisco State University

1600 Holloway, SF

www.derrickjensen.org

Foraged Health

Take a class on medicinal plants available in California. The class is taught by Tellur Fenner of Blue Wind Botanical Medicine Clinic. Come learn what Mother Earth has to offer underfoot and overhead.

1 p.m. – 4 p.m., $20 members; $30 public

18 Reasons

593 Guerrero, SF

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/130794

Radical Mental Health

This grassroots media project was created by and for people struggling with that catch-all term, “mental disorders.” Filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal presents his poetic documentary Crooked Beauty, which documents Jack McNamara’s journey from psychiatric patient to mental health advocate. Benefits San Francisco’s Icarus Project.

6 p.m.–9 p.m., $5–$10 suggested donation

California Institute for Integral Studies

1453 Mission, SF

www.crookedbeauty.com

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 255-8762; or e-mail alerts@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Rally for queer youth on Friday

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 6, 2010

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As we wrote about last week, a tragic and almost unfathomable epidemic of queer youth suicides has been reported in the past three weeks, much of it tied to vicious anti-gay bullying. This Friday, October 8, there will be a “Stand Up to Youth Suicide” rally at Civic Center Plaza at 6:30pm. Speakers Tom Ammiano, Andrea Shorter, and more will speak about queer youth and how we can help. The rally will be followed by a candlelight march to the Castro at 7:30pm.

The flyer notes: “Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are up to 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their hmosexual peers. Nearly 1/2 of transgender people have seriously thought about committing suicide.” Full announcement after the jump — Facebook event info here.

Rally and March to Focus on LGBT Youth Suicide and Homelessness
Being young and gay in much of the United States too often results in homelessness or suicide. A rally and candlelight march in San Francisco on Friday, October 8, is planned to bring awareness to what some have called an epidemic.

The rally at San Francisco’s Civic Center will begin at 6:30 pm, followed by a candlelight march to Harvey Milk Plaza at 7:30. The event is being organized by Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons, and will feature speakers from The Trevor Project, Soulforce, Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Equality California, Family Acceptance Project, Gay-Straight Alliance Network, Affirmation, and several of the people appearing in the recent documentary film “8: The Mormon Proposition,” according to Robert Moore, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for Affirmation.

“We want to stand up and say ‘NO’ to the idea of one more life being cut short,” said Moore, “Our youth need us to stand up and say we are here for you, come to me when you need help, talk to me when you need an open ear, cry on my shoulder when you need to. I am asking for you to join me and stand up for our youth in San Francisco October 8, 2010 at 6:30pm.”

While acceptance of LGBT people continues to grow in the larger population, suicide amongst LGBT youth continues to be high and is even rising in some areas. “Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers” (Massachusetts 2007 Youth Risk Survey. Even more frightening is when you look at youth from rejecting families, religions or communities. A 2009 study found that “Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual youth who come from highly rejecting families are more than 8 times as likely to have attempted suicide than LGB peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection” (Ryan C, Huebner D, et al – Peds 2009;123(1):346-352).

As a youth Robert Moore was cast out by his Mormon family and experienced what it means to be a homeless teen. Preceding the rally, the three top officers of Affirmation will each spend twenty-four hours on the streets of San Francisco without money or possessions, and will relate some of their experiences at Friday’s event. Friday’s events are among a series of activities surrounding Affirmation’s 33rd annual conference. Dale Barton, Conference Director, stated that on Saturday, members of Affirmation will be giving of their time in day-long projects serving local homeless shelters and The Trevor Project (a youth suicide counseling and prevention organization).

Speakers to include (This is not the full list of speakers):

David Melson, Executive Director for Affirmation
Tom Ammiano, California Assembly Member
Bonnie Graves, Board member of Trevor Project
Andrea Shorter, Deputy Marriage and Coalitions Director EQCA
Caitlin Ryan, Director, Family Acceptance Project
Danielle Askini Jansson, National Program Manager, GSA Network
Dr. Cindi Love, Executive Director SoulForce

Endorsements 2010: San Francisco candidates

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 5, 2010

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Endorsements 2010: San Francisco candidates

SUPERVISOR, DISTRICT 2

JANET REILLY

Frankly, we were a little surprised by the Janet Reilly who came in to give us her pitch as a District 2 supervisorial candidate. The last time we met with her, she was a strong progressive running for state Assembly as an advocate of single-payer health care. She was challenging Fiona Ma from the left, and easily won our endorsement.

Now she’s become a fiscal conservative — somewhat more in synch with her district, perhaps, but not an encouraging sign. Reilly seems to realize that there’s a $500 million budget deficit looming, but she won’t support any of the tax measures on the ballot. She’s against the hotel tax. She’s against the real estate transfer tax on high-end properties. She’s against the local car tax. She opposed Sup. David Chiu’s business tax plan that would have shifted the burden from small to larger businesses (even though it was clear from our interview that she didn’t understand it).

She talked about merging some of the nonprofits that get city money, about consolidating departments, and better management — solutions that might stem a tiny fraction of the red ink. But she wouldn’t even admit that the limited tax burden on the very rich was part of San Francisco’s budget problem.

Her main proposal for creating jobs is more tax credits for biotech, life sciences, and digital media and more public-private partnerships.

It’s too bad, because Reilly’s smart, and she’s far, far better than Mark Farrell, the candidate that the current incumbent, Michela Alioto-Pier, is backing. We wish she’d be realistic about the fiscal nightmare she would inherit as a supervisor.

On the positive side, she’s a strong supporter of public power and she has good connections to the progressive community. Unlike Alioto-Pier, she’d be accessible, open-minded, and willing to work with the progressive majority on the board. That would be a dramatic change, so we’ll give her the nod.

We were also impressed with Abraham Simmons, a federal prosecutor who has spent time researching city finance on the Civil Grand Jury. But he supports sit-lie, Prop. B and Prop. S, and opposes most new tax proposals and needs more political seasoning.

DISTRICT 4

NO ENDORSEMENT

We’ve always wanted to like Carmen Chu. She’s friendly, personable, intelligent, and well-spoken. But on the issues, she’s just awful. Indeed, we can’t think of a single significant vote on which she’s been anything but a call-up loyalist for Mayor Newsom. She even opposed the public power measure, Prop. H, that had the support of just about everyone in town except hardcore PG&E allies.

She’s running unopposed, and will be reelected. But we can’t endorse her.

DISTRICT 6

1. DEBRA WALKER

2. JANE KIM

3. GLENDON “ANNA CONDA” HYDE

CORRECTION: In our original version of this endorsement, we said that Jim Meko supports the sit-lie ordinance. That was an error, and it’s corrected below.

A year ago, this race was artist and activist Debra Walker’s to lose. Most of the progressive community was united behind her candidacy; she’d been working on district issues for a couple of decades, fighting the loft developers during the dot-com boom years and serving on the Building Inspection Commission. Then School Board member Jane Kim decided to enter the race, leaving the left divided, splitting resources that might have gone to other critical district races — and potentially helping to put the most pro-business downtown candidate, Theresa Sparks, in a better position to win.

Now we’ve got something of a mess — a fragmented and sometimes needlessly divisive progressive base in a district that’s key to holding progressive control of the board. And while neither of the two top progressive candidates is actively pursuing a credible ranked-choice voting strategy (Kim has, unbelievably, endorsed James Keys instead of Walker, and Walker has declined to endorse anyone else), we’re setting aside our concern over Kim’s ill-advised move and suggesting a strategy that is most likely to keep the seat Chris Daly has held for the past 10 years from falling to downtown control.

Walker is far and away our first choice. She understands land use and housing — the clear central issues in the district — and has well thought-out positions and proposals. She says that the current system of inclusionary housing — pressing market-rate developers to include a few units of below-market-rate housing with their high-end condos — simply doesn’t work. She supports an immediate affordable housing bond act and a long-term real estate transfer tax high enough to fund a steady supply of housing for the city’s workforce. She told us the city ought to be looking at planning issues from the perspective of what San Francisco needs, not what developers want to build. She’s in favor of progressive taxes and a push for local hiring. We’re happy to give her our first-place ranking.

Jane Kim has been a great SF School Board member and has always been part of the progressive community. But she only moved into District 6 a year and a half ago — about when she started talking about running for supervisor (and she told us in her endorsement interview that “D6 is a district you can run in without having lived there a long time.”) She still hasn’t been able to explain why she parachuted in to challenge an experienced progressive leader she has no substantive policy disagreements with.

That said, on the issues, Kim is consistently good. She is in favor of indexing affordable housing to market-rate housing and halting new condo development if the mix gets out of line. She’s for an affordable housing bond. She supports all the tax measures on this ballot. She’s a little softer on congestion pricing and extending parking-meter hours, but she’s open to the ideas. She supports police foot patrols not just as a law-enforcement strategy, but to encourage small businesses. She’d be a fine vote on the board. And while we’re sympathetic to the Walker supporters who would prefer that we not give Kim the credibility and exposure of an endorsement, the reality is that she’s one of two leading progressives and would be better on the board than the remaining candidates.

Hyde, a dynamic young drag queen performer, isn’t going to win. But he’s offered some great ideas and injected some fun and energy into the race. Hyde talks about creating safe injection sites for IV drug users to reduce the risk of overdoses and the spread of disease. He points out that a lot of young people age out of the foster-care system and wind up on the streets, and he’s for continuum housing that would let these young people transition to jobs or higher education. He talks about starting a co-op grocery in the Tenderloin. He proposes bus-only lanes throughout the district and wants to charge large vehicles a fee to come into the city. He’s a big advocate of nightlife and the arts. He lacks experience and needs more political seasoning, but we’re giving him the third-place nod to encourage his future involvement.

Progressives are concerned about Theresa Sparks, a transgender activist and former business executive who now runs the city’s Human Rights Commission. She did a (mostly) good job on the Police Commission. She’s experienced in city government and has good financial sense. But she’s just too conservative for what remains a very progressive district. Sparks isn’t a big fan of seeking new revenue for the city telling us that “I disagree that we’ve made all the cuts that we can” — even after four years of brutal, bloody, all-cuts budgets. She doesn’t support the hotel tax and said she couldn’t support Sup. David Chiu’s progressive business tax because it would lead to “replacing private sector jobs with public sector jobs” — even though the city’s own economic analysis shows that’s just not true. She supports Newsom’s sit-lie law.

Sparks is the candidate of the mayor and downtown, and would substantially shift the balance of power on the board. She’s also going to have huge amounts of money behind her. It’s important she be defeated.

Jim Meko, a longtime neighborhood and community activist, has good credentials and some solid ideas. He was a key player in the western SoMa planning project and helped come up with a truly progressive land-use program for the neighborhood. But he supports Prop. B and is awfully cranky about local bars and nightlife.

James Keys, who has the support of Sup. Chris Daly and was an intern in Daly’s office, has some intriguing (if not terribly practical) ideas, like combining the Sheriff’s Department and the Police Department and making Muni free). But in his interview, he demonstrated a lack of understanding of the issues facing the district and the city.

So we’re going with a ranked-choice strategy: Walker first, Kim second, Hyde third. And we hope Kim’s supporters ignore their candidate’s endorsement of Keys, put Walker as their second choice, and ensure that they don’t help elect Sparks.

DISTRICT 8

RAFAEL MANDELMAN

This is by far the clearest and most obvious choice on the local ballot. And it’s a critical one, a chance for progressives to reclaim the seat that once belonged to Harvey Milk and Harry Britt.

Mandelman, a former president of the Milk Club, is running as more than a queer candidate. He’s a supporter of tenants rights, immigrants’ rights, and economic and social justice. He also told us he believes “local government matters” — and that there are a lot of problems San Francisco can (and has to) solve on its own, without simply ducking and blaming Sacramento and Washington.

Mandelman argues that the public sector has been starved for years and needs more money. He agrees that there’s still a fair amount of bloat in the city budget — particularly management positions — but that even after cleaning out the waste, the city will still be far short of the money it needs to continue providing pubic services. He’s calling for a top-to-bottom review of how the city gets revenue, with the idea of creating a more progressive tax structure.

He’s an opponent of sit-lie and a supporter of the sanctuary city ordinance. He supports tenants rights and eviction protection. He’s had considerable experience (as a member of the Building Inspection Commission and Board of Appeals and as a lawyer who advises local government agencies) and would make an excellent supervisor.

Neither of the other two contenders make our endorsement cut. Rebecca Prozan is a deputy city attorney who told us she would be able to bring the warring factions on the board together. She has some interesting ideas — she’d like to see the city take over foreclosed properties and turn them into housing for teachers, cops, and firefighters — and she’s opposed to sit-lie. But she’s weak on tenant issues (she told us there’s nothing anyone can do to stop the conversion of rental housing into tenancies-in-common), doesn’t seem to grasp the need for substantial new revenues to prevent service cuts, and doesn’t support splitting the appointments to key commissions between the mayor and the supervisors.

Scott Wiener, a deputy city attorney, is a personable guy who always takes our phone calls and is honest and responsive. He’s done a lot of good work in the district. But he’s on the wrong side of many issues, and on some things would be to the right of the incumbent, Sup. Bevan Dufty.

He doesn’t support public power (which Dufty does). He says that a lot of the city’s budget problems can’t be solved until the state gets its own house in order (“we can’t tax our way out of this”) and favors a budget balanced largely by further cuts. In direct contrast to Mandelman, Wiener said San Franciscans “need to lower our expectations for government.” He wants broad-based reductions in almost all city agencies except Muni, “core” public health services, and public safety. He doesn’t support any further restrictions on condo conversions or TICs. And he has the support of the Small Property Owners Association — perhaps the most virulently anti-tenant and anti-rent control group in town.

This district once gave rise to queer political leaders who saw themselves and their struggles as part of a larger progressive movement. That’s drifted away of late — and with Mandelman, there’s a chance to bring it back.

DISTRICT 10

1. TONY KELLY

2. DEWITT LACY

3. CHRIS JACKSON

District 10 is the epicenter of new development in San Francisco, the place where city planners want to site as many as 40,000 new housing units, most of them high-end condos, at a cost of thousands of blue-collar jobs. The developers are salivating at the land-rush opportunities here — and the next supervisor not only needs to be an expert in land-use and development politics, but someone with the background and experience to thwart the bad ideas and direct and encourage the good ones.

There’s no shortage of candidates — 22 people are on the ballot, and at least half a dozen are serious contenders. Two — Steve Moss and Lynette Sweet — are very bad news. And one of the key priorities for progressives is defeating the big-money effort that downtown, the police, and the forces behind the Van Ness Avenue megahospital proposal are dumping into the district to elect Moss.

Our first choice is Tony Kelly, who operates Thick Description Theater and who for more than a decade has been directly involved in all the major neighborhood issues. He has a deep understanding of what the district is facing: 4,100 of the 5,300 acres in D10 have been rezoned or put under the Redevelopment Agency in the past 10 years. Planners envision as many as 100,000 new residents in the next 10 years. And the fees paid by developers will not even begin to cover the cost of the infrastructure and services needed to handle that growth.

And Kelly has solutions: The public sector will have to play a huge role in affordable housing and infrastructure, and that money should come from higher development fees — and from places like the University of California, which has a huge operation in the district and pays no property taxes. Kelly wants to set up a trigger so that if goals for affordable housing aren’t met by a set date, the market-rate development stops. He supports the revenue measures on the ballot but thinks we should go further. He opposes the pension-reform measure, Prop. B, but notes that 75 percent of the city’s pension problems come from police, fire, and management employees. He wants the supervisors to take over the Redevelopment Agency. He’s calling for a major expansion of open space and parkland in the district. And he thinks the city should direct some of the $3 billion in short-term accounts (now all with the Bank of America) to local credit unions or new municipal bank that could invest in affordable housing and small business. He’s a perfect fit for the job.

DeWitt Lacy is a civil-rights lawyer and a relative newcomer to neighborhood politics. He speaks passionately about the need for D10 to get its fair share of the city’s services and about a commitment to working-class people.

Lacy is calling for an immediate pilot program with police foot patrols in the high-crime areas of the district. He’s for increasing the requirements for developers to build affordable housing and wants to cut the payroll tax for local businesses that hire district residents.

Lacy’s vision for the future includes development that has mixed-use commuter hubs with shopping and grocery stores as well as housing. He supports the tax measures on the ballot and would be willing to extend parking meter hours — but not parking fines, which he calls an undue burden on low-income people.

He’s an outspoken foe of sit-lie and of gang injunctions, and with his background handling police abuse lawsuits, he would have a clear understanding of how to approach better law-enforcement without intimidating the community. He lacks Kelly’s history, experience, and knowledge in neighborhood issues, but he’s eminently qualified and would make a fine supervisor.

Chris Jackson, who worked at the San Francisco Labor Council and serves on the Community College Board, is our third choice. While it’s a bit unfortunate that Jackson is running for higher office only two years after getting elected to the college board, he’s got a track record and good positions on the issues. He talks of making sure that blue-collar jobs don’t get pushed out by housing, and suggested that the shipyard be used for ship repair. He wants to see the city mandate that landlords rent to people with Section 8 housing vouchers. He supports the tax measures on the ballot, but also argues that the city has 60 percent more managers than it had in 2000 and wants to bring that number down. He thinks the supervisors should take over Redevelopment, which should become “just a financing agency for affordable housing.” He wants to relocate the stinky sewage treatment plant near Third Street and Evans Avenue onto one of the piers and use the area for a transit hub. He’s still relatively unseasoned, but he has a bright political future.

Eric Smith, a biodiesel activist, is an impressive candidate too. But while his environmental credentials are good, he lacks the breadth of knowledge that our top three choices offer. But we’re glad he’s in the race and hope he stays active in community politics.

Malia Cohen has raised a lot of money and (to our astonishment) was endorsed No. 2 by the Democratic Party, but she’s by no means a progressive, particularly on tenant issues — she told us that limiting condo conversions is an infringement of property rights. And she’s way too vague on other issues.

Moss is the candidate of the big developers and the landlords, and the Chamber of Commerce is dumping tens of thousands of dollars into getting him elected. He’s got some good environmental and energy ideas — he argues that all major new developments should have their own energy distribution systems — but on the major issues, he’s either on the wrong side or (more often) can’t seem to take a stand. He said he is “still mulling over” his stand on sit-lie. He supports Sanctuary City in theory, but not the actual measure Sup. David Campos was pushing to make the policy work. He’s not sure if he likes gang injunctions or not. He only moved back to the district when he decided to run for supervisor. He’s way too conservative for the district and would be terrible on the board.

Lynette Sweet, a BART Board member, has tax problems (and problems explaining them) and wouldn’t even come to our office for an endorsement interview. The last thing D10 needs is a supervisor who’s not accountable and unwilling to talk to constituents and the press.

So we’re going with Kelly, Lacy, and Jackson as the best hope to keep D10 from becoming a district represented by a downtown landlord candidate.

SAN FRANCISCO BOARD OF EDUCATION

MARGARET BRODKIN

KIM-SHREE MAUFAS

HYDRA MENDOZA

Three seats are up on the School Board, and three people will get elected. And it’s a contested race, and in situations like that, we always try to endorse a full slate.

This fall, it was, to put it mildly, a challenge.

It’s disturbing that we don’t have three strong progressive candidates with experience and qualifications to oversee the San Francisco Unified School District. But it seems to be increasingly difficult to find people who want to — and can afford to — devote the time to what’s really a 40-hour-a-week position that pays $500 a month. The part-time school board is an anachronism, a creature of a very different economic and social era. With the future of the next generation of San Franciscans at stake, it’s time to make the School Board a full-time job and pay the members a decent salary so that more parents and progressive education advocates can get involved in one of the most important political jobs in the city.

That said, we’ve chosen the best of the available candidates. It’s a mixed group, made up of people who don’t support each other and aren’t part of anyone’s slate. But on balance, they offer the best choices for the job.

This is not a time when the board needs radical change. Under Superintendent Carlos Garcia, the local public schools are making huge strides. Test scores are up, enrollment is increasing, and San Francisco is, by any rational measure, the best big-city public school district in California. We give considerable credit for that to the progressives on the board who got rid of the irascible, secretive, and hostile former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and replaced her with Garcia. He’s brought stability and improvement to the district, and is implementing a long-term plan to bring all the schools up to the highest levels and go after the stubborn achievement gap.

Yet any superintendent and any public agency needs effective oversight. One of the problems with the district under Ackerman was the blind support she got from school board members who hired her; it was almost as if her allies on the board were unable to see the damage she was doing and unable to hold her accountable.

Our choices reflect the need for stability — and independence. We are under no illusions — none of our candidates are perfect. But as a group, we believe they can work to preserve what the district is doing right and improve on policies that aren’t working.

Kim-Shree Maufas has been a staunch progressive on the board. She got into a little trouble last year when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that she’d been using a school district credit card for personal expenses. That’s not a great move, but she never actually took public money since she paid back the district. Maufas said she thought she could use the card as long as she reimbursed the district for her own expenses; the rules are now clear and she’s had no problems since. We don’t consider this a significant enough failure in judgment to prevent her from continuing to do what she’s been doing: serving as an advocate on the board for low-income kids and teachers.

Maufas is a big supporter of restorative justice and is working for ways to reduce suspensions and expulsions. She wants to make sure advanced placement and honors classes are open to anyone who can handle the coursework. She supports the new school assignment process (as do all the major candidates), although she acknowledges that there are some potential problems. She told us she thinks the district should go back to the voters for a parcel tax to supplement existing funding for the schools.

Margaret Brodkin is a lightening rod. In fact, much of the discussion around this election seems to focus on Brodkin. Since she entered the race, she’s eclipsed all the other issues, and there’s been a nasty whisper campaign designed to keep her off the board.

We’ve had our issues with Brodkin. When she worked for Mayor Newsom, she was part of a project that brought private nonprofits into city recreation centers to provide services — at a time when unionized public employees of the Recreation and Parks Department were losing their jobs. It struck us as a clear privatization effort by the Newsom administration, and it raised a flag that’s going to become increasingly important in the school district: there’s a coming clash between people who think private nonprofits can provide more services to the schools and union leaders who fear that low-paid nonprofit workers will wind up doing jobs now performed by unionized district staff. And Brodkin’s role in the Newsom administration — and her background in the nonprofit world — is certainly ground for some concern.

But Brodkin is also by far the most qualified person to run for San Francisco school board in years, maybe decades. She’s a political legend in the city, the person who is most responsible for making issues of children and youth a centerpiece of the progressive agenda. In her years as director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, she tirelessly worked to make sure children weren’t overlooked in the budget process and was one of the authors of the initiative that created the Children’s Fund. She’s run a nonprofit, run a city department, and is now working on education issues.

She’s a feisty person who can be brusque and isn’t always conciliatory — but those characteristics aren’t always bad. Sup. Chris Daly used his anger and passion to push for social justice on the Board of Supervisors and, despite some drawbacks, he’s been an effective public official.

And Brodkin is full of good ideas. She talks about framing what a 21st century education looks like, about creating community schools, about aligning after-school and summer programs with the academic curriculum. She wants the next school bond act to include a central kitchen, so local kids can get locally produced meals (the current lunch fare is shipped in frozen from out of state).

Brodkin needs to remember that there’s a difference between being a bare-knuckles advocate and a member of a functioning school board. But given her skills, experience, and lifetime in progressive causes, we’re willing to give her a chance.

We also struggled over endorsing Hydra Mendoza. She works for Mayor Newsom as an education advisor — and that’s an out-front conflict of interest. She’s a fan of Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, whose policies are regressive and dangerous.

On the other hand, she cares deeply about kids and public education. She’s not a big supporter of charter schools (“I’ve yet to see a charter school that offers anything we can’t do ourselves,” she told us) and while she was on the wrong side of a lot of issues (like JROTC) early in her tenure, over the past two years she’s been a good School Board member.

There are several other candidates worth mentioning. Bill Barnes, an aide to Michela Alioto-Pier, is a good guy, a decent progressive — but has no experience in or direct connection to the public schools. Natasha Hoehn is in the education nonprofit world and speaks with all the jargon of the educrat, but her proposals and her stands on issues are vague. Emily Murase is a strong parent advocate with some good ideas, but she struck us as a bit too conservative (particularly on JROTC and charter schools.) Jamie Wolfe teaches at a private school but lacks any real constituency or experience in local politics and the education community.

So given a weak field with limited alternatives, we’re going with Maufas, Brodkin and Mendoza.

SAN FRANCISCO COMMUNITY COLLEGE BOARD

JOHN RIZZO

The San Francisco Community College District has been a mess for years, and it’s only now starting to get back on track. That’s the result of the election of a few progressive reformers — Milton Marks, Chris Jackson, and John Rizzo, who now have enough clout on the seven-member board to drag along a fourth vote when they need it.

But the litany of disasters they’ve had to clean up is almost endless. A chancellor (who other incumbent board members supported until the end) is now under indictment. Public money that was supposed to go to the district wound up in a political campaign. An out-of-control semiprivate college foundation has been hiding its finances from the public. The college shifted bond money earmarked for an arts center into a gigantic, expensive gym with a pool that the college can’t even pay to operate, so it’s leased out to a private high school across the street.

And the tragedy is that all three incumbents — two of whom should have stepped down years ago — are running unopposed.

With all the attention on the School Board and district elections, not one progressive — in fact, not one candidate of any sort — has stepped forward to challenge Anita Grier and Lawrence Wong. So they’ll get another term, and the reformers will have to continue to struggle.

We’re endorsing only Rizzo, a Sierra Club staffer who has been in the lead in the reform bloc. He needs to end up as the top vote-getter, which would put him in position to be the board president. Rizzo has worked to get the district’s finances and foundation under control and he richly deserves reelection.

BART BOARD OF DIRECTORS, DISTRICT 8

BERT HILL

It’s about time somebody mounted a serious challenge to James Fang, the only elected Republican in San Francisco and a member of one of the most dysfunctional public agencies in California. The BART Board is a mess, spending a fortune on lines that are hardly ever used and unable to work effectively with other transit agencies or control a police force that has a history of brutality and senseless killing.

Fang supports the suburban extensions and Oakland Airport connector, which make no fiscal or transportation sense. He’s ignored problems with the BART Police for 20 years. It’s time for him to leave office.

Bert Hill is a strong challenger. A professional cost-management executive, he understands that BART is operating on an old paradigm of carrying people from the suburbs into the city. “Before we go on building any more extensions,” he told us, “we should take care of San Francisco.” He wants the agency to work closely with Muni and agrees there’s a need for a BART sunshine policy to make the notoriously secretive agency more open to public scrutiny. We strongly endorse him.

ASSESSOR-RECORDER

PHIL TING

San Francisco needs an aggressive assessor who looks for every last penny that big corporations are trying to duck paying — but this is also a job that presents an opportunity for challenging the current property tax laws. Phil Ting’s doing pretty well with the first part — and unlike past assessors, is actually stepping up to the plate on the second. He’s been pushing a statewide coalition to reform Prop. 13 — and while it’s an uphill battle, it’s good to see a tax assessor taking it on. Ting has little opposition and will be reelected easily.

PUBLIC DEFENDER

JEFF ADACHI

Adachi’s done a great job of running the office that represents indigent criminal defendants. He’s been outspoken on criminal justice issues. Until this year, he was often mentioned as a potential progressive candidate for mayor.

That’s over now. Because Adachi decided (for reasons we still can’t comprehend) to join the national attack on public employees and put Prop. B on the ballot, he’s lost any hope of getting support for higher office from the left. And since the moderate and conservative forces will never be comfortable with a public defender moving up in the political world, Adachi’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Which is fine. He’s doing well at his day job. We wish he’d stuck to it and not taken on a divisive, expensive, and ill-conceived crusade to cut health care benefits for city employees.

SAN FRANCISCO SUPERIOR COURT

SEAT 15

MICHAEL NAVA

To hear some of the brahmins of the local bench and bar tell it, the stakes in this election are immense — the independence of the judiciary hangs in the balance. If a sitting judge who is considered eminently qualified for the job and has committed no ethical or legal breaches can be challenged by an outsider who is seeking more diversity on the bench, it will open the floodgates to partisan hacks taking on good judges — and force judicial candidates to raise money from lawyers and special interests, thus undermining the credibility of the judiciary.

We are well aware of the problems of judicial elections around the country. In some states, big corporations that want to influence judges raise and spend vast sums on trial and appellate court races — and typically get their way. In Iowa, three judges who were willing to stand on principle and Constitutional law and declare same-sex marriage legal are facing what amounts to a well-funded recall effort. California is not immune — in more conservative counties, liberal judges face getting knocked off the bench by law-and-order types.

It’s a serious issue. It’s worth a series of hearings in the state Legislature, and it might be worth Constitutional change. Maybe trial-court elections should be eliminated. Maybe all judicial elections should have public campaign financing. But right now, it’s an elected office — at least in theory.

In practice, the vast majority of the judicial slots in California are filled by appointment. Judges serve for four-year terms but tend to retire or step down in midterm, allowing the governor to fill the vacancy. Unless someone files specifically to challenge an incumbent, typically appointed judge, that race never even appears on the ballot.

The electoral process is messy and political, and raising money is unseemly for a judicial officer. But the appointment process is hardly pure, either — and governors in California have, over the past 30 years, appointed the vast majority of the judges from the ranks of big corporate law firms and district attorney’s offices.

There are, of course, exceptions, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been better than his predecessor, Democrat Gray Davis. But overall, public interest lawyers, public defenders, and people with small community practices (and, of course, people who have no political strings to pull in Sacramento) have been frustrated. And it’s no surprise that some have sought to run against incumbents.

That’s what’s happening here. Michael Nava, a gay Latino who has been working as a research attorney for California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, was going to run for a rare open seat this year, but the field quickly got crowded. So Nava challenged Richard Ulmer, a corporate lawyer appointed by Schwarzenegger who has been on the bench a little more than a year.

We will stipulate, as the lawyers say: Ulmer has done nothing wrong. From all accounts, he’s a fine judge (and before taking the bench, he did some stellar pro bono work fighting for reforms in the juvenile detention system). So there are two questions here: Should Nava have even filed to run against Ulmer? And since he did, who is the better candidate?

It’s important to understand this isn’t a case of special interests and that big money wanting to oust a judge because of his politics or rulings. Nava isn’t backed by any wealthy interest. There’s no clear parallel to the situations in other areas and other states where the judiciary is being compromised by electoral politics. Nava had every right to run — and has mounted an honest campaign that discusses the need for diversity on the bench.

Ulmer’s supporters note — correctly — that the San Francisco courts have more ethnic and gender diversity than any county in the state. And we’re not going to try to come to a conclusion here about how much diversity is enough.

But we will say that life experience matters, and judges bring to the bench what they’ve lived. Nava, who is the grandson of Mexican immigrants and the first person in his family to go to college, may have a different perspective on how low-income people of color are treated in the courts than a former Republican who spent his professional career in big law firms.

We were impressed by Nava’s background and knowledge — and by his interest in opening up the courts. He supports cameras in the courtrooms and allowing reporters to record court proceedings. He told us the meetings judges hold on court administration should be open to the public.

We’re willing to discuss whether judicial elections make sense. Meanwhile, judges who don’t like the idea of challenges should encourage their colleagues not to retire in midterm. If all the judges left at the end of a four-year term, there would be plenty of open seats and fewer challenges. But for now, there’s nothing in this particular election that makes us fear for the independence of the courts. Vote for Nava.

>>BACK TO ENDORSEMENTS 2010

Film listings

David Talbot

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October 5, 2010

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

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

The 33rd Mill Valley Film Festival runs Oct 7-17 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; Century Cinema, 41 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera; Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; and CinéArts@Sequoia, 25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley. For tickets (most shows $12.50), call 1-877-874-6833 or visit www.mvff.com. "5@5" events are short-film programs. All times p.m. unless otherwise indicated.

THURS/7

Rafael The King’s Speech 7.

Sequoia Conviction 7, 7:15. Nowhere Boy 9:45.

FRI/8

Rafael Cut Poison Burn 6. Katalin Varga 6:30. "Spotlight on Alejandro González Iñárritu:" Biutiful 7. Tehran Tehran 8:30. Estigmas 8:45.

Sequoia "5@5: Gimme Some Truth" 5. Made in Dagenham 6:30. Queen of Hearts 7:15. Desert Flower 9. Dumas 9:30.

Throck "John Lennon at 70: A Live Concert" 8.

SAT/9

Rafael Eep! 10:30am. "New Movies Lab: The Future of Distribution" noon. TBA 12:15. Space, Land and Time 1. Tehran Tehran 2:15. Patagonia 3:15. Opal 3:30. Adrift 4:45. From a Whisper 6. "Tribute to Edward Norton:" Stone 7. Sand 7:15. About Her Brother 8:15. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone 9:30.

Sequoia The Indian 11am. Food Stamped 1. The Reverse 2:45. Child of Giants 3:30. Kawasaki’s Rose 5:15. Puzzle 6:15. Love Crimes 7:30. The River Why 8:15. "Hi De Ho Show" 10.

Throck "Children’s Film Fest Opening Party Extravaganza" 12:30. "The Jay Clay Trilogy" 4. Ed Hardy: Tattoo the World 7:30.

SUN/10

Rafael Estigmas 12:30. Cosmonauts 12:45. Most Valuable Players 1. Becloud 2:45. The Tempest 3. Lesson Plan: Story of the Third Wave 3:30. About Her Brother 5:30. "Centerpiece:" Miral 5:45. Atomic Mom 6. Cut Poison Burn 6:15. Mr. Bjarnfredarson 8:30. Desert Flower 9.

Sequoia Twigson 11am. Sebbe noon. Precious Life 2. Moloch Tropical 2:15. From a Whisper 4:45. Cruz Reynoso 5. Leave Them Laughing 7. TBA 7:15. Ed Hardy: Tattoo the World 9:30.

Throck The Crocodiles 1:30. Truth Be Told 4:15. "Cinemasports" 8.

MON/11

Rafael "5@5: Just Like Starting Over" 5. The Two Horses of Genghis Khan 6. Precious Life 6:15. Cruz Reynoso 6:45. Child of Giants 8:30. Of Love and Other Demons 8:45. Kawasaki’s Rose 9:15.

Sequoia Dumas 4:45. "5@5: Watching the Wheels" 5. To Educate a Girl 7. Made in Dagenham 7:15. TBA 9:30.

Throck Space, Land and Time 7.

TUES/12

Cinema Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back 6:30.

Rafael "5@5: Gimme Some Truth" 5. Food Stamped 6. Blue Valentine 6:15. Opal 7. Leave Them Laughing 8:30. Black Field 9. Sand 9:15.

Sequoia "5@5: Working Class Hero" 5. Queen of the Sun 6. Cast Me If You Can 7. Kung Fu Chefs 8:30. Sebbe 9:30.

OPENING

Enter the Void See "Noé Thanks." (2:17) Bridge, Shattuck.

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

I Spit on Your Grave Riding on the still-shocking premise of Meir Zarchi’s 1978 exploitation flick and given a cranked-up revamp — post-9/11 video beheadings, torture horror offerings a la Hostel (2005) and the Saw series — this unrated remake arrives with its initial writer-director’s blessing (Zarchi co-executive produced), while foregrounding the hillbilly dread of the original and amplifying its qualities as a not-quite-literary female Deliverance (1972) with an emphasis on no-holds-barred, gorily poetic revenge. The spare framework of the original remains the same: Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) is a writer working on a novel and in search of peace and quiet. She finds some unsettling quiet in an isolated rural cabin, but little peace as director Steven R. Monroe aims the hand-held on the farm implements that will come in all-too-handy in the second half of the film. Jennifer’s run-ins with lascivious, sadistic locals (Daniel Frenzies, Jeff Branson, Rodney Eastman, and Andrew Howard) escalate into scary, bullying cat-and-mouse games and continue ratcheting up until Jennifer has been brutally gang-raped, all of which is documented on video and is sickeningly extended for the audience in turn. The rest of the film turns the tables, gruesomely, on the torturers as they run scared through the always dark, beautiful, impervious woods, and Jennifer becomes a kind of vengeful ghost, a sister spirit of The Ring goblin-girl, sans psychology, contrition, and on-camera consequences. In place of the sad-Buster-faced Camille Keaton in the original is the wraith-thin Butler, who turns in a necessarily brave performance, though, through little fault of her own, her character remains startlingly opaque — the unlikely object of men’s most offensive sexual fantasies turned into the savage instrument, hedge clippers sharpened, of women’s ruthless revenge fantasies. (1:47) Metreon. (Chun)

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

Life as We Know It "You have poo on your face." (1:52) Presidio.

My Soul to Take Wes Craven sure loves serial killers. (1:46)

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

ONGOING

*The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: "I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane." You can see why director Vikram Jayanti scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)." (1:42) Roxie. (Chun)

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

Cairo Time (1:29) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Case 39 (1:49) 1000 Van Ness.

Catfish Please do not reveal the secret to Catfish — relax, I’m not going to. What I will say is this: Catfish’s uber-secretive, Paranormal Activity-esque ad campaign is effective, but the film ultimately stands on its own merits. This is an intriguing, relatable documentary, and if the studio feels that they’ll sell more tickets by promoting it in a certain way, so be it. Without giving away too much, Catfish is the spontaneous documentary that arose when filmmakers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost began filming Rel’s brother, Nev. Like so many of us, Nev finds himself drawn to a person he’s never met — embarking on a relationship through Facebook photos and wall posts. Of course, as is so often the case with the internet, nothing is quite what it seems. Catfish has already found its critics, particularly those who insist the documentary is a fake. I believe it, but either way it’s an impressive achievement: the best film yet about social networking. (1:26) Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*The Desert of Forbidden Art Uzbekistan probably hasn’t been at the top of your vacation wish list, but it might be after seeing this documentary by Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope — at least if you’re a modern art lover. It centers on the Nukus Museum, an extraordinary institution founded by the late Igor Savitsky, a frustrated painter who came here first from Moscow as an archaeologist, then became fascinated with the remote region’s ethnic folk artifacts. By 1966 official policy had turned from wiping out regional traditions and identities to embracing them, so he was given public funds to showcase his collection here. But unbeknownst to the bureaucrats back home (until it was too late), he’d already found a new passion, and was busy funneling his budget toward it: Finding and archiving a wealth of virtually unknown Soviet modern art that had been created without notice (often in hiding) since Stalin’s cultural watchdogs condemned the once-favored avant-garde movement of the 1920s in favor of sentimental, propagandic "Soviet realism." This stuff is the bomb — almost literally, since workaholic Savitsky finally died in 1984 of excess exposure to toxic restoration chemicals. There are poignant and colorful human stories here, but The Desert of Forbidden Art‘s exhilarating primary appeal lies in the fact that it features probably more eye-poppingly great visual art that you’ve never seen or known about before than quite possibly any documentary before it. You may well walk out with a question: so, are there cheap flights to Uzbekistan? (1:20) Four Star. (Harvey)

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

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

Fresh Fresh may be a surprisingly hard sell in the Bay Area. Even though self-styled gourmands are as abundant here as subsidized corn in Iowa, they may have already seen 2008’s Food, Inc. And although Fresh bills itself as a next step in a dialogue on sustainable agriculture, it’s a bit of retread. Author and reluctant leader of the movement Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and small farm messiah Joel Salatin make obligatory appearances, if only in less depth than Food, Inc. While no more talky than Food Inc., Fresh‘s production frequently relies on stock footage against stagy interviews. The effect is more folksy than insightful. When it works, particularly in sections featuring urban farmer Will Allen, Fresh comes off as hopeful. But if you’re looking for a tool to educate someone about why they shouldn’t buy groceries at Target, you might want to shop around. (1:12) Red Vic, Smith Rafael. (Prendiville)

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

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

Jack Goes Boating Not all miserable people are interesting — sometimes they’re just miserable and dull. Case in point: all of the characters in Jack Goes Boating, adapted by Robert Glaudini from his play. The titular Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also directs) is an awkward limo driver with filthy dreads and an anger management problem. He does his best to court equally awkward Connie (Amy Ryan), while his best friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) watch their marriage collapse, spectacularly. Given the talent involved, Jack Goes Boating might be mistaken for a better film than it is. There are moments, in fact, when it’s almost good. But the movie is unpleasant on every level — and not in an engaging way, like far better Noah Baumbach films about dysfunction. The romance is strained and unrelatable: you want Jack and Connie to make it work, if only so that the movie can end. (1:29) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

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

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

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

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

*Machete Probably the first movie that was initially conceived solely as a fake-movie trailer (as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse), Rodriguez’s Machete emerges in full-length form to take on everyone’s sky-high expectations. I mean, the trailer promised motorcycles soaring through flames, a gun-toting priest, and the line "You just fucked with the wrong Mexican." Fortunately, Machete the film does Machete the trailer proud; its deliberately silly revenge plot is both spot-on vintage homage and semi-serious commentary on America’s ongoing immigration debate. In addition, it features more severed limbs, gunshots to the head, irresponsible sex, and smirking Steven Seagal close-ups than any other movie in recent memory. Frequent Rodriguez supporting player Danny Trejo pretty much kills it as the title badass — but then, you already knew he would. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

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

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

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

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

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) Shattuck. (Sam Stander)

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Again (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

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

Our queer children are killing themselves: You can help UPDATED

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 29, 2010

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Our queer children are killing themselves: You can help UPDATED

Update: According to LGBTpov.com, Gov. Schwarzenegger yesterday “signed the Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth Act (SB 543), which will expand access to essential mental health services for youth ages 12-17. The bill, authored by openly gay State Sen. Mark Leno and sponsored by Equality California, allows teens to obtain counseling without parental consent.” Unfortunately, “Friday morning, Charles Robbins, Executive Director of The Trevor Project reported a fifth suicide — Raymond Chase, 19, a sophomore at Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island took his own life on Wednesday.” Hopefully kids in California will at least have expanded access to mental health counseling services. Original post is below.

For the fourth time this month, a kid who was harassed by anti-gay bullies has taken his own life. Seth Walsh, an out gay 13-year-old in Tehachapi, in central California, had been transferred from middle school to an independent study program, reportedly because he had been teased relentlessly about his orientation. Ten days ago he was found unconscious at the base of a tree in his backyard, apparently after he had attempted to hang himself. His parents took him off life support yesterday in Bakersfield.

Even though other kids admitted to harassing Seth — police reported that some of them “broke down in tears” because “they had never seen this outcome,” and wished they hadn’t participated in the bullying — no charges will be pressed against them: their actions do not constitute a crime.

Horribly, this was no isolated incident.

According to lgbtqnation.com:

“On September 9, 15-year-old Billy Lucas of Greensburg, IN, hanged himself at his grandmother’s home. Friends of Lucas said that he had been tormented for years based on his perceived sexual orientation.

On September 23, 13-year old Asher Brown, a gay teen in Houston, TX, came home from school while his parents were at work. He shot himself in the head after enduring what his mother and stepfather say was constant harassment and bullying.“

(Also, teen freshman Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University leaped off the George Washington bridge last Wednesday, after his roommate used a web cam to secretly and maliciously stream him “sharing a gay embrace.”)

This month, as well, saw the acclaimed launch of queer advice columnist and activist Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign (in direct response to Billy Lucas’ death, as a commenter below points out). It invites LGBTQ people to record videos addressed to queer young ‘uns that tell their stories of surviving school bullies and leading full lives after they graduated. I’m not sure I agree that people need to just wait to get out of school in order to survive — many don’t exactly find gay adult life a catered picnic, either, and why can’t we elders make an effort to help change the world for children in school now? — but I definitely agree that reaching out to isolated young people and letting them know there’s an entire community on their side is absolutely essential.

It’s infuriatingly sad that these instances seem to be on the rise, right when the country is making progress on most gay activists’ bigtime agendas: repealing DADT and legalizing same-sex marriage. Who cares about those things when our young people are in so much pain that they’re taking their own lives? Yes, ending all discrimination will help people envision a brighter future — let’s just not put all our eggs in one or two baskets, and forget entire segments of our community.

And while making an “It Gets Better” video is great, there are many fantastic community organizations in San Francisco serving the immediate counseling and housing needs of queer kids, many of whom have run away to avoid anti-gay bullying. Ignoring them only perpetuates the suffering. In a time of reduced aid, these organizations could really use your donations or time. Here are a few standouts:

Larkin Street Youth Services

Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC)

San Francisco LGBT Community Center

Tenderloin Health

And if you know a queer or questioning young person who is dealing with depression, or seeks counseling, direct them (and donate!) to the great Trevor Project suicide prevention hotline: 1-866-488-7386

California is one of a handful of states that specifically protects kids against anti-gay harassment, but cases are still hard to prove — if you see someone being harassed or know of someone who is being bullied, encourage them to report it to their parents, school counselor, or other professional so that it will be documented.

*ANOTHER DEATH: Commenter Aaron Baldwin below points to the recent suicide of 15-year-old Justin Aaberg in Minnesota, who was apparently a victim of anti-gay bullying, although I haven’t been able to find out much more than what’s in this Queerty story.

**ANOTHER RESOURCE: Commenter Liz below reminds me about SMAAC, serving queer and questioning youth in Oakland and the East Bay. Her comment raises several great points as well about helping youth now.

Our Weekly Picks: September 29-October 5, 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 28, 2010

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WEDNESDAY 29

MUSIC

Kylesa

The devil went down to Georgia, and sprinkled enough hoodoo in the water to cultivate quite a metal scene. But it ain’t just Mastodon and Baroness splitting ears in the town squares. Kylesa — you know, the band with the two drummers, the badass chick guitarist-vocalist (she’s one of two guitarists and one of three vocalists), and the coolest cover art in the biz — is about to drop its fifth full-length, Spiral Shadow. The title of lead track “Tired Climb” belies the album’s fierce riffs and heavy energy. But let’s stop pretending you weren’t going to this show anyway — local mighties High on Fire headlining the glorious Great American? With the added bonus of two ironclad openers? Can’t miss, hesher. (Cheryl Eddy)

With High On Fire and Torche

8 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

1-888-233-0449

www.gamhtickets.com

THURSDAY 30

DANCE

Mark Morris Dance Company

Just because his company has become a perennial audience favorite doesn’t mean we should ignore Mark Morris. After all, the acclaim is justified: there’s nobody else who — after 30 years of working — can still surprise and delight (and sometimes disappoint) us the way Morris can. This time he is bringing three West Coast premieres. If the buzz wafting in from the East Coast is any indication, the new Socrates set to Satie’s oratorio “Socrate” (piano and voice) should be outstanding. It will be performed with the stark Behemoth — Morris’ only no-music piece — and Looky, his bemused take on pretentious museum-going in which the inmates take over the show. (Rita Felciano)

Thurs/30–Sat/2, 8 p.m.;

Sun/3, 3 p.m., $34–$72

Zellerbach Hall

Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperformances.org

DANCE

Lizz Roman and Dancers

San Francisco’s Gingerbread Danzhaus is the only venue in the city to provide dance studio space to professional companies while also serving as a nightclub in the after-hours. This weekend it will also be the seat of Lizz Roman and Dancers new site-specific work This Dance This Place, which aims to bring the architecture of Danzhaus to life through an interactive dance performance challenging viewers to really see the nooks and crannies of the space. With a live sound score, collaborative lighting and costume design, and dancers streaming from every danceable doorway, crevice, and ledge, this performance is sure to provoke thought on where and how dance is presented. (Emmaly Weiderholt)

Through Oct. 9

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $20

Danzhaus

1275 Connecticut, SF

www.lizzromananddancers.com

FRIDAY 1

DANCE

Nina Haft and Company

A few years ago, visitors to Zaccho Dance Theatre’s third-story performance space could look down onto San Francisco’s last working farm. The Bayside venue seems uniquely appropriate for Nina Haft’s site-specific Debris/Flows. Collaborating with German-born, Italian-trained Claudia Borna, the two women transformed this former warehouse space into a natural environment for 12 dancers to explore both outer and inner landscapes. In addition to watching the performance, audiences can contribute to Zaccho’s environment by planting seeds and eating food from local gardens. The dozen dancers will help you navigate the labyrinth. (Felciano)

Fri/1–Sat/2, 8 p.m. (also Sat/2, 6 p.m.);

Sun/3, 6 p.m., $12–>$18

Zaccho Dance Theatre

1777 Yosemite, Suite 330, SF

(510) 325-5646

www.brownpapertickets.com

MUSIC

Drums

A lot of the Drums’ music mines the sounds of the 1950s, smooshing it up with the more saccharine output of the Smiths and New Order, but there’s a lull halfway through the New York City band’s debut album where its intentions really become clear. A slower song than the rest of the album, “Down By The Water” mimics the believable earnestness of ’50s crooners completely without pretension. The Drums have been accused of lacking individualism, which is a fairly valid criticism considering you could drop some of their more upbeat tracks into a Smiths album and no one would bat an eye. But in latching onto eras where simplicity was something to be celebrated, the band succeeds by being sincere when tongue in cheek would have been way “cooler.” (Peter Galvin)

With the Young Friends

9 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

DANCE

SMUIN BALLET

Although the Smuin Ballet may be considered a relatively small ballet company, there’s nothing small about the renowned choreographers and kick-ass dancers Smuin attracts. Founded by Michael Smuin in 1994 and now under the artistic direction of Celia Fushille, the company presents classical ballet with a contemporary edge. It kicks off its 2010-11 home season with a fall program that includes the world premiere of Oh, Inverted World — set to the indie rock band the Shins and choreographed by the illustrious Trey McIntyre — as well as Michael Smuin’s twangy Bluegrass/Slyde and his more lyrical Brahms-Haydn Variations. (Katie Gaydos)

Through Oct. 9

8 p.m. (no show Mon/4);

Additional shows Sat/2–Sun/3, 2 p.m.), $20–$62

Palace of Fine Arts Theater

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.smuinballet.org

SATURDAY 2

FILM

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Ever get the feeling you’re being dwarfed by what’s going on around you in life? Well, that’s exactly what happens to the main character in the 1957 Jack Arnold sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, in which a freak accident causes him to get smaller and smaller with every passing day. Featuring a host of inventive special effects and memorable scenes (among them his epic battle with a house spider), the movie screens tonight as part of the San Francisco Film Society’s annual “Film In The Fog” event. Let’s hope nature cooperates and offers up a little bit of a spooky mist to make for a cool and creepy early Halloween celebration. (Sean McCourt)

5 p.m. picnic, 7 p.m. film, free

Presidio, Moraga at Arguello, SF

www.sffs.org

MUSIC

The Sword

Austin, Texas, retro-metallers the Sword are in space. This summer, new album Warp Riders saw them rocket into full-fledged concept album territory, weaving a epic saga of interplanetary travel and mystical sci-fi warriors on a loom composed of Orange amplifiers. As fall descends, they’re taking the tunes and tales on the road, and their SF date marks the second stop on a grueling national run. Fans will be eager to bask in a bevy of new songs performed live, and the band’s adroit playing on the new record bodes extremely well for the experience. Prepare for blast-off! (Ben Richardson)

With Karma to Burn and Mount Carmel

8:30 p.m., $20

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

1-800-745-3000

www.theregencyballroom.com

FILM

American Splendor

Who is Cleveland’s most beloved figure? A few months ago the answer may have seemed obvious: superhuman baller LeBron James. At least until he got on the ESPN grandstand and announced he was going to Miami. Four days later Harvey Pekar died, and it put everything in perspective. A cranky file clerk who wrote wonderfully mundane comics about life’s pedestrian absurdities for more than 30 years, Pekar was an unlikely fit for the limelight (with legendary Letterman appearances to prove it). Fame found him nonetheless, culminating in this 2003 biopic featuring not only a suitable portrayal by the continually wincing Paul Giamatti, but also the inimitable figure himself. A fine entry into a persistent legacy. (Ryan Prendiville)

8:30 p.m., $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

SUNDAY 3

EVENT

Estria Invitational Graffiti Battle

Graffiti’s outgrown furtive leaps over cyclone fencing and dark alley deployment. These days street art is a community builder, the old pros from the 1980s golden age having become teachers and respected figures in the art world. But that doesn’t mean it’s gotten stuffy. Case in point: Bay Area graff legend Estria Miyashiro’s free annual spray-off in the park. Names that are no strangers to the city’s bus stops, brick walls, and freight trains will be present to participate in and judge live painting: Nate1, Crayone TWS, and 2009’s champ Vogue TDK among them. Mix in stencil workshops, a youth sketchbook competition, and artist signings, and you’ve got a multi-generational homage to the art of aerosol. (Caitlin Donohue)

11 a.m.–5 p.m., free

DeFremery Park

1651 Adeline, Oakl.

(510) 895-5700

www.estriabattle.com

MONDAY 4

MUSIC

Guitar Wolf

In the future, anthropologists will study Guitar Wolf to calculate the speed of pop culture. The musical equivalent of Engrish, the trio channels Ramones-era punk rock (leather and all) to create Japanese “jet rock ‘n’ roll,” a louder, noisier, and enjoyably unintelligible hybrid. Tonight the band ends its first U.S. tour in five years, also the first since the death of bassist Billy. “However, it is not, not necessary to worry,” lead singer Seiji says on the band’s website. “New bassist player U.G.! U.G. is terrible! It is jet terrible! It fight! It fight rock! I will show Guitar Wolf is reborn to you!” (Prendiville)

With Hans Condor, Midnite Snaxxx, and DJ Classic Bar Music

9 p.m., $15

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

TUESDAY 5

MUSIC

Guided By Voices

Ringleader Robert Pollard is rounding up the rest of indie rock giants Guided By Voices for a one-time reunion tour to commemorate Matador Records’ 21st anniversary. And this isn’t some half-ass reunion, either. This is the GBV lineup of the mid-1990s that spawned much-beloved albums such as Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. Pollard’s been just as prolific on his own as he was before the group’s breakup in 2004, but there is just no comparing his solo work to GBV’s catalog. Don’t miss your chance to see one of the most influential indie rock bands of the past 20 years one last time. (Landon Moblad)

With Times New Viking

8 p.m., $24

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

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SKI-thal weapon

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

September 28, 2010

4

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC E-A-SKI has been in the game nearly 20 years, producing tracks with then-partner CMT for Spice 1’s eponymous 1992 debut on Jive Records and subsequently working with the likes of Master P, Ice Cube, and even Dr. Dre. He’s also maintained a career as a rapper. Yet despite several local radio hits and four major-label deals — Priority, Relativity, Dreamworks, Columbia — he’s never released an album. The deals have always soured, yet the astute businessman has always made money on them, as his professional-grade studio in the middle of a huge house hidden beyond the Oakland Hills attests.

I’ve come by for a private screening of SKI’s new video, "No Problems," the first single from The Fifth of Skithoven, an album he plans to release next year through his own label, IMGMI. If "private screening" sounds highfalutin’, "No Problems" is no ordinary clip. It’s a six-minute film, directed by Wayans Brothers associate Michael Tiddes, that recently won an award for best music video at the 13th Okanagan International Film Festival in Kelowna, British Columbia.

"I didn’t just want to keep putting videos out there," SKI explains. "I wanted to do something more cinematic to express the music."

A John Woo-like allegory of rap integrity, "No Problems" finds SKI battling to reclaim his soul from the Devil, wagering the contents of a mysterious Pulp Fictionesque briefcase that he can do it. The "x-factor," as SKI puts it, is the actor playing the gravel-voiced, gangsta Devil: Danny Glover. After meeting years ago in activist circles — SKI frequently mentors inner-city youth — the two recently reconnected when they found themselves members of the same gym. Despite the demands of Glover’s schedule (seven films currently in post-production, according to imdb.com), the Lethal Weapon star made time for the shoot.

"I did it ’cause SKI kept bugging me," Glover laughs during a quick phone call. "No, seriously. I respect what he does with Oakland and the community, and I thought it’d be fun." Judging by his over-the-top supervillain meltdown as SKI emerges triumphant, Glover had plenty of fun with the role.

"It was an honor for him to even want to be in a hip-hop project," SKI says. "I did my first line with him and just froze, like, ‘This is Danny Glover!’ I ain’t gonna lie, I got star-struck! And I’ve done a lot of stuff."

It’s hard to imagine a tongue-tied E-A-SKI, but then again, even Frank Sinatra looks intimidated alongside Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls (1955). Getting Glover in his video is exactly the type of rabbit SKI consistently pulls out of his hat to keep himself relevant in a genre in which artists usually have short self-lives. Even on his own independent label, SKI routinely places videos on MTV, most recently 2009’s "Rare Form" by IMGMI-signee and Frontline-member Locksmith. Although there’s a trailer for "No Problems" on MTV’s movie blog, and SKI plans more film festival screenings, the video remains unreleased.

"I want to make its debut a big thing," SKI says. "Like MTV showing the trailer, having a build up, then boom! — a Jam of the Week. We have a relationship, so they’re open to it. But it’s still in the works because I’m trying to see what’s best for my album."

Like a rap Paul Masson, SKI will serve no wine before its time, and Skithoven is no exception, though he’s already lined up tracks with the likes of Tech 9ine, Freeway, and Ice Cube (whose upcoming I Am the West [Lench Mob] includes a bonus track produced by SKI). "It’s like a puzzle," he says. "I like to get the pieces and now I’m structuring it." But will we finally see an album from the man known as "The Bay’s Dre," or will there be more of the Detox-like delays that have led him to shelve previous discs like Earthquake and Apply Pressure? SKI’s patience is unwavering.

"I never let people dictate to me," he says. "I’m gonna do what I wanna do. I’ve always been a firm believer in, if I can’t do what I want to do at that time and then too much time goes by, it’s time to reinvent."

www.myspace.com/mreaski

The test of the Tenderloin

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

September 28, 2010

16

caitlin@sfbg.com

This is a story about love and money. Or a story about love, money, and location. — Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City (Verso 2000)

It’s a sunny day in the most maligned neighborhood in San Francisco. I’m walking down a busy sidewalk with an excited Randy Shaw, long-time housing advocate. He’s giving me a tour of his Tenderloin.

“There’s history everywhere you look here,” he notes as we rush about the dingy blocks of one of the city’s most densely populated, economically bereft communities. In a half-untucked navy button-down and square-frame glasses, Shaw reels off evidence of this legacy faster than I can write it down and still maintain our walking pace.

To our left, Hyde Street Studios, where the Grateful Dead recorded its 1970 album American Beauty. Across the street, a ramshackle building that once housed Guido Caccienti’s Black Hawk nightclub, where the sounds of jam-fests by the likes of Billie Holiday and John Coltrane would echo out onto the streets during its heyday in the 1950s. Throughout its history, the Tenderloin has been renowned for its nightlife: music, theater, sex work — and the social space that occurs between them.

Shaw came to the Tenderloin 30 years ago as a young law student and founded and built the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a nonprofit agency that is now one of the largest property owners in the neighborhood and employs more than 250 full-time workers. Shaw has spent the last few decades fighting to improve conditions in the single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs, once notorious for malfunctioning heating systems and mail rooms that would dump the letters for their hundreds of low-income residents into a pile on the floor rather than fit them into personal lock boxes (which now line the walls of THC’s lobbies).

But that activism isn’t the reason for this tour. No, today Shaw is showing me why tourism can work in the Tenderloin. The heavy iron gate of an SRO is quickly buzzed open as the doorman recognizes him. Inside, working-class seniors mill about aided by walkers — this particular property is an old folks’ home — but over our heads, affixed to a majestically high ceiling, looms a triple-tiered glass and metal chandelier, evidence of the area’s architecturally important past.

“When I show people this,” Shaw smiles at my amazement at this bling in a nonprofit apartment building, “they’re amazed at the quality of the housing.” Further down the road, we peep in at a vividly Moorish geometric vaulted ceiling and a lobby that once housed a boxing gym where Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali liked to spar. Both are now home to the inner city’s poorest residents.

Of course, it’s not just tours that we’re talking when it comes to Shaw’s plans for the future. Shaw has acquired a 6,400-square-foot storefront in the Cadillac Hotel on the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth streets, where he plans to open the Uptown Tenderloin Museum in 2012. He says it will showcase the hood’s historical legacy as well as house a nighttime music venue in the basement. The increased foot traffic, he says, will do good things for public safety (a problem that has been identified as a high priority by the resident-run Tenderloin Neighborhood Association) and bring business to the neighborhood’s impressive collection of small ethnic restaurants.

An increased focus on the Tenderloin’s heritage and public image, Shaw says, will translate to more jobs and a better quality of life for the people who live here. “My goal is to have this be the first area in an American city where low income people have a high quality of life,” he says.

If Shaw is correct, it will indeed be a first. Many cities have attempted to transform low income areas with arts districts — and the end result has typically been the displacement of the poorer residents. Coalition on Homelessness director Jennifer Friedenbach described the process: “Gentrification follows a very specific path. First come police sweeps, then the arts, then the displacement. That’s the path that we’re seeing. Hopefully we’ll be able to avoid the displacement part,” she says.

It’d be great if the Tenderloin took the road less traveled — but will it?

Shaw’s best-case scenario seems unlikely, according to Chester Hartman, a renowned urban planning scholar and author of the numerous studies of San Francisco history and the activist handbook Displacement: How to Fight It (National Housing Law Project 1982). Hartman doubts the Tenderloin will remain a housing option for the city’s poor, given its central location and market trends. “The question is, what proportion will move and what will stay?” he said in a phone interview.

Earlier this summer, the National Endowment of the Arts awarded the SF Arts Commission $250,000 toward an arts-based “revitalization of the mid-Market neighborhood.” The area, which is adjacent to the Tenderloin, is considered by many to be the more outwardly visible face of the TL. In truth, the two neighborhoods share many of the same issues and public characteristics, including high density living and prominent issues with drugs.

Amy Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s director of neighborhood business development, said the Newsom administration is using the money “to implement arts programming that would have an immediate impact on the street. These activities would then build momentum for the longer-term projects.” At this point, plans for that “immediate impact” have started with the installation of lights on Market Street between Sixth and Eighth streets. Two other projects are also in effect: a city-sponsored weekly arts market on United Nations Plaza and an al fresco public concert series.

It’s hard to distinguish these moves from a general trend toward rebranding the image of the Tenderloin. These streets have already seen Newsom announce a historic preservation initiative that put $15,000 worth of commemorative plaques on buildings; it was also announced they would be added to the National Register of Historic Places, a move that allows property owners deep tax cuts for building renovations.

Cohen said her office has spent time trying to attract a supermarket (something the neighborhood, although flush with corner stores, currently lacks), but efforts seem to be faltering. “Grocery store operators and other retailers perceive that the area is unsafe and have expressed concerns about the safety of their employees and customers,” Cohen said. “The arts strategy makes sense because it builds on the assets that are there. Cultivating the performing and visual arts uses that are already succeeding will ultimately enhance the neighborhood’s ability to attract restaurants, retail, and needed services like grocery stores.”

These days, many of the small businesses in the area have window signs hyping “Uptown Tenderloin: Walk, Dine, Enjoy” over graphics of jazzy, people-free high-rises. Looking skyward, one observes the recent deployment of tidy street banners funded by the North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District that pay homage to the number of untouched historic buildings in the neighborhood. The banners read “409 historic buildings in 33 blocks. Yeah, we’re proud.”

Figuring out who benefits from these new bells and whistles can seem baffling at times. Even the museum plan, which Shaw says will draw inspiration in part from New York’s Tenement Museum, has drawn criticism. A July San Francisco Magazine blog post was subtitled “An indecent proposal that puzzled even the San Francisco Visitors Bureau” and likened Shaw’s attempts to the “reality tourism movement” that takes travelers through gang zones in L.A. and poverty-stricken townships in South Africa.

This seems to be a misconstruction of what he’s attempting. “You know what no one ever calls out? The Mission mural tours, the Chinatown tours,” Shaw says.

And Shaw scoffs when I bring up that PR bane of the urban renewer: gentrification. He takes me through a brief rundown of the strict zoning laws in the Tenderloin, adding that many people don’t believe that poor people have the right to live in a high-quality neighborhood: “I haven’t been down here for 30 years to create a neighborhood no one wants to live in.”

Indeed, thanks to the efforts of Shaw and others, it would be hard for even the most determined developers to get rid of the SRO housing in the Tenderloin.

In the 1980s, community activists struggled to change the zoning designation of the neighborhood, which lacked even a name on many city maps. The area was zoned for high-rise buildings and was being encroached on by the more expensive building projects of tourist-filled Union Square, Civic Center, and the wealthier Nob Hill neighborhood. Their success came in the form of 1990s Residential Hotel Anti-Conversion Ordinance, which placed strict limits on landlords flipping their SROs into more expensive housing.

Hartman remains unconvinced of the efficacy of the protective measures activists have won in years past; indeed, even SRO rental prices have soared. According to the Central City SRO Collaborative, in the decade after the Anti-Conversion Ordinance, rental prices increased by 150 percent, not only pricing residents out of the Tenderloin but out of the city. “Where do they move?” Hartman asked. “It’s probably the last bastion of low-income housing in the city. That changes the class composition of the city.”

“The neighborhood has been changing slowly but steadily,” says District Six Sup. Chris Daly when reached by e-mail for comment on the Tenderloin’s future. He writes that rents in the neighborhood have been consistently rising and that several condo development proposals have crossed his desk. Daly has been involved in negotiating “community benefits” and quotas for low income housing in past mid-Market housing projects, but has been disappointed by subsequent affordable housing levels in projects like Trinity Plaza on the corner of Sixth and Market streets. In terms of the Tenderloin, he said, “it is untrue to say that the neighborhood is immune from gentrifying forces. It is shielded, but not immune.”

But some see the influx of art-based attention to the area as a possible boon to residents. Debra Walker, a San Franciscan artist who is running for the District 6 supervisor post, said she believes arts can be used “organically to resolve some of the chronic problems in the Tenderloin, street safety being the primary one in my mind.”

Though most of her fellow candidates expressed similar views when contacted for this story, western SoMa neighborhood activist Jim Meko said he thinks artists in the area are being used to line the pockets of the real estate industry. “The idea of creating an arts district is an amenity that the real estate dealers want to see because it makes the neighborhood less scary for their upper class audience” he says.

The area clearly has a rich legacy of nightlife, arts, and theater. The Warfield is here, as is American Conservatory Theater, the Orpheum, and the Golden Gate. So is the unofficial center of SF’s “off-off Broadway district,” which includes Cutting Ball Theater and Exit Theater. The Exit has been located in the TL since its first performance in 1983, held in the lobby of the Cadillac Hotel, and sponsors the neighborhood’s yearly Fringe Festival. There are art galleries and soup kitchens, youth and age, and more shouted greetings on the streets than you’ll hear anywhere else in the city.

No one is more aware of this diversity of character than Machiko Saito, program director of Roaddawgz, a TL creative drop-in center and resource referral service for homeless youth. I met Saito in the Roaddawgz studio, which occupies a basement below Hospitality House, a homeless community center that also houses a drop-in self-help center, an employment program, men’s shelter and art studio for adults in transition.

Despite its being empty in the morning before the open hours that bring waves of youth to its stacks of paints and silk-screens, Roaddawgz is in a glorious state of bohemian dishevelment that implies a well-loved space. It could be a messy group studio if not for the load-bearing post in the center of the room covered with flyers for homelessness resource centers and a “missing” poster signed “your Mom loves you.”

We talk about how important it is that the kids Saito works with have a place like this, a spot where they can create “when all you want to do is your art and if you can’t you’ll die.” A career artist herself, she cuts a dramatic figure in black, safety pins, and deep red lipstick painted into a striking cupid’s bow. Her long fingernails tap the cluttered desk in front of her as she tells me stories from the high-risk lives that Roaddawgz youth come to escape: eviction, cop harassment, theft, rape.

The conversation moves to some of the recent developments in the area. Saito and I recently attended an arts advisory meeting convened by the Tenderloin Economic Development Corporation’s executive director, Elvin Padilla, who has received praise from many of the TL types I spoke with regarding his efforts to connect different factions of the community. Attendees ranged from a polished representative from ACT, which is considering building another theater, for students, in a space on Market and Mason streets, to heralded neighborhood newbies Grey Area Foundation, to Saito and longtime community art hub Luggage Store’s cofounder Darryl Smith. Talk centered on sweeping projects that could develop a more cohesive “identity” for the neighborhood.

I ask Saito how it felt for her to be involved with a group whose vision of the neighborhood might be focused on slightly different happenings than what she lives through Roaddawgz. She says she’s been to gatherings in the past where negative things about the Tenderloin were highlighted. Of Padilla’s arts advisory meeting, she says, “I think that one of the reasons I wanted to go was that it’s important [for attendees] to remember that there’s a community out there. Things can get really complicated. It’s hard to come up with decisions that affect everyone positively. If we’re going to say, ‘The homeless are bad; the drug addicts are bad; the business owners that don’t beautify their storefronts…” She trails off for a moment. “I don’t want to lose the heart of the Tenderloin.”

In yet another Tenderloin basement — this one housing the North of Market-Tenderloin CBD, an organization that is known for its work employing ex-addicts and adults in transition — Rick Darnell has created the Tenderloin Art Lending Library. The library accepts donated works from painters and makes them available for use by Tenderloin residents, many of whom have recently moved into their SRO housing and are in need of a homey touch.

Darnell is rightfully ecstatic at the inclusive nature of his library, but has been hurt over its reception at an arts advisory meeting he attended to publicize its creation. “Someone whispered under their breath ‘I would never lend anything to anyone in the Tenderloin,’ ” he tells me. The exclusion that Saito and Darnell sometimes feel highlights the reality that the definition of the Tenderloin might well vary, even among those who are set on making it “a better place.” The arts community appears to suffer from fractures that appear along the lines of where people live, their organizational affiliation, their housing status, and how they think art should play a role in community building.

Sammy Soun is one Tenderloin resident who would welcome an increased focus on art in the Tenderloin. Soun was born in a Thailand refugee camp to Cambodian parents fleeing the civil wars in their country. He grew up in the Tenderloin, where his family lived packed into small studios and apartments.

But he was part of a community, with plenty of support, and lives in the neighborhood to this day, as do one of his four siblings and his daughter. Soun paints, does graffiti, draws — he’s considering transferring from City College to the San Francisco Art Institute. He has worked at the Tenderloin Boys and Girls Club for nine years, giving back to the kids he says “are the future. They’re going to be the ones that promote this place or keep it going — if they want to.” His sister, cousins, and uncles still live in the neighborhood. You might say he has a vested interest in the area’s future.

He finds the incoming resources for the Tenderloin arts scene to be a mixed bag. Soun has never been to the Luggage Store, although it’s one of the longtime community art hubs in the area. He can’t relate to the kinds of art done at the neighborhood’s recent digital arts center, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, though he says the space has contacted him and friends to visit. His disconnect from the arts scene implies that future arts projects need to work harder on their community outreach — or even better, planning — with artists who call the Tenderloin home.

But Soun loves the new Mona Caron mural the CBD sponsored on the corner of Jones Street and Golden Gate Avenue. Well-known for her panoramic bike path mural behind the Church Street Safeway, Caron painted “Windows into the Tenderloin” after dozens of interviews and tours of the neighborhood with community members. Its “before and after” panels are a dummies’ guide for anyone seeking input on ways to strengthen the Tenderloin community — though the “after” does show structural changes like roads converted into greenways and roof gardens sending tendrils down the sides of buildings, the focal point is the visibility of families. Where children were ushered through empty parking lots single-file in the “before” section, the second panel shows families strolling, children running, a space that belongs to them.

Our interview is probably the first time somebody has asked Soun where he thinks arts funding in the Tenderloin should go. “For projects by the kids in the community,” he said.

Truth be told, more art of any kind can only make the Tenderloin a better place — but if you’re trying to improve quality life, focus needs to be on plans that positively affect residents of all ages — art can be a vital part of that, but it should be one part of a plan that ensures rent control, safe conditions, and access to services. After all, if you’re going to rebrand the Tenderloin, you might want to look at the painting on the wall.