Cheryl Eddy

“All our families are f-ed up:” Director David Dobkin on his Duvall vs. Downey drama ‘The Judge’

Sue Vaughan
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“All our families are f-ed up:” Director David Dobkin on his Duvall vs. Downey drama ‘The Judge’

With dysfunctional family tale-meets-courtroom drama The Judge (out Fri/10), director David Dobkin is no longer simply “the guy who directed The Wedding Crashers (2005)” — he’s also the guy who got Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall to go toe-to-toe. Downey plays hotshot Chicago lawyer Hank, who verrrry reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after the death of his mother; he’s met with hostile hospitality from his aging, long-estranged father, the town judge (Duvall), who verrrry reluctantly allows his son to represent him when he’s accused of murder. 

The Judge‘s biggest flaw (besides its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time and some sentimental tendencies) is that it tries to be too many genres at once. But those marvelously acted Downey vs. Duvall tête-à-têtes — and one memorably hilarious jury-selection scene — can’t be ignored. Prior to its theatrical release, The Judge screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and I got a chance to speak with Dobkin about his latest film.

SF Bay Guardian The film opens with quite a comedic scene, with Hank dressing down a fellow attorney in a courtroom men’s bathroom. While there are funny moments throughout, it’s not a comedy. Why did you decide to begin there?

David Dobkin I wanted to open the movie with some sort of unexpected little bang, and I also wanted to start with a character that was kind of the Robert that everyone loves in so many of his movies: the most flamboyant, fun, arrogant, sarcastic guy. Part of the design of the movie was, “What if that guy was a real guy?”, and then had to go through this real journey. What would it be when he strips himself down and gets put through a grinder? How does a guy like that fit into a real family? I think that’s part of what’s cool about the movie — he starts there, and he’s very much that guy throughout, but he does slowly peel the onion back. The layers and layers come out, and you get to see Downey in a different way.

SFBG I’m interested to hear how you approached characterizing a typical American small town. Though Hank hated living there — there’s the scene when he first drives back into town, and is moaning to himself, “This sucks!”, it’s actually an incredibly idyllic place. 

DD I’m psyched that you caught that. These are the things that, as a geeky director, have in your head and you think they’ll work a certain way, and you pitch it to your producers. I said to this to Downey, too: The town is the other glimpse of Hank’s father. It’s about certain values and a certain time period. It’s a world that’s preserved in time, like our memories of being a child, or nostalgia. What’s interesting is when he comes back, it’s something that’s appealing to the audience, but he’s put off by it. It makes us curious about him, so you lean in because of that. And then you slowly discover that he was exiled. There was no way he and his father were going to be able to live under the same roof, and there’s something that makes you sad for him about that. 

But at the end of the movie, without giving away the end, hopefully there’s a way he can reconcile that. I think we all wish we could get back home, to an imaginary home — I don’t think it’s really the home we think it was when we were kids. But the older we get, the more nostalgic we get when we think back on it. Our psyches lie to us to keep us connected.

SFBG One way you bring the past into the story is through the family’s home movies. What inspired you to use that as a narrative device, and how did you decide which scenes to depict in them?

DD We wanted to do it for real. We wanted to make it seem authentic, which meant hitting certain notes that you’d expect to see, but in our own way. Especially for [Hank’s younger brother,] Dale [Jeremy Strong]. The movies are centered around him, and it’s almost like he’s trying to put the family back together again. He’s trying to take these old image and reconstruct the stories, and he’s trying to work out what happened. He’s the innocent. We see the collateral damage of that family through his eyes of what’s happened between Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall’s characters. And the truth is, if there’s discord in a family on that level, everybody’s fucked up by it. Nobody can heal until that thing gets fixed. I think that there’s an unconscious part of you that roots for them to somehow work it out, so that the family can come together again. But we all have that. All our families are fucked up.

SFBG There’s that line, “This family is a fuckin’ Picasso painting.”

DD Yeah. That was Downey, just off the top of his head.

SFBG I enjoyed the bit in the screenplay about selecting jurors based on their bumper stickers. Who came up with that?

DD [Co-screenwriter] Bill Dubuque. He said to us, “I have an idea for a scene with the jury selection.” I was like, “What? Nobody wants to hang around for that. Get into the trial!” But he knew we were trying to find more comedy. You have to have some fun in a movie like this. We didn’t want to make a serious movie in that way. We knew there was a lot of drama in the film, but there’s a lot of humor because those were the [types of] movies that we love. We’d always talk about Rain Man (1988), or Terms of Endearment (1983), when Hollywood would make movies about people, but with movie stars. Which does not happen anymore for the most part. They happen here and there, but they’re certainly not on the agenda.

Aside from those ones in the 1980s, we all loved those ones from the ’70s, when movies were really about people. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980) — movies that were talking about cultural issues, like divorce and going to therapy, that people hadn’t worked out yet. The films were having the conversation with the audience at the same time. 

The Judge is not an agenda movie, but healing your family and taking care of a parent that’s in trouble is something we’re seeing a lot more of. Certainly for me, I never imagined I was going to have to parent one of my parents. That was the impetus that created the story for this movie — this really difficult experience [in my own life].

SFBG I read that you got the main cast together beforehand for family bonding, or dysfunctional family bonding, as the case may be. Is that a technique you’ve used before, and what does it accomplish?

DD All my movies, I do a three-week rehearsal. I bring the actors in and we build their characters and kind of do a workshop. I never actually perform the scenes all the way — I don’t want to see an emotional scene be on its feet until we’re there on set. But we break it apart, we study it, we talk about it. We talk about our own experiences. I do exercises on back story. It’s kind of like Outward Bound. 

By the time you’re done, everybody has had a shared history, even if it’s only a three-week history. We all get on the same page — I’m able to listen to them talk about stuff, or build things from improvisations into the movie, and everybody gets a chance to be in the room and have a connection that’s real. It’s a sign of commitment. It’s hard to do with big movie stars because their schedules are just really crazy busy, and sometimes it’s hard to do with big actors, someone like Robert Duvall, who is a legend, because they may not want to get down in the dirt and do that kind of work anymore. But for me, I think it informs the work deeply, and part of the reason why the performances in this movie are as powerful as they are is because these guys were all behaving as a family.

THE JUDGE opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Go for Goth

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Go for Goth

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM On paper, it seems like an odd match: director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett of indie horror hit You’re Next (2011), and British actor Dan Stevens, Downton Abbey‘s erstwhile heir. On screen, however, the trio’s The Guest is the boogeyman movie of the year, weaving a synth-scored tale of a small-town family startled by the sudden appearance of a soldier (Stevens) who claims to have known the son and brother they lost in Afghanistan. David is polite, handsome, and eager to assist in any way — whether it’s carrying kegs into a party with just-out-of-high-school Anna (Maika Monroe), or breaking faces on behalf of bullied teen Luke (Brendan Meyer).

You know what happens when something’s too good to be true, and the filmmakers know you know, enabling them to have a great time teasing out this trick-or-treat of a thriller, which is set during the cell phone era but references films like 1987’s The Stepfather and John Carpenter’s 1980s heyday (which, again, they know you know — and love, just like they do). I spoke with all three during a recent phone interview.

San Francisco Bay Guardian The Guest reminded me of another thriller that came out this year, Cold in July — both tell contemporary stories using 1980s retro style. What inspired that approach?

Simon Barrett After You’re Next, Adam and I wanted to think about what got us making movies in the first place. All three of us came of cinematic awareness during the 1980s, so a lot of the movies that inspired us were genre films of the mid-to-late ’80s. We wanted to do something that had that same fun spirit and aesthetic, but we didn’t just want to do an homage or an imitation, because that’s really easy and lazy. It was about taking that same tone those movies had, and doing something original with it. That was our goal from the very beginning, when Adam started talking about The Terminator (1984) and Halloween (1978).

Adam Wingard I read an article recently about how the most homaged filmmaker of the year is John Carpenter. There’s this weird zeitgeist of filmmakers who are inspired by Carpenter and other ’80s filmmakers. All of us making these movies are around the same age, and we all grew up on movies like Big Trouble in Little China (1986). It seems like that’s what’s in the air.

SB They Live (1988) is one we’ve referenced quite a bit — the humor in that film is so extraordinarily innovative and insane. There’s never any overt jokes, but there’s a fight scene in an alley that keeps going and going, until it becomes hysterical. That’s the humor that we were influenced by and respond to: letting something become ridiculous, and calling attention to the ridiculousness, but still taking your story and characters seriously. Carpenter just nailed that and I don’t think he gets enough credit for it.

SFBG Dan, were you a fan of horror before making The Guest?

Dan Stevens Adam and Simon are far more steeped in that specific genre than I am, but I certainly grew up on a lot of cult 1980s and 1990s American horror films. The Halloween films were huge in the UK. The action thriller genre was also massive, and something we were kind of baptized with in Britain.

AW It’s interesting how these cult 1980s genre films are, pretty much worldwide, a good connecting point. When we first talked, Dan and I had a very easy conversation, because we had those through lines. Beyond that, we both connected on understanding the sense of humor in Simon’s script, and realized we should be working together.

SFBG The soundtrack — which includes Sisters of Mercy, Front 242, and Love and Rockets — plays a huge role in The Guest. What motivated your musical choices?

AW Growing up in Alabama, I knew these pot dealers who were super gothed out. I always thought that was interesting, that even in the smallest towns there are still these weird subcultures. Through people like that I became aware of bands like Death in June and Front 242. I always thought that would be an interesting thing to bring into a movie, because I hadn’t seen somebody take a realistic approach to goth sensibilities.

I had a couple of songs in mind that I thought would be good for the movie, but I didn’t want to just make a film that had a bunch of music that I thought was cool. If it’s gonna be in there, it’s got to be story-oriented and character-motivated. I knew, also, that this wasn’t a straightforward horror film, but that I wanted it to take place during Halloween. So the approach to horror in The Guest isn’t necessarily in terms of it trying to be scary. It was more taking that goth approach to it in general, which is like having fun with the macabre and that type of energy. It’s more like fun-scary imagery than it is actually horrifying. 2

 

THE GUEST opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

You better recognize

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You better recognize

cheryl@sfbg.com

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL The Mill Valley Film Festival opens with selections by Oscar nominees (Men, Women & Children director Jason Reitman), winners (The Homesman director Tommy Lee Jones), and multiple winners (Hilary Swank stars in The Homesman). But while MVFF prides itself on star power, it’s also a champion of unsung artists, exemplified by a quartet of documentaries in this year’s lineup.

Robert A. Campos and Donna LoCicero’s 3 Still Standing charts the careers of veteran San Francisco comedians Will Durst, Johnny Steele, and Larry “Bubbles” Brown. All were integral members of SF’s booming stand-up scene in the 1980s, and seemed destined to emulate breakout stars Robin Williams and Dana Carvey (both are interviewed; the film is dedicated to Williams). The giddy energy contained in footage from the Holy City Zoo, where Williams got his start, is undeniable. For a hot minute — Durst won a prestigious comedy contest; Brown brought his self-deprecating digs to The Late Show with David Letterman; Steele scored a big-shot agent — fame, or at least lucrative TV and movie deals, seemed inevitable.

The doc jumps ahead 20 years without ever pinning down why superstardom proved elusive, but there were some obvious factors: The comedy-club scene cooled, and most of the big names moved to Los Angeles’ greener pastures. And one gets the sense that none of the men longed to play a goofy neighbor on some generic sitcom; the paycheck would’ve been nice, sure, but to hear them discuss the joys of stand-up suggests they’ve come to embrace living the dream on a slightly smaller scale. The crisply-edited 3 Still Standing benefits enormously from the fact that everyone interviewed is hilarious — with responses spiraling into riffs — though it might’ve been interesting, as part of the film’s then-and-now structure, to look at SF’s current indie comedy scene, which is livelier than it’s been in years thanks to venues like Lost Weekend’s Cinecave. (Fodder for a future doc, perhaps?) Along with a trio of screenings, 3 Still Standing‘s festivities include a Sat/4 performance with Durst, Brown, and Steele, plus Sun/5’s Robin Williams: A Celebration, a free showing of clips culled from the late great’s many MVFF appearances.

As it happens, Durst turns up in another MVFF doc about an SF artist whose career path has been highly unpredictable. Settling into Plastic Man: The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish knowing nothing about its subject, the viewer might be forgiven for thinking that William Farley’s doc (produced by MVFF programmer Janis Plotkin) is about an elderly sculptor who delights in crafting figures of people and animals from found objects made of plastic.

And it is — but Jerry Ross Barrish also happens to be the son of a professional boxer (who had Mafia connections). He’s been a bail bondsman since 1961 (a staunch progressive, he bailed out Berkeley’s free speech protesters in ’64, San Francisco State rioters in ’68, and multiple Black Panthers). He’s a San Francisco Art Institute-trained filmmaker who acted in a 1974 George Kuchar short before making his first feature, 1982’s Dan’s Motel, which landed him a spot in New York’s prestigious “New Directors/New Films” series. (His final film, 1989’s Shuttlecock, co-starred Durst.) Oh, and there was also that DAAD award he won in 1986, which enabled him to live in Berlin for a time and play a director in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987).

It’s an incredible life story, and Plastic Man — buoyed by Beth Custer’s dynamic score — manages to cram in all of the above, while keeping its focus trained on Barrish’s present artistic passions. He has trouble selling his work or getting gallery representation because “the plastic is holding him back,” according to one art-world observer. In other words, trash ain’t hip. But his work is whimsical and cleverly crafted, and it makes people happy — enough that Barrish scores a huge project at the end of the film that locals just might recognize.

German director Doris Dörrie (2002’s Enlightenment Guaranteed, 2007’s How to Cook Your Life) travels to Mexico City for the meticulously observed Que Caramba es la Vida, about female musicians who’ve added their talents to the male-dominated mariachi world. We meet three segments of this rarefied group. First, there’s a single mother who frequents gritty mariachi hotspot Plaza Garibaldi. “It’s horrible being surrounded by men,” she bitterly reports, but as soon as she croons her first staggeringly soulful note, it’s apparent why she’s pursued such a difficult line of work. Mariachi is less fraught for the other subjects, whose outlook on the culture’s sexism is mitigated by the fact that they perform in groups that are extensions of their own families. There are the housewives who comprise Las Estrellas de Jalisco, singing melodramatic tunes at birthday parties or — in Que Caramba‘s most moving sequence — during a Day of the Dead memorial. Most delightfully, there are the “still standing” members of Mexico’s first all-female mariachi troupe, 50 years on but still full of energy and rousing vocals.

The final film in this gang of four is presented as part of a tribute to its maker, Chuck Workman, the editing wizard behind those rapid-fire montages that pop up on Oscar telecasts. In Magician, Workman takes on Orson Welles, whose 1941 Citizen Kane is often called the greatest film ever made — but who suffered a subsequent career of studio interference, budgetary woes, and general creative frustration. “He was the patron saint of indie filmmaking,” Richard Linklater asserts, a theory amply supported by this essential primer of Welles film and interview footage, expertly stitched together with Workman’s trademark flow. *

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

Oct 2-12, $8-14

Various North Bay venues

www.mvff.com

Keys of life

Michael Redmond
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Keys of life

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM The music biopic is a tricky beast. Very few directors are able to compellingly compress true-life tales into films that actually have some interest beyond “Hey, that famous/infamous thing you already knew about happened like this!” — though superior performances (recent Oscar-winning examples: 2004’s Ray, 2005’s Walk the Line) can help buoy the results. Far rarer are more artistically daring films that unfold more like docu-dramas than glossovers, like Control (2007) and Sid and Nancy (1986).

As with any based-on-truth film, there’s also the question of whose version of the truth is being told. In music biographies, that’s especially important, because if whoever owns the song rights doesn’t like the portrayal of the subject — or if he or she doesn’t have a finger in the box-office pie — you just might end up with a musical story that contains very limited music. This is a problem facing Jimi: All Is By My Side, written and directed by John Ridley, who won an Oscar for scripting 2013’s 12 Years a Slave. The Hendrix family noped any song permissions, so you won’t be seeing star André Benjamin, aka OutKast’s André 3000, wail through “Foxy Lady” or any other songs that hit big during the film’s time frame (it ends just before Hendrix’s stateside breakout at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival). He does get to noodle on some blues riffs, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s notorious cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” — played days after its release in front of a crowd that included astonished Beatles — is one of Jimi‘s few exhilarating moments.

However, the absence of any signature tunes is just one of the film’s problems. Controversy has already swirled around the script’s portrayal of Hendrix as a violent drunk. Former girlfriend Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell) has publicly objected to the film’s depiction of her relationship with Hendrix. Faring marginally better is Linda Keith (Imogen Poots), who famously used her connections as Keith Richards’ girlfriend to help Hendrix break into the music biz. Both women come across as bossy and needy, though Jimi also spends a lot of time making Hendrix out to be an aimless drifter who probably wouldn’t have made much of himself, despite his talent, were it not for people like Keith or his manager, Chas Chandler (Andrew Buckley).

Most of Jimi takes place in swingin’ London, and Ridley conveys the cultural mood with collage snippets (the Who performs! A monk sets himself on fire!), costumes heavy on the go-go boots, and a lot of non-Hendrix tunes. The film addresses racial issues in a few scenes that don’t otherwise fit into its flow, making them feel like afterthoughts: Jimi and Kathy are harassed by the police; Jimi meets a pot-smoking activist named Michael X who encourages him to politicize his music. Stripped of his guitar, Hendrix’s preferred mode of communication is soft-spoken hippie patter (“I’m in a constant struggle against the color gray…”); he’s also fond of thrusting scribbled lyrics at the women he’s wronged as a matter of apology.

Without those electrifying songs to punctuate Hendrix’s day-to-day drama, Jimi‘s narrative is meandering at best. We already know he’s going to become a star. We know he’s going to die young. (Ridley might not know we know, however; for an Oscar-winning screenwriter, he’s sure quick to violate the “Show me, don’t tell me” rule by using onscreen text to ID such obscure characters as “George Harrison.”) Sure, maybe we don’t know how Hendrix wrote “Purple Haze,” but this movie, which contains precious few insights into his creative process, isn’t going to tell us.

 

CAVE OF WONDERS

Fortunately, the music-movie genre isn’t limited as Hollywood would like audiences to believe. Also, it helps with the authenticity factor when one’s subject is a living, willing participant. Lushly filmed by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, 20,000 Days on Earth purports to be a day in the life of moody Aussie troubadour-screenwriter-novelist Nick Cave — but is really an experimental docudrama in disguise.

It opens with Cave, now in his mid-50s, getting out of bed and admitting in voice-over, that he “cannibalizes” everything that happens in his life for his songs. Thus begins an intimate look into Cave’s songwriting, a rambling adventure that includes studio sessions for 2013’s Push the Sky Away (including some goofing off — yes, he smiles!); a chat about his childhood with psychoanalyst Darian Leader; a meal with bandmate Warren Ellis; sorting through his career archives; and scenes of Cave driving around his adopted hometown of Brighton, visiting with cohorts (Kylie Minogue, Blixa Bargeld, Ray Winstone) who appear and disappear in perfect cadence with 20,000 Days‘ themes of memory, the art of performance, and storytelling.

“Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we’re living in the midst of it,” Cave muses. “It only becomes a story when we tell it and re-tell it.” Jimi may have lacked the catharsis from a scene depicting its subject’s triumph in Monterey, but 20,000 Days builds to a Sydney Opera House gig in which Cave croons the songs we’ve seen him create, interspersed with footage of a younger Cave thrashing around the stage in pursuit of what the film vividly captures: “this shimmering space where reality and imagination intersect.” *

 

JIMI: ALL IS BY MY SIDE and 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH open Fri/26 in San Francisco.

Waltz work

Erica Hanna
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Waltz work

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM The New York Times called Col. Hans Landa — the sinister yet gleefully polite Nazi played by Christoph Waltz in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds — “the ultimate Tarantino creation.” In the same article, Tarantino admitted that if he hadn’t found the perfect person to play Landa, he wouldn’t have made the film at all. (Can you blame him?) The supremely likable Waltz’s elevation from German TV regular to movie star was cemented when he won Best Supporting Actor for the role. Three years later, he picked up a matching statuette for Tarantino’s Django Unchained. (In his acceptance speech, he called Tarantino a “hero” — can you blame him?)

Waltz’s ability to play loquacious characters — some evil, some crusading for justice on horseback — is undeniable. But how has this actor, having been handpicked to portray characters tailored to his strengths, fared beyond Tarantino? It’s been a mixed bag. In 2011, he did bad guys three ways, in three forgettable films (The Green Hornet, Water for Elephants, and The Three Musketeers). His best that year was Roman Polanski’s Carnage, as a tightly-wound father who’d rather check his BlackBerry than worry about his son.

His next test comes with Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem. The script was penned over a decade ago by Pat Rushin, a Florida creative writing professor. Its dystopian themes mirror Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995); an overt dig at The Matrix (1999) reflects the era in which it was written, although it’s presumably been updated to include more current-day themes, like technology’s ability to foster faux relationships and extreme loneliness.

Waltz, as gleamingly bald as his Oscars, plays computer whiz Qohen, one of “the most productive number crunchers” at mega-corp Mancom. Qohen is a stress case who dreams about black holes and refers to himself using plural pronouns, as in “We are dying.” (The affectation is as annoying to Theorem‘s other characters as it is to the viewer.) His immediate supervisor (a bewigged David Thewlis) refers him to the enigmatic “Management” (a bewigged Matt Damon), who allows Qohen to work from his home — an old church quirked up to the extreme, because, as the film’s press notes hilariously understate, “a very high standard of production design is expected from every Terry Gilliam film.” (The film’s slender budget means that most of the film takes place in this location.)

This privilege comes with a price, and Qohen is tasked with a “special project:” solving the titular theorem, a maddening beast that would drive even a stable person insane. His madness is in no way assuaged by “Dr. Shrink Rom,” his virtual psychiatrist (a bewigged Tilda Swinton), though he does get some help from Management’s genius teenage son (Lucas Hedges), who shows up at Qohen’s man cave of despair to eat pizza and share his own thoughts on the “Zip-Tee.” There’s also a romance — with Mélanie Thierry, resplendent in virtual-reality beachwear — though it proves no more “real” than anything else in Qohen’s world. Ultimately, despite Waltz’s heavy lifting (and not-infrequent nudity), Theorem sputters to sustain all its many whirring parts, including those that attempt to convey deep thoughts about the meaning of life. Maybe the meaning is “don’t overthink it.”

As for Waltz, his future slate contains a few worrisome choices (the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie? Nein!), but also some intriguing ones. This Christmas brings Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, scripted by the duo who penned Burton’s 1994 Ed Wood, in which Waltz and Amy Adams play kitsch-art impresarios Walter and Margaret Keane. To paraphrase Waltz’s Django Unchained character, how could you resist? *

 

THE ZERO THEOREM opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters.

A broad abroad

Michael Redmond
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A broad abroad

cheryl@sfbg.com

LIT In her 20s and 30s, Kristin Newman had built an enviable career writing and producing hit shows like That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, and Chuck. But her personal life proved far less satisfying; after breaking up with her first love, she bounced between relationships while watching her friends settle down and spawn. Fortunate to have a job that allowed for months-long vacations between TV seasons, she began pursuing her wanderlust tendencies in earnest — emphasis on the “lust,” since her travels to places like Brazil, Iceland, Israel, and (especially) Argentina often included flings and what she came to call “vacation-ships” with locals and others she met on the road.

Along the way, she did some soul-searching — but fear not, her memoir What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (Three Rivers Press, 291 pp., $14.99) is hardly a touchy-feely treatise along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love (more on that later). Instead, it’s a raunchy, witty, relatable look back at journeys that helped guide her into the next chapter of her life, at her own speed, with plenty of disasters and stirring moments along the way. I had to meet the woman behind the book, so I called her up in Los Angeles (her current project is upcoming ABC comedy Galavant, which has a fairy-tale theme and was created by Dan Fogelman, who wrote 2010’s Tangled).

SF Bay Guardian What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is an evocative title. How did you come up with it?

Kristin Newman I thought I’d just write a few funny stories, kind of as writing samples, to get my next sitcom job. All of a sudden, I had 70 pages. It all happened the same month that I met my now-husband, and my stepmother died, and it just kind of poured out of me.

As I sat down to write, I realized [with all these trips and relationships], I wasn’t just biding my time and being silly while waiting for something to start. What I had been doing was actually its own important thing: finding a new way to be happy. My friend, who has a kid by the way, suggested that I call it What I Was Doing While You Were Having Stupid Babies [laughs]. I thought that was going to turn too many people off. So we went with Breeding.

SFBG The title might lead some to believe that you don’t like children, but anyone who reads the book will realize that’s not the case.

KN I always wanted to have kids. But deep into my 30s, I absolutely was not ready yet. Biology kicks in at a certain point, and I felt like I saw so many people around me jumping into things just because of their age, after waiting so long. I knew that I theoretically needed to figure things out, but I just wasn’t feeling it yet. I was always cool with adopting, and I write about freezing my eggs, because I felt like, I can’t let this number dictate what I do. It’s too big of a decision.

SFBG The book is a personal memoir, but it’s also a guidebook of sorts. What’s your travel philosophy?

KN The biggest thing is: Go where the guidebooks don’t tell you to go. Find locals and ask them where their secret places are. Dating a local is a great way to get advice from a local — that’s why I love a vacation romance! If you’re traveling alone, don’t go for the high-end places, even if you can afford them, because that’s not where single people go. It will be all married old people who aren’t going to want to hang out with you. If you’re not 21 and don’t want to hang with the backpackers, shoot for the mid-range.

Always say yes! And then find out how many amazing things happen as a result of accepting invitations to places, or checking out something new that somebody you meet one day suggests. The best things always happen because I say yes to something. Then, it empowers you to do that when you get home, too. Even when I can’t jump on a plane, I take a book and read alone at a restaurant, which I never used to do. I’ll walk into parties alone, or take myself to a museum. I do a lot more things alone in my own town, and that changes everything. You just feel like, “I can handle it!”

SFBG Do comparisons with  Eat Pray Love drive you crazy?

KN I wrote about that book in my book, because I knew that people would compare the two. It doesn’t drive me crazy — that book touched a lot of people, and that’s great. I had a complicated relationship with that book, as I think a lot of people do, dealing with the concept of “misery of the entitled person.” I think that all kinds of people who have entitled, lucky lives can be horribly miserable — look at Robin Williams. So I don’t blame [Elizabeth Gilbert] for her self-created misery, as someone who creates her own misery on a regular basis.

But I wanted to try and take myself a little less seriously, and have a much more comic, self-deprecating approach to the silliness that was my tail-chasing. That was my goal, to have it be fun. Also, by holding off on having sex for most of that book, I feel like she missed out on a really easy way to feel better! [Laughs.] *

KRISTIN NEWMAN

Sept. 20, 1pm, free

Book Passage

51 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera

www.bookpassage.com

 

Falling apart together

Michael Redmond
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Falling apart together

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM “I don’t know … maybe we were doomed from the beginning,” muses Maggie (Kristen Wiig) at the start of The Skeleton Twins. It’s her voice-over, but the figure onscreen is her brother, Milo (Bill Hader), who mopes to Blondie before flopping into a bathtub that slowly fills with water and blood from his slashed wrists. The twins haven’t seen each other in over 10 years, and the ice takes awhile to break when Maggie appears at his hospital bedside. They’ve been separated by geography (he’s in LA; she still lives in their hometown of Nyack, New York) and lifestyle — recently separated from his most recent boyfriend, Milo’s on his way from being a struggling actor to simply being a failed one; Maggie’s a married dental hygienist whose life seems to be in perfect working order. Seems.

Of course, we share her secret: On the same day Milo was penning a suicide note — “See ya later,” with a smiley face — Maggie was on the verge of gobbling a handful of pills in order to make her own permanent exit. Her marriage, to perfectly oblivious Lance (Luke Wilson), is a snooze, and she’s been secretly been taking birth control despite his much-vocalized desire to have kids ASAP. She also hasn’t, ah, been entirely faithful. Clearly, these siblings have more in common than they realize. They’re both deeply miserable, unable to shake a troubled past that includes their beloved father’s suicide, a distant mother (Joanna Gleason) who prefers New Age clichés to honest communication, and the scandalous incident (involving Milo and his high school English teacher) that caused their estrangement.

There’s only one path for these sad sacks (since if one of ’em actually died, that would make this black comedy a little too black), so they set about trying to mend fences. Milo moves into Maggie’s Pottery Barn catalog of a house, and though the surroundings are twee suburbia, the mood is decidedly desperate. Milo’s former teacher (Modern Family‘s Ty Burrell) is still in town, still closeted, and still as confusing a figure to grown-up Milo as he was to teenage Milo. And Maggie is hardly a calming presence, having realized long ago that her husband is alllll wrong for her, despite the fact that he’s possibly the nicest, most understanding dude on the planet. It’s obvious — despite their frequent arguments, and the fact that both do some pretty terrible things — that the only bond in The Skeleton Twins that has any chance at repair is Milo and Maggie’s.

Produced by indie darlings Jay and Mark Duplass, and directed by Craig Johnson (whose co-writer, Mark Heyman, also co-wrote 2010’s Black Swan), The Skeleton Twins might veer too deeply into melodrama territory were it not for its restrained script, and its appealing cast. Saturday Night Live alums Wiig and especially Hader are mostly known for their comedic talents — we all saw Wiig give good pathos in 2011’s Bridesmaids, but it’s impressive to see the same actor who portrayed flamboyant club kid Stefon bringing depth to a more serious role. (Not to say that Skeleton is entirely grim; there’s an extended lip-sync sequence that fans of the soundtrack to 1987’s Mannequin will find difficult to resist. Plus, this is very much a family that uses sarcasm as a survival method … and, sometimes, nitrous oxide.)

It’s also gratifying to see a relationship movie that’s not solely focused on romance. In fact, the film’s message that squaring away one’s beef with the family members that matter most (once you’ve jettisoned those beyond all hope, like Maggie and Milo’s selfish, Sedona-dwelling mother) is an important step toward healing and finding-your-true-self-ness. And it just so happens that The Skeleton Twins is being released not long before the holiday that holds so much meaning for its protagonists: Halloween. Though many a family drama pivots around Christmas, The Skeleton Twins is a tad too smart for that, and far too aware of the ways life can sneak razor blades into its twists and turns. *

 

THE SKELETON TWINS opens Fri/12 in Bay Area theaters.

High fly

Michael Redmond
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0
High fly

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Nothing has elevated the sports documentary more than ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, which engages filmmakers (including the A-list likes of Steve James, Barbara Kopple, and Alex Gibney) to bring moments of sports history into tight focus. Subjects include single incidents that had great cultural impact (Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement); lesser-known stories worthy of attention (the decades-old murder of a high-school basketball star); rivalries that have only gotten more fascinating in the intervening years (Nancy vs. Tonya); and character portraits (George Steinbrenner, Bo Jackson, Marion Jones).

No matter the filmmaking approach, the “30 by 30” films all engage, thanks to their human-interest elements. The wide world of sports stardom and infamy is populated with oversized, theatrical, glorious, or tragic characters, be they Olympians, comeback kids, or grabby fans who interfere with World Series games. No No: A Dockumentary isn’t part of the ESPN film stable, but it fits right in with the “30 for 30” aesthetic, with a subject whose charisma is undeniable even in 40-year-old game footage.

First things first: Was Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis high on LSD when he threw his no-hitter June 12, 1970? We may never know for sure. And we may openly debate it, while secretly hoping it’s true. But as No No aims to make clear, that exploit — flabbergastingly insane though it was — hardly sums up Ellis’ entire life and career.

Jeff Radice’s film, bolstered by a funky score from Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, strives to be a well-rounded portrait beyond Ellis’ rep as “the acid guy.” Ellis proves an unguarded, honest subject in audio and video interviews recorded prior to his 2008 death. Also eager to reminisce are scores of friends, family members, and former teammates, who trade Ellis anecdotes with affection (“He always started shit,” chuckles a childhood friend). Later, recalling a game in which Ellis deliberately tried to hit members of the Cincinnati Reds when they stepped up to bat, a member of the Pirates organization shrugs, “That was Dock bein’ Dock.”

His contentious behavior on the field — which, especially later in his career, spilled over into dustups with managers and owners — rarely extended to his teammates, with whom he shared deep bonds, particularly the 1971 Pirates team that won the World Series. That same year, the organization started Major League Baseball’s first all-minority lineup, with Ellis as pitcher. His antics were usually motivated in the service of a greater cause — “He took stands,” a teammate remembers — even if the execution was a tad flamboyant. Famously, he once wore curlers on the field to draw attention to racism in the league. He was also a master of media manipulation, and cultivated an aura of danger that made him a favorite of sportswriters, evidenced by the dozens of Ellis-centric headlines shown throughout the film.

In the 1970s, his rise to pop-culture prominence, a new concept in sports at the time, coincided with the mainstreaming of African American culture, which Ellis easily embraced. (His fashion-plate tendencies were legendary.) Footage of Black Panther rallies also contextualizes the mood of Ellis’ generation, which he exemplified by refusing to put up with the institutional bullshit that earlier African American players had suffered through. Jackie Robinson took note, and wrote a letter to Ellis praising the younger man’s “courage and honesty.” In one of No No‘s most moving moments, Ellis pauses while reading the words aloud, too choked up to continue.

Of course, the film also delves into Ellis’ rampant drug and alcohol abuse. It’s frankly incredible that he was able to function as a professional ballplayer for so long, since he operated under the directive “Anything that got me high, I would do it.” But No No points out that practically everyone in baseball was, at the very least, using stimulants, or “greenies,” in those days. (The Pirates’ trainer during the Ellis’ era remembers wearily telling the guys, “If you use ’em, don’t do it in front of me.”) Who needs steroids when you can pop dozens of uppers, or snort a few lines, before every game?

The Pirates’ clubhouse parties were notorious, though that World Series win suggests athletic performance didn’t suffer. But as every “30 for 30” (or Behind the Music, for that matter) devotee knows, every tale of addiction eventually turns dark. Ellis physically attacked at least two of his wives, who recall him mostly fondly even as they share their firsthand accounts of his cruel temper (his other two wives don’t appear in the film). Eventually, his game began to falter, and after one last stint at the Pirates after years playing for the Yankees and other teams, he retired.

No No‘s last act focuses on Ellis’ wholehearted acceptance of sobriety; with characteristic enthusiasm, he channeled his rock-star magnetism into working as a drug counselor for both MLB players as well as juvenile offenders. It’s a happy ending of sorts, though his vices — he died of cirrhosis — certainly hastened the end of his life.

But back to the LSD tale, so rich it continues to spread 44 years after the fact (and 30 years since he admitted to it). It inspired a lengthy recent Deadspin article, which hinted at an in-the-works feature film titled Ellis, D. (get it?); there’s also an imaginative YouTube short that animates Ellis’ narration of the story (“I was high as a Georgia pine”). He was an ace athlete, an addict, and a crusader for civil rights — and now he’s remembered as a folk hero. What a trip. *

 

NO NO: A DOCKUMENTARY opens Fri/5 at the Roxie.

(Un)deadpan

Michael Redmond
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0
(Un)deadpan

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Consider the zombie comedy — more specifically, the zombie romantic comedy. Simon Pegg of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead famously coined the term “zomromcom,” and it makes sense that the genre has only continued to grow. Even the best zombie movies hit the same ol’ story beats: the dead rise up, a dwindling group of survivors bands together to fight back, someone gets yanked through a window and devoured by a hungry horde, etc. The variables tend to be things like cause of outbreak (disease, aliens); speed of ghoul (from lumbering to sprinting); and outrageousness of gore (the gold standard remains Lucio Fulci’s 1979 eye-gouger, Zombie). But just add in some laughs, or better yet, yearning young hearts, and you’ve got new sources of tension and plot twists galore.

The 2013 Warm Bodies (zombie meets girl, girl loves zombie back to life), 2004’s Zombie Honeymoon (self-explanatory), and the 1993 Bob Balaban-directed My Boyfriend’s Back (in which Matthew McConaughey appears as “Guy #2,” shortly before his breakout role in Dazed and Confused) are other zomromcom examples. Now there’s Life After Beth, which keeps the pun-tastic naming tradition of the genre alive. Like Shaun of the Dead, it’s about a relationship on the rocks that happens to coincide with a zombie outbreak. The twist is that the girl, Beth (Aubrey Plaza), is among their numbers, and may even be Zombie Patient Zero. Her boyfriend, Zach (Dane DeHaan), and parents Maury and Geenie (John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon) are just happy she’s alive again. Or is she?

Beth’s “resurrection” (as her dad puts it) unfolds like something out of The Monkey’s Paw, only when she knocks on her front door after apparently bursting out of her grave, she’s suspiciously preserved and has no memory of suffering that inconveniently fatal snakebite. At first, everyone’s overjoyed; Maury can mend fences with the daughter whose final words to him were “Dad, you’re being annoying,” and Geenie can finally snap all the photos she regretted not taking. It’s more complicated for Zach, whose last conversations with Beth 1.0 included the revelation that she wanted to “see other people,” not that she remembers any of that — and whose own family members (Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines as his distracted parents; Criminal Minds’ Matthew Gray Gubler as his aggro-nerd brother) are too self-involved to offer any support.

Not that they’d know where to begin, since Zach’s romantic troubles soon become supremely spooky. Maury is as dead-set on keeping his undead offspring a secret (“She died, and she’s not dead now. I don’t know why. Who cares why?”) as he is with keeping her in the dark about the fact that she’s back from beyond. Though Zach would rather be honest with Beth — he’s bummed he wasn’t more open with her the first time around — he goes along with the ruse until things get weird. Like, bellowing-fits-of-anger, window-smashing, decaying-skin, smooth-jazz-obsessed weird. “I kinda wish she’d stay dead,” he admits. It isn’t long before Beth’s affliction begins spreading through the greater Los Angeles area, and the inevitable chaos reigns.

Life After Beth was written and directed by Jeff Baena, whose biggest prior credit is co-writing David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (2004), but who also happens to be dating Plaza. Known for her dry, deadpan delivery, Plaza (2013’s The To Do List, 2012’s Safety Not Guaranteed) is more prickly than other leading-lady comedians, like her Parks and Recreation co-star Amy Poehler. Even dressed in Beth’s sweet polka-dotted dress, Plaza is equal parts snarky and unpredictable, a vibe that perfectly suits the scene where Zach tries to woo her with a song he’s written for her. “This fucking sucks!” she growls, before exploding into a rage that ends with a beachside inferno involving an unfortunately situated lifeguard stand. She’s high maintenance. She’s shrill, demanding, jealous, and terrifying. And her boyfriend may have written her the part, but Plaza is 100 percent in control of this character — even in the scenes after Beth has morphed into a teeth-gnashing monster, she appears to be having a blast. Did I mention that zombies in this movie are obsessed with smooth jazz?

Zach is the first romantic leading role for DeHaan, who’s best-known for sinister turns in Chronicle (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Though he spends most of his scenes with Plaza recoiling from Beth’s antics, his emo intensity is the perfect foil for the easygoing Reilly, whose cool-dad persona (he keeps a joint stashed for emergencies) starts to crack as Maury becomes more desperate to protect his daughter.

Life After Beth could have dared to shove the skewer a little deeper into the zombie genre — the notion that Haitian voodoo causes the dead to rise does get a well-deserved knock, and there are some funny bits with zombies who behave in non-traditional ways (some of them even deliver the mail). But aside from Plaza’s oversized performance, the humor here is surprisingly subtle, and often of the muttered-under-the-breath variety. As for the romance, the movie cops out a little bit by bringing Anna Kendrick in about midway through as Zach’s childhood friend Erica, a living, breathing alternative to Beth — who by that point is displaying aggressive mood swings and giving off killer death breath. But there’s also the suggestion that giggly airhead Erica, who agrees with everything Zach says and whose favorite word is “Ohmygod!”, isn’t much of an upgrade. A different kind of zombie, perhaps? *

 

LIFE AFTER BETH is available for viewing on DIRECTV.

Beyond the force

Michael Redmond
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0
Beyond the force

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM In the 14 years since Sir Alec Guinness’ death, his fame has only grown, thanks to the enduring cult of the biggest hit of his long career — a film he famously dubbed “fairy-tale rubbish.” Star Wars (1977) made the stage-trained thespian a very rich man. It also meant that he was forever branded as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the minds of every moviegoer born in the post-lightsaber era.

Star Wars is notably absent from “Alex Guinness at 100,” a slate of digital restorations (and one archival print) screening at the Smith Rafael Film Center — just down the road from George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, as it happens. The series does include the actor’s two Best Picture-winning collaborations with director David Lean: 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, in which a heavily eyeliner’d Guinness plays a supporting role; and 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he won Best Actor. These films are, obviously, glorious and best seen projected onto a theatrical screen, particularly when they’re being offered in sparkling 4K resolution. So if you haven’t seen either, this is a great opportunity. But the real attractions of “Alex Guinness at 100” are its lesser-seen selections, including several post-war comedy classics made at London’s venerable Ealing Studios.

The earliest among them (and the first film in the series, which begins Sun/17) is Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), made a year after Guinness’ turn as Fagin in Lean’s adaptation of Oliver Twist. Technically, he’s not the star of Hearts — that’d be Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini, whose deeply involved and darkly hilarious explanation of how he became a serial killer unfolds from his elegantly appointed prison cell, where he’s penning his memoirs the night before his execution. Born to a poor father and a mother disowned by her aristocratic family, Louis learns he’s eighth in line to be the next Duke of Chalfont. Spurred on by a number of factors (revenge for his mother’s treatment by her snooty family; his longing for a pretty childhood friend, played by the husky-voiced Joan Greenwood, who won’t take him seriously as suitor while he’s toiling as a sales clerk), he decides to start takin’ down the D’Ascoyne family, one branch of the tree at a time.

Hearts‘ most enchanting gag is that all of the D’Ascoynes are portrayed by Guinness, who dons wigs, facial hair, costumes, and even drag, but has such a way with characters that he barely requires the enhancements. Some of the heirs are more odious than others, and some of them conveniently pass away before their number comes up, but Louis’ victims all meet ghastly-yet-posh ends, like a plunging hot-air balloon (thanks to a carefully-aimed arrow) and an exploding jar of caviar. Throughout, the script is full of zingers (“My principles would not allow me to take a direct part in blood sports,” insists the bloodthirsty killer before a hunting excursion), an escalating parade of hats (worn by Greenwood’s conniving character), and the thrill of wondering in which guise Guinness will pop up next. In 2013, a Broadway musical based on the same source novel — Ron Horniman’s Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, retitled A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder for the stage — won a Tony for Best Musical.

Guinness moved to the forefront for Charles Crichton’s 1951 caper The Lavender Hill Mob, which netted him his first Oscar nomination (T.E.B. Clark’s script won for Original Screenplay). He’s bank worker Henry Holland, who oversees the delivery of gold bars from foundry to vault — and has been cultivating a persnickety, detail-obsessed persona for 20 years, biding his time until he can pull off the ultimate heist. Enter new lodging-house neighbor Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), who’s in the souvenir-trinket trade (“I propagate British cultural depravity!”, he says proudly), and has access to a foundry of his own. The first-time crooks round out their gang with two career criminals, and the conspiracy creaks into motion only to hit a major snafu in the form of one wayward, solid gold miniature Eiffel Tower. Keep your peepers primed for a pre-fame Audrey Hepburn (bangs already on point), who pops up in an early scene.

Also in 1951, Guinness starred in Alexander Mackendrick’s satire The Man in the White Suit, about textile-factory genius Sidney Stratton, who gets his kicks tinkering with fabrics on a molecular level. (That he’s a mere loading-bay worker is only a slight inconvenience, since he still manages to con his way into the research lab.) With the help of his boss’ daughter (Greenwood again, here playing a woman turned on by nerdiness), the socially-awkward Sidney creates a seemingly indestructible cloth — terrifying both factory management and the labor union, which join forces to obliterate the invention that’ll render their jobs obsolete. Lots of goofiness in this one, including Sidney’s bleep-blooping chemistry setup, which wouldn’t be out of place in Willy Wonka’s HQ. More juicy cameos, this time for classic horror fans: Hammer Film Productions player Michael Gough plays Greenwood’s uptight beau, and Ernest “Dr. Pretorius” Thesinger shows up to wave a cane around as an anxious senior executive.

Guinness and Mackendrick teamed up again for 1955’s The Ladykillers, remade in 2004 by Tom Hanks and the Coen Brothers. The original — which features a young Peter Sellers, The Man in the White Suit‘s Cecil Parker, several rascally parrots, and Guinness in comically ill-fitting false teeth — remains the better version, with several Ealing Comedy motifs in play: boarding-house shenanigans, a heist gone wrong, one or more ludicrous chase scenes involving hapless cops. Ringleader Guinness, as “Professor” Marcus, assembles a group of ne’er-do-wells, who pretend to be a string quintet for the benefit of their kindly but meddlesome landlady, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). Her creaky home overlooks a train station, which is perfect positioning for the faux musicians’ robbery scheme. But, naturally, nothing unfolds as intended. “All good plans include a human element,” the Professor muses through his choppers. “But no really good plan would include Mrs. Wilberforce.”

The seventh film in the series, 1959’s Our Man in Havana, is neither Lean epic nor Ealing farce, but it has its own impressive pedigree: director Carol Reed (1949’s The Third Man), screenwriter Graham Greene (who adapted his own novel), an authentic pre-revolutionary Cuba setting, and a supporting cast of Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Maureen O’Hara, Burl Ives, and Ernie Kovacs. Guinness is brilliant as an expat whose desire to provide a better life for his materialistic teenage daughter (Jo Morrow) leads him to set aside the vacuum-cleaner biz and accept a gig as a British secret agent. Thing is, he’d rather just sip daiquiris than engage in espionage, so he fakes his way, with luck and imagination, into being “the best agent in the Western hemisphere.” With spy-jinks galore and a plot that veers from silly to suspenseful, Our Man is probably the gem of the series — and it’ll unspool in an archival 35mm print. As Lavender Hill Mob‘s Pendlebury would say, “Capital! Capital!” 2

“ALEC GUINNESS AT 100”

Aug 17-Sept 28, $7.75-$11

Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St, San Rafael

rafaelfilm.cafilm.org/alec-guiness-at-100

 

Rise up singing

Michael Redmond
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0
Rise up singing

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM A remarkably effective — and remarkably simple — form of music therapy pioneered by New York social worker Dan Cohen finds a strong advocate in filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett, whose documentary Alive Inside benefits greatly from its awesomely cinematic results. The doc sprang from a 2011 YouTube video, “Man In Nursing Home Reacts to Hearing Music from His Era,” a six-minute clip that went viral after a Reddit post. (It’s since garnered nearly 1.5 million views.)

The scene is a typically depressing nursing home, where an elderly man named Henry sits hunched over in a wheelchair. But once he’s given a pair of headphones and an iPod loaded with the gospel songs he used to love, he lights up. His eyes open wide. He boogies in his chair. He croons along at the top of his lungs. Even more incredibly, after the headphones are lifted, he’s able to converse with Rossato-Bennett, enthusing about Cab Calloway and his long-ago job as a “grocery boy.” In just seconds, the music he’d long forgotten seemingly zapped Henry with fresh life, enabling him to connect with his memories and express himself with surprising energy.

No wonder Rossato-Bennett, who filmed numerous examples of this phenomenon over the three years he followed Cohen, chose to make Alive Inside his first feature-length doc. Even though we know what to expect after seeing Henry’s reaction, the before-and-afters are intensely moving with every patient: the bipolar schizophrenic whose constant distress is alleviated, however briefly, by a spontaneous encounter with a funky tune; the man with dementia who sparks with his healthy wife, to her teary-eyed delight, as they listen to the Shirelles; the middle-aged woman whose frustration with her forgetfulness is soothed by a much-needed dose of the Beach Boys. And it’s not just the pleasure of hearing the music, Alive Inside suggests; it’s the regained sense of identity and emotion that music triggers in people whose memories have been essentially wiped clean.

Though the film could’ve probably sustained interest just based on these small yet monumental moments, Rossato-Bennett widens his focus to include neurology — Dr. Oliver Sacks explains how music is “a back door into the mind” for patients with Alzheimer’s and related diseases — and the history of American elder care, expanded upon by physicians and others who think the current system favors efficiency over nurturing. (It also struggles against a culture where youth is prized, and aging people are seen as something to be hidden away.) Care facilities emphasize regimented schedules, and most patients are overly medicated. As activist and geriatric medicine specialist Dr. Bill Thomas points out, the big bucks in health care are in pharmaceuticals. One social worker’s dream of distributing iPods filled with big band jams and other music tailored specifically to each patient is a fringe idea at best, no matter how effective it’s proven to be.

Alive Inside also investigates music’s primal powers, with Bobby “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” McFerrin and Musicians for World Harmony co-founder Samite Mulondo offering their expertise. More of an enigma is Cohen (Rossato-Bennett handles the occasionally over-sentimental narration), a lanky, soft-spoken man who cares deeply about the people he’s trying to help, even doing an awkward shuffle with a patient enjoying her first iPod experience. Cohen’s nonprofit, Music & Memory, came about as a result of his volunteer work in nursing homes, which he describes as a “life-changing experience.” Unfortunately, not everyone shares his point of view. We see him networking at a long-term care conference with some success, but he’s also shown pleading his case to facilities that refuse to accommodate him, and prodding deep-pocketed corporations that decline to donate.

Alive Inside‘s delighted chronicling of its own viral origins — Henry and his gospel awakening — caps the movie with a sense of hope that maybe The Kids can be bothered to care about The Olds, after all. One way to start: At screenings across America, including at San Francisco’s Opera Plaza, Cohen’s Music & Memory will have donation boxes to scoop up working iPods for its cause. *

 

ALIVE INSIDE opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

Shots fired

Michael Redmond
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2
Shots fired

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM “The First World War holds the distinction of being America’s most popular conflict while it lasted, and the most hated as soon as it was over,” writes Russell Merritt in the intro to his guest-curated Pacific Film Archive series “Over the Top and Into the Wire: WWI on Film.” Though World War I is a much less popular cinematic subject than WWII, or even the Vietnam War, its complexities mean that the films it did inspire continue to fascinate.

The PFA series kicks off Sat/2 with Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918), in which the Little Tramp heads “over there” and becomes a most unlikely hero. Included in that same program are Disney short Great Guns (1927), and Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), a fiery argument in favor of America going to war, as well as one of the first animated documentaries.

“Over the Top” also includes two silent epics (D.W. Griffith’s 1918 Hearts of the World, and Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1929 Arsenal); three certified classics (Jean Renoir’s 1937 POW saga Grand Illusion; Lewis Milestone’s harrowing 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front; and Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 Paths of Glory, starring an impeccably furious Kirk Douglas); and a Washington-set oddity: Gregory La Cava’s 1933 Gabriel Over the White House.

I spoke with Merritt, an adjunct professor in UC Berkeley’s Film and Media Studies Department, just days before the 100-year anniversary of the war’s outbreak on July 28, 1914.

SF Bay Guardian How did you become interested in World War I films?

Russell Merritt For me, World War I is the event that shaped the 20th century, more than the Depression or World War II — and to see how films contributed is one of those endlessly interesting kinds of problems. They were mainly part of the war hysteria that gripped the country starting in 1917, and that in itself is of interest, because we were so opposed to the war just a few years before that, and we became even more opposed to the war after it was all over. The movies reflect that. Trying to account for these dramatic mood swings is part of the fascination.

SFBG How did you select the films in the series?

RM I tried to find both classics and some off-center ones. I suspect nobody who does a series on the First World War is going to forget All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion, or Paths of Glory, but few would think of Dovzhenko’s Arsenal or Gabriel Over the White House — though those enable us to get to some hidden aspects, or lesser-known aspects, of the ways in which the war was considered.

Of the war films that were made during the war, the only two that anybody remembers are a cartoon [The Sinking of the Lusitania] and a comedy featurette [Shoulder Arms]. Meanwhile, the most popular war film made during the war, D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World, with Lillian Gish, is all but forgotten.

SFBG World War I coincided with the early days of cinema. What bearing do you think the two had on each other?

RM In the case of Hearts of the World, it has a direct bearing. This production was unique in that Griffith is the only filmmaker — the only American filmmaker, the only fiction filmmaker — to be allowed onto battlefields, and onto the training grounds in England, to use the armies more or less as extras. It represents this great effort at trying to use motion picture fiction films as what would have been called “informational films” back then — today, we would call them war propaganda films. It reflects this fascination with movies as the latest medium with which to try to influence public opinion.

One of the most fascinating things about this film is Griffith is an American, world-famous for [1915’s] Birth of a Nation. He is invited by the British to make a feature film that will encourage Americans to join the war, or at least to be sympathetic to the Allied side of the war.

But by the time he arrived in Europe, the war had already come to America. So the project changed, and he created an American story about the war. I’m shortening a story that goes on even longer, but this kind of crazy wandering from one project to another reflects the difficulty of trying to find an image for the war other than making the Germans hideous, lustful barbarians. How do you portray the battles, the French, the Americans? That’s all being changed as he’s making the film, and he starts falling back on the patterns that he used when trying to sell the Civil War [in Nation].

All of this relates to your question, because today we have a quite pronounced way of selling government, or more frequently anti-government documentaries. Back then were the very beginnings of this effort to use film for these types of social purposes.

SFBG Hearts used real soldiers, and some of the films, like Grand Illusion, don’t depict any battles, but some of the special effects in the other films are surprisingly impressive. Disembodied hands gripping the barbed wire in All Quiet on the Western Front…

RM That is an unforgettable image, even all these years later. There was also a silent version made of that, with that same shot in it. In some ways, Paths of Glory is the most shocking of the films in the series, because it’s so angry. But the sheer horror of the war, I think, has never been better illustrated [than in All Quiet].

This leads to a subtext in this series: In some ways, you could regard this as a kind of cross-section of the kinds of films that represent the war. But I have a particular argument to make, which is that the films help perpetuate the illusion that the war that Americans fought was interchangeable with the war that Europeans fought. All Quiet is a great example of that. To this day, we think the Americans fought in trenches, that our cause was as confused and as hopeless to understand as was the European cause, and so on.

But in fact, we fought quite a different war. Our reasons for going into the war were quite different, and the experiences we had in the war were quite different. You can ask a class, as I do, “How many of you had relatives that were killed in the First World War?”, and just a sprinkling of hands will go up. Ask the same question in Europe, and it doesn’t matter if it’s France, England, or Germany — all the hands will go up. That gets blurred over in these films, and I’d like [audiences] to reconsider that.

The other thing I want to do is show how the war was used as the teens gave way to the 1920s, and into the 1930s. It had different functions, especially during the Depression, [when it was] interpreted so that it was appropriate to this great economic disaster. That’s the reason I’m including Gabriel Over the White House. And it has a much different purpose when it’s being incorporated into Soviet history; that’s why I’m showing the Ukranian film, Arsenal.

SFBG Perhaps it’s due to those complexities, but World War I hasn’t become a part of pop culture, for lack of a better phrase, the way World War II has.

RM I can’t think of a modern film about America’s involvement in the First World War. I suspect with the American centennial coming up in 2017, that will change. But even documentary filmmakers haven’t touched it. There was a 10-part British documentary series that was made 10 years ago, but we have nothing like that; Ken Burns isn’t going to do something on World War I. The strange part is, it may be as influential as any war we ever fought, certainly more than World War II, in shaping what kind of country we became.

SFBG Why did you only choose one film that was made after World War II? Is it because there just aren’t very many?

RM That’s one reason. And they’re not as interesting, since they more or less recycle the party line on World War I: it was terrible, it was unfair. There’s no new news coming out about the First World War after Kubrick’s movie, as far as I can tell.

SFBG Do you have a favorite among the movies you’re showing?

RM No, I love all my children [laughs]. When you see Grand Illusion, how can you not respond to Renoir’s humane view? This is the most generous view of the war, of officers, and of POWs, that you’ll ever see. It’s not exactly a comedy, but it’s this remarkable way of reconciling enemies, and officers and enlisted men.

Paths of Glory never gets old. It’s based on a historic event that took place in 1914, and kept on taking place; soldiers were frequently being executed for mutiny or cowardice when a military operation became a disaster.

I haven’t seen All Quiet on the Western Front in a long time, and yet for me it’s unforgettable. The big battle scene comes toward the beginning of the film, rather than where it usually comes at the end, and that makes all the difference. *

OVER THE TOP AND INTO THE WIRE: WWI ON FILM

Aug 2-27, $5.50-$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk

bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

What she sees

Michael Redmond
-
1

cheryl@sfbg.com

SFJFF The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival opens July 24 with The Green Prince, a documentary based on the memoir of Mosab Hassan Yousef. The son of a founding member of Hamas, he worked as an undercover agent for the Israeli secret service for 10 years, sharing a profound trust with his Shin Bet handler. The closing night film is also a documentary about a conflicted childhood that paves the way for tough choices later in life — but if Little White Lie is also a personal story, it’s a far less political one.

It’s a thoroughly American story, telling the tale of filmmaker Lacey Schwartz, who was raised by her parents — both products of “a long line of New York Jews” — in the decidedly homogeneous town of Woodstock. All of Schwartz’s grade-school friends had light skin and straight hair, while Schwartz was dark, with coarse curls. Lovingly recorded snapshots and home movies of her Bat Mitzvah and other occasions suggest a happy young life, but the “600-pound gorilla in the room,” as one relative puts it, was that Schwartz did not look white, despite ostensibly having white parents. Once she reached her teenage years — and particularly after she enrolled in a high school that had African American kids among its population — she began to realize the go-to family explanation (yeah … that one Sicilian way back in the family tree …) was nothing but a flimsy excuse holding back a mountain of denial.

Now in her 30s, Schwartz has overcome years of identity confusion and is self-confidently assertive in a manner that suggests years of therapy (and indeed, we see footage of sessions she filmed for a student project at Georgetown, where she found a supportive community among the Black Student Alliance). Her parents, however, are not quite as psychologically evolved, although her mother — a pleasant woman who has nonetheless been content to spend her life surfing the waves of passive-aggression — eventually opens up about the Schwartz family’s worst-kept secret. The aptly-titled Little White Lie clocks in at just over an hour, but it packs in a miniseries’ worth of emotional complexity and honesty. Schwartz will be on hand at the film’s San Francisco and Berkeley screenings — the Q&As are sure to be lively.

Another, rather different tale of women using cameras in pursuit of the truth surfaces in Judith Montell and Emily Scharlatt’s In the Image, a doc about Palestinian women who work with Israeli human-rights NGO B’Tselem. Group members, who include high school girls and middle-aged mothers, are given small video cameras to keep an eye on protests, harassment, and anti-Palestinian violence perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. (In one disturbing clip, we see a small child launch a giant spitball at the lens.) Able to capture footage in areas deemed off-limits to mainstream journalists, In the Image shows how B’Tselem brings investigative reporting to the front lines, and then to the world (thanks, YouTube). It’s also an empowering outlet for the camerawomen-activists, for whom career opportunities are otherwise as rare as are opportunities for artistic expression.

Women are also front and center in a number of SFJFF’s stronger narrative entries. Writer-director Talya Lavie won Best Narrative Feature and the Nora Ephron Prize at Tribeca for Zero Motivation, a pitch-black comedy about female frenemies jammed into close quarters while doin’ time in the Israeli Defense Forces. Most movies prefer to show soldiers in combat, and Zero Motivation does just that — if “combat” means fighting to avoid boring admin work, to achieve the highest score at Minesweeper, to fuck up the most extravagantly, or with staple guns. “There’s a war going on — get a grip!” a superior officer reminds self-centered slacker Daffi (Nelly Tager), and that’s more or less the only current-affairs statement uttered in a film that’s mostly concerned with the agonizing task of achieving responsible young adulthood.

Another coming-of-age tale unfolds in Hanna’s Journey, director and co-writer Julia von Heinz’s drama about a Berlin business-school student (Karoline Schuch) whose résumé is lacking in the sort of warm-fuzzy community service that’ll elevate her in the cutthroat job market. Her estranged mother, who works with a German group placing volunteers in Israel, proves unexpectedly helpful, and Hanna is soon winging her way to work with developmentally disabled adults in Tel Aviv, leaving her sleek wardrobe and yuppie boyfriend behind.

Hanna’s Journey has all the potential to be a pat story about a German woman coming to terms not just with her own life choices, but with complicated family history (hint: it involves World War II) only a trip to Israel can unearth. There’s also a conveniently hunky Israeli (Doron Amit) in the mix. But! Schuch, who resembles Jessica Chastain, brings authenticity to a character who morphs from superficial to soulful in what might otherwise seem like too-rapid time. She also benefits from a subtle, nicely detailed script, which avoids stereotypes and oversimplification, and is not without moments of wicked humor (“German girls are easy — it’s the guilt complex!”)

Less successful at achieving subtelty is For a Woman, writer-director Diane Kurys’ latest autobiographical drama. Here, she explores her parents’ troubled marriage, inspired by a photograph of an uncle nobody in the family wanted to discuss. The fictionalized version begins as Kurys stand-in Anne (Sylvie Testud) and older sister Tania (Julie Ferrier) have just buried their mother, who was long-divorced from the girls’ ailing father.

For a Woman takes place mostly in flashbacks to post-war Lyon, where young Jewish couple Léna (Mélanie Thierry) and Michel (Benoit Magimel) settle and have Tania soon after. Russia-born Michel is a devoted Communist, and he’s overjoyed — yet understandably suspicious — when long-lost brother Jean (Nicolas Duvauchelle) suddenly appears in France, having somehow escaped the USSR. Michel’s political paranoia blinds him to the fact that Léna — who married him to escape a death camp (he didn’t know her, but couldn’t resist her icy blond beauty) — is bored with her stay-at-home-mom life, and has taken an unwholesome interest in his mysterious little bro.

There’s more to the story than that, of course, but For a Woman never goes much deeper than a made-for-TV melodrama: entertaining in the moment, but ultimately forgettable. And even gorgeous period details (Michel’s car is to die for) can’t make up for a frame story that feels rather wan next to the film’s cloak-and-dagger main plotline. 2

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 24-Aug. 10, most shows $10-$14

Various Bay Area venues

www.sfjff.org

 

The Rock gets mythological, ScarJo turns scary-smart, Woody’s tepid latest, PSH’s final role, and more: new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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0
The Rock gets mythological, ScarJo turns scary-smart, Woody’s tepid latest, PSH’s final role, and more: new movies!

In case you missed the cover of this week’s paper, the 34th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival kicked off last night and runs through Aug. 10 at an array of Bay Area venues. Get the whole schedule and info on tickets here; check out our commentary here and here. 

From the glittering (and otherwise) land of Hollywood, a raft of new releases also await. Read on for reviews of Hercules, Lucy, Magic in the Moonlight, A Most Wanted Man, and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHFkp5IpKNo

And So It Goes It’s not hard to scope out what the draw might be here for gray foxes like Diane Keaton and Michael Douglas when it comes to this Rob Reiner effort. The woman who so winningly wrapped her vocal cords around “Seems Like Old Times” in Annie Hall (1977) was obviously diverted from her Pinterest duties by the opportunity to sing her heart out on screen again (accompanied on piano by Reiner, a sad comic side dish). Meanwhile, Douglas gets to play a self-absorbed boomer who’s making up for neglecting the next generation — namely his son, an incarcerated addict — in a role that gives off a strong whiff of autobiography. Douglas’s Oren is doing his half-assed penance by caring for his stranger of a granddaughter Sarah (Sterling Jerins), a chore that he not-so-nicely foists onto the Keaton’s Leah. His character and turnaround of sorts, burnished by the triumph of a successful real estate transaction, is as mundane and unconvincing as a half-hour sitcom pivot. The colorless characterization and lame dialogue can probably be primarily attributed to As Good as It Gets (1997) writer Mark Andrus, who seems to be recycling bits of the latter’s title as well as stale chunks from sundry romantic comedies — though considering the missed opportunities and overall weak soup of And So It Goes, Reiner also appears to be chipping away at whatever reputation he has acquired. Is this really the same Reiner who made This Is Spinal Tap back in 1984? (1:35) (Kimberly Chun)

The Fluffy Movie Concert movie starring stand-up sensation Gabriel Iglesias. (1:41)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUM3V8Yh1EU

Hercules Dwayne Johnson is imposingly large indeed as the demigod of fabled strength. Going the Lone Ranger (2013) route of being winky-wink cynical about “the legend” while eventually buying into it anyway, here Herc is really just a 4th-century BC mercenary probably fathered by some random dude (as opposed to god-of-gods Zeus), and who with his merry band of sidekicks goes around fighting against pirates, pillagers, and such. These gigs are taken “for the gold,” but you know this Hercules wouldn’t be down fighting good people on behalf of bad people. When he’s hired to lead the citizens of Lord Cotys (John Hurt) against marauding hordes of alleged centaurs and extreme-wrestling-type beardos with green makeup led by Rhesus (Tobias Santelmann), the plot advances toward the expected training montages and battle sequences. But the plot thickens only when our don’t-call-us-heroes heroes begin to suspect they might have been misled into playing for the wrong team. Relegating a mythology-based tale’s magical aspects to dream sequences and trickery (spoiler: those aren’t real centaurs!), this adaptation of Steve Moore’s graphic novel is way less Clash of the Titans (1981/2010) and much more in the straightforward action realm of Troy (2004) and 300 (2006). It’s big and handsome, like its star, though not so debonair — the pedestrian screenplay doesn’t let him have much fun, while the supporting players allowed to smirk and deliver generally lame quips aren’t much compensation. Directed by Brett Ratner, Hercules is not the campfest of unintentional hilarity some may have hoped for. Neither does it have the content originality or stylistic personality to be memorable. Instead, it’s just pretty decent late-summer entertainment: Probably worth it if you’re craving 98 painless air-conditioned minutes, possibly not if you could really use those 12 bucks or so elsewhere in your life. (1:39) (Dennis Harvey)

I Origins Sci-fi film about a heartbroken biologist (Michael Pitt) whose research leads him to some deeply metaphysical places. (1:53)

Land Ho! “Ex-brothers-in-law set off on a road trip through Iceland, hoping to reclaim their youth” — that’s the studio-supplied elevator description that does accurately describe Land Ho!, but the film is about so much more than that. Jocular Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) is fond of inappropriate jokes, smoking weed, and pushing boundaries, while more reserved Colin (Paul Eenhoorn of 2013’s This is Martin Bonner) is dealing with a recent divorce after enduring the death of his first wife. A spontaneous trip to Iceland, funded by Mitch (who’s going through a senior-life crisis of sorts), takes the pair to Reykjavik dance clubs, spectacular geysers, hot springs, and lonely rolling moors, all the while bantering about life and love (and getting into more than one stupid argument, as old friends do). Without really innovating on the road-movie genre, writer-directors Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz manage to avoid any cute-geezer clichés (for those interested, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 2 comes out next year) in this low-key, personality-driven tale, which aims to please with vintage American-indie charm. (1:35) (Cheryl Eddy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kqq2eBvGTY

Lucy Eurotrash auteur Luc Besson’s latest is a mostly fun action fantasy about a party girl (Scarlett Johansson) who runs afoul of gangsters in Taipei and ends up with a leaking packet of futuristic drugs sewn into her shapely stomach. Side effects include super strength and supernatural intelligence — insert pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo about tapping into 100 percent of one’s woefully underused brainpower, etc. etc. — which leads to some satisfying scenes in which Johansson’s Lucy flattens a hallway of cops with a single gesture, or filters through every phone conversation in the Paris metro area to find the one guy she needs to eavesdrop on. She’s also able to beam herself into electronic devices, a nifty trick that convinces kindly scientist Morgan Freeman to help download her magnificently advanced intelligence into a kind of living computer (shades of 2013’s Her and Under the Skin, except this time ScarJo’s wearing a really great dress). South Korean weirdo/superstar Choi Min-sik (2003’s Oldboy; 2010’s I Saw the Devil) is an inspired choice to play the vengeful kingpin intent on tracking down his runaway mule, and Besson adds some arty flair via nature-show footage and Cosmos-esque clips from beyond the infinite — though the film’s Big Ideas wobble precariously amid its other, mostly silly elements. (1:29) (Cheryl Eddy)

Magic in the Moonlight Woody Allen’s latest — after last year’s vodka-drenched Cate Blanchett showcase Blue Jasmine — offers a return to period romance á la 2011 smash Midnight in Paris. Instead of Owen Wilson time-traveling through the artsy 1920s, we get winsome 1920s clairvoyant Sophie (Emma Stone, 25 years old) falling for the skeptic who’s sent to debunk her, played by Colin Firth (who’s 53). Firth’s performance is easily the best part of Magic in the Moonlight; his Stanley Crawford is a theatrical conjurer famed for his yellowface act, in which he solemnly makes elephants disappear. Off-stage, he’s a self-proclaimed genius regarded by most who meet him as a pompous jerkface. When he’s summoned to the South of France to help a longtime friend and fellow magician (Simon McBurney) prove that Sophie — from humble origins, she’s grown fond of high-society living — is hoodwinking the fancy American family that’s taken her in, nothing unfolds as he expects. The whole exercise is lighter than meringue; it’d be passable as lesser Allen except for that obvious, comically huge age gap between the leads. He knows we disapprove, and he does not care. Are you trolling us, Woody? (1:40) (Cheryl Eddy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYORzJ3e-Og

A Most Wanted Man Director Anton Corbijn’s film may not be the greatest John le Carré adaptation in recent years (see: 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), but it’s still a solid thriller, anchored by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s turn as Günther Bachmann, the once-bitten-but-not-yet-shy head of an top-secret branch of Germany’s FBI/CIA equivalent. Its task: spying on Hamburg’s Islamic groups, where the 9/11 attacks were planned, though the enemies that Bachmann faces come mostly from within the greater intelligence community, including his superiors. Never before has the phrase “the Americans have taken an interest” been so chilling, especially to a guy who is just trying to do his job, if only everyone else (including Robin Wright as one of those meddling Americans) would keep their sticky mitts off his delicately planned surveillance operations. There’s a forward-moving plot, of course, about a Chechen-Russian illegal immigrant with a huge inheritance who might be a terrorist (Rachel McAdams plays his human-rights lawyer), but could also serve a greater purpose by helping bring down an even bigger target. And while A Most Wanted Man‘s twists and turns, involving Willem Dafoe as a banker who becomes a reluctant player in Bachmann’s scheme, are suspenseful, Hoffman’s portrayal of a man trapped in a constant maze of frustration — good intentions cut off at every turn, dumping booze into his morning coffee, breaking up a bar fight, ruefully admitting “I am a cave dweller,” visibly haunted by past errors — is the total package, a worthy final entry in a career that ended way too early. (2:02) (Cheryl Eddy)

What she sees

Michael Redmond
-
3
What she sees

cheryl@sfbg.com

SFJFF The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival opens July 24 with The Green Prince, a documentary based on the memoir of Mosab Hassan Yousef. The son of a founding member of Hamas, he worked as an undercover agent for the Israeli secret service for 10 years, sharing a profound trust with his Shin Bet handler. The closing night film is also a documentary about a conflicted childhood that paves the way for tough choices later in life — but if Little White Lie is also a personal story, it’s a far less political one.

It’s a thoroughly American story, telling the tale of filmmaker Lacey Schwartz, who was raised by her parents — both products of “a long line of New York Jews” — in the decidedly homogeneous town of Woodstock. All of Schwartz’s grade-school friends had light skin and straight hair, while Schwartz was dark, with coarse curls. Lovingly recorded snapshots and home movies of her Bat Mitzvah and other occasions suggest a happy young life, but the “600-pound gorilla in the room,” as one relative puts it, was that Schwartz did not look white, despite ostensibly having white parents. Once she reached her teenage years — and particularly after she enrolled in a high school that had African American kids among its population — she began to realize the go-to family explanation (yeah … that one Sicilian way back in the family tree …) was nothing but a flimsy excuse holding back a mountain of denial.

Now in her 30s, Schwartz has overcome years of identity confusion and is self-confidently assertive in a manner that suggests years of therapy (and indeed, we see footage of sessions she filmed for a student project at Georgetown, where she found a supportive community among the Black Student Alliance). Her parents, however, are not quite as psychologically evolved, although her mother — a pleasant woman who has nonetheless been content to spend her life surfing the waves of passive-aggression — eventually opens up about the Schwartz family’s worst-kept secret. The aptly-titled Little White Lie clocks in at just over an hour, but it packs in a miniseries’ worth of emotional complexity and honesty. Schwartz will be on hand at the film’s San Francisco and Berkeley screenings — the Q&As are sure to be lively.

Another, rather different tale of women using cameras in pursuit of the truth surfaces in Judith Montell and Emmy Scharlatt’s In the Image, a doc about Palestinian women who work with Israeli human-rights NGO B’Tselem. Group members, who include high school girls and middle-aged mothers, are given small video cameras to keep an eye on protests, harassment, and anti-Palestinian violence perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. (In one disturbing clip, we see a small child launch a giant spitball at the lens.) Able to capture footage in areas deemed off-limits to mainstream journalists, In the Image shows how B’Tselem brings investigative reporting to the front lines, and then to the world (thanks, YouTube). It’s also an empowering outlet for the camerawomen-activists, for whom career opportunities are otherwise as rare as are opportunities for artistic expression.

Women are also front and center in a number of SFJFF’s stronger narrative entries. Writer-director Talya Lavie won Best Narrative Feature and the Nora Ephron Prize at Tribeca for Zero Motivation, a pitch-black comedy about female frenemies jammed into close quarters while doin’ time in the Israeli Defense Forces. Most movies prefer to show soldiers in combat, and Zero Motivation does just that — if “combat” means fighting to avoid boring admin work, to achieve the highest score at Minesweeper, to fuck up the most extravagantly, or with staple guns. “There’s a war going on — get a grip!” a superior officer reminds self-centered slacker Daffi (Nelly Tager), and that’s more or less the only current-affairs statement uttered in a film that’s mostly concerned with the agonizing task of achieving responsible young adulthood.

Another coming-of-age tale unfolds in Hanna’s Journey, director and co-writer Julia von Heinz’s drama about a Berlin business-school student (Karoline Schuch) whose résumé is lacking in the sort of warm-fuzzy community service that’ll elevate her in the cutthroat job market. Her estranged mother, who works with a German group placing volunteers in Israel, proves unexpectedly helpful, and Hanna is soon winging her way to work with developmentally disabled adults in Tel Aviv, leaving her sleek wardrobe and yuppie boyfriend behind.

Hanna’s Journey has all the potential to be a pat story about a German woman coming to terms not just with her own life choices, but with complicated family history (hint: it involves World War II) only a trip to Israel can unearth. There’s also a conveniently hunky Israeli (Doron Amit) in the mix. But! Schuch, who resembles Jessica Chastain, brings authenticity to a character who morphs from superficial to soulful in what might otherwise seem like too-rapid time. She also benefits from a subtle, nicely detailed script, which avoids stereotypes and oversimplification, and is not without moments of wicked humor (“German girls are easy — it’s the guilt complex!”)

Less successful at achieving subtelty is For a Woman, writer-director Diane Kurys’ latest autobiographical drama. Here, she explores her parents’ troubled marriage, inspired by a photograph of an uncle nobody in the family wanted to discuss. The fictionalized version begins as Kurys stand-in Anne (Sylvie Testud) and older sister Tania (Julie Ferrier) have just buried their mother, who was long-divorced from the girls’ ailing father.

For a Woman takes place mostly in flashbacks to post-war Lyon, where young Jewish couple Léna (Mélanie Thierry) and Michel (Benoit Magimel) settle and have Tania soon after. Russia-born Michel is a devoted Communist, and he’s overjoyed — yet understandably suspicious — when long-lost brother Jean (Nicolas Duvauchelle) suddenly appears in France, having somehow escaped the USSR. Michel’s political paranoia blinds him to the fact that Léna — who married him to escape a death camp (he didn’t know her, but couldn’t resist her icy blond beauty) — is bored with her stay-at-home-mom life, and has taken an unwholesome interest in his mysterious little bro.

There’s more to the story than that, of course, but For a Woman never goes much deeper than a made-for-TV melodrama: entertaining in the moment, but ultimately forgettable. And even gorgeous period details (Michel’s car is to die for) can’t make up for a frame story that feels rather wan next to the film’s cloak-and-dagger main plotline. 2

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 24-Aug. 10, most shows $10-$14

Various Bay Area venues

www.sfjff.org

 

Purr-suit of happiness: SF SPCA aims to save more lives with its new adoption center

Sue Vaughan
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1

Last year, the SF SPCA assisted with 5,084 cat and dog adoptions. With its new adoption center near Bryant and 16th Streets, which opened June 13, it aims to increase capacity by 20 percent — saving 1,000 more furry lives in the process.

“When our old adoption center opened in 1998, it was the first shelter in the country to house animals in condominium-style rooms instead of cages,” SF SPCA co-president Jason Walthall said in a June press release. The upgraded shelter continues this tradition — and continues to offer dog training classes, volunteer programs for youth, and other community-service activities — but with even more enhancements for the animals. Each glassed-in enclosure features a touch screen pad that provides more information about the pet inside, with an emphasis on personality type (“social butterfly,” “busy bee,” “delicate flower”) over breed — a more efficient way of linking animals with potential new families. 

For dogs, there’s a small indoor park that’s used to make introductions (especially important if the potential new owner already owns a dog — gotta make sure the new pooch gets along with the pack), while the cats, housed in a separate section of the building, get to scamper across SF-themed cat condos. (So far, there’s a Golden Gate Bridge, a Transamerica Pyramid, a cable car, the Sutro Tower, and the SF Giants logo; a Castro Theatre design is in the works.) These improvements make the shelter life more comfortable for the animals — though most dogs only stay two weeks; cats, just slightly longer — but they also help entice visitors.

“We want to make it a fun, happy experience,” says SF SPCA media relations associate Krista Maloney, pointing out that the shelter — which was founded in 1868, has an attached vet hospital (providing free and sliding-scale spay-neuter procedures, among other services), and is a nonprofit funded by donations — competes with pet stores and breeders to place animals in homes. Earlier this year, it joined forces with fellow nonprofit Pets Unlimited, which is located in Pacific Heights, to further its mission: “to save and protect animals, provide care and treatment, advocate for their welfare and enhance the human-animal bond.”

But wait! You’re a San Francisco renter! The words “NO PETS ALLOWED” haunt your nightmares! How can visiting an animal shelter be anything but depressing? SF SPCA’s website has an entire section offering advice for landlords and tenants (one tip: create a “pet resume” to include with your rental application) on the subject of pet-friendly housing. And if the landlord won’t consent to a dog, the SF SPCA just might be able to help out anyway. Coming soon to the new facility: adoptable small mammals, including rabbits, hamsters, and guinea pigs.

Moving pictures

Michael Redmond
-
0
Moving pictures

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM As one of the Bay Area’s largest film festivals prepares for its opening (that’d be the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which runs July 24-Aug. 10), this weekend heralds several smaller fests with unique approaches to programming, including the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival at the Roxie, and Oakland’s outdoor Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Movie Festival. Also in Oakland: the second annual Matatu Film Festival, which takes its name from colorfully decorated mini-buses found in Kenya and other East African countries.

The reference suggests a focus on films from that region of the world. But while it is an international festival, it’s more interested in “matatu” as metaphor, presenting films as a way to transport the viewer to new places or points of view. Amid an overall strong program, one of the most timely entries is Mala Mala, a gritty yet joyful exploration of Puerto Rico’s trans community that makes great use of neon-lit streetscapes, a retro-synth score, and the oversized personalities of its subjects. Among them are drag queens, including recent RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant April Carrión, and transgender activists like Ivana Fred, who cuts a striking figure whether she’s raising awareness on TV talk shows, handing out condoms to sex workers, patiently enduring the opinions of a homophobic priest, or modeling her carefully sculpted assets (“I was born in Puerto Rico, but I was made in Ecuador,” she jokes).

The less-glamorous figures are also compelling, including prostitute Sandy, who’s refreshingly candid about all aspects of her life, and Paxx, the sole transman interviewed, who faces what he sees as a “harder transition than trans girls,” since his hormone therapy is far less accessible, and his social support system is far more limited. With trans issues in the spotlight more than ever — see: TV actress Laverne Cox’s Time magazine cover and Emmy nomination — Mala Mala directors Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles do an admirable job showing how diverse the community is, and how complex each individual’s struggles and triumphs can be. Speaking of triumphs, once the dance moves of future drag superstar Queen Bee Ho command the screen, it’s pretty clear who should star in the filmmakers’ next project — or at least season seven of Drag Race.

Elsewhere among Matatu’s docs is Evolution of a Criminal, Darius Clark Moore’s deeply personal film about his detour from standout Houston, Texas, high school student to bank robber, and from prisoner back to school — this time, at NYU’s esteemed film school. Criminal benefits from the sheen of executive producer Spike Lee, but Moore’s story would be gripping even with less polished production. He frames the film as a series of interviews with family members — mom, step dad, grandma, assorted aunts and uncles, etc. — and others (former teachers, the district attorney who prosecuted him) who reflect on the family history and financial circumstances that nudged Moore down the wrong path.

He was a bright kid from a close-knit, hardworking family that couldn’t seem to dig its way out of debt. One night, he was watching America’s Most Wanted and got the bright idea to plan a crime so flawless there’d be no way he’d get caught. He and his fellow teenage accomplices even had the perfect alibi: They’d show up at school, fake illness so they could slip out for the heist, do the deed, and then return to class several thousand dollars richer.

It did work — we watch the crime unfold in re-enactments far more tasteful than anything ever seen on America’s Most Wanted — until it went sideways, as recounted in interviews with Moore’s now-grown, now-regretful friends, and Moore himself, who brims with genuine emotion and yearns for closure, even going so far as to track down, and apologize to, bank workers and patrons who witnessed the robbery. After awhile, this feels like we’re witnessing a 12-step program in progress, but one of the men, a born-again pastor, is an effective mouthpiece for Criminal‘s themes of forgiveness. On the other hand, the DA is far more skeptical, wishing Moore well with his film career, but suggesting she won’t believe he’s really turned a corner until his prison stint is more than 10 years in the past.

Also among Matatu’s doc fare is Evaporating Borders, Iva Radivojevic’s poetic take on the current immigration crisis in Cyprus, an island ruled by both Turkey and Greece (with an “open wound” of a border between). “Its story is multi-layered and complex,” the filmmaker explains in voice-over. “It’s sordid and manipulated.” She has personal insight — she immigrated there herself during the war in her home country, the former Yugoslavia — but also offers of-the-moment perspective via firsthand accounts from recent arrivals. Many arrive fleeing war, as Radivojevic did, though now most come from Iraq, a situation that inflames the island’s considerable anti-Muslim bias. (The filmmaker interviews one Cypriot politician whose anti-immigration rhetoric sounds awfully Tea Party, a reminder that sweeping intolerance isn’t a uniquely American trait after all.)

Other Matatu docs include Virunga, about park rangers fighting to protect the dwindling population of mountain gorillas in Congo’s Virunga National Park; 12 O’Clock Boys, about a scrappy pack of young Baltimore dirt-bike riders (it had a Roxie run earlier this year, though here it’s paired with dreamy sci-fi short Afronauts as an added incentive); and Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace, which follows the famed NYC-based painter as he shifts his focus from male to female subjects for the first time.

Clocking in at under 40 minutes, Kehinde Wiley is paired with a film of similar running time, if not subject matter: Unogumbe, a refashioning of the Benjamin Britten opera Noye’s Fludde. Set in South Africa, sung in Xhosa, and orchestrated with African instruments, it also recasts the Noah character as a woman (the wonderful Paulina Malefane) who gets a heads-up from the guy upstairs that she needs to gather her family and build an ark, pronto. The other two narrative films in the festival are Of Good Report, a contemporary film noir that also hails from South Africa, and the African folklore-inspired Oya: Rise of the Orisha.

But the best companion piece for Unogumbe is Matatu’s opening-night film, The Great Flood, which pairs archival footage shot during and after the devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood (curated by filmmaker-multimedia artist Bill Morrison) with a jazzy, bluesy score (by guitarist-composer Bill Frisell). It’s a memorable, haunting collection of images: slow pans across small towns with just rooftops visible; residents paddling whatever few belongings they’ve salvaged to higher ground; a makeshift tent city for the displaced, with an open-air piano providing much-needed entertainment; and starched politicians, including future POTUS Herbert Hoover, surveying the damage while skirting the mud as much as possible. *

MATATU FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/16-Sat/19, $12

Most screenings at Flight Deck

1540 Broadway, Oakl

www.matatufestival.org

 

Lost and found

Michael Redmond
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0
Lost and found

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Gerald Santana is stoked about his new Vitamix. When we speak, he’s juicing up breakfast for himself and his kids as part of their raw-food diet. “Overall, it gives me better mental clarity, a stronger ability to focus, and all of the things that I really need to get my business together.”

His business includes movies. Lots of movies. The avid film collector is the founder of the Berkeley Underground Film Society, which has for the past two years hosted screenings showcasing gems from Santana’s stash. It’s held in a Gilman Street office space that transforms into a micro-cinema for BUFS gatherings.

Amateur film collecting is a hobby that’s almost as old as cinema itself. “Home viewers [could obtain] 16mm film prints for the first time in the 1930s,” he says. “In that era, people rented whatever was available, say, The Little Rascals from the New York public library, and then have a film party. There’d be, like, the neighborhood cinema guy. If you flash forward 90 years later, we have Craig Baldwin, [filmmaker and Other Cinema curator], who is pretty much that same guy.”

Santana and the Artists’ Television Access staple met years ago through an online forum for 16mm enthusiasts, when Santana contacted Baldwin about purchasing a film. Today, Santana considers Baldwin his mentor. “He’s passed on a lot of film history to me,” Santana says. “We meet several times a year, and he gives me a personal screening of films that are on the way out of his archive, and into mine. That’s one way I started collecting.”

Once Santana started acquiring films, he was hooked. “You start with buying one or two, and then suddenly you have 100. Then you have 1,000. And some people go much, much higher.” (Santana estimates he owns “probably 3,000.”)

He started a blog in late 2010, hoping to connect with other Bay Area collectors. “Lost and Out of Print,” the name of BUFS’ screening series, is an apt description of the works he favors. “These are obscure anomalies from eras gone by. Once I started building up my collection, I started realizing how many films are just not available. I need to preserve these, because sometimes I might have the only print in the state. Sometimes, I might have the only copy. So I went from hobbyist, to collector, to archivist, to preservationist.”

Santana, who grew up in Los Angeles, has a background in video media, but he was always drawn to celluloid — a fascination that flourished once he moved to the Bay Area. “When I came up here, I found Super 8 films at thrift stores, and I wanted to try to project them. And then I wanted to know everything about film history, film stocks, projectors, and all these other things that make movies go.”

The film club seemed a logical progression once his collection was ready for an audience. “When I started BUFS” — he pronounces it buffs, as in film buffs — “it was just me, seeing if anyone else was interested. And I had to wait until I had titles that were difficult to find, or that I thought were important, and that seemed to work if you grouped them together. That’s when I learned that programming is an art,” he recalls.

His collection includes silent films, home movies, B movies, made-for-TV movies, educational and industrial films, cartoons, and classic Hollywood films that aren’t available on DVD. There are also foreign films that never made it into US theaters — like 1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan, which he’s showing in 16mm July 18 — in their original, uncut forms. (Other BUFS screenings this month are July 19 archival shorts program “Cartoon Carnival #5: Kids and Pets,” and a July 20 showing of Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 The Kid.)

One bump in the BUFS road: Earlier this year, a licensing agency contacted him after he screened some Woody Allen movies without first obtaining the rights to do so. Not wanting to have to pay any high fees — or, you know, break any laws — Santana will be steering his future programming toward works in the public domain.

“I had to backpedal a little bit. I didn’t think anyone even cared,” he admits. He put BUFS on hiatus in April to regroup. “I had to reduce the number of screenings I did, down to one weekend of programming a month. But that way I can just jam-pack that weekend with as much material as possible. And there’s a lot of great stuff coming up — it’s the best stuff I have. I don’t want to screen mainstream movies anymore.”

BUFS fans will also soon be able to experience Santana’s other passion: healthy, homemade food. “I’m going to offer incredible raw food, organic concessions, and cottage foods,” he says; it’s a small business venture he hopes to expand beyond his concession stand. “When we tested it, people responded very positively. During the [BUFS hiatus], I worked on my recipes, I got the Vitamix, and I’m ready to go. I’m excited for the July screenings.” *

“LOST AND OUT OF PRINT”

July 18-20, 7:30pm, donations accepted

Tannery

708 Gilman, Berk

lostandoutofprintfilms.blogspot.com

Key of twee

Michael Redmond
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0
Key of twee

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM The joke’s been made elsewhere that Begin Again, the latest from writer-director John Carney (2007’s Once), should have been dubbed Twice. There are undeniable similarities. Though Begin Again takes place in New York City, not Dublin, it’s another musical tale of a romantically-challenged artist whose life is changed by a chance encounter. However, unlike Once, Begin Again has an A-list cast, with Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, and Catherine Keener, plus big-name musicians like Adam Levine and CeeLo Green.

Carney eases us into this tale of Big Apple heartbreak and redemption by playing its opening moments multiple times from different perspectives. Jolly busker Steve (scene-stealer James Corden) puts his bummed-out buddy Greta (Knightley) on the spot at an open-mic night, where she croons a song she’s just written about jumping in front of a subway train. (Knightley does her own singing, but careful camerawork ensures we never get a good look at her guitar skills.) Dan (Ruffalo), a down-on-his-luck music-biz professional whose career status is nearly as dismal as his personal life — he’s estranged from his music-journalist wife (Keener) and teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) — happens to stumble into the joint as Greta takes the stage.

He’s enthralled by her performance, and the film does an “earlier that day” rewind to let us know why Dan is so drunk. Truth is, he woke up wasted, to the annoyance of his longtime business partner (Mos Def), who’s laser-focused on keeping their record label profitable (one idea: bands doing “audio commentary” on their own records…ugh). Dan, whose job is in serious danger, dreamily clings to the old-school “fostering talent” model. His ideals may be sky-high, but his dignity’s sloshing at the bottom of the flask he keeps stashed in his aging Jaguar — a status symbol of a lifestyle he hasn’t been able to afford for some time.

After he introduces himself to Greta, certain she’s his ticket to creative rebirth, he’s surprised to learn she’s packing a fully-operational bullshit detector. She also doesn’t take compliments well — “Music is about ears, not eyes,” she insists, when Dan says she has the looks to make it big. But there’s an easy chemistry between them, and once she Googles him and checks his bona fides (Harvard, Grammys), she softens. A little.

We see why Greta is so angry at the world in another rewind. She’s a recent arrival in NYC, tagging along with boyfriend and songwriting partner Dave (Levine). He’s a hotshot rising star who soon morphs into a lying, cheating, trendy facial hair-growing rock ‘n’ roll cliché. (If you have a built-in aversion to the “Moves Like Jagger” singer, this is, needless to say, perfect casting.) These scenes are so overdone — Rob Morrow cameos as a sleazy record-company exec — that Carney’s point of view is abundantly clear: tailoring one’s music to please the basic-bitch demographic and achieving overnight success is bad; while penning personally meaningful tunes and recording them on one’s own terms is good.

Fine. On principle, who doesn’t agree with that? Of course, it’s rad that Greta and Dan decide to take to the streets, NYPD be damned, and record an entire outdoor album with a rag-tag band that signs on thanks to Dan’s fading reputation and, it would seem, Greta’s talent, although for all its emphasis on musical integrity, Begin Again doesn’t bother fleshing out any of the other musician characters. Playing a former client of Dan’s, Green materializes to command a scene or two and undermine the film’s “it shouldn’t be about the money” message, since he sure makes living in a fancy mansion look like a good time.

Another point of contention: Greta never claims to be a great singer, but Knightley’s wispy pipes hardly suggest the glorious potential that perks Dan’s golden ears. Her tunes are forgettable folk-pop, and while some of the same songwriters worked on Begin Again, there’s nothing here that telegraphs the emotional weight of “Falling Slowly,” Once‘s Oscar winner. Begin Again‘s broader themes of music as a healing balm (the film’s original title, as subtle as an anvil to the skull: Can A Song Save Your Life?) are equally generic, illustrated by a scene that has Dan and Greta soothing their sadness by bopping all over the city with a headphone splitter listening to soul jams.

Begin Again strives, with obvious effort, to Make a Statement about an industry struggling to find its identity amid such troubling inventions as revenue-sapping free downloads, YouTube as a career launching pad, and shows like Levine’s own The Voice, which bring instant stardom to artists without the benefit of record-company nurturing. These are worthy issues, but they also make for some heavy-handed dialogue: “We need vision, not gimmicks!”

Fortunately, Begin Again fares better with its explorations of complicated relationships. Nobody does rumpled and wounded better than Ruffalo, and his connections with Keener and Steinfeld feel lived-in and authentic. Knightley has the most obvious character arc, as well as the biggest burden in having to sing — easily the film’s primo curiosity factor, aside from the stunt casting of Levine — but she’s likable as a hipster scorned, determined to figure out her next move even as her world crumbles around her. (Carney does a good job keeping the breakup storyline from getting too maudlin; witness a musical fuck-you drunk dial to Dave’s voice mail, in which an outpouring of emotion is livened up by an impromptu kazoo solo.) It’s also a surprisingly relaxed performance, given her predilection for films like 2012’s overstuffed Anna Karenina. Bonus: despite those wistful song lyrics, she doesn’t end up jumping in front of a train in this one. *

 

BEGIN AGAIN opens Wed/2 in San Francisco.

A great week for (indie) sci-fi and docs: new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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0
A great week for (indie) sci-fi and docs: new movies!

This week, Frameline continues (our coverage here!), plus offbeat sci-fi winners Coherence and Snowpiercer are well worth seeking out … especially if you’re not in the mood for more giant robot smash-ups from the Michael Bay factory. Plus: new docs and more! Read on.

Breathing Earth: Susumu Shingu’s Dream Japanese artist Susumu Shingu has built his career through his concerted engagement with the natural world. The wise and eternally smiling 75-year-old creates angular and often gargantuan mobiles that harness the power of wind and water to gyrate in ever-changing directions. In Breathing Earth, German director Thomas Riedelsheimer crafts a deliberately paced rumination on Shingu’s life philosophy that, while devoid of the frenetic facts, figures, and trite biographical rehashes that punctuate hyper-informative pop-docs, uses a beautifully simplistic narrative arc to illuminates Shingu’s attempt to create a hilly, open-air collection of windmills. The sculptor’s impassioned narration and charming conversations with potential landlords and investors (who usually entirely miss the point of his mission to raise environmental consciousness through aesthetic beauty) make Shingu impossible not to fall in love with — he is laid-back, funny, and astonishingly youthful. Riedelsheimer’s camera is similarly relaxed, gliding sumptuously over the green and wild landscapes on which Shingu installs his works. Despite his meditative tempo, Riedelsheimer manages to explore a remarkably wide scope; Shingu’s late-life marriage to a fellow sculptor, his appeals to both Japanese and German schoolchildren to care for the earth and help to avoid environmental disasters, and his intricate technical processes all receive intimate and inspiring sections. (1:37) (David Kurlander)

Citizen Koch After quietly influencing conservative ideology, legislation, and elections for decades, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers have found themselves becoming high-profile figures — much to their dismay, no doubt. The relative invisibility they hitherto enjoyed greatly abetted their impact in myriad arenas of public policy and “popular” conservative movements. Look behind any number of recent red-vs.-blue flashpoint issues and you can find their fingerprints: Notably state-level union busting; “smaller government” (i.e. incredible shrinking social services); seeding allegedly grassroots organizations like the Tea Party; furthering the Corporations = People thing (see: Citizens United); and generally helping the rich like themselves get richer while fostering working-class outrage at everybody else. This documentary by Trouble the Water (2008) co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessen touches on all those matters, while also focusing on Wisconsin as a test laboratory for the brothers’ Machiavellian think-tank maneuvers, following a Lousiana GOP candidate on the campaign trail (one he’s marginalized on for opposing corporate influence peddling), and more. Any one of these topics could support a feature of their own (and most already have). Citizen Koch’s problem is that it tries to encompass too much of its subjects’ long reach, while (despite the title) leaving those subjects themselves underexplored. (It also suffers from being a movie completed at least 18 months ago, a lifetime in current US political terms.) For the reasonably well-informed this documentary will cover a lot of familiar ground—which is not to say that ground isn’t still interesting, or that the added human interest elements don’t compel. But the film covers so much ground it ends up feeling overstuffed and unfocused. (1:26) (Dennis Harvey) 

Coherence See “Vortex Room.” (1:29)

Korengal This companion piece to 2010’s Oscar-nominated Restrepo — one of the best docs about modern-day warfare to date, offering unfiltered access to an Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley — uses previously unseen footage shot during the year filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent shadowing their subjects. Korengal is structured as a more introspective work, with musings on what it feels like to be a soldier in the Korengal, surrounded by rough (yet strikingly beautiful) terrain populated by farmers who may or may not be Taliban sympathizers, not to mention unpredictable, heavily armed opponents referred to simply as “the enemy.” Interviews reveal sadness, boredom, a deep sense of brotherhood, and the frustrating feeling of going from “100 miles an hour to a dead halt” after the surreal exhilaration of a firefight. Korengal also functions as a tribute to Hetherington, who was killed in 2011 while on assignment in Libya. Not only does his death add a layer of poignant subtext, it also suggests why Junger felt moved to revisit this story. That said, though Korengal‘s footage is several years old, its themes remain distressingly timely. (1:24) (Cheryl Eddy)

Snowpiercer Eighteen years after an attempt to reverse global warming has gone wildly awry — freezing all life into extinction — the only known survivors are on a one-of-a-kind perpetual-motion train that circles the Earth annually, has its own self-contained ecosystem, and can smash through whatever ice buildup has blocked its tracks since the last go-round. It’s also a microcosm of civilization’s worst class-economic-racial patterns over history, with the much-abused “tail” passengers living in squalor under the thumb of brutal military police. Unseen at the train’s front is its mysterious inventor, Wilford, whose minions enforce “Eternal Order Prescribed by the Sacred Engine.” Curtis (Chris Evans) is default leader of the proletariat’s latest revolt, in which they attempt to force their way forward though the prison section (where they free Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung as the train’s original lock designer and his psychic daughter) on to the wonders of the first class compartments, and beyond. This first (mostly) English-language feature by South Korean Bong Joon-ho (2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother), based on a 1982 French graphic novel, starts out as a sort of locomotive, claustrophobic Mad Max (1979) variation. But it gets wilder and more satirical as it goes along, goosed by Tilda Swinton’s grotesquely comic Minister Mason, and Alison Pill as a teacher propagandist in a particularly hilarious setpiece. In case the metaphor hasn’t already hit you on the head, one character explains “The train is the world, we the humanity.” But Snowpiercer’s sociopolitical critique is as effective as it is blunt, because Bong handles everything here — visceral action, absurdist humor, narrative left-turns, neatly etched character archetypes, et al. — with style, confidence, and wit. Some of the FX may not be quite as seamless as it would have been in a $200 million Hollywood studio production, and fanboys will no doubt nitpick like nitwits at various “credibility gaps.” (As if this movie ever asks to be taken literally.) But by current, or any, sci-fi action blockbuster standards, this is a giddily unpredictable, risk-taking joy. (2:07) (Dennis Harvey)

Third Person A screenwriter, Paul Haggis, pens a script in which a novelist (Liam Neeson) sits alone in a smoke-filled hotel room in Paris struggling over a manuscript about a novelist who can only feel emotions through his characters. What that psychic state would actually look like remains unclear — when the woman (Olivia Wilde) he’s left his wife (Kim Basinger) for shows up, their playful, painful, fraught interactions reveal a man with above-average emotional reserves. Meanwhile, in another hotel in another city, Rome, a sleazy fashion industry spy (Adrien Brody) finds his life turned sideways by a seemingly chance encounter in a bar with a beautiful Romanian woman (Moran Atias) in dire need of money. And in a third hotel, in Manhattan, a young woman (Mila Kunis) cleans up the suites she used to stay in when she was married to a renowned painter (James Franco), with whom she has a son she may or may not have harmed in some terrible way. The film broadly hints at connections between these three sets of lives — in each, the loss or endangerment of a child produces an unrelenting ripple effect; speaking of which, objects unnaturally submerged in water present an ominous visual motif. If the movie poster doesn’t give the game away as you’re walking into the theater, the signposts erected by Haggis ensure that you won’t be in the dark for long. Learning how these characters relate to one another, however, puts considerable drag on the fabric of the plot, exposing the threadbare places, and where Haggis offers his tortured characters redemption, it comes at the cost of good storytelling. (2:17) (Lynn Rapoport)

Transformers: Age of Extinction In Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers installment a villainous Black Ops leader (Kelsey Grammer) allies with a snarky Steve-Jobs-alike (Stanley Tucci) to build Transformers de coeur: designer impostor robot-cars they hope will reinvent the face of war. In IMAX 3D, “TransFOURmers” is packed with relentless rock-‘em-sock-‘em action, spectacular property destruction, and about as much sense as a bucket of worms. After 60 minutes, you think you’re getting more than your money’s worth. At 90 minutes, you’re tired. At two hours, confusion sets in: If Autobots get stronger together how could Optimus be in so much trouble? Who is the bounty hunting Terminator lookalike? HOW MUCH MORE COULD THERE BE? And then … the action shifts to China, Optimus rides a Dinobot, and chaos reigns. I’ve always liked the working-class poetry of the Transformers themselves — the leader is a trucker and the cast is stacked with ambulances, tanks, and the metal workforce that preserves American lives. If that’s not traditional hero worship, I don’t know what is. But Age of Extinction is the soulless designer imposter it lampoons — the whole sequel-snarking ordeal makes you long for Buzz Lightyear, who saw a thousand Buzz Lightyears on a store shelf and survived that existential crisis heroically — while also riding a dinosaur and fighting Frasier. This Transformers movie (sadly, it won’t be the final one) starts with a thesis: Mark Wahlberg walks through an abandoned movie theater and a Wilford Brimley twin (Ron Shedd) bellows: “Movies today! Sequels! Remakes! Crap!” Age of Extinction follows that moment with nearly three hours of evidence that the cause of extinction is redundancy. (2:30) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

Under the Electric Sky Hey, raver! This 3D concert film enables you to experience the Electric Daisy Carnival without punching any holes in your brain. Or, y’know, dying. (1:25)

Violette Taking on another “difficult” woman artist after the excellent 2008 Séraphine (about the folk-art painter), Martin Provost here portrays the unhappy life of Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos), whose fiction and autobiographical writings eventually made her a significant figure in postwar French literature. We first meet her waiting out the war with gay author Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py), one of many unrequited loves, then surviving via the black market trade before she’s “discovered” by such groundbreaking, already-established talents as Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain). It is the latter, a loyal supporter who nonetheless retains a chilly emotional distance, who becomes bisexual Violette’s principal obsession over the coming 20 years or so. Devos does her best to portray “a neurotic crazy washed-up old bag” with an “ugly mug” — hardly! — who is perpetually broke, depressed, and awkward, thanks no doubt in part to her mean witch of a mother (Catherine Hiegel). “Screaming and sobbing won’t get you anywhere,” Simone at one point tells her, and indeed Leduc is a bit of a pill. For the most part lacking the visual splendors of Séraphine (this character’s environs weren’t so pastoral), Violette is finely acted and crafted but, like its heroine, hard to love. (2:18) (Dennis Harvey)

Heavy metal time machine: “Dio: Live in London, Hammersmith Apollo 1993”

Sue Vaughan
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3

December 12, 1993: Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, and Whitney Houston were owning the American airwaves, but over in London’s Hammersmith Apollo, a different soaring voice — one that veered more toward doom than bubblegum — was showing how it’s really done. Dio: Live in London Hammersmith Apollo 1993 (Eagle Rock Entertainment) captures Ronnie James Dio (with band: drummer Vinny Appice, bassist Jeff Pilson, guitarist Tracy G, and keyboard player Scott Warren … yep, instrumental solos abound) at his peak-wizard powers. 

The setlist is, naturally, packed with jams that were new at the time (the tour was in support of the band’s Strange Highways album), as well as plenty of songs spanning Dio’s career as solo artist and frontman of various bands: “Holy Diver,” “Stand Up and Shout,” “Heaven and Hell,” “Rainbow in the Dark,” “Man on the Silver Mountain,” “We Rock” and “The Mob Rules” (“of course, that one from the Sabs,” he points out).

The set is stripped-down — aside from the amps (SO MANY AMPS … eight Marshall stacks), it’s just dudes in black wielding instruments (and flowing hair), and youuuuu know who holding it down center-stage, wearing a subdued cross necklace but occasionally flashing the devil-horns hand gesture he’s credited with inventing, or at least introducing into heavy-metal culture. 

The DVD insert contains a short essay sharing band members’ memories of Dio, who died in 2010 (Warren recalls they had the same favorite meal: curry), and of the 1993 gig (moments before they took the stage, Warren says, “You could hear a pin drop, except for Ronnie’s occasional gentle throat clear, and the clicking of his cough drop”).

DVD extras include the 20-minute featurette “Hangin’ With the Band,” a backstage glimpse at Dio (yes! chomping a cough drop!) and company as they load in from a tour bus parked on the rainy London street outside the venue, go through sound check, prep backstage, unwind post-concert, etc. It’s a pretty PG-rated affair — no debauchery (just beer and Gatorade), no Spinal Tap-style revelations, and certainly no Satanic rituals (though a hair dryer does get sacrificed, in honor of the tour ending). It’s just a bunch of self-described “mellow” guys who are super-stoked to be playing music together.

“I look forward to playing with this band every night,” Dio enthuses as he’s getting stage make-up applied (foundation, mascara, and just a swipe of eyeliner). “After doing it for 3,000 years, as I have, it’s kind of special to be able to still enjoy it as much. More, really.”

Vortex room

Michael Redmond
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1
Vortex room

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Coherence begins with an important phone conversation that’s cut off by a crappy connection — just as the phone’s owner, Em (Emily Foxler), realizes its screen has spontaneously cracked. It’s the first eerie moment in a film set at a seemingly normal dinner party among four couples: insecure ballet dancer Em and boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling), who are teetering on the verge of either taking the next step in their relationship, or breaking up; new-agey older married couple Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) and Hugh (Hugo Armstrong); the casually dating Amir (Alex Manugian) and Laurie (Lauren Maher); and hosts Lee (Lorene Scafaria), a techie, and her actor husband, Mike (Nicholas Brendon).

About five minutes into the movie, chatter turns to the comet that’s about to pass overhead — a casual conversation topic that soon becomes an invasive presence. Phones don’t work, and the power shuts off — except for that one house a few blocks over that’s mysteriously illuminated. Tension among the group spikes as various members go to investigate and discover that the comet has some serious fucking-with-reality powers. Spooky, pleasingly mind-bending, and highly creative (the whole thing takes place almost entirely within a single room), Coherence only gets more satisfying with multiple viewings. It’s the directorial debut of James Ward Byrkit, a Hollywood veteran who wrote Oscar-winning animated film Rango (2011) and worked on multiple Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Once my brain had time to untangle a bit, we talked Coherence.

SF Bay Guardian You’re known for your work on Rango and the Pirates movies. What drew you to Coherence, which is a completely different type of film?

James Ward Byrkit I actually have a background of working on much more intimate projects — but all these years, because of my drawing abilities, I ended up working on these huge blockbuster films, which I love, and I love those directors, and I love big crews. But I was really craving getting back to the purity of working closely with actors, and concentrating on storytelling and characters. Especially after Rango — which was super-fun, but it was years of manipulating every pixel of every frame — I wanted to get back into something much more improvisational and grounded in bare-bones filmmaking.

SFBG How did you cast your actors?

JWB They were friends of mine — I knew them all, but they didn’t know each other. I cast people that felt like they would be friends, or partners. They met each other for the first time five minutes before we started shooting, and they had to jump right into it. The whole thing was an improvisational experiment.

I’ve always wanted to try something that did not rely on a script, because everything in Hollywood is all about the script, and that’s the only priority; that’s one way to do it, but it’s not the only way to do it. I wanted to get rid of the script so I could get those naturalistic performances. I wanted eight people talking, and overlapping, and having natural speech patterns. The only way you can do that, really, is to get rid of the script and allow them to be in the moment.

SFBG The dialogue may be improvised, but the story is intricately plotted. How did you approach that without a script?

JWB It took a year of just pounding out the story — the twist and turns and the puzzle of it all, figuring out the clues and the structure. I had a very clear, very solid outline that was just for me, though I made it with my co-writer, Alex Manugian, who plays Amir in the film.

When we actually shot it, before they would show up each day, I gave each actor a note card of their character’s motivations, or back story. Little bits and pieces that they could use that night. But they wouldn’t know what any other character got, so it was all a surprise to them how everybody else reacted. And none of them knew how it was going to end.

SFBG Did the actors help create their characters?

JWB I kind of gave them a general background of what their character was, and what their history was, and what their problems were. Basically everybody is in secret conflict with themselves, or with each other. That’s the whole movie: These people who, in the first 10 minutes, they just look like they’re having a party — but there’s all this unspoken conflict going on either between each other or with themselves.

SFBG Can you talk about the unusual editing choice you made, to have scenes abruptly cutting to black?

JWB Part of it was a rhythmic theme, and part of it was a clue. For the people who watch the film multiple times, there’s definitely a pattern of cutting to black that starts to inform what’s going on, which I’m not going to give away [laughs]. Going into black is such an important theme. The lights go out, they’re plunged into blackness. There’s an even darker space when they go outside. And then, the blackness between characters. So when we tried it as an editorial thing, it was so effective that we committed to it and it ended up being something that took many, many, many weeks to perfect. And it still baffles some people, obviously, because it’s so jarring.

SFBG Coherence is a relationship drama, but it’s also a sci-fi film. What inspired you to include those elements?

JWB Well, we basically didn’t have any money [laughs]. I had a camera, some actors that I knew, and a living room — and that’s it. So how do we make a living room more interesting? It got us thinking about Twilight Zone episodes, and how those are often set in very mundane, normal places, and yet there’s this bigger feeling to them because there’s a cosmic story, or a slightly supernatural element that has permeated their reality. And that got me really excited, to think of a fractured reality, and therefore the living room became much bigger.

SFBG Sci-fi without special effects is kind of a genre on the rise.

JWB I love it. My biggest hope is that someday [Coherence] could be on a double or triple feature with Primer (2004) or Timecrimes (2007), or another super low-budget homemade movie. It’s a really exciting realm to be in. I think people went down the wrong road when they started assuming science fiction meant only big visual effects.

SFBG And wait, did you say you filmed it in your living room?

JWB Yeah! We didn’t have any money to rent another house. It was very challenging because my wife was nine months pregnant and she was planning on having a home birth. She said, “You’re gonna have a film shoot in our house weeks before I’m due? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!” I said, “I’m sorry, honey, but if I don’t do it now, we can’t really do it after the baby comes.” And she said, “All right. You have five nights.” We shot five nights, and then a week later, Emily [Foxler] came back to do some pickups around my house, walking around the neighborhood in the darkness. We ended that shoot at one o’clock in the morning; two hours later my wife went into labor. *

COHERENCE opens Fri/27 at the Presidio. For additional theaters, check http://coherencethemovie.com.

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