Dennis Harvey

Life out of balance

-
0
Life out of balance

arts@sfbg.com

FILM At the start of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, its titular character is toasted as a perfect enigma-cum-hostess, "the very icon of an artist’s wife." She accepts this with public graciousness and private dismay. Because now, with two kids grown (but still whiny) and a famous publisher spouse retired yet self-absorbed as ever, the praise only underlines a sense that she’s always served others’ needs while never quite figuring out her own.

Ergo Rebecca Miller’s latest is that seldom-produced thing, the female midlife crisis movie. Miller is daughter to playwright Arthur Miller, a titan of Big Theme manly guilts. Writing and directing for another medium — one differently scaled from dad’s own twilight-of-the-gods project The Misfits (1961) — Rebecca unsurprisingly falls some yards from the tree. Her projects are indie-scaled, about troubled domestic minutae, with whimsical twists of fate that methodical realist Arthur would never have countenanced.

They’re all flawed. But Rebecca Miller has been consistently interesting since 1995’s striking Angela — first among many narratives from the viewpoint of a child struggling in the shadow of an overwhelming and/or unstable parent. In 2002, triptych Personal Velocity‘s best segment had Parker Posey cowed by her celebrity father. In 2005’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Miller’s husband Daniel Day-Lewis was a dying hippie so close to his teenage daughter she lacks social skills for anyone else.

In Private Lives, Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) has her own monstrous parental past, revealed in 1970s flashbacks with Maria Bello as a minister’s wife wired to explode on Dexedrine. Like many people hailing from chaos, Pippa has turned self-conscious model citizen. In drifting early adulthood, she glommed onto the first man who respected her mind — or did he just recognize a rudderless, much younger woman susceptible to flattery? Ever since she’s been ideal consort to Herb (Alan Arkin), as well as doting mother to their variably grateful children.

Three heart attacks have forced Herb to retire — more or less — and move to a Connecticut retirement-community condo located near friends Sam (Mike Binder) and Sandra (Winona Ryder). Actually, they’re Herb’s friends; it’s Pippa’s job to smilingly endure Sam’s overtures and provide Sandra a shoulder to cry on. Barely 40 in an old folks’ village, Pippa is starting to think her life a tad ridiculous. Such nagging but inchoate doubt is underlined by the return of a widow neighbor’s shaggy, somewhat surly son (Keanu Reeves) to Chez Mom after his latest failure at adulthood. Opposites attract, though it’s more complicated than that.

Miller’s cluttered canvas also makes room for teensy-to-major characters played by Shirley Knight, Blake Lively, Robin Weigert, Julianne Moore, and Monica Bellucci. As is her wont, she piles on both invigorating insights and a few too many whiplash narrative left turns.

But The Private Lives of Pippa Lee has charm and idiosyncrasy to spare. Wright Penn is a deft actress who’s spent too much time as cinema’s Agony Aunt — pall-bearer for so much worry, dismay, tears, and suffering from Forrest Gump (1994) to Hounddog (2007). Here, she’s immaculately poised yet leavened by the comingling of desire and comedy. She’s larky, witty, even goofy at times. It looks good on her.

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

Triumph of the underdog

-
0
Triumph of the underdog

In Frazer Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New, Wayne (Jerry McDaniel), wears overalls too large and a look of pained, dazed acquiescence. It’s as if not just his clothes but his life were given to the wrong person — and there’s a no-exchange policy. He loves wife Reneé (the writer Beth Lisick) and their kids. But those two unplanned pregnancies mean she’s got to stay home; daycare would cost more than she’d earn.
So every day Wayne returns from his dead-end construction job to the home whose mortgage holds them hostage; and every time Reneé can be heard screaming at their not-yet-school-age boys, at the end of her tether. Sometimes he silently just turns around to commiserate over beer with buddies likewise married with children, but doing no better. Leo (Rigo Chacon Jr.) is in the middle of a very messy divorce, while Manny (the late Luis Saguar, in a beautiful performance) pretends to be maintaining better than he really is. (He has a surprising secret escape valve, and in one great late scene we realize Leo has one too.)
Wayne’s voiceover narration endlessly ponders how things got this way — more or less as they should be, yet subtly wrong. He might be willing (or at least able) to let go of the idea of happiness. But Reneé’s inarticulate fury at her stifling domestication keeps striking at any nearby punching bag, himself (especially) included. Something’s got to change. But can it?
Cue deus ex machina happy ending. Or so one would in another movie, like Katherine Dieckmann’s supposedly gritty recent Motherhood. But veteran local experimentalist and cinematographer Bradshaw’s first feature, which he also wrote, never stoops to narrative cliché. Or to stylistic ones, either — there’s a spectral poetry to the way he photographs the Oakland flats (few movies have captured ordinary landscapes so vividly). The spinning-in-place sense is underlined by Dan lonsey and Kent Sparling and Dan Plonsey’s score, which melds Philip Glass, Irish folk, and noise-rock caterwaul to externalize all Wayne’s suppressed tumult.
The ordinary wear, tear, and occasional rending of relationships you and I might actually know is portrayed infrequently enough onscreen that when it does turn up, the recognition factor is a little startling. Everything Strange and New seemed a tonic at the Sundance Film Festival this year precisely because it was the kind of indie — quiet, serious, intimate, void of stars and buzz — people complain can’t get made, or even into Sundance, anymore.
Seen again, Everything Strange and New is even better — a film about very small (except to the afflicted), banal (ditto), everyday problems that manages to be mysteriously exhilarating.

EVERYTHING STRANGE AND NEW opens Fri/4 at the Roxie.

Valley of the dolls

-
0
Valley of the dolls

CULT HORROR Many babysitters had the bejesus scared out of them by the 1975 TV movie classic Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black is attacked by a "Zuni fetish doll" come to malevolent life. Yet among key 1970s horror films, this one inspired relatively little imitation, unless Chucky and myriad Gremlins knockoffs count. One exception, however, remains among those subterranean titles so improbable people don’t quite believe it exists until they see it — then they can’t believe what they’re seeing. That would be Black Devil Doll From Hell, a no-budget camcorder wonder gone straight to video (and Hell?) in 1984.

It was produced, directed, written, scored, and edited — all very badly — by Philadelphia auteur Chester Novell Turner, whose whereabouts or even continued pulse no one seems sure about after he completed a second, even more obscure feature. (That 1987 horror omnibus, Tales from the Quadead Zone, is currently on YouTube. It’s hypnotically dreadful but no BDDFH.)

Shirley L. (for Latanya) Jones, definitely not to be confused with the Partridge Family lady, plays a Marian the Librarian type who buys a ventriloquist-dummy-looking doll from a junk shop. It begins inserting itself into her hitherto virginal, God-fearing thoughts … then into other places, barking some of the most ludicrously filthy dialogue in cinematic history.

Naturally, being pleasured by a jive-talking misogynist puppet can’t end well for our heroine. As if atoning for its own egregious sins, the film ends with an actual church ceremony whose sermonizing goes on even longer than its slug-slow opening credits. Stupefying, hilarious, endless (even at 70 minutes) and unforgettable, Black Devil Doll from Hell has inspired various tributes. My favorite written one is BlackHorrorMovies.com’s description: "The little train wreck that could."

Full-blown cinematic tribute — in comparatively glorious HD — just arrived on DVD after a couple years of inciting fanboy love and occasional outrage on the horror festival circuit. Black Devil Doll (2007) has puppet sex, wildly padded closing credits, an animated prelude in which G turns to X ("Rated X by an all-white jury!" tipping hat to 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song), and significant acknowledgement of "breast augmentation by Dr. Leonard Gray of San Francisco." (No joke — he’s got a Web site.)

Yup, this Black Devil Doll is local, shot in the East Bay by brothers Shawn and Jonathan Lewis, with multitasking cinematographer John Osteen. Antioch has never looked more … Antioch. There, executed Black Power revolutionist and multiple rapist-murder of white chicks Mubia Abul-Jama is reincarnated as an evil doll fully kitted out in 1970s pimpwear and jiving potty mouth. (Before you get too offended, let us note here the wiseass creators are themselves African American.) He makes himself at home with chesty Heather, but turns homicidal once she invites over equally bimbolicious pals Natasha, Candi, Buffi, and Brandi for an evening of wine coolers and Twister.

Those roles are played by thespians with names like Precious Cox, whom you probably won’t be seeing at Berkeley Rep anytime soon. Nonetheless, this new Doll is enthusiastically finagled: even when the joke runs thin, all concerned bat it out of the park in terms of sheer energy, recalling Russ Meyer’s turbo-charged expressions of knowingly absurd sexploitation. Turner’s Hell was awesome for its ineptitude and unintentional humor. The Lewis’ Doll is sheer intentional (albeit heterosexual) camp, joyous enough in its deliberate cheese and craftily rude dynamism to be equally hilarious in an entirely different way.

www.blackdevildoll.com

Pray tell

-
0
Pray tell

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Oh My God? took the words right outta my mouth about 10 minutes in. It was then clear this "multicultural spiritual quest" about religion worldwide illustrated the three worst trends in contemporary nonfiction filmmaking: the gratuitously first person vanity project; the Koyaanisqatsi (1982) school of globetrotting coffee-table pictorialism; and the "These are important questions. Let’s ask a celebrity for answers!" tactic.

Shot in 23 countries, God?‘s luxury do-gooderism might not compensate for its carbon imprint in any judgmental afterlife. The opening montage of Stuff ‘Round the World is meant to dazzle with the breadth of human experience. Instead, such expensive flash raises a red flag: who funded this? De Beers? Exxon Mobil?

Perhaps writer-producer-director Peter Rodger did himself, being maestro of "numerous car, clothing, and cosmetics companies’ print and commercial campaigns in over 40 countries." That explains a lot. The world is so cluttered with striking images — MTV, advertising, and computer graphics have rendered mere visual brilliance trivial. What’s rare now is the providing of context that makes a picture meaningful.

"Truth is being diluted by too many voices all keen to reference the name of God. But what exactly is God? I decided to go around the world and ask people what they think," Rodger says at the start. Albeit not before Hugh Jackman has brushed his chestnut mane back to announce "God is unexplainable!" Whoa. Why is he here? Rodger presumably lives in that fabulous A-list bubble where success is understood to impart wisdom. Because what can’t money buy?

Oh My God? also includes philosophic two cents from Baz Luhrmann, Seal, Ringo Starr, HRH Princess Michael of Kent, and Sir Bob Geldof. (What, no Bono?) These celebs have zero special to say, but are top-billed — unlike the spiritual leaders, leading academics, and mere proles whose profoundities were likely left on the cutting-room floor.

The movie does have plenty of time for Peter Rodger, our intrepid host for no obvious reason. Surely it doesn’t require his onscreen presence to ask questions like "If God really does exist, why does he permit so much suffering in the world?" We certainly don’t need him to call lingering Katrina devastation "pretty sad," a sentiment as trite as the quick cutaway from some New Orleans kids’ very moving statements is offensive.

Shooting with a real eye for travelogue imagery (sometimes at actual tourist events), Rodgers reduces animal-sacrificing African Maasai tribalists ("very colorful people"), Arizona Native Americans (tribe unidentified), Balinese Hindu priests, and more to exotic dress extras in a 93-minute music video scored by Alexander van Bubenheim as one long world beat mixtape. Tonal slants are predictable: born-again Texans = funny/bad; Tibetan monks = serene/good. OMG indeed.

As in so much human history, the use and abuse of religious ideas now urgently affects us all. Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein notes (in a rare moment of permitted garrulousness), "The problem with religion today is that there’s just enough of it for people to learn to hate each other, but not enough to learn to love each other."

Yet Oh My God?‘s Babel of glancingly sampled opinions is just more contradictory noise — a pu pu platter of empty-calorie pictorialism and half-formed big questions at no risk of meaningful exploration. Like that modern lit classic Eat Pray Love, it wrassles eternal issues of being and meaning into the feel-good hollow address of rich people’s problems.

OH MY GOD? opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

What’s hate got to do with it?

-
0
What’s hate got to do with it?

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Like so many recent it’s-true-if-we-say-so slogans, "A Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged" is smugly, fundamentally misguided on more levels than can be addressed here, suggesting that only conservatives have the horse sense to grasp that it’s a big, scary world out there. Interpreted another way, however, this catchphrase contains a grain of truth: the sense of victimization can be blindsiding. When you begin to perceive all criticism as persecutorial, you might forget it’s possible to be wrong.

That’s the worry driving Yoav Shamir’s Defamation, which opens Friday following a stormy reception at July’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The documentarian (2003’s Checkpoint) says that as an Israeli Jew he’s never actually experienced anti-Semitism. So he sets out to explore that prejudice’s status quo — or so he claims, somewhat disingenuously. Because Defamation‘s real agenda is positing anti-Semitism as a distorted, exploited, propagandic bludgeon used to taint any critique of Israeli government policies or the foreign lobbies supporting them.

This is a theory bound to inflame angry emotions, not least the "self-hating Jew" accusation. It must be said that Shamir lays himself at risk — à la Michael Moore — of selectively gathering only evidence that supports his agenda. Anti-Semitism certainly does exist today, in many different forms, around the world. But the only folks Shamir finds to spout negative stereotypes are some African American Crown Heights youths — whose complaints about their insular neighbors seem reasonable enough until they cite Nazi best seller The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an important ethnic expose — and his own granny. (Bizarrely, she opines that Jews are indeed money-hoarding shirkers of "real" work — albeit only foreign Jews, not industrious Israelis like herself.)

Yet if Defamation‘s deliberate omissions and occasional snarky tone hamper its case, Shamir nonetheless makes legitimately troubling points. He views Israeli media as obsessing over any incidents of global anti-Semitism (and ignoring decreases) much as the U.S. media endlessly dwells on certain lurid crime stories — because their public loves to feel indignant.

More than 30,000 Israeli high schoolers now go on field trips each year to European Holocaust sites. But their experience is heavily stage-managed, with Secret Service guards ensuring they have no contact with locals — in Poland a group is kept sequestered in their hotel because (they’re told) this "relatively hostile country" is rife with neo-Nazis.

No wonder when two girls briefly try to bridge the language barrier with some old men in a park, they instantly assume they’re being insulted. (They are not, as the exchange’s subtitled translation reveals.) This thrilling experience of actual, or at least assumed, anti-Semitism reinforces what one student calls "what makes us special: that no one can stand us, but that we are proud of it."

"Everyone knows the Jews are hated. We are raised that way," another proclaims.

Getting ample cooperation (now regretted) from its Manhattan H.Q.’s staff, Shamir suggests the Anti-Defamation League also inflates anti-Semitism’s modern-day realities to exert political muscle, and to dismiss any criticism of Israel as simple Jew-hating "in disguise." When a British academic at an ADL conference rather mildly asserts anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism can indeed be separated — is it racist to think the West Bank settlements and occupation of Palestinian lands unjust? — he’s denounced as an outrageous provocateur.

The most controversial interviewee is Norman Finklestein, whose book The Holocaust Industry got him pilloried as a Holocaust denier (untrue) and quite likely cost him his teaching position. The son of Shoah survivors, he thinks "the Nazi Holocaust is now the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression" and that "pathological narcissism" desensitizes many American Jews to other people’s sufferings. (One U.S. rabbi here theorizes that the sense of ongoing historical persecution has replaced religious observance as many Jews’ primarily source of ethnic-cultural identification.)

Finklestein can be persuasively reasonable. To Defamation‘s credit, however, it doesn’t yell "Cut!" when he whips himself into a crank-case frenzy that masochistically self-destructs his credibility. Absolute righteousness ain’t pretty, anywhere on the political spectrum.

DEFAMATION opens Fri/20 at the Roxie.

Hell yeah!

-
0
Hell yeah!

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Before the Halloween and Friday the 13th series made slasher cinema’s top instruments of unstoppable evil, and after Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf pretty much had their day, there was a brief sunny window of opportunity for Satan. Or rather, Satan and his Satanists — sounds like a garage band, yes? — who dominated horror for a few years highlighted by Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976). Not to mention 1975’s Race with the Devil, that same year’s The Devil’s Rain (Ernest Borgnine as Satan’s acolyte? Credible!) and 1973’s Satan’s School for Girls.

Ah, those were the days. Who gives much screen time to Beelzebub now, when the multiplexes are cluttered with routine slasher sequels and Japanese horror remakes?

Somebody called Ti West evidently does. Bringing it all back with extra hugs, his new The House of the Devil is a retro thrillfest quite happy to sacrifice that babysitter to the Dark Lord. Without even a tip for her labor.

"Based on true unexplained events" (uh-huh), the buzzed-about indie horror has fanboy casting both old school (Dee Wallace, Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan — all performing seriously rather than campily) and new (AJ Bowen of 2007’s The Signal and mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig). Its heroine (Jocelin Donahue), a 1980 East Coast collegiate sophomore desperate for rent cash so she can escape her dorm roomie’s loud nightly promiscuity, signs on for a baby- (actually, grandma-) sitting gig advertised on telephone poles. For tonight. During a lunar eclipse. Bad move.

The House of the Devil takes its time, springing nothing lethal until nearly halfway through. Even then, things escalate ever-so-slowly. Its 1980s setting allows for ultratight jeans, feathered hair, rotary dialing, a synth-New Wavey score, and other potentially campy elements the film manages to render respectfully appreciative rather than silly.

All freakdom doesn’t break loose until very late, at which point writer-director West effectively abandons all restraint (and hope), much assisted by The Last Winter (2006) composer Jeff Grace’s suddenly panicked score. The best contemporary horror has understood that potency of waiting. Prolonged development of relatable characters, agonizing our dread for their fates, amplifies standard terror to no end in movies like 2005’s Wolf Creek or Paranormal Activity.

House isn’t significantly better than various fine indie horrors of recent vintage and various nationality that went direct to DVD. (Quality, let alone originality, aren’t necessarily a commercial pluses in this genre.) But it is dang good, and that cuts it above most current theatrical horror releases. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be watching 1977’s Suspiria, 2005’s Satan’s Playground, 1994’s Aswang (a.k.a. The Unearthling) or 1981’s Possession instead of this deft throwback: now those surreal visions truly gave the Devil his due.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL opens Fri/20 in San Francisco.

Beasts from the east

-
0
Beasts from the east

Into the wilds

-
0
Into the wilds

arts@sfbg.com
One painful component of the ever-escautf8g government service cutbacks, particularly in our own endlessly explorable state, has been the threat to parkland access. The notion that the national park system Wallace Stegner (and Ken Burns’ current PBS documentary series) called America’s "best idea" might someday be sold to the highest bidder seems blasphemous — unless, of course, you’ve never been (like most of the nation’s vacation-hobbled poor) or are in a position to make that buck.

Unintentionally assuaging that unfortunate final-future despoiling is new indie quasi-horror The Canyon, which asks the unmusical question: why, stupid humankind, did you ever think you belonged in wild country? "We don’t belong here," its hero realizes when camping misadventures have gone from rad to worse. Yeah, people should never intermingle with nature. That’s why we are born from robots, plastic afterbirth spilling into a soft cushion of Styrofoam curls then recycled into spin-off products for the Transformers films. "Soylent Green is PEEEEOPLE!!!" Actually that has no relevance here. Just thought I’d drop it in.

A first feature for director Richard Harrah and writer Steve Allrich, The Canyon falls firmly within that vacation-from-hell subgenre recently capped by the very clever, funny, and fairly freaky A Perfect Getaway. (None of which adjectives apply here, alas.) Other examples of late include the supernatural off-trail hazards of 2008’s The Ruins, several organ-harvesting horrors (2006’s Turistas), and numerous more films suggesting it’s best to stay the fuck home — this being a movie world, psychos and predators are everywhere.

The Canyon sports minor novelty in sticking to mainland U.S.A. terra firma, albeit a world-famous landmark — if a 227-mile long, 5.4-million-year-old, mile-deep gorge can be considered mere "landmark." Introduced in blandly nice/cute terms they never really recover from, swarthy Nick (Eion Bailey from HBO’s Band of Brothers) and perky blonde Lori (Yvonne Strahovski from NBC’s Chuck) are eloped newlyweds anticipating a mule-ride down to the Grand Canyon’s bottom that she’s not too keen on. She’s even less keen once it turns out Nick didn’t get the necessarily permits and their only option is signing on with "guide extraordinaire" Henry (Will Patton), whom they meet at a local bar and who doesn’t look so much a friend of nature as somebody freshly rolled in its excrement.

Nick’s enthusiasm wins out, though. It’s not spoiling too much to reveal that traveling with a slightly creepy guide fast proves better than having none at all, as one nasty incident leaves the trio sans mules, food, water, and worse. Things devolve from there, as our ill-skilled, mapless protagonists find themselves increasingly pressed for survival strategies. Stress (let alone inevitable stress-induced bickering) doesn’t reveal anything more interesting about our dull protagonists. But the eventual vigor with which body parts suffer and wild wolves inflict injury does juice this empty Canyon up, unpleasantly if more memorably. Do they deserve it?

Straining, the filmmakers suggest so. "You screw with Mother Nature, she’s gonna find a way to screw ya right back," Henry portentously intones — the message being that city folk have no business in the all-outdoors. Baby, please: the Sierra Club knows we get along just fine on those trails, leaving no carbon footprint besides.

THE CANYON opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

Once upon a time in England

-
0
Once upon a time in England

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Some roles wring from an actor something they never had before, or might again. Who now recalls Eric Bana’s Aussie sketch comedian startlingly reinvented as bulked-up Chopper (2000), that native continent’s most notorious psychotic extortionist-killer-jailbird-celebrity autobiographer? Bana killed — more vividly than in any part serving his subsequent, slightly bland Hollywood leading-hunk status.

Tom Hardy is another handsome bloke at risk of looking competent and versatile without fully impressing. Yet here comes Bronson, a film (and role) highly analogous to Chopper — offering up a dramatized "Man. Myth. Celebrity" (as per its ad line) of actual "worst prisoner in Britain." The real Michael Gordon Peterson, better known as "Charles Bronson" (a PR-minded friend fitted the Death Wish star as nom de notoriety), was an extreme anger-management case whose working-class struggle ended when he robbed a post office in 1974.

As the film details, prison spectacularly agreed with the then 22-year-old "Bronson." (At one point he was briefly released because his in-house mayhem was simply costing the government too much.) He enjoyed the tension and violence — between himself and fellow inmates as well as guards — so much that he got sent to a high-security psychiatric hospital. Worry not: even drugged to the gills, he managed to create ruckuses that won national attention. Shaved, tatted, and ‘roided (OK, maybe it was just hard work) up for the part, Hardy has a field day.

This is the second English-language directing effort by Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, of the crime-drama Pusher trilogy starring the formidable Mads Mikkelsen. His next film, Valhalla Rising — again with Mikkelsen — is a Viking survivalist tone poem, less action-adventure than Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972).

Bronson is, by contrast, utterly revved up in a way that’s showy but not at all dumbed-down. Hardy’s prankster-rageaholic portrayal emerges amid several flavors: ironic Pulchinella à la contemporary music-theatre sensation Anthony Newley (Stop the World — I Want to Get Off); Tom of Finland bad-muscle-daddy fantasy (complete with nervously "gay" undercurrent); and adrenaline exercise of mainstreamed, po-mo directorial testosterone.

The frequently full-frontal Bronson (here definitely a shower, dunno about the growing) is a protagonist of scarifying ingeniousness and overpowering egocentrism. He’s a diamond-polished metaphor — miscreant, clown-star, possible bipolar case, all that and less. But Refn’s film itself is pure cinematic inspiration at least half-transcending even a case of snarkish homophobia (Bronson’s most insidious foes are his most snarkily friendly) as you haven’t seen since … well, Chopper maybe?

The elements theatrically winking at themselves lowline a package whose self-conscious dazzle betters any Brit crime flick in decades — not at all excluding anything by that flash pony Guy Richie (whose forthcoming Arthur Conan Doyle desecration we will never speak of again). It’s perhaps the most nastily great, stylish English gangster-type movie since Sexy Beast (2000) or Gangster No. 1 (2000), with an equally, heedlessly past-ordinary-pharmaceutical-help id as protagonist.

BRONSON opens Fri/30 in San Francisco.

Lars loves lars

-
0
Lars loves lars

Will history judge Lars von Trier as the genius he’s sure he is? Or as a humorless, slightly less cartoonish Ken Russell, whipping images and actors into contrived frenzies for ersatz art’s sake? You’re probably already on one side of the fence or the other. Notorious Cannes shocker Antichrist will only further divide the yeas and nays.

Seriously: why does von Trier’s particular misanthropy and misogyny make him an auteur with something to say about the human condition (as opposed to a neurotic whose particular hangups — fear of sex, for starters — might better work out in therapy)?

His endlessly violated, saintly, often pea-brained victims — previously played by Björk, Nicole Kidman, and Emily Watson — embody phony innocence to hammer home indictments of horrible humanity dependent on cartooned melodrama. Dogme 95’s "rules" briefly enlivened international cinema before becoming a tiresome fad. Less liberating than puritanical, their restrictions painted all other cinema decadent.

Antichrist does offers perhaps the most formally beautiful filmmaking von Trier’s bothered with since 1984’s The Element of Crime. Grieving parents Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe retreat to a forest primeval enabling widescreen images of poetic succulence. Yet that beauty only underlines Antichrist‘s garishness. One film festival viewer purportedly barfed onto the next row — and you too might recoil, particularly if unaccustomed to gore levels routinely surpassed by mainstream horror.

Does Antichrist earn such viewer punishment by dint of moral, character, narrative, or artistic heft? Like slurp it does. What could be more reactionary than an opening in which our protagonists "cause" their angelic babe’s accidental death by obliviously enjoying one another? Shot in "lyrical" slow-mo black and white, it’s a shampoo commercial hard-selling Victorian sexual guilt.

Later, Dafoe’s "He" clings to hollow psychiatric reason as only an embittered perennial couch case might imagine. Gainsbourg’s "She" morphs from maternal mourner to castrating shrike as only one terrified of femininity could contrive. They’re tortured by psychological and/or supernatural events existing solely to bend game actors toward a tyrant artiste’s whims.

There’s no devil here — just von Trier’s punitive narcissism. His fuzzed point is finally just old-school, arted-up revulsion toward that gender that both engulfs and births the male member. Antichrist offers the punitive sound of Lars’ one hand, slapping.

ANTICHRIST opens Fri/23 in San Francisco.

No resolve

-
0

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It was the last Bush administration’s master PR stroke to render terrorism completely abstract while appearing to frame it in layman’s terms. There’s no real choosing sides when the choices are "evil" and "freedom" — who’s going to say slow down there, pardner, when the cause is painted as humanity against the inhuman? That equation bought carte blanche approval for a lot of dumb subsequent moves, with the world arguably no safer as a consequence.

Most Americans have an absolute faith that we’re the good guys. But most bad guys were good guys once — it’s a process, not a natal condition. It’s unpleasant but valuable work to imagine exactly how fanaticism can create a sense of righteousness in violence, as opposed to the zero brain power required to think an entire country or religion might wake up one day and say "Let’s be evildoers!"

We’d like to think our principles would withstand hunger, torture, propaganda, Rolfing, whatever. But who really knows what we’re be capable of after a few weeks, months, years of deprivation or indoctrination? It took Patty Hearst just 71 days to become machine-gun-wielding Tania. Who can blame her if she chose a life of John Waters cameos and never discussed the matter afterward? The woman who robbed a Hibernia Bank must seem like a stranger — the kind who nonetheless can shame you by association, like an embarrassing relative or something said while very drunk. Her personality was bent against her will. Luckily, it sprang back.

The character played by Liam Neeson in Five Minutes of Heaven deals with his terroristic youth in precisely the opposite fashion — it’s become both penitentiary cause and ruination of his life. Neeson is an actor who carries his looks and towering stature like a burden — few stars are so at home communicating guilt, masochism, and rueful sacrifice. His Alistair is an esteemed present-day lecturer, activist, and conflict-resolution mediator of violent group behavior.

His qualifying original sin: in 1974, at age 17, he assassinated a young Catholic local to prove mettle within a midsize Irish city’s pro-England, Protestant guerrilla sect. He served 12 years for that crime. But Neeson’s face knows Alistair’s punishment is neverending. In mind’s eye he keeps seeing his young self (Mark Davison) committing murder — as witnessed by the victim’s little brother, Joe (Kevin O’Neill).

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, German director of 2004’s Downfall, Five Minutes of Heaven — the ecstatic timespan James Nesbitt’s flop-sweating adult Joe figures he’d experience upon killing Alistair — is divided into three acts. The first is a vivid, gritty flashback. The second finds our anxious protagonists preparing for a "reconciliation" TV show taping that doesn’t go as planned. Finally the two men face each other in an off-camera meeting that vents Joe’s pent-up lifetime of rage.

Heaven has been labeled too theatrical, with its emphasis on two actors and a great deal of dialogue. But the actors are fantastic, the dialogue searing. There’s nothing stagy in the skillful way both rivet attention. This very good movie asks a very human question: how do you live with yourself after experiencing the harm fanaticism can wreak, as perp or surviving victim? Surely we’re better off for understanding what shapes terrorism. The alternative is psychological non-insight as blunt as the concept "evildoer."

FIVE MINUTES OF HEAVEN opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Northen high (and low) lights

-
0

>>Check out Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ TIFF takes here.

FILM FESTIVAL REPORT There weren’t exactly tumbleweeds rolling through Park City, but this January’s Sundance Film Festival did have a becalmed feeling reflecting the economic panic — money, corporate sponsors, and industry personnel weren’t falling from the sky quite so thickly as usual, which naturally made the experience that much more pleasant for those simply there to see movies. There was no such diminished frenzy apparent at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-19), even if one of the local papers lamented "parties are smaller and over early." (Cue the Bee Gees’ "Tragedy.")

There’d been more serious lamentation in recent years that TIFF has gone too Hollywood, too average-viewer-unfriendly, its programming now driven by (rather than simply attracting) celebrity and media attention. That’s clearly not true of the program’s bulk. Still, you’ve got to wonder just how the "art" of cinema is being celebrated when one big-noise 2009 premiere was no less (what could be less?) than Jennifer’s Body, which put Diablo Cody’s Oscar in perspective.

Not much more defensible were a slew of hollow costume flicks, from opening night’s kinda-’bout-Darwin Creation to the closing Young Victoria, with Oliver Parker’s latest Wildean crapfest Dorian Gray, Carlos Saura’s frivolous I, Don Giovanni, and Stephen Poliakoff’s silly Glorious 39 among the plush time-killers unveiled like papier-mâché statuary between.

Those are movies likely to underwhelm soon at a theatre near you — though not so soon as the enthusiastically received latest efforts by the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam, Michael Haneke, Jason Reitman, Michael Moore, Steven Soderbergh, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Solondz, and others no doubt already ramping up their Oscar campaigns. Those were easy to put off. But there was a great deal I was very sorry to miss, like Cornieliu Porumboiu’s Romanian Police, Adjective, Raoul Peck’s Haitian Moloch Tropical, and Shirin Neshat’s Tehran period piece Women Without Men, films whose chances of U.S. distribution are variably remote.

Among titles caught, low expectations were more often met with high rewards than vice versa. Das Boot (1981) in a tank, Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner Lebanon proved an effective but unremarkable war-is-hell statement. There was controversy over Tel Aviv’s spotlight in the inaugural "City to City" sidebar. But if government propagandist efforts secured that slot as charged, other Israeli features here, like Danny Lerner’s lurid Kirot, were hardly goodwill ambassadors.

On the other hand, Lars von Trier’s Cannes scandal Antichrist turned out neither brilliantly here nor appallingly there — though one viewer did upchuck at a press screening, and a publicist called mine the first neutral reaction she’d heard of.

Elsewhere, the flowers of evil bloomed in myriad hothouse forms, some rather wilted on arrival. Perhaps most intriguing was a portrait of a movie that will never fully exist: L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot reconstructs footage from an aborted early ’60s thriller by the French genre master. Experimenting with psychedelic imagery to evoke pathological jealousy, he abandoned ship midway, but the remains still fascinate. Another mental health vacation, Werner Herzog’s improbable Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, won numerous fans. Yet it’s much less fraught with danger than Abel Ferrera’s 1992 original, and for all its gratuitous goofing too often looks/sounds like direct-to-cable product.

Plumbing sillier darknesses were the lamentable latests by George Romero (Survival of the Dead) and Joe Dante (The Hole), not to mention yet more not-different-enough vampire stuff (Suck, Daybreakers), a middling Manson recap (Leslie, My Name is Evil), and one dullish Robert E. Howard adventure (Solomon Kane). Midnight Madness’ one shining light was a nasty little Australian number, The Loved Ones, after which you will never hear Kasey Chambers’ "Not Pretty Enough" without cringing. I mean, even more than previously.

Elsewhere, pleasures were scattered and unpredictable, with some uneven films elevated by performances — Woody Harrelson’s delusional superhero in Defendor, Edward Norton as twins in Leaves of Grass, and just about everybody in Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. Major attention went to Drew Barrymore’s directorial bow Whip It, but Samantha Morton’s own, comparatively overlooked debut The Unloved ranks almost up there with the medium’s greatest horrible-childhood portraits. For originality, nothing quite trumped Corey Adams and Alex Craig’s surreal skateboarder fantasia Machotaildrop, even if its charms eventually wore a bit thin. Which was not an issue for French stop-motion animation A Town Called Panic, 75 minutes of perfect silliness that provided a Gallic heaven to complement Clouzot’s hell.

Welcome weirdness

-
0

DNA science has taught us everyone is unique. Art teaches that everyone — even wildly derivative sons-of-bitches — are kinda sorta likewise (at least technically). Still, there’s ordinary "individuality," actual distinctiveness, and then there’s whoa. Belonging to this last category is Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson, who’s made four features in four decades and surely won’t be hurrying up anytime soon.

Does it really take him that long? (Yes: he’s directed hundreds of commercials over the same period, yet took the perceived failure of 1975’s Giliap hard enough to pause a quarter-century before making another movie.) Or is it simply that the unclassifiable gimcracks he now records on film take years to create, not unlike someone’s backyard Lego-built Disneyland or Popsicle-stick Florentine Duomo?

No matter. Andersson’s films are like nothing else in the medium, if anything landing closer to multimedia maxi-minimalist stage avant-gardism like Robert Wilson’s vintage stage spectaculars. Albeit with considerably more humor and warmth, like Meredith Monk’s work both live and cinematic (1988’s Book of Days). But funnier still — like Buster Keaton without the character focus — and cinematically master-diagrammed à la Jacques Tati. Plus droll yet existentially dour in a particularly Scandinavian way.

Which is a long way of explaining You, the Living — finally here for a short theatrical run two years after its Cannes debut — as a bewildering whatsit of immeasurable invention and delight. (Arguably more-awesome Songs from the Second Floor, from 2000, took even longer before it got one week at the Roxie.)

How can one describe You, the Living? Fifty stationary-camera scenes, preceded by a Goethe quote, arrange mostly nonprofessional actors in tableaux of increasing musicality heavy on Dixieland tuba. Characters and settings do occasionally recur, but there’s very little "plot" per se. The highly worked production design (almost entirely studio-bound) is all queasy pastels, with a particular fondness for ’70s grandma-sweater-yarn lime.

There is, however, a slyly escautf8g absurdity in which Nordic miserabilism and fantasy apocalypticism somehow jigger a perfect cocktail. The taste is odd, at first — then it knocks you pleasurably sideways. There’s no easy convincing till you’ve seen it. Then there’s no easy convincing anyone else until you’ve made them see it. That’s worth the effort, though, because they will be so glad, and astonished by your rarefied good taste. (Dennis Harvey)

YOU, THE LIVING opens Fri/25 at the Sundance Kabuki.

American hardcore

-
0

X-RATED CLASSICS A sexploitation lifer who reportedly has directed so many features even he doesn’t know how many, Joe Sarno is nonetheless also enough of an idiosyncratic talent to have won a cult following and some high-culture-institution retrospectives. No education in psychotronic cinema is complete without the likes of 1962’s Sin in the Suburbs, a B&W exposé of swinger "bottle parties" that defines just how lurid movies could seem before they were actually allowed to show anything, and 1972’s Young Playthings, the rare erotic film one might — even must — call "Pirandello-esque."

Though he confessed to being shocked at first, Sarno didn’t blink in making the transition from softcore to hardcore, though his output finally slowed in the ’80s. Alternative Cinema has taken on the task of releasing as much of this voluminous oeuvre as possible to DVD, including some films long thought lost. (They also induced his filmmaking return — at age 83! — via 2004’s Suburban Secrets.)

The latest releases represent both his 1960s monochrome melodrama period and a mid-1970s sojourn into goofy sex comedies, the latter often available in "hard" and "soft" versions. Shoestring 1968 production All the Sins of Sodom was shot when "adults only" films could expose breasts, but nothing more beyond a lot of sexy (albeit nonprofane) situations and talk — which fortunately Sarno was most excellent at writing.

Nudes photographer Henning gets involved with several models while obsessively searching for a particular "look." He urges them on, shouting things like "More feeling! More EVIL!" à la Austin Powers. Purportedly shot over a long weekend, its cast names never even recorded, it’s a claustrophobic weirdie recalling such exploitation zeniths as Roger Corman’s Teenage Doll (1957) and Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd St (1973).

Its gorgeous widescreen B&W restoration stands opposed to three-color features on the Deep Throat Sex Comedy Collection. Their visual quality (and variably complete edits) underline the ephemeral nature of movies often sporadically released at best originally, and that no one thought to "preserve." The headline attraction, Deep Throat II, was a spectacular 1974 flop inaccessible even to bootleggers until now. It reunited the original "porn chic" smash’s stars Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems — albeit in an aggressively dumb, atypically amateur (for Sarno) espionage spoof nobody liked. Dubious authority Al Goldstein called it "the worst movie ever made" because it committed the ultimate sin of omitting all graphic sex, even Linda’s signature oral party trick. (Rumors persisted for years that hardcore scenes were shot, then lost, in a lab fire.)

The other two Sex Comedy inclusions are equally rare but more rewarding. Likewise featuring a range of famous vintage porn stars, The Switch, Or How To Alter Your Ego and A Touch of Genie (both from 1974) each have their own inimitable softcore charms. Female Jekyll/Hyde spin Switch debuts long-term Sarno fave Mary Mendum as a scientific researcher whose formula turns her from unconvincing Plain Jane into a raving beauty who perpetually arouses others, male and female. Starting out in a burlesque-humor mode, it gets surprisingly darker as it goes along.

Genie is about Melvin Finklefarb, a Woody Allen-like nebbish granted five wishes by a junkshop’s bottled Barbara Eden aspirant. In one "wish," he’s Harry Reems. Evidently video-transferred Switch comes with mysterious (Danish?) subtitles; Genie‘s 35mm source is streaked and spotted. Apparently no better prints exist. Particularly ingratiating are Sarno’s invariably kind recollections in the extras — either he never met a performer he didn’t like, or they all liked him enough to be on their best behavior.

www.alternativecinema.com

Nuclear implosion

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 After Life stepped into a bureaucratic beyond. His 2001 Distance probed the aftermath of a religious cult’s mass suicide. Likewise loosely inspired by fact, Nobody Knows (2004) charted the survival of an abandoning mother’s practically feral children in a Tokyo apartment. 2006’s Hana was a splashy samurai story — albeit one atypically resistant to conventional action.

Despite their shared character nuance, these prior features don’t quite prepare one for the very ordinary milieu and domestic dramatics of Still Walking. Kore-eda’s latest recalls no less than Ozu in its seemingly casual yet meticulous dissection of a broken family still awkwardly bound — if just for one last visit — by the onerous traditions and institution of "family" itself. There’s no conceptually hooky lure here. Yet Walking is arguably both Kore-eda’s finest hour so far, and as emotionally rich a movie experience as 2009 has yet afforded.

One day every summer the entire Yokohama clan assembles to commemorate an eldest son’s accidental death 15 years earlier. This duty calls, even if art restorer Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) chafes at retired M.D. dad’s (Yoshio Harada) obvious disappointment over his career choice, at the insensitivity of his chatterbox mum (Kiri Kirin), and at being eternally compared to a retroactively sainted sibling. Even more so now that Ryo now has a bride (Yui Natsukawa) and son (Shohei Tanaka) eager to please their new in-laws — though they’re already damned as widow and another man’s child.

Not subject to such evaluative harshness is many-foibled sole Yokohama daughter Chinami (Nobody Knows‘ oblivious, helium-voiced mum You). Simply because she’s a girl — so dim-bulb husband and running-wild kids get the pass stern grandpa denies prodigal son Ryo and company. Small crises, subtle tensions, the routines of food preparation, and other minutae ghost-drive a narrative whose warm, familiar, pained, touching, and sometimes hilarious progress seldom leaves the small-town parental home interior — yet never feels claustrophobic in the least.

There’s a whiff of compromise in a coda that feels compelled to spell out the reconciliatory note already hard-won through inference. (Gratuitous sentimentality is a habit Japanese non-genre cinema often finds hard to kick.) Nonetheless, this is Kore-eda’s most truly naturalistic, let alone Ozu-like film since his first — the comparatively bleak 1995 Maborosi — as well as a dysfunctional-family seriocomedy uncommonly beautiful inside and out. It’s a quietly funny and insightful two hours capable of inducing one pretty ecstatic afterglow.

STILL WALKING opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters.

Band of blabbers

-
0

With Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino pulls off something that seemed not only impossible, but undesirable, and surely unnecessary: making yet another of his in-jokey movies about other movies, albeit one that also happens to be kinda about the Holocaust — or at least Jews getting their own back on the Nazis during World War II — and (the kicker) is not inherently repulsive. As Rube Goldbergian achievements go, this is up there. Nonetheless, Basterds is more fun, with less guilt, than it has any right to be.

The "basterds" are Tennessee moonshiner Pvt. Brad Pitt’s unit of Jewish soldiers committed to infuriating Der Fuhrer by literally scalping all the uniformed Nazis they can bag. Meanwhile a survivor (Melanie Laurent) of one of insidious SS "Jew Hunter" Christoph Waltz’s raids, now passing as racially "pure" and operating a Paris cinema (imagine the cineaste name-dropping possibilities!) finds her venue hosting a Third Reich hoedown that provides an opportunity to nuke Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering in one swoop. Additional personalities involved are played by the disparate likes of Diane Kruger, Hostel (2006) auteur Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Daniel Bruhl, Til Schweiger, Rod Taylor, Mike Myers, and more.

Tactically, Tarantino’s movies have always been about the ventriloquizing of that yadadada-yadadada whose self-consciousness is bearable because the cleverness is actual. That balance started to slip in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) and Grindhouse‘s Death Proof (2007) passages where you just wanted the actors to quit shooting QT breeze so something could happen. Brief eruptions of lasciviously enjoyed violence aside, Basterds too almost entirely consists of lengthy dialogues or near-monologues in which characters pitch and receive tasty palaver amid lethal danger. When the movie’s too-brief climax is followed by un petit closing punchline, one feels a little less yappin’ and a tad more payoff could have pushed Basterds from highly to career-cappingly enjoyable. Still, even if he’s practically writing theatre now, Tarantino does understand the language of cinema. There isn’t a pin-sharp edit, actor’s raised eyebrow, artful design excess, or musical incongruity here that isn’t just the business. (Dennis Harvey)

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS opens Fri/21 in Bay Area theaters.

This is your film on drugs

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Movies and drugs were made for each other — depiction-wise that is, beyond experience-enhancing audience and creativity-enhancing (or canceling) maker usage. Too bad legality and morality so frequently messed with that perfect union. Herewith a highly selective, hardly definitive list of the medium’s

resulting greatest freakouts. It excludes the following: really obvious stuff, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Reefer Madness (1936); most horrific withdrawal sequences (that’s another article); and scenes in which performers really do appear very high (inevitably, Dennis Hopper).

Case Study: LSD (1969) Your friends at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. crafted this cautionary educational short in which our heroine, already "pretty jacked up on marijuana," drops you-know-what. She then goes downtown for a hot dog. But when she’s about to consume that tasty snack it turns into a troll doll on a bun, begging for mercy because "He had a wife and seven kids at home to support." Then the screaming starts.

The Big Cube (1969) A spoiled stepdaughter and predator playboy attempt to drive wealthy widow Lana Turner insane by serially dosing her. What’s perhaps most amazing about this awesomely awful potboiler is that Turner’s acting is even worse when her character is straight.

The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) Before he’s ready to shelve pacifism once again to kick fascist butt, Tom Laughlin’s counterculture vigilante must go deep into his New Age White Dude’s identification with Native American spirituality by doing peyote in the desert. This attempt to separate ego from self is in fact the most egomaniacal drug trip in the history of cinema, equating Tom/BJ with the soaring national bird and Jesus Christ.

Go Ask Alice (1975) There may be no wrong-trip scene freakier than this TV movie’s one in which our teen runaway protagonist and a temporary traveling companion are made to bark like dogs for an older couple — the "winner" getting a new boost, the loser getting "punishment" horribly left to our imaginations.

Blue Sunshine (1976) Never grab the wig off a secret U.S. government LSD experiment veteran whose secret baldness "covers" homicidal psychosis. And if you do, this cult horror classic teaches, stay the hell away from the fireplace.

Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984) This DIY punk parody’s all-female band members avenge themselves on their greedy manager by mega-dosing him, resulting in horrific hallucinations of Taco Bell ads and Barbra Streisand Yentl (1983) posters inspire unfortunate delusions of flight.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) On everything, Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro’s Duke and Dr. Gonzo visit Circus Circus — an environment that could induce anxiety attacks in the soberest tourist.

Cookers (2001) This vastly underrated quasi-horror is a one long paranoid wigout. Its three characters are meth cookers holed up in an abandoned rural house until their batch is done. Unfortunately, madness, sexual competitiveness, and the questionably supernatural intervene. The other great meth horror movie so far is Pop Skull (2007), which doesn’t even specify the substance being abused.

Knocked Up (2007) Paul Rudd. Shrooms. Five different types of hotel chairs. Plus "Love, the most beautiful shiny warm thing in the world!"

G’day sleaze!

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the late 1970s Australia suddenly looked like the new mecca for cinematic art, as movies like My Brilliant Career (1979), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Breaker Morant (1980)achieved unprecedented international critical and commercial success.

Those award-bait films are pointedly mentioned just in passing, for contrast, in Not Quite Hollywood, which is about all the other movies from Down Under during that period — those the tourist boards and arts councils preferred you didn’t know about. Subtitled The Wild, Untold Story of OZploitation!, Mark Hartley’s documentary is one of the best appreciations ever made of some of the worst films ever made.

Actually, they’re not all bad, by a long shot, though it’s measure of Not Quite Hollywood‘s infectious spirit that it induces a potent desire to see a number of films that in fact turn out to be pretty excruciating when seen in anything more than five-second increments. Their likes include 1978’s Stunt Rock — the predictably lame high-concept combination of stunt performers, magic tricks, and a justifiably forgotten band called Sorcery — not to mention extended dirty jokes like 1974’s Australia After Dark, 1981’s Pacific Banana, 1975’s The Love Epidemic, and 1975’s The True Story of Eskimo Nell. (The latter, however, features the following philosophically defining line: "There’s a day comin’ when I’m gonna stick me dick in the heart of the Earth and the bang’ll be heard in Alaska!")

Indeed, it was the belated relaxation of draconian censorship standards that opened the initially very smutty floodgates for Aussie exploitation cinema. While American audiences were enjoying the brief cultural moment known as "porn chic," folks on the other side of the planet were vicariously experiencing the sexual revolution in the softcore form of local snickerfests like 1973’s Alvin Purple ("The Bloke Who Has Everything But Inhibitions!") and 1972’s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie ("Cripes! The Things These Porn Sheilas Will Do On Camera!"). As several older, wiser actors note, any thoughts at the time that showing skin was about "liberation" proved delusional.

Much of Not Quite Hollywood is in a similar mood of bemused recall, reflecting that most endearing national Australian characteristic, an allergy to pretension. Confessed Ozploitation fanatic Quentin Tarantino does most of the on-camera cheerleading here, while folks who actually worked on the films in question typically recount how daft, crass, and/or sometimes plain dangerous to work on these enterprises were.

Unlike the Peter Weir and Bruce Bereford movies that presented Australia’s high-cultural face to the world, Aussie genre films of the ’70s and ’80s were often deliberately origin-blurred, the better to appeal to a North American drive-in audience. (When the most famous of them all, 1979’s Mad Max, first got released here its dialogue was actually redubbed by American actors.)

Washed-up or third-tier international "stars" like Jenny Agutter, Steve Railsback, or Broderick Crawford were flown in for marquee value, often greeted with open hostility by local actors whose jobs they’d "stolen." If war stories recounted here are indicative, many got revenge by behaving very badly: Dennis Hopper, for instance, was so berserk on Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Morgan (1976) that police finally escorted him to the airport, practically banning him from an entire continent.

Not everything here is craptastic. Gems ripe for rediscovery include the 1978 Long Weekend in which a horribly combative urban yuppie couple going camping attract ambiguous vengeance from a horribly pissed-off Mother Nature. Another deeply buried treasure is 1982’s Turkey Shoot, a Most Dangerous Game spin that Brian Trenchard-Smith turned into a "high camp splatter movie" when the unfortunate last-minute disappearance of half the planned budget x’d out the script’s more expensive ideas. Its zesty offensiveness still riles critic Philip Adams, a plummy-voiced snob who decries "these vulgar films" that "admitted to the wider world we were yahoos."

But what yahoos. Australian exploitation cinema has had a particular penchant for putting protagonists at the mercy of crazy-car-driving, sheila-ogling, unkempt and un-sane rural inbreds. Sometimes they’re the main peril, sometimes just an unfriendly preliminary to the central menace of giant killer hogs (Razorback, 1984), giant killer crocs (Dark Age, 1987), giant punk prisoner camps (Dead End Drive-In, 1986) or psychotic stalkers driving Mr. Whippy ice cream vans (Snapshot, 1979).

There’s a whatever-works (even when it doesn’t) spirit to these films personified by the career of Trenchard-Smith, whose boldly indiscriminate resume has thus far stretched from several Aussie kung fu movies to 1983’s BMX Bandits (with Nicole Kidman!) to 1997’s Leprechaun 4: In Space. It’s a little annoying when Tarantino brags about dedicating Kill Bill‘s Australian premiere to this prestige-resistant director just to piss off the local "snobs." But it’s gold when the man himself cheerfully admits "I am a guilty pleasure footnote." *
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF OZPLOITATION! opens Fri/14 in San Francisco.

Summer of ’69

-
0

When Dylan wrote "Forever Young," he surely didn’t reckon on something that would make even the most yoga-limbered original hippie feel old: Easy Rider turning 40. But it just did, an occasion commemorated by the restored print playing the Red Vic this week. Disregarding the tragic social-commentary ending, one can ponder "Where would Captain America and Billy be now?" — then watch 2007’s Wild Hogs for one depressing possible answer.

Easy Rider has been lionized and analyzed as the single film that most changed — or eroded — old-school Hollywood. It was made well under the radar for a pittance, by the blind leading the naked — Peter Fonda had never produced a film, and Dennis Hopper had never directed one. Real rednecks hired as bit players really did want to beat up the longhaired crew, who really were frequently on the drugs ingested on-screen. Hopper dithered for a year before delivering a three-hour edit. (Surprisingly, he approved of the 95-minute final version others hastily cut.)

By the time Rider finally came out, some thought the biker genre was already finished. Despite all that, it became a phenomenon, "defining the sixties" and inducing the studios to chase that elusive magic by green-lighting innumerable other first-time filmmakers’ equally loose, indulgent features.

Looking at Easy Rider now is like rereading Hermann Hesse or Carlos Castaneda 40 years later — do it at your own peril, because what seemed so profound then might be revealed as pretentious, vague, and awfully dated. The mystique transcended the movie long ago. But this tale of two hippie dudes smuggling coke (scored from Phil Spector as "the Connection"!) cross-country only to discover they "blew it," has innumerable parts greater than its sum: it gave us Jack Nicholson (who was about to quit acting before being asked to replace Rip Torn), cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, all-rock soundtracks, the inimitable Karen Black, and many more. As phrase and symbol, Easy Rider still evokes a dream.

EASY RIDER

Wed/5–Sat/8, check Web site for times, $6–$9

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Yoo-hoo, Gertrude Berg!

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Even ginormous pop phenomena disappear from the collective consciousness faster than seemed possible during their heyday. Still, it’s surprising that The Goldbergs doesn’t loom larger in television history or general cultural awareness.

Admittedly, the show’s heyday came in TV’s early years as a mass medium. In 1949, when it commenced as a CBS half-hour, there were about 1 million television sets in use here. By 1954, at its run’s end, nearly three-quarters of U.S. households owned their own boob tube. One reason for that radical expansion was the vast popularity of I Love Lucy — which grabbed The Goldbergs‘ time slot and sitcom supremacy. Everybody still loves Lucy. But who remembers Mrs. Goldberg?

This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival certainly does. Its 2009 Freedom of Expression Award goes to Aviva Kempner, director of Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, which makes its local premiere at the fest prior to its theatrical release on Aug. 7. In addition to the doc, SFJFF is screening four Goldbergs episodes.

Even more than a largely forgotten popular institution, Yoo-Hoo commemorates the one-woman dynamo who created and sustained it. Known to millions as humble Molly Goldberg, in real life Gertrude Berg (née Tilly Edelstein) developed performing ambitions and organizational chops from an early age, deploying both in her career despite an engineer husband’s ample means (he invented instant coffee) and a father’s harsh disapproval.

She pitched what became The Rise of the Goldbergs — after a first series about shopgirls was yanked for being too protofeminist — in 1929, the 15-minute radio show making its debut just after the Wall Street crash that triggered the Great Depression. Its portrait of a working-class immigrant Jewish family, idealizing Berg’s own, seemed dubious in appeal at first to the higher-ups. Yet soon it trailed only Amos ‘n’ Andy in national popularity, managing that without Amos ‘n’ Andy‘s degrading minority stereotyping. The Goldbergs were humorous, but not clowns — a warm, stable, relatable clan who looked out for each other and their close-knit community.

The center of both, it seemed, was Molly herself, whose homely homebody demeanor (not to mention the ESL malapropisms that embarrassed some assimilationist Jewish listeners) belied the breadth of progressive, non-saccharine wisdoms she doled out to one and all. She had her ditzy moments, but was nevertheless a very modern matriarch — quite unlike Lucy Ricardo, domestic ninny par excellence.

Berg masterminded this long-term success not just as star and head writer, but producer, mogul, and hard-driving perfectionist. She also had a clothing line, penned books, toured the vaudeville circuit and acted on Broadway. At one point she was named "Most Respected Woman in America" — following Eleanor Roosevelt, though in income their positions were reversed.

Despite all this, The Goldbergs died something of a slow, ignoble death. In 1951, actor Philip "Mr. Goldberg" Loeb was named as one among many "Communist influences" in the entertainment field by right-wing ideologues. The network wanted him out — and when Berg balked, a Top Three show was suddenly canceled for lack of commercial sponsorship. It returned later, the role recast — I Love Lucy launching in the interim — but some alchemy was lost. Blackballed and disconsolate, Loeb shot himself in 1955.

Berg soldiered on, driven as ever, until her death in 1966. The Goldbergs disappeared from syndication, then from memory. It would be decades before demonstrably Jewish characters (as opposed to gentile-fied Jewish performers) would again be so prominent on television. It’s worth noting that 60-plus years after Molly G. made her reluctantly-greenlit bow, Seinfeld almost didn’t make it on-air for fear it was likewise "too Jewish."

YOO-HOO, MRS. GOLDBERG

Tues/28, 6:30 p.m., Castro; Aug. 1, noon, Roda;

Aug. 2, 3 p.m., CineArts; Aug. 8, 2 p.m., Smith Rafael

THE GOLDBERGS

Tues/28, 3:30 p.m., Castro; Aug. 2, 12:30, CineArts;

Aug. 4, 2 p.m., Roda

See film listings for complete SFJFF info

www.sfjff.org

Celluloid Nation

-
0

Unsurprisingly, Israeli films have been a big part of each San Francisco Jewish Film Festival program from the beginning. Yet despite that annual local sampling, occasional theatrical exports, and Oscar’s devotion (seven Israeli features have been nominated for Best Foreign Film so far, including 2008’s highway-robbery loser Waltz with Bashir), the general narrative of how that industry got where it is today has remained hazy. It clears up quite a bit after three and a half hours spent with Raphael Nadjari’s A History of Israeli Cinema, the new two-part documentary screening at SFJFF.

Nadjari’s choice of article is apt — this is a history, not any attempt at creating "the" definitive one, and no doubt seasoned viewers will be left scratching their heads over an omission or eight. (The weirdest being M.I.A. Eytan Fox, of 2002’s Yossi and Jagger, 2004’s Walk on Water, and 2006’s The Bubble.) But the myriad clips and commentators he assembles nonetheless piece together a cogent overview that will have you running to check DVD availabilities (usually in vain, alas).

Early features, before and after nationhood was declared in 1948, mostly sold the "Zionist utopia" that would unite millennia of Jewish diaspora, often using filmic language reminiscent of Soviet propagandist cinema. When audiences no longer needed that basic affirmation, more escapist forms emerged, notably the broad "bourekas" comedies and sentimental dramas depicting struggling ethnic groups (mostly Mizrahi Jews). Alongside these in the 1960s there developed a "New Sensitivity" school indebted to European art film that appealed to the intelligentsia if not the wider public. A gradual shift from collective to individual concerns affected everything from the omnipresent military dramas to dissenting political content, plus depictions of hitherto ignored or stereotyped figures whether Arab, gay, Georgian émigré, or simply female.

SFJFF 2009 continues this history with a sizable range of new Israeli screen work. Home-turf hit Lost Islands is a seriocomic family saga played to the big-hair beat of early ’80s New Wave (come back, Flock of Seagulls!). The excellent Zion and His Brother provides darker domestic strife amidst Haifa’s meanest housing-project streets. Coming highly recommended for a good time is A Matter of Size, which is pretty much The Full Monty (1997) of sumo wrestling. (Dennis Harvey)

A HISTORY OF ISRAELI CINEMA

Aug 1, 11:45 a.m., CineArts

Aug 8, 11:30 a.m., JCCSF

In the Loop

-
0

REVIEW A typically fumbling remark by U.K. Minister of International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) ignites a media firestorm, since it seems to suggest war is imminent even though Brit and U.S. governments are downplaying the likelihood of the Iraq invasion they’re simultaneously preparing for. Suddenly cast as an important arbiter of global affairs — a role he’s perhaps less suited for than playing the Easter Bunny — Simon becomes one chess piece in a cutthroat game whose participants on both sides of the Atlantic include his own subordinates, the prime minister’s rageaholic communications chief, major Pentagon and State Department honchos, crazy constituents, and more. Writer-director Armando Iannucci’s frenetic comedy of behind-the-scenes backstabbing and its direct influence on the highest-level diplomatic and military policies is scabrously funny in the best tradition of English television, which is (naturally) just where its creators hail from.

IN THE LOOP opens Fri/24 in San Francisco.

Mumblecorenography

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nervous or slightly guilty laughter is a typical soundtrack to any fear that dare not say its name. It’s not reading too deep to call the recent bromantic comedy explosion one conspicuous way in which Straight Male America is covertly coming to squirmy terms with a brave new gay = OK world.

I Love You Man, Superbad (2007), I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007), and so on provide sugar-coated therapy, allowing a youngish straight male audience to titter at the faux-mosexuality of Peter Pans with growing pains. Best-friendliness that resembles something else is milked for both "ewwww!" yuks and a certain redemptive sweetness. Offscreen, your girlfriend might laugh at skittish you for reacting with that retro "I am so not gay!" recoil to anything that looks or feels gay; so would the gay friends it’s now kinda cool for you to have. But onscreen, it’s fine to both laugh and identify with doofuses doing just that. Is this progress? Eh, more or less.

Lynn Shelton’s Humpday takes the logical next one-step-forward, half-step-back for anxious brethren. Unlike her Slamdance award-winning debut feature We Go Way Back (2006), whose arty, autobiographical memory drama recalled formative feminist cinema, Humpday operates within a contemporary dude idiom: mumblecore, complete with improvised dialogue and genre staple Mark Duplass (2005’s The Puffy Chair) in a principal role. It’s better crafted than most mumblecore movies. But what isn’t?

Seattleites Ben (Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are drifting toward conventional adulthood while remaining vaguely "alternative," liberal arts types. Enter Ben’s old bud Andrew (Joshua Leonard, finger donor in 1999’s The Blair Witch Project), pit-stopped between backpacker adventures. To Ben, this hairy hippie is the thrilling, chilling reminder of freedoms left behind. Of course he’s great at parties and an inspiration to worried college seniors everywhere. But do you really want that on your couch for more than a weekend?

Anna might have doubts about that. (Humpday‘s secret strength is its deft probing the boundary-testing not between men, but within a credible marriage.) Ben, however, grows giddy under the influence of wine, reefer, cello rock, and Andrew at a communal house party the latter’s gotten them invited to. Excited to be the center of attention for people two-thirds their age, the two dudes have a brainstorm, vowing they’ll make their own "two straight dudes, straight ballin’" video as an "art project" for an amateur sex film festival. Having double-dared, even next-day sobriety won’t let them back down.

It’s impossible to address Humpday‘s failure of nerve — it is, ultimately, another "raunchy" movie for the faint-hearted — without spoiling the tepid punchline of a hitherto amiable, pleasingly performed albeit one-joke, movie. Suffice it to say, though, it reflects the zeitgeist precisely in recoiling where it does. Millennia of territory-marking manhood still instinctively bridles, however quietly, at actual dude-on-dude snuggling. That a target audience is willing to go this far at present is cheering. That the characters and filmmakers inevitably wind up paralyzed by nervous giggles is proof just how not-over-the-hump yet we remain when it comes to real comfort with guys doing, er … stuff.

HUMPDAY opens Fri/17 in San Francisco.

Poetry in (stop-) motion

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The bizarre news that the Academy Awards, which previously gave us such Best Picture nominees as Hello, Dolly! (1969) and The Towering Inferno (1974), will be boosting that category’s nominations back to a pre-1944 quota of 10 has induced much skepticism. For starters, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is now an actual contender. Boosters claim this will make room for more indies, foreign titles, and documentaries, usually slighted because they don’t have major studios’ voting blocs and campaign funds behind them. In the case of animation, however, it’s more that older voters still don’t view the medium as suitably "serious." No matter that Pixar routinely turns out all-ages entertainments more rewarding than 97 percent of Hollywood’s live action features, or that animators mostly outside the U.S. have been creating more and more "cartoons" that are very grown-up serious indeed.

Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues, grown-up if seldom serious, is already a personal ’09 Best Picture pick, though that’s likely to remain a lunatic-minority opinion. Recent films such as Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Persepolis (2007) were certainly as artistically accomplished and weighty as anything that attracted Oscar’s climactic consideration in their respective years.

Further proof that animation can hit any dramatic or thematic note is provided by director Tatia Rosenthal’s third collaboration (following two shorts) with author Etgar Keret. Both are Israeli, though due to the mysteries of financing or whatever, $9.99 is an Australian coproduction voice-cast in Ozzie English with familiar local actors that include Geoffrey Rush, Ben Mendelsohn, and Anthony LaPaglia. Yet even if the feature looks and sounds more Adelaide than Tel Aviv, its particular world-weary gallows humor reveals that as mere shellac.

$9.99 is a stop-motion version of something that’s become ubiquitous in serious-minded movies: the ensemble piece in which numerous depressed urbanites’ fates crisscross during a short run of mostly bad luck that nonetheless ends on a vague yes-we-can-all-get-along chord of lyrical transcendence. Mercifully, however, it’s no Crash (2004). Keret’s characters dwell in the same apartment building, all lonely yet hapless at interacting with one another. Seeking the meaning of life, one figure buys a book called The Meaning of Life. Guess what: it really does live up to its title. But everyone around him is so accustomed to their unhappiness they won’t even let him share that over-the-counter wisdom. Workaday miserabilism meets magic realism to piquant effect here, Rosenthal’s Nick Park-like animation as affably unpretentious as Keret’s gestures toward profundity are half-apologetically abashed.

$9.99 opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

1...91011...16Page 10 of 16

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