Dennis Harvey

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

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PREVIEW According to (disputed) legend, the 1944 death of 36-year-old Lupe Velez was far from glamorous, yet had classic Hollywood form: face-down in the toilet, choked on the pills she was regurgitating in a suicide attempt that succeeded, albeit not as planned. That sad end — she was despondent over a married lover and their unborn child — provided high contrast with her live-wire persona on and off-screen. The latter included high-drama involvements with legendary hunks Gary Cooper and Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller. In movies, she both defined and transcended a "Mexican Spitfire" stereotype (the actual name of her popular B-flick comedy series) with manic comic energy reminiscent of a Latina Clara Bow on one hand and a blueprint for Charo on the other.

Two features in this year’s Silent Film Festival find her minus speaking voice, but hardly muzzled. She was just 18 (and a convent school dropout) when picked to star opposite superstar Douglas Fairbanks in 1927’s The Gaucho. As his highly temperamental, jealous sweetheart, she gave as good as she got, frequently engaging his rakish hero in knock-down fights — a rehearsal for notorious later public spats with short-term husband Weissmuller, perhaps? Two years later she’d assumed a title role herself in Lady of the Pavements, a very late silent (its added "part-talkie" sequences have been lost) and one of D.W. Griffith’s last films. She plays a 19th-century Parisian cafe dancer who gets the Pygmalion treatment by a duplicitous countess seeking to humiliate her ex-fiancée. Material better suited to Lubitsch or Von Stroheim, this sophisticated seriocomic fluff wasn’t ideal for stuffy Griffith; and he couldn’t (or didn’t want to) tap Velez’s natural rambunctiousness as Fairbanks had. But this rare antique is still worth a look.

Other festival program highlights include Josef von Sternberg’s Oscar-winning gangster tale Underworld (1927), Victor Sjostrom’s poetic melodrama The Wind (1928), Gustav Machaty’s scandalous Czech Erotikon (1929), early W.C. Fields vehicle So’s Your Old Man (1926), and delirious Russian sci-fi exercise Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924). Live music will accompany each program.

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL July 10–12, free–$20. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF.

(415) 621-6120, www.silentfilm.org

Daughter of darkness

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Whether by dint of nature, nurture, or nepotism, Jennifer Lynch’s small resume to date hasn’t fallen far from the paternal tree. Tie-in novel The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer annotated Twin Peaks, doing a good job too, even if one still better left to your own vile imagination. That series’ Sherilyn Fenn wound up starring (after Madonna, and then Kim Basinger, famously dropped out) in 1993’s Boxing Helena, a "controversial" amour fou tale somehow much more intriguingly offensive in anticipation than actuality.

After a very long unexplained hiatus, Lynch is back with her second feature as writer-director. Surveillance again drafts talent from dad’s stable, notably Bill Pullman, star of 1997’s Lost Highway. And again, there’s a certain hollow jonesing after shock value, where David’s cinematic heart of darkness always seemed both frighteningly real and unpinnable. Yet modern desert noir reveling in nastiness, Surveillance does have its sardonic pulp satisfactions.

FBI agents Pullman and Julia Ormond arrive at a dusty rural police station to investigate two murky incidents producing a lot of fresh corpses. Sole survivors are one precocious little girl (Ryan Simpkins), one still-high skank (Pell James), and one very defensive patrolman (co-scenarist Kent Harper).

While their sometimes fibby testimonies are teased out — what really happened being revealed in flashback — three more bodies turn up in grotesque tableau at a nearby motel. Plus, authorities are on high alert for a natural-born thrill-killing couple on the loose, precise whereabouts unknown.

At its core, Surveillance is just cruel, without any true empathy or moral weight attached. But it’s also just clever enough to invite re-viewing, no matter how far off you spy the big twist coming. Lynch has honed her directing chops; things rumble and explode with precision, no matter that credibility wobbles ever wider like an ill-bolted wheel. Some unexpected names (Cheri Oteri, French Stewart) blend seamlessly into a sharp ensemble. With this Jennifer Lynch starts to be interesting on her own — even more since her already-wrapped next, Hisss, is an India-shot horror fantasy based on local mythology. Which, at last, is a project one can’t even imagine David Lynch doing.


SURVEILLANCE opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

“Sex Positive”

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REVIEW Richard Berkowitz ought to be lionized as an early crusader in the fight against AIDS. Instead he is not only largely forgotten now, his efforts earned him hostility and a kind of blacklisting within the gay community during the U.S. epidemic’s destructive apex in the 1980s. Blessed with a still-living, charismatic subject, Daryl Wein’s documentary puzzles out that injustice. A campus radical turned S&M daddy-for-hire, he found a new outlet for highly vocal activism when the disease first began taking a significant toll in the hitherto carefree, wide-open New York City gay scene. He and the late Michael Callen cowrote a first-ever "safer sex" guide. But with HIV transmission routes/risks still a matter of conjecture, Berkowitz’s own community excoriated that concept — not to mention his pleas to rein in multiple-partner promiscuity until more medical facts were known — as reactionary. He was decried as a lowly hustler perversely bent on shaming gays back into the chastity closet, a bizarre charge reflecting the besieged community’s off-chart levels of terror and denial at the time. Most of his ideas later proved wise, but by then Berkowitz had retreated into obscurity and substance abuse, his budding journalism career nipped by still-skittish gay media outlets. Still young-ish, devoid of self-pity, he’s an interviewee with considerable flinty charm, while the movie efficiently assembles archival materials to illustrate his rocky backstory. Hopefully his pioneering crusade will be better appreciated as a result of Sex Positive — though don’t expect any such belated kudos from fellow first-wave AIDS activist survivor Larry Kramer, who in predictable fashion here sour-grapes the contributions of anyone who is not dead or Larry Kramer.

SEX POSITIVE opens Fri/3 at the Roxie.

Intelligent design

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The first world is so jammed with manufactured stuff we can’t perceive most of it — even the stuff we buy rapidly and take for granted, to be replaced by each next-model thingy. This process is now our economy’s bedrock, as was underlined when the government’s first order of business after 9/11 was to encourage partying like it’s $19.99 via those "America: Open for Business" signs with Old Glory as shopping bag. Yet the economy and consumerism’s ever-more-tangible impact on our planet seem to scream, "Shop less!"

Durability vs. disposability and perennial style vs. trendiness are conflicting impulses on both sides of the buyer/seller equation. In theory we might all agree everything we buy should be functional, sturdy, and attractive enough to keep until it gives out. But this flies in the face of nearly all marketplace logic, and purchaser desire. The whole idea is to generate decisions made on what you want, not what you need. Better still if that line blurs.

The New York Times’ "Consumed" columnist Rob Walker describes this drive as one for "the ‘New Now,’ a ‘New Next’" in Objectified, the latest documentary by Gary Hustwit. Like his Helvetica (2007), which looked at the stealthily enormous role of typeface in our lives, Objectified is more an appreciation than a critique of something utterly ubiquitous in this case product design — and a few stellar personalities behind it.

Hustwit isn’t interested in history or the full range of design as much as celebrating those idiosyncratic individuals whose design imprint falls within the ongoing tradition of 20th-century modernism, with its clean lines, minimal detailing, and whiff of yesteryear’s sci-fi future. "Good design is as little design as possible" insists retired innovator Dieter Rams of German home appliance giant Braun. Many of the film’s interviewees — mostly designers well-known within the industry by name or firm (IDEO, Smart) — muse on products rooted in the post-analog "connected world." With an item’s inner workings now reduced to the microchip’s all-powerful DNA, there’s little need for form to resemble function anymore; practically everything can be some sort of smooth, small, amorphous blob or plane.

Still, as Objectified emphasizes in Helvetica‘s same alert, amused, admiring way, the best designers don’t aim for depersonalizing aesthetic perfection (let alone garish flamboyance). Instead, their goal is honing every manufactured object we require or enjoy so it makes the world a mite more user-friendly. There’s an ingratiating segment here observing just how much thought goes into Smart’s creating garden-shear handles even an arthritic could love. Elsewhere, one colorful industry type rails that there’s simply no excuse for bad design anymore. Yet another GPS no one can figure out should occasion "riots in the streets," he says.

Objectified‘s primary images of rhyming-row merch in consumerist temples (IKEA, Target, etc.) are "globalization" personified. Yet as one person mercifully mentions here, that neverending parade of stuff only reaches a lucky 10 percent or so. Since the other 90 percent aspire toward disposable income and luxury goods, our insatiable minority now ponders how to tell them it’s all been a horrible mistake.

The designers here are aware of, yet somewhat flummoxed by, that crisis: It’s the very nature of their jobs that "most of what you design ends up in a landfill." It will fall to a different documentary to chronicle how product design adopts new agendas of quasi-permanence, successive useage, and biodegradability. When and if that truly happens, Objectified might turn into beautiful detritus, an artifact from a vanished age of elegant waste.

OBJECTIFIED

Wed/24-Sun/28, 1, 3, 5 p.m.

(also Wed/24-Sat/27, 7 and 9 p.m. ), $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

When we grow up

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the 1960s and early ’70s there was great enthusiasm behind the idea of loosening up the public school system. You know, making things more participatory, sparking kids’ imaginations, encouraging those who might have be bored or neglected in traditional classroom models.

Suddenly grade-school veteran Mrs. McGregor was prodded — not that some sterner specimens didn’t resist — to read the hidden signs of each child’s psychological well-being as well as drill ye olde reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. If the freshly arrived 20-something teacher (or teacher’s assistant) seemed more cool, accessible, and just plain interested, that’s because she or he was; universities had started moulding them that way.

Anyone who grew up in that era remembers the incongruity of old playground games alternating with teacher-led, noncompetitive new ones. Old instructional and filmstrips that seemed prehistoric because they came from the Eisenhower era, offering laughably corny behavioral (not to mention grooming) advice, were shown alongside hip new edutainments urging tolerance, getting in touch with one’s feelings, and treading gently on Mother Earth. (Most of the latter were produced by questionable corporate friends of the planet like Exxon and DuPont.) Where minority students had always had to accept their absence from textbooks and other media, now kids in the whitest small-town or suburb saw rainbow-coalition peers depicted in revised or brand-new materials.

This happened fastest on TV, where much children’s programming seemed to grow sophisticated and viewer-improving overnight. On the commercial networks, there were the likes of Schoolhouse Rock and Fat Albert. The bounty on PBS, then fatly funded and as yet undiminished by cable competition, included Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and ZOOM. All knocked themselves out painting learning as fun, group inclusion and individual differences as neat. The messages were subversive by prior standards: girls could grow up to be astronauts too; boys were encouraged to cry if they felt like it. (And we all know they sometimes do.)

Perhaps the era’s zenith was Free to Be … You and Me, a multimedia phenomenon that hasn’t died yet. (The original album is still in print.) Chosen this year for the annual Sunday kids’ matinee slot at Frameline, it has a special place in the memories of umpteen lesbian, gay, and trans adults — because while it didn’t directly address sexual identity, the emphasis on upending stereotypical gender roles echoed deep for kids who mostly didn’t know yet just how "different" they might turn out to be.

The story goes that Free first grew from liberated That Girl star Marlo Thomas’ desire to create something for her young niece. Something that didn’t reinforce traditional "See Dick! He’s building a mud fort! See Jane! She’s happy just watching him, keeping her dress clean!" sentiments in kid lit.

That idea became a half-million selling 1972 LP by Thomas and starry "friends" including one 6’5 NFL legend (and author of Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men) singing sensitive boy anthem "It’s All Right to Cry." There were also tracks like "Parents Are People," "William’s Doll," and "Helping," performed by everyone from Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross to Tommy Smothers, Carol Channing, and Dick Cavett.

Many of them were back for the prime-time, hour-long special on ABC two years later, joined by Alan Alda, Cicely Tyson, Harry Belafonte, some Muppets, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, Roberta Flack and Michael Jackson (still cosmetically intact), and the choral Voices of East Harlem.

A broadcast staple for some years, the show is still pretty great, reflecting the contributions of such brains as Carl Reiner, Shel Silverstein, Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof), and Thomas’ major collaborator Christopher Cerf. Mixing sketches and songs, live action and cartoons, it humorously soft-pedals myriad corrective lessons: revising the Greek legend of suitor-outrunning Princess Atalanta so that the happy ending is feminist, not marital; clucking at the selfishness of a superfemme, pink-clad girl who brattily insists "Ladies First" (and gets eaten by tigers as a consequence).

The term "politically correct" hadn’t been invented yet, but it could certainly be levied against Free. As it duly was/is, in some quarters. "Make no mistake, this is propaganda aimed at children. The message is that girls will find happiness only if they mimic boys," harrumphs one current Amazon customer. (He also considers the running skits with wisecracking Muppet infants "disturbing" and "revolting.") Alert Rush Limbaugh, quick!

This dangerous brainwashing tool generated picture books, a belated TV sequel (1988’s Free to Be … A Family), and a 35th anniversary revised-form original print reissue for which Thomas made the publicity rounds last year. These days she may be lesser known in gay circles for public philanthropic expressions than her alleged private despotic ones (see scurrilous unauthorized biography That Girl and Phil: An Insider Tells What Life is Really Like in the Marlo Thomas-Phil Donahue Household, a camp tell-all classic right up there with Call Her Miss Ross.) All gossip aside, however, innumerable grown-up queers are still in Thomas’ debt. A self-Acceptance 101 dose as easy to swallow as Flintstone multivitamins, Free to Be … You and Me remains good for you, and baby too.

FREE TO BE … YOU AND ME

Sun/21, 11 a.m., Castro

If you’re nasty

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U.K. HORROR Once outrage settles over the current Parliamentary expense-account scandals, our former colonialist landlords will no doubt return to their concerns about "broken Britain," as the perceived general decline of moral rectitude in the United Kingdom is termed these days. Call ’em hoodies, chavs, yobs, or Neds, U.K. youth are seen as waaay out of control — albeit in ways that would seldom elicit more than a perfunctory shrug of disgust here — and their loutish, negligent, unemployed, or dole-collecting parents merit equal time in the sense-slappin’ machine.

Real or exaggerated, this trend of antisocial behaviors has inevitably crept into the entertainment realm, horror movies included. While the two Brit features (Blood River and 2008’s The Dead Outside) in this year’s Another Hole in the Head Festival only marginally deal with the phenomenon, three recent stateside DVD releases by first-time feature writer-directors find "Whatever happened to family values?!" terror placed front and center.

Not long ago especially gory or sadistic genre flicks were branded "video nasties," heavily cut or banned outright from distribution in Britain. That those days are gone, however, is made vividly clear by Steven Sheil’s Mum and Dad (2008). When Polish immigrant Lena (Olga Fedori) misses the last bus to central London, aggressively friendly fellow Heathrow cleaning staffer Birdie (Ainsley Howard) and her shy brother Elbie (Toby Alexander) invite her to spend the night at their nearby home.

Unfortunately Lena soon discovers she’s a permanent guest, kept on a very tight leash by "Mum" (Dido Miles) and "Dad" (Perry Benson). Covering familiar terrain, with particular debt to 1991’s The People Under the Stairs, Mum sports its own distinctive musk of grotesquerie, with an all-time-sickest Yuletide celebration providing craftsy homemakers with one hell of a Christmas wall-ornament idea.

Meanwhile, in rural Ireland, the least united part of the "kingdom," Plague Town (2008) again proves you really don’t want to miss that last transit run. Here, a dysfunctional American tourist family discovers one extra-large brood of horribly functional kiddies during an overnight stranding they’re unlikely to survive. Director David Gregory cut his teeth making DVD-extra tributes to Tobe Hooper, Jess Franco, Jim Van Bebber, and the "video nasty" era itself. His mentors would be proud.

More realistic, upsetting, and directly addressing "broken Britain" fears is James Watkins’ Eden Lake (2008). Another vacation-gone-horribly-wrong tale, it played one unnoticed week at the Lumiere last year. Yuppie couple Kelly Reilly and Michael Fassbender’s weekend Buckinghamshire idyll runs afoul of some ill-mannered local tweens, who unfortunately are led by a full-blown junior psychopath. After its routine setup this develops into a genuinely grueling spin on Deliverance (1972), Lord of the Flies (1954), and whatnot, with an ending that can be nitpicked for plausibility but that nonetheless leaves a real chill.

O.G. sleaze

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A full range of involuntary facial-muscle responses have already been triggered by the trailer to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which premieres at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. First 2008’s Valkyrie, now this: Brad Pitt’s Tennessee-hills-bred Lt. Aldo Raine twangily informing his Jewish-American Secret Service unit, "Each man under my command owes me ONE HUNNERD NAAATSEE SCALPS!" while Hostel auteur-turned-actor Eli Roth smirks in approval.

Will the whole turn out righteous, raucous, controversial, or just juvenile? We proles will have to wait until the film’s August theatrical release to decide for ourselves. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is letting inquiring minds do their advance homework by reviving Enzo G. Castellari’s less orthographically challenged Inglorious Bastards, the 1978 Italian action movie Tarantino’s latest pays tribute to — though his isn’t a remake but a separate, newly crassed-up riff on The Dirty Dozen (1967).

That latter all-star World War II caper spawned umpteen "Europudding" imitations, including the QT-beloved Bastards, showing this week in a new 35mm print. A sort of Filthy Five to the original Dozen — budget reduced accordingly, with sharp eyes ID’ing the same extras experiencing different death throes in scene after scene — it centers on a quintet of U.S. Army grunts in 1944 France.

There’s Bo Svenson (who’d become a sorta-star by replacing the suspiciously car-crash-slain Buford Pusser in 1975’s Walking Tall Part II) as swaggering Lt. Yeager; Fred Williamson’s Pvt. Canfield, an incongruous 1940s fount of ’70s Black Power ‘tude; smirking wiseass, murderer, and racist Tony (Peter Hooten), who calls Canfield "Bongo;" Nick (Michael Pergolani), a long-haired hipster aping Donald Sutherland’s similar character in 1970’s hit Dirty rip Hell’s Heroes; and Jackie Basehart as fraidycat youth Berle.

After being sent to the brig for various misdeeds, they escape their captors, intending to flee to neutral Switzerland. En route they pick up a nice Nazi (Raimund Harmstorf, horny hero of 1971’s The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried) and bare collective musculature to some bathing Rhine maidens. But mostly they machine-gun everyone in sight, unfortunately including Yankee spies disguised in Third Reich uniforms.

Penitent, our protagonists vow to take over their late comrades’ dangerous mission. This culminates in an exploded train, and an SS commander foaming "All Americans are mongrels! Negro, Jew, Polish, Italian, Irish — every possible race! And your vimmen are whores! Coca-Cola! Hollyvood! Chewing gum! Stupid cowardly bastards!" just before his ass is whupped by Canfield. Musta been that soda remark.

Inglorious begins with psychedelic-silhouette images underlining two key things about Castellari: 1) he honed his energetic macho action style in spaghetti westerns; and 2) he isn’t considered "the poor man’s Peckinpah" for nothing, being absolutely addicted to balletic slow-mo violence. About a bazillion Germans here do the spastic dance of death, riddled by bullets or leaping from yet another explosion.

Yet the film’s tone is larky, at times even goofy. Hardly a neglected masterpiece, or a campy delight like some of Tarantino’s other retro faves, it’s a good example of another era’s disposable entertainment. Unlike the grim check-cashing air emitted by many similar Europudding exercises, here you can sense the fun that went into making it.

His big-screen career of Westerns, policiers, Mad Max and Escape from New York clones eventually tapped out, Castellari moved on to TV work. But at age 70, Castellari is still capable of rising to the exploitable moment. Currently being hawked at Cannes — alongside the considerably more hyped you-know-what — is his Caribbean Basterds, which appears to cobble together nods to Tarantino, contemporary sea piracy, Point Break (1991), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

Fri/29, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/31, 2 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival

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PREVIEW Moving in its fourth year from autumn to an early summer slot, San Francisco’s CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival now provides an apt alternative-entertainment prelude to Memorial Day — because what, after all, is more patriotic these days than asking the question, "What are we fighting for?" Fittingly, the opener is about Big Oil. Sandy Cioffi (who’ll be present) at one point spent five days in the custody of Nigerian security forces while making Sweet Crude, an investigation of Shell Oil Corp. and other companies’ violence and environmental ruination in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Likewise, Robert Cornellier’s Black Wave documents the seemingly neverending efforts to exact justice from ExxonMobil over the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 20 years ago. Other highlights in this year’s all-documentary edition of CounterCorp include Sam Bozzo’s Blue Gold: World Water Wars, about the escalation of conflict and privatization around that most precious (and vanishing) natural resource; Steven Greenstreet’s Killer at Large, which analyzes the industrial agribiz/food processing causes behind an obesity epidemic that has begun reversing Americans’ previously steady trend toward longer life expectancies; and Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a "mash-up movie" about the wars between copyright law and free expression. No doubting where Gaylor stands on that issue: his entire movie is already available to download and remix yourself at www.opensourcecinema.org.

COUNTERCORP ANTI-CORPORATE FILM FESTIVAL Thurs/28–Sat/30, $5–$10. Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.countercorp.org

From the shadows

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The cheapest special effect in the world is having one actor fire a cap gun as another cries, "Ow, ya got me!" Ergo crime did pay, in spades, for Hollywood’s "Poverty Row" studios in the disillusioned years between World War II and Eisenhower-era prosperity. Subsequently dubbed "film noir," this period’s myriad violent melodramas were cranked out fast, exhibited briefly, then forgotten.

Yet recent years have left very few stones unturned in the quest for buried gems. Back when he was programming at the Roxie Theater, Elliot Lavine did much to foster their cult with retrospectives showcasing both the genre’s acknowledged classics and dustiest obscurities. When he left in 2003, noir fans wore mourning black — though were consoled by the start of SF’s annual Noir City festival that same year.

Still, watching lurid old B-flicks at the funky Roxie had an extra frisson lacking amid the Castro Theater’s grandiose respectability. Very good news, then, that Lavine is bringing bad guys (and duplicitous dames) back to Valencia Street with "I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir." Its two weeks emphasize noir’s lesser-sung efforts from the cinematic sweatshops of Monogram, PRC, Eagle Lion, and other economy-class companies where production values were low and the hard-boiled sleaze factor was often cranked high to compensate. Many of the 29 features haven’t been seen theatrically for decades, and few are available on DVD.

On Poverty Row, young talent proved itself; mainstream luminaries landed there once their box-office clout had expired. Thus velvet-voiced 1930s glamazon Kay Francis briefly descended to Monogram after Warner Bros. dumped her. In Allotment Wives (1946) she’s a socialite coolly fronting a polygamy racket targeting returned GI’s, while enduring Mildred Pierce-like torments from an ingrate daughter whose every action screams "Mother, slap sense into me." (Oh yes she will.)

Another WB castoff, ingénue Joan Leslie, starred in that year’s unique Repeat Performance. She’s an actress-turned-murderess who gets her wish to live the last fateful year over again — only to watch as the same deadly events unfold, only worse. Having outgrown a famous-juvenile heyday, Bonita Granville was ready to play twins — one good, one a "cheap little chiseler" — embroiled in a murder mystery in The Guilty (1947). (And to think just months earlier she’d been crushing on Andy Hardy at MGM.)

These programmer factories promoted personalities who only rated bit parts at the majors. Where else could sneering, square-faced Lawrence Tierney’s bullying malevolence float entire movies like The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and The Hoodlum (1951)? Some noirs risked having no familiar faces at all. The docudrama-style Canon City (1948) uses real locations and (some) real inmates to recreate a Colorado prison break — one thwarted, in part, by a gutsy, home-invaded gramma-with-hammer.

While most titles here are known only to the most fanatical buffs, two come with minor cult status already attached. The craziest among fabled screenwriter Ben Hecht’s odd few directorial efforts, Specter of the Rose (1946) is an amour very-fou tale set in the ballet world, its prima ballerina imperiled by a dancing partner-spouse who experiences homicidal ideations when not husking heavy mush stuff: "Hug me with your eyes." "I am." "Harder!"

Likewise linguistically challenged in the best possible way is 1955’s Shack Out on 101, in which a young Lee Marvin unforgettably limns "Slob," bus boy extraordinaire forever pawing unaroused waitress Terry Moore. Meanwhile, lurking Commies plot to overthrow the American Way of Life, off-ramp greasy spoons included. With its hilariously pissed-off dialogue no obstacle to red-blooded patriotic display, Shack is a Cold War trash classic so plutonium-hot it smokes.

I WAKE UP DREAMING: THE HAUNTED WORLD OF THE B FILM NOIR

May 14–28, $10

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF

(415)-863-1087, www.roxie.com

On the (closet) case

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While gay rights have been a hot political button for a solid three decades-plus now, there is at least one arena in American life where the issue remains hush-hush: the corridors of actual political power. Such is the thesis — or rather accusation — of Kirby Dick’s new documentary, which wants to light a shaming agitative fire like his last one (2006 MPAA expose This Film Is Not Yet Rated), and with any luck will do so. His subject is the bizarre, undiminished existence of top U.S. politicos rumored to be gay, living as "confirmed bachelors" or "devoted family men." Despite their carefully groomed public images, however, the D.C. bubble is rife with first-person accounts of their ex-boyfriends and tricks, not to mention sightings at gay bars or even cruisey parks and washrooms. Whether due to inculcated self-loathing, ruthless careerism, or both, they live as if it were still the pre-Stonewall 1950s, their "secret" known only to a reliably zipped few.

Trouble is, the political system and mainstream media collude in maintaining that secrecy, for the sake of both convenience and a wariness toward scandal they seldom exhibit in any other realm. Nearly all of the closet cases Dick selects to out here are far-right Republicans who profit from the worst kind of hypocrisy: enjoying same-sex relations on the sly while publicly feeding conservative hysteria about the homosexual threat to family values. They’ve voted again and again against even partly pro-gay legislation, from anti-discrimination laws and (of course) gay marriage to AIDS services and research funding.

Because Outrage aims to have an explosive breaking-news impact, I won’t name the specific politicians targeted here. Suffice it to say they include a governor, Congress member, house representatives, mayors, and high-powered lobbyists, plus a couple of network news reporters. Is it anyone’s business what they "do" in private? Hell yes, when the public words and actions of these "traitors to their own people" result in hate crimes, disinformation, legalized biases, and worse. There’s nothing particularly elegant about this doc’s presentation, but then the point it has to make is blunt, and its effect is as righteously infuriating as intended. That clanging sound you hear is the closet-door lock in the executive men’s room being boot-kicked off its hinges. (Dennis Harvey)

OUTRAGE opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

Sita Sings the Blues

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REVIEW A few years ago, independent animator and comic strip artist Nina Paley left San Francisco for India, where her boyfriend had found employment. A while later, during a visit home, she received a surprise, brusque communication from the bf informing her she need not return — the relationship was over. Just what the bf ultimately got out of this episode is unknown. But Paley got posterity: her first feature film, inspired by both the breakup and the ancient Sanskrit epic the Ramayana, is artistic therapy that also happens to be just about the most delightful movie in eons, cartoon or otherwise. Utilizing very different animation techniques, she cuts between a blatantly autobiographical tale of romantic woe and the mythological travails of Sita, beloved of the noble Rama. He rescues her from an amorous, abducting rival, but his chivalry dies when false accusations about her "purity" threaten to tarnish his image. Then, as now, men are pigs. Sita wriggles through her fate like a Bollywood Betty Boop, frequently crooning vintage 78 tracks by Jazz Age blues chanteuse Annette Hanshaw, and the visual wit on display is akin to Max Fleischer’s antics plus intellectual gamesmanship, grotesque streaks, and eye-popping color. Paley breaks the fourth wall in umpteen ingenious ways. Sita Sings the Blues is so full of fun and invention you may start looking forward to seeing it again after it’s barely started.

SITA SINGS THE BLUES runs Fri/8–Tues/12 at the Red Vic. See Rep Clock.

Pretzeled logic

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Ever since Michael Moore first attempted to meld Woody Allen and Ralph Nader, and Morgan Spurlock made himself the genially comic-lite host of an experiment in culinary consumerism, more and more documentarians have been tempted to star in their own movies. This is dangerous terrain, given that whenever one introduces the Element of Me into examination of a larger issue, Me tends to hog the spotlight. Even in certain films where the filmmaker’s own scarring formative experiences with mental illness (2003’s Tarnation) and so forth are the subject, there are often worrying overtones of narcissism, selectivity, and pursued melodrama. When documentarians are their own casting couch, what often really gets fucked is the unalloyed truth.

On the surface, Kate Churchill’s Enlighten Up! appears to squirrel around that trap. After all, she found a stand-in to occupy the center stage one senses an itchiness to claim for herself. He’s new to the film’s milieu and theme, so its narrative can become his process of discovering what she apparently already knows and would like to share. Meet Nick Rosen, an athletic, attractive New Yorker. A sometime investigative journalist on ambiguous leave from that or any other employment, he has the time and willingness to find out how "yoga can transform anyone physically and spiritually."

Trouble is, Churchill insists that he "transform" — and Rosen resists. Or rather, he just doesn’t "get it," doing pretty damn well by the asanas (poses) yet admitting early on that "spiritual awakening is a concept I cannot even relate to." He’d rather check out the dateable hot chicks nearly every class is packed with — and when he demands one off-camera night after months of celibacy for cinema’s sake, Churchill seems more pissed off than is seemly. (She doesn’t speak to him for two days.)

This is the stuff of Seinfeld-ish comedy. She seeks higher consciousness! He, pressure application to lower parts! But Churchill is fundamentally humorless — you can tell by the way she inserts "humor" with cutesy sound-effects. Her frustration at Rosen’s inability to "progress" as expected feels hypocritical because she doesn’t reveal the intricacies of her own progress. "The purest, most peaceful moments of my life have happened on my yoga mat" she notes. But just what it’s done for her — or why she needed it to — is left unaddressed. She finally vents, "I’m really sick of yoga," allowing that the project began with the hope that if she could "make someone else change, then maybe I would too." A provocative admission. Which is then dropped like a hot potato.

Of course pragmatist Rosen sorta flunks his yoga journey, fine-tuning his torso while remaining averse to "charismatic personalities" and "supernatural ideas." How could he not, when Churchill shops him through a bewildering catch-all array of disciplines, faiths, and techniques variably yoga-esque: Ishta, Bikram, Kundalini, contortionism, numerology, even "laughing therapy." Class instructors, students, and gurus offer evaluations both contradictory and redundant; the filmmaker seldom lets them get more than a sound bite in. Briefly she seems about to address the ethics of commercialization in a 5,000-year-old tradition turned multibillion dollar industry, then kinda forgets to. (See 2006’s superior doc Yoga, Inc.)

Finally, struggling to put a happy spin on a process that didn’t go as planned but that she won’t admit was really about herself all along, Churchill exhales "Nick was right — yoga has no simple definition, and that’s the beauty of it!" This is one tricky pose to sustain, the Self-Canceling Handstand with Delusional Lotus Smile. Perhaps the real lesson to be learned from Enlighten Up! is that if you’re making someone else walk the plank — er, spiritual path — at swordpoint, your own consciousness is the one that really needs lifting. *

ENLIGHTEN UP! is now playing in Bay Area theaters.

Lymelife

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REVIEW It’s 1979, and disco isn’t the only thing that sucks for Long Island teen Scott (Rory Culkin). Bullies at school beat up his skinny 15-year-old ass; girl next door Adrianna (Emma Roberts) likes him, but "like a brother." Housewife mom Brenda (Jill Hennessy), neglected by real estate magnate spouse Mickey (Alec Baldwin), has gone kinda crazy. Buying into the paranoia around deer-tick-carried Lyme disease, she won’t let Scott go outside without duct-taping shut all worrisome gaps in his clothing. It’s pretty clear to everyone (particularly older son Jim, played by Kieran Culkin — who here seems a rare live wire in the usually underwhelming Culkin acting dynasty) but her that dad is cheating, though for a while no one guesses it’s with Adrianna’s bitchy mum Melissa (Cynthia Nixon). Melissa has her own problems at home, given that husband Charlie (a strikingly tragicomic Timothy Hutton) really does have Lyme disease, which has turned him from a dynamo into an exhausted, pitiful shell of a man. Yeah, you’re thinking, do we really need another dysfunctional-family flashback with the requisite retro pop hits, pot smoking (back when it came dirt cheap), awkward virginity loss, and nostalgically horrible decor? Sure, why not. Lymelife treads no original territory, but its setting and characters are granted more than skin-deep authenticity, and the tangled conflicts in director Derick Martini and cowriting brother Steven Martini’s screenplay really do lead somewhere interesting, even important. There are some annoying quirks, but the overall the Martinis nail a savvy balance of comedy and drama. Plus, amid numerous good performances, there’s Baldwin giving a smug, surly yet sympathetic one that should be a shoo-in for award consideration if anyone still remembers little Lymelife at year’s end.

LYMELIFE opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.

SFIFF: Shots in the dark

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THURS/23


La Mission (Peter Bratt, USA, 2009) A veteran S.F. vato turned responsible — if still muy macho — widower, father, and Muni driver, 46-year-old Che (Benjamin Bratt) isn’t the type for mushy displays of sentiment. But it’s clear his pride and joy is son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), a straight-A high school grad bound for UCLA. That filial bond, however, sustains some serious damage when Che discovers Jes has a secret life — with a boyfriend, in the Castro, just a few blocks away from their Mission walkup but might as well be light-years away as far as old-school dad is concerned. This Bratt family project (Benjamin’s brother Peter writes-directs, his wife Talisa Soto Bratt has a supporting role) has a bit of a predictable TV-movie feel, but its warm heart is very much in the right place, and the affectionate location shooting makes this an ideal SFIFF opening-nighter. (Dennis Harvey) 7 p.m., Castro.

FRI/24


It’s Not Me, I Swear! (Philippe Falardeau, Canada, 2008) Ten-year-old Leon Dore (Antoine L’Écuyer) is a Harold without a Maude, forever staging near-fatal "deadly accidents" that by now no one blinks twice at — whether they’re expressions of warped humor, cries for attention, or actual (yet invariably failed) suicide attempts). Mom and dad are forever at each others’ throats, while their older son pines for a domestic normalcy that ain’t happening anytime soon. One day mom simply announces she’s splitting for Greece to "start a new life," pointedly without husband and children. This event rachets Leon’s misbehaviors — which also encompass theft and vandalism — up a few notches. Set in kitschily-realized late 1960s Quebec suburbia, director Philippe Falardeau’s adaptation of two linked novels by Bruno Hebert is a very deft mix of family dysfunction, preadolescent maladjustment (or maybe budding sociopathy), and anarchic comedy. (Harvey) 5:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also Sat/25, 2:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; Tues/28, 1 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

SAT/25


Adoration (Atom Egoyan, Canada/France, 2008) When orphaned teenager Simon (Devon Bostick) writes a paper for French class in which he imagines himself as the son of real-life terrorists, his teacher (Arsinée Khanjian) tacitly encourages its being taken for fact. The resulting firestorm (largely taking place on the Web) raises questions about the boy’s actual parents, free speech, religio-political martyrdom, and so forth. This is the first Atom Egoyan feature based on his own original story — as opposed to literary sources or historical incidents — in 15 interim years. While his fame has certainly risen in the interim, some of us haven’t liked anything so well since that last one, 1994’s Exotica. Adoration recalls such early efforts in the cool intellectual gamesmanship with which characters and technologies are manipulated toward a hidden truth. Yet provocative as it is, there’s something overly elaborate and ultimately dissatisfying about his gambits that makes Adoration less than the sum of its parts. (Harvey) 6:15 p.m, Sundance Kabuki. Also Mon/27, 6:30 p.m., PFA.

Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy, Kazakhstan/Switzerland/Germany/Russia/Poland, 2008) Possible new genre alert: the docu-comedy. Documenatarian Dvortsevoy turns his camera on his native Kazakhstan, and nothing depicted suggests anything Borat might’ve broadcast. The country’s stark, southern steppes form the backdrop for a family of nomads, including married-with-children Samal and Ondas, and Samal’s brother Asa, who returns from his Russian naval service longing for his own flock of sheep. Alas, he can’t get a flock until he lands a wife — and the only local prospect, Tulpan, rejects him on the basis of his "big ears" (and the small fact that she would like to move out of the sticks, into the city, and maybe even attend college). Traditional ways bump up against more ambitious ones (as when Asa dreams of a satellite dish), just as comedic moments trade screen time with grittier scenarios (including actual footage of a sheep giving birth). The end result is an intimate and somehow totally relatable look at a fascinatingly foreign world. (Cheryl Eddy) 6:15 p.m., PFA. Also Mon/27, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 4:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

TUES/28


In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, England, 2009) A typically fumbling remark by U.K. Minister of International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) ignites a media firestorm, as it seems to suggest war is imminent even as both 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. This 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 hei from. (Harvey) 9:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 2, 9:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

APRIL 30


California Company Town (Lee Anne Schmitt, USA, 2008) This land isn’t your land, or my land, and it wasn’t made for you and me — such is the insightful and incite-full impression one gets from California Company Town. Schmitt’s beautifully photographed, concisely narrated, and ominously structured look at the Golden State and the state of capitalism is labor of love, shot between 2003 and 2008; it’s a provocative piece of American history. On a semi-buried level, it’s also an extraordinary act of personal filmmaking that subverts various stereotypes of first-person storytelling by women while simultaneously learning from and breaking away from some esteemed directors of the essay film. (Johnny Ray Huston) 8:35 p.m., PFA. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; May 4, 3:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

Rudo y Cursi (Carlos Cuarón, Mexico, 2008) A who’s-who of Mexican cinema giants have their cleats in soccer yarn Rudo y Cursi: stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, and producers Alfonso Cuarón (whose brother, Carlos, wrote and directed), Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. But while Rudo is entertaining, it’s surprisingly lightweight considering the talent involved. Bernal and Luna play Tato and Beto, rural half-brothers discovered by a jovially crooked soccer scout (Guillermo Francella) who gets them gigs playing on Mexico City teams. But athletic achievement seems barely a concern. Of far more importance are Tato’s crooning dreams and high-profile romance with a vapid TV star, and Beto’s left-behind wife and kids — not to mention his raging gambling addiction. Though the drama boils down to one final game (of course), Rudo is really about the bonds and brawls between brothers, not sports teams. Goal? (Eddy) 6:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 1, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

MAY 1


D Tour (Jim Granato, USA, 2008) There’s been many a band-on-the-brink doc about groups torn apart by substance abuse, or creative differences, or just plain nuttiness (see: 2004’s DiG! and Some Kind of Monster, and any number of Behind the Music eps). In D Tour, local indie popsters Rogue Wave face, and are drawn together by, an entirely different brand of crisis: drummer Pat Spurgeon’s urgent need for a kidney transplant. Director Granato is given full access to subjects who are very open about their feelings (and, in Spurgeon’s case, unpleasant medical procedures). The result is a music- and emotion-filled journey that’ll no doubt inspire many to check off the "organ donor" box on their driver’s licenses. A sadly ironic, late-act twist involving a different band member will come as no surprise to Rogue Wave followers, but D Tour incorporates the tragedy into its storyline without ever exploiting it. (Eddy) 9 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 4, 3:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; May 7, 5:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

MAY 2


The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (David Russo, USA, 2009) Animator Russo’s first feature is a (mostly) live-action whimsy about rudderless Dory (Marshall Allman from Prison Break) who gets fired from his white-collar job and lands in the much scruffier employ of Spiffy Jiffy Janitorial Services. Its punky artist-type staff clean a high-rise’s offices, including one for a test-marketing trying out "self-warming cookies." When our protagonists develop an addictive liking for these treats, strange things begin to occur — like hallucinations and, eventually, male pregnancies of mystery critters. Depending on mood, this arch quirkfest with an ’80s feel (think of all the similar, mildly surreal indie comedies that rode 1984 release Repo Man‘s coattails) may strike you as delightful or just plain irritating. (Harvey) 11 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 6, 3:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

Tyson (James Toback, USA, 2008) Director Toback is picking up this year’s Kanbar Award for "excellence in screenwriting," but his latest film is a doc scripted largely in the mind of its subject. To call Mike Tyson a polarizing figure is an understatement (and raises the question: Does anyone really like him except Toback, whom he’s known for two decades?). This film — narrated by Tyson, the sole interviewee — won’t endear him to a public that’s seen him besmirch his glorious boxing-ring talents with an array of bad behavior, from a rape charge (here, Tyson calls his accuser a "wretched swine of a woman") to the chomping of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Though he chokes up on occasion and admits at one point that he starting taking fights just for the money, he’s still about as unsympathetic as humanly possible. Fun fact: a friend convinced him to go tribal with the face tattoo. Tyson himself wanted hearts. (Eddy) 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

MAY 3


Moon (Duncan Jones, England, 2008) The Bay Area’s own Sam Rockwell has quietly racked up a slew of memorable performances in variable films — including 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and 2008’s Choke — so the fact that he’s pretty much the whole show in this British sci-fi tale is reason enough to see it. A one-man space saga à la Silent Running (1972), it has him as Sam Bell, the lone non-mechanical worker (Kevin Spacey voices his principal robot assistant) on a lunar mining station in the not-too-distant future. He’s just about to finish his long, lonely contracted three-year stint and return home to a desperately missed family when strange things begin to occur. First there are hallucinations, then physical disabilities, then finally the impossible — there’s company aboard the station. Debuting feature director Duncan Jones orchestrates atmosphere and intrigue, though despite one major game-changing twist his original story seems a little thin in the long run. Nevertheless, Rockwell commands attention throughout as a character whose exhaustion, disorientation, and eventual panic feel alarmingly vivid. (Harvey) 9 p.m., Castro.

The Reckoning (Pamela Yates, USA/Uganda/Congo/Colombia/Netherlands, 2008) Yates’ latest documentary chronicles the long-delayed launch and bumpy first years of the International Criminal Court, a Hague-based body founded to prosecute (primarily) war crimes that member nations were unwilling or unable to do so themselves. Its authority is not yet recognized by several nations — including the Big Three of U.S.A., Russia, and China — while prosecutions of various military or political leaders who ordered crimes against civilians are often hampered by political minefields. Nonetheless, the still-struggling court is a beacon of hope for peace and justice around the globe. Yates lays out its work so far as an engrossing series of detective stories investigating instances of mass murder, rape, plunder, etc. in Uganda, the Congo, Darfur, and Colombia. (Harvey) 5:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 5, 6 p.m., PFA; May 6, 6:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2008) It’s no joy for Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) to bring his wife and stepson up from Tokyo on an annual visit to his elderly parents. The occasion is to commemorate the passing of an older brother who’s been dead for decades but is still held up as the yardstick by which Ryo will always fall short. Mom (Kiki Kirin) is well intentioned enough, if often insensitively blunt-spoken. But retired dad (Yoshio Harada) is an imperious grump who resents Ryo’s not following him into medical practice, disapproves of his marrying a widow, spurns her son from that prior union as less than a "real" grandchild, and is generally kind of a dick. This latest from Hirokazu Kore-eda (2004’s Nobody Knows, 1998’s After Life) is a quiet seriocomedy with lots of discomfiting moments. Yet it’s suffused with enough humor, warmth and surprising joy to easily qualify as one of SFIFF’s best 2009 picks. (Harvey)

8:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 5, 6:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

SFIFF: Tune boon

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Before there was Barney or Raffi, the answer to the question, "Who is most responsible for songs most likely to make children sing and push their parents to the very brink of sanity?" was most likely "the Sherman brothers." It might have been enough for Robert and Richard Sherman to write "Supercalifragiliciousexpialidocious," "It’s a Small World," and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," each of which when heard once — let alone a zillion times — became instantly imprinted on the DNA of several juvenile generations. But no, they also had to write indelible songs for the Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967), various Winnie the Pooh species, Charlotte’s Web (1973), and other things you might have escaped only by being born very recently or growing up in rare media isolation.

World premiering at SFIFF this year is The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, a feature documentary about the Shermans made by two of their sons, Gregory and Jeffrey — partly to figure out just why these fraternal composers of so many cheerful songs have barely been on speaking terms in recent decades. The answer is complicated and, unlike most Disney movies (or documentaries about them), there isn’t a happy ending. But there are a lot of happy memories in these 100 minutes, with people like Julie Andrews, Hayley Mills, Roy Disney, Dick Van Dyke, and John Williams remembering the Shermans as a joy to work with, if not a joy to one another. The brothers themselves, still alive and variably kicking, cannot quite agree on what came between them. But of course, not agreeing is exactly the thing.

Unless you grew up in pre-Khmer Cambodia (or an ex-pat community), odds are the majority repertoire of L.A.-based Dengue Fever were not your childhood’s soundtrack. But the band’s six members know that is really too bad, because Cambodian pop of the 1960s and early ’70s just rocked, with its Farfisa organ riffs, psychedelic flourishes, and incessantly catchy hooks. In an inspired stroke, the festival’s latest silent film-contemporary music match-up was commissioning Dengue Fever to create a live score for The Lost World, a 1925 superproduction that’s a lot more like today’s mall-flick fantasias than just about anything else you could find from that era.

Adapted from Sir Conan Doyle’s story, it follows a British expedition deep into the Amazon, where one cranky suspected quack scientist claims to have discovered a hidden valley of prehistoric creatures. By gum, he’s right. This restored thrill ride, featuring stop-motion dinosaurs, elaborate miniatures, romantic intrigue, a guy in an ape suit and another (alas) in comedy blackface, was an obvious model for 1933’s King Kong (Willis O’Brien designed FX on both) and an admitted one for 1993’s Jurassic Park (whose sequel, you’ll recall, was 1997’s The Lost World). After nearly 85 years, it’s still at least as entertaining as the latter-day comic-book movies that owe it a colossal debt.

THE BOYS: THE SHERMAN BROTHERS’ STORY

Sat/25, 2 p.m., Letterman Digital Arts Center

THE LOST WORLD WITH DENGUE FEVER

May 5, 8 p.m., Castro

Fiends, eyepatches, and femmes fatales

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The cause of showing neglected old films on 35 mm — that vanishing format — is one recently taken up by a number of local presenters, including the Film on Film Foundation and Midnites for Maniacs. We’re not alone in that pursuit, with one notable purveyor of vintage esoteria on celluloid being Austin, Texas’ Alamo Drafthouse. Its Cinemapocalypse programmers are currently on an "Invasion U.S.A." tour bringing disreputable shlock to big screens along the West Coast.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ double bill on Saturday spans the Atlantic with gratuitous violence and toplessness. Fernando Di Leo’s 1976 Mister Scarface is a lively example of the crime thrillers Italy churned out back then for the international grindhouse circuit. Italian-looking German and Fassbinder regular Harry Baer and German-looking Egyptian Fulci/Franco regular Al Cliver play cocky play dudes out to shake down Jack Palance’s titular mob boss. As their flamboyant older sidekick Vittorio Caprioli opines, "That’s a-Scarface. He’s-a bad news, I tell ya. Just-a looking at him and my asshole a-twitches."

Its marginally less obscure co-feature is Paul Nicholas’ incredibly tawdry 1983 Chained Heat, considered by many the greatest of all W.I.P. (Women in Prison) flicks. The cast alone clinches it: Linda Blair, Sybil Danning, Tamara (1973’s Cleopatra Jones) Dobson, Stella Stevens, Edy Williams — you get the idea.

Midnites for Maniacs gets into the Texas action with a "Fighting Back in the ’80s" quartet at the Castro Theatre on Sunday. Escape from New York (1981) you’ve seen, and 1983’s Vigilante, a.k.a. Street Gang (Fred Williamson and Robert Forster go Death Wish on the usual cackling punk-scum "animals"), is no rarity. But curious minds really want to know about 1982’s kitchen-sink exploitation blowout (cannibal monks! T&A! Kung fu! Cameron Mitchell!) Raw Force. And you haven’t lived till you’ve seen Lady Terminator, a 1988 Indonesian whatsit about an ancient nymphomaniac water goddess who towels off to wreak havoc on the police force and civilian penises of modern Jakarta. It’s vagina dentaterrific. (Dennis Harvey)

SAT/18, MISTER SCARFACE (7 P.M.) AND CHAINED HEAT (8:45 P.M.)

$8-$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

SUN/19, VIGILANTE (2 P.M.); RAW FORCE (4 P.M.); ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (6 P.M.); LADY TERMINATOR (8 P.M.)

$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

In a Dream

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REVIEW Jeremiah Zagar’s feature has a subject that’s not just close to home, it’s in his home: father Isaiah is an eccentric artist who’s created extraordinary mosaics covering myriad walls, rooms, and several entire buildings in Philadelphia. Julia, his wife of 43 years, views herself as the necessary "reality base" to his "crazy, self-absorbed but amiable … rare flower." Isaiah is a bit of an exhibitionist, his art a "journal of my life" that might easily embarrass family members less accustomed to his idiosyncracies. His past encompasses childhood molestation and institutionalization, while the present is imperiled by "delusions of grandeur." During the several years Jeremiah shot this documentary — at first intended as a simple tribute to a very creative parent — Isaiah upset the family’s long-term yet still very delicate balance by springing a major crisis. On top of that, the filmmaker’s brother moves back in, his marriage collapsed and substance-abuse problems evident to all. The Zagars aren’t anybody’s idea of a standard-issue nuclear unit, but this quietly engaging portrait transcends train-wreck fascination because for all their quirks, they are functional — close, loving, and supportive. Also, because Isaiah’s epic mosaics of tile, paint, and embedded detritus are so remarkable, you’ll want to book the next flight to Philly to see them first-hand.

IN A DREAM opens Fri/17 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock.

Diamond in the rough

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Co-writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made their feature debut in 2006 with Half Nelson, a movie with an iffy concept — an at-risk Brooklyn middle school student discovers her teacher is a part-time crackhead but they become best buds anyway — somehow rendered utterly plausible. That same keen sense of atmospheric and character detail, as well as resistance to sensationalism or cliché, is on display again in their new film, Sugar. The film has taken its time getting to theaters since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival more than a year ago, but it’s likely to be one of the best films of 2009, as it certainly would have been of 2008.

Sugar is also possibly the best narrative film ever about the world of pro baseball, and that’s an opinion lifted from people who care a lot more about America’s pastime than me. It may not have the sentimental or fantasy appeal of 1988’s Bull Durham, 1989’s Field of Dreams, 1984’s The Natural, etc., but as with Half Nelson, Boden and Fleck create something that’s at last deeply satisfying, though their happy ending isn’t at all one you (or the protagonist) might’ve planned two hours earlier.

Here we have baseball, football, and basketball as rivals, but in the Dominican Republic there’s just baseball, a national obsession as well as major export. There are more Dominicans in Major League Baseball than any other offshore population. For everyone who reaches that status, there are umpteen contenders, their aspirations often fueled by a desire to raise themselves and family members above the poverty line. That’s the case for Miguel (Algenis Perez Soto), a coolly self-possessed 19-year-old whose big eyes are always watchful and guarded, suggesting a mind sharply focused on advancement despite his low-key demeanor. He’s called Sugar because, he brags, "I’m sweet with the ladies" — but more seriously, "I’ve got the sweetest knuckle curve you’ve ever seen." His hopes of breaking into the majors are everybody’s, from his girlfriend and mother to the hometown friends who’ll live vicariously through his success.

His pitching skills get him plucked from Boca Chica baseball academy to a cattle-call camp in Phoenix where a lot of other Dominicans await their big chance — or discover it will never come. Sugar, however, gets hand-picked for the minor league Kansas City Knights where, after a fumbling start, he looks like star material.

But as the dream grows nearer, so does Sugar’s evolving sense of insecurity and isolation. He’s absorbed almost no English, so coaching instructions, teammate camaraderie, and even restaurant ordering remain blank mysteries. He’s housed with a well-meaning farm family whose Presbyterian pieties are equally foreign (despite his own crucifix-kissing before each game). When their corn-fed granddaughter sends mixed signals his way — seemingly more interested in spreading salvation than locking lips — our sexually experienced protagonist can only read her behavior as duplicitous. Having left school at 16, he’s intimidated by teammates like Brad (Andre Holland), a million-dollar draftee who’s always got his Stanford degree to fall back on.

Boden and Fleck did their research and then some. To their further credit, it’s all so fully integrated Sugar feels more verité than instructive. Like the performance of Soto (who’d never acted before, and might not again), the film doesn’t outline its agenda or emotions — indeed, some might find it a little too internalized and averse to melodrama. Yet it does exert a spell, building almost unnoticeably until the cumulative effect quietly exhilarates. Among so many recent movies about immigrants pursuing the elusive American Dream, Sugar is a rare upbeat one, partly because it allows that the dream might best be realized when one settles for less than it first promised.

SUGAR opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Visceral reality

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Already a veteran Irish Republican Army volunteer serving his second penitentiary term at age 27, Bobby Sands was leader of Republican prisoners at HM Prison Maze, a.k.a. Long Kesh, outside Belfast in 1981. Early that year he commenced a hunger strike joined by numerous other inmates, an action intended to define IRA incarcerates as political rather than criminal prisoners while boosting international attention for the independence cause.

After 66 days, he was the first of 10 participants to die. The strike’s cessation five months later (participants joined in at staggered intervals) was claimed as a victory by Conservative P.M. Margaret Thatcher and the mainstream British press. Yet the inmates won most of their demands, IRA membership surged, and the "Iron Lady" was thereafter target No. 1 for patriotic loathing among Irish free-staters.

Hunger is the first feature by Steve McQueen, the London photographer, sculptor, and maker of often black and white shorts created primarily for the more rarefied atmosphere of museums and galleries. Their minimalist rigor is very much present here in the exactitude of composition as well as their emphasis on physical detail and visceral experience. It took Julian Schnabel until The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) to find a full-length subject that suited his tactile sense while excusing a lack of narrative instinct or interest; McQueen’s got there on the first try. Hunger is completely realized, without compromise. It’s convincingly ugly in an aesthetically beautiful way, cool to the touch, admirably near-perfect, and off-putting.

We’re introduced to Sands only after several lesser figures take brief center stage: Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), a guard whose work weighs heavily on him; new prisoner Davey (Brian Milligan), who refuses to wear "the uniform of a criminal," thus joining the already in-progress "blanket protest"; and older cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), who introduces him to the "dirty protest." That protest consisted of caking walls with smeared feces, directing urine into the corridor, and letting uneaten food rot. We finally glimpse Sands (Michael Fassbender) during visiting hours; he puts up a fierce fight as he and others are violently dragged to a forced shave-and-wash.

Hunger is clinical, politically neutral, almost purely observational — interested in simply displaying rather than commenting on the sacrifices made. It’s not unlike McQueen’s series of postage stamps commemorating British soldiers killed in Iraq — created as part of his role as "official war artist" — that were opposed by the Royal Mail and Ministry of Defense.

Ethical debate is limited to one, 17-and-a-half minute shot in which Bobby and Father Moran (Liam Cunningham) lay out personal, political, and religious arguments for and against a potentially lethal strike. It’s only in the subsequent, equally stock-still sequence — a guard sweeping an entire hall-length of piss — that the director’s severity risks feeling schematic.

Needless to say, the final act is unrelenting, with its hallucinations, open sores, and actors starved under medical supervision to scarifying effect. But McQueen finds unsentimental poetry in surprising places throughout, from the snowflakes falling on Lohan’s beating-scarred knuckles to Sands’ lifeless face as a winding sheet is drawn over it. The institutional palette, bare-bones use of sound, even the fully exposed sinewy-to-sticklike male bodies turn docudrama into a kind of exquisite art project, at once devastating and hermetically sealed. *

HUNGER opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

MORE ON SFBG.COM

Pixel Vision blog: Johnny Ray Huston’s interview with Hunger director Steve McQueen.

Kennedy, compounded

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HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING It’s chaos theory’s maxim that the mere brush of a butterfly’s wings might produce a ripple effect sufficient to changes history. But let’s face it: it’s more interesting to muse upon the big what-ifs, like assassination attempts. What if Lincoln or Archduke Ferdinand had survived? What if Reagan hadn’t?

Are such speculations actually useful, or just a glorified party game? Clearly Koji Masutani thinks it’s the former, since he’s gone to the trouble of making Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived. As presented by the director and foreign policy historian James G. Blight, this new documentary makes the case that Kennedy’s nonconfrontational tactics on the world stage during his presidency would surely have carried over to preventing that "quagmire" known here as the Vietnam War (and over there as "the American War"). Had he lived, of course.

Parallels to our moment are hard to resist. Like Obama, JFK’s election was viewed as a landmark and greeted with messianic excitement unequalled by a Democrat until now. He arrived at a time of equally daunting if very different emergencies — the Cold War’s peak boiling point, the civil rights movement heating up at home — and likewise faced hostile Republican lawmakers as well as skeptical press.

Masutani charts six occasions on which JFK dodged armed conflict that might have triggered (or so reasoning went) World War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the obvious one. Others, all four-alarm calls for anti-commie action, include resisting engagement in Laos and Vietnam, as well as over the Berlin Wall’s construction. In archival footage Kennedy looks alternately uncomfortable and good-humored defending his policies, as he’s accused of "appeasement toward communism," "utter incompetence," and "mismanaging the news" by rationing his statements to prevent hysteria outbreaks in an already paranoid nation. "This generation of Americans has already seen enough war and hate," he pronounced. Amen.

Alas, that fateful open-car ride in Dallas placed Lyndon B. Johnson in office. Though it evidently tormented him, LBJ saw no alternative to an ever-expanding Vietnam incursion. Some 58,000 U.S. lives and 2 million native ones later, it remains the quagmire by which all our blunders abroad are measured.

These days, not everyone thinks Kennedy was as golden as that Camelot glow suggested. But Virtual JFK does convince us that things would have turned out quite differently, at the very least, had he missed taking a premature powder. May history not repeat itself.

VIRTUAL JFK: VIETNAM IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED

Fri/20-Tues/24, see Rep Clock for times, $6–$9

Red Vic, 1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

Sunshine Cleaning

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REVIEW The minimum wage that Albuquerque single mom Rose (Amy Adams) earns as a housecleaner isn’t enough to pay for the private school her eight-year-old son needs after his weird behavior exhausts the public one’s resources. And aimless-party-girl younger sis Norah (Emily Blunt) just got fired from her own last crap job. Cop Mac (Steve Zahn), the former high school sweetheart who chose to marry someone else but is still having an affair with Rose, tells her there’s real money to be made in the unpleasant business of "crime scene and trauma cleanup" — in other words, scouring the mess left over after the body has been removed from a murder, suicide, or natural death site. This agreeably low-key tale from director Christine Jeffs and scenarist Megan Holley isn’t the black comedy you might expect, given that plot hook: in fact one nice thing about it is that it doesn’t turn the aftermath of sad or tragic events into a joke. Instead, the emphasis is on sister dynamics and trying to get a break in the ever-expanding, hanging-by-a-thread sector of the working class. There’s nothing wildly original here, but Sunshine satisfies in the pleasantly familiar but not-dumb mode of 2007’s Waitress. Good supporting performances include those by Alan Arkin as (yet another) eccentric grampa, and Clifton Collins Jr. as a very personable one-armed cleaning supplies store clerk.

SUNSHINE CLEANING opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

Pineapple express?

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood’s hitherto stereotypical or simply indifferent portrayal of Asians progressed, albeit in one-step-forward-two-steps-back fashion. (Notably horrifying was Mickey Rooney’s 1961 yellowface caricature as Holly Golightly’s "Japanese" neighbor Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.)

South Pacific (1958), Flower Drum Song (1961), The World of Suzie Wong (1960), and several Sam Fuller–directed pulp actioners (like 1959’s The Crimson Kimono) promoted tolerance and understanding, however compromised they might look now. Nor is sincerity an issue in 1963’s Diamond Head, which gets a rare revival screening at this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. This glossy Panavision soap opera, based on a pulpy novel (Peter Gilman’s Such Sweet Thunder), offers a perfect mixed-message read of Hollywood’s hesitant multiculturalist liberalism at the time.

Charlton Heston, then at the height of box-office stardom (concurrently a significant civil rights activist, before his infamous conservativism later in life) plays the politically aspirational, bullwhip-wielding macho Richard "King" Howland, ruler of a vast Hawaiian pineapple ranch. He’s got a borderline incestuous interest in preventing kid sister Sloane (Yvette Mimieux) from marrying "half-caste" Paul (teen idol James Darren in light-cocoaface). That intervention is intervened by Paul’s big brother Dr. Dean (West Side Story‘s George Chakiris, two years later, again with the dusky "ethnic" makeup). Meanwhile Heston’s "Dick" (ahem) hypocritically keeps mistress Mai Chen (a stilted Frances Nuyen, famed from South Pacific and ridiculously self-serving protests against 1993’s The Joy Luck Club when her big scene was cut). Blackmail, jealousy, arguably accidental death, and provocative Caucasian hula-dancing likewise figure into the contrived melodramatics.

Diamond Head sports the sort of juicy-coarse plotting that used to be called "claptrap." It’s not wholly camp yet. But the widescreen gloss, corny emoting, and sheer presence of über-alpha-male Heston at his Sir Smirksalot peak are getting there, fast. Buried somewhere in these vanilla histrionics are fairly sharp digs against ethnic prejudice. Mimieux even says, "Someday all bloods will be mixed and all races gone. Where’s the loss?" — a remarkably hopeful statement for 1963. Or today. Diamond Head semi-embarrasses now. Yet it also tries admirably hard to get over its inherent miscegenationalist sensationalism, which does count for something.

DIAMOND HEAD

Sun/15, noon, $11

Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF

www.asianamericanmedia.org

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Indie notes

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A D.I.Y. movie musical made for all of $15,000, indie popster-turned-scenarist/actor H.P. Mendoza and local cinematographer-turned-feature-director Richard Wong’s Colma: The Musical proved to be the little movie that could after its 2006 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival debut. It won a limited theatrical release and critical praise, including a flattering New York Times review. After collaborating on last year’s unclassifiable (IMDB lists it as "action/drama/musical/thriller") SFIAAFF premiere Option 3, they’re back with Fruit Fly, which isn’t quite a Colma sequel but feels like one. It brings back that film’s Maribel (L.A. Renigen), this time starring as a straight newcomer wading into SF’s theater and gay-nightlife scenes while dealing with some unresolved identity issues. With 19 numbers (including "Fag Hag"), it is once again not your grandma’s (or even ABBA’s) kind of musical.

This time around Mendoza (who also plays a supporting part) is in the director-editor’s chair. But Wong’s brightly colored widescreen HD photography is once again an outstanding element. He spoke with the Guardian before Fruit Fly‘s bow as this year’s SFIAAFF Centerpiece presentation.

SFBG H.P. Mendoza directed this time, but it seems like the two of you are collaborative in most aspects of the movies you’ve made together.

RICHARD WONG I was certainly very involved in a lot of different ways. This is definitely H.P.’s movie, though. We were originally going to do something called On Sundays. Where Colma was kind of H.P.’s story, I wanted to do a movie about my family dynamic, this big, grand musical. But the economy really screwed that. We decided to use our CAAN (Center for Asian American Media) grant just to jump in and do something, [resulting in] both Option 3 and Fruit Fly.

SFBG You must have been really surprised by the exposure Colma got.

RW So much has happened since then, it’s really changed my life. I can attempt to be an actual, serious filmmaker. When we were making it, it was hard to see that as even a possibility. It was so remote. Of course all the timing was wrong with the writer’s strike and the recession, but nonetheless, I honestly still can’t quite believe it.

FRUIT FLY

Sun/15, 6:15 p.m., Castro

March 20, 6:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

March 22, 7 p.m., Camera 12

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Lupino Noir

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REVIEW A Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts-trained Londoner born to Brit vaudeville parents, Ida Lupino improbably wound up one of hardboiled studio Warner Bros.’ favorite tough all-American dames in the 1940s. Albeit not quite favored enough: WB already had Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan, and then acquired Joan Crawford, so Lupino didn’t get the pick of parts despite some stellar work. When they let her go in 1947, she continued to act but proved her mettle by becoming something extremely rare: a director, writer, and occasional producer. She was, in fact, the only woman occupying a Hollywood director’s chair at the time. Lupino directed features just between 1949 and 1953 (then innumerable TV episodes for another 15 years), but they’re all admirably taut little black-and-white "B’s" with a penchant for taking on sensational themes in a no-nonsense manner.

This Film on Film Foundation double bill revives two. The Bigamist (1953) stars Edmond O’Brien as a businessman explaining to a shocked adoption agency investigator (Edmund Gwenn, Miracle on 34th Street‘s Santa) how he came — with the best intentions, really — to be married to both elegant San Franciscan Joan Fontaine and working-class Los Angeleno Lupino. The latter character is striking for being the kind of unapologetically self-reliant single woman portrait Hollywood generally wouldn’t get around to until much later in films like 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

The real find here, however, is 1950’s Outrage, a surprisingly frank (even if the word "rape" is never uttered) study of a young woman’s psychological deterioration as a consequence of sexual assault. Attacked after a long, Expressionistically atmospheric stalking through a late-night warehouse district, young Ann (Mala Powers) has to endure the subsequent whispers and stares of neighbors and coworkers. (Her name was printed in the newspaper crime report — something not uncommon then.) Unable to cope, she flees town, ending up incognito as an orange-farm worker. But her lingering trauma can’t simply be run away from. Outrage has its flaws. Yet there’s still considerable force in the way Lupino stylistically conveys Ann’s panic attacks, and the screenplay’s unusual, sympathetic focus on aftereffects rather than the crime itself.

"LUPINO NOIR" double feature, Sun/8, 7:30 p.m., $7. Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. www.filmonfilm.org

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