Dennis Harvey

New DVDs, old sleaze

Andrew Lam
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New DVDs, old sleaze

TRASH When it comes to home viewing, gratuitous violence is always a selling point for genre fans — the censorial gloves that handle most theatrical films are off, “unrated” becomes a plus rather than commercial suicide, “director’s cut” usually means more blood and maybe a little flesh previously removed at the MPAA’s behest. The flood of obscure old exploitation titles now being released to DVD and Blu-ray are duly advertised as high on mayhem, whether that’s actually the case or not. (One mid-70s Swedish sexploitation item just released is billed as a “violent cult classic,” though apart from a bit of fetish whipping there’s nary a violent moment in it.)

Sometimes one even wonders if the writers of back-cover copy even bothered to watch the film itself, a question that recalls the halcyon days of VHS when box descriptions of cheap back-catalog titles often seemed to be about other, perhaps imaginary films entirely.

Nonetheless, you don’t have to look too far to find retro schlock living up to its hype, reminding that in grindhouse days of yore big-screen movies could get away with considerably more crassness than they do now. One such cheerfully nasty oldie is Ruggero Deodato’s 1976 Italian Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, invitingly labeled as “ULTRA VIOLENCE from the director of Cannibal Holocaust.”

That 1980 milestone in the annals of yecch was still years away when Deodato and scenarist cop-flick specialist Fernando Di Leo delivered this crazy exercise in vigilante justice with a badge. Ray Lovelock and Marc Porel do the Starsky and Hutch thing as a Roman “special squad” police duo who always get their man — though to the exasperation of their superiors, said man always meets an bloody “accidental” death in the process of apprehension. In fact it’s acknowledged that the pair has criminal instincts. They’ve only chosen this side of the law to wreak as much violent havoc for kicks as possible and get away with it.

Swiss Porel and Italian Lovelock were two of the most beautiful men — we’re talking Alain Delon level here — in movies then. Deodato lets them act not just like a flippant thrill-crazed comedy team nonchalantly distributing harm everywhere they go, but like a couple close-knit in other ways. We see that they share the same bedroom (if not bed); the few times they express sexual interest, it’s to “take turns” with a woman in each other’s company. Such interludes clearly do no more than kill time for our prankster-hero psychopaths between the greater visceral rewards of reckless motorcycle chases (reportedly shot without permits in the heart of Rome) plus blowing and shooting stuff up. They’re adorably lethal.

Speaking of vigilantism, few U.S. films ripped off the Death Wish (1974) formula — aside from Death Wish sequels, of course — with more lurid tactlessness than 1980’s The Exterminator, now out in a DVD/Blu-ray pack. Writer-director James Glickenhaus’ magnum opus has Robert Ginty as a Vietnam vet whose avenging of a comrade’s assault by Class of 1984-style “punks” snowballs into a general NYC cleanup campaign utilizing a flame thrower, machine gun, soldering iron, giant meat grinder, electric carving knife, and jazz great Stan Getz — well, he’s featured in a rare non-violent, wholly incongruous scene at a nightclub.

Lest we object to this unlawful justice, the perps pulverized include hoodlums who gut-punch old ladies and pimps who “serve young boys to perverts.” Tea Party logic is affirmed in an ending where FBI operatives, having slain our antihero (or so they think) on government orders because successful vigilantism makes public officials look bad at election time, smirk “Washington will be pleased.” Yeah, they’re all out to fuck ya! NRA 4-ever!

The Exterminator offered a cheap-thrills alternative to the original slasher wave. Gleefully surfing the latter’s blood tide is Alex Pucci’s Frat House Massacre, a belated DVD release that reprises the excesses of that era and then some.

With nary a dull (or tasteful) moment in its 116-minute director’s cut, this 2008 campus flashback has it all: psycho fraternity president, deliberately fatal hazings, rampant cocaine abuse, nasty sex and nastier sexism, boobs, a surprising surplus of well-toned male nudity, ludicrously gory murders, a disco production number, brutal towel-snapping, music by one of the Goblin guys (of 1977’s Suspiria fame), zero narrative continuity, and lines like “Studying always gets me horny.” Frat House Massacre would be a guilty pleasure if it weren’t clearly in on its own joke. 

Twee of life

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Twee of life

arts@sfbg.com

FILM For a while there it looked like Gus Van Sant, one of the most interesting U.S. directorial sensibilities of the last quarter-century, was going to settle for cashing the checks that have lured many an “edgy” artist over to the dull dark side. His mainstreaming began with the mixed rewards of 1995’s To Die For, peaking commercially with 1997’s Good Will Hunting; Finding Forrester (2000) and Psycho (1998) weren’t justifiable choices on any terms.

But then with the quartet of Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005), and Paranoid Park (2007) he was back making films as small, idiosyncratic, personal, and (but for his name) less commercial than anything he’d done since 1986’s Mala Noche. You could call them brilliant, baffling, or boring, but they weren’t works of careerist complacency. Milk (2008) was something else, crafted to reach as many as possible politically. It was a very good rather than great movie, coaxing a warmth and ebullience previously unseen from Sean Penn.

After that streak, it’s no big deal that Restless isn’t very good, let alone great, or that it falls between personal and mainstream categorization — small enough to pass as the former, formulaic enough for the latter. What is notable, however, is that it’s bad in ways Van Sant hasn’t hazarded before, and which you might reasonably have thunk he never would. Yes, Psycho, and maybe 1993’s excessively dissed Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is still worse. But Restless is pandering and insufferable: it’s got a case of the cutes so advanced the protagonists might as well be puppies and kittens.

Making use of a certified “eccentric” identifier that (if you swap in 12 step meetings, etc.) is already an overexposed narrative gimmick, Jason Lew’s script introduces pettable Enoch (Henry Hopper) as a teenage loner so affectedly angst-ridden his primary occupation is attending the funerals of complete strangers. At one such he meets the perky, equally quirky Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), who finds his surliness delightful and presses friendship upon him. It’s not going to be a major commitment, as she soon explains she’s in treatment for cancer with a very limited remaining lifespan.

Drawn by overlapping cute fixations on morbidity (both have dead parents as well), they are fast spending all their time together, to the somewhat ill explained annoyance of her older sister (Schuyler Fisk). (He’s living with an aunt played by Jane Adams, who gets so little to do here one suspects most of her part is on the cutting-room floor.)

They do moderately wacky things and share secrets, the latter including his conversations with imaginary friend Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), the ghost of a fictive downed World War II kamikaze pilot. (Adding to the Charlie St. Cloud like levels of twee, despite his made-up status wise Hiroshi sometimes knows things Enoch doesn’t yet, and eventually Annabel can see him, too.) Both have plenty of time on their hands because, well, she’s dying and he’s been expelled from school for reasons that naturally turn out to be rather noble.

All young lovers fancy themselves in their own special world beyond others’ full understanding. But Restless buys into that specialness with a vengeance. Its romanticism is that an arrested-adolescent type spanning the tuberculic etherealism of those wasting Victorian heroines Edward Gorey parodied, the girl-dying-from-too-much-spiritual-radiance Love Story (1970) formula, and the smiley face noncomformism of Harold and Maude (1971) and its ilk, wherein acting childish was a rebellious act of sticking it to the Man. In such narratives our protagonists almost never have jobs, likable relatives, or other real-world responsibilities, the better to act out fey fanasties together, then wallow in picturesque pathos alone. They’re their own Make a Wish Foundation, 24/7.

Puppies and kittens are cute, and getting suckered by this kind of enterprise is hardly the worst form of audience manipulation. But why is Van Sant playing enabler? One suspects there was something irresistible about first-time scenarist Jason Lew, just as there doubtless was to Matt ‘n’ Ben (Good Will Hunting) and to Milk‘s Dustin Lance Black.

But those choices were solid ones, at least. Always a fan of youth, the director is to be applauded for encouraging fledgling talent offscreen as well as on it. Still, occasional traces of his recognizable style hardly dilute the sugary sentimentality at the core of Restless, lend it actual gravitas or even the kind of fanciful mood that might excuse potential preciousness as fable. Twenty-two-but-passing-for-younger of the moment Wasikowska is fine, though she has been and will be better. Hopper, son of Dennis — how did such scrubbed, nonthreatening blond adorability arise from that gene pool? — is less evidently an actor in his first film than a prepube’s pinup successor to Justin and Zac. Not that he’s asked to act so much as pose fetchingly, of course. It may be Lew’s idea to make Annabel the “mature one,” but it feels very much Van Sant’s to let the camera fawn so devotedly over Enoch. 

RESTLESS opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.

Original sin

Andrew Lam
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Original sin

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Early this year came the announcement that Brian De Palma was hot to do an English remake of Alain Corneau’s Love Crime, saying “Not since Dressed to Kill have I had a chance to combine eroticism, suspense, mystery, and murder into one spellbinding cinematic experience.” Apparently he thinks his intervening decades’ meh-to-awful “erotic thrillers” Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992), Femme Fatale (2002), and Black Dahlia (2006) don’t compare (a good call, that).

The results, should they come to fruition, may well prove a landmark in the annals of lurid guilty-pleasure trash. (Although you could argue it can’t possibly get any guiltier than Femme Fatale already managed.) And who doesn’t want to wish De Palma well in nostalgic salute to 1976’s Carrie, 1973’s Sisters, 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise, 1983’s Scarface, and such? But with the original Love Crime finally making it to local theaters, it’s an opportune moment to be appalled in advance: because there is no way he’s not going to pour the equivalent of greasy massage oil, Hershey’s Syrup, and vermilion stage blood over what is a neat, dry, fully clothed model of a modern Hitchcockian thriller, one more Rear Window (1954) than Psycho (1960).

No doubt in France Love Crime looks pretty mainstream. But here its soon-to be-despoiled virtues of narrative intricacy and restraint are upscale pleasures, an occasion to get just a little dirty at a Landmark, as one can feel both high-minded and devilish reading a Patricia Highsmith novel. Ludivine Sagnier, France’s limpid answer to Chloë Sevigny, plays assistant to high-powered corporate executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). The boss enjoys molding protégée Isabelle to her own image, making them a double team of carefully planned guile unafraid to use sex appeal as a business strategy. But Isabelle is expected to know her place — even when that place robs her of credit for her own ideas — and when she stages a small rebellion, Christine’s revenge is cruelly out of scale, a high-heeled boot brought down to squash an ant. It doesn’t help that Isabelle has by now fallen in love with Philippe (Patrick Mille), who is Christine’s boy toy and may merely be enlivening the other woman’s bed on loan.

Halfway through an act of vengeance occurs that is shocking and satisfying, even if it leaves the remainder of Corneau and Nathalie Carter’s clever screenplay deprived of the very thing that had made it such a sardonic delight so far. The rest is a question of whether that crime (which really doesn’t have much to do with “love”) can be covered up or not, a matter that holds interest but stretches story and performance credibility somewhat. Nonetheless, this is pulp fun of an elegant and intelligent type. With Scott Thomas’ inherent frostiness — which she is actor enough to completely lose on other occasions — ideally employed as the chic superior anyone would eventually want to strangle, Love Crime has no need of the naked writhing across desktops and Playboy “lesbian” frissons very likely to surface as “improvements” in the forthcoming Brian De Palma joint.

Corneau (who died at age 67 last August, just after the film’s premiere) had an interesting, diverse, not-always-distinguished career, some highlights being the 1979 Jim Thompson adaptation Série Noire and 1991’s glacial costume-drama hit Tout les Matins du Monde. No masterpiece, Love Crime closes the book on his career not with a bang but with a crisp, satisfying snap. 

LOVE CRIME opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

 

Roeg, warrior

Andrew Lam
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Roeg, warrior

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It’s grown obvious in ways it couldn’t have been originally that from 1970 to 1980 Nicolas Roeg was the most adventuresome English director, even if then as now his work seems less “British” than just about any colleague you could name. Perhaps not quite knowing where he was coming from — in any sense — made Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), and Bad Timing (1980) messy, strange, and interesting in ways that then felt borderline gimmicky, as disjointed as they were deliberately dislocative. Yet all those qualities have helped the films age beautifully. In fact they’ve scarcely dated at all, perhaps because their lateral rather than linear storytelling, seemingly contrary audio and visual cues, and pervasive cultural unease reflect a mindset familiar enough now but very strange those decades ago.

That remarkable run comes to mind because of Earth‘s return in a newly struck 35th anniversary print that offers the complete 139-minute “director’s cut.” That version has in fact been available for years — the heavily-cut original U.S. theatrical release is doubtless harder to find now — but remains full of surprises. Even after so long a span, it’s a science fiction movie unconventional enough to annoy the hell out of many professed sci-fi film fans. But then their template was formed the next year by Star Wars (1977), then shortly thereafter by Alien (1979) — two expressions of sci-fi rooted in comic books and ’50s monster movies respectively, spawning innumerable imitations since equally focused on action over ideas.

The Man Who Fell to Earth, stubbornly, has no interest in spaceships, let alone battles or creatures. Instead, its subject is human society, which from the title character’s viewpoint really is nothing for our planet to brag about. It’s still an alien piece of filmmaking because Roeg wants us to view earthly life with fresh eyes that gradually dim from amused curiosity to the cynicism of a reluctant émigré forced into permanent residency in a land he despises.

In his first major film role, David Bowie plays Thomas Newton, who turns up in the American Southwest out of the blue — no one realizes at first quite how literally — with ideas for “toys” of extraordinary technological advancement that quickly make him a very, very wealthy man. Amassing money seems to be his only real interest, toward a goal he eventually reveals to hand-picked confederates including patent attorney Buck Henry and technician Rip Torn, plus singularly dim companion Mary-Lou (Candy Clark). That goal is constructing a space vehicle capable of returning Newton to his planet, which is dying from drought. (Our protagonist’s decline is charted in his changing beverage choices, from precious water to the cheap consolation of alcohol.) He intends no harm. But despite all efforts at evading notice, he inevitably attracts invasive government attention as a freak of potential scientific, capitalist, or militaristic use.

Taking considerable liberties with Walter Tevis’ novel, Paul Mayerberg’s screenplay and Roeg’s direction enlarge several subsidiary characters, add a number of new incidents, and minimize Newton’s backstory. Yet when Earth was first released in the U.S., its 20-minutes-shorter edit removed much of the more outré inventions — including a whole lotta sex scenes, mostly between college prof Torn and myriad female students — oddly re-asserting the story’s science-fiction emphasis. Yet what remains fascinating about the film, beyond Bowie’s silvery performance and Roeg’s arresting stylistic strategies, is that it’s every bit as much a stunned observation of mid-decade middlebrow Americana as the same year’s Nashville. Like a Tibetan monk transplanted to a papier-mâché dinosaur theme park, Newton is agog at a vigorous garishness that’s as invasive as the probes eventually stuck into his body. Chocolate chip cookies, evangelical hysteria, Elvis musicals, and Mary-Lou’s ever-changing hairdos are all an equal amazement to him. The people around him age decades, but he never does, and strangely neither does the culture; when Clark and Torn visit a record store in their twilight years, it’s still selling Jim Croce records to Me Decade longhairs. Newton’s tragic fate is to be trapped in a space-time warp of alien triviality.

Famously crossing over to direction from cinematography (on movies like 1967’s Far From the Madding Crowd and 1968’s Petulia), Roeg brought a sensibility to his own projects that owed less to film and theater than to modern still photography, experimental cinema, and the literary avant-garde. Before anyone else thought likewise, his soundtracks felt like wildly unpredictable (but apt) mix tapes.

None of his features strictly fit any genre they’re aligned to, when there is one. Don’t Look Now is less interested in the supernatural than the psychological deterioration of a marriage. Bad Timing is still under appreciated as the decade’s more disturbing follow-up to Last Tango in Paris (1972), wherein male control of the female sex object grows increasingly desperate and destructive. Performance, co-directed with the late Donald Cammell, was supposed to be a Swinging London snapshot a la Blow-Up (1966) — fashionable, arty, a little kinky, with Mick Jagger acting as lure. It turned out such a druggy, gender-bending mindfuck that Warner Bros. initially refused to release it. A processing lab destroyed some “obscene” footage without permission; even without that, audiences walked out, demanded refunds, even vomited. Performance no longer shocks, but it’s still subversive.

After 1980, Roeg’s output grew steadily less compelling. After years of silence suddenly there was 2007’s Puffball: The Devil’s Eyeball, a seriocomic semi-fantasy curio based on a Fay Weldon novel. No one saw it; they didn’t miss much. At 82, it’s quite possible Roeg won’t make another feature. Yet that single decade of remarkable work still points forward, and has influenced many of the more interesting younger directors’ approaches to style and storytelling since.

 

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

To the extreme

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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To the extreme

TRASH In the West we’ve basically known two kinds of Japanese cinema. One is that of Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and their inheritors — somber, formal, detailed. The other is the cinema of crazy shit: gangster and “pink” movies from the 1960s onward, cracked visionaries from Seijun Suzuki to Takashi Miike, the exercises in tongue-in-cheek fanboy excess like Tokyo Gore Police (2008) and Big Man Japan (2007).

Definitely falling in the gonzo category is Sion Sono, a poet-performance artist who’s been making (and occasionally acting in) films since the mid-80s. But awareness of his work abroad didn’t really spike until 2002’s Suicide Club, which famously opened with a chorus line of angelic schoolgirls cheerfully leaping into the path of a subway train.

Since then he’s made the first of two projected Suicide sequels, the surreal psychosexual nightmare Strange Circus (2005), and deadly-‘do J-horror exercise Exte: Hair Extensions (2007), to name a few. Though not in the Miike league of complete unpredictability (let alone productivity), Sono’s films have been a diverse lot, not excluding an exercise or two in straight-ahead naturalism.

The mega-dose of Sono that the Roxie offers this month, however, feels like two very large pieces cut from the same pie. Opening Friday is 2008’s Love Exposure, clocking just under four hours (not counting intermission); next up is 2010’s Cold Fish (starting Sept. 16), a comparatively succinct sit at 144 minutes. Such lengths might normally suggest epic longeurs and a meditative pace. Sono, however, fills each canvas to bursting with demented narrative turns, frantic activity, extreme emotions, and absurdist logic. Not to mention sizable quantities of over-the-top violence and warped sexuality.

Love Exposure opens with the claim that it’s “based on a true event,” which is no doubt its first joke. After the death of his saintly mother, youthful protagonist Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) adapts to the adoption of the priesthood by his father (Atsuro Watabe), though it’s harder to accept the eventual intrusion of an insanely needy new parishioner (a memorable Makiko Watanabe), a crackhead-acting real-life succubus who swiftly destroys dad’s faith and vocation. As a result Yu falls in with a bad crowd, becoming its Jesus in a weird pseudo-spiritual observance of taking “peek-a-boo panty photos” while remaining otherwise chaste in anticipation of meeting his own personal Madonna — Holy Virgin and Ciccone personae inclusive.

High school heartache, martial arts, Ravel’s Boléro, female impersonation, and the insidious manipulations of an agent (Sakura Ando) from the mysterious, Scientology-like Zero Church all factor prominently in a careening story whose takes on religion, sin, and redemption are nothing if not antic. Just what Sono is saying, however, tends to get lost in the blur. Exposure‘s sheer onslaught, not to mention its scale, have made bowled-over converts out of many viewers. Whether its crazy quilt requires 237 minutes, or 90, or 900 for that matter, is an open question — is the writer-director really going somewhere here, or just going and going and going?

Similarly occupied with indoctrination, masochism, and extreme behavior is Cold Fish, which is somewhat better able to sustain a tone of hysteria escalating toward dementia. An unhappy family (father Mitsuru Fukikoshi, daughter Hikari Kajiwara, stepmother Megumi Kagurazaka) is yanked into the orbit of a tropical-fish tycoon (Denden) who at first seems a boisterous benefactor providing shock therapy to their depressed lives out of simple altruism. But he and his bombshell wife (Asuka Kurosawa) soon reveal sides not just sinister but psychopathic, ensnaring all three in diabolical doings that encompass murder, rape, grisly corpse disposals, and more. Structured like Love Exposure as one long countdown to a transformative moment, Cold Fish pushes black comedy way beyond the bounds of taste with an oddly neutralizing good cheer. It’s a manic Grand Guignol set to the soothing kitsch strains of retro Hawaiian-flavored lounge music. (Dennis Harvey) 

LOVE EXPOSURE opens Fri/2 at the Roxie.

Chicago hope

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Chicago hope

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Hard times and an African American man in the White House have unleashed racial hostilities on a level unseen for decades, even if most of it is (thinly) veiled. Millions of low-paid or unemployed whites who should know better from their own experiences with economic struggles view blacks as a homogenous group of “welfare cheats” (believing all welfare is cheating, unless of course you need it yourself) and violent thugs. The online rhetoric, where everyone’s ugliest prejudices can be aired from a safe place of anonymity, reveals a nation of way too many people who spend way too much time hating each other. The venom is so enthusiastic you know most of them wouldn’t want rapprochement if it came with a $50 Wal-Mart gift certificate.

With concern from society and government as a whole at low ebb, communities at greater risk of violence from within than ever have had to come up with their own peace-making solutions. The Interrupters, the latest documentary by Steve James (1994’s Hoop Dreams), shows dedicated efforts to help one of the nation’s worst centers of such bloodshed. In Chicago, the overwhelming majority of both victims and perps of gang-related, domestic, and armed robbery fatalities are African American; shooting incidents in a few neighborhoods have continued to skyrocket even as similar statistics have declined elsewhere around the country.

“Violence is like the great infectious diseases of all history,” says epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, in that it can be stopped from spreading to epidemic proportions by numerous “initial interruption(s) of transmission” at its source. He translated that perspective into the founding of CeaseFire, a Chicago-based organization that doesn’t aim to summarily end the existence of gangs and drug trade. Instead, its plain but hardly simple mission is to stop the shootings, stabbings, etc. which are exacerbated by unemployment, broken families, and other sources of stress whose cumulative effect can rapidly escalate a casual dis to a mortal confrontation. As one interviewee in James’ film says, “sticks and stones” logic doesn’t apply here because “words can get you killed.”

Under CeaseFire’s auspices, Tio Hardiman created the Violence Interrupters program, which drafts people from the community — many former gangbangers themselves — as mediators wading into conflicts to defuse them before things get out of hand. It takes considerable will and nerves of steel; “interrupters” have been shot at, and during the course of this documentary’s year-long span one volunteer lands in the hospital for his trouble.

The Interrupters‘ most charismatic figure is Ameena Matthews, daughter of legendary local crime boss Jeff Fort (now in prison for life) and a onetime enforcer herself. Now a mother and devout Muslim, she is seen fearlessly, tirelessly diving into fraught situations where few would be able to command sufficient respect to “interrupt,” let alone arrest, the path that leads from disagreement to threat to assault. She even takes the podium at (yet another) funeral to harangue the attendees about stopping the cycle of brutal retaliation slayings. It’s hardly just active gang members or even their families who are at risk — random, mistaken-identity, and bystander shootings claim an outrageous number of lives every year. (In the New York Times Magazine article that led to this documentary, producer Alex Kotlowitz noted one summer Chicago weekend in which 36 people were shot, seven fatally.)

Like much of inner Detroit — as other recent docs have observed — these Chicago neighborhoods have practically been abandoned by the larger society, considered incurable zones in terms of crime, blight, brutality, abuse, despair. If residents already rank low in a pinched job market, prospects for those who’ve returned from prison stints are subterranean.

Such frustration and anger will be channeled one way or another; constructive alternatives are damn few. But The Interrupters makes a powerful case against the inevitability of hopelessness turning into violence. The program has even seen former perps transformed to the point of returning to the scene of a crime in order to apologize. Rage is blinding; CeaseFire and its mediators prove there’s nothing like taking a step back and a clear-eyed look at oneself to achieve peace in near-impossible circumstances. “Community, heal thyself” may well have to become the American mantra of the near future, because you know the Tea Party wouldn’t mind in the least letting certain groups self-destruct. 

THE INTERRUPTERS opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Fortress of meh

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Fortress of meh

FILM Unless you’re between the ages of approximately 8 and 16 (mental as well as actual years applicable), it’s been difficult to avoid a serious case of superhero fatigue at the movies lately. If a particular weekend doesn’t bring yet another comic book to life at several thousand multiplex screens near you, it’s providing the same favor to a toy, video game, or some pre-existing movie franchise that might as well have originated from one of the above.

They’re always pretty much the same: some interchangeable lead actor who’s done a million crunches; some leading lady for whom this is either slumming (Gwyneth Paltrow) or a likely career zenith (Megan Fox); some interesting actors doing some of their least interesting work — but still stealing scenes — as villains, scientists, police chiefs, etc. The same CGI depicting the impossible so easily (if expensively) that the amazing has thoroughly ceased to amaze — one actor doing a back flip sans cutaways is now worth a passel of dinosaurs, morphing thespians, and cities under space attack.

These movies can only be so good or surprising or idiosyncratic (no matter what "unconventional" director gets assigned them) because they cost so much to make and market that no major deviation from formula is allowed. Yes, 2008’s The Dark Knight was very good. But in 50 years, Citizen Kane will still be Citizen Kane. Knight will be the equivalent of Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) — a popcorn flick still skillful enough to be enjoyed, but hardly exalted.

Even superhero spoofs have gotten kinda old, not that there’s been one that did the job half as well as, say, Hot Fuzz (2007) sent up Michael Bay-type awesome-but-not-quite-super heroics. (If Edgar Wright himself couldn’t quite nail it with 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, maybe nobody will.) Still, folks keep trying to tweak the formula, searching for ways to ride its coattails while doing something different, deeper, or at least cheaper.

The latest, Griff the Invisible, hails from Australia — but unlike most Australian movies, this one could have come from anywhere. In fact, it already has, in that the Woody Harrelson’s underseen 2009 Defendor (from Canada), 2010’s Super (from the U.S.) with Rainn Wilson, and doubtless others already forgotten have previously trod the delusional-loser-thinks-he’s BlahBlahMan concept. None of these are spoofs so much as dramedies. When you’re dealing with insanity and imaginary superpowers in a fairly serious, analyst’s-couch way, being adequate really isn’t good enough. Griff is adequate.

True Blood himbo Ryan Kwanten keeps his shirt on as Griff, a cubicle-working nonentity whose handsome-actor-trying-to-look-dweeby (but not too hard) Clark Kent act practically screams "I’VE GOT A SECRET LIFE NONE OF YOU KNOW ABOUT!!!" Indeed, he moonlights as a mysterious crime fighter in black rubber gear yea more fetishy than the Marvel norm. Trouble is, the victims he rescues seem as scared of him as their attackers, and the police are looking for this vigilante freak. Also concerned is Griff’s brother Tim (Patrick Brammall), who’s moved to Sydney from Adelaide to keep an eye on this sibling with no social skills and a history of acting out grandiose fantasies.

Coping with bad guys by night and one specific dickhead (Toby Schmitz as a smug workplace bully) by day, Griff is reluctantly introduced to Tim’s new possible girlfriend Melody (Maeve Dermody), with whom he has more in common than bro does. He’s working on an invisibility formula; she on something involving atoms and walking through walls. Perceiving a kindred soul, Melody labors to become Griff’s unwanted sidekick and co-conspirator.

Actor turned writer-director Leon Ford’s first feature is professionally executed but not very special, let alone super, in ideas or action. It doesn’t really have a perspective on superherodom — at least none you haven’t seen before — or mental illness, or even on which condition our protagonists truly suffer from. (The ending kinda fudges the question.) It aims for Sweet and Charming, lands at Sorta Kinda.

The routine bombast of regular superhero movies has been overexposed, but as an alternative flavor so has a certain creepy indie seriocomedy cuteness. Just recently we’ve had the fey, overly pettable likes of Beginners (2010) and The Future, with Gus Van Sant’s even more cloying Restless up next. Griff the Invisible is less irksome for having less overbearing "personality." But it’s still just another self-consciously quirky romance between contrived misfits that congratulates the audience for enjoying a plate of nutmeg chervil Hollandaise sauce rather than the usual overcooked hamburger. Either way, you’re going to wish you’d ordered something else.

GRIFF THE INVISIBLE opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters.

Stark raving mod

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Stark raving mod

TRASH One of the longer-running Holy Grail pursuits among a certain type of movie fan finally ended last month with the official DVD release of Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, a legendary 1968 boondoggle that was the veteran Hollywood prestige director’s attempt to tap the new “youth market.” Someone deemed those crazy kids might be magnetized, in the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, and Yellow Submarine, by a gangster farce starring the fossilizing likes of Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Mickey Rooney, and 78-year-old Groucho Marx (as God).

Possibly impressed by the dancing-trash-cans production number, a presumably well-paid Timothy Leary opined “I think this movie’s going to ‘turn on’ the country.” But between the script’s attempted surrealism, Preminger’s cement-block flair for levity, and the cast’s general bewilderment, Skidoo could only become Hollywood’s most grotesquely square attempt to groove with the Now Generation. A major flop, notoriety made it a sought-after curio for later generations who mostly had to dig its bad trip in crappy 10th-generation TV dupes. Now that it’s available through above-ground channels, everyone can experience the satisfaction of finally seeing something they’ve always wondered about, even if Skidoo will always be better in theory than actual viewing.

But how to see such yea more obscure relics of cinema’s most flailingly adventuresome era as Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1971), The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970), or B.S. I Love You (1971)? What about the umpteen “kinky” pre-porn sexploitation epics and Pop Art-flavored spy spoofs from Europe that never achieved the cult (let alone the budget) of 1968’s Barbarella? Or those early TV movies which scarred late-wave boomer kids’ memories, then were left to gather studio library dust?

Good luck — considered to be of no remaining commercial value, most of the above eluded salvage even at the height of the 1980s VHS craze, when it seemed almost anything shot on celluloid (or not) got shunted out to hungry renters. What is the fan of post-“Golden Age,” pre-mall flick moviegoing to do?

Fortunately, meeting the demands of a discerning, frequently obsessive few have been such variably gray-shaded online market purveyors as Video Search of Miami, Something Weird, Subterranean Cinema, and Modcinema. Modcinema (www.modcinema.com), currently celebrating its third year anniversary of “exploring ’60s/’70s culture through rare and hard to find films,” is run by Los Angeleno Dante Fontana. He blames the no-show of some psychedelic relics and Me Decade titles on music rights issues — before VCRs, soundtracked songs were licensed for very limited use, and can now be very expensive to renew.

Things are looking up, however. Warner Bros. and Sony/Columbia have launched on-demand DVD-R services, Fontana says, noting “we’ll see many rare movies become available over the course of the next several years. Many studios are in debt and they want to make money off of their titles currently being sold on the gray market by people such as myself.”

He’s not worried about the competition, however. “I love these films and want them to become available on an official level. I consider what I do preservation, [selling] titles that are in danger of being completely forgotten about, raising awareness so that the studios will see there is in fact a fanbase of people who’d buy a DVD of a movie like Skidoo if they saw it.” Still, there remain “thousands and thousands of movies out there being neglected. Films that simply don’t have any known stars in them, or experimental-art films, made-for-TV movies, international films that never got any U.S. distribution.”

Among the nuggets Modcinema has unearthed in such categories are vintage telepics like The Feminist and the Fuzz (Barbara Eden as middle America’s then-idea of a Women’s Libber — forever fuming at imaginary sexist offenses, requiring a he-man to settle her down), vanity biker flick J.C. (as in Jesus Christ, which is how producer-writer-director-star William F. McGaha’s character humorlessly sees himself), or leeringly Italian crime caper You Can Do A Lot With Seven Women. And those are just from 1971.

Fontana also has a particular fondness for vintage Franco pop. In his collection you’ll find plenty of showcases for Françoise Hardy, Serge Gainsbourg, etc., plus multiple episodes of the incredible monthly 1965-70 TV program Dim Dam Dom, which made the best use of a go-go dancing ensemble this side of Shindig! while offering musical guests both native and imported (from the Bee Gees to Jimi Hendrix).

Modcinema has also packaged some unique compilations: The “Colorspace” series is a party sampler of movie trailers (“Now you’ll know the thrill of wrapping your legs around a tornado of pounding pistons, like The Girl on a Motorcycle!”), fashion promos, commercials (007 Deodorant), and whatnot. Hearing Nancy Sinatra trill “Shake that cola drag/Try the one that’s really mad!” for RC Cola — well, it can really blow your mind. (Dennis Harvey)

A gutsy legacy

Andrew Lam
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A gutsy legacy

Movies today might be a gutless affair if not for the industry of Herschell Gordon Lewis a half-century ago. Literally gutless — you have Lewis to thank for every splattersome moment of exposed entrails and explicit gougings since.

Oh sure, the restrictions against graphic violence in U.S. cinema would have lapsed eventually, degree by degree. But who else would have had the nerve to do it all in one swoop with a movie as early, and thoroughly tasteless, as 1963’s Blood Feast? Nothing like it had existed before, and those few who noticed it outside rural drive-in and urban grindhouse viewers surely wished it never would again. (The L.A. Times called it “a blot on the American film industry,” Variety “an insult to even the most puerile and salacious audiences.”) A futile wish, that.

Next week sees the DVD release of, incredibly, 82-year-old Lewis’ latest feature: The Uh-Oh! Show, a reality TV spoof whose game contestants win fabulous prizes for getting answers right — and suffer grisly body-part losses if they don’t. A month later Image Entertainment and Something Weird will spring both a “Blood Trilogy” Blu-ray set of his first three horror “classics,” as well as Jimmy Maslon and Basket Case (1982) director Frank Henenlotter’s documentary portrait Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore. The latter features such fans as Joe Bob Briggs and John Waters, surviving collaborators, and of course Lewis himself tracing his infamous influential cinematic path amidst myriad original clips.

This was not begun as a personal mission of rebellion, perversity, or artistic aspiration, but for sheer profit pursuit. After checking out possible careers from radio to teaching English Lit, he found a Chicago berth in advertising, which eventually led to making commercials and buying out a small production company. Figuring there was more moolah in features, Lewis partnered with producer Dave Friedman and found some success via pre-porn “nudie cuties” with titles like Boin-n-g and Goldilocks and the Three Bares (both 1963).

Just as they’d imitated Russ Meyer, however, others soon imitated them, overcrowding the field with topless frolics. What other naughty but inexpensive concept could they exploit that others hadn’t milked dry yet? The answer was Blood Feast, shot in nine days for $20,000, wherein an alleged caterer (the wildly hammy Mal Arnold as “Fuad Ramses”) gathering ingredients for a socialite’s “Egyptian feast” rips limbs and whatnot from comely young women to revive an ancient goddess.

The acting was atrocious (especially by Playboy centerfold star Connie Mason), the script was laughable, and the craftsmanship primitive at best. When Blood premiered at a Peoria, Ill. drive-in, viewers howled with laughter — then hurled, as on-screen victims had brains, tongues, etc. separated from their person, then dangled in front of the camera at length. (These local butcher-shop bits often grew rather ripe by shooting time; pity the poor actress who had to stuff a rank cow tongue in her mouth.) Friedman and Lewis duly provided souvenir vomit bags at future venues. They had a hit.

Plenty more such followed, though Friedman eventually went off to L.A. to make his own sexier cheapies (such as 1968’s Nude Django and Thar She Blows!, and 1971’s The Big Snatch). Feast‘s immediate follow-up Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) was a comparatively elaborate horror comedy that remains Lewis’ personal favorite. But when it failed to make more money despite improved production values, he learned his lesson and kept costs dirt cheap. By 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls, even he realized he’d taken red paint and animal innards as far over-the-top as they could go, leaving the movie biz to become a highly successful guru of direct marketing. Until a rising tide of cult rediscovery finally prompted a larky return in 2002’s Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, that is.

At nearly two hours, The Godfather of Gore covers a lot of ground, guided by an octogenarian subject who’s still every inch the flamboyant salesman. Beyond the horror films, it touches on Lewis’ forays into biker action (1968’s incredible She-Devils on Wheels), juvenile delinquency (1968’s Just for the Hell of It), hicksploitation (1972’s Year of the Yahoo!) and even children’s entertainment (1967’s The Magic Land of Mother Goose).

Several other lesser-known 60s features are now considered lost, although it’s too bad Godfather doesn’t make room for such extant obscurities as Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In (1970) and the great wife-swapping saga Suburban Roulette (1968), whose theme song promises “ring-a-dingin’ with that swingin’ set,” while the trailer posits 1968 Illinois suburbia as “where the stakes are as high as the morality is low.”

Complete interview: “Between Two Worlds” directors Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow

Sue Vaughan
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Complete interview: “Between Two Worlds” directors Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow

In 1981 Deborah Kaufman founded the nation’s first Jewish Film Festival in San Francisco. Thirteen years later, with similar festivals burgeoning in the wake of SFJFF‘s success — there are now over a hundred around the globe — she left the festival to make documentaries of her own with life partner and veteran local TV producer Alan Snitow.

Their latest, Between Two Worlds, which opens at the Roxie Fri/5 while playing festival dates, could hardly be a more personal project for the duo. Both longtime activists in various Jewish, political, and media spheres, Snitow and Kaufman were struck — as were plenty of others — by the rancor that erupted over the SFJFF’s 2009 screening of Simone Bitton’s Rachel. That doc was about Rachel Corrie, a young American International Solidarity Movement member killed in 2003 by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer while standing between it and a Palestinian home on the Gaza Strip.

As different sides argued whether Corrie’s death was accidental or deliberate, she became a lightning rod for ever-escalating tensions between positions within and without the U.S. Jewish populace on Israeli policy, settlements, Palestinian rights, and more — with not a few commentators amplifying the conservative notion that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, even (or especially) when it comes from Jews themselves.

People who hadn’t seen (and boasted they wouldn’t see) the strenuously even-handed Rachel called the documentary an “anti-Israeli hate fest” akin to “Holocaust denial,” its SFJFF inclusion “symptomatic of a demonic strategy” by “anti-Semites on the left.” KGO radio’s John Rothmann opined on air that the festival had “crossed the line” and “sympathized with those who participate in terror.”

Stunned SFJFF executive director Peter Stein (who’s leaving the festival after its current edition) decried Jewish community “thought police” who pressured the institution and those connected to it with defunding and boycotting threats. The festival attempted damage control by inviting a public foe of the screening (Dr. Michael Harris of StandWithUs/Voice for Israel) to speak before it, which only amplified the hostile rhetoric.

Seeing the festival being used by extremists on both sides became a natural starting point for Between Two Worlds, which takes a many-sided, questioning, sometimes humorous look at culture wars in today’s American Jewish population. It touches on everything from divestment debates at UC Berkeley to the disputed site of a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem (atop a 600-year-old Muslim cemetery), from the tradition of progressive liberalism
among U.S. Jews to rising ethnic-identity worries spawned by intermarriage and declining birth rates.

The fundamental question here, as Kaufman puts it, is “Who is entitled to speak for the tribe?” For the first time, the filmmakers have made themselves part of the subject matter, exploring their own very different personal and familial experiences to illustrate the diversity of the U.S. Jewish experience. Snitow’s mother had to hide her prior Communist Party membership to remain active in social-justice movements after the 1940s, while Kaufman’s father was a devoted Zionist from his Viennese childhood who had to adjust to offspring like “Tevye’s daughters gone wild,” including one who converted to Islam.

They’re clearly in sympathy with other documentary interviewees insisting that one core of Jewish identity has been, and should remain, a stance against absolutism and injustice towards any peoples. Between their SFJFF screenings the filmmakers chatted with the Guardian.

SFBG: Is the Bay Area still a bastion of Jewish liberalism, relatively speaking? Watching your movie I wondered how many other places there are where a Jewish film festival audience would boo and heckle a conservative pro-Israeli speaker like Dr. Michael Harris.

Deborah Kaufman: What we saw at the festival during the Rachel uproar was a collapse of the center. It was really a moment when the extremes were at battle and the center simply disappeared. That’s what was and is so disturbing. A kind of apathy where the moderates just throw up their hands and walk away from what’s become a very toxic debate.

Alan Snitow: It’s not that the Bay Area is unique to boo a so-called “pro-Israel” speaker. It’s that the Bay Area has maintained an open debate about Israeli policies when other Jewish communities never countenanced such debate from the get-go. Rachel was not shown in other Jewish film festivals around the country because they are already creatures of conservative donors. The aim in this power grab by the right in San Francisco was and is to silence people and institutions like the festival that oppose a McCarthyite crackdown in a remaining bastion of free speech. And this is being mirrored in Israel itself where the Knesset recently passed a law punishing anyone who publicly supports the idea of a boycott of the West Bank settlements.

I think we also have to question this claim of “pro-Israel.” All criticism of Israel’s occupation is now being branded as “anti-Israel.” Theodore Bikel — a lifelong Zionist activist who went to jail with my mother at the Soviet consulate in Washington DC — was recently called an “anti-Zionist” because he supported an actors’ boycott of performing in the settlements. J Street — an explicitly and consistently pro-Israel voice that is critical of Israeli policies — is regularly attacked as not really pro-Israel for that very reason. “Pro-Israel” has come to mean pro the policies of the current, most right-wing government in Israeli history — a government that is now advocating the truly Orwellian position that there is no occupation at all! That’s not what pro-Israel or Zionist ever meant except to some ideologues on the far right.

DK: The Bay Area has had a history of passionate political commitment — to both the Zionist and anti-Zionist causes. But today the right wing is certainly louder and aside from what we saw at the theater that day, there has been a significant silencing of voices critical of Israel’s occupation policies.

SFBG: Conversely, have you perceived the local Jewish community as growing more conservative in recent years? In particular, more inclined to treat criticism of Israeli government policies as inherently anti-Semitic, even when voiced by fellow Jews?

DK: We were interested in the notion of excommunication — going back to Spinoza — and to the accusation “self-hating Jew” that some people used to attack Hannah Arendt when she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem. Today, right-wing Jews are leveling charges of treason against Jewish academics, rabbis, and community members whose positions on israel aren’t as rabidly right wing as theirs. We didn’t have to look very far to find dramatic stories for our film on these themes. Censorship and the stifling of dissent are happening right in our home town.

AS: There’s conservative and there’s conservative. The Jewish community hasn’t become more conservative in terms of voting patterns or support for civil rights or the welfare state, but the establishment has become more and more dependent on an ever smaller number of big conservative donors who have bought out these institutions and compromised their independence and legitimacy as representing the whole Jewish community. This is a major reason for the crisis. More and more young Jews are finding the community’s institutions do not reflect their liberal beliefs and upbringing, particularly when it comes to Israel. The result is that many young people are not identifying with Israel because its actions are not consistent with their ideals as American Jews.

SFBG: Had you already been thinking about somehow addressing political rifts in the Jewish community before the SFJFF fracas?

DK: We began the film over a year before the JFF fracas. We were focusing more on Jewish identity than politics — looking at intermarriage, hybrid identities, a new generation of American Jews — we wanted to re-tell the Biblical story of Ruth, and we were following a fantastic feminist-queer internet discussion called “Rabbis: Out Of My Uterus!” that we thought would be fun to film — but we kept getting swept into the Israel vortex and realized we had to address the question of dissent and who speaks for the Jewish community at this historical moment for the film to be relevant.

SFBG: The festival had shown other movies relating to different aspects of the Palestinian conflict before, and Rachel does make an effort to represent all the different sides of its story. What do you think particularly ticked people off about that film?

DK: Over the years the festival had shown many films that were more controversial than Rachel. In fact, that same summer the festival showed a film called Defamation that we felt was far more critical of the Jewish establishment, but it went right under everybody’s radar. It was the Tea Party summer — almost anything could have been the spark that ignited a controversy. But the tragic death of Rachel Corrie had already made her an internationally famous symbol of opposition to Israel’s occupation, so the anger was focused on the program with her name.

AS: Rachel was just a pretext. In the months before the film festival, think tanks in Israel had declared the Bay Area a node of “delegitimization” of Israel (along with Toronto and London). The right was looking for a test case to make an example of Jewish institutions that step out of line. The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival was founded as a transgression right from the start — a place where unpopular and counter-cultural and diverse views could engage. It was a perfect target to attack.

One other item: when the festival allowed [Harris] on the podium to attack one of its own films and filmmakers it was a bad precedent, and the right smelled blood in the water. The festival’s good faith effort was viewed as a sign of weakness and the attacks only intensified. The people who wrote the attacking emails are people who think that any criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism. They are not to be appeased by any symbolic action. They want control and silence.

SFBG: Deborah, since you left the festival it’s seen several well-regarded executive and programming directors depart, seemingly burnt out. Do you think the effort it takes to represent and placate the festival audience has gotten harder?

DK: I’m not sure things have changed so much. There has always been pressure on festival directors to do what major donors demand. I got a lot of that during my tenure but resisted the pressure. The difference is the political atmosphere which is more polarized and shrill, especially since the new, ultra-right government in Israel has come to power. It’s hard to withstand the bullying and accusations of treason and self-hate.

AS: I think it’s also important to add that Deborah and Janis [Plotkin] — who was director for many years — also had a lot of fun with the festival. This is a very hard job, but it’s a creative and fascinating one, and these attacks may come with the territory, but they don’t dominate it.

DK: In terms of the audience it’s always been a diverse group. I have fond memories of the midnight screening of the silent version of The Golem (1920) we did at the Roxie in our second year — where people in the audience were literally screaming at each other and at the projectionist during the whole screening about whether we should turn the volume up or down on the rock music sound track we had commissioned.

SFBG: You’ve shown Between Two Worlds to a variety of Jewish audiences so far, in Toronto, New York, and Jerusalem as well as SF. What have been some of the responses?

DK: The response has been great and sometimes surprising — we’ve had people from the left and right of the political spectrum both say the film has made them reconsider their own stridency. Non-Jews have said it mirrors what they felt they could not say out loud. Young people have told us it’s affirming of their perceptions and reveals a history they didn’t know existed. In Jerusalem one person felt the film was overly optimistic because it didn’t examine the support of right-wing Christian fundamentalists for the settlements!

AS: I think the personal stories we tell of our own families ring true to many people. Most Jews know deep down that if you look at the family histories of American Jews, you will find intense long term debates between those people at the Passover seder table who were Communists, Socialists, and Zionists. Often, the only way to sit down together was to maintain silence, but we wanted to bring those utopian hopes and ideals back into focus, and people across the political spectrum seem to take that as an opportunity to think about and question their own families and their own positions.

SFBG: How did the decision come about to put yourselves in the film? As filmmakers, was it awkward to become subjects?

DK: We’ve never been in our own films so it was something of a challenge for us. We don’t feel relaxed in front of the camera, but early in the production we realized we had to be in the film so that people would know where we were coming from, and also because our family histories shed a lot of light on debates inside the Jewish community today. We watched a lot of work by other documentary filmmakers who put themselves in their films like Marlon Riggs, Alan Berliner, and Ross McElwee, and decided we’d give it a try. We also felt this film was really about the intersection of the personal and the political, so the structure that moves back and forth between the two made sense to us.

AS: My daughter, Tania, is an actor, and I kept thinking that we needed to consult with her about being on camera. It’s not just something that you do. You have to work at it and learn how to do it. After we did it a couple of times, we realized that we weren’t dressing right, that the hair was wrong, that I was scratching my head, that we should have shot ourselves from above and not below. Rather than being an on camera ego-trip, it was a humbling experience.

Between Two Worlds opens Fri/5 at the Roxie.

Whose voice?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Whose voice?

arts@sfbg.com

FILM In 1981 Deborah Kaufman founded the nation’s first Jewish Film Festival in San Francisco. Thirteen years later, with similar festivals burgeoning in the wake of SFJFF’s success — there are now over a hundred around the globe — she left the festival to make documentaries of her own with life partner and veteran local TV producer Alan Snitow.

Their latest, Between Two Worlds, which opens at the Roxie this Friday while playing festival dates, could hardly be a more personal project for the duo. Both longtime activists in various Jewish, political, and media spheres, Snitow and Kaufman were struck — as were plenty of others — by the rancor that erupted over the SFJFF’s 2009 screening of Simone Bitton’s Rachel. That doc was about Rachel Corrie, a young American International Solidarity Movement member killed in 2003 by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer while standing between it and a Palestinian home on the Gaza Strip.

As different sides argued whether Corrie’s death was accidental or deliberate, she became a lightning rod for ever-escalating tensions between positions within and without the U.S. Jewish populace on Israeli policy, settlements, Palestinian rights, and more — with not a few commentators amplifying the conservative notion that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, even (or especially) when it comes from Jews themselves.

People who hadn’t seen (and boasted they wouldn’t see) the strenuously even-handed Rachel called the documentary an “anti-Israeli hate fest” akin to “Holocaust denial,” its SFJFF inclusion “symptomatic of a demonic strategy” by “anti-Semites on the left.”

Stunned SFJFF executive director Peter Stein (who’s leaving the festival after its current edition) decried Jewish community “thought police” who pressured the institution and those connected to it with defunding and boycotting threats. The festival attempted damage control by inviting a public foe of the screening (Dr. Michael Harris of StandWithUs/Voice for Israel) to speak before it, which only amplified the hostile rhetoric.

Seeing the festival being used by extremists on both sides became a natural starting point for Between Two Worlds, which takes a many-sided, questioning, sometimes humorous look at culture wars in today’s American Jewish population. It touches on everything from divestment debates at UC Berkeley to the disputed site of a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem (atop a 600-year-old Muslim cemetery), from the tradition of progressive liberalism among U.S. Jews to rising ethnic-identity worries spawned by intermarriage and declining birth rates.

The fundamental question here, as Kaufman puts it, is “Who is entitled to speak for the tribe?” For the first time, the filmmakers have made themselves part of the subject matter, exploring their own very different personal and familial experiences to illustrate the diversity of the U.S. Jewish experience. Snitow’s mother had to hide her prior Communist Party membership to remain active in social-justice movements after the 1940s, while Kaufman’s father was a devoted Zionist from his Viennese childhood who had to adjust to offspring like “Tevye’s daughters gone wild,” including one who converted to Islam.

They’re clearly in sympathy with other documentary interviewees insisting that one core of Jewish identity has been, and should remain, a stance against absolutism and injustice towards any peoples. Between their SFJFF screenings the filmmakers chatted with the Guardian.

 

SFBG Is the Bay Area still a bastion of Jewish liberalism, relatively speaking?

Deborah Kaufman What we saw at the festival during the Rachel uproar was a collapse of the center. It was really a moment when the extremes were at battle and the center simply disappeared. That’s what was and is so disturbing. A kind of apathy where the moderates just throw up their hands and walk away from what’s become a very toxic debate.

Alan Snitow It’s not that the Bay Area is unique to boo a so-called “pro-Israel” speaker [like Harris]. It’s that the Bay Area has maintained an open debate about Israeli policies when other Jewish communities never countenanced such debate from the get-go. Rachel was not shown in other Jewish film festivals around the country because they are already creatures of conservative donors. The aim in this power grab by the right in San Francisco was and is to silence people and institutions like the festival that oppose a McCarthyite crackdown in a remaining bastion of free speech. And this is being mirrored in Israel itself where the Knesset recently passed a law punishing anyone who publicly supports the idea of a boycott of the West Bank settlements.

I think we also have to question this claim of “pro-Israel.” All criticism of Israel’s occupation is now being branded as “anti-Israel.” “Pro-Israel” has come to mean pro the policies of the current, most right-wing government in Israeli history — a government that is now advocating the truly Orwellian position that there is no occupation at all! That’s not what pro-Israel or Zionist ever meant except to some ideologues on the far right.

 

SFBG Had you already been thinking about somehow addressing political rifts in the Jewish community before the SFJFF fracas?  

DK We began the film over a year before the SFJFF fracas. We were focusing more on Jewish identity than politics — looking at intermarriage, hybrid identities, a new generation of American Jews — we wanted to re-tell the Biblical story of Ruth, and we were following a fantastic feminist-queer internet discussion called “Rabbis: Out Of My Uterus!” that we thought would be fun to film. But we kept getting swept into the Israel vortex and realized we had to address the question of dissent and who speaks for the Jewish community at this historical moment for the film to be relevant.

Between Two Worlds opens Fri/5 at the Roxie.

Time served

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Time served

arts@sfbg.com

FILM In 1983, Deborah Peagler was sentenced to 25 years to life for first-degree murder in the death of her former boyfriend Oliver Wilson, whom two local L.A. gang members had strangled — supposedly at her behest, to access Wilson’s life insurance money.

Encouraged to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, Peagler had a juryless trial and was quickly shunted off to prison. There she was repeatedly turned down for parole despite spending the years of her incarceration as a church leader, mentor, and tutor to other inmates; a highly skilled electronics-assembly supervisor; earning two degrees; and sustaining good long-distance relationships with her two daughters. Even most of the victim’s surviving relatives had come to believe she should have been released years earlier. For her part, Peagler always claimed she intended Wilson to be beaten, but had not asked for or condoned his murder.

What was missing (or suppressed) from the original trial were the myriad reasons she’d wanted to frighten him away from herself and her family. She was a pregnant 15-year-old high schooler when she first met Wilson, a charismatic sometimes model who charmed her by taking a fatherly interest in her firstborn. But when money got tight, he abruptly insisted she turn tricks. Initial refusal brought beatings that only increased over time despite her reluctant subsequent acquiescence, stopping just briefly when she bore his own child.

Soon Wilson was dealing drugs, then taking drugs; he kept Peagler a virtual prisoner, refusing to let her speak to friends or relatives. When an eviction forced their temporary separation, he stormed into her family’s home with two armed men, threatening to kill them all. For this he was jailed exactly one night, making new death threats in retaliation for the police being called at all. At this point in 1982 she contacted the Crips members (who viewed that home invasion by an outsider in their territory as a serious offense) to frighten Wilson away before he actually killed anyone.

At the time of her trial, testimony on “battering and its effects” were not allowed as circumstantial evidence in California courts, despite — as we now know — the overwhelming majority of U.S. women being victims of domestic violence, rape, or other abuses. (In 1979 President Carter gave a huge boost to the nascent overall cause by establishing the Federal Office of Domestic Violence. Two years later, Reagan shuttered it.) In 1992 that changed, allowing new cases to benefit — although cases already tried could not be re-opened with evidence previously excluded.

A decade later that, too, changed. Walnut Creek attorneys Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran agreed to take on Peagler’s case pro bono, stepping well outside their usual land-use litigation. They launched what turned into years of effort during which her cause becomes a public cause célèbre, and indications emerge of some very ugly misconduct by the District Attorney’s office.

This battle — all the above is just a starting point — is chronicled in Bay Area filmmaker Yoav Potash’s documentary Crime After Crime. It’s a story with plenty of lurid and tragic revelations, ranging from child sexual abuse to terminal illness to hidden evidence of perjury. After a certain point it becomes clear the D.A.’s office isn’t opposing Peagler’s release because she’s guilty as charged (though nearly everyone by then agrees she should have been tried for manslaughter with a maximum sentence of six years), but because it has dirty secrets of its own to protect and deny.

Crime After Crime won’t exactly stoke your faith in the justice system. But this thoroughly engrossing document does affirm that there is hope good people can and will fight the system — even if, alas, it sometimes takes nearly three to score one bittersweet win.

Crime After Crime opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters.

To Hellman and back

Andrew Lam
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To Hellman and back

arts@sfbg.com

FILM “Legendary” is a term often applied to artists distinguished by either ubiquity or scarcity. Monte Hellman definitely falls in the second camp — nearly 80, he’s just made his first feature in 22 years, causing a flurry of interest in the sparse 10 he made during the prior three decades he was, relatively speaking, active — movies hardly anyone saw when they came out since none were more than a blip on the commercial radar.

That of course aided his reputation as a fascinating oddball working — when allowed — on the B-movie margins of mainstream entertainment, yet never quite at home there. Presumably this status, and the small number of projects he’s realized (let alone had a satisfying amount of control over), has been a cause of some frustration. Yet the laconic distance from emotional display or anything else that might pander to the audience’s easier responses — even in genres as typically uncomplicated as the western or horror movie — suggests a filmmaker who might well enjoy being perceived as the rugged, tether-resistant outsider. Lord knows it’s impossible to imagine him directing something brash, accessible, and popular.

Not that his interview quotes have ever revealed a willfully elusive nature. Hellman appears at the Roxie Friday, July 22 (and at the Smith Rafael Saturday, July 23) when his new Road to Nowhere opens, so you can gauge for yourself just how the man does or doesn’t feed the enigma his films have built around him.

After that night, the Roxie plays Road on double bills with the four movies that most shaped his cult following, offered in a mini-retrospective called “Monte Hellman: Maximum Minimalism.” They’re all road flicks in one way or another — the typical Hellman film, if there be such, is a one-way trip of some urgency but no certain destination save oblivion. Its protagonists’ circumstances may be desperate, but they themselves ruffle an outwardly sardonic, existential cool as they ride into the incinerating sunset.

Hellman got into the business via Roger Corman, Hollywood’s all-time greatest nose for cheap young talent from Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese to James Cameron. His first directorial job was 1959’s The Beast From the Haunted Cave, about a giant spider — a movie notable for being better than it needed to be, since it didn’t need to be any good at all, though no indicator of a distinctive sensibility. Nor were two 1964 action movies shot back-to-back in the Philippines, Flight to Fury and Back Door to Hell, though they commenced his brief but key collaboration with Jack Nicholson (who wrote the first as well as acting in both).

The next year they did another two-for-one deal for Corman, Nicholson now producing as well. Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting were low-budget westerns shot in Utah, intended for the bottom half of drive-in and grindhouse double bills. As Hellman later said, the expectation that they’d fly so far below radar was freeing: “Any thoughts about doing something different were for our own satisfaction. We never thought that anybody would notice.”

Evidently Corman and/or distributors noticed, because these two idiosyncratically spare Old West odysseys into ever more desolate (and deadly) terrain wound up being sparsely released around the globe as a seeming afterthought over the next many years, then falling into public domain limbo. (You can still find cheap dupes on fly-by-night labels in $1 bins.) The Nicholson-penned Whirlwind has him, a young Harry Dean Stanton, and Rupert Crosse (1969’s The Reivers) as itinerant cowhands mistaken for killer bandits, chased into the desert by vigilantes who’ll shoot first and hear claims of innocence later.

In The Shooting, Nicholson doesn’t appear until midpoint, joining Millie Perkins as a second black-hatted angel of death hiring two cowboys (Warren Oates, Will Hutchins) to lead them on a trek whose slowly revealed actual intent turns the guides into captives. That film, written by Carole Eastman (who later cemented Nicholson’s post-Easy Rider stardom with 1970’s Five Easy Pieces), not only introduced Hellman to his acting muse Oates but attracted enough stealth attention as a strikingly stark genre statement that it was shown out of competition at Cannes.

His mythos already growing in inverse proportion to his films’ popular exposure, Hellman found himself one of the more experienced directors to benefit from the major studios’ early 1970s panic — the old system having largely collapsed, and no clear roadmap to the future in place, they greenlit anything that seemed like it would appeal to the fickle new “youth” audience. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) was one of many fascinating commercial flops that resulted, a cross-country race with a stubbornly detached, becalmed pulse, Oates wryly chewing scenery that included rock stars James Taylor and Dennis Wilson (as “The Driver” and “The Mechanic” respectively). The two had never acted before, and never would again — indeed you could say Taylor never has, since Hellman’s cryptic communication on set left Sweet Baby James stiff as a board. This effect winds up seeming part and parcel of the film’s droll in-joke tenor; it’s an action movie about extreme acceleration, yet one that absolutely will not get agitated.

There was even less hope of commercial benefit from Cockfighter, a 1974 adaptation of a Charles Willeford pulp with Oates — one actor who never needed being told what to do in the claustrophobic Hellman universe — perfect as the mute loner drifting through an unlovely small-town America of sleazy small-time operators, wayward wimmen, and bloody gambling “sport.” It’s the last film in the Roxie’s mini-retro, alongside the Corman westerns and Blacktop.

Hellman’s subsequent career has largely been off the map — as a director and editor for hire, often fixing problems (like directors who die mid-production) without screen credit. Among films with his name on them, 1978’s China 9, Liberty 37 was an Italian-produced, internationally-cast western that’s okay but uncharacteristically driven by sex and sentiment. (Oates’ rancher says “There ain’t no soft-hearted gunfighters,” but that’s exactly what impossibly handsome Fabio Testi plays.) Direct-to-video killer Santa Claus sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (1989) shoehorns just enough eccentricity into the slasher formula to be bearable for Hellman completists.

But the prior year’s Iguana is something else: Shakespeare’s Tempest (with a little Robinson Crusoe) in reverse, a willfully misanthropic castaway adventure in which the facially deformed Oberlus (Twin Peaks‘ Everett McGill) avenges himself on lifelong tormentors by escaping his 19th-century whaling ship and ruthlessly ruling his own “kingdom” of enslaved castaways on an uncharted isle. Its Canary Islands shoot apparently an off-screen form of torment, Iguana was (natch) barely released and remains undervalued, but it’s as uncompromising, bitterly humorous and assured as anything Hellman’s done.

Whether Road to Nowhere qualifies as summary statement or aberration has already divided viewers since its Venice premiere last fall. Written by Iguana‘s Steven Gaydos, it’s a hall of mirrors in which a hotshot filmmaker (Tygh Runyan) making a movie about a woman’s apparent real-life murder casts an alluring non-actress (Shannyn Sossamon) whom an insurance investigator (Waylon Payne) and reporter (Dominique Swain) come to suspect might be playing herself — having faked her own death and adopted a new identity.

The mix of noir, reality-illusion puzzle, industry in-jokes, film history name-dropping (as well as archival clips), uneven performances, sometimes stilted dialogue, brief startling violence, and handsome compositions (shot without permits on a hand-held digital camera) can be taken as two hours of delicious gamesmanship or exasperating self-indulgence. But no one can argue that by now Hellman hasn’t earned his right to be difficult.

MONTE HELLMAN: ROAD TO NOWHERE AND REPERTORY

July 22–28, $5–$10.25

Roxie

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael

www.cafilm.org

Black and white and red all over

Andrew Lam
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0
Black and white and red all over

Mikhail Kalatozov’s career had a large hole in the middle, one that remains incompletely explained. Why were the two periods of his greatest work separated by roughly three decades? Why did he make almost nothing between? The answer definitely involved Stalin and his fickle cultural watchdogs, even if the full reason for such a long lull (or fall from favor) might never be known.

At least he was spared a permanent gulag vacation, which would have deprived us of a late 1950s reflowering that resulted in three world classics still being discovered in the West — particularly since 1964’s astonishing I Am Cuba got rereleased under Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese’s auspices 16 years ago. If you’ve seen that or another Kalatozov film, it’s distressing to think he spent any time unwillingly idle, since every feature still accessible today is some kind of masterpiece.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s 16th annual edition offers the last feature he made before that mysterious long withdrawal from the director’s chair. Nail in the Boot (1931) lasts just 53 minutes, but packs in more photographic and editorial ideas than a dozen features twice its length. It’s a dazzling application of sheer stylistic invention to propagandic material. Yet rather than please the apparatchiks upstairs, it ticked them off enough to derail Kalatozov’s career for a good spell.

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, he began working as an actor, editor, and cinematographer in that (reluctant) Soviet republic’s 1920s film industry, eventually graduating to directing documentaries celebrating the USSR’s industrial, agricultural, and cultural advancement. Little is known about a first narrative feature, 1930’s Little Blind Girl. But the same year’s semi-staged Salt for Svanetia won acclaim for its strikingly poetical imagery of life in a remote Caucasus Mountains village.

That success presumably greased the way for the larger endeavor of Nail in the Boot, which mixes up the epic and the intimate, beautiful shots of lovingly lit machinery and glowing worker faces intercut with striking battle vistas and the proverbial cast of thousands. The story can be reduced to the title’s troublesome metal inch: when enemy forces strand armored train “Guardian of the Revolution” between blown-up track sections, a lone comrade (Aleqsandre Jaliashevili) is dispatched on foot to notify HQ. Running over hill and dale, he’s severely hampered when the poorly made boot from his own factory falls apart, driving a binding nail into his foot. As a result, his trapped compatriots are gassed to death before reinforcements arrive.

At a huge subsequent Party trial, our fallen hero is excoriated as a traitor for stopping to soak his painful, bleeding foot. “You shot them! The undelivered dispatch was like a bullet!” “He spared his feet and destroyed the armored train!” angry comrades shout, calling for his head. But this nameless prole finally defends himself, indicting his footwear’s shoddy workmanship as at least equal in fault. Nail in the Boot was intended as a parable (based in turn on a Russian folk tale) urging Soviets to always perform superlatively for the good of all, whatever their job. A final intertitle accuses lazy bones present: “Among you spectators: are there many like the bootmakers?”

That message seems simple and unimpeachable enough, not to mention spectacularly presented. Yet Nail had the ill fortune to arrive just as USSR arts ideology was changing. The experimentation encouraged in the 1920s was now judged indulgent “formalism” unsuitable for the masses, while a new school of nail-on-the-head “Social Realism” took shape as the sole officially state-sanctioned artistic guideline. Kalatozov’s film was denounced as confusing and unrealistic on petty grounds, as well being guilty of “formalistic aestheticism.” The film was banned, for a long time considered lost, and beyond a couple features at the start of World War II, Kalatozov was kept offscreen — albeit kicked upstairs to various film administrative posts.

He did well enough in those capacities to become the Soviet film industry’s emissary to Hollywood for an extended late 1940s stay. Hobnobbing with stars, he greatly admired the major studios’ streamlined production methods and technical advances — but like a good comrade, returned home to condemn Tinsel Town as the apex of capitalist decadence. (Hell yeah!) Then, finally, he was considered rehabilitated enough to trust behind a camera once again.

The results, after a few more conventional features no longer in circulation, were stupendous: 1957’s The Cranes Are Flying introduced a new Kalatozov, energetic and inventive as ever, director of photography Sergei Urusevsky’s wildly mobile camera replacing rhythmic Eisensteinian montage as his primary instrument. Taken as a cinematic emblem of Khrushchev-era Cold War thawing, it was an international triumph, even if its tragic wartime romance now seems less conceptually unique than two extraordinary (if far less popular) next ventures.

The Unsent Letter (1960) is one of the movies’ great man vs. nature depictions, as Soviet geologists searching for diamond deposits in remotest Siberia fall prey to that land’s geographic and climatic extremes. I Am Cuba, a Soviet-Cuban collaboration depicting the Cuban revolution on a humongous scale, was derided as being “too Russian” by the Cubanos, “too formalist” (or whatever the current ideological phrase was) by Moscow. Forgotten for decades, it’s been much written about lately — suffice to say Roger Ebert thought it contained the single “most astonishing [shot] I have ever seen,” amid 141 minutes full of such wonders.

After less idiosyncratic but impressive 1970 Soviet-European superproduction The Red Tent (1970) — an arctic adventure with international stars like Sean Connery and Claudia Cardinale, shot in locations as frigid as 40 below zero — Kalatozov died at age 70, planning another impossibly ambitious epic. In a perfect world, he’d actually finish it, his cryogenically frozen brain retrieved from some secret polar lab. Imagine what he could do with a Steadicam and 3-D; James Cameron might find himself merely a wee prince of the world by comparison.

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/14–Sun/17, free–$20

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.silentfilm.org

TV party

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
TV party

TRASH These days we’re used to TV series regularly offering better, more serious, and more relevant drama than mainstream movies, a notion unthinkable not long ago. But even at the height of boob tube silliness, when zero cable alternatives and FCC strictures resulted in mostly bland programming, there was some room for deviation from formula. That room was primarily occupied by TV movies, which began being produced in 1964. By decade’s end they were a broadcast staple, earning strong ratings and lessening the need for networks to purchase old theatrical-release films for broadcast.

In the 1970s TV movies would increasingly take on social issues. That kind of activist edge was still pretty rare, however, when two little-remembered telepics the Vortex Room is showing on Thursday, July 14 first aired. Both are dated relics stylistically but surprisingly prescient politically.

The Man (1972), which was given a brief theatrical release after being made for ABC, was adapted from Irving Wallace’s trashy bestseller by The Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling — fair enough, since its conceit must have seemed science fiction at the time. James Earl Jones plays a fusty academic Senate president pro tempore suddenly swept into the Oval Office after circumstances wipe out the succession line before him.

Having a “black,” “Negro,” or “jigaboo” (depending on who’s talking and how publicly) commander-in-chief naturally brings out the not-so-latent racism in the various old white male power-mongers used to minority colleagues being powerless token figures. Polite and awed by his position to a fault — he’s no 2008 Barack Obama — our protag nonetheless learns to stand up for himself and his office, even if that means making some decisions unpopular with black voters.

Four years earlier, another trashy novelist (Sidney Sheldon of The Other Side of Midnight) had the pretty good idea of updating (without crediting) Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 cautionary novel It Can’t Happen Here — about a “patriotic” political party pushing the country toward a fascist dictatorship — as a modern action-suspense series. What with Vietnam protests, campus unrest, civil rights struggles, and so forth, the concept of our nation undergoing civil war was evidently too hot for the networks. They passed even after the original script had been shorn of nearly all direct political commentary.

Nonetheless, feature-length pilot Shadow on the Land is fairly strong (and violent) meat for the era. Its hectic portrait of a nation oppressed by governmental “security” brutality, air travel restrictions, etc. on one side, destabilized by a “Society of Man” underground resistance on the other is a metaphor applicable to the Nazi threat of Lewis’ day, Nixon vs. the Left, or post-Patriot Act America. It’s by turns wooden, heavy-handed, shrill, and sophisticated — not exactly good, but still a credible picture of something that could well happen here, perhaps more easily now than in 1968.  

THE UNITED STATES OF VORTEX

The Man, Thurs/14, 9 p.m.;

Shadow on the Land, Thurs/14, 11 p.m., $5

Vortex Room

1082 Howard, SF

www.myspace.com/thevortexroom

 

The nonconformist

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The nonconformist

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Marxist, aesthete, padrone, Oscar winner, supreme screen sensualist — the list of contradictions goes on, onscreen as well as off, for Bernardo Bertolucci. Earlier this year he emerged from a long creative hibernation (attributable, it turns out, to back pain so severe it prevented any work) to accept an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival and begin work on his first film in nearly a decade, a claustrophobic drama about a withdrawn teen who secretly sequesters himself in the family basement. It will be filmed in 3-D — an idea so daft it just might prove brilliant.

Because, after all, it is lunacy and excess as well as intelligence, beauty, instinct, and so forth that have led Bertolucci to some of his most extraordinary as well as dubious achievements, nearly all of them debatable as falling into either category.

Now that he’s reaching a half-century spent in the director’s chair, it is clear what an unpredictable, erratic, even arbitrary career this has been; the line between the sublime and silly in his films is easily felt but almost impossible to define. What makes 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, for instance, a genuine fever dream of mad desire, while two later films equally about eros and yearning — 1996’s Stealing Beauty and 2003’s The Dreamers — are fussy, false, a little embarrassing? Trained as a poet (whatever that means), he surrenders to cinema time and again as someone intoxicated by images as he once was to words, taking each sustained impulse to its logical (or illogical) endpoint, whether to transcendence or off an artistic cliff.

The Pacific Film Archive’s summer retrospective “Bernardo Bertolucci: In Search of Mystery” provides an opportunity to weigh most of the exhilarating highs and a couple of the baffling lows in a wayward trajectory one hopes is nowhere near complete. (Only 71, he can surely spare us another three decades — look at Manoel de Oliveira, wildly prolific at 102, yet without a single film as memorable as a half-dozen or more of Bertolucci’s.) All 13 features will be offered in new prints, a big lure for a director whose best movies — particularly those shot by the incomparable cinematographer Vittorio Storaro — it would be criminal to view in any but the most pristine visual condition.

After a promising literary start as a teenager — his father, notably, was a well-regarded poet, art historian, and film critic — Bertolucci apprenticed to family friend Pier Paolo Pasolini on 1961’s Accattone!. When Pasolini moved on to another project, Bertolucci made his own directorial debut at age 21 with similarly gritty The Grim Reaper (1962). That tale of a prostitute’s murder, cowritten with Pasolini, as well as 1964’s Before the Revolution (a presumably somewhat autobiographical mélange about a young bourgeois torn between tentative radicalization and pleasures of the flesh as represented by Bertolucci’s then-wife Adriana Asti) reflected his heavy early influencing by the ebbing Italian neorealist movement and still-current French New Wave.

Inspired by Dostoyevsky, 1968’s Partner was a transitional work, straddling Godardian dialecticism and pure extravagance. When 1970’s Jorge Luis Borges-drawn puzzle The Spider’s Strategem found Bertolucci discovering his sumptuous mature style (as well as Storaro’s rapturous lighting and camera movement), Godard denounced him as a sellout. The international breakthrough was that same year’s The Conformist, a Moravia story about the individual surrender to fascism — passivity turning to criminality being a frequent Bertolucci subject — that somehow became a baroque tone poem of saturated color, hedonistic suggestion, and damp paranoia. It announced the arrival of a great artist, albeit one for whom style would always trump political content, and whose literary sources were often twisted nearly past recognition by his own overwhelming authorial stamp.

The 1970s were a dazzling high-wire decade for Bertolucci. Last Tango was an X-rated scandal and sensation, an experience so psychologically (and literally) naked for Marlon Brando that he didn’t speak to the director for years afterward. Bertolucci explained: “He felt that I stole something from him, that he didn’t know what he was doing … I like to have very famous, important actors because it is a challenge to find out what they are hiding.”) Its tale of two people with only compulsive coitus in common is still berserk, implausible, off-putting, and completely enveloping.

The epic, multinational cast (Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Dominique Sanda, Burt Lancaster, even some Italians) 1900, a film originally over five hours long, offered the first half of Italy’s 20th century as a class struggle, as well as a conceptual one, between idealism and decadent pageantry — Pasolini wrestling with Luchino Visconti. Few knew what to make of the contrastingly intimate (yet, again, stylistically gaga) 1979 La Luna, an Oedipal drama based on a dream Bertolucci had about Maria Callas. Fervently loved by a slim cult following, it was otherwise so ridiculed and loathed that 32 years later 20th Century Fox still hasn’t coughed up a U.S. home-format release.

With the new decade, the limbs Bertolucci went out on became less reliably inspirational, perhaps partly because Storaro had developed conflicting allegiances to other directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Carlos Saura, Warren Beatty). Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981) is dispirited and dull. Little Buddha (1993) was a silly idea nonetheless spiked by enchanted storybook scenes with Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha — ludicrous-sounding stunt casting that is somehow perfect. Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers found this uneasily homophilic director reduced to ogling young bodies of both sexes like a dirty old professor.

On the other hand, 1990’s The Sheltering Sky was difficult, ravishing, another masterpiece if a great commercial disappointment. Another leap into exotica, 1987’s The Last Emperor had the opposite fate — winning all nine of its nominated Oscars in a slow year, a staggering spectacle widely admired yet loved by few (least of all the Chinese), elephantine yet wry, and closer to David Lean respectability than auteurist idiosyncrasy. Then after all this 1998’s Besieged, a tiny story of unrequited love and noble sacrifice shot with two actors and hand-held camera, felt rejuvenative — as if the increasingly burdened composer of massive symphonies had discovered the joy in a piano miniature.

The curio in the PFA’s series is 1967’s The Path of Oil — a three-part Italian documentary about petroleum production, apparently undertaken in a funk when two failed first features had temporarily reduced his career prospects. It’s handsome, if clearly less than a labor of love. But for the Bertolucci fetishist, no film is so impersonal or underwhelming (or on the other hand beloved) that it might not yet spring surprises, whether on a first viewing or an umpteenth. 

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI: IN SEARCH OF MYSTERY

July 8–Aug. 18, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Down Mexico way

Andrew Lam
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0
Down Mexico way

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Traditional noir cinema is like a whirlpool (and there is, in fact, a 1949 noir titled Whirlpool): its protagonists are haplessly sucked into a vortex of escalating, devouring peril against which their struggles are likely to be futile. Violence, deceit, perversity, love gone wrong, vengeance, and insanity envelop the good and the weak, the haunted and proud alike.The familiar noir setting is that of the bustling city turned malevolent and strange, suddenly underpopulated streets fraught with danger in an unending night of guns, dames, and double crosses. But the open road is equally a noir landscape, exchanging the maze of urban entrapment for flights that seek rescue from dire straits but instead only dig deeper into trouble with each incriminating mile. Loss of control and comfort is the noir hero’s inevitable slippery slope; he (or the occasional she) is increasingly at the mercy of cruel fate, unrelenting pursuit, bad judgment, and/or unforgiving alien surroundings.

The Pacific Film Archive July series “Going South: American Noir in Mexico” explores one such manifestation of the traveler becoming “lost” in ways no AAA map can help. The eight vintage black and white features in curator Steve Seid’s program trace Yank protagonists’ odysseys southward, often on the lam or otherwise under duress. Some never actually make it to Mexico, or just to those border towns fabled for lawlessness and licentiousness (if largely because northern money, cultural ignorance, and thrill-seeking encouraged criminal predation).

Those who do make it find no comfort in a strange land: the stark desert, tourist traps, and insinuating locals with their maddening foreign tongue (the titular villain from 1953’s The Hitch-Hiker keeps expressing exasperation that Mexicans insist on speaking “Mexican”) provide no hiding place from their demons.

No less than three features star the inimitable sloe-eyed Robert Mitchum, a man who always seemed like he’d have a few Tijuana stories unfit for family consumption. Two by Mia’s dad John Farrow (1950’s Where Danger Lives and the next year’s His Kind of Woman), as well as Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 noir classic Out of the Past, find his variably innocent heroes drawn like flies into ornate sticky webs with an alluring brunette at their center. If Danger and Past prove her deadlier than the male, Woman‘s lighter tone allows a tropical resort near Santa Rosalita to parody den-of-thieves exoticism. In it, Jane Russell gets to be one dame who’s hard-boiled on the outside but soft on the in, as opposed to vice versa.

Mexico is likewise just the end point of thorny chases — after stolen loot or lying tail, respectively — in Phil Karlson’s excellent 1952 Kansas City Confidential and Anthony Mann’s cheesy Blue Angel (1930) update The Great Flamarion (1945) (with Erich von Stroheim as a grandiose vaudeville sharpshooter). But it’s central to the series’ three most potent entries, which also notably offer more complex takes on the relationship between our perennially poorer neighbor and imposing Gringolandia.

If you haven’t seen Orson Welles’ 1958 Touch of Evil — either in its original studio cut or drastically different 1998 Walter Murch reconstruction of the director’s original intent — you need to, because it’s a masterpiece of noir, exploitation, irony, and stylistic delirium. When Charlton Heston’s unlikely spray-tanned Mexican narcotics agent marries very blonde, “pure” (and racist) gringa Janet Leigh, their honeymoon becomes a grotesque nightmare of border-straddling sleaze, though the Spanish-speaking miscreants are just pawns in the hands of Yankee pros — especially Welles’ own Jabba the Hutt-like police captain.

Much lesser-known are two other films by actors behind the camera. Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker finds two average American Joes on a Baja fishing trip kidnapped by a serial-murdering psycho who forces them deep into desolate foreign terrain. It’s the keen eye of locals rather than our desperate heroes’ resourcefulness that might ultimately save them from the maniac’s itchy trigger finger. Spare, tense and realistic, it’s contrasted by Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Ride the Pink Horse, a sort of noir-fever-dream spin on Under the Volcano (1984) in which the director stars as a war-veteran tough guy unraveling from sleep deprivation and general dislocation on a revenge mission in a fictitious border town. Full of phony ethnic exoticism and stereotypes, it nonetheless offers hope of salvation solely from kindly Spanish-speaking locals, notably a teenage girl (pigtailed Wanda Hendrix) who can see his imminent death in our gruff hero’s eyes.

“Go on, beat it. Scrambo!” he barks at her — a good line to be sure, though none can beat Out of the Past‘s (false, it turns out) koan “A dame with a rod is like a guy with a knitting needle.”

GOING SOUTH: AMERICAN NOIR IN MEXICO

July 1–29, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Heroes and hoedowns

Andrew Lam
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0
Heroes and hoedowns

arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE This year’s Bay Area-centric Frameline features run a thematic and identification gamut appropriate to the festival’s ever-inclusive programming. Several are celebrations of local LGBT heroines and heroines, some recently deceased and some still-with-us.

Scott Gracheff’s With You commemorates the life and legacy of late local resident Mark Bingham, who famously died on United Airlines Flight 93 and is strongly suspected of being among the passengers who stormed the cockpit and prevented that hijacked Newark-to-SFO flight from reaching its presumed governmental target in Washington, D.C., on 9/11.

As his activist mother Alice Hoagland and everyone else here says, it’s the sort of thing he would do — Bingham was, among other things, an avid rugby player, metalhead, daredevil, UC Berkeley frat president, world-class partier, several-time arrestee (for reckless hijinks rather than criminal menace), bear chaser, global traveler, dot-com-wave surfer, and “human labrador retriever” (as a long-term boyfriend calls him). He lived a very full life and doubtlessly would have continued living it to the limit if this encounter with terrorism hadn’t cut his time short at 31.

A life that remained eventful for nearly three times that length was that of Del Martin, who along with surviving partner Phyllis Lyon founded SF’s Daughters of Bilitis — the nation’s first lesbian political and social organization — in the highly conservative climate of 1955. They remained highly active in feminist, gay, senior, and other progressive causes over the decades. Martin’s death in 2008 at age 87 occasioned a tribute in the City Hall rotunda that is captured by veteran local filmmaker Debra Chasnoff’s Celebrating the Life of Del Martin. This hour-long document demonstrates the breadth of Martin’s influence as prominent politicians, musicians, authors, progressive and religious leaders, et al. pay homage.

How exactly to honor our dead is the question at the heart of Andy Abrahams Wilson’s very polished The Grove, which charts the creation of the National AIDS Memorial Grove — an idea brought to fruition by the surviving partner of local landscape gardener Stephen Marcus — as well as some struggles over its visibility (even most visitors to Golden Gate Park don’t seem to know it’s there) and purpose.

When a recent contest was held for an installation to be added to the site, two women designers won with a striking sculptural concept intended to make a potent statement à la D.C.’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial about the disease’s devastation. But the grove’s current board shot it down, preferring to maintain the space’s leafy, meditative feel — even if that might also maintain its relative public invisibility. Should the memorial comfort those who directly suffered loss, or metaphorically convey that loss in vivid terms for future generations?

Very much living with HIV — emphasis on the living part — is the subject of Dain Percifield’s Running in Heels: The Glendon “Anna Conda” Hyde Story. Glendon Hyde a.k.a. Anna Conda fled a horrific Bible Belt background to become one of SF’s premier drag personalities, running the Cinch’s popular Friday night Charlie Horse revue for five years until a new condo’s complaining tenants shut that down. Enraged by the city’s “war on fun,” hostility toward the homeless, and other issues to boot, he joined 13 other candidates running for District 6 (Tenderloin) supervisor last year. He didn’t win, but this doc will make you hope he tries again.

Last but far from least is this year’s sole Bay Area narrative feature, shot largely in Fruitvale even if it is set in Texas. A big leap from writer director David Lewis’ prior features, Longhorns is a delightful romantic comedy about several 1982 Lone Star state frat boys dealing with sexual impulses and related emotions that might — oh lawd no — mean they’s quar, not just “messing around.” With some soundtracked songs by H.P. Mendoza (2006’s Colma: The Musical), this total charmer is (as one character puts it) “hotter’n a billy goat in a pepper patch.”

FRAMELINE 35: SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL

June 16–26, most films $9–$15

Various venues

www.frameline.org

Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’

arts@sfbg.com

FILM There are “documentaries” that use staged or fictive elements to fib, and others toward some greater truth. Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte is of the second type. You might well question just how much of this “docu-essay” simply occurred on camera, or occurred when/how it did for the camera. But that really doesn’t matter, because the results have their own enigmatic, lyrical truth, one that might not have been arrived at by pure observation. In some ways, this is a better movie about life, existence, and the possibility of God than The Tree of Life. At the very least, it’s shorter.

It might help to know — though the film itself won’t tell you — that Frammartino drew inspiration from the purported theories of ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician, and mystic Pythagoras. (Purported because his sect was highly secretive and no writings survive.) He believed in transmigration of the soul, a.k.a. metempsychosis — souls reincarnating from human to animal to various elements, endlessly replenishing nature.

Pythagoras and followers moved to a Greek-émigré outpost in the southern Italian region of Calabria to start their own religious community, one whose extreme exclusivity led to their persecution and demise — though the unquestionably brilliant leader’s ideas would live on not just in mathematics but as an influence on later quasi-religious “secret societies” like Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.

There, now you have some CliffsNotes on a movie that itself chooses to wash over the viewer almost as neutrally as the stationary landscape studies of James Benning. Void of recorded music and nearly all speech (the few overheard bits go untranslated), Frammartino’s film — shot in and around the medieval Calabrian village of Serra San Bruno — is part neorealist nod and part metaphysical rapture. (No Harold Camping reference intended.) It is gorgeous, and occasionally goofy. Just like the deity one might pick to be Up There.

The narrative, so to speak, first focuses on a wizened goat herder (Giuseppe Fuda) who creakily drives his flock into the grazing hills. The world might be getting more crowded every minute, humanity overbearing on nature till hairy predators invade suburbs — but there are still some places people are mostly leaving. Metaphorical tumbleweeds might as well be tumbling through the streets of his depleted town. Coughing himself to sleep at night in his spare room — three chairs used as shelves, suggesting company he’ll never have — he’s an exemplar of a vanishing lifestyle, one seemingly little-changed since the town’s founding a millennium ago.

Indeed local human society appears less diverse, sturdy, and communicative than that of our protagonist’s goats, which fascinate. The young ones are cute as heck; the adults handsome and dignified. A kid whose birth we observe slides out of mom splay-legged, looking a bit like the “baby” in Eraserhead (1977), making a sound like a squeak toy — then later panicking at being left behind in a gully. Guarding the goat-pen, the herder’s dog freaks at a passing annual costumed parade of Passion Play reenactors. When the gate is broken, goats scatter surreally around town, including the quarters of their dying keeper. (This is where the “documentary” claim seems least probable, as the fabulous imagery can hardly have been an accident.)

Le Quattro Volte — the four times, meaning four soul migrations — goes on from there, transferring its focus from man to kid to a tree felled for another annual ritual. (Yes, that’s just three incarnations; Frammatino flummoxed me on the fourth.) It’s a frequently ravishing abstract, sonically as well as visually — collar-bells meld with church bells, and even the buzzing of flies seems part-of-the-natural-order beneficent.

Let’s face it: there has never been an unpretentious movie made by a filmmaker named Michelangelo. But this one merits that weight. It begins and ends with the area residents’ traditional creation of coal in a smoking pile of lumber that looks like a half-buried meteor. Point taken: in the end, we’re all compost recycled back to the air, earth, and sea. *

LE QUATTRO VOLTE opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

A fountain of Penn

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
A fountain of Penn

When Arthur Penn died at 88 last September, obituaries listing career highlights reinforced the notion that he was one of those directors — others include Mike Nichols and George Roy Hill — who were BFDs in the 1960s and ’70s yet rapidly faded from prominence thereafter. In Penn’s case the decline was especially steep, particularly given that during arguably the single most roiling period of change in mainstream American filmmaking, he was at the top of the heap in terms of prestige and thematic adventure.

Did he simply lose interest? Did some significant flops dishearten him? Whatever the cause, post-1976 his occasional films — he was never very prolific — became those of any competent journeyman whose projects seemingly picked him rather than vice versa. (Particularly dismaying was 1981 “turbulent ’60s” drama Four Friends, in which he reduced that era of his own greatest impact to stereotype-ridden soap opera.) After the respectable 1996 TV movie Inside, about apartheid, he never directed another feature.

The Pacific Film Archive’s June retrospective is titled “Arthur Penn: A Liberal Helping.” That moniker pays tribute to his lefty conscience, yet in another sense this assortment isn’t so liberal: there’s nothing here dating from after the 1976 Bicentennial Year, when both he made his last identifiably personal film and saw it widely trashed. (That would be The Missouri Breaks, a Jack Nicholson-Marlon Brando revisionist western that deserved better than it got but was doomed to ridicule by one of Brando’s deliberately bizarre later performances. Now, of course, that’s its major attraction.)

What we’ve got here is an extraordinary run: encompassing 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, one of those movies that changed the movies in general; 1969’s counterculture pulse-taking Alice’s Restaurant; Little Big Man, the big-noise historical black-comedy literary adaptation (along with Nichols’ Catch-22) of 1970; and 1962’s The Miracle Worker, a joltingly good translation of the play he directed on Broadway. Even his commercial failures were exceptionally interesting, from 1958 film debut The Left Handed Gun (Paul Newman as Gore Vidal’s neurotic Billy the Kid) to 1965’s Mickey One (a dazzling, pretentious expressionist nightmare with Warren Beatty at its bewildered center) and 1975’s Night Moves (private eye Gene Hackman wading into a morass of Florida Keys corruption).

But there was a blot even during those glory days. In the mid-1960s the country was in thrall to civil rights struggles, and them “Hollywood liberals” duly responded. Penn’s 1966 The Chase was arguably the worst, most artificial “prestige” effort to deal with the issue this side of Otto Preminger’s 1967 Hurry Sundown, which humiliated Jane Fonda even more. (It has a scene in which she tries to arouse probably-gay Southern tycoon husband Michael Caine by fellating his saxophone.)

Hopes were high for a while, though. Adapting The Chase, Horton Foote’s 1952 Broadway failure about an escaped con settling a score with a Texas sheriff was no less than literary lioness Lillian Hellman, penning her first (and as it turned out, last) screenplay since being blacklisted as an alleged commie threat.

Everybody was excited about their involvement in the prestigious project, packed as it was with high-profile talent on and off-screen. (Besides Brando’s sheriff, Robert Redford’s fugitive, and Fonda as his pining ex-wife, the cast included E.G. Marshall, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, Miriam Hopkins, Robert Duvall, and James Fox.) Penn wanted to prove he could direct a large-scale commercial picture; Fonda to break away from sex-kitten roles; Redford to establish himself as a movie star; etc. All were thrilled about working with the exalted Brando, who badly needed a hit. He also strongly identified with the (initial) script’s potent commentary on civil rights struggles.

Like Foote before her, Hellman envisioned a taut, intimate drama about small-town tensions boiling over during one long night of drunkenness, bigotry, and violence. But this was, above all, a “Sam Spiegel Production.” And the notoriously egomaniacal, controlling, duplicitous producer (one colleague called him “a corkscrew … very effective … but twisted and bent”), hungry for more Oscar gold after a major roll encompassing The African Queen (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), kept pressing her to make it “larger.” He eventually brought other writers in to further tart things up.

As detailed in James Robert Parish’s book Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops, the steadily cheapening rewrites continued daily even after shooting commenced. Morale sank, with Brando the most conspicuous malcontent. (One scene he remained enthused about was his sheriff being badly beaten by local bigots — onscreen it’s as if the sleepwalking actor suddenly wakes up for a couple vivid minutes.) Penn clashed with the old-school cinematographer he hadn’t chosen. Adding insult to injury, Spiegel managed to exclude the director from the editorial process, insisting that the film be cut in London or Los Angeles while fully aware that Penn was stuck in New York City on a Broadway assignment.

The result was crude, inauthentic (it was shot in SoCal), stagey-looking, with variably laughable Texas accents and barn-door-broad sexual innuendos. Aiming for importance in the worst way imaginable, it instead recalls the lurid finger-waggling Southsploitation of such later non-triumphs as Shanty Tramp (1967), The Klansman (1974), Scum of the Earth (1963), Mandingo (1975), and (more recently) Hounddog (2007), albeit on a more grandiose scale. Embarrassingly, this movie about Southern prejudice and injustice kept any people of color waaaay in the background: its lone “noble Negro” was played by Joel Fluellen, billed 21st.

Reviews were scathing (“witless and preposterous drivel,” “a phony, tasteless movie”) and the expensive project tanked commercially as well. It also turned Spiegel’s luck for keeps: all his subsequent films were ambitious disappointments. Penn recovered, and then some — next stop, Bonnie and Clyde — but one suspects that he (or Foote, or Hellman, or Brando) never quite got over being so callously undermined and pushed around. For the next decade, at least, he made sure he’d never be in that kind of compromised position again.

ARTHUR PENN: A LIBERAL HELPING

June 10–29, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

The importance of being self-important

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
The importance of being self-important

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Badlands (1973) was the kind of idiosyncratic, near-brilliant commercial nonentity that period’s commercial flailing allowed executives to fund; 1978’s Days of Heaven was pictorially stunning, but dramatically freeze dried, its 19th-century prairie triangle a melodrama sublimated by a director who worshipped landscapes. People? Not so much.

Yet those films’ cool status as commercial failures and artistic treasures fostered a Malick cult, amplified by his elusiveness in subsequent decades. He became the holy grail — one prodigy who checked out before he could disappoint (unlike, say, Michael Cimino), heightening all expectations by staying nearly as inaccessible an artist and celebrity as Thomas Pynchon.

Were those two in cahoots? Because around the same time Pynchon launched his shockingly unexpected literary return, Malick returned with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, a James Jones novel (à la From Here to Eternity) turned metaphysical spectacular, with half the male stars in Hollywood drafted to prove their artistic cred by working for the master. It was a pretentious, uneven, distractingly starry movie — but also frequently transcendent, the horror of World War II military life and death spun into a frequently rapturous lyric meditation on nature, God, and existence. It provided the hitherto unknown, subsequently not-much-less-so Jim Caviezel with a better Jesus part than The Passion of the Christ (2004). It was a film whose tremendous poetry and heart barely triumphed over self-indulgence. Still, it did.

By contrast, 2005’s The New World was a mess no amount of pretty pictures could sculpt into viable shape. It offered the worst of latter-day Malick — New Age coffee-table-book photography, the endless banal stream-of-consciousness voiceovers in search of a screenplay — with scant narrative or thematic spine.

Now there’s The Tree of Life. Famously delayed over and over again from predicted festival debuts while Malick tinkered, it’s at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point.

Tree starts (after a quote from Job 38) with a 1950s all-American family getting some very bad news — never specified — about one of its sons. Soon we get a lot of gauzy psychedelia, cosmos views, and miscellaneous FX one gradually perceives are meant to be the mind of God, the big bang, and subsequent evolutionary development of earthly life. Malick does not disappoint with the staggering imagery. Some is gorgeous if predictable in his now-familiar staring-through-trees-at-glinting-sunlight fashion, some space-odyssey fantastical (2001: A Space Odyssey‘s VFX wizard Douglas Trumbell is listed as a consultant).

What’s simplistic is the larger meaning — despite the now-usual Malick excess of affected voice-overs ("Father … always you wrestle inside me, always you will" a child intones) — the gender roles (Jessica Chastain’s ’50s wife is part Donna Reed, part angel of mercy) and aesthetic cliches of his prayerful search for significance beyond the underserved norms of narrative and character development.

The thesis here is a conflict between "nature" (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and "grace" (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering, often forcedly "lyrical" fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch is sternly demanding of his three young sons. Eldest Jack (Hunter McCracken) eventually comes to hate this alternately affectionate and cruel father.

As the father, a solid Brad Pitt gets the best-defined part here, playing a man who invents arbitrary rules simply to punish petty transgressions. Yet he’s no monster but a conflicted, resentful aspirant toward the American dream taking those frustrations out on his loved ones. The specificity of everyday tyranny, most often practiced at family meal times — the movie’s aesthetically simplest, most emotionally potent scenes — suggest Malick is working through autobiographical demons here.

The Tree of Life is thus like The Great Santini or This Boy’s Life meets Tarkovsky (or, worse, Tarsem); something relatably intimate housed in the most ornately overblown package imaginable. It’s like those James Michener novels in which a simple soap opera is backgrounded by 300 pages of historical errata practically going back to the amoeba from which our protagonists descended. Only Malick, bless him, actually depicts the amoeba.

As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. The child actors are excellent. But Chastain, in an expansion of the Eternal Woman roles played by Miranda Otto in The Thin Red Line and Q’orianka Kilcher in The New World, plays not a character but an abstract of ethereal, endlessly giving maternity, forever swanning about in gauzy sundresses, at one point so full of grace she literally floats in midair. I doubt Malick realizes he’s put her on a traditional sexist pedestal that reduces while it exalts. She’s a simple creature — all love! — while the menfolk get to be thorny and complicated.

Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. (Malick’s soundtrack of Mahler, Smetana, Holst, Górecki, Berlioz, etc. only heightens his grandiosity.) Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent.

Speaking for the middle ground, I’d say this is a cheeringly daft enterprise by turns extraordinary, masturbatory, and banal. Encouraging slightly loony poets to work on a grand scale is always a good thing, even if the results are this mixed. Malick goes way out on a limb, his attempted philosophical weight often nearly crashing the movie to the ground. But by a hair’s breadth he stays on that branch, wobbling and flapping wings — while most major studio-bankrolled American directors never think of climbing the tree in the first place.

THE TREE OF LIFE opens Fri/3 in San Francisco.

Last train to Fuck Town

Maria Poblet
-
0
Last train to Fuck Town

arts@sfbg.com

The course of an acting career can vividly illustrate the randomness of fate. Rutger Hauer spent some years in Dutch experimental theater of the 1960s — after pulling off that best way to terminate one’s military service, faking mental illness — then became a local heartthrob as a medieval knight in a hit TV series at that decade’s end.

He spent the 1970s primarily starring in Dutch movies, notably the striking early films of Paul Verhoeven — well before Showgirls (1995), Starship Troopers (1997), or even 1987’s RoboCop (the director wanted Hauer for the lead, but was overruled by the studio). In the 1980s, Hauer played the memorable villains of Blade Runner (1982), The Hitcher (1986), and 1981’s Nighthawks (inducing tough investigative cop Sylvester Stallone to don drag at the end to catch him), between runs at being an action hero and theoretically loftier assignments around the globe.

Then he settled into a multilingual journeyman’s potluck of low-budget genre features, TV projects, small parts in mainstream films (2005’s Sin City and Batman Begins), Guinness commercials, and a Kylie Minogue video. Apparently 67-year-old Dutch actors in Los Angeles can’t be choosy.

Then again, sometimes better opportunities might choose them. At Sundance this January, Hauer played lead roles in two diametrically opposed movies. One was as the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Polish director Lech Majewski’s extraordinary The Mill and the Cross (recently at the San Francisco International Film Festival), which brings one of that painter’s most epic canvases to cinematic life and will hopefully open on U.S. art house screens later this year. The other was Hobo With a Shotgun. Guess which one is opening theatrically here already.

Hobo began as a $150 faux-trailer short that got considerable exposure online and off. The resulting long-form debut for director Jason Eisener and scenarist John Davies is doubtless the zenith in Halifax, Nova Scotia-shot retro ‘ploitation splatter comedies to date. Which tells you nothing, of course. But it is pretty good — not great — insofar as spoofy gross-out nods to yesteryear’s exploitation cinema go. Better than Machete (2010), a whole lot better than the likes of Zombie Strippers! (2008) or 95 percent of what Troma puts out.

Grizzled Hauer stars as the titular character who rides rails into an equally nameless berg nicknamed “Fuck Town” because it’s so plagued by drugs ‘n’ thugz. The hoodlums are led by crime kingpin “The Drake” (Brian Downey) and goon sons (Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman) whose violent perversities are Caligula-licious. With corrupt police force in pocket, they’re free to terrorize the populace via acts of degradation and violence pushed over the bad-taste top and then some.

When Hauer’s hobo rescues a prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) from this clan’s clutches, he trips his own mental wire from peaceably detached transient to pawnshop-armed streetsweeper of scum, à la 1980s vintage vigilante cheese like 1982’s Class of 1984 (Perry King vs. evil high school “punks”), 1985’s Death Wish 3 (Charles Bronson vs. evil gang “punks”), and 1984’s Savage Streets (Linda Blair versus … figure it out).

Hobo With a Shotgun faithfully apes exploitation conventions, from its lurid widescreen Technicolor hues to a score combining overproduced 1970s funky soundtrack kitsch with ’80s direct-to-video synth pulsing. (Complete with a closing-credits rock song that channels Pat Benatar.) Its ludicrously over-the-top violence is kinda funny, but also nastier than need be.

Throughout, Hauer maintains a straight face. Maybe a tad more so than necessary — this movie could have used the wilder streak crazy-coot comedic streak shown by Jeff Bridges in last year’s True Grit or Kurt Russell in 2007’s Grindhouse.

Game Rutger Hauer retains his blue-eyed charisma and clearly relishes playing the gentle (when not lethal) giant in this artificially baroque scenario. He’s also an actor long on the world stage still seeking a role in a worthy film (or play) that may define him for posterity. He’s obviously got the talent — but at this point, would he take it? Would it even be offered? Did he take Hobo With a Shotgun because it seemed funny, or because it was the best he could get? 

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Last train to Fuck Town: Rutger Hauer rides again in “Hobo With a Shotgun”

Sue Vaughan
-
0
Last train to Fuck Town: Rutger Hauer rides again in “Hobo With a Shotgun”

The course of an acting career can vividly illustrate the randomness of fate. Rutger Hauer spent some years in Dutch experimental theater of the 1960s — after pulling off that best way to terminate one’s military service, faking mental illness — then became a local heartthrob as a medieval knight in a hit TV series at that decade’s end.

He spent the 1970s primarily starring in Dutch movies, notably the striking early films of Paul Verhoeven — well before Showgirls (1995), Starship Troopers (1997), or even 1987’s RoboCop (the director wanted Hauer for the lead, but was overruled by the studio). In the 1980s, Hauer played the memorable villains of Blade Runner (1982), The Hitcher (1986), and 1981’s Nighthawks (inducing tough investigative cop Sylvester Stallone to don drag at the end to catch him), between runs at being an action hero and theoretically loftier assignments around the globe.

Then he settled into a multilingual journeyman’s potluck of low-budget genre features, TV projects, small parts in mainstream films (2005’s Sin City and Batman Begins), Guinness commercials, and a Kylie Minogue video. Apparently 67-year-old Dutch actors in Los Angeles can’t be choosy.

Then again, sometimes better opportunities might choose them. At Sundance this January, Hauer played lead roles in two diametrically opposed movies. One was as the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Polish director Lech Majewski’s extraordinary The Mill and the Cross (recently at the San Francisco International Film Festival), which brings one of that painter’s most epic canvases to cinematic life and will hopefully open on U.S. art house screens later this year. The other was Hobo With a Shotgun. Guess which one is opening theatrically here already.

Hobo began as a $150 faux-trailer short that got considerable exposure online and off. The resulting long-form debut for director Jason Eisener and scenarist John Davies is doubtless the zenith in Halifax, Nova Scotia-shot retro ’ploitation splatter comedies to date. Which tells you nothing, of course. But it is pretty good — not great — insofar as spoofy gross-out nods to yesteryear’s exploitation cinema go. Better than Machete (2010), a whole lot better than the likes of Zombie Strippers! (2008) or 95 percent of what Troma puts out.

Grizzled Hauer stars as the titular character who rides rails into an equally nameless berg nicknamed “Fuck Town” because it’s so plagued by drugs ’n’ thugz. The hoodlums are led by crime kingpin “The Drake” (Brian Downey) and goon sons (Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman) whose violent perversities are Caligula-licious. With corrupt police force in pocket, they’re free to terrorize the populace via acts of degradation and violence pushed over the bad-taste top and then some.
When Hauer’s hobo rescues a prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) from this clan’s clutches, he trips his own mental wire from peaceably detached transient to pawnshop-armed streetsweeper of scum, à la 1980s vintage vigilante cheese like 1982’s Class of 1984 (Perry King vs. evil high school “punks”), 1985’s Death Wish 3 (Charles Bronson vs. evil gang “punks”), and 1984’s Savage Streets (Linda Blair versus … figure it out).

Hobo With a Shotgun faithfully apes exploitation conventions, from its lurid widescreen Technicolor hues to a score combining overproduced 1970s funky soundtrack kitsch with ’80s direct-to-video synth pulsing. (Complete with a closing-credits rock song that channels Pat Benatar.) Its ludicrously over-the-top violence is kinda funny, but also nastier than need be. Throughout, Hauer maintains a straight face. Maybe a tad more so than necessary — this movie could have used the wilder streak crazy-coot comedic streak shown by Jeff Bridges in last year’s True Grit or Kurt Russell in 2007’s Grindhouse.

Game Hauer retains his blue-eyed charisma and clearly relishes playing the gentle (when not lethal) giant in this artificially baroque scenario. He’s also an actor long on the world stage still seeking a role in a worthy film (or play) that may define him for posterity. He’s obviously got the talent — but at this point, would he take it? Would it even be offered? Did he take Hobo With a Shotgun because it seemed funny, or because it was the best he could get?

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

 

Bastard samurai

Maria Poblet
-
0
Bastard samurai

arts@sfbg.com

Takashi Miike is 50 years old, has only been active in film since 1991, and since then has directed approximately 80 features for TV, video, and theatres. Eight-zero. Even Rainer Werner Fassbinder on every puppy-upper in the world achieved nothing like that volume (and was dead at 37). It’s not like Miike’s films are cheap knockoffs assembled by a stock company à la the prolific Ulli Lommel or your average pornographer. Though they started off on the low end of the Japanese industry’s budgetary scale — and one suspects he’s still a producer’s wet dream of bang for buck — from early on his projects were busy, elaborate, even frantic with highly cinematic ideas. Not to mention frequently insane.

Miike’s trademark cinema is the gonzo genre mashup as first significantly noted abroad via cult hits like Ichi the Killer (2001) and Dead or Alive (1999) — movies so crazed with jaw-dropping, often hilarious splattersome outrageousness and relentless high energy that they could be both unforgettable and exhausting. (It is perhaps Miike’s only major fault that he often gives us too much of a good thing.) But the breadth of his imagination and stylistic adaptability is amazing. He’s made children’s fantasies, teen musicals, blackest domestic satire, a low-key rural whimsy (1998’s The Bird People in China), formulaic J-horror (2003’s One Missed Call), and one languorous all-boy lockup saga suffused with the homoerotic surrealism of Fassbinder’s 1982 Querelle (2006’s Big Bang Love, Juvenile A).

Miike’s first significant hit here was another stylistic departure, 1999’s Audition — a May-December romance of Ozu-like restraint that only revealed its true agenda in a last few minutes of harrowing violence. Since then the odd Miike film has gotten modest U.S. theatrical release, like 2007’s gonzo mode Sukiyaki Western Django.

But the new 13 Assassins is clearly destined to be his greatest success yet outside Japan. (One just hopes success doesn’t do what it frequently does to hitherto fast, almost impulsive artists — i.e., slow down their future output because the decisions are now more commercially and prestigiously “important.”) It’s another departure, doubtless one of the most conventional movies he’s made in theme and execution. That’s key to its appeal — rigorously traditional, taking its sweet time getting to samurai action that is pointedly not heightened by wire work or CGI, it arrives at the kind of slam-dunk prolonged battle climax that only a measured buildup can let you properly appreciate.

That buildup is long, though, so ADD-addled mall rats should be forewarned. In the 1840s, samurai are in decline but feudalism is still hale. It’s a time of peace, though not for the unfortunates who live under regional tyrant Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), a li’l Nippon Caligula who taxes and oppresses his people to the point of starvation. Alas, the current shogun is his sibling, and plans to make little bro his chief adviser — which could throw the entire nation into chaos.

Ergo a concerned Shogun official secretly hires veteran samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) to assassinate the Lord at one of the rare times he’s vulnerable to attack, during his annual trip home from the capital court. Fully an hour is spent on our hero doing “assembling the team” stuff, recruiting other unemployed, retired, or wannabe samurai for a lean-mean total of 12 (eventually joined by Takayuki Yamada’s comedy-relief rube). This slow, sober initial progress is tweaked by glimpses of Naritsugu’s extreme cruelty, which encompasses rape, murder, and dismemberment just for the hell of it.

When the protagonists finally commence their mission, their target is already aware he’s being pursued. He’s surrounded by some 200 soldiers by the time Miike arrives at the film’s sustained, spectacular climax: a small village his retinue must pass through, and which Shinzaemon and co. have turned into a giant booby trap so that 13 men can divide and destroy an ogre guarding army.

A major reason why mainstream Hollywood fantasy and straight action movies have gotten so depressingly interchangeable is that digital FX and stunt work can (and does) visualize any stupid idea — heroes who get thrown 200 feet into walls by monsters then getting up to fight some more, etc. 13 Assassins is thrilling because its action, while sporting against-the-odds ingeniousness and sheer luck by our heroes as in any trad genre film, is still vividly, bloodily, credibly physical. 

13 ASSASSINS opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

 

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