Johnny Ray Huston

SFIFF: A magic act from Claude Chabrol

-
0

Jeffrey M. Anderson looks at the latest sinister magic act from veteran auteur Claude Chabrol:

Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in Two is about as good as any of his films, which is to say, it is highly skilled and hugely entertaining. Yet it will probably come and go fairly quickly. Chabrol made his fiftieth film a few years back, and when you make your fiftieth film, no one cares. If the Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson live long enough to make fifty films, just see if anyone notices. If the quality of their films falls, people will complain, but if it stays the same, they’ll be taken for granted, just like Chabrol. I guarantee it. Look at Ingmar Bergman. He cracked fifty films, and when his last, the great Saraband, opened in 2005, people could scarcely be bothered to even yawn.

girltwoa.jpg
Since Claude Chabrol has fewer unlicensed YouTube clips than feature films to his name, this still from A Girl Cut in Two will have to do

In any case, Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in Two tells the story of a love triangle. Beautiful, ambitious television weather girl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) falls for the much older, but successful, married writer Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand). At the same time, a snotty, rich younger man, Paul (Benoît Magimel) is swept away by her and is even more intrigued by her utter indifference to him. The strong characters show at least two sides, slyly seducing one another while selfishly scheming. Chabrol moves the story ahead with a deceptively deft combination of humor and suspense. And of course, there’s more. It just wouldn’t be a Chabrol film if there weren’t a murder or something equally sinister.

A Girl Cut in Two screens Tues/6, 9:30 p.m. at the Clay.

SFIFF: The umbrellas of China

-
0

Jennique Mason weighs in on Du Haibin’s Umbrella, also featured in Jeffrey M. Anderson’s ‘SFIFF, day ten’ diary:

Director Du Haibin reveals the gap between labor and commodity in his modern-day documentary odyssey Umbrella. Beginning with the actual construction of mass-produced umbrellas in an urban factory, Du traces the product’s journey as it becomes increasingly divorced from its origins. He juxtaposes the tedium and repetition of factory work with the mindless chatter of umbrella merchants’ wives who shamelessly lust after Audis and BMWs.

umbrella2a.jpg
Can you stand under an umbrella?

Umbrella complicates these relationships with one beautiful shot after another. As factory workers, students and soldiers all attempt to shed their agricultural heritage, they find there are no guarantees in a consumer-based society. In creating a vast societal portrait through his focus on umbrellas, Du pulls off the rare feat of capturing the ephemeral. Umbrella takes modern life to its logical conclusion, succinctly stated by an auctioneer-type host at a job fair cattle call: “You go to school, so you can get a job, so you can make money, so you can buy a home, so you can start a family and send your children to school.”

Umbrella screens Thurs/8, 8:30 p.m. at the Kabuki

SFIFF, day ten: Cachao and the wow of Still Life

-
0

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Last night, Maria Bello accepted her Peter J. Owens award and hosted a screening of her new film Yellow Handkerchief. I haven’t seen that film yet, but Bello will always have a place in my heart for her fearless performance in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005).

If you saw Buena Vista Social Club at the festival in 1999 and Calle 54 at the festival in 2001, then you may be familiar with the music of Israel ‘Cachao’ Lopez, the great Cuban songwriter and bassist who helped bring the mambo to popularity. The new Cachao: Uno Mas arrives just in time, given that Cachao passed away two months ago at the age of 89. It would be great to report that this 68-minute documentary was a worthy farewell, but it’s far too brief and it breaks the cardinal rule of music films: it interrupts the songs with talking heads.

Cachao: Uno Mas talk at SFIFF

SFIFF, day eight: Bed, bath and beyond the ordinary

-
0

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I love the festival’s crazy Late Show selections, but sometimes I miss them. Luckily, Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales screened for a third time on Wednesday afternoon. It’s very reminiscent of John Cassavetes’ 1974 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but not as focused. (Ferrara’s style is even more rambling.)

Willem Dafoe plays Ray Ruby, a man living his dream by running a strip club. The trouble is that the club is failing, the girls haven’t been paid and Ray loves to blow all his money on lotto tickets. A series of miniature dramas play out over the course of one night. Old friends stop in, new customers come and go, strippers dance and complain, and a man tries to sell organic hot dogs! A tanning booth explodes, nearly burning down the joint. The abrasive landlady (the great Sylvia Miles) shows up, threatening to let Bed, Bath and Beyond move in. A stripper called Monroe (Asia Argento) brings in her dog, which gets in the way. (She uses the dog in her act, and more or less makes out with him on stage.)

ferrara_miles.jpg
Bed, bath and beyond, baby!: The peerless Sylvia Miles with Go Go Tales director Abel Ferrara

SFIFF, day seven: Home, Towne, and Leigh love

-
0

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Well, I wasn’t able to catch up with Errol Morris this time around, and I’m bummed, but I secured an interview with screenwriter extraordinaire Robert Towne, which I will share with you later in the week.

I did catch up with Touching Home, the feature debut by local twins Logan and Noah Miller, and after watching it I suspect that their future may lie more in the realm of producing than directing or acting; their meetings may be more interesting than their movies.

touching.jpg
Touching Home touches upon Christmas

Apparently the Millers accosted Ed Harris outside the Castro Theater in 2006, when the actor received the festival’s Peter J. Owens award. They pitched him their project and even showed him a trailer. The movie itself shows similar marketing smarts. It’s the story of twin brothers, both baseball players, who dream of making the big time. One loses his scholarship and the other is fired from his bush league position, so they slink home, get jobs in the local quarry and hope for a chance in the spring in Arizona. Meanwhile, one brother reconnects with their alcoholic, gambling-addicted father (Harris) and finds a cute new girlfriend, leading to fights between the brothers.

I hear a symphony named Kimya Dawson

-
0

By Alex Felsinger

When the Moldy Peaches became increasingly popular in the ’90s, Kimya Dawson decided she wanted out. She hoped to avoid the mainstream music industry and its managers, bookers, and publicists. Her band-mate Adam Green continued within that realm, and has even been known to sell-out stadium concerts in Europe. Dawson, however, latched onto the growing global do-it-yourself punk scene, booked her own shows, and released all her albums on small, independent labels.

In the past, Dawson has always performed in smaller Bay Area venues. Two years ago, I booked a show for her at a Haight Street coffee house that could barely seat 40 people, but it was canceled at the last minute along with the rest of her tour.

Then Juno happened. It put Dawson back in the spotlight, even more than before. Her last stop in the Bay Area, at 924 Gilman Street, reflected an attempt to hold on to her underground ethos. But when it sold out in less than an hour, it was clear (at least for the time being) that she’d outgrown the facilities that the Bay Area punk scene has to offer.

So, a couple months later, what was the next logical step? Maybe the Independent? Slim’s? Nope — Dawson was asked to play the Herbst Theatre. Yes, the famous seated venue where the United Nations Charter was signed in 1945, a place typically reserved for classical music performances, theater, and dance.

kimya1.jpg
A spoonful of Kimya Dawson helps the Juno hype go down

But Dawson’s down-to-earth demeanor turned the room’s paneled mosaics into finger paintings and shortened the figurative distance from seat-to-stage to mere feet. She knew that she was out of place, and she didn’t mind saying so. “I’ve never played a show in the Bay Area that cost more than five dollars,” she said to the crowd, who’d paid $20 per ticket. “Next time, it’ll be free.”

SFIFF, day six: Iran further away — and Errol Morris

-
0

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The SF International Film Festival has always been open to Iranian films. Festival-goers have been able to see Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1996 A Moment of Innocence and 1998 The Silence, Jafar Panahi’s 2000 The Circle, Jazireh Ahani’s 2005 Iron Island, and a whole batch of Abbas Kiarostami films (he was given the festival’s “achievement in directing” award in 2000). But lately the output of Iranian films has slowed. The unfriendly Bush-era climate could be responsible for fewer Iranian films being imported to the U.S. Or it could be that the burst of new cinema from the 1990s has run its course.

This year’s SFIFF only has only one Iranian film and it’s a decidedly minor work, though still difficult to pinpoint. Mania Akbari was a painter when Kiarostami cast her as the driver for his experimental digital feature Ten (2002). The filmmaking bug bit her and she embarked on her own directorial debut, 20 Fingers (2004), a solid, if sentimental look at different facets of men/women relationships. Now, with Kiarostami’s blessing, she’s returned with the official sequel to Ten, entitled 10 + 4.

10_+_4_01.jpg
10+4, good buddy

Akbari was diagnosed with cancer and decided to make 10+4 about her disease (and about her chemotherapy and resulting baldness). I don’t like disease-of-the-week pictures anyway, but when the disease is real, forming a critical analysis is doubly hard. And when the filmmaker is prone to overreaching (Akbari is), it’s triply difficult. Perhaps making 10+4 helped Akbari come to terms with her illness, and perhaps it will do the same for someone else who watches it. At the very least, some of the film’s segments have a power of their own, hinting that the Iranian New Wave hasn’t entirely dissipated.

SFIFF, weekend one: city songs and auteur-itis

-
1

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The first Saturday of the SF International Film Festival is usually loaded. This year, the broad array of movies included some disappointments: the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts showed that Phil’s a genius with wide-ranging talents and interesting friends, but it lacked drama; Ermanno Olmi’s One Hundred Nails was a letdown from the director of the masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).

The Castro had the day’s best films, starting with Carlos Saura’s magical Fados, so far one of my favorites in the festival. Fado has recently come back in a big way and Saura does little more than stage several music videos back-to-back with no commentary. But each segment overflows with its own narrative and emotional power, aided by Saura’s expert staging and cinematography (the screen fills with huge squares of bold colors).


Carlos Saura’s Fados completes a trilogy by the director

SFIFF, weekend one: Dario, Black Francis, and Roy Andersson

-
0

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I found it vaguely irresponsible, and perhaps even cruel, that the festival programmed its two most high-profile horror pictures on the same night at around the same time. Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears and Paul Wegener’s 1920 film The Golem both played Friday night between 9 and 11 p.m. I managed to see the Argento film in advance: Mother of Tears is the third in a trilogy that Argento began with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), but unlike those two this one is laughably awful. Written and performed in stilted English, it’s filled with continuity gaps, logic holes and otherwise unmotivated behavior. But its use of gratuitous nudity, gratuitous gore (much of it actually done with latex rather than CGI!) and gratuitous random acts of cruelty make it a hilarious, MST3K-style cult classic keeper. Not to mention that Asia Argento, though not exactly deserving of an Oscar, manages to inject enough sheer animal presence into the movie to make it worth sticking around.

Mother of Tears is supposed to get a theatrical release in June, while SFIFF’s particular version of The Golem was a one-time deal. The screening boasted a live score by none other than Black Francis (once again going by his Pixies-era moniker, rather than Frank Black or Charles Thompson). The good news is that it was a great Black Francis show, but the bad news is that I’m not sure the songs actually synced up with or enhanced the movie in any way. For the most part they actually rubbed up against the movie, competed with it for our attention. In 2005, American Music Club’s score for Frank Borzage’s Street Angel (1927), was pure genius, absolutely mesmerizing. Francis’ The Golem played a bit more like syncing up Pink Floyd to The Wizard of Oz (1939); sometimes something magical happened, melding music and film, but other times, you were trapped in some netherworld between the two forms.

SFIFF, day two: A golem on the horizon

-
0

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Tonight, I’m off to see Roy Andersson‘s You, the Living and then Frank Black‘s live accompaniment to 1920’s The Golem. Three years ago at SFIFF, I saw Frank Borzage’s 1927 Street Angel with a live score by the American Music Club, and it was one of the great movie nights of my life. I hope this one comes close.

living.jpg
Word has it that Roy Andersson’s You, the Living blows — in the best possible sense

golem2.jpg
The Golem will soon be hit with a wave of Frank Black’s sonic mutilation

SFIFF, day one: The world according to Asia

-
0

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

This year, it’s Asia Argento‘s festival, and we’re all just invited. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Asia will not be in attendance at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, but her diva-ness will exude throughout. She’s in no less than three festival films this year, a feat I can’t remember ever having been duplicated (if you were quick enough, a fourth one, Boarding Gate, recently opened and closed in San Francisco).

lastmist2.jpg
Asia Argento picnics in The Last Mistress

Asia has always struck me as an unholy fusion of Uma Thurman and Rachel Weisz, but far more daring and alluring. In her father Dario Argento‘s Mother of Tears, she looks unbearably sexy striding through the streets of Rome in a black raincoat. A raincoat! She’s not so much an actress as she is a force of nature; she explodes rather than performs. None of her films can be categorized as trifling, bland or boring, and she sets the bar for guts at this year’s festival. Among the rest of this year’s films one can find elements of psychotronic cinema: dangerous marginal ideas like time-travel, ghosts, murder, martial arts, gore and sex. This is no shoe-gazing, hand-wringing fest. We’ve got some of the strangest films since Harmony Korine’s Gummo turned up in 1998.

Events kick off tonight with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress — starring Asia — and the big opening night party. I’ll talk more about the film tomorrow. After that, I’ll do my best to prowl around the festival front lines, and report back on what I see. I’ll be here every day, unless I somehow fry my retinal nerves in the meantime…

Five random early picks: Bela Tarr’s The Man from London, Peter Chan’s The Warlords, Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life, Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra and Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up on Mu.

Highway 51: The 51st SFIFF, week one

-
0

THURS/24
lastmist.jpg
The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations — 2006’s Anatomy of Hell — to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, the entitled, Mick Jagger-lipped Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decade-long affair with the magnetic mistress to his fiancées grandmother (she’s rapt). Locked into place by an attraction at once destructive and indestructible, they’re not star-crossed lovers so much as fatal accomplices. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years — not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)
7 p.m. Castro
FRI/25
alexand.jpg
Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra’s seventy-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven — Alexandra wanders about the vast compound and war-torn nearby town, trying to re-instill a little humanity between weary, wary occupiers and occupied — but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role (and a non-singing one), veteran opera singer Vishnevskaya etches a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)
7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., PFA
blackbelt.jpg
Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles and a stripped and ripped discipline that allows for only one or two evil cackles from warlord villains, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a brink-of-WWII parable about the uses of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. The year is 1932 and an imperialist Japan has just invaded Manchuria. The next takeover: a peaceful Kyushu karate dojo where the students — arrogant and aggressive Taikan (Tatsuya Naka), dutiful and gentle Giryu (Akihito Yagi), and peacemaker Choei (Yuji Suzuki) — are not quite ready to go quietly into the armed forces. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: the fact that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)
8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki
brick.jpg
Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane — which takes it’s name from a London street on which many immigrants reside — is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. After her mother commits suicide, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is forced to leave Bangladesh in order to marry Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who lives in London, England. There, she submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair with Karim. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)
7:15 p.m., Kabuki
Golem_01.jpg
“The Golem with Black Francis” (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it, this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing in a promised beautiful archival print. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Co-directed by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the Golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history and political commentary. (Harvey)
9:30 p.m., Castro

SFIFF: Apolitical animal

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF Do we have Francisco Vargas’s The Violin (2005) to blame for the omission of Lake Tahoe — the follow-up to Fernando Eimbcke and screenwriting partner Paula Markovitch’s imperfect and wonderful 2004 debut Duck Season — from this year’s selection of Mexican films at the San Francisco International Film Festival? Did the success of Vargas’s film, which won the New Directors Prize at last year’s fest, give the selection committee too much confidence in the rookies?

There are three Mexican films this year, all first features. Though one manages to be an infield home run, the overall representation of the country is underwhelming and, we hope, less than representative.

Let’s begin with Rodrigo Plá’s La Zona (2007), an alleged thriller that seeks to eviscerate Mexico’s cloistered middle class.

It does not. Nestled within the dirty vibrancy of Mexico City is "La Zona," a gated community of those same ornate houses with the Mediterranean-tile roofs that blight the American suburbs (I lived in one during high school). When a fallen billboard becomes a stairway over the wall, a violent scuffle with intruders puts the community’s zoning charter in peril. For the residents of the enclave, the possibility of losing their ability to live separately just won’t do. The movie’s message — that a tier of Mexican society is sacrificing its soul to divorce itself from its economically ravaged country — may as well have been plastered across that catalytic billboard.

La Zona is the type of idea Eimbcke and Markovitch might have considered and rejected in high school. The Nintendo light guns in Duck Season do a helluva better job evoking the spiritual violence that is so painfully literal in La Zona. It’s strange to me that Eimbcke and Markovitch haven’t made a bigger splash in the United States. Lord knows the majority of people inclined toward reading subtitles don’t like to work too hard, but the American influence on these filmmakers’ first film (it got a lot of Stranger Than Paradise comparisons) is apparent. It’s a wonder they aren’t already riding the same train, albeit in coach, as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuarón. They’re minimalists, but the likeable kind.

But enough pining. Back to the reality.

One wants to muster the energy to hope that Alex Rivera’s sci-fi antiglobalization flick Sleep Dealer, which wasn’t available for screening, takes La Zona‘s same drive to filter Mexican political concerns through pop conventions and produces something substantial. The centerpiece concept — site-specific American labor outsourced to Mexico with the help of drones — is certainly intriguing. But judging from the easy political humor of Rivera’s short films (the proxy farm worker idea was already played for laughs in his 1998 short Why Cybraceros?), we should brace for another dour lecture hastily fitted with genre tropes and called subversive.

But even if Sleep Dealer turns out to be a powerhouse, its NAFTA-Tron 3000 robots have to be awfully cool to contend with the quiet power of Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán’s Cochochi. The film, about two preteen brothers from the Raramuri tribe in northwest Mexico, is slightly shy of the visual achievement of The Violin‘s textured grayscale, but it’s also more sincere and less showy in its social awareness. The two boys (real-life brothers Antonio Lerma Batista and Evaristo Lerma Batista), while delivering medicine to family in a neighboring village, promptly lose the horse they "borrowed" from their grandfather. Then they lose one another. Like a bifurcated Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Cochochi is a pleasantly disorienting trek through unfamiliar territory, trailing overburdened children who register their mounting worries with the stony expressiveness kids are brilliant at.

It’s an unassuming naturalist document that, for all its hushed grace, crackles with anxiety and proudly maintains a layer of abrasiveness. In this respect, it reminds me of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ gorgeous nutso-realist films, minus the impish provocation. Like Reygadas, Cárdenas and Guzmán use local, untrained actors to languorously stilted effect. The filmmakers relied heavily on the brothers for the film’s story and dialogue, which is spoken in the Tarahumaran dialect of Raramuri.

Cochochi is no thriller and there aren’t any robots, but it is the rightful destination of your dollar. Besides, if the current Under the Same Moon is any indication of distribution trends, there’ll be plenty of opportunity for self-flagellation later.

COCHOCHI May 1, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 6:30 p.m., PFA

SLEEP DEALER Mon/28, 9 p.m., PFA; May 4, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

LA ZONA May 3, 9:30 p.m., Clay; May 5, 2 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Color her deadly

-
0

It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains at least one, and arguably two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

You’ll go blind doing that

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

ISBN REAL Nobody knows better than writers that there’s nothing inherently special or ennobling about reading a book. Fiction abounds with infatuated references to studious ritual, yet there’s also no shortage of passages that portray reading as a distraction, or an ingredient in a tedious bourgeoisie mating dance. The Great Gatsby (1925) may stroke the ego with its halfwits who treat books as props, but Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) get straight to the point and portray reading as a fool’s pastime.

It still brings me down a bit when I think of that blip of a minor character in Wilson’s book martyred to this belief: a sort of intellectual Margaret Dumont. Here was a woman who undoubtedly read millions of words — and good ones — and all it got her was the position of deluded gadfly.

Meta-masochism is hardly required to appreciate the point that books ain’t all that. There are plenty of sad reminders in the three-dimensional world, like an acquaintance of mine during college who sported on his backpack a button with the mating call "I STILL READ BOOKS." Clearly we had an enlightened soul on our hands, one with an intellect of such dexterity, no less, that he somehow pulled off the Orphean mental journey necessary to think Pay It Forward was a high-quality movie. The world is so full of bookworm poseurs and onanists it’s hard not to question one’s own motives for curling up by the fire.

Mikita Brottman’s new book, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Counterpoint, 224 pages, $14.95) takes a crack at this question on our behalf, attempting a scholarly treatise against the assumption that reading, in and of itself, makes you a better person. Brottman, a language and literature professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, wonders if perhaps our faith in the alchemical power of the practice "draws its power from a toxic brew of magical thinking, narcissism, and nostalgia."

Them’s fightin’ words. Unfortunately, Brottman’s punches don’t land nearly as often as they should. It would be hard to find the academic who could give the hyper-literate life a sound thrashing. But to maintain a modicum of fidelity to one’s thesis, not to mention one’s doubly barbed title, seems a modest expectation. The articulate introduction of Brottman’s book, sprinkled with aperitif-caliber evidence, lugs behind it 200-plus pages of disposable items from the trove of idiosyncrasies that is modern readership. Equal parts trivia, anecdotal digression, and halfhearted cautionary tale about the perils of culture-sanctioned solipsism, the result is not easily distinguishable from a valentine to reading.

I picked up Solitary Vice expecting to intermittently yell, "Preach it!" and have my opinions about literary fetishism fortified with case studies and garnished with academic authority. I don’t buy the spiritual democratization argument put forth in books such as Mark Edmundson’s 2004 Why Read? (Bloomsbury USA, 160 pages, $12.95). A book’s availability is the democratizing factor, not its contents. It seems wise that we’re introduced in our dumb-ass youth to the many types of intellectual life ripe for the plucking if we ever become so inclined. What’s not wise is assuming that students shouldn’t shuck those disciplines they find obnoxious immediately upon leaving school — that the best examples of literature aren’t at their core well-executed indulgences of an impractical enthusiasm. My reading life has helped the world only inasmuch as the world has to put up with a much less cranky person.

I will not fault you, Mikita Brottman, if you humbly disagree.

You’ll go blind doing that

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

ISBN REAL Nobody knows better than writers that there’s nothing inherently special or ennobling about reading a book. Fiction abounds with infatuated references to studious ritual, yet there’s also no shortage of passages that portray reading as a distraction, or an ingredient in a tedious bourgeoisie mating dance. The Great Gatsby (1925) may stroke the ego with its halfwits who treat books as props, but Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) get straight to the point and portray reading as a fool’s pastime.

It still brings me down a bit when I think of that blip of a minor character in Wilson’s book martyred to this belief: a sort of intellectual Margaret Dumont. Here was a woman who undoubtedly read millions of words — and good ones — and all it got her was the position of deluded gadfly.

Meta-masochism is hardly required to appreciate the point that books ain’t all that. There are plenty of sad reminders in the three-dimensional world, like an acquaintance of mine during college who sported on his backpack a button with the mating call "I STILL READ BOOKS." Clearly we had an enlightened soul on our hands, one with an intellect of such dexterity, no less, that he somehow pulled off the Orphean mental journey necessary to think Pay It Forward was a high-quality movie. The world is so full of bookworm poseurs and onanists it’s hard not to question one’s own motives for curling up by the fire.

Mikita Brottman’s new book, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Counterpoint, 224 pages, $14.95) takes a crack at this question on our behalf, attempting a scholarly treatise against the assumption that reading, in and of itself, makes you a better person. Brottman, a language and literature professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, wonders if perhaps our faith in the alchemical power of the practice "draws its power from a toxic brew of magical thinking, narcissism, and nostalgia."

Them’s fightin’ words. Unfortunately, Brottman’s punches don’t land nearly as often as they should. It would be hard to find the academic who could give the hyper-literate life a sound thrashing. But to maintain a modicum of fidelity to one’s thesis, not to mention one’s doubly barbed title, seems a modest expectation. The articulate introduction of Brottman’s book, sprinkled with aperitif-caliber evidence, lugs behind it 200-plus pages of disposable items from the trove of idiosyncrasies that is modern readership. Equal parts trivia, anecdotal digression, and halfhearted cautionary tale about the perils of culture-sanctioned solipsism, the result is not easily distinguishable from a valentine to reading.

I picked up Solitary Vice expecting to intermittently yell, "Preach it!" and have my opinions about literary fetishism fortified with case studies and garnished with academic authority. I don’t buy the spiritual democratization argument put forth in books such as Mark Edmundson’s 2004 Why Read? (Bloomsbury USA, 160 pages, $12.95). A book’s availability is the democratizing factor, not its contents. It seems wise that we’re introduced in our dumb-ass youth to the many types of intellectual life ripe for the plucking if we ever become so inclined. What’s not wise is assuming that students shouldn’t shuck those disciplines they find obnoxious immediately upon leaving school — that the best examples of literature aren’t at their core well-executed indulgences of an impractical enthusiasm. My reading life has helped the world only inasmuch as the world has to put up with a much less cranky person.

I will not fault you, Mikita Brottman, if you humbly disagree. *

Twin Olsen meltdown

-
0

>johnny@sfbg.com

If you see one 11-minute video this year, make it Michael Robinson’s magnificent, hilarious, and terrifying Light Is Waiting (2007). The primordial, extreme slo-mo soundtrack is like a glitch mix from beyond the grave by DJ Screw. Robinson’s seizure-inducing blasts of stroboscopic light rival those of the Austrian film experimentalist Peter Tscherkassky.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Olsen twins.

Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, that formerly pint-size pair of formerly perfectly interchangeable human products, are part of Light Is Waiting. Robinson uses episodes of Full House as source material. His video’s first big punch line arrives after a two-minute unfiltered blast of the sitcom replete with laugh track, bad fashions, and Candace Cameron’s feathered hairdo. Robinson’s deployment of this clip is akin to a magician juggling TVs. He then mines the show’s trip-to-Hawaii episode — a colonialist trope that dates back past The Brady Bunch to another Robinson, last-name Crusoe (and that fires up a torch that’s been passed forward into the Survivor era) — in a manner so kaleidoscopic it’s hallucinatory. A three-eyed John Stamos’ version of "Rock-a-Hula Baby" turns into a Godzilla dirge, as his white-pantsed rump does the bump with itself. One Olsen twin becomes one two-headed Olsen twin, then turns into two Olsen twins forced to smooch each other.

Light Is Waiting exorcises American pop cultural demons via video the way Kenneth Anger did with film in 1964’s Scorpio Rising. Rife with floral symbolism, Robinson’s older studious excavations of the ideologies lurking beneath scenic landscapes don’t have the same impact. He had a semi-breakthrough with 2006’s And We All Shine On, where a karaoke instrumental of "Nothing Compares 2 U" — yet more floral imagery, this time evoked via unsung lyrics — magnifies the loneliness of video game vistas. The sardonic creep factor is akin to that of Bobby Abate’s One Mile Per Min (2002), and it makes me wonder what a recent Robinson video I haven’t seen, 2007’s Victory over the Sun, does to Axl Rose.

SHINE ON: FILMS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON

April 27, 7:30 p.m., $6–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

Here, my Dearie: Jacqui Naylor knows Blossom Dearie

-
0

By Johnny Ray Huston

SFBG When was the first time you saw Blossom live on stage? What impressions or favorite memories do you have from her performances?
Jacqui Naylor I first saw Blossom with my vocal teacher, Faith Winthrop, in 1997 in San Francisco at the Great American Music Hall. I fell in love with her unmistakably sweet voice, quirky delivery and unmatched style.
Blossom’s voice was small and large at the same time and she used her nice range to tell the story of a song with sincerity, rather than over singing it, sometimes with a little sweet vibrato at the top and sometimes with an almost speaking quality in her middle and lower register. I appreciated that she made the most of every lyric, especially with such a diverse repertoire, everything from lovingly sung ballads to wit-filled swing tunes and songs that she wrote. I was also struck by the fact that she was selling her CDs herself and taking the time to sign them for people. I have a few that I cherish from that evening. She is the only artist from whom I’ve felt compelled to get a signature.

SFBG Did you know Blossom?
JN I saw Blossom on a number of occasions in New York and met her through my distributor, John Nustvold, from Ryko/Warner. He is also a big fan of her work and was hopeful to get her music out to more people. We dreamed that maybe there were even some unreleased tracks that we could help bring to market.
I should say here that Blossom not only inspired me musically but also in her business savvy, since she was one of the first artists to own her own label, Daffodil Records. It was great to meet her and tell her how much she had affected me, inspiring my own Ruby Star Records and my determination to find a sound that was uniquely mine. It is because of her that I stopped worrying about whether I sounded like a traditional jazz singer and instead focused on telling the stories of the songs I chose to sing in a ways that felt true to me. Because of her, I also began to imagine bringing humor to my music and shows by reinterpreting the idea of modern cabaret songs, and by writing songs that might inspire people. Many of the songs Blossom chose to sing touted words of spring, birds, love, flight, and yes, blossoms. And even when she sang the most cruel and humorous cabaret song, she did so with a sense of compassion, humility and good fun. Famous for refusing to sing unless her audience was quiet, Blossom did so politely and without malice. A true talent with a lot of grace and charm.

Blossom Dearie sings “Surrey With the Fringe on Top”

After the jump: Schoolhouse Rock, grape-peeling appeal, great live clips, “Blossom’s Blues” and Dearie’s musicianship,

Neo Geo trio

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com

"Bay Area Now" roundups have come and gone since Glen Helfand coined the term "the Mission School" in an influential 2002 Guardian cover piece (See "The Mission school," 04/07/02). Exactly six years later, the "heartfelt, handmade" traits Helfand described still hang heavy over or range freely through local art aesthetics, even if a few core creative forces from the loose movement — Alicia McCarthy, especially — didn’t cash in on the cachet of a higher profile. But April is always a month for growth: this year it brings a trio of shows by San Francisco (or SF-to-NYC) artists who’ve moved through or around Mission School color and figuration, forging a new direction and forming a new pattern. Call it 21st-century Neo Geo, though the tag might not apply to what these artists will be doing 12 months from today.

A playful approach to geometric shape is at the core of distinct traits shared by Todd Bura’s, Ruth Laskey’s, and Will Yackulic’s new shows. Dozens of triangles form formidable spheres in "A Prompt and Present Cure," Yackulic’s collection of 10 works on paper at Gregory Lind Gallery. These spheres have been likened to geodesic domes, disco globes, and IBM Selectric typewriter balls. I’d throw in mentions of Asteroids and the orb from Phantasm (1979) for good measure, though such 1980s pop cult references are no longer as near the forefront of Yackulic’s visuals as when he offered a twist on the phrase cubist via images that suggested the video game Q-Bert gone existentially lonely. Yackulic’s new work is a breakthrough, due to sheer inventiveness: in all the show’s pieces, he paints with a typewriter.

Throughout most of "A Prompt & Perfect Cure," Yackulic uses endlessly repeated asterisk and period symbols to generate waves and horizons of visual energy, and sometimes even employs the typewriter to create the show’s signature orbs. Like op art, the resulting pieces lure one to press one’s face against the object itself, and they take on three-dimensionality when viewed as group formations from a distance. The potent, disconcerting humor of Yackulic’s show stems partly from his laconic use of text, a strategy that — along with his use of pre-electric typewriters — obliquely acknowledges his New York School poetic roots. But it stems primarily from his spheres, a gang of faceless main characters. Some are darker, some lighter, as if the viewer facing them is giving off varying degrees of glare. Yackulic also has a droll flair for timing, saving his bravura gesture for the tenth, last, and largest piece, where one orb joins another — a cause for celebration, or worry?

Some Time to Mend the Mind, the title of that duel-sphere finale, might apply in reverse to Todd Bura’s "Misfits" at Triple Base Gallery. Like Yackulic, Bura has an interest in geometrically-based architectural representations of mental states. But his penchant for arranging wooden right angles results in three-dimensional sculptural forms in addition to two-dimensional painterly ones. He also has a poetic sensibility, though his gambit of giving 14 pieces the title Untitled, followed by a small group of capital letters in parentheses, is cumulatively closer to language poetry, albeit language poetry overcome with angst.

"Misfits" has a unique quality, as if Bura found fragments from his inner world, brought them to a room, then mounted or arranged them for people to see. (Its quietude and careful use of placement, akin to that of the Bay Area’s Bill Jenkins, also draws attention to the space around Bura’s works — even or especially if they are framed or on canvas.) While Bura might be devoted to the idea of a unfinished whole that is nonetheless greater than the sum of its parts, there are a few standout enigmas. Untitled (NIT) builds from his past explorations of — and emphasis on — paper’s materiality, while remaining a riddle: does it utilize the inset of a book’s cover, or is it a collage in which comics peak from the very edges of aging blank pages? (A small formation of pinpricks on the surface characterizes Bura’s varied minimalism.) Perhaps indebted to Richard Tuttle, the much larger oil painting Untitled (ETRI) layers light over darkness. (Or does it cover darkness with light? Regardless, Bura plays the recurrent binary both ways.) The latter suggests a buried cross or intersection.

Ruth Laskey’s approach to geometric form is based upon intersections, though her presentation, at least at first glance, trades Bura’s evocative, open-ended symbolism for a plain approach that recognizes that literal meaning is many-faceted. As the saying goes, Laskey’s "7 Weavings," at Ratio 3, is what it is: seven tapestries from her ongoing "Twill" series, where the structures or perhaps strictures of the loom and the diagonals of twill shape help form diamonds, triangles, pyramids, and crosses of color. Like Yackulic, Laskey’s process involves extreme repetition that yields varying waves of visual energy — albeit megaminimal, muted waves that might require squinting. As Rachel Churner notes in a recent Artforum essay, Laskey’s tapestries "are not fields for projection, but rather instances of the figure being imbedded in the ground itself."

One of the rich literal pleasures of Laskey’s tapestries is their deployment of specific reds, blues, yellows, and greens, which is less antic but just as imaginative as the peak Mission School–era in terms of drawing from Josef Albers’s color theories. At times, new hues emerge from the intersection of two individual colors that Laskey has first created by blending dyes and then painting the thread that she weaves through cloth. There’s an inscrutable quality to "7 Weavings" that echoes that of Bura’s and Yackulic’s shows: the colorful cloth shapes Laskey forms might as well be flags for countries in a world a bit more observant, and less brutish, than our own.

MISFITS: NEW WORK BY TODD BURA

Through May 4; Thurs.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.

Triple Base

3041 24th St., SF

(415) 643-3943

www.basebasebase.com

RUTH LASKEY: 7 WEAVINGS

Through April 26; Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

WILL YACKULIC: A PROMPT & PERFECT CURE

Through May 17; Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Gregory Lind Gallery

49 Geary, Fifth Floor, SF

(415) 296-9661

www.gregorylindgallery.com

Lit: A Nowtopian Q&A with Chris Carlsson

-
0

By Erick Lyle

Chris Carlsson, one of the founders of Critical Mass, has long been one of San Francisco’s most notable utopian tinkerers. Through projects like his magazine Processed World and his radical archive Shaping San Francisco, he has devoted much unpaid labor to investigating lost people’s history and to imagine possibilities for a better world. In 2004, he turned his attention to the future with After the Deluge, a speculative fiction novel about a post-economic San Francisco of 2157 where compulsory work has nearly been abolished and the Financial District has been submerged in rising floodwaters caused by global warming.

Carlsson’s brand-new book, Nowtopia (AK Press, 288 pages, $18.95), looks, instead, for seeds of that money-free utopia in the present, with chapters focusing on subjects as diverse as vacant-lot gardeners, the growing bio-fuels movement, the rise of Bike Kitchens across the nation, and Burning Man. Carlsson shows that as our economy, civic institutions, and faith in the system continue to break down, there are people all over the world organizing autonomously to “build the new world in the shell of the old.”

nowtopia.jpg

SFBG: In Nowtopia, you highlight groups of people who are doing very diverse things. How do you perceive that, say, the open source software movement, the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, and people who farm empty lots in West Oakland are related?
CHRIS CARLSSON: I tried to reduce those things to the common thread that they are all forms of self-expressive behavior that people are doing outside of work and outside of what they consider to be political. People are coming together to try to add to their depth of experience, or to make their lives worth living. All of the activities in the book also represent people who have a creative engagement with technology.

SFIFF: Color her deadly

-
0

It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains not one, but two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

Scanner: In Touch with Henry Rollins

-
0

By Johnny Ray Huston

Welcome to Scanner, my occasional foray into bringing archival goodies and contemporary obscurities into the digital realm. What better way to kick things off than with a gay porn magazine’s lengthy interview with Henry Rollins, back when he was a prime slab of pre-‘roidal rough trade beefcake. In 1984, In Touch magazine got in touch, verbally at least, with the punk paragon. The magazine’s Jim Yousling doesn’t spell Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s name correctly, but he gets Rollins to speak relatively freely about raw letters from admirers of both sexes. The raw Q&A even includes a touching heart-to-heart phone convo between Rollins and dear ‘ol Mom. The same issue also boasts “The Sexiest Men in Rock, Part 2,” a lengthy spread with naked pics of the then-obscure Red Hot Chili Peppers, some strange choices (Huey Lewis?!), and a nod to Judas Priest that calls them “a crotch-watcher’s dream band” before concluding, “If only we could print the rumors.”

Henry_web.jpg

Where’s Otto?

-
0

>a&eletters@sfbg.com

ISBN REAL Graphic novels, obviously, aren’t just movies with a lot of missing frames. In the hands of artists like David B. or Craig Thompson, the elastic potential of their subjects, and of the panels that hold them, is realized in a manner entirely at odds with the medium of film.

From the perspective of screenwriters, however — particularly ones beaten repeatedly over the head with the knotty stick of the studio system — that’s nothing that can’t be worked out over a cup of coffee. More and more frustrated writers and directors are reviving their dead film and television projects in the form of comics and graphic novels, either as a last, affordable option or as a way of seeing an original vision make it through the production process intact. Joss Whedon could follow his and not the WB’s muse with the illustrated-only eighth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and certainly no one was knocking down Richard Kelly’s door to film the six-part prequel to Southland Tales.

Alex Cox, writer and director of the 1984 cult classic Repo Man, also has seen the light. His sequel to that film, Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday (Gestalt Publishing, 164 pages, $19.95), is finally coming out, after more than a decade in the drawer, as a graphic novel. The script, written for the screen in the mid-1990s, was presented unsuccessfully to Universal and then later was the source material for an unfinished independent venture. So Cox posted the screenplay on his Web site, as well as dozens of others he has written or cowritten, with the open offer of a yearlong license to anyone interested in making a film.

Comics artist Chris Bones responded with a graphic novel proposal. The finished version, with artistic contributions by Justin Randall, is a richly drawn and smartly assembled festival of scuzz.

Waldo, as one might expect, answers the questions Repo Man raised with equivocation and deferment, and adds a couple of revelations that are quite cool if I understand them right.

You’ll recall that Repo Man left our hero, Otto, as he was shooting off into space in a glowing green 1964 Chevy Malibu. What we are kinda informed of right off the bat in the sequel is that Otto, now calling himself Waldo (presumably in a legal sidestep), has come back from a 10-year stint on Mars, maybe, though he thinks he’s only been gone for the night. Expecting to find his numskull parents where he left them on the couch, he shows up at their door only to discover he owes rent to a couple of bachelors (one "confirmed") now living there in meticulously rendered squalor.

Waldo more or less shrugs off his situation and proceeds to hop from one doomed job to the next, each of them overseen by the same mysterious man, though under different names. All the while, he abuses the trusting nature of the Russian Shopping Network and makes several attempts to use free tickets to Hawaii he earned by sitting through a real estate pitch. (I’m still not sure what was glowing in the Malibu’s trunk in Cox’s movie.)

Of course, there are more aliens and whatnot, but the strangest thing is Otto-now-Waldo’s change in temperament. The edgy, snotty Emilio Estevez of Repo Man is nowhere in sight. Waldo is a gentle, courteous kind of punk who says things like, "I’ll just redouble my efforts … buy a printer, get these job applications out, find another job ASAP." Waldo must have learned the word "redouble" in space, where he also picked up a considered cheeriness that could have been mistaken for maturity if it weren’t so apparent that Cox is up to something.

It helps to know that Cox is not one to shy away from the polemical, particularly at the expense of economic imperialism. The introduction to X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press, 304 pages, $17.95), an upcoming book about his experiences as a filmmaker, is only a few angry pen strokes shy of a screed, and his 1987 film Walker lampooned — not very elegantly, really — the 19th-century American mercenary William Walker’s overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Amongst Cox’s movies, Three Businessmen, a 1998 love child of the gospel according to Luke and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), presents the closest echoes of Waldo. Its characters share Waldo’s aimless, profligate compliance with the dictates of modern capitalism.

And that’s really what Waldo’s Hawaiian Adventure is about, probably.

Would you finance that movie?

1...141516...25Page 15 of 25

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