This year the Sundance Film Festival has a new programmer (John Cooper) and a fresh vow of cinema relevance. We’ll see about that but one thing’s for sure the state of Sundance, artistically and financially, has a hell of a lot to do with the treats that will sustain art house maniacs. What follows are my hunches as to what may make it out of Park City and on to screens from forty feet to four inches.
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“You have killed God, sir! Say good riddance to the old bugger. Science is at war with religion and when we win we’ll be rid of those old bishops with their damn everlasting sense of divine retribution. We’ll lose things that are clearly redundant, like the appendix and the male nipple!”
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There’s no way on earth that any higher authority can question the things that make us laugh or cry, or god forbid, both. In a sense all humor, especially the anarchic, non-linear variety involves a willful regression to whatever devilish impulses were nurtured in the garden of childhood. As children we rejoice, laugh and give way to absolutely fiendish delight at virtually every attempt to subvert, suspend and topple the tyranny of adult rules and even the laws of the physical universe that seem to prop up adult authority.
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An epidemic of mysterious and increasingly brutal crimes descends on a small German Protestant farm village in Michael Haneke’s nuanced fable about whether repressive religion and draconian child rearing practices can lay the groundwork for unthinkable evil.
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In possibly the most deceptively slow moving police movie you’ll ever see, a young Romanian vice cop faces a crisis of conscience when pressed by his bosses to bust a college kid for possessing a small amount of hashish.
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Unless you happen to be a diehard fan of the Fox Network’s best kept secret comedy show, Arrested Development, or have a weird trope for watching vintage Canadian kiddy TV, you probably never heard of the Brampton, Ontario born Michael Cera until a certain astonishingly sweet scene popped at the very end of the Judd Apatow produced box office busting teen comedy, Superbad.
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A Single Man: In Tom Ford’s hyper cool take on Christopher Isherwood’s path breaking 1964 novel, a middle-age Englishman, George, wakes up in his stylish LA home heartsick over the recent death of his young lover. Despite discarding significant portions of Isherwood’s George, Ford maintains the novel’s core conceit that taking us through a day in George’s life will reveal the whole of that life in what might be its last day.

Invictus: The thirtieth feature film directed by San Francisco born libertarian Clint Eastwood tests your knowledge of Nelson Mandela, possibly the world’s most violent contact sport and a not-so-obscure British poem that’s been quoted everywhere from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the final words of Okalahoma City terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh.
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In his three edgy comedy/dramas, Canadian born writer/director Jason Reitman has displayed a sure knack for summoning feisty chemistry between characters from different generations. In Thank You for Smoking a brazenly charming tobacco lobbyist gives his teenage son a hands on lesson in political spin-doctoring; in Juno a very pregnant high school girl enables a frustrated adult woman to achieve motherhood while learning how to slip back into a far more innocent role with her own cute-as-pudding track star boyfriend.
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In Broken Embraces, his latest meditation on how a love of movies can shape, enrich and at times perhaps even redeem our lives, Spanish master Pedro Almodovar first shows us a seemingly broken man, a blind man who begins this particular day by buying a newspaper. Harry Caine – even his cinema charged name possesses an intriguing back story – saddles up to a beautiful young woman in the street – who has just popped out of a nearby “modeling” agency. Drinking in her odor, Harry persuades the young woman to return to his flat on the pretext that she read to him from the newspaper.
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It has taken San Francisco based filmmaking partners Scott McGehee (he’s gay) and David Siegel (and he’s not) over fifteen years to turn out four films – their weird 1994 thinking man’s horror debut Suture; their gay kid in trouble with a bathhouse mob boss, who’s saved by his very focused mom, The Deep End; their crack at filming a quality bestseller with a star laden cast, Bee Season; and now (opening Friday at the Roxie) their lovers on the lam New York thriller and just possibly their breakout hit, Uncertainty.
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In the taut, heartbreaking, emotionally truthful new family at war drama from Irish director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot/In America), two brothers, Sam and Tommy Cahill are sitting at a New Mexico ice rink. Sam, has followed their mean drunk of a dad straight into the substitute family of the United States Marine Corps – as we watch him Sam, his boyish countenance haggard from an unnatural weight loss, experienced on a fourth hitch in Afghanistan – is perched close to black sheep brother, Tommy.
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In Tom Ford’s exhilarating take on Christopher Isherwood’s path breaking 1964 novel A Single Man (based on a screenplay co-written with David Scearce), a middle-age Englishman, George (Colin Firth), wakes up in his sunny, very stylish LA home heartsick over the recent and still incomprehensible death of his young lover, Jim (Matthew Goode). Despite discarding significant portions of Isherwood’s George (more on this in a moment) Ford deftly maintains the novel’s core conceit that taking us through a day in George’s life will allow us to see the whole of that life in what might be its last day.
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Movies that get under my skin can drive me to books that spawned them: No Country for Old Men, Revolutionary Road and now Push, a 1996 novel by army brat, performance poet Sapphire.    

On the printed page this overweight black teenager’s existential wail was uncomfortably close to my younger self’s fall into the welfare caste system, brutal or distracted parents, weird food and huge overdoses of the worst kind of TV.
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When, half jokingly, I refer to him as “a poet of the Oakland flatlands,” the Alabama born but Bay Area loving Frazer Bradshaw is slightly startled and little amused. But nobody who sees his meticulously crafted first feature film, Everything Strange and New (opening Friday at the Roxie), will doubt for a second that this career cinematographer has lovingly, tenderly, dare I say hypnotically captured a landscape and a people, who are at times as much prisoners as residents of that landscape.
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This lushly filmed Russian River love story will linger with lonely-hearts of all persuasions. Everett -- the risibly fussy and preternaturally boyish Brendan Bradley: in the film his character is aptly described as “twelve going on forty” -- is a young guy trapped in a suffocating marriage to the more than slightly anal Miles (Tad Coughenour).
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If Merchant/Ivory’s Howard’s End is a perfect metaphor for bristling class tensions in just before the Great War (1910) Britain, perhaps Chilean director/writer Sebastian Silva’s (with Pedro Peirano) domestic farce about a posh Santiago family’s fumbling for a new way to view a cherished but misunderstood domestic servant is a lens for viewing a post-Pinochet Chile.
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This inspired bit of lunacy, from the creators of Napoleon Dynamite, is an instant cult classic, spoofing home-schooled kids, Mormon uber geeks, Star Trek fanatics, crossing-dressing divas and the question of original authorship.
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Personally, I haven’t had this much fun laughing at pretentiousness and the dogged pursuit of false values since Alex Guinness adapted Joyce Carey’s story about an old rascal of a painter, Gulley Jimson, in The Horse’s Mouth.
  Jonathan Parker’s art spoof (co-written with Catherine DiNapoli) is witty, sharply observed and makes good use of its talented leads.
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If you’re a fan of movies where real men manage to break the taboos about touching, without actually fucking, a tough minded, tendered hearted new film, The Messenger, may be just the ticket.
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The notion that music on the radio can actually have an impact on your life seems horribly old fashioned in a day when young folks robotically tune into their ten thousand song play lists on their iPods. A new movie out from the writer of the gay friendly British comedy Four Weddings and Funeral gloriously recalls a time when rock ‘n roll did actually signify a not so quiet revolution against all the stuffy WWII era conventions that hung on into the not yet swinging sixties like bread mold.
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The 7^th Third Eye San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival covers a large swath of subjects affecting peoples this turbulent region centered around the Indian subcontinent. Kicking off Thursday and Friday at the Roxie, the festival concludes Saturday ands Sunday at The Castro.
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Rebounding from a bout of severe depression that he claims left him unable to work, Danish Dogme 95 daddy Lars von Trier has returned to some of his favorite themes and devices in a new film provocatively called Antichrist.  Von Trier won a loyal and sometimes uncritical following for his 1996 masterwork Breaking the Waves, in which a naïve young woman embarks on a series of affairs in the hope of somehow alleviating her husband’s paralysis.
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This Bay Area produced blood spattered adventure from James Issac puts you in the company of a racially diverse, seemingly nice group of young upscale San Francisco city folks as they push way beyond their limits into Deliverance territory.
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As Roman Polanski rots in a Swiss jail a new screen romance puts a zesty new wrinkle on the curse of dirty old men and young girls with large musical instruments. In an edgy “cute meet” scene seventeen-year old Jenny (the likely to be Oscar nominated Carey Mulligan) is hauling her cello through the rain when she is approached by the silky smooth and twenty-years-older David (a  lovely deceptive cad turn by Peter Sarsgaard) driving an outlandishly sexy sports sedan.
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In possibly his best save the country from itself tutorial, a sadder and wiser Michael Moore resurrects Depression-era factory sit-ins, glimpses of greed in action and the almost forgotten gospel of FDR to produce a Frank Capra worthy documentary promoting the “D” word, as in democracy.
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If you’re as sick of dystopian fantasies as I am and dread even sitting through trailers for The Road, this uproarious dystopian spoof/action comedy is cinema catnip. Kicking off in my family’s hometown, Garland, Texas (“Garland is car-land”), we meet uber nerd college boy, Jesse Eisenberg. Jesse soon acquires a wuss-baiting sidekick, Woody Harrelson, who rudely assesses his manly deficiencies, “I bet you’re a real bitch!”
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Not, perhaps, since Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy has a talented filmmaker challenged his audience to an integrity war quite as brazenly as does first time director Robert Siegel.
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In this awkward, sweet, painfully accurate new comedy from the producer of  Beeswax, our increasingly gentrified Mission District becomes “the Valley of ex’s” as ex-boyfriends, girlfriends, straight and gay, perform an elaborate ballet of avoidance and re-coupling. This clumsy dance for which no one quite seems to know the steps begins for us in bed as a one night stand between Kira – recently evicted from a nearby bed and involved in a painful process of vocational downsizing – cuddles up to Max – owner of the bed, a playful cherub, this night cheating on his non-live in girlfriend.
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In Russian auteur Karen Shakhnazarov’s funny/sad peek at a seventies generation of pop besotted Russian youth, three pals start a rock band, trade stolen old books for American clothes and British rock and generally drink away their college years.
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With over three dozen programs – 36 features and two shorts collections – the San Francisco DocFest (running at the Roxie Cinema October 16^th through 29^th) provides one of the most wildly entertaining, and thoughtful collections of non-fiction filmmaking on the subject of human obsessions. With most programs screening twice, here’s my pick of four not to miss.
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In Pop Star on Ice (DocFest/October 25 & 28^th), a startlingly intimate examination of a brilliant and dashingly handsome young queer athlete, who just may be on the verge of winning Olympic gold, we behold our young hero in a series of coy poses.
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What is there about the movie sequel that makes it so often feel like the ultimate act of betrayal? In the dreaded seventies every time I kissed a boy, especially if his name was Tom, I couldn’t wait to repeat the act – and yes, it was always better each subsequent time! But never did I pine for Jaws 2, Rocky 2, Airplane 2 (well, maybe I’ll make an exception there), Superman 2, The Apartment 2?
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In the beginning of the latest and possibly best film in the Coen Brothers’ distinctly weird body of work, A Serious Man, we find ourselves securely lodged inside the head of a thirteen-year-old Jewish pothead. That well-groomed head has a white wire extending out of its ear, the wire running into a small transistor radio from which is emanating a druggie anthem: Darby Slick’s lyrics for The Jefferson Airplane’s first Top 40 hit Somebody to Love.
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Years ago, hooked on PBS’ The News Hour -- that orgy of competing DC think tanks with their insidious agendas – I noticed the funding credit for Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). After gulping down the latest Steven Soderbergh thang, The Informant!, I started to grasp that my news fix of choice would have been less morally compromised if the underwriting checks had been signed by Tony Soprano.
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In an era awash in pornography, it’s refreshing to catch a film where the “money shot” between the lovers consists of a bout of fully clothed sonnet reading. There’s much to recommend in Jane Campion’s resolutely downbeat account of the last two years’ of the tragically brief life of the great Romantic Era poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw), as seen through the eyes of his platonic lover Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish).
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Novice director/star screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, Amores Perros, The Night Buffalo, 21 Grams) brings his patented multi-character, multi-layered style to a story that confusingly time flips between parallel tales of women flirting with forbidden loves.
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The 32^nd Mill Valley Film Festival (October 8^th through the 18^th at CineArts@Sequoia theatres in Mill Valley and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center) is chock full of celebrity sightings. A fiftieth birthday party for San Francisco’s legendary Mime Troupe follows a screening of the 1985 doc Troupers (Throckmorton Theatre/Mill Valley/10-16); British leading man Clive Owen is honored (Rafael/10-9/followed by his debut in Croupier); Uma Thurman’s astonishing versatility, from Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, is celebrated in conversation and by her latest star turn in Motherhood (Rafael10-10); Juno and Thank You for Smoking director Jason Reitman unveils his latest satire, Up in the Air (Rafael/10-14); Cassavetes’ veteran Seymour Cassel appears with Rob Nilsson (Throc/10-14); and Woody Harrelson screens his sensitive war drama The Messenger.
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In 2003 the Global Film Initiative started serving the needs of subtitled deprived filmgoers. This year’s batch of dramas from China, Macedonia, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Argentina, Mozambique, Kazakhstan, Iran and Morocco provide acute glimpses of landscapes that often pall on the evening news. Here’s five I liked (playing September 25 through October 7 at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael) including a totally unexpected glimpse of queer boy flesh on a slab.
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In his harrowing biography of the late queer film genius Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Love is Colder Than Death, Robert Katz quotes a highly agitated Fassbinder on the morning of October 18, 1977, reacting to the news that Andreas Baader and several of his associates in a then notorious gang of ultra-left-wing terrorists had committed suicide while in custody at the West German Federal prison at Stammheim.
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Once again this little vest pocket showcase plays over four days (September 9-12) at The Red Vic Movie House – 60 films and music videos from 19 countries with a hefty variety of Bay Area entries.
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Where have all the queer films gone? After one of the finest batch of fiction features and docs at the SF LGBT Festival it’s been somewhat depressing to discover that very few are headed for commercial screens.

Why? The downsizing of Hollywood’s once thriving Indie divisions plus the increasing uncertainty in distribution channels prompted by tight money and the move to web streaming of specialty films has left fall slates with a notable absence of LGBT films.
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Taking Woodstock opens on a note of Borsch Belt comedy – Elliot’s ferocious mom gives the fish eye to a enraged guest at the Tiber’s rundown Catskills motel and then proceeds to do her “I walked through the snow out of Russia” rant to the local bank president. The El Monaco is virtually a roach motel – unlocked rooms, pubic hair sticking to unwashed sheets, unconnected phones and fake air conditioners. The first third of this bitter Jewish family comedy is taken up with the Tibers staving off foreclosure. Elliot, (the fresh-faced, Cable TV comic Demetri Martin) ever the dutiful and forlornly closeted good Jewish son, has poured every cent from his Gotham decorating business into keeping the El Monaco and its surrounding swamp land off the auction block.
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In Shane Meadows’ poignant, bittersweet, but ultimately comic ode to the totally unexpected friendship that erupts between adolescent boys, a sly manipulator -- Tomo

(the cheeky discovery from Meadow’s skinhead family saga, This Is England, Thomas Turgoose), a boy fleeing the British Midlands, insinuates himself into the life of a young Polish lad, Marek (Piotr Jagiello), himself dealing with the fallout from his first brush with puppy love – a crush on an engaging young immigrant woman, Maria.
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Turkish director Abdullah Oguz’s stylistic risks pay off beautifully in this travelogue gorgeous road movie that explores the emotional growth of a teenage rape victim who faces the double jeopardy of her still feudal community’s savage sense of honor.
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Basterds opens on a deceptively quiet note on a small French dairy farm. The time is 1941 and its an anxious time for anybody hiding Jewish refugees in Nazi occupied France. A French farmer who has a whole Jewish family hiding in his the basement of his crude farm house has a distinctly uncomfortable encounter with an SS officer, Colonel Landa – played with in three different languages with an almost feline grace and feral menace by German character actor Christoph Waltz – the scene played out observing all the rules of classic Hollywood cinema features bouts of whiskey drinking, pipe smoking and perhaps one of the most sinister takes on a truly evil man ingesting two glasses of fresh dairy milk ever captured anywhere. By the time the scene reaches its inevitably denouement all but one member of the Jewish family has been slaughter and the surviving daughter is seen fleeing across an open field to an uncertain fate.
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In the riveting new film Pressure Cooker three inner-city high school seniors find not only their greatest teacher but a real substitute mom in a fierce, no-nonsense culinary school instructor by the name of Wilma W. Stephenson. Seemingly oblivious to the cameras rolling through her North Philadelphia school kitchens during two life changing semesters, Mrs. Stephenson makes it perfectly clear on day one that not everybody is cut out to be a first class chef but that those who internalize her rigorous standards can expect a passport to scholarship money and some of this country’s finest cooking academies.
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This unexpected jump cut to a sexually more permissive time comes as an aspiring American cook is pulling some freshly boiled cannelloni out of a pot of hot water. One of the first things you learn about the legendary cooking star Julia Child in Nora Ephron‘s affectionate new bio-pic is just how important her cozy, collegial and sexually alive marriage to hubby Paul Child (Stanley Tucci) was in establishing Julia (an outrageously amusing, at times slapstick funny Meryl Streep)  as America’s TV ambassador to the kitchens of France.
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The self-pitying hero of this pleasant if shallow young love on-the-rocks dramedy, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has landed a job he knows is beneath him, that of copy writer for a treacle-prone greeting card company – “Everyday you make me proud, but today you get a card” – the only worthy perk is Tom’s libidinous proximity to the boss’s assistant, Summer (Zooey Deschanel).
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I’m not sure why playing Jeffrey Dahmer in what one critic hailed as “a sensitive, non-exploitive serial killer movie,” qualifies Jeremy Renner to play a military bomb disposal expert in the best and perhaps last of the Iraq era war movies, but there you have it. Fans of Kathryn Bigelow’s heart pounding, subversively funny early 90’s surfer bank heist flick Point Break know this gal can handle the guy-land niche of mixing screen gore with a wicked grasp of the genre’s absurd pertinence.
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In Pedro: The True Story of Pedro Zamora, a twenty-two-year-old intensely charismatic, Cuban born AIDS activist learns just how sick he really is during a doctor’s appointment. Unlike most young men getting really bad news Pedro’s dilemma is complicated by the fact that cameras are rolling.
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In the gorgeous widescreen b/w restoration of Calder Willingham’s witty send-up of hazing rituals at “The Southern Military Academy” (based on South Carolina’s notorious Citadel) a young cadet officer (a youthful Pat Hingle) sneers at two shaking in their boots cadet students, looking especially foolish standing in their pajamas minutes after lights out.
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Kirby Dick has never hesitated to take his camera places where the going gets rough...In Outrage he goes inside a shadowy institution that he argues is one of the most dangerous and least reported in America: the political closet. Beginning with the almost farcical fall from grace of former Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, after he was caught propositioning a Minnesota state cop in an airport lavatory, Dick ends by tip toeing close to a very powerful door, that of popular Republican Governor Charles Crist, jr.
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The ever shortening window between a great movie’s life on the big screen and the DVD release means that many fans will clutch their copies of Focus Features’ Milk while the bio pic still graces more than 400 screens and is inching past a very respectable $45 million dollar worldwide box office gross, while many still bask in the afterglow of Oscar speeches by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and lead actor Sean Penn.
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This slick package of six shorts bounces geographically: South Florida, East Coast, West Coast, Norway and Brazil with sharply observed stories, director interviews (for four films) and an optional 19-year-old Latin boy host, Oscar Peralta, who is tastefully appealing without stooping to video lap dancing.
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A new series on here! TV – John Roecker's Everything You Wanted to Know About Gay Porn Stars *but were afraid to ask – is an intimate, brave and frequently witty exploration inside the heads of sixteen male erotic video performers, many with well known porn deplumes: Johnny Hazzard, Brad Benton, Nick Capra and Jason Ridge.
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This week at the movies be prepared to lose your heart to a valiant young queer lad who figures out how to turn the tables on his prep school's thuggish rugby boys, with a little assistance from Mr. William Shakespeare. Were the World Mine opens on a kind of mock execution of the sort most of us endured in PE class, the dreaded dodge ball game where all of a sudden it's open warfare on the gay boy. Just as our hero to be, Timothy (the radiantly handsome, multi-talented newcomer Tanner Cohen) is about to be smacked senseless and given a honey of a shiner, the movie freezes on the movie playing within Timothy's about to be battered noggin, a movie where he turns into Shakespeare's sly trickster, Puck, spreading a special kind of fairy dust that will turn everyone it touches into a lover of his own sex.
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It's official, The Boys in the Band has now entered the cannon of great queer art, complete with a Tony Kushner authorized Good Housekeeping seal of approval. That last line is no joke, incidentally, the author of Angels in America provides a witty and incisive testimonial to the proud queer lineage of Crowley's still astonishingly funny and cathartic snapshot or urban gay life just before the dawn of Stonewall.
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In many ways a counter intuitive tale about the mysteries of becoming famous in America, Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon reveals the many improbable ways in which gay male porn stars helped father and advance the gay liberation movement. With witty interviews from porn industry insiders and celebrity Wrangler fans, Jeffrey Schwarz's immensely entertaining doc tells the wildly improbable tale of a little blonde boy who grew up to be a male porn star in order to please his Hollywood producer daddy. It's the story of little Jack Stillman, whose Beverly Hills family had shed its Jewish roots to become good media savvy Episcopalians.
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Painter Julian Schnabel serves up a deft blend of fact and fiction in his screen adaptation of Cuban poet/novelist Renaldo Arenas' frank expose of the persecution of gays in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution. Schnabel gets an expressive performance from the Spanish heart throb Javier Bardem as Arenas, reinventing the bio-pic genre to depict the rags to rags saga of a resolutely non-conformist writer, who managed to get only one of his eight novels published on his native island and who died of AIDS, in poverty in New York City.
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A big budget Hollywood film that doesn't cue its viewers on when or whether to laugh or cry is rare enough, an all-star film that mixes gay and straight characters like different candles on a cake without stereotyping or pandering is practically unheard of.
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French phenom Francois Ozon discovered a dark little play by the master of domestic Sturm und Drang, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written by a then 19-year-old Fassbinder, the play is an amazingly prophetic look at the Svengali-like lover the adult Fassbinder would become.
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In this age of cheap irony how many filmmakers will risk ridicule by trying to get us to cry over something as out of fashion as a crisis of faith? Antonio Bird's 1994 heartfelt if seriocomic undressing of a guilt-riddled young priest and his shacking up with his housekeeper older mentor – as the men cope with all measure of carnal indulgence in a sooty Liverpool diocese – feels even more spot on since the American Catholic Church's meltdown over wayward priests.
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Happy birthday! This year Gregg Araki's "New Queer Cinema" two lovers on a killing spree fable, The Living End, turns sixteen, but only in the sense that British auteur Ken Loach meant in his 2002 Scottish gang rumble should this be consider a sweet sixteen.
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