Picking up on the theme of when scandal rocks a once sheltered world Ben Berkowitz gets terrific performances from Vincent Piazza and veteran Judd Hirsch in showing us the underside of a Chicago Orthodox Community where an ambitious young DJ, Reuben (Piazza) betrays his uncle’s trust while trying to carve out a career for himself in the world of Hip Hop, drug dealing and pole dancers. This hip slice of life compares favorably with the Jesse Eisenberg vehicle Holy Rollers.
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How do you top a Castro summer that has given us sing-along Grease, The Sound of Music and The Littlest Mermaid? Israeli filmmaker, man of all genres, Eytan Fox has an answer: beginning tomorrow you will thrill to the sight of a skinny boy/drag diva, Ido Rosenberg, introducing an ABBA worthy musical melodrama that features a pop besotted mama.
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“Going to Ukrainian Catholic school – holy days and holidays, every Sunday – Ukrainian Catholic service is beautifully ornate, pomp and circumstance, lots of marble, icons, stations of the cross, in Ukrainian Catholicism there’s a lot of ritual – you do stations of the cross and you’re actually bent down on your knees and you kiss the marble floor, a lot of flair!”
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Coming this week to the Roxie two Wisconsin straight boys, seeking elegant digs in the lower Height, in the mid 80’s, discover a dirty little secret world. In the new Aussie produced doc Shut Up Little Man: An Audio Misadventure, “Eddie Lee Sausage” and “Mitchell D.” describe their pilgrimage to the lower depths of 237 Steiner Street.
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The recent and sad demise of the Red Vic should teach us not to take our fabulous Castro movie palace for granted. This late August bonanza is highlighted by an absolute knockout Midnight for Maniacs Friday from Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.
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Brendan Gleeson – Harry Potter’s grouchy Professor Mad-Eye Moody – has racked up an impressive number of star character turns for filmmakers as different in their predilections as mad Mel Gibson (Braveheart) and John Michael McDonagh’s twin playwright brother Martin (In Bruges). In the profanity spewing, authority tweaking Sergeant Gerry Boyle Gleeson sinks his teeth into a role that is on the surface a winking tour de force of bluster and blarney, masking the mid-life sorrow of a lonely man who sees his closeted junior partner assassinated by a vicious drug gang while his equally depressed cancer afflicted mum chooses death by pills.
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And ye shall know them by their enemies. In the final rip-roaring -- I’ve always wanted to invoke that crackerjack box hype from my youth -- installment of his screen adventures, Harry Potter, boy wizard, confronts Death Eaters, Horcruxes and the demise of dear friends; battles foes with delicious vowel hogging names: Draco Malfoy, Bellatrix LeStrange, Professor Severus Snape and, of course, he who previously must not be named: Lord Voldemort; and in the far nastier off-screen world provokes the wrath of grumpy old guys: Professor Harold Bloom and the Pope.
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In Howard Hawks’ uproarious screwball comedy classic Bringing Up Baby a shrewd but wildly impetuous young woman (Katharine Hepburn) ambushes a stodgy, prematurely middle aged dinosaur scientist (Cary Grant) and drives him so far out of his comfort zone that in the movie’s penultimate moment the poor bugger greets his perspective mother-in-law in drag with the exclamation, “I’ve just gone gay!”
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The 31^st Edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (Castro Theatre 7-21 thru 28/Jewish Community Center of San Francisco 7-30 & 31/Roda Theatre at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre 7-30 thru 8-6/Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto 8-1 thru 8-7 and Rafael Film Center 8-6 thru 8-8) presents new work from master Israeli queer filmmakers Tomer Heymann and Eytan Fox; a Kirk Douglas Tribute featuring an early Holocaust feature (The Juggler) and a special Castro (7-24) screening of Spartacus at which time the actor will accept at SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award in recognition of his fight against the Hollywood blacklist; a comedy night screening of Jews in Toons with episodes from TV’s Family Guy, South Park and The Simpsons; and a seven film spotlight on the fate of Jews in modern Poland.
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Remember back in 1999 when a band of skinny young men, sporting turtlenecks and ski masks reeked temporary havoc across downtown Seattle, unhorsing a mayor, embarrassing a police chief and ruining a Bill Clinton “crowning achievement” economic summit? In the meticulously researched, thought provoking, remarkably balanced and humane new doc If a Tree Falls Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman plant us inside a reckless moment when a small band of environmental radicals went toe-to-toe with folks they considered evil doers: logging companies, meat packing plants, SUV dealerships, university agriculture labs, local cops and, fatefully, the US Department of Justice.
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Ever since J.D. Salinger caught literary lightning in a bottle with the glorious rants of that sarcastic little shit Holden Caulfield filmmakers have been drooling and dreaming about bringing The Catcher in Rye to the screen without frightening the horses: all the pathetic adult authority figures (the phonies) who produce, fiancé and, yes, censor, movies that sarcastic little shits are supposed to take their dates too.
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Up to now I’ve missed every opportunity to catch the prime time work of TV show runner/movie producer J.J. Abrams: Lost – much too big a commitment; Felicity – too soapy; Mission Impossible III – I’m so over Tom Terrific. But as soon as I heard about his Spielberg reboot I was hooked. Suddenly I find myself embedded in the lower half of the California theatre in Berkeley’s upper balcony, the part you have to climb down into, a sort of conversation pit style living room where you can imagine yourself actually in the movie.
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Tourette’s, anorexia and obsessive-compulsive desires drive this surprisingly tender German comedy from Ralf Huettner – screenplay by co-star Florian David Fitz. Fitz plays title character Vincent whose barking drove his late mom to drink and has him trading insults with his politician dad.
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My British dad swore by it; his American raised younger brother would cap his career there and treating my teenage self to a tour of  its cavernous 43^rd Street newsroom as the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba took the world to the nuclear brink – before treating me to perhaps the 60’s most surreal political thrillers where a macho Sinatra fended off Red agents in drag; the price mirrored that of the subway: a nickel, a dime, fifteen cents for the edition containing the once top secret Pentagon papers; it was the paper of record: if your obit ran there -- you were still dead – but most famously you had arrived; the drama critic fussed that my favorite playwrights (Albee/Williams) lacked an organic connection to their female characters; there were no Sunday funny papers and the slang “gay” for homosexual was verboten; Truman Capote would find the story of a slain Kansas farm family buried back with the lingerie ads; the Stonewall Bar riot was buried even deeper; a editor named “Abe” was thought to hate the mere idea of queer reporters;
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On June 24^th my buddies Claude, Wayne and I left the Castro Theatre for our Market Street abode to join Claude’s husband David in lifting a glass of California bubbly in celebration of our old stomping grounds, New York’s adoption of same-sex marriage. The euphoria of the moment was followed for me by a flashback to my living room office where a year and a week earlier a small Mormon family sat on my black couch to discuss how their lives had been upended by the passage of California Proposition 8. This family: mom, son and son’s handsome hubby are the poster folks for an engrossing, if profoundly disturbing and astonishingly well documented study on how a most American religious sect planned and plotted to upend gay marriage in our largest state.
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Friend of many in the SOMA and Castro districts, Bill Cox tragically lost his life on September 6. He succumbed to massive injuries suffered when he was struck by the driver of a large SUV at the intersection of 14th & Noe Streets in San Francisco. Bill is survived by two older brothers in Hawaii, their families, and a large circle of friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rest in peace, our dear friend and brother. A memorial celebration of Bill’s life is being planned. Check back here for more information.
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This 35^th Edition of the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival (June 16^th through the 26^th at the Castro, the Roxie and Victoria theatres in the city, with selected programs playing at the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley) has an ambitious array of over two hundred films from thirty countries. This year the festival is putting special emphasis on a collection of narrative features, docs and short films dealing with transgender issues and communities, kicking off with a truly awesome opening night curtain raiser Gun Hill Road. This year’s Frameline Award will be presented to comedienne Margaret Cho prior to the screening of her latest comedy concert, Cho Dependent, Sunday, June 19^th 6:30pm at the Castro.  There will be special programs and panels devoted to Transgender Images in Cinema (Victoria/6-19); Frameline: the Early Years (Main Library/6-23) as well as a conversation with the makers of the Sundance acclaimed Pariah, about the life of a black lesbian teen in Brooklyn (Victoria/6-18) discussing the film’s commercial debut this summer.
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A new film, Beginners (opens Friday), puts a vivid and very odd twist to the traditional parent child coming out story. A couple of viewings and a chat with its creator, Mike Mills, caused me to reflect back on my own story, observing the power movies have to reinforce lessons that real life can leave truly murky and unsatisfying.
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This month -- apart from our legendary LGBT film festival – the action for film buffs will be at 2575 Bancroft Way, home to the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Film Archive where from June 10 through the 29^th they’ll have dueling retrospectives to American film icons George and Mike Kuchar and the late Hollywood iconoclast Arthur Penn. My Kuchar coverage is based on a one hour phone chat with George from his vacation HQ’s in El Reno, Okalahoma (the heart of Tornado Alley) where he indulges his fascination for extreme weather.
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Regardless of your opinion of his five films – squeezed out over thirty-eight years, with a yawning gap of twenty between number two and number three -- Terrence Malick, the Harvard educated son of a Waco, Texas oilman, is neither a critic’s darling nor an opening weekend driven box office whore.
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The cover photograph on the beautiful new Criterion edition of The Times of Harvey Milk features a profile shot of a joyous populist drinking in one of his greatest public moments: riding up San Francisco’s famed Market Street as a Grand Marshall of the 1978 San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade. The then recently elected city supervisor has his right fist proudly raised in salute to the crowds lining each side of one of the world’s great boulevards.
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ust as a French president in waiting suffers a career ending pratfall in some insanely pricey Manhattan digs, the one man capable of preserving our dearest fantasies about Gotham and Paris returns with a minor masterpiece about why the Kindle Generation clings to a Gertrude Stein led Lost Generation. In Woody Allen’s best movie since Match Point, Midnight in Paris, a frustrated American screenwriter Gil (the fearsomely talented Owen Wilson) yearns to escape a horrible pending marriage to the philistine daughter of a right wing Tea Party spouting tycoon.
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Repeat after me this one rule and, maybe, I won’t have to hurt you: “In art, unlike politics, church, school and daytime TV, sentimentality is the one unforgivable sin.” Now listen up as I tell you the story of a little boy – actually, thirteen is not so little but it’s a movie and there is the big bad old rating board to consider – this boy has recently lost his mom in traffic and he is very sad. The boy, TJ (newcomer Devin Brochu is undersized for his age and so doesn’t look completely ridiculous on one of those cut off little bikes) lives with a dad, Paul (Rainn Wilson) who’s so sad that he’s grown a bushy beard and spends most of his days hibernating on the couch; then there’s grandma (Piper Laurie) who’s sad because her men folk treat her like a house plant.
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n the opening frames of Jim Mickle’s dystopian vampire melodrama (at the Roxie) which plays like a real movie, a grizzled red neck, Mister (co-writer Nick Damici ) is behind the wheel of a battered muscle car with a young man, Martin (Gossip Girl’s Connor Paolo), nervously riding shotgun. Suddenly there are ghoulish noises emanating from the trunk. Without hesitating Mister empties a revolver through the back seat silencing the cries.
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Robin Hessman grew up with what for a kid in Reagan’s America was an unhealthy interest in life in the Soviet Union. Her second grade classmates played a game called USA vs. USSR – the girls were the Americans, while the boys played the Russians. Curiosity and a natural contrariness put her with the boys. Soon she was begging her parents to subscribe to Soviet Life Magazine, superficially a dull propaganda organ arriving in a brown paper wrapper (much like The Advocate in those days),
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Chewing this one over prior to its Bay Area debut at The San Francisco International Film Festival, I suddenly was struck by the discomforting thought that this sex free wagon train saga, with women who could handle a long rifle and  maintain a safe distance behind an moody ox, and men who ranged from passive to an incipient lynch mob, might just have been a film that my old Lawrence Welk, Gunsmoke loving, Nero Wolf detective pulp novel addicted British dad might have gobbled down like Gummy Bears at a kids’ Saturday morning matinee.
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I don't think I deliberately dragged my young painter boyfriend to a 1976 Dallas screening of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver just so he would leap into my arms as the film's deranged anti-hero starts assassinating the operators of a Lower Manhattan brothel, but leap he did, in the climax of one of our better movie dates.
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The Festival’s finale sizzles with the lesbian centered Iranian family drama, Circumstance; the late Sidney Lumet’s wildly entertaining Dog Day Afternoon; the surviving lover of Yves Saint Laurent details life with a manic-depressive fashion maestro (Kabuki 5-3 & 5); plus a restored sci-fi by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Christopher Munch’s fictional meditation, Letters from Big Man, on a female hydrologist and Bigfoot. (Kabuki 4-29 5-3/New People 5-5)
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This year’s edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (April 21^st through May5th at the Castro, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, New People Cinema, and The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley/PFA) starts off on a sprightly queer note with Mike Mills’ moving ode to his late to come out gay father, Beginners and has a few more to follow including a moving portrayal of a lesbian relationship under the Iranian religious police state, first time director Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance; the revival of the late Sidney Lumet’s insurrectional Dog Day Afternoon; a newly rediscovered and restored science fiction melodrama from German bad boy Rainer Werner Fassbinder; and a State of the Cinema Address from Killer Films founder and queer indie producer Christine Vachon.
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In Max Winkler’s terrifically funny, and at times subversively sad buddy comedy, Ceremony, two old friends, Sam and Marshall, having not spoken to each other for over a year and having reached that awkward age: their mid-twenties, are desperate to escape the vapid if comfy cocoon of life on Long Island. Sam is a barely surviving children’s book author and Marshall has been living zombie like with his parents following a traumatic mugging. This is a make or break moment for two resolutely hetero boy/men who imagine themselves fitting the template of Scott Fitzgerald’s tortured romantics.
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In The Lost Coast – a new film on DVD that may prompt some curdled nostalgia for the good old days of Halloween blowouts in the Castro -- a couple of guys, who know each other only because of their close ties to a third fellow, embark on some rather cruel drunken banter at a party neither is enjoying.
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In one of the more intriguing, disturbing and genuinely thought provoking new films of the year, British director Simon Rumley’s Austin, Texas situated Red White & Blue (Friday at the Roxie) – an emotionally damaged, feckless young woman, Erica (Amanda Plummer), ridicules a trick’s suggestion that they use a condom for their motel room one-off. “Condoms are for homos.”
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Somebody who claims wisdom over such matters asserts there have eighteen versions of Jane Eyre filmed since film was invented. I shall not count them myself because number eighteen – the transcendently romantic, tragic, gothic ghost story directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga with the captivating quartet of Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell and Dame Judi Dench will forever be my Jane Eyre.
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It’s a crying shame that school boy wrestlers don’t have a pro league of their own to aspire to but this ultimate don’t get no respect sport gets a shot at major league comedy in Tom McCarthy’s sweet/sad moral parable Win Win. Set, where else, in the morally slippery slopes of New Jersey the story is kick started by the attempts of a schlemiel to survive the Great Recession. As we meet him Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) is drowning. A family law court attorney/high school wrestling coach whose fees can’t cover his nut and whose boys are forever gazing up at the gym banner proclaiming, “You’ve been pinned,” one day in court Mike decides to layoff his conscience and accept a hefty guardian’s fee to keep a dementia afflicted old guy out of a state home.
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“My ideal listener is someone who’s smoked a little pot and is playing dress-up in their room, getting ready to go out.”

It’s balmy, almost sweltering in my Market Street flat, not a breeze stirring as I dial up Justin Vivian Bond, cabaret artist extraordinaire who, as we speak, is standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street, late on a cold drizzly Manhattan afternoon.
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One sunny day, thirteen years ago, I decided to play hooky from film school to catch Todd Haynes’ exploration of the brief if fabulous history of the glam-rock revolution. I slipped into the Variety Club screening room on Market Street somewhere in the middle of the glorious muddle that is Velvet Goldmine.
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Not everybody will agree with Oscar voters in picking Susanne Bier’s boy-centered moral parable over Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s spiritual voyage to Barcelona’s lower depths, Biutiful, but give this Bergman lite exploration of the roots of human violence a fair hearing. The ads for In a Better World suggest that Bier evenly divides her time between Scandinavian adolescents battling school bullies and a Swedish doctor’s horrific duties in an African war zone that looks suspiciously like Sudan. Actually the movie is mostly about two boys whose unlikely and very rocky friendship seems at times to be heading for Columbine territory and then goes in rather different direction.
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“The best fashion show is definitely on the street. It’s always the hope that you’ll see some marvelous exotic bird of paradise, meaning a very elegant, stunning woman or someone wearing something terrific!” An eighty-something, slightly stooped, bicycle riding, smock wearing (the blue smocks worn by Paris street sweepers) eternally young street photographer stars this week in the best fashion flick and living ad for New York City as still the greatest place on earth.
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Mid way through Potiche openly gay director Francois Ozon’s period farce about how anarchy in the bedroom can reverberate on to the shop floor, the despotic owner of a provincial umbrella factory, Robert Pujol (Fabrice Luchini) confronts his small town’s Communist mayor, Babin (Gerard Depardieu), threatening to reveal a dirty little secret in the big man’s past. It seems that twenty-five years back Babin had a one day tryst with Pujol’s wife, Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) resulting in a now grown and somewhat fey man child, Laurent (Jeremie Renier). Pujol threatens to expose Babin’s shenanigans unless the mayor forces Suzanne to relinquish control of the factory.
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n Pablo Trapero’s gripping, violent, compellingly bleak film noir, Carancho, two people who probably should never have met are cohabitating, literally licking each other’s wounds and conspiring to make a big score – money due victims in one of Argentina’s annual epidemic of fatal car crashes – money claimed by a very bad guy, “The Dog,” the kind of guy who always lurks in films that take nefarious behavior to the end of the line.
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This Philip K. Dick light, parallel universe romance is a fascinating ride precisely because it doesn’t take its Twilight Zone sci-fi premise any deeper than absolutely necessary. Beginning with a Hotspur vibrant young Senate candidate’s late campaign gaffe and continuing with a guardian angel who fails to bump into his charge in the park, resulting in a spontaneous cute meet romance that should never have happened, writer/director George Nolfi keeps the beats coming at us so fast and furiously that we haven’t time to question Dick’s original short story premise that a creepy band of guys with hats are running our lives according to a master plan.
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Deep into this surprisingly entertaining, exhaustive and, yes, at times exhausting eighty-three minutes on the fate of the planet’s honey bees, a beekeeper wittily opines on the number of stings it takes to kill a human being. That number turns out to be 500 or so – about the same number of dingers that would have gotten you into baseball’s hall of fame, pre-steroids. What the hell’s that got to do with the price of honey at my Noe Street Farmer’s Market? It turns out that the bees, the food on our plates, the air we inhale, or the sanctity of baseball’s once sacred records are all threatened by the same mentality, that of an industrial combine you might call agro-business, global economics, or the industrial/military complex.
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A powerful new movie, based on an Oliver Sacks’ case study, The Last Hippie, provides an emotionally seductive twist to the good dad/bad dad dichotomy. Based on Dr. Sachs’ observation of a young man from the Sixties -- a significant portion of his brain was destroyed by a benign tumor, short circuiting his ability to form new memories -- Jim Kohlberg’s film The Music Never Stopped begins with one positive spin from the case: the idea that music we love can prompt startlingly accurate flashbacks of memory from the undamaged portion of our brains.
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In his new film, Heartbeats (opening Friday), Dolan’s character, Francis – a bitter gay romantic who chain-smokes, has a penchant for marshmallows, expensive haircuts – and who keeps a tally of his failed affairs on his bathroom wall, just to the right of the mirror – is seriously besotted with a blond Adonis, Nicolas (Niels Schneider) who has also stolen the heart of his best female pal and co-conspirator Marie (Monia Chokri).
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The 29^th San Francisco Asian American Film Festival -- opening tonight at the Castro with the premiere of British director Andy De Emmony’s coming-of-age story, West Is West, (followed by a gala party at the Asian Art Museum) -- runs through Sunday, March 20^th at the Castro, the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas and the Viz in San Francisco, Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive (PFA) and the Camera Cinemas in San Jose. This year the festival – catering to both fractured attention spans and an explosion of digital filmmaking -- offers more new media, an emphasis on South Asian filmmakers, expanded panels, cutting edge Asian American pop music groups and array of short films for all persuasions.
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As Tea Party America celebrates Ronald Reagan’s 100^th birthday, the Roxie gives us a week long counter inauguration bash, with Director Yony Leyser’s captivating film hymn to a queer junkie high priest, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within.
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Filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert cheerfully demolish every misconception I had about lions in the wild in the course of a riveting tale of a lioness determined to save her three cubs from the bad intentions of a rival pride or the razor sharp horns of a herd of wild buffalo.
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A wealthy corrupt family hires a naïve young woman to look after their daughter and cater to their increasing selfish kinks in this powerful erotic thriller from South Korean writer/director Im Sang-soo. When Eun-yi (Jeon Doyoun) first arrives at the Goh family’s palatial country home she thinks she’s landed her dream job. Developing a playful bond with the family’s grade school age daughter, Nami, Eun-yi initially ignores warnings from the autocratic old housekeeper (Yun Yeo-jong) that the Goh’s are scary lot.
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There was a time when the Academy Award Nominated Shorts categories produced little more than the quiet rumble of feet padding out to the kitchen and a serious strain on the nation’s plumbing; practically no one, apart from each filmmaker’s immediate circle, had seen these very real motion pictures. Beginning Friday the Oscar nominated live action shorts and animated shorts will play as separate programs at Landmark’s Lumiere and Opera Plaza theatres in San Francisco, the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael and Camera Cinemas in San Jose.
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A naïve, painfully sincere aspiring poet finds violence where he least expects it – in the upscale bosom of a middleclass relationship – and tender nurturing where he could hardly expect it, from a remarkably together rent boy, in Scott Boswell’s poetic, time tripping debut feature The Stranger in Us.
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This mistaken identity comedy wobbles badly between cringe inducing satire and a true romantic’s need to find signs of intelligent life in the Southland’s craven boy ghetto. Blaine  (the sweet/savvy Nicholas Downs) is a low self-esteem afflicted, almost pretty boy who’s fishing for love in the oil infested waters of Web chat rooms. Blaine’s waking hours are spent spinning a poetic personal column for a nitwit gay rag.
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There’s probably not a soul left on the planet, save John Waters and Justin Bieber, who wouldn’t get a massive image boost by having themselves played on screen by Helen Mirren. The lady is truly running the board and her and director Julie Taymor’s Christmas present to us: The Tempest -- a play many consider a great summing up by Mr. William Shakespeare – is a sublime illustration of how a bold theatre voice can inject something truly magical into a much loved but frequently misunderstood classic.
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A hawk. A city. A love story. Imagine Conan O’Brien pulling off a feature length doc where a Belgium boy – fleeing his clueless dad’s insistence he become a lawyer – escapes to the Big Apple, moonlights running a Manhattan hair salon in order to support his movie muse detailing the unbelievable story of a large predator who gets his talons on some pricey Central Park digs with views to die for. Whew!
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San Francisco resident Joseph Graham first came to my attention with a featurette length gay erotic ghost story, Vanilla, where a voraciously horny seventeen-year-old attempts to shed his annoying virginity while withstanding the distractions of a terminally dysfunction family, a Dante inspired leather bar and a fiendishly successful gay serial killer.

Graham’s sophomore effort, Strapped, smoothly doubles down on many of Vanilla’s genres by embedding us with a chameleon like boyish hustler who spends a melancholy rainy night gliding between apartments in a queer haunted building whose absentee cinema landlord is probably named Polanski.
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The Boys Life 7 DVD queer shorts collection blows into stores with four edgy pieces that stimulate without letting their well conceived  messages spoil our fun. All were featured at Sundance and several made it to our Frameline festival.
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This week (January 21 thru 27) the Roxie turns into a fabulous cinema time capsule as it hosts an extraordinary retrospective of the guys most singularly responsible for the sixties French New Wave: Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Running in conjunction with Emmanuel Laurent’s provocative new doc, Two in the Wave

(reviewed below), will be a seldom seen series of films starring their movie love child: Jean-Pierre Leaud. Each night Two in the Wave will play in rotation with one of the five films in Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel Cycle, in which the young Parisian born actor took on the mantle of Truffaut’s screen alter ego or three of the more politically charged films Leaud appeared in for Godard.
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If you plan on seeing what is likely the best and most brutally honest new film of the year – Derek Cianfrance’s robust, haunting and at times unexpectedly funny autopsy of a marriage, Blue Valentine -- be prepared to see it more than once and by all means see it with somebody who likes to chew it over afterwards rather than just getting smashed and pretending that they didn’t see pieces of themselves up on the screen.
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The Mostly British Film Festival – with works from the UK, Australia and New Zealand is headquartered for the next week at San Francisco’s Vogue Theatre.
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The latest film carved posthumously from the Richler canon, Barney’s Version, comes roaring out of the gate -- fueled by a pugnacious, misanthropic bad boy turn by Paul Giamatti – but then runs smack into a horrible second act anti-climax from which it never recovers. As with most of Richler’s ghetto lads behaving crassly as they scheme for fame, money and the ability to marry outside of the faith, Barney glides over, around and through the carnage he instigates: the suicide of his pregnant by another guy first wife in Rome, the acquisition of a testy second bride who he immediately wants to dump once he lays eyes on wife number three (at the wedding banquet for number two).
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We meet the protagonist of Biutiful (Beautiful) – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s operatic fable of how a simple, almost primitive slum dwelling hustler finds his soul at the brink of his extinction -- Uxbal (Javier Bardem), in the dream state. It’s his dream and he’s standing in a winter landscape – dotted with denuded trees – striking up a conversation with a handsome young man.
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Hallelujah! Reports that the lesbian centered feature movie is as much a dinosaur as say top 40 radio, TV variety shows or pro-choice/gun adverse Republicans are greatly exaggerated – that’s part of the news you can use from the 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival (running from January 20^th through the 30^th in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah). This combined with at least a mild revival of gay male generated films, as well as female directed and/or written features augers well for queers at art houses and boutique mall houses this year, that is, of course, if Hollywood feature buying bucks match Park City buzz.
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How lucky are we to be blessed each year by two German film festivals. Long time programming wizard Ingrid Eggers (for many years the brains behind the Goethe Institute’s Berlin and Beyond Showcase at the Castro) last year demonstrated her survivor’s instincts with a sublime one day film banquet, the aptly titled German Gems. This year Eggers regains her old first festival of the new year slot, completing a triumphant comeback with a full weekend at the Castro (January 14 through 16) as well as a one day set of encore screenings at Point Arena.
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This week we find buried treasure, a critically important, exhilarating film in the resume of director Ang Lee, who with his friend, writing partner and producer James Schamus has given us three top drawer queer themed films: The Wedding Banquet, Brokeback Mountain and Taking Woodstock. In deciding to adapt Daniel Woodrell’s Civil War novel, Woe to Live On By, Lee and Schamus were embarking on an unusually daunting challenge, even by their illustrious standards: translating a little known sidebar of America’s greatest domestic crisis into popular entertainment, attempting to shoot an epic on an independent film budget, with a largely unknown cast of twenty-something actors, many of whom were just bubbling under their first stab at stardom.
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Our best of the year list again produces a first place tie: a magic realism fueled romantic tragedy, celebrating the taming of the Latin macho, is paired with a dark view of a digital urchin who’s upended our lives with motives perhaps as base as Welles’ media tyrant Charles Foster Kane. Several picks are followed by “Oscar bait” tips. Two worthies whose films didn’t make the list: Patricia Clarkson (Cairo Time) as a beautiful approaching fifty lady whose platonic affair grandly overshadows mere sins of the flesh; and a shout out to neglected funny man Jim Carrey for a mesmerizing queer con man in I Love You Phillip Morris.
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he Fighter is less a boxing movie than the screwiest of screwball comedies in which the poor pug, Mickey (a ring-ready Mark Wahlberg) dukes it out with a control freak mom, Alice (a ferociously focused Melissa Leo) and his crack addicted half brother Dickie (a scene stealing Christian Bale) for the honor of getting his block rocked in the ring.
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If you can get to the Roxie this holiday season you’ll be treated to a master at work. Gym rats especially should devour Frederick Wiseman’s study of a working class Austin, Texas Boxing Gym.
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Sometime during my first viewing of Rabbit Hole – John Cameron Mitchell’s delicately threaded, darkly funny tale of how grief over the accidental death of a four-year-old boy continues to haunt the family he leaves behind (written by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on his play) – I remembered a terrible secret I hid from my mother: that at ten I was nearly run over after I dashed into Mamaroneck’s Mt. Pleasant Ave. after a red rubber ball. At the time I was an only child -- like Danny who chases his dog and is run over by high school student, Jason (Miles Teller).
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Based on an Obie-award winning play by the Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi, this is the closest thing on my menu to that tiniest of genres: the Thanksgiving Day film (since nobody’s reprising the genre’s singular classic: John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles).
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All but breast-fed on New York Times editorials indicting the wicked links between machine politics and Wall Street, by all rights I should have gobbled down Alex Gibney’s true life morality play with the same relish I found for his immaculate skewering of the Enron crowd, The Smartest Guys in the Room. But, alas, watching a disgraced white knight – the rise and improbable fall of New York’s crusading former attorney general/governor Elliot Spitzer – tumble over on his sword while the baddies smirk and gloat is a bitter cinema pill.
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Thirty-five minutes into arguably the best American film of the last thirty years a young woman is ordered by her lover to take off his pants; her tongue begins a slow cruise down his chest, beginning where a forest of dark hairs gives way to the plain formed by a washboard stomach. Before her tongue gets to glide below the beltline, her lover leaps up and runs into the bathroom pouring a pitcher of ice water over his now flaming crotch.
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If you love a truly mad ride with a wildly insecure heroine who is as likely to be fitted for a straight jacket as a tutu by film’s end then Black Swan is for you; also it doesn’t hurt if you secretly think that ballet dancers are little full of themselves and should be made really vicious fun of, made to behave even more coarsely them pro wrestlers, in this case Black Swan also delivers.
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It’s a stretch to label The King’s Speech a prequel to The Queen, Stephen Frears and Peter Morgan’s witty, humanizing portrait of the royals under media siege for their implied snub of Diana. But in many subtle ways director Tom Hooper’s moving account of how a sickly boy kicks his fear of daddy, King George V, and becomes a wartime monarch the British people still fondly recall, as well as father to the current Queen, allows us to see these super privileged stand-ins for God and Nation, as frail, resilient reeds before the gathering storm of WWII.
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Once you get past the fact that the new off-beat and very funny gay prison comedy I Love You Phillip Morris is not a ninety minute stealth cigarette ad, enjoying this mad romp with two of the screen’s funniest leading men, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, just takes a bit of relaxing, letting go of all the image conscious pressures about what we’re suppose to enjoy as a queer audience and allowing ourselves to savor a wildly improbably love story, with more than a little larceny in its heart.
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 finds the young wizards Harry, Ron and Hermione, having dropped out of Hogwarts, in the worst crisis of their young lives, faced with tracking down the evil one, Voldermort, and putting their six years of witchcraft studies to its most ferocious test. As even the least informed Potter addict knows all too well Part 1 is at best a delicious tease, an obligatory anti-climax bit of black magic foreplay before next summer’s series climaxing showdown. That said the filmmakers: director David Yates, screenwriter Steve Kloves, director of photography Eduardo Serra and company have made this one, the seventh and shortest of the series, feel in no way a cheat.
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This collection is a mixed bag: all succeeded at the box office, several were actually quite good. Here are my picks. Special features are indicated at the end of the applicable film capsule.
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At a time when LGBT characters show up less dependably on the big screen, and then often in dime store budget underground movies, shown only in selected cities – and surprisingly enough the Bay Area often gets left off the these informal theatrical circuits – old fashioned over-the-air TV has spun out a couple of jewels.
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The San Francisco Film Society presents ten reasons for a cinema night out at Embarcadero Center (October 28^th through November 3^rd) with the work of new directors along with the return of a seasoned old pro: Bertrand Tavernier (The Princess of Montpensier/10-30 & 31).
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Reflecting its 1957 origin as a festival that highlighted the then emerging post-war Italian film movement, the San Francisco Film Society presents a week of work by new Italian directors

(November 14^th through the 21^st at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema)
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For Colored Girls: Attention all you Tyler Perry haters out there: our clownish, self-taught playwright/filmmaker/drag artist has produced a mini-masterpiece that includes a glimpse of the down-low, child murder, back alley abortions and the sight of an all-star female ensemble finding the perfect way to get inside the skin of poet Ntozake Shange’s 1974 play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.
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The 15^th edition of Berlin and Beyond, the Goethe-Institute’s annual celebration of German language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Castro Theatre October 22^nd through 28^th with a San Jose Encore Day October 30 at the Camera 12 Cinemas) comes at a new season and features a German co-produced candid portrait of the late Rock Hudson featuring our own Armistead Maupin, filmmaker guest appearances, Germany’s first 3D animated feature in English (Animals United 3D, Castro/ 10-24), a major historical fiction on the possibility of there having once been a female Pope, Pope Joan(Festival Spotlight/Castro 10-23), special book-tie-ins at San Francisco’s Books , Inc.) and lavish opening and closing night parties.
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At a moment when a virtual queer community is mourning the suicide of a promising young violinist whose final Facebook page reportedly read, “Jumping off the (George Washington Bridge) sorry,” an astonishingly perceptive American movie opens with clues as to why the volatile cocktail of youth and the Internet is so capable of reinforcing Jean-Paul Sartre’s belief that “Hell is other people.”
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Cancel your cable or Direct-TV, seriously this San Francisco Documentary Festival (Roxie Theatre, October 14^th through the 28^th) offers a variety and quality of reality TV that puts the 500 channel universe to shame. Sometimes the titles alone provide hard clues: I’m in to seeing Miss Landmine where Stan Feingold focuses on an only in Cambodia “Miss Landmine pageant.” (10-16 & 18) or OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger’s Movie (10-16 & 20) – how could this movie possibly disappoint! For those films whose titles don’t sell them sight unseen, here’s a guide to some of my personal favorites.
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When it comes to John Lennon and the Beatles I’m an old dog, Pavlov’s dog at that, so when a certain chord is struck at the beginning of Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy my auditory juices are primed for A Hard Day’s Night. Alas, I’m stuck in the wrong decade for female director Taylor-Wood’s tale -- penned by Matt Greenhalgh, screenwriter of the Joy Division biopic, Control – opens in 1955 as the future rock star is acting more like a superstar juvenile delinquent – “Fuck-off, Lennon, show us your cock!” – clinging to the roof of a Liverpool double-decker bus to win a girl away from another bullyboy, and generally playing the class clown at Liverpool’s middle-class-aspiring Quarry Bank High School.
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Christopher Isherwood hailed J.R. Ackerley’s memoir of the decade and a half he spent all but married to his Alsatian bitch, Queenie, a classic animal book. Paul and Sandra Fierlinger have applied their Sesame Street technology – a hand drawn, paperless animation style that produces images with the texture and subtly of watercolor painting – to give filmgoers a kind of interactive Ackerley where the drawings are cleverly supplemented by the author’s text to flesh out the story of an openly gay bachelor, resigned to never finding his human “perfect friend,” who learns to his amusement and chagrin how to satisfy a very demanding canine companion.
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With tributes to a bevy of great filmmakers, all here with new work – Edward Norton (Stone), Julian Schnabel (Miral) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Biutiful) – and a judicious selection of award season treasures, the 33^rd Mill Valley Film Festival (October 7^th through the 17^th at Mill Valley’s Sequoia Twin Cinemas and San Rafael’s Smith Rafael Film Center) offers 85 feature programs, a renowned short film showcase: the 5@5 series weeknights at both venues, a children’s festival and good parties.
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In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – the latest laugh out funny multi-star piece from Woody Allen -- the decision of a recently dumped dowager to seek solace and life counseling from a fortune teller becomes the catalyst for a series of life altering pratfalls by practically everyone within her neurotic London social set. Helena (Gemma Jones/Bridget’s mom from the Bridget Jones’ comedies) is suicidal after hubby Alfie’s (Anthony Hopkins) very late male menopausal crisis puts the kibosh on their forty-year marriage and leads Alfie to squander his time and life savings on a buxom rent girl, Charmaine (Lucy Punch).
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Never Let Me Go: For fans of Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian romance novel, the good news is that director Mark Romanek – known to the MTV crowd for setting a Michael Jackson video on a flying saucer – hasn’t painted a mustache on your Mona Lisa; but the rest of us coming to this chilling fable of kids cloned for reparative medicine may leave the theatre wondering what the fuss was all about.
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Robert Altman distrusted the attention span of kids and therefore always insisted that his films get as hard an “R” rating as possible, and boy he knew how to stick a burr under the saddles of both critics and censors. The six films playing at the Roxie’s Altman Festival (September 20-22) are all adult entertainment from a master who hailed from the birth place (Kansas City, Missouri) of both Disney and Hemingway and managed  brilliant swipes at the mythology of both.
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The Agony and The Ecstasy of Phil Spector does feature a relatively coherent sit down chat with its obviously troubled subject, unfortunately the career review is illustrated by visually incoherent slices from Court TV’s coverage of his first murder trial. We do learn how hard it was to be a rock Mozart on sixties mono mixing boards, how he never got the respect he thought he deserved – despite his 1989 induction into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame – how he reacted when Martin Scorsese “ripped off” one of his works of genius for the opening needle drop to Mean Streets and how he could endure almost any sound in the pop world, except that of the Plastic Yoko Ono band.
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This late summer romance begins literally on the oddest note when a French construction worker, Jean (Vincent Lindon), finds himself having coffee at the apartment of his son’s grade school composition teacher, Mademoiselle Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). Invited to son Jeremy’s class to describe why he enjoys knocking down walls and laying brick for a living, Jean accepts the teacher’s invitation to inspect a window in her apartment.
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Late in the third act of David Lean’s astonishingly intimate epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, (opens Friday for a week at the Castro) a troupe of British soldiers – whom we have spent the previous 150 minutes ogling naked to the waist – don green skirts and bras and proceed to serenade their blissed out and possibly mad commanding officer, one Colonel Nicholson (Alex Guinness/1957 Oscar: Best Performance by an Actor), with an old music hall standard written to ward off the horrors of WWI. The soldier boys mime kisses and jump into each other’s arms to celebrate the completion of a railway bridge that will allow the Japanese Army to extend its supply lines from Bangkok to Rangoon.
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Director Steve Buscemi’s taut, no bull shit handling of a skinny young pot dealer’s struggle to avoid being a punk in a tough state prison cellblock is must viewing for a queer audience eager to get a non phobic treatment of the dicey issues of men abusing men behind bars.
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1969: it was a hell-of-a year! Let’s see: Richard Nixon gets possession of the atomic football and ratchets up the war in Vietnam prompting an escalating series of demonstrations including the first candlelight vigils; the Woodstock Music and Art Fair succeeded and failed on such a colossal scale that for three mad days it was New York’s second largest city; acid rock, most particularly trippy midnight shows by the Jefferson Airplane,  was showcased weekly at Manhattan’s Fillmore East; what was possibly the worst professional baseball team ever: “the amazing” New York Mets won the world series; man walked on the moon, an event that is probably the most emblematic for filmmakers trying to capture the essence of that year; and, oh yes, thousands of gay men and women from every possible spectrum on the gender scale rebelled, rioted and taunted New York’s finest for six days in and around the Stonewall Inn in Sheridan Square.
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In this unsettling time when the only film about our eternal state of war that could command a Best Picture Oscar is one whose message is buried deeply inside the rituals of an adrenaline junkie bomb disposal officer (The Hurt Locker), Shout Pictures is releasing a disturbing Vietnam era chamber piece which has the definite potential to scare the horses, if not burn down the stables on the subject of gays in the military.
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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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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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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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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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