North Village

Here, the Alameda Bike Posse encounters North Village, an abandoned Coast Guard housing complex. Surely, it is the future site of the zombie apocalypse.

Loyal readers will remember the site from an earlier post...

Watching the Fire

An abandoned military hospital, as many local reports termed it, burned over the weekend not far from Alameda Point. Scott and I took a long bike ride Sunday, the first part of which consisted of following, then getting away from, the noxious smoke. We circled around and got pretty close to the fire by riding into this weird ghost town on the west end. I think it's former Coast Guard housing and obviously the future site of the zombie apocalypse.

Taken

Felt like a movie this gloomy afternoon, so Scott and I headed to Taken at the Alameda Theatre. Currently the number 4 movie in America, the film is a gloriously preposterous ticking-clock Frantic revamp that swaps daughter for wife, Liam Neeson for Harrison Ford, Pierre Morel for Roman Polanski and Paris for...okay, Paris. It's about a one-time "government worker" (read: super-spy) whose formerly-estranged 17-year-old daughter gets abducted by Albanian sex-slavers while she's on a trip to Europe to - get this - follow U2 around on their summer tour. Of all the hilarious absurdity in this film, this last detail might be my favorite, were it not for the fact that U2 has a new album about to drop, making this sublimely ridiculous notion seem like mere product placement. (I mean, she may as well be going on tour with Bing Crosby, for all the relevance U2 has for the high school demographic.)

This set-up is simply an excuse, of course, for Neeson's snarling sadist to go all Jason Bourne on a bunch of thugs, or all Abu Ghraib on a sleazy kidnapper, depending on whether you read the film as a delightfully post-narrative exercise in mindlessly kinetic cinematic bone-crunching or a delightfully post-9/11 ironically enthusiastic argument for the Bush era's tough-love foreign policy. I chose to read it both ways, my delight intact. We laughed our way through the whole thing, both at the consistently risible plot devices and the genuinely pulse-quickening action.

Thankfully, the filmmakers do not take any of this seriously, which is the only reason why the film works (apart from Neeson's strong work) - an observation that I suspect will become a refrain for me if I continue to write about film. When a wholly preposterous film takes itself seriously I find it far more irritating than a trifle of a film that just wants to have fun and blow things up. Taken is a case of savvy filmmakers, with a decent sense of fun, having a lark and taking the audience along with them. It's a propulsive revenge flick with a pleasingly savage and unsympathetic hero and zero sentiment. It adds up to a fine time at the picture show - which is not to say that the film couldn't be a great deal better.

It would have been better if the daughter had been lying about following U2 around when in reality she just wanted to gallivant around Europe for the summer flirting with, and maybe fucking, a bunch of silly Euroboys.

It would have been better if Liam Neeson had spoken French when posing as a Parisian cop who, as far as I know, speak French. Filmgoers can take a minute or two of subtitles, for chrissake - it's not about authenticity, it's about making him appear like even more of a badass. He can kick the asses of twelve guys at once and speak French!

It also would have been better if the first act - in which we learn that Neeson has been estranged from his daughter, but is trying to connect again - had been, you know, cut. We don't care, and daughter Maggie Grace (of "Lost," my current TV obsession) sucks too much for us to care that we don't care. She is just a hottie MacGuffin, and the sooner those fuckers abduct her, the sooner Liam can kick much ass. Get on with it.

Finally, just a point of interest. I don't know whether it's our "post-9/11 world" or what, but, man, are Americans really this afraid to let their kids do anything? I get that daddy Liam is overprotective because he's a paranoid former spook who has seen all kinds of whatever, but the girl is 17 (although it's true that 25-year-old Grace's version of 17 makes her seem 13) and it doesn't seem entirely far-fetched that she could go to Europe and not get sold into sex-slavery. That is, the filmmakers do an especially weak job of convincing us that this all-important aspect is even possible - I know I just said that I wanted less exposition, and I'll stand by that, but I'm just surprised that the filmmakers thought they needed none about this part of the story.

Two notes: this is a PG13 film that really feels like an R. It's very violent, though there's almost no blood which is how they get away with it. I was convinced it was an R and that the chatty young boys in our aisle had snuck in (for which I applauded them, though we know how I feel about talking in the movies). Also, once again, the projection was substandard. I had to leave the film to ask the staff to correct the framing - the frame line was visible at the top of the screen as was a sliver of the bottom of the next frame. This is pure carelessness.

Catching up with the films of 2008

One of the (few) disadvantages of life in the San Francisco Bay Area affects movie-lovers like myself. Whereas nearly every film released in the United States will play in New York or Los Angeles, immediately, some of those will never play here and the rest will either play in one or two San Francisco theaters (as opposed to East Bay theaters) and then close, or open at an annoyingly slow pace weeks or months after that initial release. This situation is much better than that of most areas of the country, of course, where some of these films will simply never play at all - so, I should be thankful, I suppose, that I don't still live in Iowa. And I am.

The films I'm talking about are not the multiplex fodder that most Americans think of when they think of "the movies" (myself frequently included); I mean the smaller films that barely have a chance to find an audience before getting yanked from the few art house chains and independent theaters that remain and that never play in the sticks. I should confess, though, that I am not a very good cinephile. I will rarely travel far to see a good film - these days, it's tough to get me to leave the island, though I will do it for a special film that I won't get to see in a theater otherwise or that I feel I MUST see as soon as possible.

For instance, as a die-hard Woody Allen fan, I will always see his latest film immediately upon release. Most of them vanish shortly thereafter, although this year's effort, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, became popular enough to get a wider release and even won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. So, good for Woody. This week, too, I plan to go to San Francisco to see the "roadtrip" version of Steven Soderbergh's Che, in which the whole film is shown rather than broken up into two parts. Four hours long? Shot on the Red One? Soderbergh and Del Toro? Violently mixed reviews? Cinephile catnip!

Last week, Scott and I traveled to Berkeley to see The Wrestler. We had heard all the buzz, so we had to catch it. I found the film to be very moving and satisfying, with minimal schmaltz and a quietly extraordinary performance from Mickey Rourke. Marisa Tomei, who has always seemed to me to be working hard (and impressively) to actually earn that Oscar she got way back in 1992, is also great here. I had been thinking about The Wrestler for a few days until I spoke to my film school buddy, Andy, who pointed out how terrible the script is - and he's right. The script for The Wrestler is a paint-by-numbers quickie sports-movie formula piece, with an embarrassingly awful subplot involving Rourke's estranged daughter. It could easily be that "Wallace Beery wrestling picture" Barton Fink finds himself unable to write.

But his argument left me strangely unmoved and failed to change my impression much. It's true that Andy and I have often disagreed about movies in the past - he has frequently said that I "like everything," an untrue statement on its face, but indicative of my ability to be swept away - but here it's not that we disagreed, exactly. It's that, at a certain point, the film went somewhere for me that I found quite interesting. Early on, the Tomei character quotes the passage in Isaiah that predicts the suffering of the Messiah and the redemption of believers - "by his stripes, we are healed" - which she unironically attributes to the film The Passion of the Christ. She's suggesting that the way Rourke's washed-up professional wrestler abuses his own body for our entertainment is not unlike what that Jesus character in the Passion undergoes. After I heard this, I felt I understood something essential about the character and about the filmmakers' purpose - it's a film about a man who believes he's nothing more than a piece of meat, good for nothing but a beating, and about his messy, faltering, daily search for redemption.

As an allegory, in its moving story and in its the performances, The Wrestler far transcends its script; I think it's Darren Aronofsky's best work to date. Fans of the Dardennes will note with interest some of the camerawork in the film, too - the Belgian brothers have developed a distinctive style for their super-realist dramas, two of which have won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in the last decade, in which they frequently hover their hand-held camera just over their subject's shoulder. Aronofsky co-opts this style frequently in his film in a way that, for me at least, immediately recalled The Son or Rosetta, among other films. I suppose if the Dardennes are, perhaps, the most-celebrated neo-realists working today (for lack of a better term), it makes sense that this kind of camera work (hardly unique to them, but somewhat unusual in narrative film) has become a kind of shorthand for "authenticity." A bit of a cheap trick, really, that Aronofsky uses only occasionally - but it's nice to see him trying new things.

Another film that makes much better use of Dardenne-style camerawork, less obtrusively and more rigorously fused with an objectively framed, devastatingly omissive mise-en-scene, is the 2007 Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian writer/director, Cristian Mungiu. I only saw this recently, on DVD, and it's an example of the kind of film that I am sometimes too lazy to see. Another is the likewise highly-praised, The Edge of Heaven, which I have had from Netflix for several weeks now. 4 Months I had for about four months. Okay, not that long; as the film is about an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania, my very-pregnant wife opted out, and I assumed I was in for a big downer and it took me a little while (and her being out of town) to pop it into the DVD player.

I am very glad I did. It's an extraordinary film, powerful, clear-eyed and straightforward - it takes place in nearly real time and makes no political statements about abortion, apart from simply depicting the harrowing, horrifying ordeal of such a procedure under a dictatorship in which it's illegal. Most striking for me - because from early on I could see I would not be spared much, though the worst moment takes place off-screen - were the relationships. Otilia and her pregnant friend, Gabita, reminded me very strongly of some of the young women I knew in college. These women had extremely intense, emotional friendships of the kind that appear quite strange to young men, for whom things might be simpler or more straightforward, relationships that are sometimes strengthened by awful behavior rather than kindness, as if that awfulness itself is an assurance of intimacy: I would never dare to treat anyone else so horribly and with such selfishness; it is only because we are like sisters that I am willing to do so. It is not worth citing specifics because - if anyone were to actually read this post - I would hope not to ruin one minute of this film, which must be the best of the year.

I want to move now, quickly, through a few other films that I have seen recently, as I try to catch up with 2008:

Gran Torino, is a funny, satisfying bit of hokum, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. The trailer sold the film as some kind of geriatric Dirty Harry film; in reality, it's another of Eastwood's sly revisionist takes on his violent persona, like Unforgiven, though not nearly as fine a work as that film. If sentimental and a bit hokey at times, this story of a ridiculously cranky, racist old-timer who loves his vintage Gran Torino and little else has enough specific and unique details of time, place and character to help the film work pretty well. Eastwood's character helped build the titular muscle car as a Ford mechanic in better times, and Eastwood-the-director clearly felt a resonance in this story of an old, muscular American archetype who finds the world changing all around him, even as he tries to cling to what he knows. It's a terrific performance, both gentle and foaming at the mouth, wise and reckless, stern and hilarious. (Seeing this film made me want to go back and watch the Dirty Harry films, the first two of which I screened over the weekend. They're a lot of silly fun, of course, but it's also interesting to see the San Francisco of the 70s as well as the filmmaking style of that time. And Clint Eastwood in the first Dirty Harry film must certainly have the Best Haircut in Cinema.)
Doubt is an example of the oft-tested rule that prize-winning plays rarely translate to the screen. Kim and I saw the film while we were up in Red Bluff, with a very well-behaved crowd, which I appreciated. And I think the blue-hairs in the audience had a nice time discussing the film afterwards; Kim and I actually had a long conversation about it as well. Any film that generates productive argument after leaving the theater has gotta be worth something, I'll give it that. For me, I guess I simply did not have any of the "doubt" about what happened that supposedly drives the film. The story, set in the 1950s, is about whether or not a priest at a Catholic school had some kind of inappropriate relationship with a young male student. Absolutely nothing in the film made me suspect that the priest had acted inappropriately. Nothing. Not the fact that he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who always plays total schlubs and creepy losers, not the fact that he had longer-than-usual fingernails, not the fact that Meryl Streep demolished him and all available scenery in every scene she "shared" with him (which made it a pretty fun performance to watch, don't get me wrong - but I was certainly watching a performance, not any kind of recognizable human being). However, it became clear after leaving the theater that many other viewers thought the film was much more ambiguous than did I. Well, fine. Glad they enjoyed it.

Finally, a film I recently saw on DVD that many people probably also missed this year: In Bruges. Written and directed by the talented playwright, Martin McDonagh, it's one of those rare films that manages to balance beautifully between pitch-black comedy, poignant drama and violent action. Tonal shifts like that are very tough to pull off; on top of that, theater writers don't often make great screenwriters, let alone directors. McDonagh makes it all look easy here, making the tired hitmen-out-of-water genre fresh again with clever dialogue, rich characters, and genuinely heart-stopping twists and turns. Colin Farrell gives the best performance of his that I've seen - he's wonderfully oafish, idiotic, hilarious and moving, all at once - with terrific work from Brendan Gleason and Ralph Fiennes. Farrell pulled off an upset at the Golden Globes by winning in the comedic acting category - a richly deserved and unexpected win.

Quantum of Solace

Saw the new Bond film with Scott and Charlise last night. Here's what I kept thinking:



This video is much better than the film, in spite of how there are better actors in Bond films these days. We sat way in the back, which was a great place to sit (apart from the young children nearby that should not have been there who kept talking throughout) but our vista did not make it any easier to understand the action. As for the story, well, I gave up on that very early. It involved a French dude with stained teeth (a very good actor, the one who looks like a young Roman Polanski), a seriously hot girl and someone from Bond's past named Vespa, which Charlise informed me is Italian for "wasp." She was also able to tell me that the opera featured in the film (at which a group of bad guy conspirators chose to hold a meeting via bluetooth - like, during the opera from their seats) was Puccini's Tosca, and that it was an actual production but without the usual cast.

(About the young children ... I like kids and will soon be a father, but you can't take kids who are under, say, 8 to PG-13 movies that aren't "Mommy and Me" screenings. It's rated that way for a reason, parents! If kids are not involved with what they're seeing - and even if they are, sometimes - they'll just talk, talk, talk. At that point, it is your responsibility to shut them up or leave. For. Christ's. Sake.)

Outside Lands, Part 2

My second day at the Outside Lands festival (a couple weeks ago now), was a better experience than the first. I was hanging out with Scott (who kindly gave me his extra ticket) and his friends, without a big agenda about what to see, and we smoked some weed and wandered around a lot. The day ended with Wilco, my Favorite Band, and it was a decent, if uninspiring, set.

But that day I also saw what must have been the best act of the festival, the Mexican duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela. I think it was the sickest guitar-playing I have ever seen. They had two giant screens so we could watch them play. Scott told me later every time he looked over my mouth was just hanging wide open. Slack-jawed, they call it. Here's one of their videos:



It was a beautiful day, the throngs were tolerable and the music was great. Also, the sound did not go out much, from what I recall.

Outside Lands

This weekend is the giant Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park. Kim and I went to the first night last night, primarily to see Radiohead. I have not gone to too many festival shows and I doubt I will go to too many in the future. It's a total clusterfuck and just not worth it.

I didn't mind how difficult it was to actually get there - we took the BART, tried to get a cab from downtown, gave up, went to the Muni, gave up, took the Muni back to Powell and looked for a cab again. We eventually found one.

Inside the park, it was cool until we tried to go see Beck. Kim and I got in separate lines for beer and food and an hour later had beer and food. It was just stupid. I'm actually going back on Sunday to see Wilco; I'm going to try to smuggle in some beer because fuck the organizers and their fucking bullshit. I basically paid $160 bucks so Kim and I could stand in line for food and beer and then hear Radiohead from half a mile away. Plus my sciatica was about as bad as it's been in six months.

There was bike parking:
Some delicious oysters:
Looking this way from the beer line, I thought I heard some music that might have been being played by Beck:Looking the other way, you just get the sense that humans are really stupid creatures. Why would any intelligent creature want to be doing this?
Emanating from that reddish and greenish area, below, were the sounds of the Greatest Band on Earth. Well, it wasn't all bad.