Harvey forever
So suburban
Lamplighters glow
Out &About
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The
Vol. 43 • No. 05 • January 31-February 6, 2013
www.ebar.com/arts
Scary times continue
E C N A D N SU S N O I T A R VIB by David Lamble
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his edition of Sundance, America’s premier independent film showcase, is one of the queerest ever, with a mix of veteran and novice directors delivering a lineup that sizzles dramatically and erotically. If you want to gauge the talent before these films descend from (Left to right:) Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan and Jack Huston in Kill Your Darlings.
Robert Redford’s ski lodge, check for scripts vetted through the Sundance writers’ lab, widely acknowledged as the place where novice filmmakers can banish pretentious beats – in other words, “kill their darlings.” Kill Your Darlings is getting Sundance buzz for moments where young Daniel Radcliffe, as fledgling poet Allen Ginsberg, ingests drugs, masturbates, and has sex with an older man. This is possibly the movie that finally gets the Beats in focus. Big Sur Sundance has the Beats on the brain: director Michael Polish spotlights an older Jack Kerouac, overwhelmed by the hoopla surrounding the publication of On the Road and battling alcoholism, hiding in a small cabin owned by his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The retreat results in a 1962 novel, Big Sur. With Jean-Marc Barr, Kate Bosworth, and Henry Thomas. Valentine Road Marta Cunningham follows the story behind the classroom shooting death of California queer teen Larry King by classmate Brandon McInerney. “Brandon was 14 when he committed the crime, he was looking at 53 years to life without the chance of parole, and I thought, ‘That’s not right, either.’ It’s not right to kill somebody in the middle of English class, but is it right for him to be tried as an adult?” Don Jon’s Addiction Joseph Gordon-Leavitt takes a logical step in his progression from TV child star to indie actor to edgy action/drama guy, creating his own erotically tinged vehicle. Demonstrating what he’s learned from the indie world’s best directors, Gordon-Leavitt essays a
by Tavo Amador
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Lothario whose fixation on computer porn interferes with a highly charged relationship with Scarlett Johansson. Jobs This modest bio-pic promises a peek at the “Steves” Jobs and Wozniak as they crank out their first toy. Here’s a chance to see if Ashton Kutcher is ready to fill anything but Charlie Sheen’s shoes. With Josh Gad as Wozniak. C.O.G. Kyle Patrick Alvarez directs the first film based on a David Sedaris story, the rocky misadventures of a cocky young man (Jonathan Groff) who works a summer on an Oregon apple farm. Alvarez said, “What I liked about the story was that it took that confusion [about homosexuality] and mixed it with a religious confusion. It was funny, kind of dirty, and really cinematic.” Concussion As Abby, a wealthy lesbian house-
ddie Muller’s 11th Noir City film festival concludes at the Castro Theatre with many rarely seen and restored gems. Cheap blonde Cleo Moore is The Other Woman (1954). She’s a no-talent actress who avenges herself on movie director Hugo Haas for firing her from his latest opus. He’s an expert at dealing with angry dames. Haas directed. In The ComeOn (1956), Oscar winner Anne Baxter and Sterling Hayden lust for each other. What about her husband? Baxter’s heavy breathing whenever Hayden approaches is hilarious. Directed by Russell Birdwell. This is the last surviving 35mm print. Neither film is on DVD. (Thurs., Jan. 31) Oscar winner Edmund O’Brien is the Man in the Dark (1953), a hood who undergoes brain surgery to cure him of his crooked ways! It also erases his memory. Where did he hide the loot? His former mobster pals, including mean Ted De Corsia, want to find
out. Strange dreams help him reclaim his past. Hard-boiled Audrey Totter is his girlfriend. Directed by Lew Landers. Shown in a fully restored 3-D print. Robert Ryan, not a man to be messed with, finds himself in an Inferno (1953) after his unfaithful wife (gorgeous redhead Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan) leave him for dead in the desert. Ryan survives. His revenge is frightening. Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Shown in a fully restored 3-D print. (Fri., Feb. 1) Cornell Woolrich’s novels and short stories have been the basis for many great suspense movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). The first to be filmed was Street of Chance (42), shown in a fully restored 35mm print. Burgess Meredith loses his memory after being struck by a beam. He realizes he’s lived the past year as someone See page 18 >>
Putting on the Ritz by Paul Parish
Scarlett Johansson and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in Don Jon’s Addiction.
wife, rides home with her wife and kids in the family bus, she’s just been struck in the head at her son’s Little League game. Stacie Passon explained what she was trying to accomplish with her first feature. “The script wasn’t about this lesbian housewife who became a hooker, but about the human predicament.” Lovelace Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ratchet us back to 1970s porn’s “Garden of Eden,” when the hip and the horny found common congress in shabby theatres boasting a gimmick: a genuinely sexy XXX film that didn’t shun humor. Using fact-to-fiction techniques that served them well in Howl, the filmmakers show a young woman from a religious background going from porn superstar to exploited sex worker. Amanda Seyfried is Linda Boreman (Lovelace), Peter Sarsgaard is her hustler-guru-despoiler Chuck Traynor; with Adam Brody, James Franco and Sharon Stone. Interior. Leather Bar. For decades, even the severest critics of director William Friedkin’s 1980 leather-bar thriller Cruising have cited how his film documented gay nightlife in the See page 26 >>
San Francisco Ballet dancer Pierre-François Vilanoba in Petit’s L’Arlésienne.
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ig-time dance is back. The San Francisco Ballet launched its 80th season last Thursday night with a gala that lasted, in all its outlying festivities, well into the next morning. It’s a unique civic event, attended by everybody who’s anybody in SF politics, society, civic or cultural life, with dinner parties before the show and dancing after in the great courts of City Hall. The spectacle of ball gowns in the aisles and in the lobby rivals the parade of costumes onstage (trains are short this year). I saw Nancy Pelosi in the lobby; perhaps she did not boogie afterwards, but the late-night dance floors were packed. SFB galas were instituted by Helgi To-
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masson at the beginning of his tenure here as artistic director – in part to ensure that our ballet would never be faced with bankruptcy again, and to make the case that SFB is an ambassador for our way of life. This kind of event goes back 300 years to Louis XIV, who used ballet among other fine arts to display the glory of France, frankly as an instrument to put his rebellious barons in their place – they had to “dance attendance” on him at Versailles – and to impress foreign diplomats. It’s been an instrument of diplomacy ever since. During the Cold War, the State Dept. countered Russians by sending American See page 24 >>