Category: Film

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Everybody Maggie Cheung Tonight!

Philip came over for a light pasta and Irma Vep tonight. I made some really strong espresso and now I can’t sleep and the bf of the guy downstairs is throwing up so it’s not like I’d be asleep anyway and there’s no one new at Bear-licious, well, no one new since a little while ago, and where is Big Chris when I’m actually awake? Irma Vep is a French film from a few years ago starring Maggie Cheung playing Maggie Cheung shooting a contemporary remake of Les Vampires for a French auteur director who breaks down and eventually disappears from the set as everything falls apart in a superb and almost comic self-reflective glimpse at the current state of French cinema. It’s really weird seeing Maggie Cheung seeming so unstar-like and speaking English. It’s even weirder seeing all these cineastes who have no idea that they’re working alongside one of Asia’s biggest movie stars. (When Bob and I were in Havana we visited a client of an architect friend, who lived in this big house and had a blonde girlfriend, a cellphone and bodyguards and a TV screen that descended from the ceiling with the push of a button. On our way out of the country I casually glanced at the TV in the airport to see our friend’s client singing on the screen–“Hey Bob, look, there’s Pablo on TV,” as the camera pulled back to show him singing to a sold-out STADIUM. We had lunched with Cuba’s Elton John and didn’t know.) Anyway, I had to show Philip a little bit of In the Mood For Love to give him a feel for Maggie’s superstar-ness.

I completed step two of my two-step alchoholic program today–adding the sugar and more alchohol to my Limoncello base. It has another month to steep and settle down, but soon, you will enjoy the alchoholic fruit of my, uhh, fruit.

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Palindromes

Last night BC and I went to see Palindromes, Todd Solondz’ latest, and plopped ourselves down several rows ahead of Davide and Richard at the Castro, I in my regular seat, #107, 10th row center. It is an amazing film, about a girl, Aviva, who wants to have a baby. The role of Aviva is played by several different actresses, including a 40-year old Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her desire is thwarted by her parents’ misguided need to protect her, her age–she’s only 13 or so–and, the film seems to say, fate. At one point the older brother of Dawn Weiner (falsely, he says, accused of molesting a child), tells Aviva that we’re destined to start back where we started, that we are who we are and there’s no getting around it. The film illustrates this physically through Aviva’s storybook adventure, which ends up where it began, with her having sex with her buddy Judah, who changes his name to Otto at the end of the film to make the connection overt. Solondz creates a world in which everyone speaks very softly, yet within the softness are extremes of moral ambiguity and physical anguish. At many times we’re squeamish because he makes us laugh hysterically about something that in the next beat is heart-wrenching. The absurdity and cruelty of the world is just too much to not laugh at–that kind of laughter that sounds like sobbing. He has created a small masterpiece.

And remember Richard Masur? He plays Aviva’s dad! Remember? He was Ann Romano’s sometimes boyfriend, David Kane, on One Day at a Time! I had such a total crush on him when I was 10.

Tonight I took my sister to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, which reminded me of Todd Solondz in how they create hilarity by upending convention, but of course without all the depressing stuff. The all-male troupe dances playful parodies of classical ballets. Yet with all the hilarious physicality, there is an amazing poise and strength to each dancer. Odette, the queen of the swans in their Swan Lake is played by Olga Supphozova, whose comic timing and broad delivery is as impeccable as his powerful precise dancing. In Fokine’s Dying Swan, Ida Nevasayneva jiggles an endless number of feathers from his tutu as he prances histrionically across the stage and back, again and again, the flow of feathers non-stop, his death a grand guignol burlesque.

And who was seated but a few rows ahead but A.J. Kiltbear in full regalia. Before he waved me over, I thought “Another ‘kilt-bear’ in the east bay?” before I realized that there is only one Kiltbear. At least for me. Thank heavens he didn’t lean against the wall at any other time than intermission, as this swan was quite a distraction from the ones of stage.

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eBay, a Few Movies, Free-Range Seafood?

I’m back on eBay. I just had to prove that I live where I say that I do, and promise not to do whatever they said that I did, which I didn’t do in the first place. Having jumped through all of their hoops, it’s good to be back amidst the possibility of more fine mid-century treasures.

I saw a delightful film the other night, a new film by Alain Resnais of all people, with whom I definitely don’t associate the term “delightful,” based on an operetta from the 1920’s, Not on the Lips, a really fun musical very much not of our time and utterly enjoyable. And speaking of mid-century treasures, I also watched Barbarella again, I guess because of all this Jane Fonda-ness around. What she does with that role is amazing. It’s basically her husband’s wet dream, and she takes this completely exploitative and stupid film and invigorates it with excellent comic timing and deadpan intelligence. The opening sequence, in which she slowly and clumsily strips off her space suit, and THEN turns on the gravity, is nothing short of visionary. And I absolutely MUST have a space capsule like hers, lined in long-haired brown acrylic fur. Every scene involves her being ravaged by some hostile but ultimately benign alien being, her spacesuit partially bitten off, some sexy guy saving her and then making love to her in the barbaric way that extraterrestrials do, and then another fabulous designer latex outfit. Every single man in the film lusts after her, except for the dude with wings, Pygar, who’s BLIND, but he at least gets to cop a feel when he finds her unconscious.

So channel surfing the other day I came across a piece of vegan propaganda on the public access channel about how poorly animals are treated and decided on the spot to be a vegetarian. This was of course following the Michael Pollen piece a while back about the cattle industry and corn-fed beef. Seeing those cute little piggies just broke my heart, and I pledged half-heartedly not to support such cruelty. I don’t have a problem with eating animals, just the cruelty part, so I’m limiting my animal intake to creatures with not much in the way of higher brain function, like seafood, and meat that I know has been raised in luxurious country settings. So not really a vegetarian. And I’m already a slow-food enthusiast. What would you call me? A compassionate carnivore?

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Orange and Brown

Tonight the Super Bears and I had dinner at the Pacific Cafe, in the Richmond. I’ve been going there since 1985, the last time I think in ’88, and absolutely nothing has changed, from the predominance of the colors orange and brown to the two choices of starch. As usual, there was a line out front, and as usual we were each handed a glass of chablis as we waited for a table to open. It took two full glasses each for a table to be available, so dinner was a delightful blur of crustaceans and conversation and a pretty yummy cheesecake for dessert. We made our way back to BC’s and watched The Conversation, continuing my reacquaintance with the films of the 60’s and 70’s, which I’m convinced was truly the Golden Age of film. It’s all about Before and After the New Wave for me. It’s filmed on location in San Francisco and, narrative aside, you get to see the Embarcadero Center being built, the City of Paris building before it was demolished and replaced by Philip Johnson’s Neiman-Marcus, the harmonious Union Square before it too was destroyed to make way for the abomination that sits on the site today, and a really really young Harrison Ford, before all the muscle! And Cindy Williams doing serious acting!

Earlier I took in a few of the new Mission gallery spaces with Emily, including hot shows at Mission 17 and Queen’s Nails Annex. The neighborhood is finally buzzing with some exciting artist-run spaces. I’m not lucid enough to recount the shows that I saw, so check them out before the next dot com bubble forces everybody out of town again.

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Petulia

The Balboa is hosting a series of films set in San Francisco, called “The Reel San Francisco.” Tonight I saw Petulia, with Julie Christie, Richard Chamberlain, George C. Scott, Shirley Knight, with all these great uncredited appearances by Janice Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Rene Auberjonois, Mickey Hart, and Howard Hesseman! It was such a strange and amazing movie. First of all, Julie Christie’s white lips are more luscious than ever, and her hair is piled on her head in a baroque mound of coiled brown rolls. The film opens with her, inexplicably, making the move on the sad and grumpy and soon to be divorced George C. Scott, while dashing husband Richard Chamberlain looks on, permeating sexual heat in the background. Scott is turned off by her antics, and even more so when she starts appearing everywhere, telling him things like they’re going to be married and he’s going to be her lover, etc… Well, she is Julie Christie, and the morning after he finally gives in, he leaves her in his apartment, post coital, as he takes the kids out for a day on the Bay, calling her from every phone booth he passes, and returns to find her brutally beaten and unconscious. As his desire grows for her, she slips away, back to the arms of young Richard Chamberlain, of whom she’s terrified, as he’s the guy who beat her to a bloody pulp. We never see the violence, only its potential and effects. Shirley Knight, given only one key scene, is marvelous as a woman pulled simultaneously toward and away from George C. Scott, who also is marvelous, conveying his isolation and desire subtly, but deeply. The film itself has very jagged intrusive editing, with different narratives woven in that unwind chronologically backwards or forwards as the events are revealed by the thoughts or glances of the various characters. Very much of its time, and very fascinating to watch.

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Ida-bo-bida, fee-fi-fo-fida

Ida Lupino. I want a name like “Ida Lupino.” She’s my favorite hard-luck dame–powerful and sexy, and one of my favorites of her films is Road House. I made a photo a few years ago and called it Road House, not because it had anything to do with her, but because I liked thinking of her, Cornell Wilde, Celeste Holm, and Richard Widmark when I looked at it. She sings in the movie, a throaty, gravelly, been-around-the-block-and-back voice that sounds like it’s about to fall apart. “There’s only one kind of lovin’—MY kind of lovin’…”

I’ve been thinking about her because I’m going to show that photo next spring, as well as several other single-image color works that I’ve never shown before–romantic platinum blonde landscapes, peach blossoms, and Jack Radcliffe of course. Maybe. But that’s all I’m going to tell you for now.

It’s just a stunningly beautiful day in San Francisco today. With all the recent rains, everything’s in bloom and everybody’s sneezing and rubbing his eyes. Has it become accepted to use “their” as a single possessive pronoun? I grew up with “his” as the gender neutral choice, but then had “his/her” drummed into me in college to undo the gender bias of my forefathers, I mean foreparents. It still makes me cringe to hear “their” in the same sentence as a single ungendered subject, but even more so to hear “his/her” or “he/she.” What is one to do?

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Wake Up, Everybody!

I woke up sometime this weekend, actually a few minutes after BC called, and said to myself, well, actually repeating RRR’s thoughts that BC had just passed on to me, and said to myself, “Chris, what the BLEEP is wrong with you? You’re going to show in NEW YORK CITY! Who the BLEEP cares if the gallery is a little dinky place, just make a great show!” Whew, crisis diverted. I will be bringing my silly furry grids to… to–I can’t yet bring myself to actually tell you the name of the gallery so that you have all that time to find out the type of art that they show, and who knows, maybe by then they’ll be the hot place, but–to Chelsea in March, 2006, so if you know anyone there, more specifically if you know anyone with money, send them to my show and tell them that how cheap and easy I am…

Okay, so today I go into work, very excited after reading about the new book by Sean Wilsey, Dede’s stepson, because I know that my boss has read the same review and as the former “walker” to Madame S, has tons of dirt to share with me. Well, no sooner than I run up the stairs and blurt out “Did you read THE review this morning?” his cellphone rings and it’s his Most Recent Boy-Toy (MRB-T), whom he moved to Seattle a few months ago, calling from Seattle to say that he’d sero-converted and was going to sue the BLEEPITY BLEEPER who gave him HIV, The Virus That Causes AIDS™, and wanted his advice. Boss gave him the number of Previous Boy-Toy, whom the Boss moved to Pasadena last year after being milked to the tune of 20 grand and the promise of leaving the profession, after he too had sero-converted. It turns out that MRB-T was filming a scene in a porn film at the time of the alleged assault, and unable to appear as excited as he most assuredly was, was offered a fast-acting booster shot by his co-star. It was the needle that pierced his pubis, MRB-T claims, that passed the virus into his bloodstream, and this guy should be stopped before he infects any others this same way! Meanwhile Infector-Boy has started his own porn house, a bare-back porn production facility, and continues to not only shoot people with shared needles, is also bare-backing while not disclosing his HIV+ status. Well, it was all too much for this AIDS widow. I just said “Uh huh, tell me about Harry de Wildt” and mentally chiseled tombstones for them all. If only they were just killing each other…

And speaking of protecting each other, stay far away from the travesty that is Sin City. What a ridiculous piece of immaculately stylized trash. Although Mickey Rourke rocked. I’ve thought about it all weekend, since seeing it–why doesn’t this film work for me and I still ♥ Quentin Tarantino? Tarantino’s distillation and appropriation of film is accompanied by such a deep love and encyclopedic knowledge of the material.. Sin City is a graphic novel moved to the screen and nothing else. It’s like that big red strawberry that genetic engineers have spent generations making bigger and juicier looking, but it still tastes like cardboard. See it on a big screen. I also saw Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life tonight, in Cinemascope at the Castro. James Mason is a school teacher who is saved from near death by the then-new miracle drug Cortisone, but then abuses the drug and gets progressively more and more psychotic while his family refuses to call the doctor until he decides that his son should die because he’s slow at math and Walter Matthau walks in just as he’s about to cut up the whole family with a pair of scissors… It made me so anxious, like a nightmare where you’re trying to run from the guy with the ax and your legs are moving in slow motion. The wife ignores every meager suggestion or indication that something is wrong, and every single offer of help. I almost stood up and screamed “Call the Doctor!!!!”

BC is in arrivo. See ya’ll later!

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The CocoPlex

Has anyone noticed that the first run films at the Castro are not being reviewed by the Chronicle? Is there an organized critical boycott because of Anita Monga’s dismissal? I’ve actually been going to the Balboa a lot lately, where the programming is similar to Monga’s Castro, but sadly without the Castro’s grand environment. I have no idea what the Nasser family thinks they’re doing–the new calendar is poorly designed, the programming completely flat and unchallenging (The Valley of the Dolls again?), and the website has info about how to “rent” the Castro! All of my favorite movie houses have closed down (Cedar Cinema, the Strand, Royal, Mission, The Alhambra, Northpoint, the York, Pagoda Palace, the Alexandria…), and now the Castro, with its fabulous interior and huge screen, is becoming a retro bauble.

With DVDs coming out so fast, I’ve decided to set up my own screening room in the house. I’m looking at the Panasonic PT-AE700U, which seems to have the largest image with the smallest throw (it’ll be in a 13 foot room)–an LCD, although it seems that the quality gap between DLP and LCD has narrowed. If anyone has any input on projectors, please share…

My first showing will be Antonioni’s L’Avventura, la Notte and L’Eclisse, which I’ve always wanted to see together, in my jammies. Six and a half hours of modern malaise.

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Banquets and Donkey Skin

Nick and Su-Chen whipped up a royal feast last night at Nick and Jeff’s loft in Oakland. I didn’t realize that there were going to be eight courses. I was pretty full after the second, but the flavors were so delightful, I yielded to dish after dish, and did my best to not explode. The courses began with a cucumber and marinated pork appetizer, then crisp asparagus in a light soy sauce, crab cakes served over an Asian version of succotash, whole shrimp, cooked quickly over a hot flame in a ginger garlic pepper sauce, salmon cooked in miso with cucumbers again and toasted sesame seeds, anise-flavored pork with bok choy, a light broth with tofu and tomatoes, and then a kind-of flan for dessert. A lot of the local Hairy Bodies alumni were present, including Big Chrissy, Dean the model and Dean the artist, and his charming BF Doug, and Ruth and her hubby, John. As soon as we realized that John had helped design the G4 titanium laptop we all squirmed our way onto his discount waiting list. I felt compelled to give him a little grief about the hinges. A full course or two was spent talking about heat sinks. The dishes stopped coming around midnight, and after a few games of pool, where Dean won every game by default, we toddled home, fat shadows of our former selves.

Today I saw Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin, with Catherine Deneuve and Jean Marais, from 1970. The totally delightful fairy tale opens with Queen Catherine Deneuve on her deathbed, forcing King Jean Marais (Bête of Beauty and the Beast) to promise to wed only someone prettier than she to secure a male heir to the throne after she dies. Well, wouldn’t you know it, but the only girl prettier than the queen is her daughter, also played by Catherine Deneuve, so after her death, the King decides to marry her! The fairy godmother intervenes and disguises Princess Catherine in the skin of a donkey (that pooped gems), and whisks her away to another kingdom, where she eventually is found by the local Prince, after baking him a “love” cake and slipping her tiny ring into the batter, a ring so tiny that it will only fit on her slender finger. Borrowing from Cinderella, the Prince assembles all the bachelorettes in the kingdom to try on the ring, lining them up in order from Princess to “unemployed,” and eventually on down to our girl with the donkey skin. Following their wedding, King Marais shows up in a helicopter with his new bride, yes, you guessed it, the Fairy Godmother, and everything’s great.

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A Few Shows, No Drama, Carol Reed

Today Les and I took in a few gallery shows, the entire experience contained by different relations to space. The first show featured the photos of John O’Reilly, my favorite artist. John is in his mid 70’s, and his last 2 projects have focused much more acutely on the passage of time, meticulous little surreal paste-ups of black and white polaroid images of his crumbling world and studio, flecked here and there with allusions to youth and music, the visual space vibrating between personal and public past and present. He shared the gallery with an Australian artist, Timothy Horn, who created what seemed like baroque earrings and baubles, but enlarged to extreme proportions, vulgar and delicious. We then saw the photographs of Candida Höfer, large-scale photos of grand interior public spaces around the world, devoid of people but filled with amazing detail. The spaces were all quite gaudy and antique, but with slight references to the occupation of a contemporary presence and sensibility.

Happily or not, my love life seems on an even keel, and the absence of any heart-wrenching obsession or drama has me wondering about what to work on next. I’ve asked Dean to make himself busy on Friday so that I could have the day to myself to work in the studio on some ideas for my next project. I’ve never made art during such a lull in my soap opera–I’ll have to make something about that.

Philip came over last night for Chicken Coco-tore and then we zipped up the hill to join Redbackfur at BC’s for Carol Reed’s extraordinary Odd Man Out. James Mason plays an IRA leader who falls off the getaway car while speeding away from a robbery. Shot in the shoulder, and slowly dying, he wanders around town, looking for a place to hide and for someone to take him in, and thus wanders through every strata of republican or loyalist sentiment. At one point in Mason’s plight, a fey painter obsessed with capturing the darkness of the human soul takes him back to his flat to paint him. It’s a moving film, compassionate without being moralistic, with subtle performances and a brilliant script.

FLASH: Reese and I put up a new page on Fluffy and Ruffy last Friday…
Transform-a-Character!
(Reese did all the animation himself!)