YBCA: IN A GLASS CAGE

It isn't necessarily time to fulfill a semi-promise made last year, but memories remain of the still-ended film program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Some memories are stronger than others, and some experiences will stick in the front of my head until I put them down. Some of these posts will celebrate milestones in the film program. This one, however, centers not on the curatorial largesse of Joel Shepard but on a particularly memorable screening. One of the freakiest I've ever attended. Read on...

In A Glass Cage had a three-show run in May 2011 at YBCA. It was a new print that was making the rounds; smaller distributors announce their offerings to various theatres and programmers, and in those days Joel was often the only programmer adventurous enough to jump on some of the more esoteric films thrown his way. (There were a few restored classics over the years that Joel was astonished he landed; he couldn't believe that no other cinema in the Bay Area was as excited as he to show certain films.) The debut film by Spanish filmmaker Agustí Villaronga (who based it on the life of Gilles de Rais), In A Glass Cage tells the story of a decrepit Nazi child molester who falls into the care of one of his former victims. A certain level of controversy still hovered over the film given its rigor, politics, and explicit sex and violence. There were about fifteen of us in the audience, braced for something quiet, disturbing, and confrontational.

Interjection: YBCA's house managers fill out a report form at the end of every event. There's a box to check if everything goes fine and without incident, and a number of spaces to fill in details on anything that goes wrong (facilities things like the room being too cold or too warm, problems brought up by audience members, etc.)

So the movie quietly reveals itself to be an austere, slowburn treatment of its subject matter, creating a grey, humid world in which its characters regard each other with unspoken but deeeeep volumes of hatred, longing, and emotions too complex to express.

About twenty minutes in some guy and his date blow in, making quite a lot of noise as they get acclimatized to the low light of the movie and try to find the best seats. Plenty of space near the door where they could just sit the fuck down and not disturb anybody, but it's almost as if they deliberately pick (after much debate and calculation) the longest path across the space between the door and available seats. There's been very little exposition at this point in the movie, but the newcomers are a little louder than they have to be in trying to catch each other up.

Then the guy, from somewhere in his jacket pocket (which he makes a weird amount of noise trying to find), withdraws a particularly crinkly snack bag (Doritos or something) which he noisily opens and even more noisily starts eating.

Three rows in front of him, a reedy, older moviegoer (a regular I believe - don't recall exactly who but believe I had seen him there before or since), gets up out of his seat, walks to the aisle, walks back to this guy's row, walks up to him, AND SNATCHES THE BAG OUT OF HIS HANDS and storms back to the aisle, back down the aisle to his row, then back to his seat.

The Screening Room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts seats 94 people, in eight rows of seats. It would be hard for all of this not to be noticed in the average house of your average multiplex, but this shit is EXPLODING and bouncing off the metal walls that line the powderkeg of this little room.

So the latecomer gets out of his seat, goes to the aisle, down the aisle, then up to the snatcher and demands to know what the fuck his problem is. The snatcher tries to make his case while keeping his voice down, God love him, though the particular mood of IN A GLASS CAGE has been pretty much destroyed by this time, as the drama unfolding in the audience has escalated far more quickly than Agustí Villaronga would have ever allowed. All of the moviegoers are completely distracted by the drama unfolding in their midst, which seems to be headed to a violent resolution more quickly than the movie. But someone in a seat near the door has left the room, and soon the house manager has poked her head in and left, and soon after that Security arrives to escort BOTH men from the screening room. (The latecomer's date follows him out.) None of them return, but no one in the audience is on the wavelength of the movie, and though the rest of the screening goes without incident the movie's chances at taking us in were pretty much dashed.

I later found that the latecomer had split from a performance in the Forum (a larger space on the floor below the screening room) and, having announced that the quality of that performance not to his liking, demanded to be let into the movie upstairs since he figured YBCA owed him one.

"Whatever the case," I thought to myself, "she won't be able to check that box tonight."

cinephile at large, again!

"Farewell, my liege. Now no way can I stray;
Save back to England, all the world's my way."
--RICHARD II, I, iii


And so the ace film programmer Joel Shepard (and his trusty assistant, yours truly) are exiled from Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, who have chosen to place their film program "on pause" before they convene to reimagine it along lines similar to their other programming.


Even before I started working there with Joel, I had, to the point of tedium, opined that his film program was one of the best in the country. He's been a visible figure on the scene for the 22 years he's helmed the program, and I've been pleased by the number of tributes being paid to him and the volumes of words in support on line (flattered, also, by the number of people acknowledging my own contribution to the program).

On pause it may be, but life continues for your proprietor, who has given himself a little time off to get re-centered. It is necessitating some adjustment, I tell you what. But if nothing else, it'll give me more time to update here more regularly.

And I suspect there'll be some recollections of memories of the YBCA film program over the years. As these are not archived anywhere it may be useful to put even my own selective memories down here. Meanwhile, I'm going to give Joel the last word, and reprint from his final statement to YBCA's stalwart staff (and note that you can replace the SF-specific venues with your own local film programs, who just as surely need your support.:

"Movies matter. Please support the theatrical exhibition of independent and foreign film. Please patronize the Castro, Roxie, PFA, SF Cinematheque, Landmark theaters, YBCA’s future screenings, and the work of all the beautiful weirdos out there keeping this impossible dream alive."

THE MUMMY (2017)

This one hurt.

It hurt because it was clearly the product of people who knew what the hell they were doing. Everything that happens in THE MUMMY happens for a reason, and the story is solid. You have a good script (by Christopher McQuarrie and David Koepp, among others) that is logical when it needs to be (triangulating the hero's fate along the axes of a love triangle, between two poles) with flourishes winningly insane enough that you just go with them (Doctor Jekyll is a) alive in 2017, b) chasing monsters, and c) played by Russell Crowe). So many people showed up ready to play in this thing, including Sofia Boutella in the gender-swapped title role.

BUT GOD DAMMIT. The game cast doesn't feel like it had a chance to let loose, to explore the emotional life and conflicts that are right there in the material. Director Alex Kurtzman brings in the action and the spectacle, but does nothing to cultivate the emotional lives of the characters. The problem may simply be with his leading man, who has been better managed in the past: Tom Cruise here is required to be roguish, clever, conflicted, and ultimately full-hearted, and though he speaks the lines that indicate all of this, he doesn't seem to believe any of them. For a man ultimately torn between the otherworldly realms inhabited by Boutella and the more earthy and human love of archaeologist Annabelle Wallis, Cruise has no real chemistry with either. (Even Jake Johnson, cast in a funny wiseass role he could play in his sleep, seems, oddly, to be sleepwalking through the movie.) And the moments that should transcend and take the characters beyond themselves simply (though clearly) register as beats, without ever taking us beyond ourselves.

In the end one isn't bored by it, but that's hardly enough to kick off a franchise, is it? At first blush I mused that all of the movie's problems would be solved had Cruise and Crowe simply switched roles: as overvalued as THE NICE GUYS was, it did remind us that Crowe still possessed reservoirs of charm, action chops, and a sense of humor that would have lent themselves to THE MUMMY's roguish lead; and given the rumors that handily explain why Cruise's chemistry with his female co-stars is so flat, one salivates thinking of the subtexts he'd bring to Jekyll and Hyde. And one is depressed further to think that without Cruise in the lead, this movie doesn't get made. That a great movie that would have kicked off a franchise with grace, smarts, and style is right there in plain sight yet beyond its makers' grasp is a huge disappointment. To your proprietor, an engaged cinephile looking for anything in 21st century Universal Horror to believe in, such a missed opportunity is frustrating and painful.

that fucking trailer

< 60-second-HATE >

So the latest salvo in the ongoing onslaught of DC's superhero movies got fired this weekend, and if the fans can have their say so can I. Yes, it's cool that we've got some parademons in there, and the Mother Box, and they actually made Cyborg look like an interesting character, and Momoa looks hot, and yeah yeah yeah

But we're subjected to the same on-the-nose needle drops on the soundtrack, the same listless looking action, the same drabid-awful-looking dull bluish gray color on everything when this thing, given the revitalizing focus on team-based action, should be exploding across the spectrum.

And I was ready to just write this off as another superhero movie that simply held nothing for me until we got to this choice bit of dialogue.

AQUAMAN: So what's your superpower?
BATMAN: I'm rich.

NO NO NO FUCKING NO YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER

This is the trademark tone-deafness of auteur Zack Snyder creeping in. This is this franchise's ongoing cordial dialogue with, and reinforcement of, the absolute worst in the American status quo. This is Batman-as-Donald-Trump, and we're supposed to cheer this bullshit. This is an absence of understanding that Batman holds his own among magicians, among aliens, among gods not through the pricetag on his toys through sheer force of will. The corrected dialogue follows:

AQUAMAN: So what's your superpower?
BATMAN:

That's it. That's the fucking line. That line became a meme for a reason. That's all the goddamn Batman ever has to say to justify his presence to anybody. But the cheap laugh (if that) provoked by "I'm rich" is a tacit understanding that money = power, that the money spent on this thing is what makes it great.

And I'm tired of that shit.

So in closing, and this is the last I'll say about this: Fuck this movie. Fuck Zack Snyder. Fuck DC "Entertainment". Fuck superhero movies in general. And while we're at it, fuck you.

< /60-second-HATE >

Norris

Seriously, what a sanctimonious pile of steaming horseshit. I'm talking about the much remarked-upon video of Chuck Norris warning America about the oncoming "thousand years of darkness" in the event of Obama's second Presidential term. I'm not going to embed it 'cause it's just too fucking stupid - click the above link if you must.

I can't say I'm surprised to see Norris, never one of my favorite action heroes and never someone I suspected of having anything like a credible opinion about anything political, shilling so hard and so mindlessly for the Republican party. I take offense to the hare-brained notion that Obama's second term will lead America into apocalypse, though I suppose it's helpful to have the Right's demonizing rhetoric rendered so obviously. This is some serious lowest common denominator shit, and if it's the best argument the GOP is capable of making for their case then they need to uproot themselves from civil discourse and leave it to smarter, saner Republicans more able to form coherent thoughts and better equipped to speak to current realities. I refuse to assume that all who vote for Mitt Romney in the coming election are stupid; I have to believe that any honestly free-thinking Republicans would be appalled to have Norris presuming to speak for them in this shrill and idiotic spot.

And what the fuck happened to Norris' voice? This isn't the voice of an American badass, it's the voice I hear in my head whenever I try to read an idiotic fanboy rant criticizing Carol Danvers' costume change in the pages of CAPTAIN MARVEL. The thousand years spot looks and sounds like the GOP once again letting a senile, out-of-touch, possibly crazy Hollywood icon speak on their behalf. Which didn't go well last week, either.

Since I can't bear the though of anybody leaving an entry here dumber than they were when they started reading it, here's some fragments of Orson Welles' aborted and unseen MERCHANT OF VENICE:

THE PITCH

From last night's post-MAD MEN sneak preview: Two ad agencies (each filled with dull people who would probably describe themselves as "creatives") vie for a Subway breakfast campaign targeting the 18-24 demographic. Lots of blah-blah, people talking about how fear is a great motivator for them, quiet (nearly subliminal) music, advertising is a very competitive field, people talking about how they're in it to win it, someone uses the word "concept" as a verb, and I turn it off about 20 minutes in.

Your proprietor's interest in reality television has thus been exhausted for the year.

Missing Persons

This was one of the strangest fucking nights of my life.

This is the kind of story that I think is better heard in person, but I have to write this down, 'cause I'm still not totally sure it happened. I've never seen a band fall apart the way Dale Bozzio and Missing Persons did last month...and I've never seen a night where artists and audience came together so powerfully.

Advance word, from a friend who'd seen the band in San Diego three nights prior, wasn't positive. Apparently Bozzio was still in good voice, but quite intoxicated onstage, and prone to lengthy rants. As keen as I was to see the show, and cautiously optimistic about the night in general, I'd prepared myself for a difficult night. Missing Persons had been one of THE new wave bands of the early 80s, boosting a plastic, high-gloss and high-tech image with real musicianship and a knack for complex rhythm and melody (since all musicians were veterans of Frank Zappa's late-70s ensembles, such skill is hardly surprising).

But even though Dale Bozzio had co-written all of Missing Persons' songs, from a distance a 2011 tour might seem desperate, a clinging of a washed-up musician to past glories (particularly with the other founding members Terry Bozzio, Warren Cuccurullo, and Patrick O'Hearn having moved on, all enjoying more professional clout and respect than Dale Bozzio ever received). That her most recent release had been a collection of remakes of MP tracks, as well as other hits of the 80s, would also lead one to expect the worst.

But we steeled ourselves and soldiered on. Though I showed up at Yoshi's an hour before the gig, scant few people had shown up. We had ordered seats at a table on the first tier behind the dance floor, and were surprised to enter the space to find the floor filled with the usual table setup. Not enough tickets sold. Bad news. A bunch of open tables right in front of the stage. Good news for us.

As usually happens at Yoshi's there wasn't a GRAND ENTRANCE of the band - just a bunch of musicians taking the stage and getting set up. So we got a good look at the people filling the shoes of Missing Persons: Mike (I think), a non-descript guitarist; Doug, an older bass player (his instrument had five strings); a keyboard player who looked more like a roadie, save for his purple scarf and zebra-print platform boots; and Jake, the youngest member of the group, a drummer who, it would turn out, was a fine, fine musician.

As the show started Dale looked a bit disoriented. She reminded us a couple of times that it was her birthday. She kept moving around the stage, and looking at the ceiling like she was trying to remember the words. (D suggested that perhaps she was looking up to not be distracted by the smallish crowd, which may well have been the case.) This said, there was NOTHING wrong with her voice - it still carried the range and the weird mix of innocence and sexuality that it had always had. And though she would continue to down flute after flute of champagne (brought out by a dutiful roadie who seemed to have no other responsibilities), her voice remained strong, and by the fifth song ("Words", the band's earliest hit), everything was falling into place. The show was truly well under way, the band continued, and the audience were into it. But I think everyone was still keeping an eye on Dale, half expecting that she could flame out at any time.

So we were all caught by utter surprise when, about five bars into "Give," the guitar player fell over his amplifier. He got to his feet, played a couple more chords, and then fell against the wall. The band stopped and everything was chaos for the next few minutes.

Perhaps you've seen something like this happen, but when when a live performance goes THIS spectacularly wrong it's quite, quite disorienting to the viewer (to the people onstage, as well, sure). I felt weirdly concussed as the ensuing minutes unfolded, but I do remember these things:

-The band members struggling to get the guitarist offstage and into the hands of suitable attention.

-Jake in particular springing to action to nail everything down. ("You're our EMT, Jake, take care of it," quoth Dale.)

-Some strange things from Dale: "Get him a stool, he'll be fine." And ultimately "It's not like he's a drug addict or anything." These are not words you want to hear anyone say under any circumstances.

-And finally, a couple of fans, undaunted by the carnage unfolding before their very eyes, bringing some Missing Persons records for Dale to sign.

What we pieced together was that the guitarist had been in a fight (!) a couple of days prior, and was taking painkillers, which mixed badly with the beer he'd had earlier. So there was a lot of frantic activity (you could see the zebra boots running back and forth beneath the rear curtain), and there was quite a conflicted vibe coming from the stage - it seemed that Mike was determined to retake his place on stage but that the band wanted to just get him some medical attention. Eventually they said that there'd be a liability if he were to resume, and so finally, it was clear there would be no guitarist for the rest of the performance.

So we reached a point where you get whenever things go wrong onstage (somewhere in there we all sang "Happy Birthday To You" to Dale), and Jake played a 3-minute drum solo to fill the space. This is a sign that the band is desperate, but 'twas good. Jake was, in fact, an exceptional drummer (and certainly capable of filling Terry Bozzio's drum throne).

And then the remaining band launched (tentatively, at first) into the album track "U.S. Drag", more intimate and spare without a guitarist to fill it, and yet...

An acting teacher told me that an audience loves to see an actor recover from a flubbed line or some other disaster. I remember thinking at the time that I'd rather see a smooth performance. But this moment in this show made me rethink this.

Because what I saw in "U.S. Drag" at this moment was simply magical: the four remaining musicians were at a point of no return, no way to undo what had just happened, and so they thrust themselves forward. Something resembling a performance gelled before our very eyes, the music rose up from the ashes and took these four wayward souls (and the unbelieving/faithful/coked-up audience members) into its confidence. At that moment, Dale and band resealed the compact with the audience, and made it work. They'd gone over the cliff but reached out for a post, and the momentum pulled them back up on the road.

And from that point forward the show was just fucking solid. Dale continued her between-songs rants, fueled by champagne, endorphins, fearlessness, and utter carnage, but I don't remember her squinting for the words that point forward. The reduced band played on, motivated by a clear "fuck it, we're gonna do this", and it sounded like nothing was missing. Powering through the set, offering a perfectly appropriate and wonderfully rendered "Destination Unknown," ending with a SOLID "Walking In L.A." then covering a Zappa track as a coda. And thank you, good night.

Crazy applause from all of us, particularly a clearly coked-out contingent in their best neon 80s-wear sitting behind us. At my table we just looked at each other, delighted but still not entirely sure that we'd seen what we'd seen. As we lingered to process it, some roadies and a couple of band members came out to strike the set. Jake made the rounds, and there were a couple of us who wanted to compliment/congratulate him. One of the 80s contingent wanted to give Dale something: "Can you give this to your mom?" "She's not my mom." (Jake probably heard that at every gig.) He came over to us and thanked us for coming, asked us if it came off all right. I told him exactly what I wrote above: that after the chaos, something opened up and took us all in, and that the band had more than made it worked. He was pleased, and thanked us again.

On the way home, D had to pull the car over so that we could process. We laughed. This was not a derisive laugh at the band, but the somewhat hysterical laughter of the shellshocked. To this day we still can't quite believe that we saw what we saw. I've seen a fair amount of on-stage chaos (be it Link Wray falling off the stage at Bimbo's, or a typical Testicular Momentum gig at dc space), and even weathered my own share of backstage chaos during plays (one day I'll spill all about THE NIGHT) but this qualified as the most protractedly weird, gloriously uneven, and full-tilt bizarre performance I'd ever seen.

But we were both happy to have seen it.

Because there's no way in hell Yoshi's will ever have them back.

(And yet return they did, though not to Yoshi's - their next SF gig, at the Red Devil Lounge, with original guitarist Warren Cucurrullo replacing the inebriated Mike, happened just a couple of months later. I wrote about that one, too.)