PULSE

Pulse has confirmed a suspicion. When a publicist declines to have a press screening for a horror film before its opening weekend release, you can be sure they're more afraid of the press than the press is going to be of the movie. Pulse arrives at the cineplexes D.O.A.; that is, without a pulse. Jim Sonzero's remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo cannot be resuscitated no matter how many startle edits, loud screechy noises and cute collegiate bodies are jammed into this Wes Craven/Ray Wright script. Further, the film's cinematography is drenched in ubiquitous fluorescent-blue lighting that serves only to highlight how red the utility tape is that—for no reason whatsoever—keeps out the predatorial cyberghosts hungry for life.

As fond as I am of genre auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa, I have to admit that Kairo didn't do much for me either. Partly because its edginess was compromised by a belated Stateside release but also because its reliance on the topicality of the Internet just couldn't hold up over time. It's a hazardous enough proposition to laminate old fears onto new technologies, let alone keeping up with those technologies. I was hoping that Sonzero's remake would do for Kairo what The Grudge did for Ju-On—Americanize it in some serviceably entertaining way—and though there are one or two things introduced into the remake that caught my eye—"actress" Kristen Bell caught in a nightmare of limbs and a fly melting into its own shadow—my hopes crashed along with the rest of the system and never really rebooted. Especially when the ghosts start throwing wet socks out of the laundry machine. You'd expect that out of a mischievous Casper perhaps, but not electronic specters intent upon subverting civilization as we know it. Then again, lost socks at the laundromat is as much a metaphor for the end of the world as anything else, I guess.

If anything, the remake has helped me appreciate the original a bit more, especially its eerie ending of a jet in flames crashing into the besieged city, which was shamelessly appropriated for the remake. At least with Kairo, Kurosawa's signature pervasive dread leaning towards the inevitably creative possibilities of apocalypse sustained some atmospheric interest. Pulse, on the other hand, is the first time I've been tempted to stand in front of a movie audience and ask that they turn their cell phones back on.

CASA DE AREIA / HOUSE OF SAND—2006 SFIFF Q&A With Andrucha Waddington

House of Sand, which I caught earlier this year at the San Francisco International, is currently in distribution and receiving favorable reviews. It will be opening up in Bay Area Landmark theaters next week—at the Lumiere in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley—and I strongly encourage folks to catch this sumptuous, stately film. The Landmark website has Andrucha Waddington's Movienet essay on the photograph that inspired the film.

With customary skill, Dave Hudson has gathered together the critical response for the Greencine Daily. Hannah Eaves has, likewise, provided an interview with director Andrucha Waddington for Greencine's coffers. Though I have previously posted my own interview with Andrucha, Dave inspired me to work up my notes from the Q&A following the film's first festival screening.

Due to an unfortunate and somewhat clumsy shift to an available vacant space from the original house in which the film was screened—which had to be quickly vacated for the next film—Andrucha Waddington lost most of his audience, making attendance at his Q&A sparse. That didn't interfere, however, with the discussion being informative and insightful.

The first comment was posed as a "silly plot question." What did Massu do to keep Áurea and her mother Donna from leaving that forsaken place? Andrucha responded by saying that Massu used silence to keep the women from leaving. He didn't tell them he saw the return of the scientific caravan and he admonished his son not to tell them as well. They had a tacit agreement. The scientists had said they would return in six months to photograph the same sky again, Massu and his son spotted them, but didn't alert Áurea. He didn't want her to know because he didn't want her to leave.

Andrucha was asked if the scientific expedition was an actual historic event and he confirmed it was. The expedition to Brazil had been sent by Albert Einstein to prove his general theory of relativity. Einstein sent not only this expedition to Brazil but another to Africa to photograph the solar eclipses and to follow-up with photographs of the same sky six months later to prove that light bends with gravity. The skies in Africa were clouded and the theory was proven through the Brazilian expedition, which occurred about a hundred miles from the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park where the film was shot.

Andrucha was asked how difficult it was to film the movie and if the film crew was anywhere near stores. "No. Not anything," Andrucha responded, "It was a hell." They operated out of a tiny fisherman's village of roughly 1,900 fishermen. There were no hotels so they had to spend a year working out logistics. The entire film was shot on location, even the interiors. The co-producers tried to no avail to convince Andrucha to shoot his interiors in the studio after location shooting but it worked better to build the houses on location and to shoot the interiors there because—after 8:00 in the morning—the sunlight was so hard that they had to necessarily retire to the interiors for respite. After shooting the interiors, they could return outside once the sun had gone down somewhat. They would start shooting at 5:00 in the morning every day, first exteriors from 5:00 to 8:30, then interior shots for an hour and a half, followed by a three-hour break. They would return to the set at 1:00 and then work from 1:00 to 6:00.

One woman asked if the house was built from sandbags and Andrucha clarified it was built from an adobe-like mud and wood collected from the village.

He was asked how many cameras were used and he answered two cameras for the whole movie. They actually had to replace four separate cameras because of the sand. During the eight week shooting schedule they had five of the eight weeks where they were shooting with only one camera.

One fellow complimented the film's painterly look and wondered if Andrucha had been inspired by any particular painters. Andrucha claimed to be totally inspired by the location, which—though beautiful and amazing—he wanted to portray as harsh and unfriendly. He partially effected this by not using polarizing filters, thus making the sky white. He consciously and purposely wanted the movie to be bathed in harsh, white light, the sky white, the dunes white, saturated in tones of white and grey so the audience could sense how difficult it really was to stand outside in the direct sunshine. I was intrigued by the question because I had read somewhere that Andrucha had actually been thinking of Caravaggio and Latour when coming up with his cinematic design. He qualified that—though he loved Caravaggio and Latour—they had nothing to do with the look of the movie. He and his cinematographer Ricardo Della Rosa did not talk about painters when they were planning the shoot and trying to find the look of the movie. Instead, they spent a week beforehand testing the light to see what they could accomplish. "It was very hard to work only with white and white and white. We decided to bring white to the sky as well." They shot all the exterior shots, always against white, to have this whitish sky instead of the blue sky that you would have if you shot in less heat or were adjusting for the light.

One young woman praised the film's costume design noting how—when the daughter Maria is grown—she's wearing what looks like the old Victorian tablecloth made into a dress. She felt this skillfully portrayed the passage of time and wondered who did the costumes and if they had worked on anything else. Andrucha credited Claudia Kopke, who likewise did the costume design for his previous film Me, You, Them and who has since worked on other Brazilian films. In his initial discussions with Kopke, Andrucha placed these precise limitations upon her, "Okay, these people, they will take with them only a couple of the fabrics and a couple of clothes that they will have to adapt during the movie." As the film was shot chronologically, Kopke built the costumes chronologically, beginning with the initial Victorian silhouette that gradually changed as the characters began loosening their clothing, cutting their sleeves for example, to adapt to the demands of their new environment. Claudia adapted the clothes as time went along, shooting first in the 1910 block, then 1919, then 1942 and finally 1969.

Andrucha was asked how he came up with such a beautiful, philosophical end to the movie and he outlined how he didn't have an end for the film for at least two years writing the script. One evening around 10:00 p.m. he was putting water in a bus and suddenly had the idea to have Fernanda Montenegro coming back and seeing herself. "Maria would be grown up. It would be her with her. Then I run to the room and—actually Fernanda Torres is my wife—so I run inside to the room and I said, 'Fernanda, I found the end! It's a mirror that she will see herself in her daughter.' " Having already decided to use two actresses leapfrogging roles, having the young Fernanda Montenegro as the mature Maria meeting up with Fernanda Montenegro as the aged Áurea underscored the notion that we look a lot like our parents even as we are totally different. The idea about incorporating the landing on the moon came about in a discussion between the writer Elena Soarez and with Ruy Guerra. Ruy Guerra, who played the role of Vasco, is himself a well-known director in Brazil. In one of the readings he commented that—even though men landed on the moon—they didn't really find anything. So the ending to the film evolved organically by exploring and building up the original ideas.

One fellow was intrigued by Andrucha's decision not to contrast the barren landscape with references to the city from where the characters had come. Why had Andrucha decided not to show them leaving the city for the dunes? Andrucha felt that the city was represented by Áurea, Maria and Vasco and the arrival of the caravan to the dunes. Admittedly, at a certain point he and Soarez had considered including a scene in the script showing the characters leaving the city, but, then asked themselves why they should do so? They decided it was more interesting to begin the movie with them already lost and exhausted, arriving in this place where you understand slowly what's going on. The first dialogue of the film starts ten minutes into the movie so, granted, some people in the beginning of the film might not understand why these characters have traveled so far. Then again, why should he respect the expositional formulas? Why underestimate the audience? Why not let them think for themselves, guess the answers to their own questions by watching the film, reach their own conclusions without the dialogue telling them everything beforehand? Andrucha complained that too much of contemporary cinema predigests the information for the audience, not giving them the chance to chew for themselves. Despite his explanation, the fellow clung to his original question and still wanted to know why Andrucha had not provided a scene in the city for contrast.

Andrucha explained again that the film was about the place these women had come to, not where they had come from. The seminal idea revolved around Áurea originally not belonging to this place, to this house of sand. By the time she accepted her destiny, she had become part of this place and there was no reason for her to leave anymore. "So that's why," Andrucha concluded, shifting to the next question.

One audience member wasn't sure if Vasco had died when the building collapsed and Andrucha confirmed that, yes, he had been killed and that this was "a black humor."

Andrucha was asked if there were any filmmakers who had inspired this work and Andrucha admitted there were two: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Woman in the Dunes, and Luis Buñuel, The Exterminating Angel. These were the two films that encouraged him to film House of Sand.

One woman asked for clarification about the final scene where Maria returns as an adult to see her mother Áurea. Maria tells her mother that men have landed on the moon and Áurea asks if they found anything. Maria answers, no, nothing but sand, to which Áurea responds, "Then I didn't miss anything." Did she hear that right, the woman asked. Yes, Andrucha confirmed, the idea being that—as far as Áurea was concerned—why should men go so far to find sand on the moon when she was living on the moon for almost 60 years? The woman then asked if Áurea had started to like living in the sand and Andrucha answered that, once Áurea found her love for Massu, she belonged to that place.

Andrucha was asked what it was like to work with Fernanda Montenegro? He replied she was an amazing, phenomenal actress, a working class hero who was ready every day to do everything she could for the movie. All the actors in the film, Andrucha expressed, were passionate and believed in the project more than he had ever expected so, of course, directing them was a nice experience.

Andrucha was asked why Massu's character didn't talk very much. Was that intentional? Andrucha stated it was a fact of Massu's personality. He was a no-talking person who spoke through action. Andrucha pointed out that the women would have died if it hadn't have been for Massu's actions.

One audience member expressed her delight in how Andrucha achieved the time lapse effect of switching from the first dynamic of the story between Donna and Áurea to the second dynamic between Áurea and Maria. "It took a minute to get," the woman offered, "that Áurea now looked like her mother and her daughter looked like she once did."

Andrucha expressed that he preferred using the time lapse over indicating dates on the screen to register the passage of time. He decided not to use such predictable locators and to, again, let the audience think for themselves, figure it out for themselves. "Have a cut and you see the child coming down the dune. Have a cut and you see the war planes. And then you see that Fernanda Torres is walking the beach with a bottle and then you don't know, you're not sure if that's not Áurea, and then you see the mother looking from the top of the dune and then first you think it's a ghost and then you understand in the next scene. In this film we tried not to explain everything right away but to make it flow."

Cross-posted at Twitch.

08/12/06 UPDATE: With the selfsame focus and eloquence that he admires in House of Sand, Eric Kohn provides an appreciative and poetic synopsis for The New York Press.

BALBOA THEATER—Little Miss Sunshine

My heartfelt thanks to Gary Meyer for picking The Evening Class up as his website of the week on his ever-informative Balboa Theater email newsletter. For those of you who haven't already subscribed, you really should. Not only does the newsletter keep you apprised of the creative programming at the Balboa, but amplifies your viewing pleasure of any particular screening with ample links to online reviews and commentary. Rich and easy!

Gary writes: "The Bay Area must have more passionate film lovers than any other city. They see movies, talk about them and write about them in impressive numbers. Many movie websites are created here. One of my favorites is Michael Guillén's The Evening Class. He reviews films and offers new items. But the core of the site are his in-depth interviews with the people who make movies. He usually gets a good chuck of time to record an interview and transcribe it for our reading pleasure. It is the closest thing to being there when we obviously weren't. Recently the directors of Little Miss Sunshine, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton were in town and Michael got to spend quality time with them. Enjoy."


The Balboa is currently showing Little Miss Sunshine in Theater 1 at (12:00), 2:20, 4:40, 7:00, and 9:20. Not only is this great because the film is so enjoyable in and of itself but because it heralds a new stage in The Balboa's programming strategies. Gary explains: "It is no secret that each week we are searching for the answers about what will bring audiences to our neighborhood theater. As we have written before, the calendared mixture of premieres and repertory was unpredictable and expensive to produce on a full time basis. Trying to find quality second runs this summer has been difficult. They either run out of interested movie-goers by the time distributors agree to let us play them or there are so few prints we can't obtain a booking.

"This week will be a new experiment and one we think will work. My unrelenting discussions with distributors have resulted in the Balboa getting two very hot new movies. The Sundance hit, Little Miss Sunshine, has garnered nearly unanimous rave reviews and this hilarious and touching movie deserves them all. The terrific performances from an ensemble cast including Steve Carrell (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, TV's The Office), Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear and the never predictable child actress Abigail Breslin are topped by Alan Arkin. Jeffrey M. Anderson of the SF Examiner and www.CombustibleCelluloid.com wrote, 'The movie's real triumph is Arkin's winning performance. His last Oscar nomination came all the way back in 1968 (for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter), and he deserves some overdue recognition. It's one of those truly savory moments that remind us what's great about the movies.'


"The film opened last weekend and the multiplexes turned away big crowds. The distributor's plans called for expansion on August 18 but the demand was so strong that they decided to add theaters this week." The Balboa has stepped in to meet that demand. So all of you who voice your support for neighborhood theaters need to put your money where your mouth is and support the Balboa's continuing commitment to providing first-rate films in their historical venue. I'll be out there this weekend turning friends on to Little Miss Sunshine. Maybe I'll see you there?

TEASE: BROWN JESUS—The Evening Class Interview With Steve Barretto

One of the main delights of catching the Chicano Visions exhibit currently running at the M.H. deYoung Museum in San Francisco, was discovering Steve Barretto's Brown Jesus in the museum store. My bud Tavo Hernandez bought the t-shirt for me and I proudly wore it to my interview with the Quinceañera team. Jesse Garcia, especially, was taken by it so I contacted Steve to see if he would be willing to comp Jesse a t-shirt and he generously obliged. His generosity of spirit intrigued me so I asked if we could have a chat. We met in his office at the base of Potrero Hill and sat outside on a rooftop deck to discuss the Brown Jesus campaign. I came with a copy of Entertainment Today which featured my Quinceañera interviews and my own shout out to Brown Jesus.

Blanched by years of misrepresentation, Brown Jesus is the ultimate branding campaign by Barretto-Co. Recognized as a work of excellence by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Brown Jesus is in their permanent archive. More than a campaign that rewrites or recontextualizes history, Brown Jesus effectively exposes false history and reclaims accurate representation.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Steve, can you give me a little background on yourself, your training, and the inception of your business?

Steve Barretto: Absolutely. I trained formally as a graphic designer down in San Jose. I worked in several small studios, and middle-sized studios, and ended up working at Apple Computer. When I left Apple in 1989, I started my own business. My own business has transformed over the years. Barretto Co. recently incorporated in 2004. I've been working with nonprofit and for profit clients since 1989.

MG: Helping them develop brand name; is that how you sell yourself?

SB: It's marketing communications and that involves graphic design at all the different levels. A lot of that has been put under the umbrella of "branding" recently, right? That's the industry-speak.

MG: Could you define "branding" further for us non-industry folk?

SB: Sure. "Branding" I find to be a strange name actually for what we're doing because historically I think branding's sort of a strange practice, to claim ownership, right? But the way that we use it in our industry, it involves all the aspects of how you put a face on an organization or a company. That includes writing, images, and how those words and images go together with design. Design seems to be the element that ignites passion for brand. Words alone are tough. Images alone are tough. But when you find the right mix of word and image, you can really compel somebody or have an image with words resonate.

MG: So it requires an intertextuality? You have to have image and word for it to be branding?

SB: For the most part, right. A brand is expressed in every business transaction that occurs that involves communication—from the receptionist picking up the phone and having a dialogue with the prospect or customer, to the way that you receive your monthly invoices, to logos, to advertising, packaging—all that makes up a company's brand. I've been doing this for clients for years—for Fortune 500 companies and really small mom and pop companies—and always wanted to do personal work.

In the process of creating these people's identities or brands, I do a lot of sketching and one night—while I was working on a sketch for a client—I drew this [shows me a sketch]. It started off with the two archs and the little arch beneath it and then I thought, "This looks like something very familiar to me." I was raised Catholic in the Bay Area. The war was just happening, it was 2004, and there were lots of images of longhaired men with beards and moustaches and I thought, "Hey, there's something here to this image." So I put some eyes on it and it started to look like … well, it was definitely recognizable for me. And then it needed a name. So, growing up Catholic in a world where I was one of four kids who was a minority in a Catholic school, I've always had an issue with the fact that Jesus has been portrayed as a Caucasian person and so I said, "This is my chance here." My chance to reclaim what was most likely the color of Jesus Christ's skin, which was most likely brown.

MG: Not only chance but an appropriate eloquence. I recently interviewed a young actor Sirak M. Sabahat, an Ethiopian Jew, who was telling me about his life and his understandings of Christianity, and how shocked he was when he came to Israel to find out that they thought that Jesus was white because he had grown up with the image of Jesus being a black man with full lips….

SB: That's right!

MG: So when I first saw Brown Jesus at the deYoung's Chicano exhibit, I was stunned by the simplicity of the message: it's political, it's comical. I've never interviewed a designer before but I was so intrigued by the concept that it made me explore your site to see what you were doing. How did you get the gig with the deYoung and the Chicano exhibit?

SB: I pursued this and I produced some silkscreen posters and t-shirts purely for my own need to publish my idea, my message, and I shopped it around to a few small boutique stores. The first store that said it had some potential was Super7 in Japantown in San Francisco. They bought a few shirts and a few posters and the next week they called me up and said, "We've sold out of all the shirts." I said, "Huh." So I gave them a few more shirts. They called me the next week and they said, "We've sold out of all your shirts." I said, "This is good." People are getting it and for those reasons exactly; it's got an edge to it, lots of undertones, you can read into it whatever you want to.

One of those people who bought one of the t-shirts and the posters was Kelly Chin at the deYoung Museum; she works at the store. When Chicano Visions was on the exhibit list for the deYoung, she was my advocate there and said to the store manager and the curator, here's a local artist who isn't Chicano but he's a minority and he's got this thing that he's doing and I think it would work with the show. She called me up out of nowhere and said, "Oh, y'know, I got me your t-shirts and posters and I'm a fan of Brown Jesus"—there are these people out there who have seen it and I'm so grateful for that and she said—"We'd really like to get it in the show but I have to get it past the curator and the store manager. The store manager wasn't sure about it but the curator said something which was the highest compliment, something to the effect of, "It's too bad it's just in the store and it isn't part of the show."

MG: Exactly.

SB: I'm thinking about becoming a Chicano somehow. [Laughs.]

MG: Are you Latino? What's your background?

SB: No, my folks are from Hong Kong and Macao so I am of Portuguese descent with Cantonese and lots of mixed cultures over there.

MG: All the more fascinating that this issue of representation—which was an issue for you—crosses across ethnic lines to address the question and groups minorities together into a larger majority.

SB: Yes.

MG: I begged for the t-shirt because I didn't have any money and I was with friends and I said, "I've got to have this t-shirt." They pulled together….

SB: They ponied up for you?

MG: They ponied up for me so I was really appreciative.

SB: Good friends!

MG: I was especially glad that Jesse Garcia was so into the t-shirt when I interviewed him and that Entertainment Today included my plug in the interview (you never know what they're going to edit out). I'm hoping that, if Jesse wears it, it will provide some good exposure for you in the Los Angeles area.

SB: I want it to resonate with people. I'm not in it for the commercial aspect; I'm in it for the awareness, really, for all those reasons.

MG: So the Brown Jesus t-shirt, the posters, the buttons, are being sold through the Barretto Co. website but your business is much much more than that, right?

SB: My business is a service business for clients who are looking to tell their stories to their audiences in more effective ways and that involves designing-writing.

MG: So the product that you have on the website, this is more your personal creative expression?

SB: Exactly.

MG: Brown Jesus, Babies Not Bombs, Spare the Air, these are all messages that you're trying to get across through this particular medium?

SB: Through design and print mostly. I'm sort of new at this. There are old hats and really wonderful examples of people who have come up with concepts like this that have succeeded wildly, like the Obey Giant campaign that a guy named Shepard Fairey started. It was an underground … I don't know if you've seen that graphic? [He shows me an example.]

MG: Oh yes, yes, yes, I know his work. There is a strong articulation that can come across in a simple image and a simple word.

SB: A simple word, exactly. When it can be read at many levels, it's really effective I find. Even [the Obey Giant campaign] is not so clear. Anybody can take this graphic and this word and interpret it in different ways. With the Brown Jesus thing there's more of a reclaiming of what was probably historically true instead of creating something new from nothing. Brown Jesus is reclamation.

MG: Where do you hope to take it?

SB: I don't know. I feel the need to talk with other artists and people who understand how to push something like this to have it be accessible as a—not a movement, necessarily—but just as a cultural…..

MG: A cultural icon?

SB: A cultural icon, yeah, and really pervasive.

MG: What I've appreciated about Shepard Fairey's work is his exhibition strategy, his ability to shift between different exhibition venues. He's in galleries, he's exhibiting as art, but he has a strong commitment to keeping his work public and on the street as well, you see him ubiquitously graffitied all over the city, and he's also extremely commodified. You see the Obey Giant on purses…

SB: It's a clothing line.

MG: It's everywhere. So I imagine that's where you're taking Brown Jesus?

SB: I would hope to, I just don't know how to get there. That's where I really need some mentors and peers to talk with to come up with creative ideas of where it could go.

MG: Within your career field, have other designers provided input?

SB: Not with where it could go.

MG: Just that they enjoy it?

SB: Yeah, exactly, not with how the campaign could really take off. Just the little bit of input that I've received from emails and 50-year-old guys out in Minnesota saying, "Hey, my son sent me this t-shirt and I love it." I know that it's got the potential to spread outside of San Francisco and catch like wildfire.

MG: Definitely. Well, it's in Los Angeles now.

SB: Thank goodness.

MG: Are you at The Mexican Museum? Are you in La Tienda?

SB: I'm sending out postcards to folks and The Mexican Museum's one of them.

MG: The Galería de la Raza?

SB: No. I need to write that down.

MG: Yeah, the Galería de la Raza, because they have a store where they sell a lot of product. Now, the sticky wicket—as you've already dealt with at the deYoung—is that you're not Chicano. Is this going to get in your way? But why should it?

SB: I know!

MG: In fact opening this weekend at the Galería, in collaboration with The Mexican Museum, is an exhibit on the African presence in Mexico and I think there's a burgeoning awareness of the breadth of the diaspora and what these influences entail culturally. You might want to take a peek at that. The artists are going to be there on Sunday, I think. Definitely Brown Jesus should be sold in their store. It would sell like hotcakes! I'm so excited by your Brown Jesus campaign because it's such a clean, edgy thought. When I first saw it I thought, "How did he design this? Because it looks like Jesus!"

SB: Right. And he's not happy. [Laughs.] If you really look at him, he's contemplative. He's not like a smiley face have a nice day Jesus.

MG: Another idea I would suggest to you is to contact Trey Parker from South Park. Brown Jesus should make an appearance on South Park. You know South Park?

SB: I do know South Park and I'm a huge fan. In fact, when I did this, I thought it kind of has a little bit of the South Park feel to it.

MG: It does! That's why I made that association. It'd be funny to see their Jesus meet Brown Jesus. [Steve chuckles.] You never know! Do you have any advice you would give to young designers?

SB: Absolutely. This is another sticking point for me with this piece. I think that our industry—graphic design, graphic communication—there is an imbalance with people of color working in this industry. I'd love to see design students that are of different cultures other than those who dominate graphic design. I would love Brown Jesus to reach somebody who's interested in drawing as a kid and doesn't know where to go with drawing and maybe doesn't have parents who are saying, "Y'know you can make a career out of ideas and drawing." And that career would be design. So I would really love Brown Jesus to touch people who don't know that they can take their drawing into a commercial career.

MG: Is college training requisite?

SB: Not necessarily but it's a lot harder if you don't have it.

MG: I imagine entry level positions are hard to come by.

SB: Yeah. There are state programs—I went through a state program—that are affordable. It wasn't a private art school that costs $40,000 a year. You can get there with a state education and compete at the level that art school students are competing at. I don't see enough Hispanic or African-American people in graphic design in the circles that I'm in or the shows that I go to.

MG: Brown Jesus would also be a great album cover. You should contact Los Lobos. You should contact Carlos Santana. They're local. You should offer it up; I bet they'd grab it.

SB: Are you Hispanic?

MG: I'm Hispanic, yeah. I don't look it but their causes are certainly my own. I've also been an early Christianity aficionado for many years so the issue of the representation of Jesus and its cultural/political implications has long held fascination for me. So, along with the Brown Jesus, Babies Not Bombs, Spare the Air Day, what's coming up? What's in the pipeline?

SB: I think that Brown Jesus is so singular in its message and so powerful and simplified that I really want to explore this in other ways, how to get it out in a larger way, so instead of putting my energy into some other ideas, I'd rather try to see how Brown Jesus could go further.

MG: Do you offer finder's fees?

SB: Absolutely. See this is what I need. I need a network of evangelists and finders fees are fair. I'm all about fairness. This isn't going to become a Paul Frank.

MG: Why not? I'll start working on it right away! I've often thought that I should have been a publicist, I should have been an agent, that's what I've always loved. When I find something that I like, I go after it with a passion, I want to find out everything about it and I want everyone to know about it.

SB: You're a maven.

MG: Well, thanks. Again, I appreciate that you've taken the time out to speak with me, Steve, and I look forward to helping you spread the Word.

GLOBAL LENS 2006—Sheng Si Jie (Stolen Life)

According to Tony Rayns, Li Shaohong first read An Dun's story—on which Stolen Life was subsequently based—with a sense of mounting dread, which intensified when she realized Dun's fiction was based on a true story about a man who seduced and impregnated women in order to sell the babies. Initially conceived as part of a fact-based series about the lives of contemporary Chinese women, Stolen Life was blown up to 35 mm and shown at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won "Best Narrative Feature." Robert De Niro presented the award to Shaohong along with its $25,000 prize. It has now been selected to be one of the eight features showcased by Global Lens 2006, and one of the three involved in their educational outreach program to high school youth.

Shaohong tackles a difficult conceit. She asks her audience to suspend disbelief even as from the onset of the film her protagonist—Zhao Xun as the infuriatingly naïve Yan'ni (and last seen in Peter Chan's Perhaps Love)—omnisciently recalls via narrative voiceover the inevitable folly of suspending disbelief. "Although the narrative voice is omniscient," Bill White specifies, "the story is contained within the ignorance of the moment, creating a stimulating contrast between what is experienced and what is remembered." So even as Yan'ni leaves her joyless home life to study at the university, and her future is poised to reveal itself, anticipated brightness is forfeited for immediate despair on her very first day away from home—most notably through a chance encounter with Muyu (Jun Wu), a handsome delivery truck driver, who beguiles Yan'ni with a love she has never known and a hat that looks just like hers. Surely that means they are kindred spirits? But Muyu, as Variety's Ronnie Schieb quips, "is full of unwelcome surprises, like a chance-discovered infant and cleaver-wielding wife."

To Shaohong's credit—despite our knowing what's going to happen to Yan'ni in her misguided love for Muyu—you still care enough to watch her come to consciousness. As Amy Taubin states it: "What's marvelous about the film, besides the way Li's supple DV camera follows the young woman like her own shadow, is the way she gradually overcomes her pain and desire for revenge and finds agency through her misfortune. Together Li and her expressive lead actress convince us that this change, rather than being grafted on to fulfill a political agenda, comes from within the young woman herself." (The italics are mine because I adore Amy's clause; it's lovely.) Bill White writes that Zhao Xun achieves a "quietly implosive performance that captures the serenity of despair."


The film becomes not so much a cautionary tale about the perilous morality of unwed mothers—though it certainly tweaks all that melodrama—but more a tone poem where the tone is the selfsame mounting dread Shaohong experienced when first reading the story. This is evocatively rendered by what became my favorite aspect of the film: its sound design, structured by Young Wang. Yan'ni's stubborn and taciturn silences are contrasted by the periodic use of a loud, rushing slamming sound that effectively and repeatedly unnerved me. The sound suggested unavoidable collision. I kept thinking something horrible was about to happen. When Yan'ni in vengeful anger goes shopping for knives, I braced myself for bedrooms of blood. Thankfully, Shaohong doesn't take that easy route, and achieves more with less through her dispassionate treatment of events, emphasizing that what is truly horrible is the stolen life of the film's title: not only Yan'ni's own hopeful youth but her firstborn.

The glimpse into Beijing's "underground city" where Yan'ni and Muyu create their love nest is an intriguing attraction to the film. It seemed almost mythic to me, parallel to the marriage descent of Persephone.

Mention must be given to Bérénice Reynaud's insightful take on the film for Senses of Cinema. Reporting from the 24th Vancouver International Film Festival, Reynaud opines: "Repetition can be a psychological pattern—or an aesthetic device." Then proceeds to flesh out the theme: "Much later [Yan'ni will] understand that her mother's apparent coldness was an awkward way to try and protect her from making the same mistakes and giving up her future for a man unworthy of her. Yet, Yan'ni can't wait to 'live her life'—even if it means squandering her chances for a college education as soon as she meets Muyu …. Unknowingly, she finds herself trapped in repetition: not only—horror!—of her mother's life, but also—horror of horrors!—of the lives of the other women who have been seduced and swindled by Muyu. As the screw turns and the melodrama thickens, I found myself recoiling—no, it's too much, no woman would be that clueless, that gullible. Yet, it's based on a true story, and in real life, while horrible things do happen to women, most of them display a surprising resilience that goes beyond the stifling confines of melodrama. In the last part of the film, Yan'ni gets a hold of herself and takes stock of what her possibilities are. Maybe she needed to have her entire life 'stolen' from her, to realise who she really was."

Bay Area audiences will have several opportunities to see Stolen Life at one of the various venues for this year's Global Lens. On Wednesday, September 6, at 7:30 p.m. it will be screened in San Francisco at the San Francisco Art Institute. At last night's press conference it was announced that Gary Meyer has agreed to The Balboa Theater being an additional San Francisco venue for Global Lens and Stolen Life will screen at the Balboa on Saturday, September 9 at 11:00 a.m.

Stolen Life will screen at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland on Thursday, September 14 at 7:00 p.m.; on Friday, September 15 at 7:00 p.m.; on Saturday, September 16 at 9:30 p.m.; on Sunday, September 17 at 9:30 p.m; on Monday, September 18 at 7:00 p.m.; and finally on Tuesday, September 19 at 9:30 p.m.

At its final venue, the Smith Rafael Film Center, Stolen Life will screen on Friday, September 22 at 8:45 p.m.; Sunday, September 24 at 8:45 p.m.; Tuesday, September 26 at 8:45 p.m.; wrapping up on Friday, September 29 at 6:30 p.m.

Cross-posted on Twitch.

08/09/06 UPDATE: Via filmbud Michael Hawley, if you're nostalgic for the days of Peter Scarlet and his thoughtful film introductions, indieWIRE reports that Link TV begins a weekly film series called Cinemondo on August 26. Here in the Bay Area Link TV can be found on DirecTV channel 375. Of note is that three of the films scheduled for the Cinemondo series are part of the Global Lens fare; namely, Stolen Life, Almost Brothers and Border Café.

HALF NELSON—The Evening Class Interview With Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Half Nelson was one of my favorite press screenings from the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, where I had the opportunity to speak with directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Half Nelson then went on to win the festival's FIPRESCI prize. It's easy to understand why. Half Nelson's compassionate portraits of Dan Dunn—a high school instructor caught in the grip of a crack habit—and Drey—the student who discovers Dunn's secret and is caught in the grip of latchkey impoverishment—provide an affirmative conviction that each can help the other. Ryan Gosling's performance as the addicted instructor is disturbingly believable and even more disturbingly sympathetic. Shareeka Epps as his streetwise young charge matches him scene for scene. Their unlikely friendship proves revelatory.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Congratulations on winning the IndieWIRE Critics Poll. That's some compensation for Sundance not recognizing what they had in their hands. But I was glad to hear you'd received some recognition because I think that you have a remarkable project here for a first feature, and of course you've done such a good turn for Ryan Gosling who—I predict—will get a nomination for an Independent Spirit Award at the very least, if not an Academy Award nomination. Your film title Half Nelson is a wrestling term, but my understanding is the title isn't that literal?

Ryan Fleck: It's a metaphoric use of the wrestling term. To represent someone who's struggling with all kinds of aspects of social political addiction, class, any kind of addiction.

Anna Boden: Yeah, it was inspired by the Miles Davis tune Half Nelson, which we imagine uses the metaphor in a similar way.

Ryan: I doubt that Miles Davis is writing songs about actual wrestling.

MG: That Miles Davis tune isn't on the soundtrack?

Ryan: A little expensive. [Laughs.] Not on our budget.

MG: Still, you got some good music through Broken Social Scene. I'm intrigued with the compassion the two of you have for each of your characters' situations. You show them at a juncture where they both fall into need and hopefully, potentially, help each other out of their respective situations. Where is that compassion coming from?

Ryan: I think it comes from the Bay Area and growing up here. I don't know. I'm kidding. Maybe I'm not kidding. I don't know. I just feel we really love these characters. It would be hard to make a movie about someone you didn't like. Even if Dan Dunn pushes the limits of what you will accept in a person, you ultimately root for this guy because he's such a great teacher and he's such a charming person. You really want him to get over whatever he's wrestling with and you want him to help Drey out and his students and you want her to get out of the situation that she's in. I think that's what it comes from. Liking the characters. Liking the people.

Anna: Even if all these characters in the film are judging themselves and judging each other, we don't feel like it's our jobs as writers or filmmakers to judge the characters.


MG: That's an appropriate but unexpected response. I've seen several movies about addicts and you usually get the gutter down-and-outer or Bukowski strata that, in my experience, doesn't hold true and doesn't align with the white collar addicts I know. They're certainly portraits that test compassion more than engender it. I'm not sure if you're aware, but here in San Francisco as in many parts of the nation there's a major methamphetamine epidemic. So many people I know, many of them friends, have been put into this half-nelson almost before they knew what was happening. At one point in the film when Dan is scoring from Frank [Anthony Mackie], there seems to be an indication that he was transitioning away from something like meth into crack. Is that a correct observation?

Ryan: Yes. I think he started out doing a lot of cocaine, which was more expensive, and I think occasionally he just wants something.

MG: That was a subtle point to get across. You zoom in on Dan when the shift to crack precipitates his downspin.

Ryan: I think it may have been something he may have done before but it's starting to increase in frequency.

MG: How did Ryan prepare for this role? Again, his depiction is probably one of the most accurate I've seen, especially after he would smoke the crack, and you would see him blanche and start to slightly sweat. How did he do that?

Anna: He went to meetings and he talked to people who had been through addiction. I don't know if he actually has ever smoked crack. You'd have to ask him. As an actor, he digs deep and is able to put himself into the position where he thinks his character should be in a way that most of us who aren't actors don't know how to do. So it's a little bit of a mystery to us how he's able to get into that place so realistically.

Ryan: But when he's there, he stays there. When we were shooting that scene in the bathroom, when he came from his dressing room—which was a classroom in the school—he came down, the set was totally quiet and everyone—it wasn't like I said, "Okay, everyone be quiet. Here comes Ryan. He's going to do some acting"—everyone just knew he was in a state where you just wanted to be quiet and watch. Between takes he wasn't like, "Hey guys! How did that go?" He was still in this weird place and really intense to watch.

MG: It's remarkable because it is the most accurate depiction of a crack fugue state that I've ever seen in a film. Returning to the compassion issue—because, really, you must be commended for what you did here—as I've been reviewing the critical response to Half Nelson—which is already amping up and it hasn't even opened yet—I'm finding some of the critics are judging. It's like they're not even evaluating the film; they're judging what's going on in the film. I thought that was sadly ironic that the compassion you're trying to get across in the film, not everybody's going to get it.

Ryan: Right.

MG: Dennis Harvey wrote in Variety that you have a challenge ahead of you in presenting this "unappetizing subject matter" to the average public. I felt, from something that I had read, that you two wanted to do the film out of a point of frustration and, clearly, so many people who fall into the clutches of addiction are frustrated with the fact that they can't make any change happen. The frustration leads to a loss of responsibility.

Ryan: Yeah.

MG: The scene I thought was incredible—among so many of them—was the denouement where Drey delivers drugs to Dan in his hotel room and realizes at that point what she's getting into and that she's harming people she cares about. Before then, she didn't seem aware of that. How did you two develop the script? Did you go through many drafts that you volleyed between each other?

Ryan: Yeah, it's evolved for a long time. One of the things about writing on spec before you have any kind of career in film, which we're still not sure we have….

MG: Oh, you have a career in film.

Ryan: Thank you. At the time we really wanted to tell the story but no one was saying, "Hey, what do you have? I want to take a look and maybe make a movie with you." We had time and we were trying to get things off the ground and we were making the short film version of it to try to raise awareness of the feature….

MG: That was Gowanus, Brooklyn?

Ryan: Gowanus, yeah. In that time we had plenty of time to keep talking about it and working out ideas and that scene particularly evolved over this time, going from exchange of dialogue to stripping it all out to where it's just where nobody says a word but everything is communicated.

Anna: When you have a job and someone pays you to write something, they give you three months, and you're getting paid so you have literally all those three months full-time to be working on it. That's great. That's a lot of time and we never had that where we could be working on writing full-time; but, we were working part-time over years and sitting with things. So even when we weren't writing, we were living this story and I think that was a great liberty to have.

MG: Do you think if you had been less compassionate with this character and you had painted him more stereotypically that things would have been easier for you?

Ryan: It's hard to say, I don't know.

Anna: We never thought about that.

Ryan: Well, there's definitely, like, okay so we've made this movie and the studios have seen it and they're scouting for directors and writers for their projects and we would go out there and we met a few people who might say, "I'm really taken, I really love the film. Is there…."—and they actually would ask us—"Is there a way you think it could be more commercial? Is there a way you could remake it somehow?" Which was completely bizarre to us because it was, like, well, no, this is the film that we wanted to make and we never considered the commercial viability of it. I don't know if that answers your question.


MG: I don't mean to belabor your compassionate treatment of these characters, it was just so stunning to me that I can't seem to let go of it. I suspect one of the main reasons you won the IndieWIRE poll among the critics was precisely because you've crafted a film where the audience is engaged to understand these characters rather than judge them. Usually in these kinds of films an audience is removed from addict protagonists; with Half Nelson, you're not. You feel for Drey, this young woman who has to be the adult among adults, and you feel for Dan, this teacher whose obvious disillusionment has led him to addiction. Some critics are saying, "Why didn't you show why he was having such a problem and why he became addicted?" Others are saying, "Oh, I'm so glad you had the scene with the parents with the end because then we finally got why he became addicted." There but for the grace of God…. Why do you think he became addicted?

Ryan: I think we touched upon that already. Some people oversimplify the end with the parents as—like you said—"Oh, now I get it. His parents were addicts." But I think what's going on there and why we wanted to diverge at the end of the film was to explore this idea of lost idealism, this idea that his parents came out of this activist culture of the '60s and felt that they could make a difference in some way. I think that they did and I think Dan Dunn thinks that his parents did, but, they've lost the ability to think that they can make change and not just in their communities and in the world, but in their own families even at some point. And when that happens, they go into denial and they start to use and abuse.

MG: How old are you guys?

Ryan: I'm 29.

Anna: I'm 26.

MG: My goodness. You're wise beyond your years.

Ryan: I don't mean to say that this is how the world works but I just thought it was a fascinating idea.

MG: This is how the world works; don't apologize. I'm a child of the '60s. I recently was talking with David Zeiger who directed the documentary Sir! No Sir! on Vietnam, this whole forgotten history. His documentary was so revitalizing for me because it allowed me to remember that spirit of my longhaired youth and I have to tell you it is the loss of that spirit that weakens you over time. It's the loss of that ability to make any kind of change that corrodes, where you're just working day after day after day, maybe you've even worked up to a pretty cush job, and it means nothing because you don't touch anyone, you're not doing anything of importance. As young filmmakers I'm anticipating that you're going to be touching people with your awareness of this spiritual crisis and its connection to chemical dependency.

Anna: Well, thank you.

Ryan: That's great. Thanks. We feel like—even though it's not totally resolved—that there's a glimpse of hope for the two of them.

MG: How did Ryan Gosling become involved?

Ryan: Serendipitously—I like to say that word—but we had imagined someone being a little bit older in that part, maybe mid-30s, more of a Mark Ruffalo type of guy, and through our casting director who was friends with Ryan's manager or agent or somebody, they just started talking about the role and his manager said, "Oh, that might be something that Ryan might be into." He got a hold of the script and—before we knew any of this had happened—we were having lunch with him to consider him for the role. We'd only seen The Believer, which we thought was a terrific performance, but thought this guy was just out of high school, how is he going to teach? We thought he was too young.

Anna: He'd aged.

Ryan: We looked at his other movies and I actually thought, "This would be great. He's still young but he's not 19. He could play late 20s and it will be great, this teacher who's idealistic right out of school. I feel that it worked. It shows his rapport with the students.


MG: Yes, he had to have that street cred with them. And Shareeka. What a natural. How did you come across Shareeka?

Anna: When we were casting for the short a couple of years ago we didn't have a casting director so we literally walked into—well, we called ahead of time—but we walked into public schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan and told the kids about open auditions and she came. She'd never acted before but she was charming and great and natural and we ended up casting her in the short. We're really lucky to be able to keep her for the feature because she didn't grow too much even though it'd been a couple of years, even though it was the difference between 13 and 15.

MG: Is she still acting?

Anna: She wants to pursue it now. She got a manager after Sundance this year.

MG: As a young actor, as a young person, how did she deal with these issues that she was seeing in the movie or having to enact in the movie?

Ryan: I think there are a lot of parallels in her own life, which we weren't really aware of, but became clear, we could just tell there was a lot going on with this kid's life, and instead of hiding from it, she was able to embrace it and use it for her performance.

MG: My final question: you've dealt a lot with dialectics. Can you touch upon why the use of dialectics? You feel it expresses how change occurs?

Ryan: Yeah, for all of the political, subversive stuff involved with it, I thought that that fit this rebellious teacher, what he wanted to explore in the classroom.

Anna: And in his own life because he's struggling with how to make change in his own life as well so he uses this as a tool for himself as well as his class.

Ryan: And the idea [that] all of these characters are made of their opposing force. Frank is not 100% bad. He's a good friend in some ways. And the same with Dan. He's a good teacher but he's also got this secret other life going on. And Drey is being pulled between them. I just felt that metaphorically it was provocative.

MG: You've toured the festival circuit primarily in North America?

Ryan: So far, yeah.

MG: Any invitations to go overseas at all?

Ryan: Not yet. We're working on it. Think Film is just trying to figure out….

Anna: Strategize….

MG: Congratulations, by the way, on them picking you up. I'm interested in the phenomenon of new directors and their first year on the festival circuit; how they cope with becoming festival darlings. What's that like for you?

Ryan: It's been great. We're level-headed about it.

MG: You've worked hard for it.

Ryan: It's nice to have people respond to the film.

MG: You have a screening tonight?

Ryan: Tomorrow night.

MG: And you'll be there for Q&A?

Ryan: Yeah.

MG: I'll try to drop in to see how the audience reacts.

Ryan: It will be good because it won't all be filled with my dad's friends. [Laughs.]

MG: Thanks again.

Photo of the directors courtesy of Henny Garfunkel/Retna Ltd., Filmmaker Magazine, where Matthew Ross likewise interviews Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

Cross-posted on Twitch.

JOHN HUSTON & MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS: A Friendship

One of my cultural heroes—on so many different levels—and someone whom I unquestionably emulate is the Mexican artist and scholar Miguel Covarrubias. I first learned of him during my Maya studies when I read his theories regarding the "mother culture" of the Olmecs and his graphic illustrations of cultural diffusion. Later, I became familiar with his caricatures for Vanity Fair and his social skill for interacting with so many of the best artists of his time. Along with Anaïs Nin, Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias were models to me of individuals who chose to live at the hub of culture; my ultimate dream.

With regard to film, Miguel and his wife Rosa were both part of the "mexperimental" film movement outlined by Jesse Lerner in his exhibition catalog of the same name. That movement was just one of the many topics I could have written about for Girish Shambu's blogathon on avant garde film. I hope to massage that information at a future date.

In the mid-90s Adriana Williams published a biography on Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias. At the time I was doing programming for a Bay Area arts nonprofit called The Friends of Ethnic Art and I invited Adriana to speak for our organization. We became good friends on the basis of that invitation and each year at the San Francisco International, I catch up with Adriana (who loves international film as much as I do) and further our friendship while we wait in lines, often to see the same films.

Dave Hudson's Greencine Daily reminder that today would have been John Huston's 100th birthday reminded me of Huston's interaction with Miguel Covarrubias and I thought my readers might be interested in some of Adriana's research regarding their friendship. She interviewed John Huston for her book in Los Angeles, 1986. Huston himself had also written about Covarrubias in his autobiography An Open Book. Here are a few excerpts from Adriana's wonderful study, with my sincere thanks to her for her erudite passion.

* * *

In 1929 Miguel [Covarrubias] met the as yet unknown John Huston, who had arrived in New York that year with a script under his arm based on the "Frankie and Johnny" legend. Huston had written his version of the story as a puppet show for a young puppeteer named Ruth Squires, who persuaded Sam Jaffe to compose some incidental music for it. The show debuted at a party that George Gershwin hosted and for which the famous composer performed Jaffe's score.

The production was written up in the New York Times, where Charles Boni read about it and was inspired to pair Huston with Covarrubias to collaborate on a book. The result, published in 1930, is a richly illustrated collection of various versions of the well-known song, including Huston's and thirteen others. One reviewer declared: "This book is not a Huston book: it is a Covarrubias book. There is very little that can be said in words of Mr. Covarrubias' illustrations. To describe them requires both line and music. They should be seen to be sung."

After that collaboration, Huston recalled: "I saw [Miguel] frequently. He initiated me into a kind of life in New York I had not known before. A life full of fascinating people and forays into little prohibition clubs. We often went to Harlem together. I don't know which one of us was more taken with the dancing and the music…. Speaking of which, I first saw Rosa [Covarrubias] when she danced in the Gaieties. She was a real hit—a wonderful dancer." (1994:55)

* * *

Huston became a close friend of the Covarrubiases and remained so. Nearly twenty years after they had collaborated on Frankie and Johnny, Huston was in Mexico shooting The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of the first American films to be made entirely on location outside of the United States. Huston had chosen Tampico on the northwest coast of Mexico as the set for his film, and he was shooting pre-production material with a small crew when a local newspaper published the rumor that the Huston film was anti-Mexican. Huston claimed that the local Mexican population "had risen in righteous indignation and threatened us, going so far as to throw stones at our camera crew." None of this was true, but it attracted media attention, and soon Huston received word from Mexico City to discontinue filming. John Huston, An Open Book (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980):143.

Upon reading about the incident in the morning paper, Covarrubias telephoned his friend Huston. On Huston's behalf, Miguel Covarrubias and Diego Rivera conveyed Huston's assurances to President Miguel Alemán. "Thanks to these old friends, Huston was able to resume shooting in April." Lawrence Grobel, The Hustons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989):287. (1994:272, fn.61.)

* * *

Miguel was also a genuinely sweet man. John Huston saw that, also, and spoke of it many years later: "There was something so dear about him. You really wanted to embrace him. It wasn't so much that Rosa was the dominant personality, but Miguel was exceptionally modest. It wasn't that he was in any way retiring, or in a world of his own, or secretive, but private. He had his own distinctive way of looking at things. He was wonderful to talk to…. He had a great sense of humor." (1994:161-162)

* * *

John Huston thought that a genius was "someone who sees things in a way that illuminates him…," and I believe that Miguel's quest for the essential spirit of man illuminated him. Huston also believed that a genius "enables one to see things in a different way," and "this was also true of Miguel. I can honestly say that he was one of the few geniuses I have known." (1994:256)