OUT AT HOME

Displacement fuels poignant, dreamy Last Black Man In San Francisco


The vintage hippie anthem, "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)," keeps popping up on the soundtrack of The Last Black Man In San Francisco. Its use is ironic, referencing the mythology of the city's fabled past while its characters — two young black men born and raised in the city — reckon with the uncertainty of its present.


The most apropos lyric from the song, however, is never actually sung in the movie: the recurring refrain, "People in motion."


Everyone is on the move here —the protagonist on his skateboard, navigating the city's steep hills and ramshackle neighborhoods; passers-by in the streets — techies, joggers, homeless scavengers; chattering Muni bus passengers; platoons of sanitation workers in neon vests marching out to clean up the toxic waterfront.

Majors, Fails: Stealthy

And yet, despite all the activity around them, the protagonists seem rooted in place, unable to move forward as time marches on, struggling to imagine viable new lives for themselves in the rapidly evolving city they love.

This is the first feature from rookie director Joe Talbot, who wrote the script with Rob Richert, based on a story Talbot concocted with his longtime friend and fellow San Francisco native, Jimmie Fails — who stars as a semi-autobiographical version of himself.

Jimmie's passion is the stately, Victorian-style home in the Fillmore district that his grandfather built in the 1940s, after entire communities of Japanese-Americans had been removed to internment camps. It’s long since fallen out of his family’s possession. But when the current owners move out, Jimmie and his best bud Montgomery (the excellent Jonathan Majors) stealthily move in.

It’s a bit thin, plot-wise, but the storytelling is everything in this splendidly atmospheric mood piece. Themes of displacement, gentrification, and cultural identity are there to be pondered in every dreamy, thoughtfully composed shot, every passing image, without Talbot beating us over the head with them.
(Read more)

Trivia alert: Director Joe Talbot is the grandson of longtime Hollywood veteran Lyle Talbot. Leading man material at Warner Bros in the 1930s and ’40s, Lyle Talbot became a fixture in B-movies of the ’50s (including the notorious Plan 9 From Outer Space), and segued smoothly into TV for a couple of decades after that.

Joe Talbot is also the nephew of Stephen Talbot, a Bay Area TV journalist (long associated with PBS) and documentary producer. Stephen Talbot was also a child actor who had a recurring role on Leave It To Beaver.

Talk about family history!

DEAD ZONE

Look at that cast: what could go wrong?

Jarmusch zombie comedy needs infusion

In some circles, the words "Jim Jarmusch zombie comedy" would be all the PR you'd need to sell a movie. It's irresistible: the hipster auteur of Stranger Than Paradise, Coffee And Cigarettes, Ghost Dog, and Only Lovers Left Alive making a meal of the flesh-eating dead horror apocalypse genre.

Especially when you learn the cast includes such longtime Jarmush stock company stalwarts as Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, Carol Kane, and Tom Waits.

But while it looks so promising on paper, the onscreen result needs a little more meat on its bones.

It would be shameless punning to employ words like "stilted" and "catatonic" to describe a movie about reanimated dead people. (That's the point, right?) Certainly, everybody involved seems to be having a swell time, from actors playing both the living and the dead (often getting to segue from one to the other), and Jarmusch himself, so tickled that he lingers over every shot; you can almost hear him chuckling off-camera.

Murray and Driver: deadpan

But for the audience, not so much. Sure, there are fleeting moments of droll humor in the deadpan (sorry) byplay between Murray and Driver as small town cops trying to fight off the zombie menace.  Throwaway gags about zombies staggering around, moaning for "Cof-fee," "Xanax," and "Wi-Fi," also occasionally hit the mark.

But be prepared to endure long, long stretches of ennui between unsubtle moments that drive home the message, and name-that-zombie celebrity-spotting.

The oft-repeated explanation is that "polar fracking" by stupid humans has knocked the Earth out of whack and opened the floodgates for the zombie apocalypse — one way for Mother Nature to get even.

Point taken. But a bit more honed outrage (or at least funnier satire) might have served better.
(Read more in this week's Good Times)

POP FICTION

Aging Shakespeare vs self-delusion in tender, wistful All Is True

With summer (finally, almost) here, regional Shakespeare festivals, including our own Santa Cruz Shakespeare, are ramping up for their summer seasons. What better time to launch a movie about Shakespeare himself, reflecting on art, love, family, and reputation, at the end of his life?

That movie would be All Is True. The sardonic title refers to the act of adapting historical fact into fiction (we're told it was the original title of the playwright's Henry VIII), as well as to the little equivocations and outright falsehoods we cling to in the act of getting through our daily lives.

Written by Ben Elton (longtime scriptwriter on the Black Adder TV series), All Is True is produced and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars as Will Shakespeare. These guys know their Bard, and they've come up with a wonderful homage — witty, atmospheric, at times heartbreaking — to both the towering genius of myth and the oh-so-fallible man within, trying to separate fact from fiction in the story of his own life.

Branagh, Dench: well-met by candlelight

When his Globe Theatre burns down in London, Will Shakespeare (Branagh) returns to Stratford-on-Avon, and the family he's scarcely seen in twenty years. His homecoming is not exactly triumphant. Obedient, but long-neglected wife, Anne (the ever-formidable Judi Dench), puts him in the guest bedroom. Lively daughter, Susannah (Lydia Wilson), is happy to see him, but unhappily wed to a theatre-hating Puritan.

Touchier still is Will's relationship to his spinster daughter, Judith (Kathryn Wilder), twin sister to the couple's only son, Hamnet, who died years earlier at the age of 11.

The themes are a bit darker than you might expect from the lighthearted trailer, although the story is handled with plenty of dry humor.

McKellan in close-up: All-terrain

Then into the midst of it all rides dear old Ian McKellan as the visiting Earl of Southampton, patron of Will's theatre company (and reputed to have once been the object of the poet's romantic sonnets).

In a private fireside chat with Will, where they discuss past glories and future legacies, both Branagh and McKellan have a go at the "Fortune and men's' eyes" sonnet. Each man’s delivery of the lines is completely different from the other, and yet equally captivating and powerful.

In an act of extreme generosity, director Branagh shoots in close-up on McKellan's expressive face, the all-terrain roadmap of McKellan's eyes; the tart and wistful working of his mouth. If they gave Judi Dench and Oscar for ten minutes of screen time in Shakespeare In Love, McKellan deserves at least knighthood — wait, he's already a knight; sainthood, maybe? — for this one delicious scene.
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HIS THINGS/HIS STUFF

Castle Moving Day — but where to?

In my daily circuits around the house, I keep running into his things.

Understand, his things are not to be confused with his stuff, of which there is an inexhaustible (and exhausting) supply around the place: entire rooms full of meticulously organized art stuff (paints and brushes, card stock, hooks, spools of wire, tacks, posters, spray cans, sketches and cutouts, files on all of his commissions, slides and/or photos of every single one of his images), as well as his vast collection of art books; a small but judiciously curated collection of his beloved '50s sci-fi monster movie posters; boxes of his Famous Monsters magazine collection; monster models, robot toys, Cootie, Slinky, and all the other pop-culture paraphernalia that he loved so much.

And let's not even venture into the video closet!

No, I'm talking about his personal things.

His glasses on the bedroom dresser that he didn't have time to put on that last morning he was here.

His toothbrush and razor, still waiting in the medicine cabinet. His hairbrush in the bathroom drawer that he brought with him all the way from Illinois.

What lurks within the (dreaded) video closet?

His inhaler — one puff a day, if he insisted on living with cats, which he did —  still lying forlorn in the bowl on the kitchen counter, alongside a few random corks, and grocery coupons tucked into an envelope he devised with separate compartments for each store. (Yes, he was, in fact, the most organized human on the planet.)

His slippers, parked in the bottom cubbyhole of the bedroom dresser he designed, with a vertical row of shelves alongside the drawers, waiting for him to waltz in, kick off his "hard" outside shoes, and slip them on to go work at his art table.

If only.

I've moved out the extra pairs of athletic shoes in various stages of decrepitude, the still-relatively-decent ones for walking in the harbor, and the extra-grody ones to wear while wielding his spray paint cans. But I find myself unable to dislodge his slippers. They are too personal to be brushed aside They belong where they are.

All of his things belong where they are. I still don't have the heart to move any of them. I joke to myself, it's because, you know, DNA.  Just in case cloning ever becomes a thing.

(Not that a clone of James could ever be as good. He might have the same crooked smile and the same devilish twinkle in his eyes. The same springy hair, the same slight swayback. But unless he's lived every second of the life James led, especially the last 40 years with me, not even the most exact replica could ever be my Art Boy!)

Meanwhile, his stuff stands by, silently rebuking my inability to deal with it. It’s not the objects themselves that are the problem. It’s the way I see them. Right now I still view it all as an archive to be preserved, like the re-created Gustav Klimt studio we saw behind glass somewhere in Vienna during the Klimt 150th anniversary celebration.

I am loath to move a single brush or box of hooks for fear of messing up the historical integrity of his workspace.

When my friend Donna Mekis lost her husband, poet Morton Marcus, she was able to ritualize the process of saying goodbye in preparing and cataloguing his effects to go into Special Collections at UCSC.

But so far, no one has offered to build an Aschbacher Museum to preserve all of James’ stuff. And if there were ever to be such a place, it probably shouldn’t be in my house. That is the very definition of living in the past, the surest way to become a museum-piece myself.

It's up to me to find another way of looking at his stuff, some way that I can let go of it without feeling like I’m betraying him, or trampling on his legacy.

If only I could figure out how.

MESSY & DARK

Googling around the web, I came across this page of instgram/bookstagram pics featuring Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge!

It is, I agree, insanely photogenic. I can say that in all modesty, since I had nothing at all to do with this glorious cover design. I wish I could take the credit! Chalk it up to those creative elves in the art department at Candlewick.

Opinions on the text inside the dust jacket continue to be radically mixed.

But, boy, everyone loves that cover!

Here’s my favorite of all the images. It’s from Malin Karlsson, who operates the book review website Grimmsnaught. Very atmospheric; I like how she used the silver candelabra, the slightly decaying winter rose, and the rich, blood-red drape.

If you click the link to her site, you’ll also find one of my favorite one-sentence reviews of my Beast:

“I like this book for the simple reason that it is complicated, messy and dark.”

Thank you, Grimmsnaught!