Around Town (San Francisco) in Recent Independent Movies

The dramatically photogenic, hilly San Francisco was shown off to great effect by Karan Johar in "My Name Is Khan" (2010), a big box-office hit in India. The offbeat romance between Rizwan Khan (Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan) who has Tourette's Syndrome and eventually goes on a mission to tell the president of these United States "My name is Khan and I'm not a terrorist" and the beautiful Hindu hairdresser Mandira (Kajol, teamed with Khan in five earlier movies) takes place on multiple hilltops of what is locally capitalized as The City. The first tragedy takes place in no-so-marvelous Marvelous Marin (a town called Banville), followed by a Georgia black community ravaged by a hurricane, and some rough Texas "justice" (not surprisingly, the word to which US authorities react is "terrorist," not attending to the preceding "not").

In "Medicine for Melancholy" (2008, written and directed by Barry Jenkins), the male lead (Wyatt Cenac) lives in a North Beach apartment considerably less glamorous (and without the great view) of Midge's in Hitchcock's classic 1958 "Vertigo." He and Jo (Tracey Heggins) get around town (by bicycle and taxi). At the start of the movie, she and Micah wake up in an expensive home that I think is on Nob Hill. They are hung over and had sex the night before without learning each other's name. Micah suggests they have coffee (which turns into breakfast) in Noe Valley after walking "over the hill." This hill is Twin Peaks (overland down from the lookout), making the itinerary as nonsensical as some of those in "Bullit." While the white man who is keeping her is away, they spend Saturday afternoon and night and Sunday together, visiting the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Martin Luther King waterfall/memorial, and the old-time Zeum carousel in Yerba Buena Gardens.

I thought that Jenkins made a moderately interesting movie about two San Francisco African Americans approach-avoidance relationship on a very low budget. Despite the charm of the two characters, even with the sport of figuring out where the characters were throughout the movie, my attention flagged (especially during the bar scene).

The nocturnal streets in "The Stranger in Us" (2010, written and directed by Scott Boswell) on which Gavin (Adam Perez), the 17-year-old Latino runaway from Chico hustles are in the Tenderloin (though not on Polk Street, which I'd guess has too much traffic, pedestrian and automotive for guerilla filming). It is not clear to me where the apartments of on-again, off-again boyfriends Anthony (Raphael Barker) and Stephen (Scott Cox) are. Anthony works at the concession stand at the Bridge Theater in the Inner Richmond. I'd guess that Stephen's apartment is in the Haight somewhere. I found the chopped-up (though meticulously dated) segments of newcomer (from Virginia) Anthony's relationship with Stephen, who supports Anthony so that he can write (which he doesn't) and with the street kid (Gavin) who in many ways is more mature and more experienced than Anthony is gratuitous. By the end, I was able to remember the segments in chronological order, and think that the movie would have been better had it flowed in chronological order. I had the most affection for Gavin '" not just because Adam Perez is more my type than his costars! I found Anthony churlish and awkward in ways that I do not find cute. Stephen had reason to be irritated by Anthony's failure to develop either as a writer or as a cosmopolitan in The City, but was also annoyingly irritable, overflowing into abusive, and a lousy mentor IMO.

I was impressed by the more conventional (chronological) unfolding of tragedy in the (Latino) Mission District. Gavin got beaten up in The Stranger in Us" and the sidewalk in front of Anthony's apartment is spray painted "Faggot," but homophobic violence in "La mission" (2009, written and directed by Peter Bratt, starring his brother Benjamin Bratt; both are San Francisco natives) wracks up a fatality. The focus of the movie is the rejection of the homosexuality (and Anglo boyfriend) of Jes Rivera (Jeremy Ray Valdez) by his Brown Power macho father Che (Benjamin Bratt). Jesse Borrego (whom I remember watching grow up on "Fame!") provided support to both (Jes and Che, nephew and brother) as Rene. Che drives a 14-Misison Muni bus, and the family is involved in low-rider culture, so there are slow rides in vintage cars in the movie, as well as the bus route. I have to agree with local critic Mick LaSalle (in the San Francisco Chronicle) that "the film is so intent on making a positive statement about life in San Francisco's Mission District that the street conversations ring false. People just stand around smiling and being genial. There's none of the flavor of ordinary speech, the challenges, tiny conflicts and conversational shortcuts of normal human communication. Put simply, people just don't talk like this, not in the Mission or anywhere on earth, except in amateur writing." Still, the lead performances are compelling and the movie showcases murals and styled Mission cars.

Going further back and down (down the map and down in neighborhood SES) Bayview, Spike Lee's (2004) "Sucker Free City" looked at multiple dark sides of San Francisco as imagined by Alex Tse, showing the intersection of the lives of a young Anglo office worker, Nick Wade (Ben Crowley) whose family has been pushed out of the San Francisco Mission District to the tough black neighborhood of Hunter's Point with a young black gangster entrepreneur there, Keith (Anthony Mackie, who starred in Lee's "She Hate Me") and a young Chinatown gangster, Lincoln Ma (Ken Leung), has a Latino homeboy to represent the fourth racial-ethnic group in The City (as we like to capitalize it: "Sucker Free" is an alternate meaning for the acronym SF). I thought that the connections are surprising in satisfying, unarbitrary ways. Interestingly, the black youth exhibited less resentment (and was less moody) than the white and the Chinese youths.

The exploitation is intraracial as are the two murders (though one is an inter-racial collaboration). The culture clashes and generational differences in perspective seem plausible/accurate to me. Some of the dialogue does not. For me the worst part is Nick's father, Anderson, played by John Savage. Although it is an agit-prop clueless liberal role, it does provide some humor of the "God takes care of fools" variety. Alas, Kathy Baker as Anderson's wife and Nick's father has nothing with which to work to develop a character. The older Chinese characters (George Cheung and James Hong) are also cardboard stock characters, as in a cameo is Jim Brown (about whom Lee made a documentary).

On classic noirs and neo-noirs with San Francisco locations, I highly recommend San Francisco Noir by Paris Review editor Nathaniel Rich (who is also author of the interesting novel The Mayor's Tongue, which is not set in San Francisco). Also, I enjoyed the brown suburb (Colma and Daly City Filipino and Latino) pair of guerilla-filmed musicals "Colma" (2006) and "Fruit Fly" (2009).