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Hot Docs, Dramas & Hybrids at SFIFF by Tony Reveaux & Doniphan Blair
A shot from 'Google and the World'; depicting how the Google Book Scanning Project has the world in its hands. photo: courtesy of SFFS
Google and the World Brain
by Tony Reveaux
The San Francisco International Film Festival, now streaming through its 56th year, has always shined forth with a worldly reach. Its internationalism is often fiction, but includes non-fiction as well. Indeed, here’s one doc that has our global consciousness in its sights: “Google and the World Brain” (2013).
Directed by Ben Lewis and co-nationally produced, England/ Spain, it is an 89-minute analysis of the omnipresent all-encompassing entity that is Google which has so chummily wrapped us in its maps, images and deep-drilling searches that it can sometimes seem like a second skin.
But Lewis reveals their massively-scaled movement of World Knowledge Capture, also known as the Google Book Scanning Project, that is silently harvesting the stacked pillars of civilization for their proprietary astral fiefdom. We cheer the spout above the waves; Lewis shows us the whale beneath.
As a conceptual leitmotif H.G. Wells is shown in the film speaking of the coming of a “World Brain” for all mankind. And that shared ideal is just what has captured the compliance of so many libraries and universities to allow Google unlimited digital access to everything on their shelves.
As the number of books they’ve scanned surpasses the tens of millions, surprised authors, publishers and other libraries abruptly discover that Googlezilla has already plowed through hundreds of thousands of their copyrighted titles without ever asking permission. Google, the broad-shouldered affable app, suddenly becomes Google, devourer of not just words but worlds.
We hear the aroused reactions of library administrators from U.S., U.K., France and Spain, authors from Germany, Japan and the U.S., and legal and technical professionals. Their defensive ripostes have brought them to court against Google, in what can be seen as but a way station of infinite litigation.
Futurist Jaron Lanier and Wired’s Kevin Kelly bring clarity to the process and the scale of what is going on—the wonder and the terror. They also see that, in the end, Google will undoubtedly succeed in the digital collation of all that has been written. But what remains cloudy is what and how the search giant’s rule will deliver.
Lewis succeeds in laying out the full, rapidly-moving skein of this movement, as huge and shadowy as global climate change. Ironically, even though Google is in our back yard, it took an Englishman with financing from Spain (broke SPAIN!!!) to investigate it. Hopefully, some Indonesian doc maker is looking at FaceBook's Big Data/Big Brother storm clouds on the horizon.
Kathryn Hanh (lft) and Juno Temple in the lap dance that almost destroyed them from Jill Soloway's scintillating 'Afternoon Delight'. photo: courtesy of SFFS
Afternoon Delight
by Doniphan Blair
With her feature debut, "Afternoon Delight", an experienced TV writer and producer Jill Soloway, joins Lake Bell ("In a World", 2013) and Doug Liman ("Swingers", 1996) in making deep comedies about authentic, rather than card-board cut out, Los Angeles characters.
Although Soloway seems very LA, and worked on "How to Make It in America" (4 episodes), "United States of Tara" (12 episodes), "Grey's Anatomy (9 episodes) 2007 and "Six Feet Under" (22 episodes), not only is she not but "Afternoon Delight" was produced locally by 72 Productions located in the Presidio.
Soloway's characters are average if elite middle classers deeply imbedded in LA's Jewish community replete with psychiatric services, provided by the great comic actress Jane Lynch, and an overbearing Jewish matriarch running—OK, nagging for—the Jewish Community Center's endless fundraisers and volunteers.
You don't mind that scold getting her comeuppance in the end but when the disaffected housewife, played pensively Kathryn Hanh (characters on "Parks and Rec" and "Girls") adopts a supercute and sex-positive pole dancer-prostitute played by Juno Temple, you start to worry something terrible may happen.
An English actress who has been silverscreening since she was 11, but with little more to show for it than the science fiction comedy "Kaboom" (2010), Temple's career ark may change drastically with "Afternoon Delight".
Solaway's story started germinating in her mind—as she told the audience, after her almost sold out show—one father's day when she was wondering what she could get her husband and realized, "What he'd really like would be a blowjob."
Jill Coloway addresses an audience that also included political correctos who challenged her for her sympathetic prostitute portrayal. photo: D. Blair
This is a very matriarchal film with a Jewish Queen bee running civilization, a "mom who doesn't want to be a mom" staggering along behind her, and Temple's character, who unashamedly wields the biggest female gun of all, the vagina, dominating because civilized women have forgotten how have smoking hot sex.
The men meanwhile are overgrown teenagers, playing in a garage band, doing bong hits and learning to surf. While it could have easily gone ominous, when the Hanh character brings Temple into her own home, Soloway wisely sticks with just sexual selection and its bearing on the nuclear family, which is devastating enough.
While admitting her proclivity to screw good things up, the Temple character is the nice nanny to Hanh's young son UNTIL the proposal that she babysit the Queen Bee's daughters, for which buys hair-ties and candy, is scuttled because, well, the Temple character is a whore—producing the primordial anger of a women scorned and well equipped to deliver revenge not through the violence of men but sex.
The film is colorfully and lovingly-lensed by Sandra Valde-Hansen, first in bright colors but when the sex scenes come closeup, hand-held, and weaving and bobbing. When the quick reverse angle cutaways from each partner's perspective puts you right there, you know you are in bed with a master cinematographer.
While the music was a bit too poppy and the ending too drawn out, "Afternoon Delight" is a robust freshman entry into the ever-growing genre of complex matriarchal films. In the after-film question and answer, Soloway was challenged on where she stood on the "Are prostitutes abused victims or empowered individuals" question by a typical Bay Arean politico-correcto but she held her ground, insisting that was precisely the discussion she was trying to stimulate.
Pop star Peaches breaks the fourth wall as well as all possible sexual stereotypes not to mention film genres in her 'Peaches Does Herself'. photo: D. Blair
Peaches Plays Herself
by Doniphan Blair
No such middleclass concerns for Peaches the international pop music star, who takes her name from the Nina Simone song, and wrote, directed and stars in "Peaches Does Herself". Her first feature, the film is a spectacular hybrid of opera, performance, documentary, sex-positive rant and Busby Berkeley dancing and more.
One of its most striking qualities was how it made the big movie screen into a facsimile of a theatrical performance space. It starts with a shot of guy at a podium introducing the film in German—Peaches, a nice Canadian Jewish girl, has lived in Berlin for 13 years—as if he was introducing the film's players at a live performance.
Her use of the longdistance shot, with her actors running around on the bottom of the screen, provide life size representations of how it would look if it were a live performance on a stage. This quality is emphasized when she breaks the fourth wall at the end and walks through the theater into the street.
Essentially a performance doc of an opera, it is tour-de-force of choreography, music and sex from pink-clad dancers crawling out of a soft-sculpted vagina on the bed/stage to Peaches wearing soft-sculpted exploded tits and dick—which she insisted in the Q&A was not a negative. Perhaps it was her word to the wise to not be too sex-positive.
Indeed, that is just a good example of her overturning of all rules including her own, although just the titles of her songs “Fuck the Pain Away” and “Diddle my Skittle”, which combine catchy word-play poetry and power chords, lets you know where her sympathies lay.
Peaches also had to deal with politico-correctos, this time criticizing New York performance artist 'Naked Cowgirl' for her red, white and blue outfit.. photo: D. Blair
Although Peaches was also challenged by politico-corrrectos in the audience, one calling out the performance artist "Naked Cowgirl", who was also in attendance, for wearing a little red, white and blue, evidently forgetting the she was in SF one of the more popular towns in the US of A which made Queer culture possible.
Ironically, although "Peaches Does Herself" stars, after Peaches, the tranny Danni Daniels, who is loaded for bear with his/her Aryan-god physique and dick and tits—the film and Peaches and her tunes are rather hetero positive.
A nice Jewish girl who grew up in Toronto as Merrill Beth Nisker (born 1966), her songs have been featured in lots of movies ("Mean Girls", "Waiting...", "Jackass Number Two", and "Lost in Translation") and television shows ("Lost Girl", "The L Word", "Ugly Betty", "South Park", and "30 Rock"). Peaches also guest vocals with a lot of stars like Pink and Christina Aguilera.
Since gay marriage will soon pull a whole sector of society out of the fringes and into the stolid middleclasses, we desperately need artists like Peaches to continue reinventing edgy sexual identities so that the young men and women of the future will have something to intrigue and inspire them to solve the ever present problem of sex.
Tony Reveaux is a media maven, teacher and writer living in Marin County and can be reached .