Plastic fantastic

PLASTIC MAKES IT possible: Indeed, "every three seconds another house in North America is sided with vinyl," reads the opening title to Judith Helfand's HBO documentary Blue Vinyl. Tacky, yes, and sinister. After Helfand's had her 100 minutes with you – visiting PVC-making plants and the diseased neighbors who live near them, consorting with legal muckrakers who've exposed manufacturers' schemes to keep the public uninformed about PVC's dangers to the environment, and getting intimate with former PVC workers dead or dying from exposure to toxic goo – those words are below-zero chilling. At Sundance this past year, Helfand, the Michael Moore of the moment, supplemented the frightening take-home message with cheerful handmade tchotchkes – the actual vinyl from her parents' Long Island home, now being recycled as the pendants on Mardi Gras-beaded necklaces. Lately, Helfand's turned the revelations into a road show, which hit town earlier this week at the Oakland Museum – as a collaborative effort with Bay Area Cancer Coalition, the Center for Environmental Health, Greenaction, Healthcare without Harm, and the Healthy Building Network – and continues with community-based screenings throughout the month. The Bay Area comes across in the film as a utopian paradise of recycling, featuring local homes made with recycled license plates and experts in straw-bale home manufacture, but these screenings, organized with the help of Blue Vinyl coproducer and Bay Area resident Julia D. Parker, are targeting populations affected by toxic processing in their neighborhoods, as well as green builders and their friends. Look out for Blue Vinyl at a May 6 screening at the Shields Reid Community Center, near north Richmond's oil refineries; a May 9 screening at the Natural Step Sustainability Conference, at Cowell Theater in Fort Mason Center; a May 15 screening and panel discussion with architects, designers, and members of Planners for Social Responsibility and Healthy Building Network, at the Pacific Energy Center in downtown San Francisco; and other to-be-determined events at the end of May and in early June in Hunters Point, west Oakland, and Redwood City. For more information call the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland at (510) 594-9864 or go to the film's Web site at www.myhouseisyourhouse.org. (Susan Gerhard)

The irrational International

By the time you read this, you will either be sated or sickened at the mention of the words "film festival," and we, too, are hungover with the high- and lowlights of two weeks of celluloid indulgence, featuring but not limited to: leaning in to whiff the pheromones emerging from Super Diamond but getting only a headful of fake fog ... watching Superchunk's score to A Page of Madness devour the audience, which included the members of labelmates Imperial Teen ... ZZ Top beard nearly to his ankles, Fernando Birri participating in a charming give-and-take with an audience of true believers who followed him to a sangria feed after the movies ... Warren Beatty having a hard time completing a thought without censorship help from wife Annette Bening ... Ann Hui laughingly convincing the audience that she did not consciously choose beautiful young ingenues to represent herself in her films ... the sold-out Princess Blade house chanting "Donnie Yen" before the midnight performance (and after guzzling free Guinness) ... watching the audience during Ichi the Killer to see how many other people were closing their eyes as a man cheerfully sliced through his own tongue ... after one hour of director Q&A, still coming no closer to understanding the ending of Distance ... One Fine Spring Day's director explaining that a more accurately translated title would have been "as spring goes by" ... a vivacious Rose Troche picking up the tab for her dinner with admiring strangers ... Hui shedding her tomboy look in favor of a Vidal Sassoon 'do, a power suit, and lipstick ... wishing daily that "guest programmer" Roger Garcia would become part of SFIFF's permanent collection ... the comic gruesomeness of the animated video warning patrons to turn off their cell phones at the New PFA Theater getting spontaneous bursts of applause ... (Susan Gerhard, Summers Henderson, Johnny Ray Huston, Laura Irvine, Jennifer Young)