FILM
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
(In Bay Area theaters)
The devil, as the saying goes, often comes in an attractive form. So it was with the reverend Jim Jones, the magnetic leader of San Francisco’s now-infamous Peoples Temple. In Jones­town, award-winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson charts the church’s transformation from utopian social justice movement to doomsday cult, as well as Jones’s own descent into insanity. We know how this story ends, of course—in a South American jungle in 1978, with the biggest mass suicide-murder in history—and the film propels us toward its conclusion with metronomic precision, giving the proceedings a sense of sickening inevitability. Through spooky, archival footage and interviews with temple members and a handful of survivors—whose raw pain, as they remember loved ones dying in their arms, is almost too hard to watch—Nelson masterfully connects the radical preacher’s flower-power teachings to the piles of bodies in Jones­town’s muddy town square. (One of the most fascinating characters is Jim Jones Jr., Jones’s black adopted son and the subject of a San Francisco profile in 2003.) What even Nelson can’t tell us, though, is why things went down as they did. As one temple member says, “We felt like we had gotten in so deep that there was actually no way out.” That’s the best answer we’re likely to get. A
CHRIS SMITH

DVD
Cars
(Pixar)
The real joy of watching Cars on DVD is being able to pause and pore over the details. Never mind that Wallace & Gromit director Nick Park had the whole anthropomorphized automobile thing going on more than a decade ago, in the TV commercials he made for Chevron. Cars comes from Pixar, Emeryville’s animated-hit factory with a heart of gold, where every high concept (the secret lives of toys, of bugs, of superheroes, of cars) gets special treatment: strong storytelling, empathetic voice talent, and bar-raising digital wizardry. In the studio’s seventh feature, a narcissistic race car (voiced by Owen Wilson) gets stuck in a rustic, rusty little town on the old Route 66, where the locals, vehicles all, teach him to slow down and appreciate the scenery. That’s easy for the viewer to do: director John Lasseter’s fondness for open roads in majestic landscapes beautifully enriches his inherently cartoony tale. Though unabashedly nostalgic and just shy of trite, Cars is deeply felt and expertly rendered. From automotive houseflies to “Question Interstate” bumper stickers, nothing’s wasted in this droll, richly realized universe. Bonus features include the unseen silly, spooky short Mater and the Ghostlight. Kernel of a sequel? A
JONATHAN KIEFER

CD
Joanna Newsom: Ys
(Drag City)
On sophomore albums, artists usually try to offer their record companies and fans more of what they liked in the first place while slowly evolving artistically. Former San Franciscan Joanna Newsom (a distant cousin to Gavin) takes a bazooka to the formula here, blithely disregarding past notions of pop tunesmithery for looong prose poems about pharaohs and drowned spiders. There’s not a song under 7 minutes and two are over 12, which means the MTV generation will probably need a Red Bull to get through the record’s five tracks. At the same time, those dedicated to braving Newsom’s ambitious tunes—and her voice, which is half strident clarion call and half childish squawk—will find a kind of grand orchestral music seldom attempted outside of opera halls. Besides Newsom’s always-evocative harp playing, there’s a fluid, swirling mix of accordion, banjo, marimba, and guitar parts, along with a 32-person orchestra conducted by the legendary Van Dyke Parks (who’s worked with the likes of Ry Cooder and the Beach Boys). Lyrically, her stanzas sound better than they read; the highly personal allegories and animal-kingdom imagery need her elastic vocals to drive them home. But the overall result is one of art with a capital A, of a young woman shooting for the stars, career arc be damned. B+
DAN STRACHOTA

BOOK
Isabel Allende: Inés of My Soul
(HarperCollins)
Conquistadora. It’s such a great word, summoning up images of swashbuckling, gender-bending heroines. Isabel Allende’s latest novel is the story of real-life conquistadora Inés Suárez, who immigrated to the New World from Spain in the early 16th century and helped found Chile, though “helped found” sounds dull next to her actual exploits. As told in this exhaustively researched novel, Inés, a modest seamstress, baker, and healer, hooks up with Francisco Pizarro’s field marshal, the valiant Pedro de Valdivia, and the two fight side by side as they penetrate the barely known lands south of Peru. Inés is a wildly appealing character, brave and bloodthirsty and lusty, though sometimes, as imagined by Allende, a little contradictory in her motives: she’s endlessly sympathetic to the natives’ plight, right up until she beheads them. At its best, the novel illuminates colonial life in gorgeous detail; particularly compelling are the passages dealing with the Chileans’ years-long despair as they rebuild their capital, Santiago, which the indigenous locals have (understandably) burned to the ground. Allende, who lives in Marin, occasionally overweights the book with her research, but as a Chilean herself, she demonstrates a palpable affinity for this rare and real woman. B+
CLAIRE DEDERER


CD
Tom Waits: Orphans
(Anti-)
Tom Waits says he and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, wanted his new three-CD box set to be like “emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping.” In other words, these 56 tracks are a wonderful hodge-podge—roughly half from preexisting sound tracks, compilations, a live show, and tribute albums, and half stray compositions finally recorded—organized into three fluid categories: brawlers, bawlers, and bastards. The discs encompass every musical genre imaginable, as well as some that aren’t (gut-bucket rockabilly, anyone?), while reveling in Waits’s typical underworld of losers, boozers, and users. The covers, including songs by the Ramones, Leadbelly, Jack Kerouac, and the Seven Dwarfs (a scary “Heigh Ho”), show Waits to be an interpreter on a par with Nina Simone. Waits, who lives north of San Francisco, could easily have cherry-picked the 15 best songs to make an album rivaling Rain Dogs or Swordfishtrombones. For me, highlights include the carnival waltz “Little Drop of Poison,” the spoken-word musings on “The Pontiac,” the woozy blues of “Altar Boy,” and the delicate acoustic number “Tell It to Me,” one of his best love songs ever. Only Waits neophytes, though, will be shocked by the sheer volume of creativity on display here. A-
DAN STRACHOTA