One festival closes, and a few days later, another opens. Noir City continues through Sunday at the Castro, and IndieFest opens Thursday for a 16-day run at the Roxie.
And the Roxie is closed for renovations.
I Was Born, But . . ., Pacific Film Archive, Wednesday, 3:00. Ozu’s late (1932) silent comedy/drama sees the world through the eyes of two bothers–
sons of a man rising in the corporate world. They love and worship their father, and are shocked by his submissiveness to those above him in his job. Funny, touching, and very true. As part of the Film 50: History of Cinema series and class, the presentation will include a lecture by Marilyn Fabe. if you have any way of playing hooky from work on a Wednesday afternoon (I don’t), catch this one. Bruce Loeb on piano.
Wendy and Lucy, Rafael, Embarcadero, Shattuck, opens Friday. Wendy (Michelle Willia
ms) hopes she can find work in Alaska, but first she has to get to Alaska. Traveling with her dog Lucy, she sleeps in her car and watches every penny. In other words, she can’t afford disaster. And when her car breaks down in a small Oregon town, one disaster leads to another. A sobering film for economic hard times. Read my full review.
Pre-Code Follies, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Friday, 8:30. Short subjects and clips from the few years between the birth of talkies and enforcement of censorship. And speaking about pre-code fun:
Double Bill: Gold Diggers of 1933 & She Done Him Wrong, Stanford, Saturday through Monday. Before A Hard Day’s Night, before Singin’ in the Rain, before Astaire and Rogers (well, before Astaire), Warner Brothers was putting out a whole different type of musical; smart, sassy, funny, definitely pre-code, and with Busby
Berkeley production numbers that defy description (and the laws of physics). Gold Diggers of 1933 is the best early-thirties’ Warners musical; upbeat, sexy, and entertaining, but never really letting you forget that there’s a depression going on out there. I can’t say as much for Mae West’s first starring vehicle, She Done Him Wrong. It has a few classic West lines, but not enough to save the dull, melodramatic plot. This double bill’s A definitely belongs to just one of the movies.
Stranded, Red Vic, Sunday and Monday. In 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan 
rugby team and their friends and family crashed into a glacier high in the Andes. The survivors endured extreme cold, hunger, an avalanche, the deaths of loved ones, and the necessity of eating those loved ones’ corpses. Combining interviews with the survivors, re-enacted sequences, and some photography from the actual events, Gonzalo Arijon recreates the harrowing experience with dramatic intensity. I first saw Stranded at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and you’ll find my full report here.
Double Bill: The Killers and Sweet Smell of Success, Castro, Sunday. The Killers isn’t called the Citizen Kane of film noir because it’s the best of its genre, but because of its multiple flashback story structure. When a gas station attendant (Burt Lancaster) is murdered, starts asking questions and a life of crime is revealed. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Sweet Smell of Success for me to trust my memory with a wholehearted recommendation. But not by much. Lancaster risked his career by producing this exploration of the seamy side of fame and by playing a truly despicable character. The result, if I recall correctly, is fantastic. Tony Curtis co-stars, from a script by Ernest (North by Northwest) Lehman.
The Blue Angel, Pacific Film Archive, Sunday, 2:00. Josef von Sternberg’s one German-language film was meant as a vehicle for Emil Jannings, who had just returned to Germany after the talkies put a lid on his American stardom. But everyone remembered his co-star, Marlene Dietrich, as the singer who seduces him to his doom. Historically fascinating, neither its clumsy use of sound nor its Victorian morality have aged well. Part of the PFA’s Josef von Sternberg: Eros and Abstraction series.
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Low-key drama
bate movie set in the 1970s. Michael Sheen plays David Frost as insufferably upbeat, which is probably accurate, and Frank Langella creates a complex Nixon who’s almost charming in his willingness to admit his lack of charm. Of course, he admits a lot more before Frost is through with him. Has anyone else noticed that as he ages, Kevin Bacon is starting to look like Clint Eastwood?
Love, in large part because it doesn’t feel like a James Bond flick. (In fact, to a large degree, it feels like a James Bond book. And the book it feels like is, amazingly enough, Casino Royale.) Instead of gadgets, countless babes, wit, and incredible cool, you get a well-made and gritty thriller with several great action sequences (and a couple of babes). It just so happens that the protagonist, a newly-promoted, borderline psychotic government agent with a huge chip on his shoulder, is named Bond–James Bond.
Archive
Shooting: This is a very strange film, and I mean that in the best possible way. The protagonist, Finn (German rock star Campino) is a successful photographer doing both serious art and fashion shoots–and the fashion shoots seem more fulfilling as art. His life is a fine line between reality and hallucination, and after a brush with death he goes to Sicily–perhaps to recover his equilibrium. Things only get weirder. Let’s just say the movie is about embracing death so you can embrace life, and that Dennis Hopper has a small but wonderful, funny, and pivotal part.
OTOH, he thinks digital is just fine for motion pictures, which have always been about illusion, anyway. "In film, digital added something but didn’t change the ball game. In photography, it changed the ball game."
trying to change the extremely parochial world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism from within. That’s not an easy–or perhaps even a possible–goal. The young women in question are the scholarly daughter of a respected rabbi (Ania Bukstein), and a French rebel (Michal Shtamler). They meet at a women’s seminary in Safed, where they secretly undertake the subversive task of helping a dying murderess prepare to meet G*d. They also discover a mutual sexual attraction and fall in love. Writers Hadar Galron and Avi Nesher (who also directed) successfully delve into an extreme and often cruel form of Judaism most of us haven’t experienced, and raise questions about forgiveness, repentance, love, and the need both to conform and to rebel.
