Earthquakes and monsters. Oh, my.
I didn’t see a single new movie last weekend, but I still managed some intense movie-going. A good chunk of it had to do with technology–either movie technology or plate tectonics.
It started Friday night with both. My wife and I went to Earthquake at the Pacific Film
Archive–part of their 65 Seconds That Shook the Earth earthquake centennial series. Earthquake is a big, silly, yet surprisingly entertaining disaster film from 1974. How silly? If I hadn’t known that it was made before the advent of personal computers, I would have assumed that the screenwriter used a cliché-generating program. But the big quake itself, boosted by the recreated Sensurround system, was outstanding, and in a few isolated sequences, the movie actually generated suspense.
Sensurround involves extremely powerful subwoofers sending out a sub-audio frequency at appropriate moments. You don’t hear these sounds; you feel them. I’ve lived in California more than 50 years; this felt like the real thing.
Speaking of real things, Saturday night I went to the Rafael to hear Ray Harryhausen speak and hawk his new book, The Art of Ray Harryhausen. Much of the talk centered around 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the movie on view that evening. 7th Voyage is an important movie in Harryhausen’s career; his first in color, his first period piece, and his first out-and-out fantasy after a series of sci-fi pictures involving aliens or monsters wreaking havoc on major metropolitan areas. Harryhausen decided to make 7th Voyage, he explained, “when I got tired of destroying cities.–
Much of the talk, appropriate to the book’s subject, revolved around his pre-production drawings and his creature designs, which often avoid too-human forms. “I didn’t want [7th Voyage’s Cyclops] to look like a man could get into a Cyclops suit.–
Harryhausen made his pictures for very little money–about $650,000 for 7th Voyage. “We never had the money or time to do retakes.–
Speaking of low-budget –˜50’s sci-fi and destroying cities, Sunday night I attended the last movie in the PFA’s 65 Seconds series, The Night the World Exploded. Let’s just say that this Columbia cheapie is not earthshaker. For what it’s worth, Kathryn Grant plays the insufferably upbeat heroine both here and in 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
After the movie, Peggy Hellweg of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory stepped up to the podium, theoretically to discuss the film’s scientific accuracy or lack thereof. She didn’t have much to say about the movie, so she spent about half an hour answering our questions about earthquakes.
But my weekend wasn’t all fantasy and adventure. Sunday afternoon, once again at the PFA, I attended a talk by Phillip Lopate, editor of American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, accompanied by a screening of Mikio Naruse’s 1935 drama, Wife! Be Like a Rose! The anthology came about, Lopate explained, because he “wanted to put together my two great loves–movies and essays.– Lopate argues that there has been “more interesting writing on film in the last 50 years than on any other art form.”
Typical of Naruse, Wife! Be Like a Rose! is a close, intimate look at a family in low-level crisis. The father left the mother years ago for another woman, and the now-grown daughter needs her father back as her own wedding approaches. There are no villains in this movie, just good people who can’t help but to hurt each other. An excellent film.
But enough of my weekend. On to the San Francisco International Film Festival. For that big event, I’ve revived my old red dot icon (
) in the listings. A red dot by a film tells you that it’s scheduled for a regular theatrical release at some point in the future. In other words, if you can’t make these films at the festival, you can catch them later.
Speaking of skippable pictures, my son Elijah informs me that there’s another movie about a carjacking/kidnapping on the way, Waist Deep. Judging from the trailer, this one is a pretty conventional action flick.
That description, I’m glad to say, doesn’t apply to any of the films below.
Not Recommended: Syriana, Elmwood, ongoing. What a mess. Writer/director Stephen Gaghan utterly fails to do to the oil industry what he did for drugs in Traffic (which he wrote but didn’t direct). This time around, the convoluted, multiple story lines confuse rather than intrigue and enlighten; eventually, you just give up on them. And the father/son conflicts Gaghan keeps throwing at us in place of real character development don’t help, either. To make matters worse, the whole film appears to have been shot by a blind-folded cameraman pointed in the actors’ general direction. There are plenty of good ways to learn about corruption in the oil industry; this two-hour torture session isn’t one of them.
Recommended: King Kong (1933), Red Vic, Friday and Saturday. The first effects-laden adventure film of the sound era still holds up. It’s not just Willis O’Brien’s breathtaking special effects–technically crude by today’s standards but still awe-inspiring. It’s the intelligent script by Ruth Rose, the evocative score by Max Steiner, and the wonderful cast headed by Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong. But most of all, it’s the complex title character. Kong is the stuff of nightmares, utterly terrifying as he grinds people into the ground or bites them to death, but also confused, loving, majestic, and ultimately doomed. Pretty good for an 18-inch model covered with rabbit fur. Sure, the story is silly, but so are dreams.
Recommended, with Reservations: Old San Francisco, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Friday and Saturday nights. Aristocratic Spaniards, corrupt Chinese, a caged dwarf, an Irishman in love, and an evil land speculator with a humiliating secret all get shaken by the 1906 earthquake and stirred by lurid melodrama. Silly and offensively racist, but still fun. There’s also considerable historical interest; this movie offers a fascinating glimpse at how Hollywood (and white America) saw the world in 1927. With its pre-Jazz Singer Vitaphone music-and-effects soundtrack, the essentially silent Old San Francisco stands as an important early film in the transition to sound. But you won’t hear that soundtrack at Niles; the Museum is showing Old San Francisco with live accompaniment–a different pianist each night.
Noteworthy: Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, Clay, Friday and Saturday, midnight. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the second Star Trek movie (and the first to get it right), but if I remember it correctly, it’s a fun one. Sure, the plot is silly, but the action snaps, the effects look great, and the story understands the characters better than the first movie or the original TV show.
Recommended, with Reservations: Sir! No Sir!, Roxie, opening Friday. Today’s mythology vilifies Vietnam-era protesters for mistreating returning veterans. David Zeiger attempts to put the record straight, using old footage and new interviews to remind us that it was the soldiers fighting that war and the veterans coming home who started the anti-war movement. There’s nothing exceptional here as filmmaking, and the picture never really hooks you on an emotional level. Still, we’d do a lot of good if we could get people to see Sir! No Sir! who don’t already agree with it’s message.
Not Recommended: Adam & Steve, Roxie, opening Friday. Craig Chester (who also wrote and directed) and Malcolm Gets make an attractive-enough couple as two gay men falling in love, but their chemistry can’t carry a picture that’s almost entirely lacking in conflict. Without conflict, it’s also deficient in story, drama, and humor. When conflict finally arrives in time for a third act, it feels contrived–even though it was telegraphed at the beginning. With it’s New York setting, Jew/WASP romance, and mixture of the realistic and the absurd, Adam & Steve clearly wants to be a gay Annie Hall, but Chester lacks Woody Allen’s ability to bring diverse elements together and make them all work–¦or even just to make them funny.
Recommended, with Reservations: San Francisco, Balboa, Sunday through Tuesday. A big, silly, melodramatic special effects vehicle (that was unusual in 1936), San Francisco is a classic example of code-era Hollywood trying to have it both ways. It celebrates the non-conformist, hedonistic, open-minded joy that, at least to the screenwriters, symbolized the Barbary Coast. But it covers itself in a thick layer of Christian moralizing that’s as annoying as it is laughable. Still, San Francisco has considerable pleasures, especially in the last half hour when the earth shakes and the fires break out. And let’s not forget the title song–the best ever written about a city. As part of its Reel San Francisco festival, the Balboa is showing San Francisco on a double-bill with After the Thin Man. On Tuesday night (the actual earthquake anniversary), the theater will present historical shorts before San Francisco.
Recommended: The Big Lebowski, Red Vic, Tuesday through Thursday. Critics originally panned this Coen Brothers gem as a disappointing follow-up to the Coen’s previous endeavor, Fargo. Well, it isn’t as good as Fargo, but it’s still one hell of a funny movie.
Not Recommended: Perhaps Love, Castro, Thursday, 7:00. Sounds promising. A musical romance from Hong Kong, filled with flashbacks, film-within-film sequences, and dances choreographed by Farah (Monsoon Wedding) Khan. Unfortunately, Perhaps Love is basically a love story between an obsessive stalker and a self-centered bitch. Who cares if these two get together and live happily ever after? The movie-within-the-movie sequences feel contrived, and the dance numbers are so heavily edited that we don’t get to watch any actual dancing. This unfortunate movie is the opening night event of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Bayflicks 