There’s limited room in my life for Bayflicks at the moment, so I’m doing the bare minimum. I’ll keep the weekly schedules going and the microreviews, but I won’t start the newsletter with an essay.
I hope to be back to full mode in a few weeks.
Design for Living, Pacific Film Archive, Sunday, 3:45. Impeccable credentials
occasionally pay off. Design for Living is every bit as good as you’d expect from Ernst Lubitsch directing a Ben Hecht screen adaptation of a Noel Coward play. Of course, it also helps to have a cast headed by Gary Cooper, Fredric March, and Miriam Hopkins as a sort-of romantic threesome and Edward Everett Horton as the voice of misguided morality. A very funny and sexy pre-code charmer. Another great movie in the Archive’s series on The Lubitsch Touch.
Rio Bravo, Pacific Film Archive, Thursday, 7:30. Director Howard Hawks’ second western lacks the epic sweep and moral complexity of John Ford’s best work, or of Hawk’s first western, the very Fordian Red River. But it’s still great, character-driven, often funny entertainment. John Wayne plays it light as a sheriff in trouble for arresting a murderer with very powerful friends. The sheriff’s own friends aren’t as powerful, but they’re loyal, and as played by Walter Brennan, Dean Martin, and a very cool Ricky Nelson, they’re a lot of fun to watch. Wayne’s scenes with ingénue Angie Dickinson play like romantic comedy. This week’s entry in David Thomson’s 1,000 Decisions In the Dark series.
Double Indemnity, Stanford, Friday through Sunday. Rich but unhappy (and evil) housewife Barbara Stanwyck leads insurance salesman Fred MacMurray astray in Billy Wilder’s noir thriller. Not that she has much trouble doing it (this is not how those who grew up on “My Three Sons– remember MacMurray). A good, gritty thriller about sex (or the code-era equivalent) and betrayal. On a double bill with The Big Sleep.
Children of Men, Cerrito, opening Friday. Set in a dystopian, near-future Britain living 
under a Fascism that looks all too familiar, Alfonso Cuarón’s labor of love feels a bit like V for Vendetta. But it’s better. It’s 2027, with the human race slowly dying out due to mysterious, world-wide infertility, and the British government rounding up illegal aliens the way the Nazi’s rounded up Jews. When one of these aliens turns up pregnant (the last successful birth was more than 18 years ago), an apolitical former radical (Clive Owen) is forced to think beyond himself. One of the rare thrillers that actually keeps you guessing what will happen next.
Babel, Parkway, opening Friday. A stupid act committed by a boy too young to understand the consequences sends shockwaves around the world, affecting the lives of an American tourist couple in Morocco, an immigrant nanny in the United States, her family in Mexico, an alienated deaf-mute teenager in Japan, and the boy’s own family. Writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu weave a complex, four-strand tale of love, tragedy, parental responsibility, and the borders–political, economic, linguistic, and emotional–that separate us all. In the end, Babel (an appropriate title for a film told in Arabic, English, Spanish, Japanese, and Japanese sign language) hails the incredible human ability to heal. The cast, which ranges from major international stars (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Kôji Yakusho) to complete novices, is uniformly excellent. Emotionally draining yet exhilarating, and filled with an intense love of humanity that never ignores our weaker selves, Babel is easily the best new movie I saw in 2006.
Bayflicks 