Films for the Week of June 8, 2007

Pickings are slim this week. Once again, little things like life got in the way of my movie going.

The African Queen, Stanford, Friday through Sunday. Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Africa, and Technicolor all make for splendid entertainment in John Huston’s romantic comedy action adventure. According to Huston’s autobiography, he didn’t intend the film to be funny, and had to be pressured into giving it a happy ending. But during production (in Africa and on a soundstage in England) he realized that Bogart and Hepburn’s chemistry was inherently comic, making him glad that he didn’t stick with his original ending. On a double-bill with Summertime as part of the Stanford’s Katharine Hepburn Centenary series.

The Lost Boys, Parkway, Thursday, 9:15. A clever and funny, and even occasionally scary teenage vampire movie shot in Santa Cruz. What do you do when peer pressure tells you to become an immortal bloodsucker? Hey, all the cool kids are doing it. A benefit for Power (People Organized to Win Employment Rights).

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, Rafael, Wednesday, 7:00. A sad, harrowing, yet ultimately inspiring true story told with only moderate competence. Refugee All Stars focuses on six musicians, refugees from Sierra Leone’s horrifyingly brutal civil war, who came together in the Guinean refugee camps in which they’d lived for many years. In the course of the film, they tour the camps, visit their homeland to record their first record and consider moving back. But directors Zach Niles and Banker White don’t give us a real chance to fall in love with the music, nor do they stay on the individual musicians long enough for us to fall in love with them. The result feels like it’s skirting over the top and not quite opening itself up to show us how these six have turned tragedy and poverty into music.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanford, Wednesday and Thursday. Stanley Kramer’s morality play about mixed marriage and tolerance is as dated as a 40-year-old movie can get. And not only the theme seems stale in an age where mixed-race families raise hardly an eyebrow. The picture’s dialog, sexual prudery, and visual style (including an overdependence on rear projection, made necessary by Spencer Tracy’s ill health) must have seemed old-fashioned in 1967. But while Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner no longer works as entertainment or moral lesson, it now holds considerable interest as a relic–a preserved piece of Hollywood, and America, in transition. As part of its Katharine Hepburn Centenary series, the Stanford is double-billing Guess Who with The Lion in Winter, which I haven’t seen in decades but remember liking.

March of the Penguins, Central Field, Fairfax, Friday, 8:30. Yes, emperor penguins are very cute and extremely funny. Luc Jacquet offers plenty of footage to make you laugh and sigh, but he goes beyond that, showing the tremendous hardships these birds endure to raise their young. No living creatures are as adorable as penguin chicks, which is a good thing considering what their parents go through for them. And Morgan Freeman is the best celebrity narrator since Orson Welles. Unfortunately, this will be a DVD presentation.