Return of This Week’s Movies

~ Lincoln Spector

I’m back, and I’m posting again. In fact, I’ve posted four articles since Tuesday:

I’ve even got a new calendar online–not as ambitious as the old one, but hopefully still of use. You can find it here.

The Sonoma Valley Film Festival opens Wednesday and plays through Sunday, April 13. This sort of snuck up while I was taking a break from this site, and I really don’t know much about it. So if you’re curious, just click the link above.

Special Appearance at 21 Screening, Balboa, Sunday night. Jeff Ma, the math whiz kid whose adventures inspired the movie 21, will answer questions between the 7:15 and 9:30 screenings of that movie. Audiences to either screening are invited to attend.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Castro, Thursday. Bad dreams keep bothering Korean War veterans Lawrence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. Were they brainwashed by Communists? And where do the rabid anti-Communists (including Angela Lansbury as the screen’s most evil mother) fit in? The Denzel Washington remake was pretty good, but this, the original, is the masterpiece. As part of its United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival, the Castro will screen The Manchurian Candidate on a double-bill with On the Beach.

Dr. Strangelove, Red Vic, Tuesday and Wednesday. We like to look back at earlier decades as simpler, less fearful times, but Stanley Kubrick’s “nightmare comedy– reminds you just how scary things once were. Thank heaven we no longer have idiots like those running the country! It’s also very funny.

RoboCop & The Terminator, Castro, Tuesday, 7:00. Two of the best sci-fi action films of the 1980s, and both about cyborgs. RoboCop, which I haven’t seen in many years, mixes extremely violent action with smart and funny social/political satire. The Terminator lacks RoboCop’s wit, but its thrills keep you on the edge of your seat. And it maintains an internal logic rare in time travel stories. Besides, it offers a now-rare view of our Governor’s naked butt. Part of the Castro’s “Second Dark Age” series.

Remembering Joaquin Murieta, Local Bandit, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Sunday, 1:00. The bandit Joaquin Murieta terrorized Gold Rush California and–in myth if not in reality–was something of a Robin Hood figure. The Silent Film Museum presents an afternoon devoted to the man who may have inspired Zorro. The free presentation includes Dead in the Sierra: The Legend of the Two Joaquins” a new documentary by Warren Haack; a PowerPoint presentation on Murieta, and a screening of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro, with piano accompaniment by Frederick Hodges. This 1920 adventure flick is where it all began. Douglas Fairbanks bought the rights to a then-recent novel, projected his already-famous athletic comic hero into a romanticized past, grabbed a sword, and invented the movie swashbuckler. There are better Zorro movies (including Fairbanks’ sequel, Don Q, Son of Zorro), but no other catches the birth of a genre.

Youth Without Youth, Castro, Sunday. Stylistically, it’s an art film, with slow pacing, a mix of muted and striking colors, and unusual camera angles. Yet the plot sounds like a superhero comic-book movie. If Francis Ford Coppola had stuck to this odd mix of style and story, his first film in eight years might have become his first good one in nearly 30. But just as the cat-and-mouse game heats up, the plot drops out from under you. The second part of Youth Without Youth meanders without direction, trying to say something existentially profound, but without anything really profound (or even interesting) to say. Read my full review. On a double bill with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

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Published by Lincoln Spector

Lincoln Spector writes about cinema, technology, and cinema technology. From 1986 through 2008, he wrote Gigglebytes, the first technology-oriented humor column. From 1977 through 2016, he wrote PC World's Answer Line column and blog.