What’s Screening: October 3 -9

The Mill Valley Film Festival runs through this week. I’ll list those films after everything else.

Three other festivals, Dead Channels, French Cinema Now, and the Oakland International Film Festival open this week. Dead Channels screens independent and international fantasy films Friday through Thursday, mostly at the Roxie, although it moves to the Parkway for its last day. French Cinema Now takes over the Clay Wednesday through the following Sunday to show contemporary French cinema not released in this country. The Oakland festival runs Thursday to the following Thursday at the Grand Lake.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Red Vic, Saturday. The only Dr. Seuss feature film made during his lifetime, and as creative, visually daring, and funny as any kid’s fantasy ever to come out of Hollywood. At least that’s how I remember it, many years from my last screening. Even the sets, photographed in three-strip Technicolor, look as if he painted them himself.

Manhattan, Red Vic, Tuesday and Wednesday. Made immediately after Annie Hall, Manhattan doesn’t measure up to its predecessor, but it’s still one of Woody Allen’s best. A group of New Yorkers fall in and out of love, cheat on their significant others, and try to justify their actions, all in glorious widescreen black and white accompanied by Gershwin. In light of Allen’s personal history since Manhattan was made, his character’s relationship with a 17-year-old girl feels both unsettling and more revealing than he originally intended.

Rosemary’s Baby, Castro, Friday, 7:00. Roman Polanski’s overblown satanic thriller was edgy and shocking in its day (just before the production code gave way to the rating system), but it’s tame by today’s standards. Mia Farrow effectively plays a pregnant woman who slowly discovers that she hasn’t been nearly paranoid enough (insert Woody Allen joke, here). But the building tension never quite builds enough. On a double bill with The Devils, which I haven’t seen since I was too young to get into this X-rated film without lying about my age.

The Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of San Francisco Amateur Sex Cinema from The ’60s, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Thursday, 7:30 & 9:20; Saturday, 7:30. Forty years ago, San Francisco was the center of the sexual revolution. Not surprisingly, a lot of people whipped out their home movie cameras and shot their own, mostly softcore, erotica. The YBCA presents three separate programs of shorts.

Some Like It Hot, UA Berkeley, Thursday, 8:00. Maybe this isn’t, as the American Film Institute called it, the greatest American film comedy yet made. But Billy Wilder’s farce about desperate musicians, vicious gangsters, and straight men in drag definitely belongs in the top 20. And its closing line has never been beat.

Oliver Twist, (1948 version), Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 3:00. David Lean’s film version is every bit as anti-Semitic as Dicken’s novel–perhaps more so, and I admit to having a harder time overlooking this type of bigotry than I do the blatant racism found in so many early Hollywood movies. But Lean also captures the grinding, seething poverty, crystal characterizations, and thrilling melodrama of Dicken’s classic. Part of the series Before Big: The Early Films of David Lean, as well as one of the PFA’s Movie Matinees for All Ages.

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Piedmont, Saturday and Sunday, midnight. Tim Burton’s first feature revels in its own silliness. Pee-Wee Herman, before children’s television and indecent exposure, is a strange, almost neurotically innocent creature. The movie is uneven, and most of the jokes are extremely dumb, but the oddball charm cannot be denied. Besides, the last sequence, reworking the plot as a Hollywood action film, is alone worth the price of admission. A child-friendly midnight movie.

Kagemusha, Castro, Saturday, Sunday. I am now about to do the unthinkable: pan an Akira Kurosawa film. Even geniuses make mistakes. Kurosawa’s 1980 epic–made largely with Hollywood money–is one big, long, and empty bore. Visually beautiful, it lacks the warmth and humanity we expect from Kurosawa. Nor does it find anything to replace that warmth–such as humor, irony, or insight. The story of a petty thief posing as a warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai in two roles) could have had all those things, but here is little more than an excuse to show thousands of soldiers massing and preparing for battle. On the other hand, it’s visually stunning and the Castro will screen a new print.

Mill Valley Film Festival

Idiots and Angels, Sequoia, Sunday2:45; Rafael, Tuesday, 7:15. Bill Plympton made a very bizarre, dark, and funny cartoon, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows his work. This story of a lonely, angry, and all-together rotten man (at one point he pushes a tear of empathy back into his eye) who inexplicitly sprouts angel wings will make you grimace as well as laugh. Dialog-free, Idiots and Angels reveals its characters by showing us their actions and their daydreams, which are mostly about money and undeserved glory. But no matter what their bearer may be thinking, the wings themselves insist on virtue. Plympton has created a dreadful world filled with dreadful people, yet allows something magical and wonderful to come out of it.

Katyn, Sequoia, Saturday, 2:15. In the spring of 1940, Soviet special forces massacred over 15,000 Polish prisoners of war, including the father of future filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. After the war, Stalin’s government blamed the massacre on the Nazis and suppressed the truth. Wajda tells the story of the crime and the cover-up through a handful of fictitious characters in this visually gorgeous yet emotionally shocking historical epic. The second half, set mostly after the war, sags through too many characters you haven’t really gotten to know, but it’s still an amazing recreation of a largely-forgotten atrocity.

Happy-Go-Lucky, Rafael, Tuesday, 6:30; Sequoia, Thursday, 9:30. There’s no excuse for Happy-Go-Lucky working as well as it does, and not only because the term “Mike Leigh comedy” sounds like an oxymoron. This movie has no real plot, no significant conflict, and not all that many laughs. But it has a bubbly, upbeat, outgoing, loving, caring and extremely happy protagonist named Poppy (Sally Hawkins in a glowing performance) who’s just fun to be with. Nothing truly horrible happens to her in the course of the entire film, aside from a few sessions with a very unpleasant driving instructor (Eddie Marsan). Leigh’s films have always observed everyday life, and this one observes the everyday life of a very happy person. Tuesday’s screening is a major festival event; a tribute to actress Sally Hawkins with Hawkins attending; Thursday’s is just a screening. Happy-Go-Lucky will receive a full theatrical release after the festival.

Cumbia Connection, Rafael, Saturday, 4:00, Sunday, 1:30. René Villarreal brings silent film (or almost silent film) into the 21st century with this vibrant, sexy tale of a love triangle in Monterrey, Mexico. A videographer falls in love with a beautiful woman and starts stalking her. She already has a boyfriend, but that doesn’t keep her from falling in love again. Cumbia songs dominate the almost dialog-free soundtrack. The sex scenes are as explicit as they can get without becoming hardcore. I wouldn’t mind that if they didn’t also feel cold and mechanical, without the love and passion found elsewhere in the movie.