What’s Screening: July 2 – 8

And if you’re looking for horror or laughs, both Another Hole in the Head and the Bay Area’s newest festival, LOL-SF, open on Thursday.

Also, I’ve got so many listings here for the Castro’s Hollywood on Hollywood series that I’ve put them together at the end of the newsletter.

B Double Bill: Sanshiro Sugata & Sanshiro Sugata II, Pacific Film Archive, Wednesday, 7:00. Akira Kurosawa’s first film is a fairly conventional martial arts  movie about the arrogant young man with talent, and the old master who must break him before he can train him. It’s well-made, with a couple of amazing sequences, and clearly a sign of greater things to come. It’s sequel is one of only two Kurosawa films I haven’t yet seen. I plan to rectify that Wednesday night.

Toy Story 3 with Animator in Person, Balboa, Friday, 7:00 & 9:15. Animator Teddy Newton, who directed the short that precedes Toy Story 3 in theaters, will be at the Balboa after the 7:00 show and to introduce the 9:15 show. I haven’t yet seen the movie, so I have no opinion on it. A Cerrito Classic.

A Jaws, Cerrito, Thursday, 9:15. Steven Spielberg thought this out-of-control  production would end his still-new career. Instead, it put him on the top of the Hollywood pyramid; and with good reason. By combining an intelligent story (lifted by novelist Peter Benchley from Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People), brilliant editing, and a handful of effective shocks, Jaws scares the living eyeballs out of you.

B- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Stanford, Saturday through Tuesday. Howard Hawks’ musical battle of the sexes contains a handful of wonderful dance numbers and some good comic moments, but there are too many weak scenes to wholeheartedly recommend it. The real surprise is in the stars. Gentlemen helped turn Marilyn Monroe into a star, but co-star Jane Russell blows her out of the water. In this film, at least, Russell is funnier and sexier. On a double bill with another Monroe feature, Niagara; I’ve never seen this one.

Hollywood on Hollywood

A Sunset Boulevard, Castro, Saturday. Billy Wilder’s meditation on Hollywood’s  seedy underbelly is the flip side of Singin’ in the Rain (now that would make a great double bill). Norma Desmond is very much like Lena Lamont–after twenty-two years of denial and depression. And in the role of Norma, Gloria Swanson gives one of the great over-the-top performances in Hollywood history. But instead of showing it with Singin’ in the Rain (which, after all, the Castro screened only last Wednesday), it’s on a double-bill with The Star, which I haven’t seen and have no opinion on.

Star Is Born (1954 version), Castro, Sunday. I’m not grading this one because I haven’t seen it in over a decade, but I suspect I’d give it an A if I did. The third version of this story (the second titled A Star is Born), it surpasses the two that came before and the one that followed—so much for the natural inferiority of remakes. Judy Garland gave the performance of her lifetime as a rising star in love with an alcoholic at the end of his career (James Mason). Few dramas are as musical, and few musicals are this dramatic. This is also the first great film made in Cinemascope.

A Double Bill: The Aviator & Boogie Nights, Castro, Monday. The A goes to Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic tale of the porn industry in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, as it transitioned from chic to mass-produced video. Mark Wahlberg became a star playing a nice, not-to-bright kid with a very large package, but Julianne Moore won the Oscar for her role as a coke-snorting porn queen den mother. Scorsese’s Howard Hughs biopic,  The Aviator, can’t make up its mind if it’s fun lark through Hollywood or a serious drama about someone losing his mind. The two pieces never quite fit together, but each kind of works in its own right.

B+ Gods and Monsters, Castro, Tuesday. James Whale was a World War I veteran, a relatively (for his time) open homosexual, and the director of some of the greatest horror movies ever made. He committed suicide in 1957 at the age of 68. Gods and Monsters examines this fascinating man with a fictional retelling of his final days. Ian McKellen plays Whale as a charming and cultured seducer frustrated by the degenerative disease that’s destroying his mind. A pre-stardom Brendan Fraser matches him as the straight hunk whom Whale fails to seduce but succeeds to befriend. On a double-bill with Ed Wood, which I haven’t seen in many years and didn’t care for then.