What’s Screening: June 17 – 23

The only festival going on this week is Frameline, which opened last night and continues at various theaters.

B+ The Cove, Rafael, Tuesday, 7:00. We’re all pretty much used to documentaries as left-wing agit-prop, but The Cove adds a new element. It’s a left-wing agit-prop documentary heist movie. Much of the film follows the filmmakers as they assemble a team and set out to film an annual slaughter of dolphins off the coast of Japan. It even has a star, Ric O’Barry, who captured and trained dolphins for the old TV show Flipper, and has since devoted his life to letting all dolphins swim free. Both suspenseful and horrifying The filmmakers will be there in person, as will the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. A benefit for Save Japan Dolphins.

A Bonnie and Clyde, Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 8:40. This low-budget gangster movie, produced by and starring Warren Beatty , hit a nerve with young audiences in 1967 and became one of the big surprise hits of the year. Shocking in its time for its violence and sexual frankness (matching a horny Bonnie with an impotent Clyde), it still hits below the belt today. Here the historical bank robbers of yesterday become alienated youth, glamorous celebrities, good kids who made a bad decision, selfish jerks, and tragic heroes with a sealed fate. And we root for them, fear for them, and suffer with them every step of the way—even while we’re horrified by their actions. Part of the series Arthur Penn, A Liberal Helping.

B+ Wings of Desire, Red Vic, Sunday and Monday. Wim Wenders’ fantasy about angels in Berlin offers a view of the city as a land of interior monologues. Two angels (Bruno Ganz, and Otto Sander) watch over the people, listen to their thoughts, and comfort them in their pain. Then one of them (Ganz) falls in love with a trapeze artist, and finds himself longing for mortality. Wenders couldn’t have known it when he made the film in 1988, but he was capturing the last months of a divided city; the wall seen in the film would soon come down. With Peter Falk as an unnamed American actor who is, I suspect, supposed to be Peter Falk.

A Purple Rose of Cairo, Red Vic, Tuesday and Wednesday. The Hollywood fantasies of the 1930’s mesh and collide with Great Depression reality in Woody Allen’s funny and sad comedy about the limits of the imagination. Mia Farrow plays an unhappily married waitress whose only solace is the movies. Her great devotion to one particular picture results in a fictitious character (Jeff Daniels) walking off the screen and making her world as wonderful as his. This isn’t just her fantasy; the incident makes headlines and throws Hollywood into chaos. But even in a fantasy, Woody Allen can’t allow imagination to lead to a happy ending. On a double bill with Broadway Danny Rose, which I haven’t seen in a very long time but liked when I saw it. This is a MiDNITES FOR MANiACS presentation, which is weird because the whole thing will be over by 11:00.

B The Host, 4-Star, Thursday. A barely-functional family fights an uncaring government and a giant mutant carnivore, and it’s hard to say which is the scarier threat.  I didn’t find this quite the masterpiece others saw–the political points are obvious, the third act gets confusing, and the big finale fails to satisfy. But director/co-writer Joon-ho Bong succeeds where it counts: He makes you care about the characters and scares you out of your seat. Much of the credit goes to the talented computer animators at San Francisco’s own The Orphanage, who brought the monster to life. On a double bill with Yang Zean, which I’ve never seen.

Tokyo Story, Pacific Film Archive, Wednesday, 7:00. I’m not giving this film a grade because, frankly, it’s been way too long since I’ve seen it. But I suspect I would give it an A. Shot in that simple, direct, Ozu style, it examines an elderly couple and their children as life is coming to an end. If I recall it properly, the direct approach makes the story all the more heart-rending.

Comedy Short Subject Night, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Saturday, 7:30. “Easy Street” is one of the better shorts from Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual period, and “Cops” is one of Buster Keaton’s best shorts, period. I can’t vouch for the other two that make up the evening.

We Have to Stop Now, Season 2, Elmwood, Wednesday, 7:00; Victoria, Thursday, 7:00. I haven’t seen season 2, but here’s what I thought of season 1, which I previewed before it screened last year: Talented performers and a funny concept don’t always make a good comedy. That requires a strong script. We Have to Stop Now–made up of bits and pieces of a web series—lacks just that. The concept: Just as an extremely unhappily married couple, both therapists, agree to divorce, their book on maintaining a happy marriage hits the bestseller lists. Now they have to stay together for the book’s sake. (The fact that it’s a same-sex marriage is almost incidental to the story, although much could have been made of it.) Unfortunately, Ann Noble’s script manages to miss almost every opportunity to milk that rich vein for either humor or insight. The movie has a a few scattered laughs, some of them pretty big, and most of them involving their hilariously incompetent marriage counselor (Suzanne Westenhoefer).  A Frameline screening.