What’s Screening: July 22 – 28

I’m writing this a week early, so if anything changed at the last minute, it won’t be reflected here.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival plays at the Castro through the week. I’ve listed those screenings at the end of the newsletter. And the Red Vic closes its doors Monday night.

Harold and Maude, Red Vic, Sunday and Monday. After Woodstock, this comedy about a young man and a much older woman is the ultimate statement of the hippie generation. I loved it passionately in the 1970′s. But I haven’t seen it in a long time and I’m not sure how well it’s aged. But the Red Vic has chosen it as the theater’s final farewell.

A Bill Plympton in person & Idiots and Angels, Balboa, Monday through Wednesday, 9:00. 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. Idiots and Angels made my list of the Best Films You Couldn’t See in 2008, and here’s another chance for you to see it. The Monday and Tuesday events will include the shorts “The Cow that Wanted to be a Hamburger”  (described here), and “Tiffany the Whale.” Wednesday night, Plympton will conduct a master class.

A Life Above All, Embarcadero, opens Friday. Children must often carry greater and more difficult burdens than they should bear. Occasionally, an unusual child is up to the task. That’s the case with 12-year-old Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka) in this remarkably touching film from South Africa. Her baby half-sister just died. Her step-father is a useless drunk. Her mother isn’t well, and is getting worse. Two young half-siblings need care. Her mother’s close friend is more concerned with respectability than love. Her own friend has become a prostitute. Somehow, she must find the strength to fight poverty, disease, and a disapproving community. Read my full review.

A Vengeance is Mine, VIZ Cinema @ New People, Sunday, 2:00. Director Shohei Imamura and screenwriter Masaru Baba take us into the mind of a psychopath in this film, tracking the life of and manhunt for one of Japan’s most notorious serial killers. The result isn’t pretty. The filmmakers treat Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) analytically, neither asking for nor receiving any sympathy for a man incapable of feeling sympathy for others. Yet the film itself is far from cold. For while Enokizu himself fascinates and repels us, Imamura makes us care deeply for the imperfect people whose lives Enokizu touches, ruins, and in some cases terminates. This one stays with you for a long time. Part of the “CLASSIC” SUMMER WEEKENDS series.

A Jaws, Oakland Paramount, Friday, 8:00. 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, Jawsscares the living eyeballs out of you.

A On the Town, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Friday, 8:00. Three sailors arrive in New York for a 24-hour leave. That’s precious little time to see the sights, drink in the atmosphere, and fall in love. What makes On the Town so special–beyond the great songs, terrific choreography, and witty script–is the prevailing sense of friendship and camaraderie. These three sailors and the women who fall for them all seem to genuinely like each other and care very much for the others’ happiness. The movie also treats sexuality in a surprisingly upbeat and positive way for a 1949 Hollywood feature. The women in the story (Vera-Ellen, Ann Miller, and the infinitely funny Betty Garrett) seem at least as motivated by lust as the men (Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin, and Frank Sinatra). It’s just too bad that screenwriters Adolph Green and Betty Comden updated their own wartime stage musical to the post-war period, losing the urgency that came from not knowing if the sailors would come back alive.

A+ Hitchcock Double Bill: Rear Window & Rope, Stanford, Saturday through Thursday. Rear Window represents Alfred Hitchcock at his absolute best. James Stewart is riveting as a news photographer temporarily confined to his apartment and a wheelchair, amusing himself by watching his neighbors. Then he begins to suspect that one of them committed murder.  Hitchcock uses this story to examine voyeurism, urban alienation, and the institution of marriage, and to treat his audience to a great, suspenseful entertainment. Rope, on the other hand, while not Hitchcock’s worst film, is easily his most frustrating. He turned it into a virtual one-shot film, robbing himself of the ability to edit—a distracting and pointless gimmick.

A Hitchcock Double Bill: Vertigo & Psycho, Stanford, Saturday through next Friday. The A goes to Psycho. Contrary to urban myth, Alfred Hitchcock didn’t really want people to stop taking showers. He was, however, inspired by the television show he was then producing, and decided to make a low-budget movie in black and white. On its own, Vertigo earns a D in my book. Everyone else thinks it’s a masterpiece, but it tops my short list of the Most Overrated Films of All Time.Vertigo isn’t like any other Alfred Hitchcock movie; it’s slow, uninvolving, and self-consciously arty.

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

A Freedom of Expression Award & Spartacus, Castro, Sunday, 1:00. Kirk Douglas produced as well as starred in Spartacus, and made the courageous decision to give blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo a screen credit, and thus helped break the blacklist. That act is large part of why he’s receiving this award. Forgetting the film’s historical significance (it was also Stanley Kubrick’s only work as a director-for-hire), Spartacus is simply the most powerful, intelligent, and coherent toga epic from the golden age of toga epics. Yes, I know that sounds like weak praise, but it isn’t. One scene tells you more about gladiators than that whole Russell Crowe silliness from 2000. And I can’t think of a better local theater to see it in than the Castro. (Too bad they couldn’t get a 70mm print, however.)

A- 100 Voices: A Journey Home, Castro, Thursday, July 28, 8:15. San Francisco closing night. In 2009, documentarians Danny Gold and Matthew Asner followed 100 American cantors as they flew to Poland for a concert tour and a return to their personal and professional roots. The resulting film follows many stories: the art and history of cantorial singing, the long history of Jews in Poland, the Holocaust, and a new, Polish resurgence of interest in Jewish culture. Gold and Asner weave these threads into a touching, fascinating, and triumphant garment without ever getting them tangled. I do wish, however, that they’d given more time to pre-WWII Jewish-Polish relations. On the other hand, the movie is filled with beautiful music. Some sounds like opera, some like jazz, but all of it is deeply spiritual and unquestionably Jewish.

B- Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology, Castro, Saturday, 4:30. Tiffany Shlain had Tree-of-Life-level ambitions for her documentary about life, human evolution, networking, her father’s terminal cancer, and her own difficult pregnancy. Although she made an entertaining movie, she failed to make a profound one. Like most autobiographical documentaries, much of Connected comes off as self-centered. But more of it is Daddy-centered; the movie worships her father (surgeon and best-selling author Leonard Shlain) to the point of idolatry. While this is emotionally understandable—she made the film while he was dying—it’s not good filmmaking. When not dealing with family health problems, Connected looks at the networks human beings have created, and the essential connectedness of everything. In doing so, it offers no insights that a reasonably educated and curious person would not have found elsewhere. So why do I give it an even moderately positive B-? Because Shlain is at least an entertaining documentarian if not a deep one. Connected contains many clever, informative, and often funny cartoons (animated by Stefan Nadelman), and uses old movie clips in amusing and original ways.

Jews In Toons, Castro, Monday, 7:00. Three episodes from three different animated primetime sitcoms. I’ve never seen the South Park episode "The Passion Of The Jew," or Family Guy’s "When You Wish Upon A Weinstein" (to be honest, I’ve never seen Family Guy). But I can tell you with full authority that The Simpsons’ episode, "Like Father, Like Clown," is very funny, although it’s not one of the best.

C+ Next Year in Bombay, Castro, Thursday, 1:30. Did you know there are Jews in India? Not once-British Jews who stayed behind when the Empire collapsed, but people who are racially and ethnically Indian, yet identify themselves as Jews and practice the religion. For too much of this too-short documentary, filmmakers Jonas Parienté, and Mathias Mangin seem content to let us marvel at that very fact. But in its second half, as it looks at a small, Jewish peasant village (seen through the eyes of a young, urban, educated Bombay Jew), and then deals with questions of immigration to Israel, it dips into profound issues of Jewish identity. But it doesn’t give these issues the time they deserve. The festival will precede this 55-minute feature with a 19-minute short, “Starring David.”