The Santa Rosa International Film Festival continues through Tuesday. From Britain with Love continues at the Rafael through Sunday. The Irish Film Festival opens Thursday.
B- Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology, Embarcadero, Shattuck,opens Friday. 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. She reached for profundity, but achieved only entertainment. 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. Some clever, informative, and often funny cartoons (animated by Stefan Nadelman) and some amusing old movie clips make Connected enjoyable. Shlain in person at the Shattuck on Sunday, 3:15 and 5:30.
A Bringing Up Baby, Stanford, Saturday through next Friday. How does one define a screwball comedy? You could say it’s a romantic comedy with glamorous movie stars behaving like broad, slapstick comedians. You could point out that screwballs are usually set amongst the excessively wealthy, and often explore class barriers. Or you could simply show Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, a frivolous and hilarious tale about a mild-mannered paleontologist (Cary Grant), a ditzy heiress (Katharine Hepburn), and a tame leopard (a tame leopard). On a double-bill with An Affair to Remember, which I saw long ago and didn’t care for.
A Psycho, Oakland Paramount, Friday, 8:00. 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 to make a low-budget movie in black and white.
B+ Aliens, Castro, Friday, 7:00. Like most sequels, James Cameron’s first big-budget movie isn’t as good as the original Alien. Less of a horror film and more of an action picture (or, arguably, a war movie), it strands a platoon of marines on a barely hospitable planet infested with the big, egg-laying predators. Sigourney Weaver stars again. Unfortunately, the Castro will be screening the original, 137-minute cut. Cameron’s 154-minute director’s cut, which to my knowledge has never been shown theatrically, goes into far more character detail and is a much better film. On a triple bill with Starship Troopers and Dark Star.
C+ Fiddler on the Roof, Lark, Sunday, 4:00. When I first saw the last of the big Hollywood roadshows as a teenager, I hated the movie so much that my mother accused me of being a self-hating Jew. That was odd because I had loved the original stage play. (My objections were that the production values were too big, and the comic timing was off.) Revisiting it again decades later, I can appreciate what director Norman Jewison was trying to do. Rather than making a musical comedy with a period setting and a serious undertone, he attempted to turn it into a historical spectacle with songs. The result isn’t entirely satisfactory, but it has its moments.
On the Vitaphone: 1928-1930, Pacific Film Archive, Thursday, 7:00. When Warner Brothers went out on a limb and started making sound films 1926, Vitaphone shorts were an important part of the program. These were vaudeville acts, each about 10 minutes long, filmed simply with two or three cameras set very near each other. The picture for each short could be edited, but the sound could not. Today, these shorts provide both an important part of cinema’s most disruptive transition and an excellent record of authentic vaudeville. I’ve seen several Vitaphone shorts, but none of the ones on this presentation.
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