House of Wax (1953)

WHO: André de Toth directed this.

WHAT: There's Raoul Walsh, who directed Gun Fury. There's John Ford, who directed (uncredited) the final scenes of Hondo when John Farrow was contractually forced to give up his director's chair to go make another picture. There's even the little-remembered Herbert L. Strock, who directed the science fiction picture Gog. But of all the one-eyed filmmakers of the 1950s, the one most famous for making a 3D picture is André de Toth. This is probably because he was first out the gate; before House of Wax no major studio had released a color 3D picture, and the horror film became an immediate sensation. De Toth secured his legacy as a stereoscopy specialist by following House of Wax up with two 3D Westerns starring Randolph Scott, 1953's  The Stranger Wore A Gun and 1954's The Bounty Hunter, although the latter was filmed but never shown in 3D as by the time of its release the 3D craze was already over- to lie dormant for decades.

WHERE/WHEN: 5 screenings: Tonight, Sunday and Monday at 6:30 PM, and tomorrow and Sunday at 2:15 PM, all at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

WHY: A big week for special screenings at the Rafael; in addition to these five shows there's also a 30th anniversary screening of the epic astronaut drama The Right Stuff with director Philip Kaufman tomorrow night at 7:00. Both showings seem timed perfectly with the popularity of current 3D astronaut movie Gravity. The rest of Halloween week at the Rafael is filled out by a Tuesday tribute to television horror hosts and two showings of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu with a recording of Hans Erdmann's original 1922 score for the film on Wednesday and Thursday. In addition, seven screenings of the so-called "final cut" of director Robin Hardy's 1973 cult film The Wicker Man occur between tonight and Thursday. Some good comments about the latter item were made by my friend David Robson.

All of the above are digital screenings, but the Rafael plans to flex its capability to screen 35mm prints at least a couple more times before the year is out, according to the latest calendar (pdf). On November 10th local filmmaker Rob Nilsson brings a new 35mm print of his ultra-naturalistic 1979 Cannes-prize winning film Northern Lights to the Rafael November 10th (shortly after showing it at the Pacific Film Archive). And on December 12, Randy Haberkamp returns for an annual visit to Marin to screen Lois Weber's astonishing Suspense, D.W. Griffith's The Mothering Heart, and other films and excerpts from "The Films of 1913" with live music from pianist Michael Mortilla. At least some of the films will screen via a vintage 1909 hand-cranked 35mm film projector.

House of Wax was a remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, itself influenced by the 1924 German film Waxworks, which screens tomorrow at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. If San Rafael or Niles are to far-afield for your Halloween screening excursions, the Roxie is hosting a Saturday night "Spooktacular Slumber Party" but has not revealed any details of what it will be showing. My curiosity is piqued.

HOW: House of Wax will screen using modern digital 3D technology; it would be nice to see it in its original dual-35mm-projector version but Frisco Bay theatres haven't screened prints this way in years (the Castro in 2006 and the Stanford back in 2000) and there's no sign they'll start again anytime soon.

Gravity (2013)

WHO: Emmanuel Lubezski was director of photography for this, and is already being called a "lock" or near to one to earn his first Best Cinematography Oscar for it. I agree with Nathaniel Rogers that this indicates serious trouble in this category. I hope the cinematographers resist pundit and fan pressure and decline to nominate Lubeszki for this- perhaps they can pick him for To The Wonder instead. Because it makes more sense to me for Gravity to be an Animated Feature Oscar nominee than a Cinematography nominee.

WHAT: All that said, I really liked Gravity even if it came up far short of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris in conveying more than just thrills on a heightened scale. Then again, it may be unfair to compare this film to science-fiction, which it is not. I recommend Eric Henderson's review.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily into the foreseeable future at nearly half the cinemas on Frisco Bay.

WHY: I haven't usually featured the so-called "movie of the moment" on this blog this year but that's because I rarely find that movie both intriguing to see for a reason other than just being part of a current pop-culture conversation, and worth recommending. But Gravity is certainly well worth a look if you keep you expectations in check. And its box office success makes the Castro's booking of space-set Alien and Dark Star for October 23rd seem very prescient.

HOW: Here's where it gets complicated. I saw Gravity in digital 3D on the Metreon's IMAX screen, but though this is the largest screen in the Bay Area, it was not the IMAX experience (a title card shown before the film started even stated so), as the entire screen was not filled and a wide aspect ratio was maintained. I understand other IMAX screens show it the same way. Yet the full IMAX 3D price was charged. If I revisit the film I will certainly not go with IMAX, and will instead find a cheaper digital 3D screening. I'll admit I'm curious about the multidimensional sound options available through Dolby Atmos, and unavailable at any IMAX showings.

If you're the sort who cannot or does not appreciate 3D for any reason, there are also 2D screenings of Gravity as well, including a 35mm booking at the Balboa

South And North

Since my previous post on the Frisco Bay screening scene, two major pieces of news have caught the eyes of cinephiles like myself. First, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto quietly began a new multi-calendar series last week. It's an extensive centennial tribute to Universal Pictures, focusing attention on the oldest of the Hollywood studios, which mogul Carl Laemmle formed out of his company IMP (Independent Moving Pictures Company) and several others after emerging victorious in his legal battle with the 'old guard' of American motion picture production: Edison, Bioscope, Vitagraph, etc. a.k.a. "The Trust". The first picture made at his Universal City studio after this formation, At Old Fort Dearborn, was released on September 28, 1912, and was itself a centennial commemoration of a War of 1812 battle taking place where Chicago would eventually be founded. Though this film (if it indeed exists) is not announced for the Stanford schedule, there are three silent film presentations between now and the end of the calendar: two early entries in the famous "Universal Horror" series: the spooky Cat and the Canary this Friday September 21 & Lon Chaney's famous Phantom of the Opera November 2nd, as well as Erich von Stroheim's 1922 drama Foolish Wives on October 12th. All three will feature Dennis James at the Wurlitzer organ, and will hopefully be followed by more Universal silent films in subsequent calendars.

The Good Fairy (William Wyler, 1935) screen capture from Kino DVD

The meat of the Stanford schedule over the next two months is not 1920s silents, however, but a healthy sampling of features from the 1930-1935 period, all on 35mm prints as usual at this venue. Essentially all of the surviving Universal Horror films from this period will screen, from famous titles like Dracula and the Mummy to lesser-knowns Werewolf of London and Secret of the Blue Room, paired on Halloween night. With quite a few films by melodrama master John Stahl (Magnificent Obsession & Imitation of Life make a double-bill of Douglas Sirk pre-makes Oct. 13-14) and a complete retrospective of James Whale's work from 1931's Waterloo Bridge and Frankenstein to his 1935 Bride of Frankenstein and Remember Last Night?, the series is ideal for auteurists. If this Wednesday & Thursday's pairing of Frank Borzage's rarely-shown but highly-regarded Little Man, What Now? with one of my very favorite William Wyler films (from a Preston Sturges screenplay) The Good Fairy doesn't entice you to Palo Alto I'm not sure what I can say. Maybe you have an excuse if you're immersing yourself in one of the two other current studio-focused film series happening in Berkeley right now. I was sad to miss Stahl's 1933 Only Yesterday last week but glad I caught Isao Takahata's 1991 film with coincidentally the same (English) title- it was as equal to the best films of Hayao Miyazaki as it was different from them, and it plays again at the California Theatre this Wednesday only.

The other studio-focused series in Berkeley is the Pacific Film Archive's Nikkatsu centennial, which I'm sad to say I haven't been able to attend any of yet. (How could I let myself miss a rare Mizoguchi film?) There are still quite a few screenings left to go however, including a Daisuke Ito chambara from the silent era and three Seijun Suzuki selections from the 1960s. Like Universal, Nikkatsu is still in action today, releasing films like Rent-A-Cat, which will screen nearby next month. This brings me to screening news #2: Last Wednesday's press conference and announcement of the program for the Mill Valley Film Festival happening in various Marin County venues from October 4-14. 

In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

Though the press conference itself was underwhelming (why rent the Dolby Labs screening room and then show compressed clips with cut-off subtitles and obfuscating pixelation? Well, at least the festival trailer looked great.) the program itself more than made up for that. Quite a few of the festival circuit's hottest titles, by veteran auteurs and up-and-coming makers alike, are part of the MVFF program this year. Whether this is because the festival is celebrating an anniversary itself (its 35th) or because of other factors, I don't know, but there's no doubt I'm finding more to lure me on the trek North this year than I've ever seen on a prior Mill Valley program. I don't feel left out of hyped Eastern festivals, knowing that 7 highly-anticipated films from the New York Film Festival's main slate are set to play here in less than a month: Christian Mungiu's Beyond The Hills, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die, Antonio Méndez Esparza's Here And There, Leos Carax's Holy Motors, Ang Lee's Life of Pi, Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone In Love, and Miguel Gomes's Tabu. These are joined by more new films I have I hopes for, foremost among them the first screen team-up between one of my favorite international directors Hong Sangsoo, and one of my favorite international performers, Isabelle Huppert: In Another Country. 

I'm also curious to see Nor'Easter and Fat Kid Rules The World, both first features from American directors Andrew Brotzman and Matthew Lillard, respectively. I believe these are the first films completed with some assistance from Lucas McNelly and his ambitious A Year Without Rent project (full disclosure: my roommates and I contributed a night on a couch to this project) to have public screenings in the Bay Area. There's also The Wall, which comes to Mill Valley after screening at the Berlin & Beyond festival this month, a fascinating Frisco-focused documentary called The Institute, and the annual offering from the prolific local legend Rob Nilsson, whose films rarely screen in San Francisco proper, even when they're made here. This one is called Maelstrom and is set in Marin, making MVFF an even-more ideal showcase than usual. 

Tales of the Night (Michel Ocelot, 2011)  courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

Thanks to the festival's timing on the "awards calendar" there's always a certain amount of "Oscarbaition" at Mill Valley, and this year Ben Affleck is expected to be on hand to excite people about his upcoming Argo and David O. Russell will be here with Silver Linings Playbook. But I'm much more interested in an Oscar-ineligible animated feature, silhouettist Michel Ocelot's first 3-D venture Tales of the Night, which screened in Frisco once last year, in French with English subtitles. I missed it with some regret but won't miss the subtitles when I catch it dubbed into English at Mill Valley this year. A recent viewing of the otherwise-excellent Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (which comes to the Castro next month) made me realize I haven't yet trained myself to read words on one focal plane while taking in stereoscopic action at the same time. Thoughtful dubbing is usually less damaging to animation than live-action work anyway. Note that Robert Bloomberg's 3-D short How To Draw A Cat, which screens along with Ocelot's feature, is, contra the festival catalog, not made by young Croatian artists. There is an animation workshop as part of the MVFF Children's Filmfest, and the other features in this sidebar will be preceded by shorts, but labeling How To Draw a Cat as such was a publishing error.

With all the treats in store, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that all the above-mentioned films will be screening digitally rather than in 35mm prints. This is the reality of film festival exhibition for the present and foreseeable future, however, and although the main MVFF venue, the Rafael Film Center, still retains its 35mm projection capability, they understandably also want to show off their recently-upgraded digital projection systems. To festival director Mark Fishkin's press conference promise that the festival screenings will look much better than the clips shown did, I can only say: they'd better! I feel it's worth noting the handful of titles that I'm told will be sourced from actual film reels and not DCP or other digital formats: the painter/film director biopic Renoir, Brazil's Xinga (also a biopic), Polish thriller To Kill A Beaver, and two of the selections in the shorts program entitled Crosseyed And Painless. And two of the retrospective presentations as well: the screening of 

La Jetée that will accompany the October 6th (but not the October 8th) showing of Emiko Omori's tribute to its departed director, To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, and the October 7th 35mm screening of Yoyo, a 1965 comedy co-written by Jean Claude-Carrière, and directed by and starring the all-but-forgotten French clown Pierre

Étaix- a pair mentored and introduced by the great Jacques Tati. If 

Étaix's name doesn't ring a bell his face may if you've seen Fellini's The Clowns, Oshima's Max Mon Amour, Iosseliani's Chantrapas, Kaurismäi's Le Havre, or (not bloody likely) Lewis's The Day The Clown Cried.

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012) courtesy Mill Valley Film Festival

With the studios' all-or-nothing digital push, 35mm prints are disappearing from festivals all over- not just Mill Valley but household-name festivals like Cannes and Toronto as well. This is purely speculation, but it may be that the main reason why this year's MVFF line-up seems stronger than usual is that distributors are more willing to let digital versions of their films play at a regional festival like this than they were willing to send one of their few 35mm prints to Marin in the days when celluloid was king. Small distributors are giving in to pressure to "go digital" just as commercial cinemas are, and the whole film ecosystem as we know it may be unrecognizable in a year or sooner. I'm told a touring 35mm print of Holy Motors will grace at least one local Landmark Theatres screen about a month after it plays digitally at MVFF, but this may already be the exception to the rule.

All I know is, I'm determined to see e.g. Like Someone In Love in Marin County next month, even if it is going to be shown from a Digital Cinema Package (DCP). And if IFC distributes a print of it to a local arthouse sometime this winter or spring or later, I imagine I'll happily pay to see it again there as well. I mean, it's an Abbas Kiarostami feature set in Japan. Of course I'm going to want to see it at least twice! Now, off to buy my ticket befpre it goes to "rush" status...

Lincoln Spector Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Lincoln Spector of Bayflicks. With his permission, I extracted the Frisco Bay repertory events from his previously-published list of Best Movie-Going Experiences of 2011:

Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm, Castro, June 11. Hollywood made a lot of long epic movies in the 50s and 60s. Many of them were shot in large formats, and initially presented in 70mm roadshow presentations—a great way to see a big film. Some of these movies were pretty good. A few were excellent. Too many of them are unwatchable. But only one stands out among the greatest masterpieces of the cinema: David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia—as perfect a blending of medium and story as you can find. Seeing this film this way wasn’t a new experience for me last summer, but an old, beloved one. Had it been my first such experience, it undoubtedly would have made number 1.

Four Noir Features in One Day, Castro/Noir City, January 22. It was dark. It was dangerous. Lust, greed, and fear hung heavily in the air. It was enough to drive you crazy. On one dark and scary winter day, I sat through two double bills of vintage noir, all about people who were out of their minds (a festival-long theme last year). I loved three out of the four movies, but the best was easily Don’t Bother To Knock, which gave Marilyn Monroe one of her first starring roles. She plays a babysitter who really should not be trusted with a child. She shouldn’t be trusted with a grown man like Richard Widmark, either.

Three Charlie Chaplin Mutual Shorts, Castro/Silent Film Festival Winter Event, February 12. Forget, for a moment, the mature Charlie Chaplin of The Gold Rush and City Lights. It was the short subjects he made a decade earlier that won him more populsilarity than anyone could have imagined before he stepped in front of a movie camera. The three shorts presented that day, The Pawnshop, The Rink, and The Adventurer reminded me and hundreds of other people of just how amazing he was in his third year as a filmmaker. The early Chaplin character could be exceptionally selfish and cruel–even sadistic. Yet you root for him. That’s star power. Donald Sosin provided piano accompaniment.

Upstream, Castro/San Francisco Silent Film Festival, July 14. How often do you get to see a newly discovered John Ford movie (actually, this was my second). Thought lost for decades and recently found in New Zealand, Upstream is not the sort of picture you associate with Ford. But this amusing and entertaining trifle about the residents of a theatrical boarding house–a story with a love triangle at the center–showed that he was considerably more versatile than we generally assume. Rather than merely accompanying the film on a piano, Donald Sosin put together a jazz sextet that rocked the house.

Serge Bromberg and the History of 3D, Castro/San Francisco International Film Festival, May 1. In 2011, the Festival gave its Mel Novikoff Award to film restoration expert, distributor, and entertainer Serge Bromberg. After a brief Q&A where he discussed preservation and set some nitrate film on fire, he presented, narrated, and occasionally accompanied some rare, historic 3D shorts. Among the filmmakers whose works were presented were George Mêliés and Chuck Jones. With the exception of the first two-reeler, all of the films were presented digitally.

Kirk Douglas & Spartacus, Castro/San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 25. Last year, the Jewish Festival gave its Freedom of Expression Award to Hollywood star, living legend, executive producer, and stroke survivor Issur Danielovitch—better known to the world as Kirk Douglas. The stroke slurred his speech but not his enthusiasm, and didn’t keep him from talking about the importance of free expression in a democracy, and that how without it we are all slaves. Then they screened Spartacus–one of the great roadshow productions of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like Lawrence of Arabia, this picture requires something like the Castro to make it work its best. My only regret: They screened it in 35mm as no 70mm print is currently available.

runners-up, listed in chronological order by screening date

The Leopard, Castro, February 20
The Battleship Potemkin, Castro, March 18
Screenwriter Frank Pierson and Dog Day Afternoon, Kabuki/San Francisco International Film Festival, April 30.
Days of Heaven, Cerrito, August 11
Elevator to the Gallows, Pacific Film Archive, November 4

SFIFF54 Day 11: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is in its final week. It runs through May 5th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (FRANCE: August & Louis Lumière, 1896)

playing: at 5:00 PM at the Castro as part of the Retour De Flamme: Rare And Restored Films in 3-D program, which has only this single screening during the festival.
distribution: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat has been released on several different DVDs, including this one by Image Entertainment. But not in 3-D. In fact, though many of the works showing tonight have been released on video by different companies, 3-D systems for home viewing are still notoriously subpar, not to mention expensive. It seems fair to guess that this particular collection of films might never be screened together in a San Francisco theatre again.

It's one of the most-often repeated founding myths of the cinema. When a Paris audience at one of the first public exhibitions of films by the pioneering Lumière Brothers saw on the screen an indistinct object near the vanishing point become a locomotive charging towards them, the crowd mistook the illusion of the image for a real train and panicked, screamed, and even fled their seats to get out of the vehicle's path. It's hard to imagine people being so naive about the cinema, even in its earliest days, to react so drastically. It's been a while since I last read Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer's article on the film from a 2004 edition of the journal The Moving Image, but I recall it being a convincing, if not quite conclusive, debunking of this tale. As I recall, the next issue of the journal included a reader letter theorizing that the October 1895 Montparnasse Station accident might have made the January 1896 Lumière screening audience more jittery about the possibility of an indoor locomotive crash. Myths always contain elements of truth within their falseness, and if we sense that this early audience didn't react quite as dramatically as we often hear to seeing Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat for the first time, some of the assembled members might have had a much more spirited response than we'd expect from our seat-neighbors nowadays.

Can a cinematic effect come closer to replicating the kind of physical response we imagine for this nineteenth-century Paris audience than 3-D? I'd sometimes turn my head away from the screen to watch my fellow audience members bob and sway in reaction to certain "comin' right at ya" 3-D effects, when the Castro Theatre used to regularly host classic-era 3-D film series. The last one was spontaneously turned into a classic-era 2-D film series due to a projector breakdown, and I've heard no rumor of another stereoscopic series on the horizon. This evening's screening will be in digital 3-D, just as the program was presented in Telluride and elsewhere.

Curated and presented (and, in the case of silent-films, accompanied on piano) by French archivist, filmmaker and impresario Serge Bromberg, this set includes films made in 3-D from all eras, and each person who attends will receive two different pairs of 3-D glasses to keep up with the different kinds of processes used over the decades. The best-known era of classic 3-D is the 1950s, which provides several program titles including the only 3-D Chuck Jones cartoon Lumber-Jack Rabbit. But the evening reaches back to the early silent era to filmmakers like Georges Méliès (who only inadvertently worked in 3-D, as I'm sure Mr. Bromberg will explain) and forward to more modern 3-D animations from institutions like Pixar and the National Film Board of Canada. In addition to the screenings, Bromberg will be interviewed on stage in conjunction with his receipt of the Mel Novikoff Award for "work which has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema." Previous recipients include critics like Donald Richie, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert, and archivists like Paolo Cherchi Usai, Kevin Brownlow and David Shepard, who has written an excellent article on Bromberg for the program guide.

But what does this program have to do with Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat? More than just the fact that the Lumière film might be the genesis of that "comin' right at ya" philosophy of 3-D filmmaking that I'm sure some, but not all, of this evening's films will exhibit. Apparently a 3-D version of some Lumière Brothers films, including this one, was prepared and presented in the mid-1930s. I haven't be able to determine whether this 1930s 3-D version was a remake/reshooting of the 1896 film, or if it was some kind of primordial back-conversion akin to that of The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D. I can't wait to see it and find out tonight.

SFIFF54 Day 11
Another option: The Autobiohgraphy of Nicoale Ceausescu (ROMANIA: Andrei Ujica, 2010) Over the past six or seven years or so, Romania as been put on the international cinematic map in a very high-profile way, with filmmakers like Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu emerging with award-winning films liike the Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Frequently this "new wave" has been characterized as a signal of a new drive for self-expression, a delayed flowering after the decades of artistic repression under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaucescu, who was overthrown (and executed) by his people twenty years ago. So what was Romanian cinema like under Ceaucescu? Few outside that country know very much, but this three-hour compilation of footage shot by the cameramen officially assigned to cover the man's addresses, official state visits with foreign leaders, and even his vacations, is providing festival audiences with a hard look at one particular strain of filmmaking sanctioned under the regime. There is no commentary (besides a few select musical cues overlaid upon some of the images) to contextualize what we are seeing, yet a narrative of history emerges through curation and editing, even if the viewer has only the slimmest knowledge of Cold War-era Romania. The final hour of the piece is wall-to-wall packed with astonishing documentary footage, and built upon the previous two hours it makes a ferocious impact.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: ...But Film Is My Mistress and Images From the Playground at the Rafael Film Center in Marin County. These are a pair of documentaries on Ingmar Bergman, made since the Swedish director's death a few years ago. that are screening only on this day. Director Stig Björkman, a film critic who has also written books and/or made documentaries on Lars Von Trier and Woody Allen, will be in attendance for the screenings.

Up at the Castro

On Friday, the Castro Theatre began showing the latest Pixar film, Up, directed by Pete Docter (who previously made Monsters, Inc.) I saw it there, and here are eight reasons why I think it's the ideal Frisco Bay venue in which to watch:

1. The Wurlitzer organ which plays before the evening screenings. When I attended the organist performed well-known Disney themes by the likes of the Sherman Bros. and other songwriters. Though Disney and Pixar are now joined at the hip (or at least the knee) Up thankfully contains no tacked-on pop songs intended to add to an Oscar nomination haul. Yet its music score composed by Michael Giacchino is nonetheless essential. Hearing the organ beforehand may also evoke the silent movie era for modern audiences- quite appropriate given that Up, even more than bleepity-blooping Wall-E, has an early sequence that deserves to be compared to the most accomplished visual storytelling of the silent era.

2. The Castro is playing the film in 3-D, which, yes means paying extra for the new-fangled glasses, but it certainly adds to the experience, even if it's not essential to appreciating the film. If you don't care at all about stereoscopic gimmickry, or prefer viewing a 35mm print, the Presidio provides an opportunity for viewing without the 3-D surcharge. At any rate, the Castro ticket price makes it Frisco's second-cheapest option for viewing in 3-D, outside of certain matinee screenings at the Sundance Kabuki.

3. I really don't want to do more than hint about the content of Up, but I think it's not spoiling a key surprise to say that the film begins with a clever "Movietown" newsreel showing the exploits of an intrepid explorer, hero to our protagonist Carl, who sits in a darkened theatre looking up at the screen with his thick-rimmed glasses and aviator goggles on. It's an ingenious device to create cinema audience identification with the character; we are placed in his position from the outset, and as we're adjusting our 3-D glasses he's adjusting his goggles. As we're delighting to the images on screen, so is he. The sequence also works as a time bridge, placing us in the distant past- perhaps the late 1920's or early 1930's. Needless to say, the scene in Up is not set in a multiplex but in a single-screen theatre, and the technique is certain to work better the the latter than the former. Though the Century Theatre in Corte Madera, a fine venue in its own right, is also a single-screener on Frisco Bay in which to fully experience this dreamworld transference, it was built in the 1960s. Dating from 1922, the Castro is by far the best simulator of Carl's experience around.

4. The respectful audiences. Even when playing mainstream fare, the Castro draws a more informed, enthusiastic crowd than you're likely to find at the shopping malls. Part of this may be a function of attending opening weekend in a Frisco Bay venue, not so far from Pixar's Emeryville headquarters. Were all those people staying to sit and clap the credits just fans, or were they supporting their friends and co-workers who'd had a hand in Up's creation?

5. Perhaps the interest in seeing a new 3-D film in Frisco's grandest remaining cinema will get folks excited about seeing revival films in 3-D. The last time the Castro brought out the silver screen, the dual projectors, and prints of terrific fare such as Dial 'M' For Murder and Robot Monster was a few years ago. Might a successful Up run inspire another such series?

6. Not enough quality animation graces the Castro screen, period. Sure, we had the live-action/stop motion hybrid the Lost World (which Up clearly references) earlier this month thanks to the SF Film Society, and a somewhat recent $5 Tuesday night offering was a bill of out-of-copyright Fleischer Brothers films. But there are whole worlds of animation that would be wonderful to view on that screen. My own first visit inside the Castro's hallowed halls was during Spike & Mike's animation festival, but now both that event and the folks who tour The Animation Show use other Frisco Bay venues. Why not a Hayao Miyazaki fest in conjunction with his upcoming visit to Frisco Bay in July? Or a Tex Avery night at the Castro? Animation-heads need opportunities to be reminded how great a venue it is for our beloved medium. The next two and a half weeks provide many; here's hoping there's more to come.

7. The Castro is the venue where Frisco Bay Herzog fans were able to see the White Diamond, one of the best films the Bavarian auteur has made in the past couple of decades. I wrote a bit about that screening in a piece for Senses of Cinema back in 2005. Don't try to tell me that Up and the White Diamond are not brethren, if in a slightly oblique way. Credit Robert Davis for noticing it.

8. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Up seems particularly poignant in light of last week's news event which rocked California, and the Castro district perhaps especially hard. Though he is responding to an advance screening that took place last Tuesday, and goes further into plot detail than I personally feel comfortable sharing with readers who have not seen the film yet (he doesn't reveal anything from beyond the first twenty-five or so minutes, but as these were my favorite minutes of Up I'm still feeling conservative at this point), Arya Ponto has eloquently made a connection that I feel is worth highlighting. Somehow, it seems unexpectedly appropriate that the day after Up's Castro run ends on June 17th, the theatre is given over to the 33rd Frameline festival, which has been nicely previewed by Michael Hawley. Perhaps Frameline fans coming in from out of town might want to arrive a day early to catch Up in a unique venue.