The Lineup (1958)

Screen capture from Sony DVD

WHO: Eli Wallach had one of his most memorable roles in this as a hit man named Dancer.

WHAT: Often grouped with great San Francisco noir films like The Maltese Falcon, The Lady From Shanghai, and Out of the Past, The Lineup came more than decade after those films, was based on a popular television cop show, and integrates new styles of acting and dramaturgy based in cutting-edge New York Theatre that feel to me somehow out of step with the noir tradition of the 1940s and early 1950s and more in line with the human-psychological explorations of Elia Kazan (who gave Wallach his start in movies), or with the future work of its director Don Siegel (best known for Dirty Harry), than with noir stalwarts like Fritz Lang, Joseph G. Lewis, etc.

Noir or not, it's undoubtedly a great San Francisco film, packed with exciting and/or atmospheric scenes shot in real locations as they were fifty-six years ago. And not just the typical shots from the northeast corner of town usually captured by Hollywood crews when shooting here. The above image was, according to Brian Hollins of the amazing Reel SF website, taken at 2011 Bayshore Blvd., the current site of the Bayshore Cafe. The Cow Palace might not be as familiar a landmark to our-of-towners as Coit Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, but to locals it's unmistakable.

WHERE/WHEN: Noon today only at the Castro Theatre

WHY: You may recall that Wallach died this past June at the age of ninety-eight and a half. Today's screening of The Lineup is the first of an unhappily large number of memorial screenings coming to the Castro in the coming month or so. August 27th tributes director Paul Mazursky, who died a week after Wallch, with his films Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Tempest. August 29ths screening of Robert Altman's Popeye, the first big film role for Robin Williams, was booked well before his tragic suicide last week, but has now become a de facto tribute to his performance genius. Shortly after his death was announced, the Castro's twitter account informed me that the theatre will screen The Fisher King, presumably as a dedicated Williams tribute, on Sunday, September 14th.

If you can't wait that long to see a Robin Williams film with a crowd of the actor's fans (and perhaps even friends?), then tomorrow's screening of the 1996 comedy The Birdcage at the Lark Theatre in Marin might be what you're looking for. The Lark is also the first theatre around to schedule tribute screenings to the iconic Lauren Bacall, who also died last week; they'll show Howard Hawks's classic To Have And Have Not August 24th & 27th. The Lark is not advertising their screenings today and this coming Wednesday of Breakfast At Tiffany's as a memorial to Mickey Rooney, who died at age 95 this past April, perhaps because his role in that film is for so many the aspect of his career and/or of that film they'd most like to forget.  By contrast, the Stanford Theatre's current calendar has reserved two days a week from now until October 7th to show a 35mm print of a film from Rooney's late-1930s/early-1940s heyday every Monday and Tuesday. This week it's showing The Human Comedy directed by Clarence Brown in 1943.

HOW: On 35mm, as part of a Wallach tribute double-bill with The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (the latter on DCP)

Tokyo Family (2013)

WHO: Yoji Yamada directed and co-wrote the screenplay for this film, based on the classic Tokyo Story directed by Yasujiro Ozu and written by Ozu and Koga Noda.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, but as a big Ozu admirer I'm terribly curious about a remake helmed by Yamada, the beginnings of whose career at the Shochiku Studio overlapped with the final years of the great master's. Mark Schilling's review is mixed but that doesn't deter me.

WHERE/WHEN: 1:30 PM this afternoon only at the Lark Theater in Larkspur, presented by the Mill Valley Film Festival.

WHY: Aside from last Thursday and Friday's revival screenings of Raoul Peck's Lumumba, Tokyo Family is the only MVFF title this year to be screening in 35mm. I was unaware that the Lark had even retained the ability to project film when they installed their 4K DCP technology- I hear that most theatres can get better financial deals on the latest digital projection equipment if they remove their 35mm projectors from the booth. I'm hoping to visit the venue for the first time today, and to see a print that is very unlikely to wind its way back to Frisco Bay.

HOW: 35mm.

The Missing Picture (2013)

WHO: Cambodia's great documentarian Rithy Panh co-wrote, co-edited and directed this,

WHAT: As a fan of Panh's films since seeing Land of the Wandering Souls back in 2001, I jumped on the chance to see his newest, and perhaps already most acclaimed film, a soulfully autobiographical account of his days as a youth experiencing the horrors of Pol Pot's regime told using poetic narration, hand-carved figurines, and the propaganda footage created by the Khmer Rouge. The latter became the only motion picture record of that terrible time in the nation's history, as a relatively thriving film industry was completely obliterated, its practitioners often killed or at least driven to disguise their affiliation with what was seen as a damningly modern and intellectual pursuit.

There's a "hold review" on The Missing Picture until its local commercial release (date TBA, but hopefully before the end of the year), so I'll just say I was not disappointed in The Missing Picture as a Rithy Panh fan, and link to Jordan Cronk's excellent review, which fruitfully contrasts the film against others by the director, as well as The Act of Killing.

WHERE?WHEN: Screens today at 4:45 at the Lark Theatre and 5:30 tomorrow at the Rafael Film Center, presented by the Mill Valley Film Festival.

WHY: MVFF only has a couple more days left in it, but the majority of the films I'm most interested in seeing, whether at the festival or upon general release, are packed into these final days. Unfortunately a large number of showings are at Rush status which means braving lines and hoping for luck, but not all are. This afternoon's screening of The Missing Picture, tomorrow's 5@5 shorts showcase featuring Black Angel and three other favorites, and the last screening of the only 35mm print of a new film in the entire festival, Yoji Yamada's Tokyo Family, are among those that still appear to have available tickets. Of course, waiting in a rush line may require less patience than waiting to see a film like top Cannes prize-winner Blue is the Warmest Color when it arrives on local screens. (That one is currently set to come to the Embarcadero November 1st, presuming that theatre's remodeling and reopening goes according to schedule.)

HOW: The Missing Picture screens digitally.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

WHO: Ennio Morricone wrote the score for this film.

WHAT: Other than the fact that Morricone's musical themes for this are among the more striking and memorable, at least from among those he composed for films I have yet to see, I don't know much about this Elio Petri-directed picture beyond basics. It won the Grand Prix (essentially second-prize to Robert Altman's M.A.S.H.) award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival and later beat out Buñuel's Tristana and other films for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1971 Oscar ceremony. Thus proving that M.A.S.H. is better than Tristana, in case you were wondering.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:00 tonight only at the Lark Theater in Larkspur, CA.

WHY: The Lark is an art deco single-screen movie house in Marin County that I've never been inside. I've kept an eye on its programming for several years now, however, and though it does have a tradition of hosting special screenings, most of them tend to be of content frequently as available at other Frisco Bay venues as well, and I've never felt compelled to justify a visit. 

Seeing an uncommonly-shown Oscar-winning classic on the theatre's schedule this week, however, made my eyes perk up. That it's part of a four-film presentation of screenings of "library titles" (non-new-releases) in 4K digital presentation is a sign of the times; I'm not sure the Lark has 35mm capability any longer. If this were a film screening I'd be very interested in attending, but I just skipped a chance to see this film projected digitally at the Castro a couple months ago.

Then again, the Castro's projector is only a 2K model and the Lark's is now 4K, twice as powerful. Might this be a more special occasion because of that? I've yet to be really wowed by the digital image of a classic film shown digitally, but perhaps that's because the only time I've watched one in 4K it was something I'd seen multiple times in 70mm, not 35mm (Lawrence of Arabia).

These are the thoughts cinephiles are beginning to ponder as we enter the industry's final push to completely transform the exhibition landscape from a film-based to a digital one. More and more theatres are converting to digital, although there are still holdouts depending on the studios' continued production of 35mm prints, and there seems to be confusion about what's going to happen to them. For an interesting take on the current state of this transition, I recommend a recent Variety article that looks at the situation from multiple angles, with perspectives from film purists and digital proponents alike.

I was particularly interested in the fact that everyone quoted in the article seemed to agree about the need for "library titles" to be able to be screened in cinemas. And it isn't Martin Scorsese or famous film-on-film advocate Christopher Nolan, but James Cameron's producing partner Jon Landau who argues for the need to "preserve the infrastructure needed to continue to show library titles as they were created by the filmmakers of the past"- meaning on film. This is not the way the industry is trending, with the Virtual Print Fee system providing incentives for the decommissioning of film projectors as digital ones take their place (even in booths with room for both), and fewer and fewer new prints of older films being struck by most if not all of the studios.

One aspect of the transition not mentioned in the article is particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day. Conventional wisdom holds that the old system of chemically producing thousands of 35mm prints and sending them in heavy cans around the country via petroleum-dependent vehicles, and finally destroying most of them to prevent their getting into the hands of pirates, collectors, etc., was incredibly wasteful, and that distribution via more lightweight DCP drives is far more environmentally friendly. It sounds logical but I'd like to see some data, or even just some projections, before I take this at face value. I've written before about the ecological effects of widespread home video vis-a-vis cinema screenings, which to me seems like a no-brainer to me: more individual screens means more waste. But digital projection in cinemas does appear to have some worthwhile environmental efficiency compared to 35mm. Those film cans are heavy, and wide releases in the multiplex age surely involved a lot of wasted resources.

On the other hand, 35mm projectors lasted a long time before having to be replaced. Digital projectors (and DCPs use resources as well, and even if the latter are lighter than multiple reels, that doesn't mean they were produced in a more ecologically-friendly way. What's more, we don't know how long it will take for 4K projectors to seem antiquated and in need of another environmentally-costly mass replacement with 8k projectors, and how quickly pressure will mount for that cycle to be repeated again and again. It feels to me that in the short term, the widespread switch from film to digital may well be taking a greater toll on the Earth's resources than status quo would have. In the long term, the ecological cost might eventually become lower, but if an arms race in resolution and screen size continues to be waged between cinema exhibition and home video, it could just as easily become much much greater.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and would especially love to collect links to studies or articles or even just quotes by credible people about the ecological costs and benefits of the massive, worldwide shift from film to video exhibition.

HOW: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion screens digitally, in a 4K restoration that had its US premiere in New York last fall, and its local premiere, albeit through a 2K rather than 4K projector,