Brian Darr: IOHTE

Screen capture from Columbia DVD

Thanks for reading the 2015 edition of I Only Have Two Eyes, my annual survey of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite cinematic revivals seen in local cinematheques, arthouses, museum screening rooms, movie palaces and other public spaces between January 1 and December 31, 2015. The hub page for this year's results will point you to the selections and, in many cases, eloquent write-ups, by sixteen esteemed allies in appreciation of the screen, the programmers, and of course the films that could be seen in Frisco Bay venues last year. Though not all by one person, as the name of the survey should suggest.

I compile a survey that eschews new releases in favor of focusing on our cinematic heritage not because I don't have interest in new films (you can see some of my own favorites listed here), but because I feel there are plenty of others covering that ground. And, perhaps as importantly, because I feel that the usual film rankings often obscure the circumstances under which they're viewed. So many variables play into how a viewer receives a film: method of delivery, reaction (or lack thereof) of fellow viewers, preconceptions before viewing, mood of viewer, among others competing with "quality of the film" in shaping a judgment. I know there are fastidious critics who take care to rewatch a film multiple times, often in multiple ways, before committing it to a top ten list, but though I admire the approach, it feels too much like a vain attempt to cram opinions into boxes made for facts for me to adopt it myself. Rather I prefer to present a year-in-review that emphasizes the unique nature of every viewing of a film. In-cinema screenings of older films are easier for most of us to think of as unique, I feel (in part because they very often are!)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

I suspect the timing and placement of my first-ever viewing of The Honeymoon Killers couldn't have been better for appreciation of this exceedingly disturbing 1969 portrait of the murderous Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck. It was the final film shown at the January 2015 edition of Eddie Muller's Noir City film festival, pushing an audience who'd just taken in a week full of mysteries, thrillers and melodramas made in the classical Hollywood style (square frame, presentational acting style, continuity cutting, the works) out into the world on a completely different note. It's the only film written and directed by opera composer Leonard Kastle, with a few scenes filmed by a very young Martin Scorsese until the producers determined his methods ate up too much of the film's quick schedule and extremely low budget. Kastle created a raw and unflinching window into a notoriously lethal marriage, filmed mostly in long takes, in cars and in non-descript dwellings, giving the feeling of a nightmarish home movie exploding in widescreen on the the Castro screen. I felt shell-shocked after the screening and felt like I wouldn't want to watch another noir again for at least another year (although this wore off eventually, certainly in time for me to see the majority of screenings in the Castro's summer noir series hosted by Elliot Lavine.)

2015 was the last year, or should I say half-year, of the Pacific Film Archive's existence at its 16-year "temporary" location at 2575 Bancroft, across from a lovely Julia Morgan- & Bernard Maybeck-designed gymnasium. I witnessed so many outstanding screenings inside this corrugated shed, and though the new location holds great promise, I'm sure I'll miss the cozy purple-cushioned seats and the walks from the BART station through the forested campus quite a bit, if not as much as I'll miss some of the staff that was not invited to make the hyperspace jump to the new screening space when it opened this past week. Luckily I took great advantage of the old space during its final few months, sampling great retrospectives for filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Gregory Markopoulos, John Stahl, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Victor Erice. But I think my favorite PFA screening of 2015 was a mystical film completely unknown to me before viewing it in February: The Day is Longer Than the Night, with the director Lana Gogoberidze on hand to discuss her poetic, pictoral approach to national narrative (my tweet at the time), in a nation that didn't exist independent of the Soviet Union at the time she made it, and the fallout from its success at a crucial moment in Soviet film history. I wish I'd been able to take in a lot more of the PFA's monumental survey of Georgian film during late 2014 and early 2015, but I'm sure glad I at least caught this precious work.

Screen capture from Lionsgate DVD

There's no getting around it: now that I no longer live three blocks from the Roxie Theatre (since moving to Grant Avenue almost two years ago) I don't find myself there nearly as often as I used to. It may just be an optical illusion that has me thinking there's not quite as many can't-miss screenings happening there since I moved away- at least for a film-on-film proponent (though not purist). I did get to see perfectly-projected 35mm prints of Brandy In the Wilderness, Takeshi Miike's Audition, and a set of Quay Brothers shorts there in 2015, and am glad that Polyester screens in 35mm AND Odorama tonight (though I'll be helping present The Fall of The I-Hotel at the nearby Artists' Television Access instead). But my favorite recent-ish screening there has definitely been last March's showing of Kathryn Bigelow's solo directorial debut Near Dark, a post-punk vampire variant set in rural American states where, (as I tweeted after the screening) "blood flows as cheaply as beer & gasoline". I think it's my new favorite Bigelow film. The screening was presented by the Film On Film Foundation, which paired the film with the schlocky Stephanie Rothman grindhouser Terminal Island, but my mind really connects it with a more closely-kindred film seen at the Castro a month and a half before: Abel Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers remake.

More than fourteen years ago, after I saw my first Budd Boetticher Westerns midway through a Pacific Film Archive series, I started to visually devour as many as I could get my eyes on, whether via VHS tapes or Turner Classc Movies airings (at my neighbor's house, since I've never subscribed to that channel myself). But for some reason I'd always held that series opener The Tall T (pictured at the top of this post) at arm's length, in the hopes of another theatrical opportunity arising. Meanwhile, the movie was released on DVD, and then went out of print, and then back in again (this time only as an on-demand DVD-R), with no such screenings appearing in this cowboy-hat-averse region until this past April when the intrepid Yerba Buena Center for the Arts finally booked it as part of a very fine Western series (couched as "Noir Westerns" to help lure in horse opera skeptics). It proved itself to be the most formally and narratively "perfect" of Boetticher's Ranown films made with unassuming star Randolph Scott. A case in which my patience really paid off in a tremendous first-time viewing.

Screen capture from Parlour DVD

"If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You might as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." The greatest film I saw at the San Francisco International Film Festival this past Spring was a 45-year-old revival of the sole feature film directed by its star, who also wrote the screenplay and won an award at the Venice Film Festival back in 1970. There's not much new I can say about Barbara Loden's Wanda in a world where Bérénice Reynaud's essential Senses of Cinema article on the film exists, but I will add that Rachel Kushner's introduction to the Castro Theatre congregation not only quoted a passage from her novel The Flamethrowers that discussed the film, and gave shout-outs to Frisco's fallen repertory houses (the York, the Strand, the Red Vic), but debunked one notion in Reynaud's article: that Wanda never screened in the United States beyond an initial New York run. The SFIFF catalog refers to at least 1970 screening in San Francisco, and Kushner spoke eloquently of how her mother saw the film in an Oregon arthouse and always maintained it was the best film ever made. Watching with those words ringing in my ears, it was hard to disagree, at least for the 102 minutes it played, which is the most I can ever ask of a film anyway.

This past May's San Francisco Silent Film Festival was filled with gems, and I didn't even have time to see all of them, I'm sure. Most of my festival favorites (Ben-Hur, the Swallow and the Titmouse, the Bert Williams presentation) have been mentioned by other IOHTE contributors this year, but since nobody else mentioned another silent film event that happened earlier that month and opened my eyes equally wide to the place of pre-talkie cinema history in modern life, I'm going to use this slot to give it some attention. It's an experimental silent film called The Big Stick/An Old Reel by Massachusetts filmmaker Saul Levine, who made a rare Frisco Bay public appearance courtesy of an SF Cinematheque co-presentation at Oakland's more underground Black Hole Cinematheque, an admission-always-free screening space that will celebrate its fifth year of operation later in 2016. The Big Stick/An Old Reel is quite simply one of the most effective "found footage" films I've ever witnessed, and a 10-minute manifesto of how "old" films don't survive simply to be seen, but to be applied to our lives. Between 1967 and 1973 (it took him six years to perfect), Levine expressed this by splicing together footage of police trying to quell a mass protest, shot with his regular-8mm camera off a television broadcast, with fragments from 8mm reduction prints of pertinent Charlie Chaplin comedies. Namely 1914's Getting Acquainted, in which the Little proto-Tramp evades Edgar Kennedy's Keystone Cop as he interacts with Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen Cecile Arnold and Harry McCoy (strangely, much of the literature identifies this film as In The Park, which Chaplin filmed in San Francisco with an entirely different cast for Essanay in 1915), and 1917's Easy Street, in which Chaplin himself plays the cop- and a pretty outrageously abusive one. As if juxtaposing these three sources together didn't create an intense enough layering, Levine creates even more with additional interventions such as blackening parts of the image and varying the rhythm of the cuts. Indeed the very nature of 8mm splices, which leave a highly noticeable scarring on the frame (perhaps exacerbated when blown up to 16mm, as I believe the print I saw was?) creates more texture in an already-dense film. And context adds yet another level of layering. Watching cycles of violence so embedded into a film print in 2015 Oakland of all times and places felt like a particularly apropos summoning.

Screen capture from Universal Vault DVD

Last year the Stanford Theatre provided opportunities to watch all of the feature-length talking pictures Ernst Lubitsch directed up through 1939, and I took advantage of the opportunity to see the two from this period that had eluded me up to now: The Man I Killed, his sole pure drama during this period, and which is also known as Broken Lullaby, and the film I now think might be the summation of his powers, the 1937 Marlene Dietrich/Herbert Marshall/Melvyn Douglas love triangle Angel (which could also bear the title Broken Lullaby, as I noted in a post-viewing tweet). It was released after the longest period of apparent inactivity in Lubitsch's career as a director, which I can't help but notice coincides with the period of strict enforcement of the Hays Code (the precise date was July 1, 1934, two weeks before the end of principle photography on Lubitsch's prior directorial effort The Merry Widow). It's as if he needed a period of time to regroup and rethink how to extend his "Touch" into a more censorious Hollywood environment. He found some marvelous solutions, creating a masterpiece that walks a fine line between marital drama and aching comedy that somehow befits the strange combination of satisfaction and melancholy I feel at the thought that I'll never again see a 1930s Lubitsch feature for the first time. At least there are still a couple from the 1940s and a slew from the 1910s and 1920s I can look forward to making the acquaintance of...

The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco presented its third annual tribute to a filmmaker from "the beautiful country"; after Pasolini in 2013 and Bertolucci in 2014 this year's maestro was Vittorio De Sica, still world famous of course for Bicycle Thieves, but whose lesser-known works like Shoeshine and Miracle in Milan are more beloved to me personally. The second Castro screening that September day was another for me to add to that list: Gold of Naples, a wise and witty portmanteau film made on the streets of De Sica's hometown, featuring six (approximately-) equally-wonderful Giuseppe Marotta short story adaptations. Sofia Loren plays a philandering wife with a misplaced wedding ring. Silvia Mangano a prostitute who takes revenge on a self-loathing nobleman. De Sica himself plays an inveterate gambler (a role that his friends considered his most autobiographical) and Totò (another Neapolitan) a put-upon clown. Other segments portray a neighborhood problem-solver and a haunting funeral procession for a dead child. Each vignette could stand on its own as a top-notch short film; together they conspire to create a filmic work worthy of standing with Rossellini's Paisan and Pasolini's Trilogy of Life films as proof that Italians have understood the power of portmanteau better than anyone.

Screen capture from Mileston/Oscilloscope DVD

I knew I'd be filling a major gap in my understanding of documentary history when I went to a 35mm showing of Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity at the Rafael Film Center. I didn't realize, however, just how much I'd learn from, be moved by, and even, dare I say, entertained by, this 1969 epic (over four hours, not including intermission) of cultural history and its intersection with "harder" political history. Ophuls, in San Rafael to receive a Mill Valley Film Festival tribute and to introduce a newer film as well as this one, sat and watched this one along with the audience, as if he hadn't already viewed it countless times before. Here he tears apart the myths associated with resistance in Nazi-occupied France, not as a radical but as a sly provocateur, using techniques that have since becomes hallmarks of successful documentary: the incorporation of disturbing "ephemeral" film footage (years before The Atomic Cafe solidified an American vogue for such), and of "enough rope to hang themselves" interviews like that of a merchant asked to explain why he took out an a newspaper ad proclaiming himself "100% French". Few of the interviews were as self-incriminating as this one, but they all wove together a damning self-portrait of a nation still unreconciled with its past. I'll never watch a Maurice Chevalier film in quite the same way again.

Finally, another French film that might never have been made without the unwitting participation of Nazi Germany: Fritz Lang's only film completed during his brief stay in Paris after fleeing Hitler's Germany (in style), albeit less abruptly than he'd maintain in later interviews. The film was Liliom, a 1934 adaptation of the same Ferenc Molnar play that Frank Borzage had made with Charles Farrell in 1930. The Stanford Theatre screened both back-to-back as part of a rapturous 100-year anniversary  tribute to the Fox Film Corporation, providing opportunities for me to rewatch rarely-revived personal favorites like the Borzage Liliom and Henry King's State Fair, and to see great works like John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend for the first time. But none I'm as glad I made sure to trek to Palo Alto for as Lang's Liliom, which emphasizes the fatalistic elements of Molnar's play while presenting a "poetic realist" setting for its events to unfold in. Charles Boyer is particularly wonderful here as the title character, effectively differentiating his performance between different phases of life in a way that Farrell didn't even attempt. And the scene in which he watches his life unfold via a film projection is one of Lang's most inspired ever. Apart from a few late-career Satyajit Ray films co-produced by Soprofilms or Canal+, this is the first French film (made under the Erich Pommer-led Fox Europa) that I can recall the Stanford screening in the decade-and-a-half I've been paying attention to the venue's programming. I'd certainly be happy to see more.

The Assassin (2015)

Screen capture from trailer.

WHO: The legendary Hou Hsiao-Hsien directed and co-produced this film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Xie Hai Meng, Zhong Acheng and his longtime collaborator Chu Tien-Wen.

WHAT: Although I was able to view Hou's first feature since 2007's Flight of the Red Balloon at a Mill Valley Film Festival-sponsored press screening, I'm not supposed to provide more than a brief "capsule" review until its commercial run a week and a half from now. Just as well, as I'd need at least one more viewing to feel comfortable talking about it in any depth. For now I'll just call it a visually sumptuous, anti-kung fu film that verges closer to "avant-garde" than anything else Hou has done. Ninety-nine percent of the film is presented in a square-ish Academy aspect ratio, which along with its black-and-white opening makes The Assassin seem more like a 1950s Akira Kurosawa film than like the wuxia pian made by King Hu and others (always in widescreen) in the 1960s and beyond. Though honestly Mizoguchi, especially a late color film like Princess Yang Kwei Fei, feels like a more relevant referent (and one I'm not surprised to see Danny Kasman had perceived long before I did). Hou has worked with square ratios before, but (I'm pretty certain) only in his framings-within-framings in widescreen films like City of Sadness and Good Men, Good Women. It's as if he's reclaiming 4:3 Academy as a more truly "cinematic" shape in this era of wide televisions and phones.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at the Embarcadero Cinema at 6:30 and 9:15, and 8:30 on October 17th at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. All these showings are "at RUSH", meaning advance tickets are sold out and would-be buyers must form a line in hopes of obtaining seats as they're made available. The Assassin opens a regular theatrical run at the Metreon, the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and Camera 3 in San Jose starting October 23rd.

WHY: Although tonight's screenings will take some persistence to get into for those who haven't already secured tickets, it's fair to say they'll be worth it, as Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself is expected to attend at least the first one, a rare occurrence here in San Francisco indeed. An auteur of his stature visiting this city is cause for real celebration, and the SF Film Society has complied by making Hou a main focus of its entire Taiwan Film Days mini-festival tonight and tomorrow. In addition to the two showings of The Assassin there's a revival showing of what many consider Hou's first great film, The Boys From Fengkuei, and although Hou is not (as far as I understand) expected to attend this showing, he does make a cameo appearance in a very early-eighties perm. There are still advance tickets available for this screening as well as for the Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema, a recent documentary about the 1980s and 1990s heyday of Taiwan's cinematic production history, focusing attention on famous names like Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou (whose Flowers of Shanghai obviously inspired the doc's title) but also on lesser-knowns like Wang Tung, who employed a pre-Rebels of the Neon God Tsai as a screenwriter on multiple films. Director Chinlin Hsieh will be on hand for tomorrow night's showing.

Although the Mill Valley Film Festival The Assassin screening on the 17th is also at "Rush" (as was its Frisco Bay public premiere via the festival this past Thursday), there is still a lot of this festival to go that has plenty of tickets available. There are still seats for tonight's second screening of the Hungarian prize-winner Son of Saul, for instance. I'll be attending this as consolation for missing Hou in person, thankful that the film's distributor insisted it be screened in 35mm. It's the only new film in the festival (and so far, to my knowledge, any 2015 Frisco Bay feature-oriented film festival) to screen in this format, but MVFF has also booked a couple of retrospective titles showing on actual film reels: The Sorrow and the Pity October 16th with director Marcel Ophuls on hand, and on October 18th Autumn Sonata, Inmgar Bergman's final made-for-the-cinema film and his only collaboration with Ingrid Bergman. A documentary about her, Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words also screens at the Rafael Film Center tonight, launching an eight-title series celebrating her centennial. I'm told than the program page for this series contains a typo and that the documentary will not screen in 35mm but that Autumn Sonata and Notorious definitely will (the latter is also newly booked to play the Paramount in Oakland in that format) . As will Confidential Report and F For Fake in the Rafael's upcoming Orson Welles centennial conclusion, and Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home on December 3rd. In fact, between the Mill Valley Film Festival (which is far more thoroughly explored at The Evening Class by Michael Hawley and by Michael Guillén) and the upcoming Rafael winter calendar, I feel safe to say the California Film Institute holds a commanding lead among local cinephile institutions stepping up their game in the absence of the Pacific Film Archive this Fall, at least from my perspective. No, the Stanford's current Rogers & Hammerstein festival is not going to cut it for me, and though the Castro and Roxie both have some interesting programs on their slates (I'm most excited by Ken Russell's The Devils October 20th, the Brothers Quay shorts in December and Audition Halloween week), neither venue is doing quite enough to prevent me from wishing it were as easy to get to San Rafael in public transportation as it was to get to Berkeley.

HOW: The Assassin screens as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP).

I Only Have Two Eyes: 2014 Edition

Screen capture from Warner DVD of Macao

We're already well into the 2015 film-going year, but it's not too late to take time to reflect on the cinematic character of 2014 before it recedes into memory too far. One major release bucked trends by bringing 35mm and 70mm projectors back to life in a few cinema spaces. Otherwise, 35mm screenings of new films all but disappeared from the Frisco Bay screening landscape, with only the 4-Star in San Francisco and the Bluelight Cinemas in Cupertino by year's-end still regularly playing whatever new commercially-available films they're able to track down prints for from the studios still striking them. Remaining film projectors at a place like the Opera Plaza were so under-utilized in the past twelve months that learning that the venue just the other day removed them from all but one of its tiny screening rooms (installing DCP-capable equipment into its two comparatively "larger" houses) felt completely unsurprising and barely disappointing at all to me. It's safe to say that film festivals are no longer a home for 35mm either; as far as I'm aware the only new films that screened in that format at any local fests in 2014 were the throwback short Broncho Billy and the Bandit's Secret at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival in June, and Yoji Yamada's The Little House at Mill Valley in October.

Most of the major local festivals have only kept the embers of sprocketed film warm in 2014 either by showing 16mm works by "experimental" artists still employing celluloid, or by showing a few revival titles in 35mm. Indeed, revivals and repertory houses are now where almost all of the action is at for those who like to view light passing through 35mm strips onto screens. Frisco Bay still has venues where this is a major component of programming, as well as a growing contingent of cinema spaces finding creative ways to attract audiences out of their home-viewing patterns (which are shifting themselves) by embracing digital-age developments. I'm eager to see what 2015 will bring to the cinephiliac landscape in San Francisco and its surroundings. Changes are afoot; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley will be closing midyear to prepare for a move to a new, more transit-connected space; meanwhile the biggest DCP advocate among its programming team has just retired. The Alamo Drafthouse is expected to open its first branch in the region in 2015 as well, at a site within walking distance of several cherished repertory haunts. As highlighted in the new Film-Friendly Links section of the Film On Film Foundation website, Alamo CEO Tim League appears committed to involving 35mm in his company's continued expansion. I'm excited to see how that shakes out.

My annual "I Only Have Two Eyes" survey of local cinephiles' favorite screenings of revival and repertory films may have more mentions of digital screenings than ever for 2014, but as you'll see as I unveil the various contributions over the next week or so, there is plenty of diversity of format, venue, and of course the films themselves, in their selections. I'm so pleased to have gotten a strong turnout for this year's poll, including many participants from the past seven years when I've conducted it, as well as new "faces". Enjoy perusing their lists and comments as more are added!

January 26: Veronika Ferdman, who writes for Slant Magazine, In Review Online and elsewhere.
January 26: Lucy Laird, Operations Director for the SF Silent Film Festival.
January 27: Michael Hawley, who blogs at his own site film-415.
January 27: Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, educator at the Academy of Art & MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS
January 28: Margarita Landazuri, who writes for Turner Classic Movies & elsewhere.
January 28: Ben Armington, Box Cubed Box Office guy for many Bay Area Film Festivals.
January 29: Terri Saul, a visual artist who posts capsule reviews on Letterboxd.
January 29: Lincoln Spector, the proprietor of Bayflicks.
January 30: Michael Guillén, schoolmaster of The Evening Class and contributor to other publications.
January 30: David Robson, editorial director of Jaman and caretaker of The House of Sparrows.
January 31: Jonathan Kiefer, critic for SF Weekly and the Village Voice.
January 31: Adrianne Finelli, artist, educator, and co-curator of A.T.A.'s GAZE film series.
February 1: Haroon Adalat, a designer, illustrator and video editor.
February 1: Maureen Russell, cinephile and Noir City film festival volunteer.
February 2: Ryland Walker Knight, a writer and filmmaker with a new short at SF IndieFest.
February 2: Carl Martin, film projectionist and keeper of the FOFF Bay Area Film Calendar.
February 3: Claire Bain, an artist, filmmaker and writer.
February 4: Brian Darr, a.k.a. yours truly.

IOHTE: Lincoln Spector

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Lincoln Spector is the proprietor of the Bayflicks website, where the original version of this abridged list was first posted.

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

9: Paths of Glory & The Killing 
Pacific Film Archive
Eyes Wide: The Films of StanleyKubrick
DCP  
To my mind, Paths of Glory stands out as Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. This World War I tale of ruthless generals and the common foot soldiers shows the budding auteur at his best. The film he made just before it, The Killing, is a wonderful little noir; a classic heist thriller with a complex plan that goes horribly (and entertainingly) wrong.  The DCPs, supplied by Park Circus, looked great. Whoever supervised the digital mastering respected the film look and the grain structure. They kept the original mono soundtracks, without trying to convert them to 5.1

8: Too Late For Tears & The Hitch-Hiker
Castro
Noir City
35mm
Lizabeth Scott plays that paragon of mid-century American virtue, the housewife, in Too Late for Tears, but she plays her as a femme fatal-. Willing to do anything to hold onto an illegal fortune, she proves herself smarter and meaner than everyone else as she sinks into depravity and murder. The Hitch-Hiker is a quick, efficient thriller that’s simple, suspenseful, and based on a true story. Two men on a fishing vacation pick up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be a psychotic killer wanted by the police.  Both films were shown in recently restored 35mm prints. Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation explained the problems in restoring Too Late for Tears, which admittedly suffered from uneven image quality. Shy of an expensive digital restoration, it’s not likely to look any better. 

Screen capture from Universal DVD

7: Duck Soup
Pacific Film Archive  
Funny Ha-Ha: American Comedy, 1930–1959
35mm
The Marx Brothers at their purest and most perfect. What makes it so pure and perfect? First, it’s comedy stripped to the bone; there’s scarcely a minute without at least one good laugh. Second, the Brothers were always at their best when up against the stuffy, respectable protectors of the status quo, and the richest strain of that gold can be found in the halls of government. As the absolute ruler of Freedonia, Groucho Marx encourages graft, refuses to take anything seriously, and starts a war on a whim.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Duck Soup, but the day before this screening, it had been at least 30 years since I’d seen it theatrically. Watching this great comedy in a theater, with an enthusiastic audience, made it come back to life again. Over the years, I’d forgotten that even the name Rufus T. Firefly gets a laugh. 

6: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 
Lark
Mill Valley FilmFestival
4K DCP  
Here’s an epic, sardonic, semi-comic western quest motivated purely by greed. Three violent and deadly criminals set out to recover $200,000 in stolen gold. None of them knows exactly where the loot is hidden, but individually each has a piece of the puzzle. They constantly change allegiances, sometimes collaborating with and then double-crossing each other. Meanwhile, the Civil War rages all around them.  MGM recently gave this classic a new, 4K restoration, which included the original mono soundtrack. it was a great presentation, showing the deep colors and heavy grain expected in a Techniscope production of the 1960s. Unless there’s an archival dye-transfer print from the original release somewhere, this is as good as the picture can get. A great audience as well, and my first visit to the Lark. 

Screen capture from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film

5: The Best Years of Our Lives 
Castro
DCP
There’s no better movie for Veteran’s Day. A huge commercial hit and the Best Picture Oscar winner for 1946, it’s now all but forgotten. That’s too bad, because Best Years is not only an excellent film, it also deals with an issue that’s unfortunately still with us–integrating war veterans back into civilian life.  This was my first chance seeing Best Years theatrically, and it was worth it. Before the film started, the Castro entertained us with a slideshow of coming attractions and music appropriate to the immediate postwar period. Then came the organ concert, followed by The Best Years of Our Lives. The digital transfer was mostly excellent, although a few scenes had clearly come from low-quality sources. 

4: Another Fine Mess: Silent Laurel and Hardy Shorts
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival‘s Silent Autumn
35mm, with live music   
Laurel and Hardy’s onscreen personas were probably the dumbest reoccurring characters in the history of cinema. Stan appears incapable of having a thought or remembering an instruction. But Stan at least knows he’s dumb; Oli considers himself smart. Their comedy is extremely violent, but the slow, methodical, and absurd nature of that violence makes it enduring. The festival screened three of their two-reel silents–Should Married Men Go Home?, Two Tars, and Big Business. All three were extremely vengeful and destructive–and extremely funny.  Donald Sosin accompanied these shorts on a grand piano. All three films opened with the MGM lion, and Sosin managed to recreate the roar musically. His lively music also  helped keep the laughs coming. The Festival screened archival prints from the Library of Congress and the UCLA Film Archive. Aside from some bad titles in Should Married Men Go Home?, they looked excellent. 

Screen capture from 20th Centtury Fox DVD

3: Die Hard
Castro
DCP
What makes a great action movie? A strong plot, a likeable and sympathetic hero, a fun but scary villain, great fights, and the willingness to spend nearly half an hour on character development before the first violent act. NYC policeman John McClane (Bruce Willis) arrives in LA hoping to reconcile with his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia). She’s a rising executive; he’s a working-class cop. Then a dozen well-armed bad guys take over the building, kill a few people, then hold everyone hostage.  Die Hard was originally released in 70mm, but up until a couple of weeks ago, I had only seen it on Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray. But between the big screen, the powerful sound system, the excellent DCP transfer, and the enthusiastic audience, it was a whole new experience. I used to give Die Hard an A. Now I give it an A+. 

2: The Big Lebowski
Pacific Film Archive  
Rude Awakening: American Comedy, 1990–2010
DCP
As with Die Hard, I had never seen the Coen Brothers’ cult hit theatrically before 2014. But unlike Die Hard, I had never really appreciated it before. This comedy really needed the theatrical experience to come alive. Imagine a Raymond Chandler story where Philip Marlowe has been replaced with a happily unemployed, perpetually stoned, thoroughly inept slacker who calls himself "the Dude" (Jeff Bridges). Behind the laughs, you can find a thin, barely grasped sense of Zen–as if you could throw yourself to the universe and everything will come out okay…unless it doesn’t.  The well-packed audience made the film special, allowing me to discover that a film I thought was pretty good was actually pretty great. But the presentation had a very big flaw: an over-processed DCP. It looked like video, with film grain removed and everything smoothed over. Considering the quality of this transfer, I would rather have seen this movie in 35mm. 

Screen capture from Warner DVD.

1: The Gold Rush
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival‘s The Little Tramp at 100
DCP, with live music
In this epic comic adventure, Chaplin’s tramp travels through the frozen Yukon of the Alaskan gold rush, gets marooned in a cabin with two much larger men, nearly starves to death, nearly gets eaten, and falls in love with a dancehall girl who scarcely knows he’s alive. This seemingly serious story contains some of Chaplin’s funniest set pieces, including the Thanksgiving dinner of boiled shoe, the dance of the rolls, and my favorite–the fight over a rifle that always points at Chaplin. It’s not my favorite Chaplin feature–that would be City Lights, but it’s a close second.  This was unquestionably the best screening of The Gold Rush I’ve ever experienced. The digital image quality was uneven, but most of it looked very good, and none of it looked dreadful. Timothy Brock conducted the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra in his adaptation of Chaplin’s score, adding some wonderful musically-created effects. And the large, enthusiastic audience made it even better.

Our Man In Havana (1959)

Screen capture from Sony DVD

WHO: Alec Guinness, the versatile English actor who would have turned 100 earlier this year if he were still alive today, stars in this film directed by Carol Reed.

WHAT: I haven't seen this particular Guinness film, but Cheryl Eddy, in a recent article on Guinness, describes it thus:

Guinness is brilliant as an expat whose desire to provide a better life for his materialistic teenage daughter (Jo Morrow) leads him to set aside the vacuum-cleaner biz and accept a gig as a British secret agent. Thing is, he'd rather just sip daiquiris than engage in espionage, so he fakes his way, with luck and imagination, into being "the best agent in the Western hemisphere."

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Rafael Film Center at 4:30 & 7:30.

WHY: Our Man in Havana screens as part of a seven-title centennial Guinness tribute that's been running each Sunday since August, and which winds down the next two weekends with new DCPs of his Ealing comedies The Man With The White Suit and The Ladykillers. Of course the irony of Guinness's legacy is that he's by far best remembered for a role he frequently voiced his disdain for, that of Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas's original Star Wars and its two immediate sequels. Though these films have been left out of this mini-series, fans of Guinness as Kenobi will be able to see him on an even bigger Marin County screen on Monday, October 6th, when The Empire Strikes Back (or the 1997 revision thereof, to be precise) is brought to the Cinema Corte Madera by the Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF).

One of Frisco Bay's largest remaining single-screen theatres, the Corte Madera is where I first saw The Empire Strikes Back upon its original 1980 release, a still-vivid memory for this then-seven-year-old. I'm a bit surprised to see this Marin-made blockbuster in the line-up, as it just screened the festival in 2010, on the 30th anniversary of its release, kicking off an annual string of Lucasfilm productions revived on some multiple of five years after it's debut (1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark in 2011, 1977's Star Wars in 2012, and 1983's Return of the Jedi in 2013). I was expecting this year to bring a 30th anniversary showing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or a 25th anniversary of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it appears the expectations for the 2016 arrival of new Star Wars saga episodes is "altering the deal." The MVFF program guide refers to a "count down" so perhaps we might expect the 1977 Star Wars, which (spoiler alert) features Guinness's Obi-Wan in a larger part, to appear at the Corte Madera next year...

This is one of the many surprises the MVFF program had in store when last week it revealed the full program for its 37th edition, to be held in Mill Valley, San Rafael, Larkspur and Corte Madera from October 2nd-12th. The longest-running and highest-profile of Frisco Bay's "general interest" film festivals outside of the San Francisco International Film Festival, MVFF has built loyal audiences through employment of a successful formula over the years: securing Northern California (and sometimes West Coast or even U.S.) premieres of several major end-of-year awards "hopefuls", most with acting and/or directing talent expected in attendance, bringing a healthy selection of documentaries and unsung independent films, many with local ties, choosing foreign-language films fresh from Cannes and other festivals, and filling out the program with shorts, retrospectives, and the annual "Children's Filmfest" within the main festival. Lincoln Spector of Bayflicks has written a good first overview on his site, and I plan to write more soon myself. In the meantime, look at the list of MVFF films at or near RUSH status for a sense of what tickets to buy in advance if you're thinking of attending this year.

HOW: It's rare for the Rafael to screen 35mm prints these days, but they still have the capability, and will be utilizing it to screen Our Man In Havana. The next print scheduled to play there is of Yoji Yamada's award-winning follow-up to last year's wonderful MVFF selection Tokyo Family, entitled The Little House, which is the only 2014 MVFF title expected to unspool in 35mm.

Tabu (2012)

WHO: Miguel Gomes directed this.

WHAT: I have not yet seen this Portuguese-made film which takes its title and, apparently, much more, from F.W. Murnau's 1931 South Seas swan song, but I'm very excited to. Perle Petit has written a piece comparing the two films.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 6:00.

WHY: Increasingly, film festivals are not a place to see 35mm prints, especially of new films, even those that cry out to be seen that way. Of the eight current and upcoming local film festivals on my sidebar, I believe only one is planning to screen anything on film: the Another Hole In the Head genre festival which plans to show 35mm prints of Jaws and The Shining in December at the Balboa, which recently installed new digital projection systems but has been lucky enough to be able to retain 35mm projection capability. The San Francisco Film Society's Fall Season included 35mm prints in one of its festival showcases: the retrospective-minded Zurich/SF weekend. And the highest-profile local Fall festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, showed only two 35mm prints this year, one of them for a thirteen-year-old title (Lumumba), and the other for a remake of a 60-year-olf film (Tokyo Family). This is down from the dozen or so titles at the 2012 festival, a dozen that did not included its showings of Tabu despite it having been shot on film and appealing greatly to a good portion of those last cinephiles who still make an effort to support film-on-film screenings.

The upshot of all this is that tonight's PFA screening is not only the first theatrical showing of Tabu in Berkeley, and the first in the Bay Area in over a year when it played MVFF, but the first-ever local showing of the film in 35mm (not to mention the only 35mm screening as part of the PFA's New Portuguese Cinema series). I know it's available on DVD now, but I'm planning to head to Berkeley to see it tonight the way I'm sure it was meant to be shown.

HOW: As noted above, 35mm

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.

F-Line (2013)

WHO: Silvia Turchin made this.

WHAT: I haven't seen this short documentary, but according to press materials provided by the Mill Valley Film Festival, "F-Line is a sensory-based poetic film that explores the ethereal past of San Francisco's historic streetcars. Shot entirely on celluloid, F-Line embodies a textural way of perceiving these relics and examines the traces of time's mystery that fluctuate beneath the surface."

WHERE/WHEN: On a shorts program starting 7PM tonight at the Pacific Film Archive, or on another shorts program screening next Tuesday at the Sequoia and next Thursday at the Rafael, both courtesy of the Mill Valley Film Festival.

WHY: Tonight's PFA program is a student film showcase including works from filmmakers studying at half a dozen different Frisco Bay film schools. A few, such as Michael Ong's striking Through the Darkest Valley are currently available to view online, but for most of these works a screening like this may be the only way to see them, especially with filmmaker present. (PS the PFA November-December calendar is now available.)

F-Line was fortunate to be selected for one of the higher-profile local film festivals as well, thereby perhaps escaping the "student film" stigma that unfortunately is attached to works made on the way to earning a degree. (A stigma I abhor; great films like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Dyketactics started their lives as "student films" but have become canonized classics of a sort). The Mill Valley Film Festival (which I previewed here last month) starts tomorrow, and includes shorts programs on almost every day it runs, culminating in an October 13th screening of festival favorites and a premiere revival of the legendary 22-minute fantasy film from 1980, Black Angel.

HOW: Digital presentation on aforementioned shorts programs.

Thérèse (2012)

WHO: Starring Audrey Tautou, this was the last film directed by Claude Miller before his death last year, and it features cinematography by Gérard de Battista.

WHAT: Here's a case in which another critic has written such a thorough review of a film, contextualizing it within French cinema history and insightfully identifying its strengths and limitations, that to do much more than link would seem extraneous. Without further ado, please read Julian Allen, or at least this excerpt:

Miller, aware of the audience’s expectations, opts for a more robust, risky, and modern view of Thérèse’s personality. The implication is that even if you don’t agree with or even like Thérèse, her oppression is symbolically unconscionable. In this respect at least, the film wins its bet. The final sequence, like the novel, shows Bernard battling to understand her still, but she gives us no easy reasons because she does not have them herself—she is left alone, free from the social constraints of her past life, but still in hock to her own impulsive and rebellious nature.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple showtimes daily today through Thursday at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

WHY: Thérèse is the kind of film that once populated Frisco Bay cinema screens en masse but now has become rare enough almost to become a major event: a foreign film with a literary pedigree, a familiar (if not exactly box office gold) star, and a lack of "hip" or "high art" pretensions of any sort. It's the kind of film whose existence on American screens owes a debt of thanks to the film festival circuit, where publicity and word-of-mouth have a better chance to build than if the film simply opened cold for a week-long run. When I attended there weren't so many fellow theatregoers, but it at least posted solid enough numbers its first week at the Opera Plaza to be held over for a second. A third appears unlikely, as a brand new calendar (pdf) is coming onto Landmark's San Francisco screens (essentially the Opera Plaza, as the Clay usually books higher-profile titles and the Embarcadero is expected to remain closed for remodeling until November).

Of the nine titles on this week-by-week calendar, three (Populaire, Museum Hours and Let the Fire Burn) arrive, like Thérèse, after successful showing at the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival. A fourth, The Trials of Muhammad Ali, was one of the most widely-appreciated titles at the SF Jewish Film Festival. And a fifth, Zaytoun, (quite possibly the most currently topical of the bunch, as it's a Middle-Eastern war-set drama directed by Eran Riklis, who made the terrific The Syrian Bride) arrives October 18th after two screenings on the final two days of the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival, which runs October 3-13 in cinemas all throughout Marin County.

You may have noted that my sidebar has exploded with links to upcoming film festivals beginning this weekend after a relatively slow late summer. The most established and most widely anticipated of them is the Mill Valley Film Festival, which announced its full program at a press conference this morning (that thankfully didn't include any poorly-presented preview clips- perhaps someone read my comment on that last year?). Now in its 36th year, MVFF has become best-known as the Northern California launch pad for Oscar-seeking Fall and Winter releases hot from their continental debuts in Colorado and Ontario. This year is no exception; if you haven't heard the "buzz" yet on titles like Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is The Warmest Color or Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave let this be your first warning: you'll be hearing about these films a lot unless you hide under a rock in the next few months. Both are slated to play MVFF this year along with other films whose distributors have a budget to try to push them into the various year-end "Best of 2013" conversations. The Marin festival doesn't shy away from playing up its possible role in these conversations; press materials note that four of the last five Best Picture Oscar winners (all but The Hurt Locker) had their Frisco Bay debuts in front MVFF audiences.

But with over a hundred features and shorts in the festival line-up, most of the titles in the program have little or no chance at joining Argo, The Artist, The King's Speech and Slumdog Millionaire in future almanacs the world over. There's plenty of moviegoing available for fest-goers interested in avoiding "Oscarbaition" (to re-use a term I applied last year), whether they're interested in fiercely independent voices like MVFF regular Rob Nilsson (here with his new Collapse, while his first feature Northern Lights screens at the PFA November 7th) or aesthetically innovative documentarians like Rithy Panh (whose Khmer Rouge miniature piece The Missing Picture should be a festival highlight), or rediscoveries and retrospective titles like Roger Christian's long-lost Star Wars-related short film Black Angel, or Raoul Peck's 2000 biopic Lumumba.

A list of world-renowned elder statesmen directors with new features in this year's MVFF might start with Hayao Miyazaki (who says The Wind Rises will be his final film) and continue with Andrzej Wajda (Walesa, Man of Hope completes a political trilogy begun with Man of Marble in 1975), Jan Troell (who will be on hand for screenings of The Last Sentence), Yoji Yamada (who began his career working under Yasujiro Ozu and now updates that master's most famous masterpiece into Tokyo Family, which I'm told will be one of the few 35mm screenings of the festival), and Costa-Gavras (here with his latest Capital). I could go on, but let me instead turn to a younger generation of well-established filmmakers like Connie Field (her new doc is Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine) and Hirokazu Kore-eda (represented with Like Father, Like Son). And then there are brand-new directors like Françoise Charpiat; her Cheba was shot by veteran French cinematographer Gérard de Battista, who also shot 1995 MVFF hit French Twist, 1997 Chris Marker documentary Level Five, and four Claude Miller features including Thérèse.

All of the above MVFF titles may sound like they have strong pedigrees, but it will take audiences to decide whether they're actually as good as they promise to be. I haven't had a chance to see any of them myself yet. But I did see Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton in a packed Castro Theatre at Frameline, and have been eagerly awaiting a chance to send Frisco Bay friends and readers who missed it this past June to an enthralling, accessible, and un-hagiographic documentary on one of Frisco Bay's most independent spirits among filmmakers. Broughton was born November 7, 2013, so the October 6 & 9 Mill Valley and San Rafael screenings are just in time to get ready for his centennial. Whether you're totally unfamiliar with the poetic, personal films he made in San Francisco, Mill Valley and all over the world, or have memorized every last one of them, you won't want to miss out on this complicated portrait of a fascinatingly complicated man.

HOW: Thérèse screens in 35mm at the Opera Plaza and via DCP at the Rafael.

Passion (2012)

WHO: Brian De Palma directed this.

WHAT: I have not seen Passion or the Alain Corneau film it was based on (Love Crime) but I love what De Palma had to say when Fernando F. Croce asked him what drew him to remake the latter film:

I liked the way of the plot. I liked the power struggles between the main characters. I didn't like the way Corneau revealed the murder, but that's okay, because if we're planning on remaking a film, then let's remake one that has room for improvement.

It seems to me this is exactly the right attitude for a director to take toward a remake: with confidence that he or she can improve on the original. Then again, De Palma is no stranger to other common approaches as well: the Hollywoodization of a well-known commercial property (The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible), the reconfiguring of setting and character of a respected classic (Scarface), and even the oblique homage that isn't quite a remake but resembles one (Blow Out from Blow-Up, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, etc. from the collected works of Alfred Hitchcock). As a De Palma fan I'm interested in all of these approaches, and am very excited to finally see Passion a year after its world premiere.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily only at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael today through Thursday September 5, and at 2:45 and 7:00 at the Castro Theatre only on September 4 & 5.

WHY: I don't know why the Rafael is the only Frisco Bay theatre showing Passion for an entire week-long run (which began this past Friday), but it ought to be a good place to see it, with its 4K digital projection. It's also the only cinema where it's possible to see David Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints now that the latter has left San Francisco and Berkeley theatres. Of course the Rafael is preparing to be one of the main venues for the Mill Valley Film Festival in October, which is slowly revealing a few of its programming selections. Since I last checked in on this subject, it's been announced that filmmaker Costa-Gavras will be present at the venue October 4 for a tribute and screening of his latest film Capital, and that on September 17th, a couple weeks prior to the festival's official start date, the U.S. Public Premiere of Metallica Through The Never will occur there. 

But since San Rafael is out of my way, I'm very glad that the Castro will also be screening Passion this week, if only for two days. I find it a little delicious that the venue has booked a De Palma film to screen so shortly after its (approximately) annual 70mm presentation of Vertigo, which ends with three showings there today. Any De Palma fan knows that Hitchcock is the director's biggest cinematic inspiration, and Vertigo in particular (along with Psycho and Rear Window) frequently alluded to in his filmmaking style and content.

HOW: Passion is (as far as I know) only being distributed on DCP. It was shot on 35mm but I've yet to hear so much as a rumor of a physical exhibition print existing. The Castro screenings pair it with 35mm screenings of prior De Palma films, however; Dressed to Kill on Wednesday, Sep. 4 and Femme Fatale on Thursday, Sep. 5.