Computer Chess (2013)

WHO: Andrew Bujalski wrote and directed this.

WHAT: One of the most unusual and pleasurable new movies I've seen in 2013, a puzzling film (if not a "puzzle film") shot with an analog video camera and set at a 8-bit-era chess tournament pitting rudimentary predecessors to Deep Blue against each other in awkward death matches. I love Amy Taubin's take on the film after seeing its premiere at Sundance this past January. An excerpt:

With nods to Stanley Kubrick and George Landow, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess is bracingly idiosyncratic—and close to perfect. Set in 1980 in a nowheresville hotel hosting an annual artificial-intelligence chess competition (software programs operated by computer nerds compete at chess) the movie is part faux documentary and part hallucinatory coming-of age sexual fantasy.

WHERE/WHEN: Runs at least through Thursday at the Opera Plaza with showtimes at 2:20 and 7:00.

WHY: The Opera Plaza has been Landmark's default house for the most offbeat edge of the chain's programming, since the closure of the Lumiere last fall, and I'm glad that even with the temporary closure of the Embarcadero and its five screens until sometime this Autumn, the venue is keeping a screen dedicated to movies without famous celebrities in them. This week is likely the last for Computer Chess as another highly-anticipated title The Act of Killing is set to open Friday.

Unfortunately, although the Opera Plaza still has the capability to run 35mm prints, most of what they play there is shown on older-model digital projectors. One exception right now is Before Midnight, which despite having been shot on video, is available to screen in 35mm and is currently running that way at the Van Ness venue.

HOW: Digital video screening of an analog-video-shot title.

Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)

WHO: Judy Garland starred, and met her second husband Vincente Minnelli while being directed by him, in this film.

WHAT: The movie that earned an Oscar nomination for a song including these lyrics sung by Garland:

"Clang, clang, clang," went the trolley,
"Ding, ding, ding," went the bell,
"Zing, zing, zing," went my heartstrings,
From the moment I saw him I fell.  

"Chug, chug, chug," went the motor,
"Bump, bump, bump," went the break,
"Thump, thump, thump," went my heartstrings,
When he smiled, I could feel the car shake.

WHERE/WHEN: Today through Tuesday at the Stanford Theatre at 7:30, with an additional screening today at 3:35.

WHY: Perhaps this isn't the best week (or the best summer) to sing about public transportation. If a less optimistic film about American transportation, The Magnificent Ambersons, was playing on a Frisco Bay cinema screen somewhere tonight I'd surely highlight that instead. But Meet Me In St. Louis is a wonderful film to see in a glorious Technicolor 35mm print, if you can get to a theatre showing one.

The Stanford is one Frisco Bay film venue that isn't near any BART station, though that doesn't mean transit there and back won't be impacted by a probable strike. I'm crossing my fingers that BART management will be swayed by public pressure and pay serious attention to the (from what I've come to understand) sensible demands of its workforce, and make a reasonable counteroffer that can avert another strike. Since that doesn't seem likely to happen, I like many other car-less cinephiles may find myself privileging screenings at my local neighborhood theatre over those at more far-flung venues for a while.

HOW: 35mm print, on a double-bill with Apartment for Peggy.

The Lawless Breed (1953)

WHO: Raoul Walsh directed and was, according to biographer Marilyn Moss, uncredited producer on this film.

WHAT: Walsh's 1941 picture They Died With Their Boots On may have been about George Armstrong Custer, but its title was taken from a 1935 book about three other larger-than-life figures of the Old West: Ben Thompson, Bill Longley, and John Wesley Hardin. Perhaps to make up for this decade-old slight, Walsh eventually did make a film about Hardin based on the outlaw's own memoir, using ascending star Rock Hudson in the role of the well-known gunslinger and gambler (who had been played by John Dehner two years prior as a supporting character in the Phil Karlson-directed The Texas Rangers). That film was The Lawless Breed. It was the first of three films Walsh made with Hudson as lead, all in 1953. It would be followed by the swashbuckler Sea Devils and by another Western Gun Fury, the latter distinguished by having been shot and released in 3-D (although Walsh by this point had lost sight in his right eye, making him, like André De Toth and Herbert L. Strock, a monoscopic director of a stereoscopic picture).

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 6:30 PM.

WHY: Being able to attend virtually every screening thus far in the PFA's retrospective A Call to Action: The Films of Raoul Walsh has been a highlight of my cinematic year. Thanks to the lifting of the July BART strike just hours before the series launched, I've been able to attend eight out of nine screenings in the series to this point, all except The Big Trail, the only one of the selections I'd seen before (albeit nearly ten years ago). With another strike looming I'm not sure I'll be able to complete the rest of the series, which includes some of Walsh's most well-known titles (yet still unseen by me) like High Sierra and They Drive By Night. But I definitely plan to be at The Lawless Breed tonight, and probably stay for the noir-ish Western Pursued starring Robert Mitchum.

Everything in the series so far has been well worth watching, but certain films and scenes can be singled out as highlights. They Died With Their Boots On and Objective Burma are rah-rah patriotic action films made on the eve of and the near the end of American involvement in World War II, but at least for me, in 2013 they played as compassionate inquiries into the senselessness of martial sacrifice. Objective Burma in particular was overwhelming in 35mm, as light from the projector bombarded my eyes in the climactic night battle sequence, like luminous shrapnel being cast from a flicker-form grenade. Silent films Regeneration and What Price Glory benefited from crack piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg, and made me hope that more Walsh silents like The Red Dance or (although it is considered a lost film) The Honor System might make it onto a screen in my vicinity in my lifetime. Of the four pre-code era films in the series, it was hard to beat the series openers Sailor's Luck and Me And My Gal for their exuberant humor and earnest sentiment, but I also very much appreciated seeing Wild Girl the other night, one of the few early-1930s Westerns I've seen that's recognizable to modern audiences as a "pre-code" film, with Joan Bennett starring as a woman with the kind of sexual energy generally stamped out of Hollywood pictures after 1934, and some wonderfully risque dialogue by supporting cast players such as Eugene Pallette and Minna Gombell.

New York Times DVD reviewer Dave Kehr was in town to present Wild Girl and to discuss "the future of classic films" (to latch onto a phrase Kehr sheepishly coined on the spot) and other topics with local critic Michael Fox and a highly-engaged audience. Though I very much related to one audience member's comment that the discussion didn't go very far in exploring the challenges of using the written word to encourage audiences to congregate to watch films made to be seen collectively, I was nonetheless stimulated by the conversation that did take place, mostly centering on the lamentably increasing unavailability of all but the most solidly canonized classic film titles without resorting to bootlegs of questionable quality.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of information Kehr related regarded a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (I think it's section 108-h) that should allow libraries and archives to distribute at least certain films (from my understanding, those made in the 1920s and 30s at any rate) that copyright owners refuse to circulate "at a reasonable price". Could the intentional studio withering of their repertory, DVD and streaming distribution channels put thousands of unavailable titles into a legal zone in which they could be distributed by a place like the PFA in lieu of commercial distribution? A lawyer would be the only one to be able to hazard an informed guess, but the prospect is surely tantalizing.  With copyright extension likely to become a major policy battle in Washington in the next five years as the 1998 extension's expiration looms in 2018, the landscape could shift dramatically relatively soon- or it might not change at all. But in the meantime, I hope to take advantage of rare opportunities to see films like The Lawless Breed when I can.

HOW: The Lawless Breed screens via a new 35mm print, following a 6:00 book-signing event with Kehr on hand with copies of his recent anthology When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade.

Betty (1992)

WHO: Marie Trintignant stars in this film directed by Claude Chabrol.

WHAT: Though it comes highly recommended by Chabrol fans, I haven't seen Betty, and will defer to this excerpt from Ed Howard's review:

Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, the film is a deeply affecting study of addiction and disconnection. Marie Trintignant delivers an astonishing performance as the title character, exploring the confusion, depression, and fragility of this aimless young woman — as well as the undercurrent of emotional coldness and cruelty that perhaps lies beneath her surface frailty.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Aside from being a rare chance to see a Claude Chabrol film on the big screen, and to continue with the Georges Simenon series mounted by the venue, there's another reason to see this screening today in particular. Yesterday was ten years to the day since the film's star Marie Trintignant was tragically, brutally killed by her serially abusive boyfriend, a rock star who has used the ten-year anniversary of this horrific event to announce plans for a comeback. Trintignant, of course, was the daughter of French acting legend Jean-Louis Trintignant, subject of his own PFA retrospective earlier this year following his brilliant performance in Michael Haneke's Amour after a long absence from the screen following his appearance with his daughter in her last completed film Janis and John.

HOW: Betty screens in a 35mm print imported from the Institut Français

Footlight Parade (1933)

WHO: Busby Berkeley choreographed the dance sequences in this film.

WHAT: The first two thirds of the movie are fine. A fast-paced backstage drama about the aspirations and Depression-era struggles of a dance company trying to make a name for itself as the top provider of live-on-stage "prologues" to accompany movie screenings at grand downtown movie palaces in New York and across the country. It's a story about the upheaval from silent films to "all-talking" and more importantly "all-singing, all-dancing" pictures, and its ripple effect on live entertainment, made in a moment when the topic was still in the daily papers, as many Warner Brothers pictures of all genres were. With James Cagney, Joan Blondell and Ruby Keeler in key roles, there's a streetwise, hard edge to the acting performances lacking in certain other Busby Berkeley-associated features with plots that evaporate off the screen and are barely worth sitting through to get to the lavish musical numbers. (I'm looking at you, Gold Diggers of 1935!)

If you've never seen the last thirty-five minutes of Footlight Parade on the big screen, however, you've missed out on some of the most spectacular reels of cinema ever sent through a projector. Even the largest of televisions can't capture the unreal scale of Berkeley's final three, back-to-back-to-back musical numbers in this film, each one representing one of his three major varieties of productions as identified in David E. James's book on experimental filmmaking in Los Angeles, The Most Typical Avant-Garde. "Honeymoon Hotel" is not identified by James as such but seems to fit in his first category of "sophisticated versions of stage show set design and ensemble dancing, unfolding in theatrical space and continuous time", although in content this sex farce is as pre-code bizarre as just about anything dreamed up by the Fleischer Brothers.

"By A Waterfall" (pictured above) is among the most elaborate of Berkeley's numbers of James's second type, where "film-specific devices and effects are used to elaborate complex orchestrations of dancers into abstract patterns". These are commonly Berkeley's most celebrated productions; they include "Young and Healthy" from 42nd Street and "I Only Have Eyes For You" from Dames, for instance. In the case of Footlight Parade and "By A Waterfall", the transportation from the theatre stage into the realm of the impossible is marked by Dick Powell's slumber as a kind of dream state. The aquatic theme of this sequence makes it stand apart from all Berkeley's other achievements. The term "synchronized swimming" hadn't even been used yet at the time: it would make its first recorded appearance a year later according to Dawn Pawson Bean.

Finally, "Shanghai Lil" representing James's third category of Berkeley production: "quasi-narrative compositions, again dependent on film-specific procedures and essentially autonomous". He notes that these number differ from the other two categories in combining the "largely dystopian narrative" whose echoes are basically banished from the "entirely utopian interludes" of category 1 & 2. But "Shanghai Lil", like "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935  and "Remember My Forgotten Man" from Gold Diggers of 1933 in James's words "contains a noir countermovement, a recognition of violence, class difference, and exploitation that interrupts the saccharine bliss". Indeed, with its themes of prostitution, militarism, colonialism and substance addiction (whether the explicit alcohol or the coded heroin), "Shanghai Lil" must be the most disturbing of the musical numbers Berkeley ever created, even before taking account the discomfort of seeing Ruby Keeler in yellowface makeup.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight & tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 5:35 & 9:10.

WHY: I've always thought that the Castro should have a Busby Berkeley retrospective annually, and that Footlight Parade should be included. It's been two and a half years since the Castro's last such retro (a mini-retro featuring four films in fact), so this Palo Alto booking has to be the next best substitute.

HOW: 35mm on a double-bill with Flying Down To Rio