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38 • BAY AREA REPORTER • April 7-13, 2016
April showers at the Castro Theatre by David Lamble
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n April, the Castro Theatre is transformed into a movie-palace Chautauqua with a sterling array of classic film programs leavened by special talks and live presentations. Last Men Standing (2016) The San Francisco Chronicle produced this 65-minute documentary following the lives of eight young men living with AIDS. (4/8) Labyrinth (1986) One of the strangest entries on the David Bowie film resume, this Jim Henson (of the Muppets)-directed kids’ tale involves Bowie as a “King of the Goblins” creature who abducts a teen girl’s baby brother. Good of a kind. The Dark Crystal (1982) Jim Henson and co-director Frank Oz provide a Muppet spin to this struggle to recover a missing hunk of the crystal that will save the world. (both 4/9) The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Director John Ford produced perhaps his greatest Depression-era chronicle of ordinary Americans overcoming economic collapse and personal despair. The film was Hollywood’s last stab at vox populism before the nation would be mobilized in the Titanic two-front war against Fascist totalitarianism. Lead
actor Henry Fonda is forever linked to his conscience-stricken ex-con in a career that would take him to Broadway and beyond. Citizen Kane (1941) While no longer an automatic pick for greatest American film of the sound era, this masterwork from then-25 Orson Welles still exposes the sins of corporate media, especially when tied to an oversized ego. Welles’ Charles Foster Kane was widely believed to be based on real-life media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Welles took his best shot (in collaboration with his screenwriting partner Herman J. Mankiewicz), although his career took a hit from Hearst critics from then on. The complete story of this cursed masterpiece is contained in New Yorker critic Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book, including her tart essay “Raising Kane.” (both 4/10) Hail, Caesar! (2016) Trust it to director brothers Joel and Ethan Coen to concoct a screwballish comedy-drama where real-life star George Clooney is abducted for ransom. Josh Brolin is the studio honcho who must raise the ransom while keeping the news from two Hollywood gossip mavens (a dual turn by Tilda Swinton). The Coens round up the usual suspects in a fine ensemble: Ralph Fiennes,
Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill, Frances McDormand and Channing Tatum. Anomalisa (2015) Filmmaker Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) employs stop-motion animation to poke fun at the plight of a motivational speaker who has swallowed his own b.s. (both 4/11) San Francisco Moth GrandSLAM V: Leaps This pretentious title is merely the name of a local storytelling contest. (4/12) Beyond Prisons Live on-stage conversation on prison reform with Van Jones and Shaka Senghor. (4/13) San Francisco Green Film Festival features 70 new environmental films, with opening & closing nights at the Castro. (4/14) Big Trouble in Little China (1986) Kurt Russell is the main attraction in this copycat melodrama set in a sinister fake Oriental-style setting. Production values triumph over story sense. Horrormeister John Carpenter takes the rap. Never Too Young To Die (1986)
Leonard Maltin cites this travesty’s singular virtue as Gene Simmons scoring a few points in his portrayal of a power-crazed hermaphrodite. (both 4/15) Peaches Christ presents a Spice World parody. (4/16) Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and
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Love the Bomb (1964) American-born British director Stanley Kubrick was at the zenith of his career as a world-class satirist when he unleashed Peter Sellers in a triple-threat turn as a British Air Force officer, a befuddled American president, and the wheelchair-bound, totally bonkers, evil inventor of a doomsday machine. At a remote Air Force base, Sellers’ incredulous officer hears the ravings of a lunatic who plans to launch a sneak attack on the Soviet Union. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) Roger Moore as 007 confronts an end-of-theworld plot from a mad man who plans a new civilization under the sea. The Madness of King George (1994) Nigel Hawthorne rounds out this trilogy of madness in high places with a sublime portrait of British King George III losing his way. Alan Bennett’s play is deliciously mounted by Nicholas Hytner. (all three, 4/17) Laura (1944) Otto Preminger showed an uncharacteristic gentle touch with this classic noir/romance. See page 52 >>
Another straight white dick film by Erin Blackwell
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oes the world need another male private eye movie? No. But obviously LA does, because LA without a hollow-cheeked private dick ricocheting from one floozy to another, collecting bullet holes and landing sucker punches in dark alleys before waking in a weird room
with a corpse is not classic LA. Classic is as classic does. Surely one of the classiest excuses for sitting through this overdone hash is a fulllength feature shot as a series of five 20-minute takes, in glorious 35mm color. You can see Too Late for its audacity, heterosexism, and selfreference at the grandiose Alamo Drafthouse, starting April 8.
The best thing about Too Late is the giddy sense of connection you get from watching characters appear, disappear, and suddenly reappear in new contexts scattered around that great Southern sprawl, Los Angeles. Five moving tableaux are set in a park, a mansion, a strip club, a drive-in, and a swanky hotel. That’s the order they’re shown in,
not their chronological order. I’m not giving away anything the press notes don’t divulge, and it won’t hurt knowing the thing is a puzzlemaker’s zigzag through space-time. It’s a voyeur’s dream to travel with the camera crew through this series of sordid milieux, whatever the order. If I hadn’t taken notes, there’s no way I would’ve been able to piece together the story. The next best thing is that the cast isn’t your usual puffed-up crowd of “stars.” All the actors were unknown to me, which only shows how little I know. They’ve all cut their teeth on TV screens or stages. John Hawkes would not be considered a discovery. His face is the face we’re stuck with for most of the 107-minute run-time, so I’m grateful it’s a seedy, ravaged, ratty face with grizzled face-hair under thinning poetic locks. No one has ever come close to replacing Humphrey Bogart as the screen’s master of cynical or sadistic or psychotic despair, but at least Hawkes looks convincingly underfed. Hawkes’ Sampson isn’t so much a character anyway as an icon, an homage to Raymond Chandler’s ideal of a lone knight with an automobile tailing bad guys. For all his logistical flair, firsttime writer-director Dennis Hauck doesn’t have much to say in the way of political, social, moral critique. This is no Chinatown, although he borrows a bit of mother/daughter confusion to achieve a fifth-act
narrative surprise. Beyond surprise, there’s no deeper payoff. The story as a story closes in on itself and won’t trouble your sleep by awakening in you some greater existential dread. It’s never even scary, and maybe it doesn’t want to be, choosing intrigue over suspense. Fair enough. There’s joy in its performance-based, cinéma vérité approach to this industry town that’s never really left the soundstage behind. Everybody hits their marks in Hauck’s freewheeling, fast-panning camera’s-eye view, leaving in its wake something like a soap opera with guns. You will enjoy this movie if you enjoy movies, or long for LA, or admire bravura. You’ll like it best if you’re a straight white male. It’s a bit late in social evolution for Too Late. There are no queers or eccentrics in it. No bums or gunsels or, god forbid, dykes. No Peter Lorre or Eve Arden. An impressive array of professional girl flesh includes a young tart (tits-out Vail Bloom) married to an old fart (magisterial Robert Forster) who in a fit of pique answers the doorbell naked below the waist, blurring the line between nice clean murder and dirty porn. I guess that’s pure Mickey Spillane. Pulp. It’s sad to see a young wannabe auteur scraping the bottom of the gun barrel when he could’ve aspired to a truly transgressive vision by breaking the dominant heteronormative imperative. That’s what Noir is for.t
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John Hawkes in writer-director Dennis Hauck’s Too Late.