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FILM DECEMBER 16-22, 2009 M E T R O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y
FILM REVIEW
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Lights, Camera, Action The California Theatre rings in the holidays with a series of $5 matinees
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HAT PEOPLE’S PALACE, the 1927 California Theatre in downtown San Jose, is practically a shrine to the riches of the Ghost of Christmas Past. A trip there caps a downtown ice-skating party or a wander past the world (or at least Bay Area) famous Christmas in the Park display, now celebrating its 30th year. A Christmas Eve (at 9pm) screening of >IÉH 6 LDC9:G;JA A>;: (1946) runs simultaneously with the Stanford Theatre’s annual showing in Palo Alto. Director Frank Capra maintained that It’s a Wonderful Life had been made to combat atheism by fostering a belief in divine providence. What’s up front is an honest air of panic about the holiday. The film is equally honest about something else that’s in the air during the holidays: a feeling of failure, a feeling of not fufilling duties to family and friends. Dickens is clearly at the root of the Capra tale. Lionel “Mr. Potter” Barrymore had played Scrooge on an annual radio broadcast: “a character I’ve loved for many years,” Barrymore said in theater previews for the 1938 film version of 6 8=G>HIB6H 86GDA (playing Dec. 19–20, 1 and 6pm). Appearing in the coming attractions was Barrymore’s way of putting his seal on a role he was born to play—but couldn’t play, because of his crippling arthritis. As with James Bond, so with Scrooge—whoever you saw first in the role is your ideal. My first Scrooge was the one Barrymore introduced: the Anthony Hopkins–ish Reginald Owens, a fleshy snarler. The version is a trim 69 minutes with the uncredited film noir factotum John F. Seitz behind the camera. In her introduction to the new Everyman’s Library A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, Margaret Atwood supposes a couple of reasons why Scrooge sticks around. First, he gives us the pleasure of imaging a boycott of Christmas, bahhing and humbugging all the way. Second, the tale is grounded in Scrooge and Dickens’ own deprived childhoods and a fantasy of living them over happily. When Ebenezer reforms, he says that he is as merry as a schoolboy; Atwood responds, “Now, what schoolboy might that be?” The holiday theme of making a past better continues in the modern favorite, 1983’s 6 8=G>HIB6H HIDGN, playing on the 25th itself (at 7:30pm). It became a classic because of the never-ending delight in dangerous toys, Bob Clark’s sturdy, fast direction and the vastly underrated actress Melinda Dillon as the mom. As a Boxing Day afterthought—and as an urging-on to populist triumph in the new year, 1938’s all-color I=: 69K:CIJG:H D; GD7>C =DD9 (Dec. 26–27, 1 and 6pm) features Los Gatos’ own then-17-year-old Olivia de Havilland, fit to make Natalie Portman look like Ugly Betty. I=: L>O6G9 D; DO (Dec. 17–18, 7:30pm) needs neither outline nor justification: everyone’s favorite film, on a big screen in a true picture palace, not an overpriced shoebox. And at $5 a ticket, these screenings are doable. A rough end for a rough year begs for a little working-class luxury, which calls to mind the banner outside a New Orleans theater, seen in the novel The Moviegoer by Walker Percy: “Where happiness costs so little.” Richard von Busack THE WINTER MOVIE SERIES, presented by Team San Jose and Stanford Theatre Foundation, runs Dec. 17–27 at California Theatre, 345 S. First St., San Jose. Tickets are $5.
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to wrap the action around snow, Christmas trees and good old C-9 Christmas lights. (RvB) Fantastic Mr. Fox (PG; 87 min.) A real artist learns to turn his limitations into strengths. In switching gears entirely from live action to stopaction animation, director Wes Anderson has created his most consistently enjoyable film. Anderson has softened his typical aura of disappointment with a sense of rejuvenating play. Based on a short Roald Dahl children’s book, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a fairy tale, but it’s a realistic, slightly bleak one. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is living a straight life with his wife (Meryl Streep). A midlife crisis rouses the beast; he decides to turn hunter once again. Retaliation comes fast and hard: the Fox is robbed of his tail by a shotgun blast. In the war that follows, Fox and his family—and,
soon, all the creatures in the woods— become refugees. Clooney is a fox in full: we see both the humorous suavity and the realization of possible failure. Clooney is our Cary Grant, but what people forget about the original Grant is something that this superbly compelling Clooney remembers: the buried fears that a suave man harbors of being out of control. (RvB) The Hurt Locker (R; 131 min.) The soldiers of Bravo Company are stationed in Baghdad for the 2004 fighting. Central to the film is the mystery of Staff Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner) who comes in to replace a slaughtered demolition expert. James’ risktaking amazes and angers his subordinate, Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). The suspenseful, grimly funny script is by coproducer Mark Boal. Renner is outstanding as the inhumanly brave demolition expert. Director Kathryn Bigelow does what Howard Hawks would do: she finds
the cooperation between men of great competence in a killing trade, rather than pumping up rivalry. Bigelow breaks through the sense of anonymity that characterizes most Iraq war movies, where helmeted men move alike and talk the same terse slang. However, The Hurt Locker takes an essentially knightly view of the war, of men suiting up and closing their visors. Thus this is the first Iraq film an American audience can feel good about. Boal’s script does discover the hollow inside the brave James: the missing part that made him never stop to realize why he did his job. That final revelation is smart filmmaking. It’s just that the hollow inside this movie— inside almost all war movies, even the good ones—isn’t as easily seen. If war is a drug, as The Hurt Locker claims, who’s pushing it? (RvB) Invictus (PG-13; 124 min.) The tunnel-visioned sports movie par excellence. Based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, Clint Eastwood’s film tells of South African president Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) exhorting the South African Springboks to greatness in the Rugby world cup as a public-relations move to heal the racial divisions. It’s obvious Freeman could do the role in his sleep. It’s the kind of part where someone says of Mandela “He’s not a saint!” because this conception of Mandela is such a saint. Team captain Francois Pienaar is not much of a role, but Matt Damon makes it a model of recessive, intelligent interpretation. Rugby is not a game made for screen poetry, though, and the dog piles and all-but-drag-out fights on the field have no shape to them. (RvB) The Maid (Unrated; 96 min.) The thrilling yet nuanced performance by Catalina Saavedra—a highlight of the year in film—makes The Maid everything that The Powers That Be claim that Precious was. Raquel (Saavedra), the maid of the title, takes care of a large family in Santiago, Chile. The mom, Pilar (Claudia Celedón), is too distracted by her own career to pay attention to Raquel’s increasingly ominous moods, and she underestimates the cold war between Raquel and Pilar’s daughter, whom the maid loathes. Director Sebastián Silva doesn’t patronize his subject, whom he tracks with such admirable intimacy. About halfway through, you’re certain that The Maid can only end in violence, but the film delivers an unexpected development: the newest assistant maid, Lucy (Mariana Loyola), arrives; she’s a bohemian type, who likes jogging and sunbathing. And she brings to the movie moments of unexpected happiness, no more strained than the quality of mercy itself. (RvB) The Messenger (R; 105 min.) Woody Harrelson’s Capt. Stone is a CNO (Casualty Notification Officer), one of the pair of soldiers who turn up on doorsteps to regret to inform. Stone’s new partner, Sgt. Montgomery (Ben Foster), is a simmering, tattooed fan of punk rock; he’s scarred from the war and is boiling with his own contempt for the civilians around him. The two-man team keep the pity for themselves and not for the survivors. But we start to see celebrity actors playing the bereaved: Steve Buscemi as a spitting, furious father; Samantha Morton, plumped and cushiony, with hair swept back to look like late-period Ann-Margret. That’s when the film’s previous death’s-head irony starts to grow domestic. One can’t stop watching Harrelson, who—despite cartoony work this year—seems on the verge of something great. Writer-turneddirector Oren Moverman did the research; the slang sounds right. He also uses ideas and symbols that could have been done without: the first shot of Sgt. Montgomery, putting eye drops in his wounded eye, all but says, “This man cannot weep.” The locations, in New Jersey’s aluminum-siding
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