With the Castro Theatre soon to close for what’s estimated as 18 months of renovations, after which it will be primarily a venue for live performance, the battle to preserve its historic role as a movie palace appears to be pretty well lost. (Although the compromises settled on include an agreement that a minority of days each year will be dedicated to film-related programs.) The shift towards mainstream concerts has also been read as yet another watering down of the Castro’s status as a gay neighborhood, as it promises large regular influxes of patrons who may be indifferent or even hostile to that identity.
To many, that result seems yet another testimony to city officials—in particular the mayor’s office—endlessly prioritizing the interests of corporate lobbyists and developers over the public’s needs or preferences. In this case, the latter were amply championed by a long, loud community activism… which ultimately, for the most part, fell on deaf ears.
There are certainly things to look forward to in the Castro’s next incarnation, including promised extensive restoration of original architect Timothy Pfleuger’s ornate interior decor and the exterior neon-topped marquee. But for many in the neighborhood and Bay Area film communities, the result also represents a somewhat baffling and infuriating failure to be heard. Whatever lessons can be gleaned from that fallout will be discussed in “The Fight for the Castro Theatre: Lessons for Queer Preservation,” a panel discussion being held at the Roxie Theater this Thu/11 at 6:30pm. Those participating will include architecture and LGBTQ history experts, preservationists, representatives from the Castro Cultural District program, and more. An emphasis will be on how to better protect historic queer sites in the future, but no doubt there will be considerable weighing of what went wrong this time, with opportunity for audience input. For info, go here.
But there are still some immediate, last film events at the Castro Theatre before its temporary closure, both of them this weekend. First up is SF Silent Film Festival’s screening on Fri/12 of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr, a dreamlike tale of the supernatural that exchanges the genre’s usual Gothic murk for bright sunlight, rendering its surreal progression of inexplicable events all the more disorienting.
Poorly received on initial release, the Danish director’s German-French coproduction has greatly gained in critical stature over the decades since. It was officially his first “talkie,” but dialogue was kept to a bare minimum, with emphasis instead on the haunting visuals and Wolfgang Zeller’s original score—which will be played live by the SF Conservatory of Music Orchestra, conducted by Timothy Brock.
On Sun/14 Movies for Maniacs takes over the venerable space with two of the 1980s greatest sci-fi films—or greatest films, period. Still going strong at 86 with this year’s ambitious Napoleon, Ridley Scott hit an early artistic peak in 1982’s Blade Runner, a Philip K. Dick adaptation set in the dystopian-future Los Angeles of 2019 (!). An initial box-office disappointment but also instant cult classic, it has been seen in no less than seven different versions—the 2007 “Final Cut” being shown on 35mm here is the only one on which the director had full control.
It will be paired with a 4K restoration “director’s cut” of 1987’s RoboCop, the ultraviolent action movie that was also an unexpectedly witty sociopolitical satire. It was a first Hollywood hit for Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, who would later take its pointed excesses even farther—some might say way too far—with Showgirls and Starship Troopers. For event info, go here.
The Roxie is also hosting a notable revival this week, one considerably closer to home than vampires and dystopian futures: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Judy Irving’s 2003 documentary about the incongruous flock of colorful tropical birds that is a startling occasional sight (and sound) around San Francisco. Among all the small movies each year that might’ve struck a popular chord if viewers had actually been aware of its existence, this proved the rare exception—a sleeper hit that really did find its audience, playing all over the nation and beyond. Irving and non-avian principal subject Mark Bittner will be present for the first two nights (Fri/12-Sat/13) of the Roxie screenings, plus single showings at the Smith Rafael Film Center (Sun/14) and Bolinas Community Center (Feb. 3).
Meanwhile, men—real, dramatized, entirely fictive, and merely a robotic facsimile—are doing bad things in a clutch of new streaming releases:
Man on the Run
You would hope an ever-increasingly global economy would come with ever-increasing checks and balances… but unfortunately the world simultaneously seems ever-more susceptible to high-rolling con artists and elaborate scams. Few in recent years were more embarrassing, or destructive, than the one chronicled in this documentary feature by Cassius Michael Kim. Between 2009 and 2018, a man called Jho Low (real name Low Taek Jho) stole over $5 billion from Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, in apparent full collusion with then-Prime Minister Najib Razak.
The fund was supposedly intended to spur improvements to the national infrastructure and economy. Yet somehow it wound up being funneled to equally corrupt oil-rich Arab countries, international shell companies, Razak’s pocket, and the extravagant lifestyle of rotund “Asian Great Gatsby” Low. He was frequently seen partying (often at fetes he threw himself) with the likes of Leonardo Di Caprio, Paris Hilton, Kanye West, Bradley Cooper, Robert DeNiro, Jamie Foxx, Michael Phelps, and Kim Kardashian. He lavished gifts (like a $600,000 purchase of Brando’s Oscar to Leo) on some, paid others for their appearances—Britney Spears got a cool million just for popping out of a cake. He actually played a big role in financing Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, making that objectionable glorification of a(nother) high-living, high-end real-life financial scammer even more objectionable.
Low is now in hiding, Razak in prison, and Malaysia saddled with $11 billion in related debt obligation—it may never graduate from “developing” to “developed” nation because of these perps’ greed. Yet the investment bankers of Goldman Sachs, who also made out like bandits from this chicanery, escaped with just a court-ordered-fine slap on the wrist. The celebrities who gorged on the generosity of their onetime patron now refuse to discuss him.
Indeed, the film ends with a long list of people who declined to be interviewed, or even answer inquiries. (Surprisingly, Razak is interviewed here, pre-conviction, and his “Who, me?!?” postures of innocence are jaw-dropping in their shamelessness.) Practically the only folks who did consent were the journalists and activists who’d doggedly worked to expose the scandal, despite all the Malaysian government’s attempts at stifling criticism—which may well have encompassed murder.
This is an absorbing, infuriating tale of institutionalized corruption around the world, the kind that makes rich people richer while bankrupting those poor suckers they got rich off. (Average Malaysians are dealing with skyrocketing living costs, as empty skyscrapers no one can afford to live in represent practically the sole physical result of the “development fund.”) Low himself remains a sketchy figure, his background left murky here, his current whereabouts unknown. In the end, he was just a flashy, reckless, fame-chasing criminal buffoon it’s hard to believe anyone was ever taken in by. Thank god nothing like that could ever happen in the U.S. of… hey, wait a minute!! Man on the Run began streaming last Fri/5 on Netflix.
He Went That Way
“This really (mostly) happened” announces onscreen text at the start of Jeff Darling’s debut directorial feature. Yet credibility immediately goes out the window, despite the story’s basis on events actually recounted by celebrity animal trainer Dave Pitts, who survived abduction by one Larry Lee Ranes amidst the latter’s killing spree. (Ranes’ brother Danny would become a serial killer, just a few years later.)
Here, Zachary Quinto is Jim Goodwin, a fictionalized version of Pitts, traveling from gig to gig with his moderately famous chimpanzee charge Sparky (played by a pretty obvious actor in an ape suit). He offers a ride to hitchhiking bad boy Bobby Falls, with Jacob Elordi (Elvis in Priscilla) as the stand-in for Ranes.
Bobby wastes little time in belittling, threatening, and even beating Jim, who in Quinto’s blandly passive performance seems to tolerate it either because he’s a nerdy simpleton or a needy closet case—though the screenplay overtly acknowledges neither. We know the younger man has already killed. But the tension that should arise from Jim’s peril is MIA in a film that can’t seem to decide whether it’s a thriller, a same-sex quasi-romance (despite the frequency of homophobic language), or some kind of inspirational buddy drama. Absurdly, it seems most inclined towards the latter, asking us to see Jim as a Good Samaritan whose kindness humanizes a monster… even if that monster continued killing people after they parted ways.
With its anachronistic musical choices, pointless narrative digressions (as when a weird motel owner tries to sell knives to Jim), and other bad decisions, this is a professional-looking movie of strange, amateur tonal haplessness. If Elordi—also currently in Saltburn—continues his rise to stardom, He Went That Way will at least have curiosity value as a misstep on the way to much bigger/better things. It is his Kalifornia, the pretentiously crap serial-killer movie Brad Pitt likewise postured though 30 years ago, before he also started making better career choices. Having bypassed local theaters, the movie reaches On Demand platforms this Fri/12.
I, Lethal Weapon: ‘Mayhem!,’ ’T.1.M.’
Two more new movies fit more snugly—maybe a little too snugly—into conventional genre pockets, providing decent escapist entertainment if few surprises. Mayhem! is a very basic revenge thriller in which kickboxer Sam (Nassim Lyes), already on the lam from former criminal associates in his native France, must fight another small army of bad guys when his new life in Thailand goes off the rails. This latest by director Xavier Gens, whose prior features were mostly horror films, is good-looking, well-crafted, and action-packed.
In that last regard it certainly plays to the strengths of Lyes, a ripped, handsome former MMA fighter. But on the evidence here, he’s not a very expressive actor yet. That’s a problem, since the movie eventually aspires to a kind of emotional reach neither he or the script can begin to support. Nor, in fact, is the action much more than brutally efficient beyond one highly visceral elevator confrontation near the end. As fighting movies (a B-pic genre unto themselves) go, it’s a cut above, but still pretty mediocre. Mayhem! is currently in limited theaters and accessible via On Demand platforms.
One of the sleeper hits of last year was M3GAN, a high-tech variation on the old Twilight Zone episode in which mean dad Telly Savalas was given what-for by his daughter’s “Talking Tina” doll, which started saying things (only in his earshot, of course) like “I’m Talking Tina! And I’m going to kill you!” The new film was about a recently orphaned little girl whose aunt gives her a prototype of a very sophisticated humanoid robot companion whose programmed protectiveness soon takes a lethal turn. It was fun if formulaic, and required a familiar giant leap of faith—why, exactly, would even a complexly programmed machine begin acting out of such very human emotions as jealousy, sarcasm, and spite?
Almost exactly a year later, we now have T.1.M., a slick but obvious derivation. Abby (Georgina Campbell from Barbarian and Bird Box: Barcelona) is a newly hired prosthetics chief at a robotics company. She’s invited to test out a “technologically integrated manservant” (Eamon Ferren), who all too quickly usurps the place of her previously unfaithful husband Paul (Mark Rowley), while also gravely threatening anyone else who might get in his/its way.
Spencer Brown’s U.K. production has the same plausibility issues M3GAN did, plus a slower pace and less humor. Still, the actors are better than the material deserves, and that material is handled well enough to be reasonably entertaining. As far as amorous male lovebots go, however, I’ll stick with Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe in Spielberg’s 2001 A.I.—an empathetic android who really did seem an improvement on humdrum humanity.
