This is a big week in San Francisco moviegoing for looking backward—although of course that may be every week, if you’re less than enraptured with what the entertainment industry puts out these days. At present, the Balboa Theater is celebrating its 100th anniversary by inaugurating the annual Balboa Award, whose first recipient will be costume designer Aggie Rogers. She began her career over a half-century ago with three of the 1970s “New Hollywood” era’s most enduring works—American Graffiti, The Conversation, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—then continued to put her stamp on a remarkable number of commercial and/or critical hits.
They’ve included flights of fancy (Return of the Jedi, Buckeroo Banzai, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, The Witches of Eastwick) and exercises in relatively straightforward realism (The Fugitive, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Fruitvale Station). She’s had a particular interest in Bay Area-set projects, from Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers through La Mission, Rentand recent release The Optimist. Despite this stellar resume, she’s only gotten one Oscar nomination, for 1985’s The Color Purple. The titles boldfaced above are all included in the Balboa’s week-long retrospective tribute commencing Mon/13, which also features the adventurous local indie horror Pig Hunt and 1980s senior sci-fi Cocoon.
On Sat/18 Rodgers will accept her award in person as well as introduce Graffiti and Body Snatchers. The evening will also include unveiling of a new entrance mural by artists Sandow Berk and Elyse Pignolet. Info on that event is here; the overall schedule for Rodgers’ retrospective and other programming this month is here.
Elsewhere, a couple idiosyncratically memorable movies are getting anniversary screenings as well. Famed editor and sound designer Walter Murch, whose contemporaneous career shares some credits with Rodgers (notably Graffiti and The Conversation), will be at the Castro Theatre this Thurs/9 to present his sole directorial feature. 1985’s Return to Oz, which he also co-wrote, is one of those lamented commercial flops that had begun making an object of cult adulation even before its brief theatrical run ended.
It’s closer to the anarchic spirit of L. Frank Baum’s original Oz books than either the classic 1939 Wizard or Sam Raimi’s middling (but popular) 2013 Oz the Great and Powerful. It’s also more melancholy, and closer to horror, than any of the above—which no doubt added to its failure to connect with mainstream family audiences or fantasy buffs. Return is far from perfect, but an original vision (with poignantly winsome young Fairuza Balk as Dorothy in her screen debut) that sticks in the mind. Murch will discuss the film with 48 Hillscontributor and Movies for Maniacs curator Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, more info is here.
A mere Gen Z whippersnapper at age 20 to Return’s 40 years, the Duplass Brothers’ The Puffy Chair emerged in 2005 as a high-water mark for what was already termed “mumblecore.” That term loosely bracketed a wave of shaggy low-budget seriocomedies about twentysomethings that emerged in the Oughties, bringing with it such other talents as Joe Swanberg, Greta Gerwig, Lynn Shelton, and Andrew Bujalski. I found the movement’s earlier missives a little too amateurish, aimless, and self-indulgent—but Puffy Chair was so good it seemed almost unfair to compare them.
Mark Duplass plays a slackerish rock dude who finagles his girlfriend (the actor’s then-fiancee/future wife Katie Aselton) and monastic brother (Rhett Wilkins) into a road trip to acquire the titular object as a parent’s birthday present. This semi-improvised narrative may seem formless, and/or willfully odd—but it is always funny, unpredictable, and ultimately more touching than you’d expect. It plays SF’s Roxie Theater on Sat/11 only (more info here).
Two days later the Roxie is also hosting a single 35mm showing of the Calamity Jane, a 1953 Warner Brothers musical rather obviously contrived to mimic the success of Annie Get Your Gun, a hit film of a Broadway smash. This genial imitation did not make history repeat itself at the box office (at least in the US—oddly, it did well in the UK), but it won one Oscar, got nominated for a couple more, and in a reversal of Annie’s course, became a moderately successful stage show after originating as a film. It was a favorite role for Doris Day, giving her an opportunity to break from the more vanilla vehicles she had before and after.
Her strenuously tomboyish Wild West sharp-shooter may end up caught between two potential male romantic interests (Howard Keel, Philip Carey). But Calamity eventually became a bit of a cult flick for lesbian viewers, who interpreted the heroine’s butch ways—before she gets a feminizing makeover—and song “Secret Love” (which won that Oscar) in terms SF-born director David Butler and writer James O’Hanlon probably didn’t intend at the time.
It’s a fun movie, with a rare chance to sample the singing and dancing chops of second female lead Allyn Ann McLerie, a Broadway regular whose film career didn’t catch fire until 1969. Then, she commenced playing character parts in a stellar series of New Hollywood classics: They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, The Reivers, Jeremiah Johnson, Cinderella Liberty, The Way We Were, All the President’s Men and more. Info on the Roxie show is here.
Enjoying a more extensive Roxie revival that will already be in progress by the time you read this is Thief, the 1981 movie that was Michael Mann’s big-screen directorial debut. Only moderately successful at the time, it introduced the neon-noir aesthetic he’d hugely popularize a couple years later on TV hit Miami Vice, then carry into memorable subsequent features Manhunter and Heat. He’s made some well-received films since (like The Insider and Collateral), but I miss the maximalist minimalism of this Mann era, with its distinctive mix of existential angst and exacting high style.
James Caan plays the title role in Thief, a safe-cracking loner whose on-the-job meticulousness is doomed by the chaos of other people. It’s a striking vision (with a Tangerine Dream soundtrack) worthy of comparison to such other near-abstract crime classics as Melville’s Le Samourai and Refn’s Drive. A new 4K restoration plays the Roxie through Tues/14, more info here.
Last but not least, there’s a re-release to IMAX screens on Wed/15 and Sun/19 (with “full nationwide arthouse release” as of April 24) of Werner Herzog’s 2010 Cave of Forgotten Dreams. That documentary did very well 15 years ago—who would miss the chance to view approximately 32,000-year-old cave paintings only recently discovered, in remarkable condition?—but disappointed me at the time. While much was made of the crew being granted access at all, the resulting footage was murky and grainy, not much enhanced by 3-D. Well, apparently Herzog wasn’t all that happy about it either, believing the film severely compromised by time and technological constraints. This restoration promises a “revitalized cinematic experience” that will hopefully get you as close to the Paleolithic Era as you’re likely to enjoy in this lifetime. A list of participating theaters (including SF’s Metreon) is here.
New movies arriving this week:
The Stranger
It’s often opined that it’s easier to make a great movie out of a bad or mediocre book than to make a good movie from a great one. A recent exception that proved the rule was Train Dreams, the rare adaptation of a brilliant novel that actually managed to get very close to reproducing its literary qualities onscreen. More often, though, something crucial gets lost in translation—though that doesn’t stop filmmakers from trying. The issue is frequently that cinema is inevitably a much more literal-minded medium, and as diverse as its effects can be, it has a hard time not flattening out the more nuanced, ambiguous subtleties of the best print fiction. Albert Camus is a perfect case in point. The short-lived Algerian-born French author has tempted many adaptors, to generally frustrating results. His distinctive viewpoint and style has been identified with existentialism and absurdism, though neither bracket quite fits; the books (I mean Camus’ five novels—never mind his numerous other writings) resist categorization as stoically as they do adaptation.
Francis Ozon’s new version of the 1942 novella is the third such, having been preceded by Luchino Visconti’s 1967 film, and 2001’s Yazgi aka Fate from Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz. I haven’t seen the latter, but the Visconti is a prestigious misfire—Marcello Mastroianni was miscast (the director wanted Alain Delon, a better choice if a lesser actor), and the screen auteur’s operatic sensibility clashed with Camus’ ascetic one. This latest effort is the most faithful to its source material so far… yet that material remains elusive.
Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, also a lead in Ozon’s Summer of 85) is a diffident young Frenchman who’s part of the colonialist European society in 1930s Algiers—he’s lived his whole life here, yet in many ways is a perpetual outsider. His mother’s death in a remote rest home stirs little emotion; he falls into a romance with Marie (Rebecca Marder) that always feels tentative; he lets a rather disreputable neighbor and friend (Pierre Lottin) drag him into a dispute that’s really none of his concern, but somehow leads to a young Arab’s death. Put on trial for murder, Meursault cannot explain his own actions, damning himself with such statements as “More than regret, I feel a certain ennui” (spoken to the judge, no less).
Ozon has discreetly heightened a backdrop of political conflict which would eventually lead to Algerians’ war for independence. The B&W film is handsome, though without much dramatic weight behind them, cinematographer Manu Dacosse’s more arresting images can feel over-fussy. This well-crafted, respectable attempt is solid to a point. But the director doesn’t fully conjure Camus’ alienated atmosphere, and his lead actors are too winsome—key factors that dissipate the book’s moral ambivalence. Without it, The Stranger becomes more picturesque than disturbing, an anecdote rather than an indictment. It’s good enough, taken on its own terms. Still, once again this novel seems to reject being transplanted to another medium. The film opens Thurs/9 at the Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin, Fri/10 at SF’s Roxie Theater.
Exit 8
Another purgatory for the morally untethered is sketched in this adaptation of a popular recent video game. An urban twentysomething designated only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) is on the subway en route to a temp job—emblematic of his reluctance to make commitments—when he gets a call informing him that his recently ex-girlfriend (Nana Komatsu) is pregnant. Should he take this as a sign that they’re meant to be a family, or let her abort the fetus and burn that bridge for good?
Of course, he cannot decide. But as he attempts to leave the transit station, its corridors seem to stretch endlessly, repeating themselves. Eventually he realizes he’s in some sort of metaphysical maze, his mettle being tested to see if he can find his way out and forward. Other figures including a “walking man” Yamato Kochi, a young boy (Naru Asanuma) and teenage girl (Kotone Hanase) also turn up, though some may be “anomalies” designed to trick him, and/or fellow prisoners trapped in their own parallel limbos.
Already a hit in Japan, Russia, and Korea, Genki Kawamura’s film has been judged a satisfactory adaptation by fans of the game. Whether it will do much for other viewers is an open question—at an advance screening, someone behind me spent a fair amount of the runtime snoring. The visual, thematic, and horror-adjacent-content repetitions built into Exit 8’s concept can be enervating, while the sentimentality at its core is conventional. Could the whole thing have been conveyed in 15 minutes rather than 95? Perhaps. Yet there is novelty to it, not least in seeing an entire feature built around realizing the aesthetic of artist Escher (conspicuously name-checked onscreen) in live-action terms. Exit 8 opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters including SF’s Kabuki, Cinemark Century Daly City, and AMC Bay Street in Emeryville.
Chica, Beware: ‘Faces of Death,’ ‘Thinestra’
Casting norms for genre movies are often so rigid, it stands out when those unspoken rules are broken. This week brings not one but two horror thrillers—much more straightforwardly so than the arty fantasy Exit 8—that sport young Latina heroines who are definitely not of the glammed-up, super-toned J-Lo ilk. This probably doesn’t constitute a trend, but it is encouraging nonetheless.
Like the recent, much jokier Anaconda, Faces of Death is a reboot of/commentary on some people’s idea of a golden-oldie guilty pleasure—in this case, a series of “mondo” quasi-documentaries (mixing authentic footage of real events with staged sequences) starting in 1978 that purported to show grisly human and animal fatalities. Then as now, nothing could induce me to watch that stuff. But this is an overtly fictive narrative in which Margot (well-known plus-size model turned actress Barbie Ferreira) is a content moderator for a major online platform, determining what viewer-posted videos cross a line into obscenity, illegality, sexploitation, et al.
A series of upsettingly violent, realistic-looking submissions appear to her to be recreating the demises in the FOD films. But her supervisors, preferring to rubber-stamp everything as acceptable for profit’s sake, slough off those concerns. She investigates on her own, however, a path that inevitably brings her to the attention of the real-life serial killer (Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things) making those not-at-all-faked videos.
Director-cowriter Daniel Goldhaber does a decent job with this conceit. Still, Death is still a somewhat disappointingly conventional exercise after his more interesting prior features, the enigmatic sex-work mystery Cam and excellent radical-environmental-activists fiction How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It will likely strike dedicated horror fans as a notch above average, but won’t necessarily reward anyone else’s time. It opens in theaters nationwide Fri/10.
To its credit, Goldhaber’s film doesn’t make an issue of its protagonist nonconforming to society’s stubbornly consistent standards (i.e. the blonder & thinner, the better) for screen beauty. But that’s the whole point in Thinestra, where Penny (Michelle Macedo) is a single Los Angelean whose insecurities about her body get endlessly reinforced at work—she’s a photo retoucher for a prima donna orchestrator of advertising images (Brian Huskey) whose models are invariably rail-thin.
One of the latter gives Penny a handful of not-yet-FDA-approved diet pills whose effects are immediate, and dramatic, as she begins dropping weight at a pace that would alarm any physician. She’s thrilled, however. The only caveat is that Penny now suffers blackouts in which a slim, feral doppelganger (Melissa Macedo, the lead’s sibling and partner in indie pop act Macedo) takes over. It exercises a ravenous hunger that doesn’t shy from living flesh. That proves hazardous to others in Penny’s life, including her mother (Norma Maldonado) and a cute neighbor who likes her (Gavin Stenhouse).
Directed by Nathan Hertz, written by Avra Fox-Lerner, Thinestra is well-acted, competently made, and has some diverting dream sequences. But its mashup of Stephen King’s Thinner with The Substance doesn’t really have any fresh ideas of its own, and the critique/satire of easy targets (the advertising, diet, and self-help industries) is predictable. Again, this is a movie that will likely please those who consume new horror releases in bulk, but it’s not quite distinguished enough to warrant everyone else’s attention. Thinestra arrives on streaming platforms Tues/14.
