Screen Grabs: Caught up in the raptors, again

When the original Spielberg Jurassic Park opened 32 years ago, it was a phenomenon both understandable and (at least to me) a little depressing. Yes, it was exciting to see computer-generated imagery, then still very new, bring prehistoric species to “life.” But while everyone was shouting about how the floodgates of cinematic imagination were now wide open, I found myself thinking “OK, what if this technology is only used to make monsters and spaceships and realize formulaic genre stories?” Which of course is exactly what happened. The content of mainstream movies since then has been even less driven by ideas as opposed to cliches and juvenile spectacle, with comic-book or other action franchises now so dependent on CGI that the fantastical has become routine. And the fast-tracked imminence of AI suggests whatever human element is left onscreen will soon shrink even further.

That original film was the highest-grossing ever for a time, so of course there were sequels—I can’t remember which I did or didn’t see, because they kinda blur together. Now there’s a seventh feature, Jurassic World Rebirth, written by David Koepp (who adapted the first two from Michael Crichton’s novels), directed by Gareth Edwards, whose 2014 Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story a couple years later were among the better entries in those separate franchise behemoths, IMHO. Also helping get me in the theater was the fact that this “stand-alone” followup to 2022’s JW: Dominion does not carry over any characters from the three prior World entries—meaning no Bryce Dallas Howard, a performer ideally taken in doses so small they’d be microscopic.

A prologue informs us that a top-secret bio research facility on an equatorial island was shuttered after a disaster with a ridiculous cause. (Though I appreciate that at a time when our government no longer seems to be in the business of ecological messaging, this sequence suggests even one stray candy wrapper might lead directly to the litterer’s grisly demise.) Seventeen years later, Big Pharma wants to send an illegal expedition to that forbidden isle, on the suspicion that the something in the DNA of the mutant dino-beasts still residing there might lead to a cure for heart disease… and enormous profits, natch.

To that end, a team is assembled consisting of Scarlett Johanssen, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, and Rupert Friend—plus others of lesser name and survivability value—to get blood samples from three critter types who respectively dwell in water, on land and in air. Of course, all those heavily fanged thingies would like to snack on our protagonists. Adding to the potential menu is a sailing family led by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo that must be rescued from their wrecked vessel before anyone reaches Kong (or whatever) Island.

Even the first movie was as much theme park as narrative, and this is more of the same. There isn’t room for much of a story, and the brief, rote attempts at emotional depth are laughable; I won’t care if these characters are never seen again. Rebirth is hemmed in from having any deeper resonance, any poetry, or even much humor by the demands of being a ride. As such, though, it’s pretty good. Once the preliminaries are dispensed with, Edwards does well maintaining a sense of emergency. The nearly back-to-back action setpieces, with of course great creature FX, are almost tense enough to make you overlook the illogic of so many giant carnivorous beasts constantly being outrun by tiny panicked humans.

The “corporate greed is bad” message is generic enough that it probably wouldn’t even offend Jeff Bezos. I’ll take it anyway—who knows, by next year even that may be too controversial for Hollywood to risk. Call me a wuss, but I think these movies and their monsters are too scary for younger children. Which probably won’t stop this Jurassic from being the #2 American family activity this week after fireworks, however. It opens everywhere July 2.

Elsewhere in the monster zone, joining 28 Years Later as yet another vision of a zombie-apocalypse future is R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres, a Canadian thriller in which Danielle Deadwyler stars as the matriarch of a rural family. It’s been 14 years since a “fungal pandemic” triggered a wave of death, then civil war, then famine. Now farmland is the most valuable thing, and the one the Freemans have occupied for generations must maintain a constant vigil against marauders. The latter may not be your classic celluloid “undead,” but they are merciless “flesh-eaters” nonetheless. It’s a well-made if rather humorless action flick to which Deadwyler brings her usual intensity—maybe a little more than this decent if overlong retread of familiar genre tropes can support. The film opens Wed/2 at Bay Area theaters including SF’s AMC Metreon 16.

Taking itself a lot less seriously is another title releasing the same day (albeit direct to Amazon Prime Video). Heads of State has John Cena as a Stallone-like action star turned just-elected POTUS, while Idris Elba is a former British Army commando who’s now Prime Minister. The first treats his new job like he’s still in show biz, maintaining an addiction to social media, photo ops and poll numbers; the latter is all business, so they pretty much loathe each other on sight. But when hijackers attack Air Force One, the feuding leaders on board find themselves parachuting down to rural Belarus, then trying to reach safety as bad guy Paddy Considine’s assassins pursue them—and traitors in their separate governments try to dissolve the traditional alliances between western nations.

While that last bit may seem reflective of our current real-world situation, Heads was written and shot well before Trump regained office. In fact, offscreen events have kind of ruined such fictive depictions: What we’re actually dealing with is so much more outlandish (and less reasonable) than reality, so even Cena’s well-intentioned buffoon lacks much satirical kick. Russian director Ilya Naishuller imbues this more conventional large-scale popcorn exercise with the same occasionally inspired, occasionally juvenile tongue-in-cheek flashy excess he lent his prior features Hardcore Henry and Nobody. The result, landing closer to True Lies than 007 territory, is very silly—but it’s energetic, and not boring.

You Gotta Have Art: ‘Art For Everybody,’ Fraenkel Film Festival

Thomas Kinkade was by some measures the most commercially successful artist of all time—and like our POTUS, he extended his “brand” to all kinds of tchotchkes and tie-in products, anything to make a buck. This “painter of light” (sometimes he even embedded electric lights beneath the canvas to heighten that effect) might have been acclaimed as an illustrator of children’s books or greeting cards. But as gallery art, his garishly colorful, idyllic landscapes evoking “an old-fashioned way of living”—like that exalted in Hummel figurines, Norman Rockwell images, or other kitsch objects—earned scorn from the establishment art world. Not that he seemed to care. Miranda Yousef’s documentary Art For Everybody finds him justifying his career path as early as age 16, when he opined “A person has to eat. I don’t want to end up like Van Gogh.”

But beloved as his mass-produced work was by the masses, Kinkade had “dark sides”—he hid from public view a substantial body of art made in styles very different from his saccharine popular one. And even as he pandered to evangelical audiences (going so far as to claim “the Master [i.e. God is] working through me”), he was unraveling via alcoholism and other sins. Before dying at age 54 in 2012, he’d destroyed much of his empire—gallery franchisees sued him for fraud—as well as his marriage, his business partnership, and seemingly his mental health. Yousef gradually introduces those wrinkles, so what at first seems a stock portrait of a cloying success story has by the end turned into something of a nightmare. It’s an absorbing look at a man whose contradictions can’t be reconciled. It opens at the Roxie on Sat/5.

A few days later the Roxie will also see the return of the Fraenkel Film Festival, which debuted last year. Its second edition again lets Fraenkel Gallery artists select movies that have provided them with influence on or amplification of their own ideas and aesthetics. There’s a much larger roster of such curators this time, with twenty-two representing a full gamut of visual media masters—including Christian Marclay, Sophie Calle, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Robert Adams, Carrie Mae Weems and Lee Friedlander—presenting twenty-one features.

Opening night on Wed/9 is Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 The Last Picture Show, plus a recorded conversation between artist Richard Misrach and his actor friend Jeff Bridges. The next night, Nan Goldin’s choice is Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go To Hell, a 1932 pre-Code drama whose portrait of an alcoholic marriage is unusually bleak for the period. Later films run a wide gamut, encompassing auteurs like Hitchcock (Rear Window), Truffaut (The 400 Blows), Altman (3 Women), Coppola (The Conversation), Tarkovsky (Mirror), Weerasethakul (Memoria), Satyajit Ray (The Music Room), Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter), Malick (Badlands) and Ozu (The End of Summer)—as well popular smashes of different eras from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to the original Rollerball and Little Mermaid. For the full schedule running July 9-19, go here.

Repertory Roller Derby: Naruse, Wong Kar-wai, ‘Spinal Tap,’ Bill Gunn

The Fraenkel series is hardly the only roundup of vintage titles available on local screens, with a few imminent events particularly worth noting. One is BAMPFA’s “Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman,” a major retrospective of the Japanese director who died at just age 63 in 1969—but managed to make nearly one hundred films in the four decades preceding. Sprawling over the entire remainder of the year, the series commences Thurs/3 with 1960’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, one of his more famous works alongside 1935 breakthrough Wife! Be Like a Rose! and 1950s classics Floating Clouds, Flowing and Late Chrysanthemums. Apparently as rigorously low-key offscreen as his dramatics were onscreen, Naruse had little taste for the spotlight, so his reputation grew more slowly than those of some contemporaries in Japan’s celluloid “golden age.” But this representative sample of his work, running through Dec. 21, should help keep his name alive.

Getting reissued in new restorations are a couple repeat-viewing favorites. There’s a 25th-anniversary release of Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, that dolorous meditation on unfulfilled romance, with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as the Shanghai expats at first bound by the realization that their spouses are cheating on them with each other. It’s currently playing SF’s Roxie (more info here).

In an entirely different vein, there is pioneering 1984 mock-rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, which was the first directorial feature for Rob Reiner and the first feature screenplay for Christopher Guest, who’d later make a whole subgenre of its satirical improv-comedy form via Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, etc. A much-belated sequel is due this fall, but meanwhile Fathom Events is returning the original to theaters nationwide this Sat/5-Mon/7. For venues and ticket info, go here.

Ranking high in the annals of thwarted filmmakers is Bill Gunn, an African-American playwright, actor, scenarist and novelist whose three directorial features were all ill-starred. 1970’s cryptic games-rich-people-play drama Stop! was shelved by Warner Brothers, and still has never been released. (Though it has been surreptitiously seen, including by yours truly.) 1973 cult horror Ganja & Hess, an Afrocentric take on vampirism considerably more intellectual than Blacula, was re-cut and resold without his permission after its initial commercial failure.

1980’s Personal Problems, written by Ismael Reed, was conceived as a televised “meta soap opera,” but found no takers—so its video-shot footage was ultimately compiled into a three-hour film. SFPL will host the three-part “Bill Gunn: A Retrospective” at the Main starting this Sat/5 with Problems, continuing on Thurs/10 with Ganja, and ending Sat/12 in a “Drawing From Film” class focusing on imagery from that latter feature (which Spike Lee remade in 2014 as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus).

And if your holiday weekend isn’t star-spangled enough, the Balboa has two classics that are as all-American as it gets: On Fri/4 there’s Robert Altman’s 1975 paean to country music capitol Nashville (more info here), while the next day brings George Stevens’ 1956 version of Edna Ferber’s epic Giant (more info here), with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean as three sides of an oil-rich Texas triangle.