The recent and sad demise of the
Red Vic should teach us not to take our fabulous Castro movie palace for
granted. This late August bonanza is highlighted by an absolute knockout Midnight
for Maniacs Friday from Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Halfway into this pop tart cute Michael Cera vehicle, our
intrepid slacker Romeo waltzes into the hyper campy pad he shares with his gay
roommate, Wallace Wells, only to discover the acid tongued Wells going down on
a boy tart. “Oh, you may just have seen a guy’s junk. And he’s very sorry.” The
author of this sassy line, the sublimely insolent, scene stealing Kieran Culkin
has been waiting a long time to grab his proper share of the spotlight. There
is a sweet irony to a ruby lipped, if furious Culkin boy playing queer in order
to win kudos from the Box Office Mojo crowd, but Culkin nails every scene as
the non too butch Scott Pilgrim’s boy hungry, advice spewing best friend.
What kind
of straight boy hero needs a gay best friend to advise him how to fight his new
love’s evil ex-boyfriends? Well, an attention deficit afflicted, pee-shy,
guitar playing Canadian who frets about practically everything from the success
of his talent challenged punk band, Sex Bob-omb to the delicate process of
dumping his seventeen-year-old girlfriend “Knives” Chau: a Midnight for
Maniacs triple bill with Edgar Wright in person doing a Q&A before his
zombie classics: Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. (August
26th)
Badlands: Ever so loosely based on a real life crime
spree (Charles Starkweather), Malick’s auspicious 1973 debut, Badlands, feels
very much of a piece with its bratty film school contemporaries: nestled
somewhere between the genre revising blood spattered visual poetics of Arthur
Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and the hyper Disney pop slickness of Steven
Spielberg’s Sugarland Express, Badlands gives us a gloriously cocky
Martin Sheen as a James Dean styling serial killer who seduces his slightly dim
girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) on a corpse producing jaunt across the Great Plains
after shooting her pop and burning down the family homestead. (Plays with Days
of Heaven/August 25th)
The Tree of Life: Don’t miss this very special taste
of Malick in its Castro premiere. The Tree of Life’s 1950’s Waco, Texas
clan is in many ways modeled on an American Sparta prototype of the family as a
basic fighting unit: with the frequently absent, authoritarian dad (a lean and
mean Brad Pitt), the mostly nurturing mom (newcomer Jessica Chastain) and a
feisty trio of real boys -- heartfelt performances delivered in an almost
dialogue free zone by pre-teens Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Tye
Sheridan – as the restless grunts, seen both cowering under dad’s drill
sergeant worthy dinner table rants or out-of-doors with their feral buddies
getting into trouble. Malick demonstrates that these boys’ lives teeter between
the claims of a Lord of the Flies descent into chaos and a Norman
Rockwell/Walt Disney version of a crew cut nirvana. With an editing style that
totally fractures any obvious coherent narrative -- death intrudes at the
municipal swimming pool, as well as claiming one of the brothers in a
mysterious late adolescent accident – Malick evokes the brutal freedom of an
Eisenhower era boyhood: bad frozen food, adults teetering on a murderous
domestic breakup, combined with an exhilarating taste of freedom’s mad
possibilities.
The Castro’s not to be missed Pedro
Almodovar series begins with his queer boy masterworks:
Bad Education: Gael Garcia Bernal is brilliantly
showcased in the master work of Almodovar’s cinema of men behaving badly – a
triple barreled homage to Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and himself. Inspired by a
scene in Law of Desire where Carmen Maura’s Tina has an awkward reunion
with a priest who had abused her as a child. Bad Education truly sizzles
with an electric triple role turned in by Bernal, who is beautiful and deadly
both as a Barbara Stanwyck like femme fatale and a boyish enfant terrible young
actor looking for a killer part. The film is tour de force on the subject of
telling stories on film. Kicking off when Almodovar alter ego filmmaker Enrique
(Fele Marinez) receives a mysterious visitor (Bernal) who claims to be his
schoolboy friend and childhood lover Ignacio, Almodovar then allows us to see
Enrique’s film of Ignacio’s story about the abuse and then ups the ante when a
sexual coming of age tragedy shifts into a full film noir revenge tale. Bernal
and Martinez give mesmerizing performances as the two men conduct a deadly duel
that blows the David/Crawford catfights off the screen. High voltage sex scenes
make a pointedly painful guide to the differences between physical and
emotional penetration. Bernal’s characters all perform operatically giving and
receiving (there’s a delectable full frontal shot of Gael through wet jockey
shorts), although Almodovar warns us that these characters do not regard sex as
“source of pleasure, but of pain for everyone else.”
Law of Desire: One of the director’s most male
obsessed comedy/melodramas commences with a startlingly frank scene of
auto-eroticism, with diabolically comic overtones that is merely a prelude for
a delicious expose about a movie director who must battle for his own body and
soul against a two male lovers and his own brother who becomes his sister – the
sex change prompted by a passionate liaison with their father. (Castro/August 17th
)
All About My Mother: A beautiful teenager celebrates
his seventeenth birthday with a note begging his mother to allow him to meet
his absent father. “I don’t care who he is, or how he treated my mother. No one
can take that right away from me.” That night Esteban is hit by a car prompting
his mother to take a painful journey through her own unsettling adolescence to
inform a transsexual, Lola, that the son he never knew reserved his last
written words for him. A tender and yet resolutely unsentimental meditation
about family born and chosen, All About My Mother prompted film
historian David Thompson to gush, “A sweeping tribute to women, and one of
those films to make you wonder if God didn’t mean movies to be gay.”
Talk To Her: Almodovar reinvents the buddy flick
around the premise of two guys caring for two comatose women – one gored in a
bullring. It both rekindles the best of his early dark comedies of runaway
passions and reaches sublime new layers of feeling. The silent
film-with-in-a-film that neatly balances sincerity with parody (sort of The
Incredible Shrinking Man meets The Vagina Monologues) is enchanting.
(August 18th)
Flower of My Secret: A romance novelist tries to kick
her bad habits both literary and carnal with surprisingly good results after
the usual run of Almodovar pratfalls including a very tight pair of boots.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown:
This commercial breakthrough screwball comedy features a
woman who is so angry at a disappearing boyfriend that she practically erupts
into flames, indeed her bed does ignite. Inspired by a Jean Cocteau play, Women
features some memorable comic misadventures including the interference with
a police investigation when two when two cops are served drug-laced gazpacho.
(August 19th)
2001: A Space Odyssey: This Stanley Kubrick
mind fucker has always puzzled me: I love Hal, the world’s meanest and perhaps
first computer assassin but the trippy light show always put me to the sleep –
and that’s when I was in my mid-twenties. I’m going to give this one another
chance. (Plays with 2010 August 21st)
Double Indemnity: This wicked noir – an early sign of
Billy Wilder’s brutal edge – is besides a great male/female double/double
cross, also a great platonic male love story. If you ever desire a story of
cinema masochism dial up Wilder’s account of the sublime torture involved in
dragging a filmable screenplay out of his one-time only collaborator Raymond
Chandler. (Plays with The Postman Always Rings Twice August 24th)