Dinner at Eight

OK – stay with me here – I’m recommending the most oddly-paired double bill of Sorry to Bother You and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?.   Both films fiercely stake out positions in support of basic human worth.  The savagely funny social satire Sorry to Bother You carries the message that humans are more than just their commercial value as consumers and labor to be exploited.  The surprisingly emotional biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is about Fred Rogers’ fierce devotion to the principle that every child is deserving of love and our protection.

One of the Bay Area’s top cinema events: the 38th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF38), has opened and runs through August 5 in San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Rafael, Albany and Oakland. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest Jewish film festival, and, with a 2017 attendance figure of 40,000, still the largest. As always, there’s an especially strong slate of documentaries; I’ll be writing about the Must See docs tomorrow.

OUT NOW

• Please make every attempt to see the best movie of the year, now in Bay Area theaters: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.
• First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
• Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
• American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
• RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

This week’s video pick, the inventive Ruby Sparks, is about romance and it’s very, very funny, but it transcends the genre of romantic comedy. It’s clear that its co-star Zoe Kazan is a major talent as a screenwriter.  Ruby Sparks is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

This week’s offerings from Turner Classic Movies are remarkably diverse.  On July 24, there’s George Cukor’s  Dinner at Eight, an all-star 1933 Hollywood dramedy that mostly still stands up today.  Jean Harlow is hilarious as the trophy bride of the course noveau-millionaire played by Wallace Beery.  Marie Dressler is at least as funny as a former star yearning to relive an old romance.  John Barrymore adds a heartbreaking performance as a man facing disgrace.  If all this weren’t enough, we also get Lionel Barrymore, some ditziness from Billie Burke and a splash of sarcasm from quick-patter artist Lee Tracy.  Harlow, who died at 26, is usually remembered as a platinum blonde sex symbol, but Dinner at Eight reminds us of her comic brilliance.

On July 26 , TCM presents The Getaway, a 1972 crime thriller starring the charismatic Steve McQueen and his real-life squeeze Ali MacGraw.  McQueen and MacGraw are delightful to watch as they move between violent clashes and double- and triple-crosses. As befits a Sam Peckinpah film, there’s an intense shootout at the end.  The grossly underrated character actor Al Lettieri (Sollozzo the Turk in The Godfather) gets to play perhaps his most delicious villain; when he comes across a oddly matched married couple –  the nubile Sally Struthers and the nerdy Jack Dodson (county clerk Howard Sprague in The Andy Griffith Show), Lettieri layers on some glorious sexual perversity.   Speaking of character actors, we also get to enjoy the crew of Peckinpah favorites: Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor, Bo Hopkins and Richard Bright.

And, just for fun, on July 23, TCM will air the original Godzilla and two movies from my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters: The Black Scorpion and The Killer Shrews.