Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley’s best Holiday movie experience

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Donna Reed and James Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Every Christmas Eve, the Stanford Theatre presents Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen.  It’s a great retro experience to see any film in an elegantly restored movie palace (balcony and all), especially with a Mighty Wurlitzer Organ pre-concert.  But sharing the laughs and tears of It’s a Wonderful Life with a large (I’m guessing about 750 seats), sell-out audience is very rich indeed.

The tickets are an egalitarian ten bucks or so, but you must be invested in the experience – you can only buy tickets IN PERSON at the Stanford Theatre box office.  The tickets go on sale with little fanfare in the first week of December and quickly sell out.  So you have to watch the Stanford Theatre’s website for the start of ticket sales and show up to buy tickets weeks ahead of time.  The unforgettable experience is worth it.

This year, advance tickets go on sale Friday, December 14 at 5:00 PM.  The Wife and I will be lined up at 4:30.

Cinequest: THE VALLEY

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THE VALLEY
THE VALLEY

In The Valley, a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur seeks an explanation for the suicide of his college student daughter.  The entrepreneur and his wife were born in India and raised their American-born daughters in the US.   Cinequest hosted The Valley’s world premiere.

The Valley gets much about Silicon Valley essentially right; (one guy shows up to a party wearing a necktie, but that’s quibbling).   The Valley captures the Valley’s diversity especially well.  38% of Silicon Valley residents were born in a foreign country. Significantly under 50% are white, and over 50% speak a language other than English at home.  And it’s impossible to round-up a posse of engineers around here without collecting some Indians and Indo-Americans.

The phenomenon of parents putting extreme and unhealthy academic pressure on kids is common here, and even frequent among immigrant families (and not isolated to Indo-Americans by any means).

Unfortunately, the clunky story is clichéd and predictable.  The soapy dialogue is worse, so there’s really not much opportunity for the actors to look like they are behaving instead of acting.  This hyper-emo screenplay might have worked on a daytime TV serial, but as a movie, it’s an overwrought mess.