Movies to See Right Now

Ruth Negga in PASSING. Courtesy of Netflix.

This week, the big movie on Netflix is Passing, and Oscar favorite Belfast opens in theaters – stay tuned for my reaction.

Cinequest’s online festival CINEJOY is running through November 17, and here are my five top Cinejoy recommendations (and capsules on nine other Cinejoy films).

REMEMBRANCE

Dean Stockwell in BLUE VELVET.

Dean Stockwell‘s 70-year acting career contained at least four distinct chapters, between which he took mostly voluntary breaks. He started as a child star – one of the biggest; he was spanked by William Powell in Son of the Thin Man and acted with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh. After walking away as a teenager, he returned for serious, original roles in Compulsion and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. During his hippie drop-out phase, he dropped back in for the Roger Corman hippie exploitation movie Psych-out. Then Stockwell played Harry Dean Stanton’s sympathetic brother in Wim Wenders masterpiece Paris, Texas. He followed that with hos most indelible performance, as his friend Dennis Hopper’s terrifying henchman in Blue Velvet, where he unforgettably lip-synchs a Roy Orbison tune. Stockwell topped of his career with the popular television series Quantum Leap. Here is Sheila O’Malley’s marvelous tribute at RogerEbert.com.

IN THEATERS

Passing: Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star in Rebecca Hall’s thought-provoking drama about the value of one’s identity and navigating in a racist societ. Also streaming on Netflix.

Also in theaters:

ON VIDEO

An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy: Celebrate Norm’s 90th birthday this November by streaming it for free here: An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy.

Son of Monarchs: A promising young NYC biologist must revisit his home in rural Michoacán to resolve his own identity. HBO Max.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Eli Wallach, Mary LaRoche, Cindy Calloway, Robert Keith and Richard Jaeckel in THE LINEUP

On November 13 and 14, Turner Classic Movies broadcasts Don Siegel’s The Lineup, one of my very favorite San Francisco movies. The villains and the final chase scene are unforgettable, as are the movie’s iconic San Francisco locations. It’s on TCM’s Noir Alley, so Eddie Muller will present the intro and outro. Don’t miss it.

Cynda Williams and Billy Bob Thornton in ONE FALSE MOVE

Moving from classic film noir to neo-noir, on November 14, TCM airs the gripping contemporary neo-noir One False Move. A Los Angeles crime is solved right away – the cops know who did it and that the murderers are headed to a small town in Arkansas, where the cops lay in wait. One False Move is a ticking time bomb as we wait for the criminals to drive across the Southwest to the inevitable confrontation. There are guys overreaching for greed and ambition, a femme fatale, and a very dark secret, but America’s original sin – race – is at the core of One False Move.

Bill Paxton in ONE FALSE MOVE

Movies to See Right Now

OUR LITTLE SISTER
OUR LITTLE SISTER

THE LAST LAUGH at the 36th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
THE LAST LAUGH at the 36th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

Here are my top picks at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF36), underway right now throughout the Bay Area. The romance Fever at Dawn plays in Palo Alto tonight. This weekend, the festival hosts the West Coast premiere of the documentary The Last Laugh, which explores (gasp) humor and the Holocaust.

In theaters right now:

  • The Japanese domestic drama Our Little Sister is remarkably uplifting. I would seek it out because it’s unlikely to remain in theaters for more than two or three weeks.
  • Zero Days is a documentary on a jaw-dropping hacker mystery – who and how was able to get Iranian military computers to destroy the hardware for their own nuclear weapons program.
  • Opening today in San Francisco, the subversive documentary Under the Sun is a searing insight into totalitarian North Korean society, all from government-approved filming that tells a different story than the wackadoodle dictatorship intended.
  • Finding Dory doesn’t have the breakthrough animation or the depth of story that we expect from Pixar, but it won’t be painful to watch a zillion times with your kids.
  • I’m not writing about Ghostbusters, but I’ve seen it, and it’s not terrible. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are brilliant talents, and they produce some laughs in Ghostbusters.

My DVD/Stream of the week is the harrowing thriller ’71, about a nail-biting 24 hours in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. ’71 is now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Tomorrow night, Turner Classic Movies presents one of my favorite film noirs, The Lineup (1958), with its dazzling San Francisco locations.

THE LINEUP
THE LINEUP

THE LINEUP: cool killer, volcanic killer, careening thru San Francisco

THE LINEUP
THE LINEUP

The 1958 film noir The Lineup plays this Saturday, July 30, on Turner Classic Movies. The villains and the final chase scene are unforgettable, as are the movie’s iconic San Francisco locations.  It’s one of my Overlooked Noirs.

Two gangsters are smuggling heroin into San Francisco, hidden in the bags of unsuspecting cruise ship passengers. When a shipment isn’t where it’s supposed to be (in a girl’s doll), the gangsters take the doll’s owner (Cindy Calloway) and her mother (Mary LaRoche) hostage and then try to hunt down the contraband in San Francisco’s underground. Will the crooks find the junk? Will they harm the hostages? Will the cops find them first? The suspense builds until the man hunt turns into a spectacular chase through San Francisco.

Richard Jaeckel and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP
Richard Jaeckel and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP

The bad guys, Julian (Robert Keith) and Dancer (Eli Wallach), really set The Lineup apart from other crime dramas of the period.  Julian is ruthless, but always controlled and strategic.  One of the most self-aware villains in cinema history, Julian says things like, “Crying’s aggressive and so’s the law. Ordinary people of your class, you don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence.” He describes his partner Dancer as “a wonderful, pure pathological study. He’s a psychopath with no inhibitions.”

Robert Keith’s son, Brian Keith, became a much bigger star in the TV series Family Affair and a host of Disney productions.  But Robert Keith was himself a fine actor, especially as a PTSD-addled colonel in Men in War (1957).  The role of Julian, with its unusual combination of cool smarts and calculated malevolence, became one of Robert Keith’s finest performances.

Eli Wallach in THE LINEUP
Eli Wallach in THE LINEUP

Julian’s biggest challenge is operating with a psychotic partner (Wallach’s Dancer) who is ready to explode in violence at any moment.  Wallach was a great movie character actor who had the gift of packing maximum entertainment value into any role.  Movie fans will probably best remember him for two bandito bad guys – Cavela in The Magnificent Seven and Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  But here he is, just three years after his feature film debut in Baby Doll, and Wallach is seething with intensity as he gives pychopathy an especially bad name.

To make their situation even edgier, Julian and Dancer have hired a local getaway driver  (the ever reliable character actor Richard Jaeckel) who is a raging alcoholic.

There isn’t any lineup of note in The Lineup, which was a theatrical feature seeking to exploit a police procedural TV series of the same name, hence the reference to “30 million fans” in the trailer.  Warner Anderson co-starred in the series and plays the cop in the movie.  The real juice in this movie, however, comes from the criminals that he is chasing.

The Lineup was brilliantly directed by the grievously underrated Don Siegel.  Siegel was a master of crime movies (and was the primary filmmaking mentor to Clint Eastwood).  I particularly love Siegel’s 1973 neo-noir Charley Varrick, the guilty pleasure Two Mules for Sister Sara and John Wayne’s goodbye: The ShootistThe Lineup is right up there with Siegel’s best.

THE LINEUP
THE LINEUP

The biggest star of The Lineup, however, is the San Francisco of the late 1950s. The Lineup starts on the waterfront and ends in a chase that careens from the Cliff House all across the city to the then unfinished Embarcadero Freeway (now itself torn down decades ago). The story also takes us to the old Embarcadero YMCA, the Golden Gate Bridge, War Memorial Opera House, US Custom House, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Legion of Honor, the old DeYoung Museum and the Mark Hopkins Hotel.  There’s even a critical scene in the Sutro Baths – which had become an ice skating rink when the movie was filmed.

Richard Jaeckel, Mary LaRoche, Cindy Calloway, Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP
Richard Jaeckel, Mary LaRoche, Cindy Calloway, Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP (the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island in the background)

The unfinished Embarcadero Freeway in THE LINEUP
The unfinished Embarcadero Freeway in THE LINEUP

The Lineup (one of the few DVDs that I still own) plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies and is available to rent on DVD from Netflix.