Balboa Theatre revives nostalgic Saturday matinees
On a weekly basis, the 90-year-old Richmond District treasure offers up a classic safe for the whole family — and 10 bucks gets you a ticket, popcorn and a drink.
The 1981 original is a nearly perfect movie that changed action films forever, with a rock-solid story and screenplay (by Bay Area filmmaker Philip Kaufman and Lawrence Kasdan, both terrific directors in their own right) and fresh characters — Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and a host of great character actors from John Rhys-Davies to Denholm Elliott.
For the underrated “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (Feb. 18), Lucas wanted to go much darker than the original, much as he had with “The Empire Strikes Back,” the second film in his “Star Wars” trilogy.
Maligned by many, but there’s so much to like: A fantastic Busby Berkeley musical number to Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” to open the film; a wonderful new character in Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), Indy’s 10-year-old helper who is a tribute to Sam Fuller’s Short Round character in the 1951 Korean War film “The Steel Helmet”; and a fantastic mine car chase done with mostly miniatures capped by a thrilling climax on a rope suspension bridge.
The conventional wisdom holds that “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (Feb. 25), which imagined Sean Connery as Indy’s father, as the far better film than “Temple of Doom.”
The Struggle for Utopia, this movie series examines the groundbreaking, politically charged independent cinema that flowered in a turbulent time.
Take “Medium Cool” (8:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11, and 7 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12), Haskell Wexler’s brilliant tale of a photographer (Robert Forster of “Jackie Brown”) covering the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago — filmed documentary-style during the actual convention.
The series, which runs through May 11, includes two Rolling Stones documentaries, one by Jean-Luc Godard (“Sympathy for the Devil,” Feb. 18) and one by Albert Maysles (“Gimme Shelter,” Feb. 19); Michelangelo Antonioni’s fascinating head-scratcher “Zabriskie Point” (March 4, March 19); and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s midnight movie acid trip “The Holy Mountain” (May 7).
Picking up where the hippies left off, the punk and alternative music scene thrived as an anarchic counterpoint to the disco-fueled club scene of Studio 54.
“When Harry Met Sally ... ”: Yup, I’ll have what she’s having too, as the Rob Reiner-Billy Crystal-Meg Ryan comedy classic is this month’s Cerrito Classic series pick at 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9.
The German-born Golden Age Hollywood director of sophisticated comedies and musicals that were so distinctive they were said to have “the Lubitsch touch” is celebrated with a series that runs through March 26 at the Stanford Theatre.