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Silicon Valley Movie Times
Movie times in San Jose, Campbell, Fremont, Los Gatos, Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley cities.
Santa Cruz County Movie Times
Movie times in Santa Cruz, Aptos, Capitola, Scotts Valley, Watsonville and other Central Coast cities.
Sonoma County / Napa County / Marin County Movie Times
Movie times in Santa Rosa, Cloverdale, Healdsburg, Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Sonoma, Sebastopol, and other North Bay cities.
Elegy
Philip Roth's novel gets lost in the shuffle of film adaptation
Mirrors
Horror-movie director Alexandre Aja stays one step ahead of his fans
The Rocker
Pete Best Syndrome strikes second-chance drummer Rainn Wilson
Transsiberian
A mystery train races across Russia in Brad Anderson's new film
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Woody Allen warms up in new romantic comedy
Tropic Thunder
Ben Stiller sends up Hollywood egos
Frozen River
A hardscrabble mom turns to smuggling
American Teen
It's not easy surviving to graduation in new documentary
Pineapple Express
Stoner humor keeps Apatow-Rogen fans high
Man on Wire
The true story behind the greatest real-life stunt of them all
The Naked Spur
The Stanford Theatre revives one of Jimmy Stewart's most troubling Westerns
My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin explores the quirky side of Canada
Baghead
Mumblecore comes of age
Ripple Effect
A fashion designer and really bad driver finds redemption in forgiveness
Swing Vote
Kevin Costner plays election-day snafu for laughs
Bottle Shock (PG-13; 110 min.) Helicopter shots of Napa, Glen Ellen and parts of Sonoma County are the highlights of this fictionalized comedy about the 1976 French blind tasting that established California wine as an international force. The feuding father-and-son team of Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) and his hippiesh son Bo (Chris Pine in a Kurt Cobain wig) punch the hell out of each other in a makeshift boxing ring. Freddy Rodriguez of Six Feet Under is the best chum who is learning to become a winemaker on his own. Meanwhile, an intern from UC-Davis named Sam (Rachael Taylor) causes romantic confusion. To the film's credit, there are some knowing references to the coming money storm that would all but drive the funk out of wine country—a montage in which a group of shade-tree vintners are startled to realize that someone would pay them for tastings. A huge improvement over Randall Miller's last film, Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, it still serves up a relentless snarl of cliches—it's amazing that Miller spared himself and us the line "We will sell no wine before its time." The restaging of a famous scene from It Happened One Night epitomizes the general shamelessness. (The scene is a further irritant if you remember how easy it was to hitchhike in Northern California in the mid-1970s.) Alan Rickman, as the British wine merchant who starts the kerfluffle, does a great deal with his air of sarcastic melancholy, and he gives this film a boost whenever he appears. (Opens Aug 15 at Camera 7 in Campbell.) (RvB)
I.O.U.S.A. (PG; 85 min.) The subject is the national debt, the watering of the currency and the lack of a clear plan to make the dollar sound again. Features Patrick Creadon's live closed-circuit discussion with Warren Buffett, Bill Novelli of AARP, Pete Peterson of the Blackstone and others after the show. (Plays Aug 21 at 7:30 at numerous South Bay theaters, including the Eastridge Mall 15, Milpitas Great Mall 20, and the Oakridge 20; www.fathomevents.com.) (RvB)
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (PG-13; 117 min.) The pants don't make much of a showing in this new sequel to the 2005 film, but no matter. They're nothing more than a gimmick to draw us into the lives of our four lovable characters, played by Alexis Bledel, America Ferrera, Blake Lively and Amber Tamblyn. Spending another summer apart, the girls have begun to argue, withhold secrets from one another and generally grow apart. Music-video maker Sanaa Hamri copies the successful formula of the first, including lots of fantasy (especially the cartoonish boyfriend characters), slapstick, heavy-handed plot twists, beautiful vacation spots and ridiculously happy endings. Yet even with only a fourth of the running time apiece, each girl still clocks in with her own potent, involving little short film. With Blythe Danner, Rachel Nichols, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Kyle MacLachlan. From Ann Brashares' novel. (Plays valleywide.) (JMA)
The Wackness (R; 110 min.) Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, The Wackness invests a great deal of energy re-creating the summer of 1994 in New York City; when anyone listens to "Ready to Die" by the Notorious B.I.G., they point out, "It's brand new! It just came out!" But after all this window dressing, it's a banal coming-of-age story. A sensitive, insecure drug dealer (Josh Peck) has somehow turned his glamorous job into a daily drudgery (i.e., no cars, guns or girls). He divides his time between the elusive girl of his dreams (Olivia Thirlby) and his dope-smoking shrink (Ben Kingsley, in yet another show-offy performance), and saves money for his parents' back rent. By the end of August, everyone learns a valuable lesson. It's definitely wack. (Opens July 25 at Camera 7 in Campbell and Century 16 in Mountain View.) (JMA)
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
We can't believe they bothered one more time
Brideshead Revisited
Once was enough
Tell No One
The French deliver a paranoid thriller in the Hitchcock groove
The Edge of Heaven
Fatih Akin tells a multifaceted story of reconciliation
Hancock
Will Smith's superhero falls hard only to fly again
Gonzo
A new documentary traces the incandescent life and works of Hunter S. Thompson
WALL-E
New Pixar feature is a blast-off
Savage Grace
Jullianne Moore's mother from hell makes Joan Crawford look like June Cleaver
Encounters at the End of the World
Werner Herzog explores the ice floes of Antarctica in a quirky new documentary
Brick Lane
Life isn't easy when you're Bangladeshi in east London
Amélie (2001) Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet shows us the working-person's Paris an audience would still like to believe exists. The interiors are so dowdy, they're chic. The citizens are old French-movie people: gruff, shrugging brutes; stout, wheezing landladies with colorful pasts; and, of course, sexless, angelic little gamines looking for love. The moony pixie Amélie (Audrey Tautou) is a counter-girl, paralyzed by the death of Princess Diana. She is moved to follow the princess' example as a helper of others. Cartoonish comedy taffy-pulled into a full-length movie. (Plays Aug 23 at 8:30pm in San Jose at Naglee Park Garage, 505 E. San Carlos St.) (RvB)
Anatomy of a Murder/Bell, Book and Candle (1959/1958) Law school grad Otto Preminger's excellent Michigan murder mystery about a slightly bohemian ex-district attorney (Jimmy Stewart) whose new client (Ben Gazzara) believes the Unwritten Law will get him off a murder charge. Lee Remick co-stars as his wife, voted The Woman Most Likely to Spontaneously Combust; the sharklike prosecutor is George C. Scott. The most quotable line is Stewart's famous protest to the judge: "I'm just a humble country lawyer" (as the fox said to the hens). As the judge: American hero Joseph Welch, the lawyer who stopped Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his tracks; he gives a little speech that has the charm of an amateur Shakespearean reading a favorite passage. BILLED WITH Bell, Book and Candle. A purring witch (Kim Novak) and her purring Siamese familiar, Pyewacket, put the hex on an unsuperstitious Manhattanite. The Novak/ Stewart vibe, made deathless in Vertigo, is here played for bruised comedy; snowy New York (as photographed by James Wong Howe) subs for the heights of San Francisco. This movie has a blessed slowness to it, particularly in a scene where the witch empties Manhattan for the sake of her beloved; while it's a trifle, it seems poignant, probably because of the way Stewart looks at the impassive catlike Novak. (Plays Aug 23-26 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Broken Blossoms/Only Angels Have Wings (1919/1939) A classic melodrama about the London slums, wherein a Chinese immigrant (Richard Barthelmess) befriends a beaten child-woman (Lillian Gish). Directed by D.W. Griffith. Dennis James at the Stanford's Wurlitzer. BILLED WITH Only Angels Have Wings. In a squalid seaside town in Ecuador, pilots face death daily hauling mail over the Andes. We meet the pilots at their hangout, Dutchman's, and learn of their fierce code through the arrival of a stranger, a visiting showgirl. Jean Arthur's brave, classy heroine facing off against Cary Grant's supposedly disinterested pilot is some people's ideal vision of grace under pressure, in men and women alike. Compare it to the similar but superior Henri-Georges Clouzot film The Wages of Fear, which is smart enough to ask the right questions about what the cargo was, why these lives are so cheap and who sent the men to die in the first place. (Plays Aug 20 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
A Mighty Wind (2003) A happy hour and a half with some of the funniest people alive: here, then, is the brainless baba Jennifer Coolidge, the pornographically chirpy Jane Lynch, the terrifyingly spunky Parker Posey, Fred Willard, oafus buckeyestatianus, Bob Balaban as a dithering little squirrel-man, and Ed Begley Jr., presumptuous enough to make Mother Teresa bark. The group targets a folk-music revival show, such as haunts PBS as often as the pledge breaks; on the bill are thinly disguised versions of the Kingston Trio ("The Folksmen"), the New Christy Minstrels ("The New Main Street Singers") and Ian and Sylvia ("Mitch and Mickey"). As Mitch and Mickey, co-writer Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara give the film a strong spine and a big heart. (Plays Aug 23 at sundown in San Jose at St. James Park; Cinequest.org. Free.) (RvB)
National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) Even in its day, and even with the help of low-grade marijuana, this movie was not considered quite as funny or as drastic as the Chris Miller short stories it was based on. Yet John Belushi left his biggest footprint on cinema as Bluto, the slob-legend of the frat house. Belushi's scene of gobbling up the food at the cafeteria, set to the sweetie-sweet "Theme From a Summer Place," is gross comedic magic. (Plays Aug 27 at sundown in San Jose at San Pedro Square; free.) (RvB)
Niles Film Museum This week: Reggie Mixes In (1916). Before becoming the first action hero, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. commonly played fatuous but blythe rich men about town. Here's an example, with Fairbanks going slumming and tangling with a gangster. Billed with The Thieving Hand (1908) with Paul Panzer, and Fatty's Tintype Tangle (1915), in which the portly comedian is mistaken for a wife-stealer. Frederick Hodges is at the piano. (Plays Aug 23 at 7 in Fremont at the Edison Theater, 37417 Niles Blvd.) (RvB)
