December Delights at the Castro Theatre

The Castro Theatre delivers an operatically eclectic December calendar, from the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus' Christmas Eve concerts to my favorite Marx Brothers comedy slam, "A Night at the Opera" (12/30). Our survey kicks off with a modern queer doc classic.

"I Am Divine" It's a warm, early-70s summer day in Austin, Texas, and I'm strolling along Guadalupe, "The Drag," with my buddies Troy and Ronnie. We've just caught Divine wrapping her lips around a dog turd in John Waters' Pink Flamingos at Dobie Cinemas. My queer-culture baby teeth had been cut on Andy Warhol's "Lonesome Cowboys," but this was definitely a whole other drag planet. My friends treated Flamingos as just another of the bizarro events peppering the fringe of the UT campus, while I would be pushed along a curve of energy leading to radio chats with drag illuminati Charles Busch, Charles Pierce, Ethyl Eichelberger and Justin Vivian Bond.

Jeffrey Schwarz's intimate, hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of Harris Glenn Milstead, a.k.a. Divine, kicks off a decade-and-a-half after I was struck by the Divine/Waters fairy wand. It's the evening of Feb. 16, 1988, the world premiere of the movie "Hairspray" in Baltimore, with the city's African American mayor giving the Divine/Waters team their hometown's official seal of approval, inducting them into their weird burg's hall of fame, joining such more respectable luminaries as Anne Tyler and Barry Levinson. It may have been the greatest night in Divine's life, and sadly the last, as he would, within hours, die in his sleep.

Schwarz gives us a totally candid "This Was Your Life, Divine," with a roll call of the performer's childhood friends and early observers of his unbelievable stab at stardom. Glenn's mom recalls the doctor informing her that her boy might be gender-challenged. A female friend notes the fast crowd that the teenage Glenn hooked up with. "We were freaks, we weren't hippies. Freaks drank, ate meat, and did drugs."

Waters, noting that he and Glenn/Divine didn't really bond until they were about 17, recalls an early movie moment. "Divine and I were the only people who ever saw Bergman movies on LSD. 'Hour of the Wolf,' where she pulls her face off, that really freaked Divine out!" (12/9)

"Gravity" This lost-in-space instant classic from Mexican auteur Alfonso Cuaron rocks in 3-D because the space junk threatening the lives of astronauts George Clooney and Sandra Bullock really makes a dramatic impression when it's hurtling your way. (12/10-11)

"Some Like It Hot" A gem of a double-bill bookends the arc of the hottest creative streak of onetime-German/Jewish, Austrian-born journalist/gigolo/director Billy Wilder. Wilder's delicious screwball romp is still the top farce featuring men in dresses that hews to character and story. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are hilariously in synch as two feuding out-of-work musicians donning dresses to survive the Prohibition-era Chicago mob's St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Marilyn Monroe shines as the hot-blooded Sugar Cane, her last great performance for the only director who worked with her more than once. The very hetero Wilder still holds the record for the best-ever film-ending, gender-bending one-liner, as Lemmon's Daphne yanks off his wig to confront his millionaire future husband.

"Osgood, I'm a man!"

"Nobody's perfect."

"The Fortune Cookie" Walter Matthau absolutely crushes the first of his pairings with Jack Lemmon. This Billy Wilder/A.I.L. Diamond-penned insurance-scam caper - a sort of sequel to the team's five-Oscar 1960 masterpiece, "The Apartment" - finds Lemmon's schnook, a TV cameraman injured while shooting a Browns-Vikings game, falling prey to his shyster brother-in-law's scheme to claw a million bucks from the Browns and CBS. Wilder cast Matthau on the strength of his Tony turn as Broadway's Oscar Madison in "The Odd Couple." Matthau blends Groucho's insinuating slouch and W.C. Fields' deadpan one-liners with a wicked knack for finding dark humor in the worst side of our nature. Matthau's Best Supporting Actor Oscar for "Cookie" would ignite a leading-man career that careened across categories from "Hello, Dolly!" to "The Bad News Bears."

A film that traffics in wire-tapping private eyes, gambling nuns and drug-dispensing racetrack touts also features Hollywood's most spectacular on-screen crash diet: Matthau, hospitalized for three months after a massive heart attack, can be seen opening a door weighing 198 lbs., then entering the room at a trim 160. (both 12/29)

"Blue Jasmine" Cate Blanchett is over the moon in the strongest Woody Allen drama since "Match Point." Allen hands the Australian actress some juicy material. It's not often anyone gets to emote through a script inspired by two of the country's finest tragedians, Tennessee Williams and Bernard Madoff. (1/2)

"Bettie Page Reveals All" (opens Friday at Landmark Theatres) If the small-town gal who was Bettie Page had never existed, Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner might have dreamed her up himself. And, in a sense, he did. In Oscar-nominated director Mark Mori's absorbing culture doc, the pajama-attired Hefner sits inside his mansion and describes what was so special about the Nashville-born pin-up model who became an unlikely soldier in the 1960s sexual revolution. We observe how Page combined physical beauty, personal audacity, and a surprisingly clean-cut image, becoming the very embodiment of Hefner's drive to make straight boys feel like diving into a slick package of soft-core erotica and big-league consumerism.

In an interview recorded just before her death, Page narrates her lifetime battle against censorship and repression. This doc, intended as both an insider's view and a rebuttal to aspects of director Mary Harron's acclaimed 2005 narrative "The Notorious Bettie Page," boasts a lively soundtrack featuring Los Straightjackets and Jack Rabbit Slim. Mori is heartbreakingly precise about Bettie's post-pin-up decline, resulting in a nine-year commitment for a religious-fueled mental breakdown.

Info: www.castrotheatre.com