Friday, March 15, 2024

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 15 March 2024 - 21 March 2024

As much as I am looking forward to seeing Love Lies Bleeding this weekend - it looks cool! - I'm also looking forward to two months from now, when it leaves theaters, and neither listings nor posters cause the Elton John song to play on repeat in my head. It's led me to look up "love lies bleeding" and discover that both the film and song are likely named after a flower, though, so that's fun.
  • So, might as well start with Love Lies Bleeding, which features Kristen Stewart as a woman managing a gym owned by her gangster father (Ed Harris), her eye turned by a new-in-town bodybuilder (Katy O'Brien), even as the FBI is poking around >it's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Somerville, CinemaSalem, Kendall Square, CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, and Assembly Row.

    Video game midnights at the Coolidge are Nintendo-themed, with The Wizard on Friday and the original live-action Super Mario Bros. on 35mm Saturday (The Room also plays late on Friday). There's also a kids' show of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids on Saturday morning, while Goethe-Institut presents Born in Evin with director and subject Maryam Zaree, who learned as an adolescent that she was born in an Irani prison after the rise of Khomeini. On Tuesday, they screen Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on 35mm with a pre-film seminar by Kyle Stevens, while Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death the Big Screen Classic on Wednesday and Winter's Bone the next film in the Debra Granik retrospective on Thursday. Thursday also has the first instance of Dune: Part Two moving upstairs and playing digitally rather than on 70mm film.
  • Arthur The King is the more conventional wide-opener, with Mark Wahlberg as an adventure racer who, on his last race, encounters a Very Good Stray Dog who helps and becomes a symbol of his team. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.

    More peculiar is The American Society of Magical Negroes, which makes the trope literal, with Justice Smith assigned to make a software developer's life easier, because white tears cause Black trouble. It's at Boston Common, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row.

    Also opening is One LIfe featuring Johnny Flynn and Anthony Hopkins as the same man at different points in his life - as a young man rescuing Jewish children from the ghettos in WWII Czechoslovakia and as a retiree wondering what became of them. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, The Embassy, and the Lexington Venue.

    Knox Goes Away is the second film that Michael Keaton has directed, and in both he plays a hitman, in this case one suffering from early-onset dementia, and his one last job appears to be getting his son (James Marsden) out of trouble. Nice cast, including Marcia Gay Harden and Al Pacino. It's at Boston Common and South Bay.

    Boston Common also has a surprising number of showtimes for Snack Shack, which looks for all the world like a throwback comedy about teenagers hanging around the community swimming pool; interestingly, it's directed by Adam Rehmeier, who made the more hard-edged Dinner in America. The Prank, also playing at Boston Common, looks edgier, with two students spreading a rumor online that their physics teacher (Rita Moreno) is a murderer after failing a test.

    Documentary Bad River also plays Boston Common; it's a documentary by Mary Mazzio about the Native people in Wisconsin attempting to prevent the contamination of Lake Superior.

    Labyrinth has an encore show at South Bay on Sunday. The Matrix plays 25th Anniversary shows on the Dolby screens at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row on Wednesday. Hal Needham-directed BMX film Rad plays Thursday at Boston Common, South Bay.
  • Landmark Kendall Square opens Netflix release Shirley, starring Regina King as Sherley Chisolm, America's first Black Congresswoman, with the late Lance Reddick and Terrence Howard in supporting roles. They also give the mostly-matinee treatment to Shadya, with Amir Ebrahimi as an Iranian expatriate in Australia fleeing an abusive husband.

    Tuesday's New Hollywood film is Jaws, which if they were really clever would be the last film in the series.
  • The Brattle Theatre has one roller coaster ride of a week coming up, starting with a free screening of Blackwaters on Friday afternoon, with a post-screening panel.

    After that, they present "Still Walking: The Cinema of Hirokazu Kore-Eda", including After Life (Friday/Saturday), Still Walking (Saturday), Broker (Saturday), Air Doll (Saturday), and Shoplifters (Sunday), and Monster (Sunday). Kore-Eda will appear in person at many shows (several marked as sold out), and is the special guest at the annual Chlotrudis Awards on Sunday night.

    Horror oddity Messiah of Evil returns on Monday & Tuesday in 4K (the theater installed a fancy 4K laser projector during renovations a week or so ago). That's a fair lead-in to The Boston Underground Film Festival, which kicks off Wednesday with a preview of Immaculate and a restoration of Fatal Termination (a Hong Kong actioner with Moon Lee and an infamous car chase; Thursday features Strange Kindness, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, and Femme, with the festival continuing through Sunday.
  • It's a relatively quiet weekend for Indian film at Apple Fresh Pond, with only three new releases. Yodha (also at Boston Common) kind of looks like Hindi for "Passenger 57", with Sidharth Malhotra as a security expert who may be hijacking a plane or may be being set up, with some engine failure thrown into the mix. Also playing in Hindi is Bastar: The Naxal Story, which chronicles an uprising in 1910 Chattisgarh. They also open Telugu-language horror movie Tantra Telugu drama Sharathulu Varthisthai plays out at the Liberty Tree Mall.

    Shaitaan returns to Fresh Pond on Sunday, and is also held over at Boston Common; Gaami and Manjummel Boys return Monday.

    Chinese film YOLO continues at Causeway Street and Boston Common.

    The End of Evangelion plays Boston Common Sunday and Wednesday. Three other movies from Japan are still around but dwindling this weekend, with Oscar-nominated Perfect Days at the Coolidge, the Somerville, Kendall Square, the Embassy, the Lexington Venue; Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba - To the Hashira Training is down to South Bay; and The Boy and the Heron still at Fresh Pond and West Newton.
  • The Alamo Seaport seems to finally be showing a full schedule, including 9pm shows, although none of French horror film The Animal Kingdom three screenings (on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday) are late ones. The rep calendar has more 1994 films, namely Pulp Fiction (Friday/Sunday/Tuesday) and Crooklyn (Saturday); there's also The Fugitive (Sunday/Tuesday), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Sunday Movie Party/Tuesday), the 2018 Suspiria (Tuesday), and an early screening of Riddle of Fire on Wednesday.
  • The Somerville Theatre picks up Perfect Days and Love Lies Bleeding, brings back Oppenheimer for 70mm matinee screenings on Friday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and is still keeping Hundreds of Beavers around. They also start their spring rep series of "every movie mentioned in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" with a 35mm double feature of This Gun for Hire & The Glass Key on Monday. On Thursday, they begin "Smooth Cinema: Movies with the Yacht Rock Sound" with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on 35mm film.

    Over at The Capitol, The Maltese Falcon is the Friday/Monday Capitol Crimes show, while "Good For Her" has a double feature of Midsommar & Pearl on Saturday and Tuesday.
  • The Regent Theatre has two local rock docs this weekend: The Dogmatics: A Documentary plays Friday night, with "Boston's House Band", as they were called back in the 1980s, on-hand to perform a set afterward. On Sunday afternoon, they play Rock n' Roll Outlaw - The Ballad of Myles Connor; Connor was said to be Boston's first rock star, who also masterminded 30 museum heists, and will be at the screening..
  • Spring break is over, so The Harvard Film Archive begins showing films again o Monday with Jean-PIerre Bekolo's first, Quartier Mozart, in which a young woman is turned into a man by a local witch, hangs out with a bunch of other guys, and it pushed to make time with the daughter of a local cop. Bekolo, the year's McMillan-Stewart fellow, will be in town to introduce films next weekend.

    Also: Today (Friday) is the last day to stream their "Cinema Before 1300" lecture, although I don't imagine it will be offline forever.
  • Bright LIghts also returns with a free Thursday screening of The Persian Version in the Bright Screening Room of the Paramount Theater, with co-star Niousha Noor on-hand for post-film discussion.
  • The Boston Baltic Film Festival is still streaming films through Monday.

    Boston Jewish Film continues to stream its "2024 Musical Roadtrip" series through Thursday.
  • The Museum of Science looks sold out for its last two showtimes of Dune: Part Two, on the Omni screen this weekend , but still appears to have seats for Mad Max: Fury Road on the 22nd & 23rd.
  • The Lexington Venue is open Friday to Sunday and Thursday with One Life, The Taste of Things and Perfect Days (no show Thursday).

    The West Newton Cinema has last call for the Oscar shorts (Documentary Saturday, Live-Action Sunday, Animation both days), brings back Poor Things and The Zone of Interest (Saturday/Monday/Tuesday/Thursday), and also shows Kung Fu Panda 4, Dune: Part Two, Driving Madeleine (Sunday), American Fiction (no show Wednesday), Migration (Saturday), Wonka (Saturday/Sunday), The Boy and the Heron, and The Holdovers (no show Tuesday/Wednesday).

    The Luna Theater has Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Friday and Saturday, Blade Runner (Final Cut) on Sunday, and a Weirdo Wednesday show.

    Cinema Salem has Kung Fu Panda 4, Dune: Part Two, Love Lies Bleeding, Oppenheimer, and Stopmotion from Friday to Monday.
So, can one fit Love Lies Bleeding, Knox Goes Away, The Animal Kingdom, YOLO, Shirley, The Maltese Falcon, This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, and Quartier Mozart in before BUFF? No, Monday alone is brutal, and if you want to fit any of the oddities at Boston Common in, you're basically not doing anything else over the weekend.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 March 2024 - 14 March 2024

Here's a "maybe there's some falloff from the big debut, or maybe stuff doesn't get an Oscar boost, but let's not chance the prospects on something really big on it" slate of releases.
  • I'm kind of surprised DreamWorks didn't release Kung Fu Panda 4 a month ago for Lunar New Year, but apparently it's not Chinese enough to play there during the blackout period. This one appears to skip the Furious Five to have Jack Black's Po team up with a fox voiced by Awkwafina to face a Chameleon (Viola Davis) with the techniques of his vanquished opponents. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including RealD 3D), Causeway Street (including RealD 3D), Kendall Square, the Seaport (including RealD 3D), South Bay (including RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill..

    If you're taking kids to the movies, remember - Imaginary is not the cute-looking imaginary friends family adventure (that's IF), but the Blumhouse horror flick where imaginary friends are putting kids (and the grownups who abandoned them) in terrible danger! It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Chestnut Hill.

    Cabrini gets a bigger release than this sort of "inspirational" picture usually does (it's from the director and studio behind Sound of Freedom), with Cristiana Dell'Anna as an immigrant in the 1890s who takes it upon herself to serve New York's hungry, with John Lithgow & David Morse the more notable folks in the supporting cast. It's at the Capitol, the Embassy, Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards.

    Freud's Last Session returns for matinees at Boston Common. Based on what's scheduled starting Monday, the folks programming that theater seem to be betting pretty heavily on Poor Things and Oppenheimer at the Oscars.

    Labyrinth plays Boston Common, South Bay, and Arsenal Yards on Sunday. There's an AMC Screen Unseen preview at Causeway Street, Assembly Row on Monday. Love Lies Bleeding has a non-mystery preview at Boston Common on Wednesday.
  • The Coolidge Corner Theatre hasn't opened the new wing yet, but their site has changed how they display screens - the Screening Room is now Movie House 3 ("MH3") and the GoldScreen Movie House 4 ("MH4"), so it's a little trickier to pick up when stuff is playing on the smaller screens, like Problemista.., which features director Julio Torres as a Salvadoran immigrant trying to thread the needle between "can't get a visa without a job" and "can't get a job without a visa" in New York, hoping Tilda Swinton's gallery curator can help him out. It also plays the Kendall, Boston Common, and the Seaport.

    The Coolidge's video game midnights continue with Sonic the Hedgehog on Friday and the surprisingly fun Street Fighter on Saturday. Dune monopolizing the main screen means rep is limited to Open Screen on Tuesday, a Big Screen Debut presentation of Wanda with Kaj Wilson offering a seminar before the film on Wednesday, plus a Cinema Jukebox show of Monterey Pop and the first leg of their Debra Granik retrospective, feature debut Down to the Bone, on Thursday.
  • I think the last Lunar New Year movie to arrive stateside is YOLO, a remake of Japanese film 100 Yen Love with writer/director/star Jia Ling as the woman who leaves the family home after an argument and takes up boxing after being attacked; Jia, you may recall, had the surprise Lunar New Year hit a few years back with Hi Mom!, a time-travel comedy that still hasn't made it stateside. The new one plays Boston Common and Causeway Street. Pegasus 2 also continues at Boston Common, with Article 20 remaining at Causeway Street.

    Another six new Indian films at Apple Fresh Pond this weekend: Shaitaan is Hindi-language horror movie with Ajay Devgn, and also opens at Boston Common. Gaami a Malayalam quest into the unknown. Telugu action movie Bhimaa has a city cop sent to investigate a case at a small town temple; Telugu romantic comedy Premalu has Naslen as a young man torn between two women. Hindi-language film Mahayogi: Highway 1 to Oneness sure looks like it and writer/director/star (subject?) Rajan Luthra are trying to sell something. Those open Friday; Kannada-language comedy Ranganayaka plays Saturday and Sunday.Manjummel Boys is held over at Fresh Pond and Article 370 continues at Boston Common.

    Three movies from Japan hanging around theaters this weekend, with Oscar-nominated Perfect Days at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, the Embassy, the Lexington Venue, CinemaSalem, and Boston Common; Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba - To the Hashira Training at Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row; and The Boy and the Heron still at Fresh Pond and West Newton.
  • Very limited showtimes for They Shot the Piano Player at Landmark Kendall Square - it plays daily at 4:10pm, plus earlier shows on Saturday and Sunday - which is a shame, because the new film from the makers of Chico & Rita looks kind of nifty, another music-focused animated drama for grown-ups, this one featuring Jeff Goldblum doing the voice of a reporter investigating the disappearance of a jazz pianist in 1976 Buenos Aires.

    Tuesday's New Hollywood flick is the original version of The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen & Ali McGraw and directed by Sam Pickinpah.
  • The Brattle Theatre has a digital restoration of Martha Coolidge's Not a Pretty Picture from Friday to Sunday, and takes the opportunity to showcase a few of the directors' other movies on 35mm. Valley Girl on Friday night and separate shows of Rambling Rose (including post-film chat with Strictly Brohibited) and Real Genius.

    For the rest of the week, they have the latest "Columbia 100" series with "Some of Columbia's Best (Picture Nominees)": It Happened One Night on Sunday afternoon, a double feature of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (35mm) & Born Yesterday Monday, a double bill of The Big Chill (35mm) & The Last Picture Show Tuesday, Sense and Sensibility & Little Women '19 (35mm) Wednesday, and a 35mm print of The Social Network on Thursday. There's also the member-even Oscar Party on Sunday night and an RPM Fest presentation of "Another Horizon: Stephanie Barber" at 9pm Thursday.
  • The Alamo rep calendar has more 1994 films, with The Little Rascals (Friday), Pulp Fiction (Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday Movie Party). They also have Time Bandits on Saturday, an "On Cinema at the Cinema" special on Sunday, Nimona as part of a "World of Animation" focus on shapeshifters Monday, a Love Lies Bleeding preview with livestreamed Q&A plus an Orlando as part of the Tilda Swinton series on Tuesday, and Pi on Thursday (3.14).
  • The Somerville Theatre holds Hundreds of Beavers over for a second week, and I'm weirdly proud of my neighborhood for this.

    The folks at The Capitol have Bonnie & Clyde for Capitol Crimes on Friday and Monday, plus "Good For Her" shows of Basic Instinct on Saturday and Tuesday.
  • The Embassy plays Inundation District on Thursday; it's a new documentary by David Abel & Ted Blanco about the folly of building a new neighborhood on landfill in the Boston Seaport area as waters rise from climate change. It does not play at the Alamo Drafthouse in said neighborhood.
  • ArtsEmerson and presents two documentaries this weekend: Rally on Friday profiles Rose Pak, a tremendously influential 1970s San Francisco reporter and activist, in association with Boston Asian-American Film Festival; Dawnland on Saturday afternoon details the abduction of Native Children and the Maine/Wabanaki Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
  • The Regent Theatre has the 9th annual "No Man's Land" program of female-centric outdoor films on Friday night and the first Midweek Music Movies & More show in a while, The Job of Songs, on Wednesday evening.
  • Joe's Free Films shows a screening of Kafka Goes to the Movies, along with readings from his diary and panel discussions, on Saturday afternoon. RSVP required.

  • The Boston Baltic Film Festival continues for another week or so online, with what looks like 12 features, a television series, and 4 shorts to stream.

    Boston Jewish Film launches a streaming "2024 Musical Roadtrip" series on Thursday, with four documentaries from around the worldavailable for eight days.
  • The Museum of Science looks sold out for its last two weekends of Dune: Part Two, on the Omni screen, but will have Mad Max: Fury Road on the dome on the 22nd & 23rd.
  • Probably the last week for Oscar-Nominated Shorts, with the Kendall and West Newton showing Animation and Live Action more or less all week, with West Newton also having the docs Saturday & Sunday. The ICA has Animation and Live Action on Saturday; The Somerville has Animation (Saturday/Sunday); Luna Lowell has Live Action (Saturday), Documentary (Saturday/Sunday), and Animation (Sunday); Cinema Salem has Animation (Friday/Saturday/Monday), Live Action (Friday-Sunday), and Documentary (Friday-Monday).
  • The Lexington Venue is open Friday to Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday with The Taste of Things and Perfect Days.

    The West Newton Cinema opens Kung Fu Panda. Still playing are Dune: Part Two, All of Us Strangers (Friday-Sunday), the Oscar Shorts, Driving Madeleine (no show Sunday), American Fiction, Migration (Firday/Saturday), The Boys in the Boat, Wonka (Friday/Saturday), The Boy and the Heron (no show Thursday), and The Holdovers.

    The Luna Theater once again has The Zone of Interest evenings Friday to Sunday, with the Oscar Shorts Saturday.& Sunday afternoons, a Weirdo Wednesday show, and a free UMass Lowell Philosophy & Film presentation of The Matrix Resurrections.

    Cinema Salem has Kung Fu Panda 4, Dune: Part Two, the Oscar Shorts, and Perfect Days from Friday to Monday. They also have a Night Light show of Belladonna of Sadness on Friday, All the President's Men on Saturday, and Pi on Thursday.
Is The Zone of Interest, American Fiction, and two shorts packages possible before the Oscars on Sunday? Maybe, but if I'm as lazy as I have been… Anyway, Nimona is not, but I've already got a ticket for that Monday, Somehow, They Shot the Piano Player, Shrek 4, and YOLO will be in there too.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

This Week in Tickets: 26 February 2024 - 3 March 2024 (Slow Week)

Very slow new release weekend, very lazy get-out-of-the-apartment mid-week.

This Week in Tickets
This week kicked off with one of my favorite Boston-area moviegoing experiences, the kind of disreputable movie at a fancy institution. In this case, it was Cotton Comes to Harlem at the Harvard Film Archive. In this case, it was shown in conjunction with the University's Houghton Library, which has acquired star Godfrey Cambridge's papers and has some of them on display in the lobby. He was a writer and journalist as well as being an actor, and the slide-show before the (very fun) movie was interesting.

I believe there was some weird train nonsense that made getting to things harder during the week, but I forget which color of weird train nonsense it was. Then on Friday, scheduling was weird/off, so both the big releases got hit on Saturday - Dune: Part Two as the afternoon matinee in 70mm on the Somerville's main screen and The Moon Thieves that evening, which was a pretty good day at the movies.

Sunday's train nonsense was definitely the Red Line - I came up just short of the one meant to get me to Kendall Square for some Oscar shorts and the next one wouldn't be for fifteen minutes, too late - so I wound up getting groceries and then catching Anatomy of a Fall at night, so I at least got a little Oscar catch-up done.

This week promises a little more on my Letterboxd account, although short packages probably won't be on in and Sunday's Oscar night, so I'll be watching that.


Cotton Comes to Harlem

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2024 in the Harvard Film Archive (Godfrey Cambridge, 35mm)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on DVD at Amazon

Cotton Comes to Harlem is just top-shelf pulp filmmaking from Ossie Davis, the sort where you maybe expect to cut it a little slack for its pioneer status but instead find a movie that feels like something more assured and confident in how its genre works than a lot of later Blaxploitation films. The term didn't exist yet, but it is that, and maybe a top example of the genre.

It's adapted from one of a series of books starring two Harlem NYPD detectives, "Grave Digger" Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and "Coffin Ed" Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) who, from their nicknames, are likely not known for de-escalation and bringing suspects in quietly. To start, they're assigned to watch a rally by Reverend Deke O'Malley (Calvin Lockhart), and ex-con running Johnson is certain is a scam as he convinces neighbors to invest in his Back-to-Africa program. The event is robbed, and O'Malley's people are nearly as aggressive toward the cops as the crooks during the chase. The guys decide to surveil Deke's girlfriend Iris (Judy Pace), though he opts to shack up with his late second-in-command's wife Mabel (Emily Yancy). During the chase, a bale of cotton falls from the robbers' van, and neighborhood character "Uncle Budd" (Redd Foxx) picks it up, not knowing that the stolen $87,000 is inside and everyone is looking for it.

It's worth noting that the initial car chase is kind of terrific, not just because it's the sort of old-school chase that is quite frankly terrifying if you think about it, just cars that are all sharp metal speeding through streets where one shouldn't be going that fast, without modern crumple zones or airbags, gunshots that feel like every stray could kill a bystander, etc. It's in the classic "do more, say less" mode that it reveals a lot of the story without spelling it out (it's very clear that Deke is in cahoots with those robbing him but also not something Grave Digger and Coffin Ed can present as certain), great storytelling on top of great stunts. At the other end, there's a climax where a curtain falls in a way that's maybe more symbolic than the movie really merits, but is too good to not do. Davis and co-writer Arnold Perl know the power of the image and will do all they can to let it elevate a B-movie filled with secret passages, broad characterization, and maybe a little more nudity than is strictly necessary, at least a little.

The comedy at times gets a little broad at times, but it's notable that Davis and company already have their leads kind of cracking jokes about the sheer number of slogans and comments on authenticity that various activists are using, at the time even as they're doing it (consider the earnest performer talking about how she has to do something important that speaks to Her People toward the start and how that winds up being burlesque in the end). It kind of feels like the sort of self-aware thing that comes at the end of a cycle, tweaking the things that had gotten so serious over time, rather than at what's arguably the first blaxploitation film, but, then, sometimes things do start out that way and have it stripped out only to get more sophisticated later.

Also, the Archive had a gorgeous print of a great-looking movie - Colors really pop when everybody's outside during the daytime, and there's a sense of Harlem being both kind of run down and on the way up that the palette and Gerald Hirschfeld's cinematography really heightens.


Dune: Part Two

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 70mm)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

Like its predecessor, Dune: Part Two is absolutely impeccable as a "just look at this thing" epic, especially on the Somerville Theatre's 70mm screen, chock-full of absolutely astounding feats of design, cinematography, and every other technical element of making a movie. It may not be the best possible realization of Frank Herbert's book, but it will certainly be daunting for someone considering another adaptation 20 years from now (as that appears to be the cycle we're on).

Although, speaking of Astounding (or was it Analog by then?), you can kind of see the original serial structure here, I think, as a lot of the focus changes suddenly around the midpoint, and it's bumpy, in part because director Denis Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts compacted a novel that took place over about five years to one that doesn't quite last the length of a pregnancy. That not only robs of the series's first creepy little kid, but it means that the Fremen seem a little more credulous about Paul's Chosen One status, and his eventual turn more forced than tragic. There's also a sense that the filmmakers are a bit wobbly on how they deal with prophecy and mysticism, not quite hitting that sweet spot where there's human frailty driving the sci-fi plot devices. The royalty, eugenics, and propaganda the story rails against work too well.

Crazy good cast, at least. Timothée Chalamet does a really nice job of making a character who is such a product of a weird environment as Paul into someone a viewer can genuinely connect with before turning on the afterburners, and while I'm not sure I've yet seen Zendaya in the role that makes one sure she's this sort of single-name superstar, one can certainly see where she's capable of being that actress. Rebecca Ferguson is a force, and it feels like it's been too long since I've seen Christopher Walken in anything.

And, did I mention it's gorgeous? They seem to have refined a lot of things that were only pretty good the first time around, such as the Harkonnen planet and royal family; there are more cool details to their standard black-leather bad guys this time around, and whoever came up with the black fireworks deserves some sort of raise.

So, yes, I'm looking forward to Dune Messiah (or Dune: Part Three, if they go that route), whenever they get around to that.


Anatomie d'une chute (Anatomy of a Fall)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2024 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase on Prime and elsewhere and for pre-order on Blu-ray at Amazon

Anatomy of a Fall is a pretty darn good movie, but I think it's also the sort of movie that benefits from being the sort of thing that writers, actors, and other folks who really appreciate such things love. It's got a script full of ambiguity and chewy dialogue that actors and critics quite reasonably fall in love with, often enough to forgive when it gets a little too caught up in those things, even before the story itself is centering writing as so crucial. It wants you to know it's clever, and that it mostly is doesn't always help when it's maybe too clever by at least a little bit.

The first half is great, at least, sort of brilliantly uncomfortable in its depiction how opaque and being part of a police investigation must feel from the inside, placing the viewer right in the middle of what could be a suicide, murder, or accident, with director Justine Triet and her co-writer Arthur Harari at once presenting it as a mystery that leaves room for the victim's wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller) to be culpable but also highlighting the tension of being in her position and knowing that an inquiry is necessary but possibly dangerous rightly or wrongly. It's full of tension, with her lawyer Vincent (Swann Arlaud) trying to work this case with detachment and her son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) possibly convincing himself that she couldn't have done it. It's here that the stuff that often unnerves during courtroom dramas - the way that every kind of evidence, from eyewitness to forensic, is far more subjective than believe - plays out.

Once the film jumps forward a year to the trial, the second half can't quite avoid how much fun this stuff is for writers, actors, and lawyers, and that's before you get to the a recording being entered into evidence that is a performer's dream for just how many words it contains about just laying out the facts of a relationship and the grievances within, no matter how convenient the whole thing is, and how Triet and Harari are putting "Sandra is complex and maybe difficult to like even if she is innocent" out from. Then they pin the whole thing on Daniel being a kid who is so absurdly perceptive in retrospect that it stretches belief. Add that to the combativeness and insinuations from the prosecutor that are barely pushed against (folks used to American courtroom dramas and courtrooms are going to wonder if French ones are really like this a lot!), and the natural, discomfiting situations of the first half are replaced by a lot of people trying just a bit harder than they seemingly have to.

On balance, I think the upsides of this setup outweighs the pitfalls that the movie happily springs, and by a fair amount. It's never less than compelling, and for all that one can easily point out how the second half isn't quite so interesting as the first, Triet is pretty darn good at walking right up to the point where you roll your eyes but not quite getting there. Actors and critics don't go for this just because they're self-interested, but because there's so much good work that can be (and is) done with it.

Spare thoughts: First, everyone saying that Messi deserves all the awards for Best Supporting Animal is correct - he is just an extremely good dog. Second, this look at the French legal system does nothing to shake me of the idea that trial by jury is like democracy - the worst possible way to arrive at a fair result, except for all the others. Cotton Comes to Harlem Dune: Part Two The Moon Thieves Anatomy of a Fall

Sunday, March 03, 2024

The Moon Thieves

Me, last week: "And, with this in theaters, I think that we're probably through with Lunar New Year movies for a bit."

So, not the case - we got this on Friday, because there's apparently a limit to just how much Dune Boston Common could play with two other multiplexes a pretty easy walk or subway ride away. I honestly don't know if it would have played North America in general or Boston specifically if local theaters didn't have screens to fill because the studios' release slates were so thin after the strikes. I used to wonder when schedules would bounce back from covid before the strikes, but I wonder if consolidation and corporate debt is going to leave this the new normal.

Anyway, we've got this, and YOLO is coming out next weekend. Five or six big movies (if you count this, which isn't quite big and probably only came out in Hong Kong versus the mainland) that all got released on one weekend in China and did pretty well because that place is huge.

Kind of a shame this isn't the last one, though, because there'd be some irony if we wound up coming sort of full circle, what with Louis Cheung Kai-Chung also starring in Table for Six 2. Just like we recently had a couple of Andy Lau movies staggered a couple weeks here while they came out the same day in China, I wonder if Cheung having two movies come out the same day in Hong Kong helped or hurt, given that it was one of the local big movie weekends.


The Moon Thieves (aka The Moon Thi4v3s)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2024 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)

The Moon Thieves is your basic heist movie, but that's no bad thing. It could probably do with finding more ways to build the story around the watchmaking material that gives it a unique identity, but it does enough with that to make things kind of interesting. It's not crazy like the director's previous film Legally Declared Dead was, but does what it sets out to do.

It involves Vincent Ma (Edan Lui Cheuk-On), a young horologist with a line in "period component" watches - that is, counterfeits constructed out of parts from the appropriate era - who is being blackmailed into taking a much riskier job than his usual: Stealing three watches designed and worn by Pablo Picasso from the prestigious Quark Salon in Tokyo. "Uncle" (Kenug To), the second-generation owner of Hong Kong's most notorious stolen-watch shop who kept the nickname used by his later father, has put together a team that also includes "Chief" (Louis Cheung Kai-Chung), a veteran team leader; Mario (Michael Ning), a demolitions expert who mostly works on film sets; and Yoh (Anson Lo Hon-Ting), the safecracker son of Ms. Hong, a former yegg herself whose failing vision has her running a fabric store - and whose other son died on a job with Chief and Mario. It's a tricky job to start, complicated when Vincent discovers that the antique vault in Quark also contains S/N 43, the watch Buzz Aldrin wore on the moon which has since gone missing. Sure, it's long been his obsession, but you probably don't want to cross the collector who owns it (Tanabe Kazuya), even accidentally.

Aside from the targets being rare timepieces, this is pretty standard stuff, even if there's enough good it not to be completely abstract. The characters are fairly basic types in a lot of cases, their personalities not quite determined by the job they've got in the crew but maybe not far off expectations. They're basic enough that the offscreen stories intrigue a little more. Consider how much more interesting the dynamics of this movie might have been if Chief had been able to convince the nearly-blind older woman to be their safecracker, for instance. Writer Ronald Chan Kin-Hung might have had to rearrange some things, but it kind of instantly brings things on the back-burner up front and offers a lot more opportunities for real contrast among the team.

But, again, being a basic heist movie is no bad thing. The filmmakers get the rhythms right, toss in the fun reversals when the time comes, and don't try to jam pieces that the film doesn't need into it. There's not a lot of watch stuff in it, but enough for the material to not be a purely functional Macguffin. It sometimes looks like the budget is fairly tight - night shots in Tokyo are either roughly lit or badly compressed, at least as it was projected for me - but most of the time, it just means that we're seeing straightforward, unadorned filmmaking rather than folks getting too fancy with the camera or unneeded effects.

The cast isn't bad, considering that the bulk of the cast are members of MIRROR, a boy band formed out of reality show contestants a few years back; I kind of wonder to what extent Cantopop fans had fun with Edan Lui playing a nerdy watchmaker, Keung To as a psychotic peacocking gangster, and Anson Lo as an oddly naive safecracker, and whether the casting was considered on-point or amusingly against type. They're fine, if maybe kind of rough at points (they've acted plenty since forming MIRROR, maybe so much that they haven't been able to really slow down and practice the craft). It winds up little surprise that veteran Louis Cheung ends up anchoring a lot of scenes, or that Michael Ning is trusted with a lot of the bits that move the action forward, and they're more than capable of that while still mostly serving as support for Edan Lui & Anson Lo.

Anyway, it's an honest programmer - it'll last a week or so in North American theaters, maybe a bit longer in Hong Kong, and might be a pleasant surprise when it shows up as part of retrospectives if director Steve Yuen Kim-Wai rattles off a few more good crime flicks or one of the young singers becomes the next Andy Lau. You can do a lot worse for a random thing to watch on a given night.

Friday, March 01, 2024

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 March 2024 - 7 March 2024

So, who here wouldn't have watched Dune: Part Two if they'd released it in November or whenever without the cast around to promoting it?

(Is reminded how well that went for The Marvels.)

Well, okay, big movie this week!

  • Dune: Part Two is pretty close to it for wide releases this week, and it's getting all the big screens, playing the Coolidge (70mm), the Somerville (mostly 70mm), the Capitol, Fresh Pond, The Embassy, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport (including Dolby Atmos), South Bay (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (Including Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.

    Boston Common brings back various Oscar nominees, though not as a marathon like in previous years, with The Holdovers (Friday/Monday), Barbie (Friday/Thursday), Oppenheimer (Friday/Tuesday), American Fiction (Saturday/Tuesday), Killers of the Flower Moon (Saturday/Monday), The Zone of Interest (Sunday/Wednesday), Past Lives (Sunday), Anatomy of a Fall (Sunday/Wednesday), and Poor Things still there as a regular booking.

    There's an AMC Screen Unseen show at Boston Common, Causeway Street, and Assembly Row on Monday, and a non-mystery preview of Snack Shack at Boston Common on Wednesday. Labyrinth plays Boston Common, South Bay, and Arsenal Yards Wednesday
  • In addition to the 70mm print of Dune: Part Two (although note that a live event bumps it to a digital screen downstairs on Friday), The Somerville Theatre also opens Hundreds of Beavers, a live-action cartoon about a fur trapper facing, well, hundreds of beavers that was the funniest thing I saw at Fantasia (or anywhere) last year, including a midnight show in the big room on Saturday night.

    Their friends at The Capitol have regular repertory screenings this month, with "Capitol Crimes" screenings of The Godfather on Friday and Monday, plus "Good For Her" shows of Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead on Saturday and Tuesday.
  • The Brattle Theatre has documentary Four Daughters from Friday to Monday, with director Kaouther Ben Hania looking at a Tunisian mother trying to figure out why her first two daughters were radicalized, with her and the younger two playing themselves and actors filling in for the missing sisters during the recreations.

    Friday to Sunday also features late(ish) shows of Predator as a tribute to Carl Weathers, and they bring out a 35mm print of Moonstruck on Tuesday to pay tribute to Norman Jewison and celebrate "Reel Film Day".
  • Five new Indian films at Apple Fresh Pond this weekend: Hindi-language comedy Laapataa Ladies is a comedy where two (very?) young brides become separated from their husbands on a train in the countryside. Tamil-language action flick Joshua: Imai Pol Kaka stars Varun Kamal as a bodyguard protecting a high-profile target from London in Chennai. Three are in Telugu: Operation Valentine (also opening at Boston Common) is an Air Force action flick, Chaari 111, which looks like a James bond knockoff; and Vyooham, which appears to be either a follow-up or distillation of a recent TV cop series. Bangladeshi thriller The Scent of Sin plays Saturday & Sunday. Manjummel Boys and Article 370 are held over, with the latter also expanding to Boston Common. If you can get out to the Liberty Tree Mall, there's Telugu thriller Bhoothaddam Bhaskar Narayana.

    Lunar New Year movies are rolling out here over the course of a whole month; apparently; this weeks' new offering is The Moon Thieves, a Hong Kong crime caper (set in Tokyo) from Legally Declared Dead filmmaker Yuen Kim-Wai. Pegasus 2 also continues at Boston Common, with Article 20 remaining at Causeway Street (and YOLO opening in both placesThursday).

    Three movies from Japan hanging around theaters this weekend, with Oscar-nominated Perfect Days at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, the Embassy, the Lexington Venue, Boston Common, and the Seaport; Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba - To the Hashira Training at Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards; and The Boy and the Heron still at Fresh Pond and West Newton.
  • The Coolidge Corner Theatre not only opens Dune on 70mm, but they flip their Oscar shorts programming to the Documentaries (on the Goldscreen and short enough for one block this year instead of two). For your other Oscar study-up needs, they will have a special screening of Robot Dreams, nominated for Best Animated Film, on Wednesday evening (Neon apparently intends a summer release); it also plays Kendall Square, the Embassy, and Boston Common that night.

    In rep, the midnight folks start a month of video-game movies with a 35mm print of Resident Evil on Friday and one of Mortal Kombat '95 on Saturday. Monday's Big Screen Debut is Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight on 35mm. Thursday's Big Screen Classic is Scorsese's The Age of Innocence
  • The Alamo rep calendar is pretty thin with all the real estate Dune takes up, but they start unearthing an earlier Time Capsule, 1994, with that year's Little Women (Sunday) and Chungking Express (Monday), plus Michael Clayton on Tuesday and a Happy Gilmore movie party on Wednesday.
  • Tuesday's New Hollywood feature at Landmark Kendall Square is The Last Picture Show.
  • The Bright Lights presentation upstairs at the Paramount on Thursday is "Sacred Nations: Short Work by Contemporary Indigenous Storytellers", which, as it says on the tin, is a collections of six short films by and about Native peoples from Oceania to Massachusetts, with curator Lisa Simmons and at least some of the filmmakers on-hand for a discussion afterward.

    ArtsEmerson hosts The Boston Baltic Film Festival from Friday to Sunday, with Estonia's pretty-nifty The Invisible Fight on Friday; Lithuania's Remember to Blink, Estonia's Melchoir the Apothecary: The Executioner's Daughter, Latvian shorts, Latvian feature Soviet Jeans, and Lithuanian documentary Mūza on Saturday; Estonian docs The Paradox of Seabrook Farms (English-language) and Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, Lithuanian drama The Poet, and Latvian classic Four White Shirts on Sunday; several of these and more will be available to stream starting Monday. Note that the festival does not seem to be on Emerson's calendar, but they do have a page with tickets.
  • The Harvard Film Archive turns their schedule over with the last weekend of "Afterimage", with The Fall (plus short "Resist with Noam Chomsky") introduced by Simon Field on Friday, shorts package "The Troublesome Cases" with Field on Saturday evening, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting later Saturday night, and an encore of Wind from the East on Sunday afternoon. Hong Sangsoo's in water plays Sunday evening, and then on Monday, they begin the showcase for this year's McMillan-Stewart Fellow, Cameroon's Jean-Pierre Bekalo, with a 35mm print of his 2005 sci-fi erotic thriller The Bloodettes.

    The Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque will also let folks in to see a 35mm print of Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder on Saturday afternoon, free for Harvard students.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts finishes this year's Festival of Films from Iran on Saturday afternoon with The Winners, in which two kids find an Oscar statuette in a trash pile and must learn what it is and how to reunite it with its owner. On Sunday, the Films from Japan and "Created Worlds: Animation from around the Globe" series cross over with Blue Giant, an anime about a teenager who discovers a love of jazz.
  • The Museum of Science also has Dune: Part Two, on the Omni screen, although Friday and Saturday's shows are listed as sold out, so reserve ahead of time for future Friday/Saturday shows.
  • Oscar-Nominated Shorts continue, with the Kendall, West Newton, and Boston Common showing Animation and Live Action more or less all week with West Newton also having the docs Saturday & Sunday. The Coolidge has Documentary all week; The ICA has Animation and Live Action on Saturday; The Capitol has animation (Friday/Monday/Thursday), Live-Action (Sunday/Wednesday), and Documentary (Saturday/Tuesday); the Somerville has Animation (Saturday/Sunday); the Lexington Venue has Animation (Saturday), Documentary (Saturday), and Live Action (Sunday); Luna Lowell has Live Action (Saturday), Documentary (Saturday/Sunday), and Animation (Sunday/Thursday); Cinema Salem has Animation, Live Action, and Documentary Friday to Monday.
  • The Lexington Venue is open Friday to Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday with the Oscar shorts (see above), The Taste of Things, and Perfect Days.

    The West Newton Cinema opens Dune: Part Two, brings back All of Us Strangers, and holds over Drive-Away Dolls, the Oscar Shorts, One Love, Driving Madeleine, American Fiction, Migration (Saturday/Sunday), The Boys in the Boat (no show Wednesday), Wonka (Saturday/Sunday), The Boy and the Heron (no show Thursday), and The Holdovers. Closed Monday.

    The Luna Theater has The Zone of Interest evenings Friday to Sunday, with the Oscar Shorts Saturday.& Sunday afternoons andThursday evening.

    Cinema Salem has Dune: Part Two, the Oscar Shorts, Drive-Away Dolls and One Love from Friday to Monday. They also have All the President's Men on Thursday night.
Okay, no messing around, really gotta do Oscar catch-up this week! Fortunately, there's really only Dune, Hundreds of Beavers, The Bloodettes, and The Moon Thieves that I really need to work around them. Vaguely tempted to do a Paul W.S. Anderson/Paul Thomas Anderson thing at the Coolidge (and should probably go for The Age of Innocence as well).

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Fantasia Movie in a Theater This Weekend: Hundreds of Beavers

I didn't actually have to move this review up out of order because it was the next thing to come out in theaters - Hundreds of Beavers was next on my list of Fantasia reviews - but finishing the Film Rolls is taking longer than expected, so I'm just going to put this first entry in the next post up right now. Hundreds of Beavers is at the Somerville Theatre this weekend - including a midnight show in the big room on Saturday that I'm sure will be a blast if a bunch of people show up.

Anyway: I'll probably delete this and replace it with something that includes everything else I saw in Montreal on 31 July 2023 (good lord!) sometime in the next week, maybe updated a little with thoughts from a second viewing, but for now - Hundreds of Beavers is at the Somerville Theatre this weekend. It's probably the most purely hilarious movie you'll see all year. Buy tickets, and support it!


Hundreds of Beavers

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Underground, DCP)

When I saw this at Fantasia, I immediately thought that I wanted a major studio to pick this up and use it to fill some Covid/strike-related holes in their schedule with a big flashy, release, just so that every major movie critic in America would have to write a half-dozen paragraphs like this is some kind of sensible movie. Of course, it wound up going the self-distributed route, because large companie are by and large run by cowards, but no matter how you see it, it's a delightfully bonkers live-action cartoon that absolutely commits to the bit.

Said bit is the misadventures of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), who is drinking all much as much applejack as he is serving fur-trappers in the 19th Century upper midwest, only to have everything fall apart when beavers gnawing at logs cause a snowball effect that wipes out his house, business, and everything, forcing him to get into beaver trapping himself, both for funds and revenge! Unfortunately, he is not very bright, and the beavers and other woodland creatures are likely not just smarter, but have numbers on their side.

When director Mike Cheslik and his friends set out to make a live-action cartoon, they don't mess around - the beavers, dogs, raccoons, wabbits, etc., are all folks in suits, the characters mainly communicate through pantomime and body language, and the mostly-white background of snowy, overcast Wisconsin means that they can fill it with simple props and effects that often place it right on the edge of the uncanny valley, using that unreality in a way that lets the audience now that any sort of ridiculous mayhem might happen at any second. It's clearly done on a budget, which isn't to say cheap: Cheslik has a very good idea of where things need to be perfect and where you just need to know they're crazy instead of lazy.

It's the sort of thing that could probably wear an audience out quickly, reminding them that there's a reason most cartoons run about five or ten minutes while this hits the hundred mark. It is, fortunately, able to change things up every once in a while; it may be almost 100% pure slapstick, but it occasionally takes a break from Looney Tunes to do Buster Keaton, and then for a while the gag is basically playing things out like a Super Nintendo game. It's all more or less of a piece but at least feels like it's switching gears every once in a while, rather than seeing just how much of the exact same thing different members of the audience can endure. And, thankfully, the jokes are good, from the opening musical number to the dogs playing poker to the giant gaudy bits of slapstick that had me writing things like "beaver Voltron!" in my notebook.

It somehow works, keeping the energy level up in a way the team's Lake Michigan Monster never quite managed for me, in part because it's never arch. It just goes for the best joke available every minute or so, hits far more often than not, and never forgets that doing the silly thing is almost always funnier than winking at the audience about what a silly thing they're doing. .

This Week in Tickets: 19 February 2024 - 25 February 2024 (Annoyingly Good Programming)

Sure, I said, I'll just get the Alamo Drafthouse membership because it'll pay for itself with two movies or so a month, but probably won't use it for much more, especially since they're all the way down in the Seaport.

This Week in Tickets
Moviegoing kicked off on Tuesday when I finally got around to Pegasus 2, which may be the biggest Lunar New Year movie for the Year of the Dragon. It's not bad, although also not great, weirdly non-melodramatic for a fast-car movie!

Wednesday night I hit Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which turns out to be the only thing I went to as part of the Alamo's Time Capsule '99 shows, in part because a lot show elsewhere semi-regularly and 25th anniversary stuff, well, that'll be at the Brattle during reunion weekend and just kind of shows up regularly. Still, this was one I've not crossed paths with yet - I think it might have felt too weird for me when it came out - and I dug it. Speaking of 25 years ago, the next night was Drive-Away Dolls, which takes place in 1999, and is pretty decent, if not quite up to what the folks involved maybe could have managed.

Friday night, it was back to Lunar New Year stuff with Article 20, the latest from Zhang Yimou (who is making movies at a pace that suggests gambling debts or the like these days), although perhaps the most grounded and contemporary thing he's ever done. Surprisingly fun and quippy for the subject matter. Just kind of odd for Zhang.

Saturday was the first of two days heading down to the Seaport for stuff where the only/best show was at 12:15pm on the weekend, which isn't ideal even if the Red Line is working, which it wasn't this weekend. That got me there for Stopmotion, a decent-enough horror movie for a while that eventually diverges from what I tend to like about the genre. After that, I walked back across the bridge for Perfect Days, which is pretty much as great as people say, even if it's kind of odd for Wim Wenders to be directing Japan's submission for the Oscars.

The next day started the same way, with movie in question being The Invisible Fight, and, wow, I feel like it was just a few weeks ago that I was grumbling about how it was impossible to go to that place spur of the moment because between limited showtimes and seating, everything sold out a week in advance. When I got on the train Sunday morning, it looked like I might be alone in this show. Admittedly, it's a weird one at a weird time, but has the novelty worn off? Or is it just not enough in cases like this?

And, finally, speaking of novelty (sort of), we end the week back near home at the Somerville Theatre, which had one of the 70mm prints of Tenet that Warner was pushing out to promote Dune Part Two on large-format film next week, which is kind of odd - they're not exactly related beyond having a WB logo up front! - but we'll take it.

Those two-movie days get my Letterboxd account, closer to 1 film/day, which is either a bit much or a goal.


Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (Time Capsule: 1999, laser DCP)
Available to stream/rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on Blu-ray at Amazon

So many movies with this basic story - an assassin's assignment goes sideways and he must ultimately kill the whole organization before it kills him - are visibly working so hard to be off-kilter and cool without achieving half of the genuine eccentricity that Jim Jarmusch seems to manage effortlessly here. I'm not sure why that is - maybe it's that Jarmusch conceived Ghost Dog and his world more holistically than others; maybe he's just got an odd way of looking at things - but it makes the movie memorable in a way that others of its ilk aren't.

The assassin in question (Forest Whitaker) goes by "Ghost Dog", and after having been rescued from a beating by gangster Louie (John Tormey) some years ago, he's modeled himself on samurai retainers and pledged his loyalty. He and Louie communicate by pigeon, and that's where he got the orders to kill Handsome Frank (Richard Portnow), who has been hooking up with his boss's daughter Louise (Tricia Vessey). Trouble is, Louise was supposed to be on a bus as opposed to Frank's apartment, which means the gang can't say they don't know who to look for.

Of course, part of why this characterization works is that Jarmusch knows the price of such eccentricity; underneath Ghost Dog's cool is a man trying his damnedest to create some sense of stability by following a Way, even if his employers clearly have no code. Forest Whitaker never seems about to crack in the role, but always lets you see that this persona, real though it may be, has been carefully constructed. He may not be entirely aware that this whole situation is the result of how both he and the gangsters he serves are trying to live by genre tropes - in this case, the honorable man being used by those that change their minds capriciously, though he certainly is by the end, and is somehow at peace with that. It is, perhaps, a Way itself.

Jarmusch is aware it's a bit ridiculous,, and doesn't entirely play it straight, but his winking at the audience before the final High Noon reference is mostly having gangsters watching cartoons whenever there's a TV nearby, as if that's the highest level of sophistication these tough guys can muster about the violence they use. Instead, he makes the movie very funny in a certain way, deadpan absurdity where sometimes one finds oneself the only person in the theater laughing at a joke and sometimes one is a bit surprised to hear others. Somehow, every bit with Ghost Dog and his francophone best friend Raymond (Isaach De Bankolé) saying the same thing in different languages lands despite it always being the same joke because there's something earnest about understanding each other if not each other's words there.

By the end, Ghost Dog does not feel like it has vanished into its sort of meta-ness, but that is where it has wound up, with most characters accepting their parts in these genre narrative and the ones who haven't rather alarmed by it.


Drive-Away Dolls

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2024 in AMC Causeway #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

I hope all three movies in Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke''s B-movie project honor their origins by coming in comfortably under 90 minutes. Not in a "man, even 1:24 is too much" way but because they seem well aware that there's potential for bloat in trying to get their zany ideas to not look dinky next to other listings and resist, moving things along instead.

The plot, such as it is, works as pure road-trip hijinks fuel, as buttoned up Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) winds up having her recently-broken-up hot mess of a friend Jamie (Margaret Qualley) tag along on her trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, suggesting they can save some money by using a "drive-away" for folks who want to get a car from one place to another. A misunderstanding has them taking one with a MacGuffin in the spare tire well, so a couple of goons (C.J. Wilson & Joey Slotnick) are sent to make sure they don't accidentally find it - which, of course, they do.

It's one of the sturdiest foundations you can build a movie upon, and the filmmakers don't get too cute trying to twist it beyond some unusual details. That said, the movie often feels like it could have used a joke or two more, or maybe some better ones at times. It's never terribly serious, and doesn't seem particularly clueless in the way an older straight white dude and his wife making a movie about young gay women could be, but it's a movie that provides a steady stream of chuckles that leaves the audience maybe a bit impatient for the huge laughs that its goofy premise and impressive pedigree promise. There are a few, especially toward the beginning and end, but it still feels like the film is underachieving just a bit - they kind of know what has to happen for Jamie and Marion on the road, but don't really come up with characters to encounter that are able to steal their scenes, and there's maybe a little "I forget, was this transgressive then?" going on.

That's not true of the dolls themselves, thankfully; Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan are introduced in a couple scenes that seem a bit overdone but quickly find a groove, like Coen & Cooke figured the language could be extra-screwball for a moment to establish them before pulling back. They're really great together as an odd couple one immediately believes as friends despite opposing personalities, and if there's romance in store, sure, that'll work too. Qualley gets the obviously funny stuff, but Viswanathan kind of had the hard part playing the more uptight half without getting anywhere close to being an annoying killjoy. Joey Slotnick & C.J. Wilson have a similar sort of vibe - Slotnick plays the chatty movie goon and Wilson the hulking one - but they're better off with Colman Domingo annoyed with the pair of them.

It should have been better, but it at least moves quick enough to never actually live out its welcome. The question, given that the filmmakers talked about doing three, is whether they've got jokes enough for two more movies like this given how thin they occasionally were here.


Stopmotion

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

Horror movie life hack: As soon as the kid who looks an awful lot like a young version of yourself and never seems to have parents around shows up, talk to a licensed mental health care professional and enquire about medication. It's never a good sign.

Of course, Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) was destined to have issues anyway; the daughter of a stop-motion animation legend (Stella Gonet) whose arthritis as left her unable to manipulate her maquettes directly, Ella is serving as Suzanne's hands on what is to be her final project, even though her mother doesn't see her as a true artist. When Suzanne has a stroke, Ella attempts to finish the work in a new space her boyfriend Tom (Tom York) finds for her, but, just as Suzanne claimed, Ella has a difficult time coming up with an idea when placed on the spot - although a kid running around the building (Caolinn Springall) has a few.

That audiences are certainly going to recognize that, not only does Caolinn Springall look an awful lot like Aisling Franciosi, but her character never gives a name, is not necessarily bad for the movie, since it's not like the filmmakers are being particularly cute about it; it certainly lets Ella's mini-me just jump straight to being a very weird little girl without a lot of messing around. We are here for a movie about the animator who has to plunge so deeply into her creations and worries that there's not much of herself anyway, right? And when the film is about that, it's kind of great, retaining the magic of the technique while still satisfying curiosity about how it works. The puppet imagery is terrific, and the moments when it spills over into the real world land very well.

Unfortunately, at least for me, the finale is the sort of horror movie climax where it gets gnarly and meaner, but there's not a whole lot that compels me beyond the blood and guts. I didn't feel a sense of doomed inevitability, or the discomfort of knowing it could have been avoided, or the forlorn hope that things could be turned around. It's just kind of time to escalate, as opposed to truly feeling like the inevitable next step of what's troubling Emma, despite the fact that we're pretty invested in that, for all it's been haphazardly presented.

That's the thing that separates a great horror movie from a decent one, often, that all the little details reinforce each other and prevent any way out. It's a bit disappointing that Ella's film doesn't tell us much about her, especially when there's such good material about her actually being a good technician but thinking she should be a genius like her mother; it could have even made the genericness of her monster and need to transgress sharper. Instead, it plays more like "this is kind of nasty, let's throw it in" than something really horrifying.


Perfect Days

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

So, I was kind of at "this is really good, maybe something special, and there ain't nothing wrong with that" until the last shot of all the complex emotions going across Koji Yakusho's face basically destroyed me.

Which, basically, seemed what he and director Wim Wenders are going for, in a kind of sneaky way, spending the first half of the movie or so sort of playing up this thing outsiders low-key fetishize about Japan, the pride in how even ordinary things can be beautiful and there's dignity in doing necessary work. Then, though, he starts quietly not-quite-upending this, but maybe making one get a little fidgety about it. A camera angle we haven't quite seen before reveals a pile of paperbacks finished and set aside, then something similar with the photographs he's been taking. Then his toilet cleaner Hirayama's Niko (Arisa Nakano) shows up and it's very clear that he's built himself a life with little room for more than it has.

Wenders's movie isn't the sort to scold him for this. The beauty found here is real, but it's got a cost, especially for a man like Yakusho's Hirayama who's not getting any younger, and there's a sort of realization that being able to live like this is something of an illusion. Your life may be a story of perfect stasis, but change will come, probably in the form of some small piece of this structure you take for granted disappearing.

Yakusho plays that well, even beyond that incredible final shot; for all that Perfect Days and Hirayama aren't entirely what they appear to be on the surface, it has to work as that portrait of a humble worker who sees joy all over despite a small apartment and a job cleaning Tokyo's art-installation-quality public toilets, but there's also got to be things about him that are a bit stunted: His lack of conversation gets abrasive, he's abrasive when a co-worker quite, and his response to a friend of a friend having terrible news is on the one hand cheering but on the other, maybe a bit childish. This isn't a big man-child, but he's maybe missed some of the development that usually comes before settling into this sort of serene engagement with life. That hits home with me a bit, to be honest, and it's interesting to watch the film weigh that.


Nähtamatu võitlus (The Invisible Fight)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run/Fantastic Fest Presents, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

The clever thing about The Invisible Fight is that a viewer is quite like to start this movie kind of delighted at the idea of a genre-poisoned mind looking at this Orthodox monastery and seeing the Shaolin Temple, but by the end, it's pretty clear that the cool things that the Soviet Union has banned are not just kung fu or rock & roll, but religion. Underneath all the slapstick and silliness, these filmmakers are genuinely fond of their monks, and see the part that they and their institution have to play.

First, though, we see three rock & roll Chinese bandits (Eddie Tsai Chia-Yuan, Kyro Wavebourne, Johnny X. Wang) practically fly into a fort on the USSR/China border in 1973, seemingly killing everyone but one guard. When Rafael (Ursel Tilk) returns home to Estonia, it's clearly made an impression on him - he wears his hair long, adores Bruce Lee, and listens to Black Sabbath, presumably smuggled in, because "everything cool is banned by the Soviet Union". His mother (Maria Avdjushko) despairs, but Rtia (Ester Kuntu) notices him one night at the bar; alas, she's already engaged, to Rudolf (Ekke Märten Hekles). Soon, though, Rafel finds a hidden monastery where the monks practice martial arts, and while most want nothing to do with him, Father Nafanail (Indrek Sammul) takes him on as a student, a blow to his current protégé Irinei (Kaarel Pogga).

There is a lot of goofy physical comedy as Rafael, dismissed as a clown by most of the monks, plows through certain of his destiny and his desire to learn kung fu with little on his mind beyond that. Writer/director Rainer Sarnet riffs on everything from silent comedy to The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, seldom letting the opportunity for a physical gag go by but having a great eye for when a gag is both kind of silly and cartoonish and when it's based on something cool that's got to look cool. That high-energy enthusiasm carries the movie a long way. It's relentless and silly enough to keep the audience hooked even if the story is a bit thin, and the odd couple chemistry between Ursel Tilk and Kaarel Pogga as Rafael & Irinei is kept at a very enjoyable simmer, as these guys never actually grow to like each other but at constantly able to turn that into comedic tension. If you're going to build a movie around someone as brash and dumb as Rafael, it helps to have someone exasperated with his own flaws as a balance.

It does sort of start to stretch once one realizes that this isn't quite the martial-arts spoof it's sold itself as, or at least not entirely so and there's probably not going to be another big wire-fu set piece to bookend the film at the end; neither Rudolf nor the State Security guy they cross paths with is that formidable or even the right sort of character. It feels, a bit, like Sarnet maybe intended to go that direction, but eventually found his way to the spirituality being the thing - the confidence and trust and sense of belonging more than the supernatural or a demand of devotion - and there was some casting about while writing the script without removing the dead ends once the final direction became clear. It finishes satisfyingly, though, and I suppose that's a reasonable result for a movie tackling this sort of subject: One seldom ends a spiritual journey at their initial intended destination, after all.


Tenet

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (re-release, 70mm)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on DVD/Blu-ray/4K disc at Amazon

This random-seeming re-release to promote Dune Part Two playing on large-format film next week highlights just how great this plays with an audience and makes me think that the pandemic screwing up its intended release has allowed it to become a sort of cult film. I know, it's too expensive and filled with movie stars to be a traditional cult film, but it's weird, benefits from multiple viewings, and a lot of folks are going to discover how much they truly enjoy it because they saw it at a special show in the one place in town that can still run 70mm film, as opposed to it just being this week's blockbuster. It's a film where there's a narrative to seeing it.

And, on top of that, it's a better movie than I thought when I first saw it during its delayed initial release, and not just because there were more of us digging Nolan's amazing action sequences at a time than there were then, with everyone scattered throughout theaters that could only hold 10% or so. As with Ghost Dog (how's that for some fortunate/found bookending!), you can sort of see Nolan examining genre and moviemaking, how you may wind up building a movie both forward from the initial concept but also backward from the climactic action finale, an unseen hand putting everything in place but the story still needing to live and breathe on its own. I like the performances a bit more, with John David Washington's Protagonist dutiful but chafing at being put into a box, Robert Pattinson charmingly ostentatious, Elizabeth Debicki gaining a spine after being so thoroughly cowed. There are little bits I really love - Debicki racing back to look casual after her Kat hides a gun from her husband, Washington casually mentioning that one of the large vehicles he wants for the impossible heist he's planning has to be a fire truck, or a bit where he sarcastically asks Kenneth Branagh's Sator whether a line comes from Walt Whitman that I will believe is a Dead Again reference until Nolan personally tells me otherwise.

It is, for a movie so intent on making sure one appreciates the clockwork of it, awfully lively and emotional. It's currently lodged atop my list of most-rewatched films at Letterboxd, and although that only includes a few years, I think it will stay up there. It's enough fun to catch again when a local theater hauls it out, and I think enough folks are starting to realize that to get theaters to book it every couple years or so.

Initial Letterboxd entry from October 2020 Pegasus 2 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Drive-Away Dolls Article 20 Stopmotion Perfect Days The Invisible Fight Tenet

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Article 20

And, with this in theaters, I think that we're probably through with Lunar New Year movies for a bit. Sony Pictures Classics apparently has the right to YOLO, the new comedy from the director and star of Hi Mom!, which was a massive hit in the People's Republic a few years back but never made it here. I'm curious as to what Sony's plan is with that - it doesn't scream art-house sleeper or sound like a movie that makes the leap to mainstream audiences - but I presume there are a fair amount of smart folks there. It may be as much about getting remake rights as anything, or they may just think it will do better in North America once the other LNY releases have cleared out a bit, especially with some locally-focused advertising.

Interestingly enough, no distributor really specializing in the North American market picked up Article 20, the fifth film in a row from a director who is still probably the best-known mainland Chinese filmmaker in boutique-house circles, with one of those (Snipers, made with daughter Zhang Mo)) not having made it here at all. It's perhaps not terribly surprising for this particular film - it's contemporary, aimed at a middlebrow Chinese audience, probably not that much more propagandic than the average American crime movie but more obvious about it, and not elaborate in the way much of Zhang's best-remembered stuff is - but it's certainly another data point in showing how this person who was often thought of as courting Western acclaim in China has become a mainstream filmmaker there, to the extent that foreign releases which once might have been quite lucrative are now pretty minor.

They do still draw an expat crowd, though; it was a pretty packed house on opening night, so it might stick around for another week, especially with not a lot but Dune 2 coming out. It's kind of interesting to see Zhang do something relatively stripped down - it's not surprising that he's a pretty good filmmaker without the eye-popping production design and grandiose action scenes, but you don't necessarily often see guys like him scale back unless they have to, and with Cliff Walkers getting a sequel and both Full River Red and Under the Light big hits last year, he probably doesn't have to.


Di er shi tiao (Article 20)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #10 (first-run, laser DCP)

Truth be told, I would not have pegged Article 20 as being from Zhang Yimou at all if I'd gone in cold. After all, even his previous contemporary film, Under the Light, had a certain style to it, while this is almost aggressively... plain? Unadorned? It's the first thing he's done that feels like anyone could have made it, at least on the surface, that I can recall. It winds up solid and surprisingly entertaining, just not necessarily what you'd expect from a guy who can probably still swing getting a lavish production made.

This opens with a protest, as the associates of Liu Wenjing (Alan Aruna) block the local procurator's office, demanding the case against attacker Wang Yongqiang (Pan Binlong) move forward, as Liu being in a coma means nobody at his business is working or getting paid. Temporary staffer Han Ming (Lei Jiayin) manages to de-escalate the situation, and as a reward he's placed on the case, working under chief prosecutor Lyu Lingling (Gao Ye), who just happens to be his college girlfriend. The case is nasty - Liu was a piece of work, and the only witness who can testify that Liu was threatening Wang, the accused's deaf-mute wife Hao Xiuping (Zhao Liying), has gone into hiding. Meanwhile, on the homefront, Han's son Yuchen (Liu Yaowen) is in trouble at middle school because he broke the nose of a bully and won't apologize, leading the bully's father (Yu Hewei), to press charges, and Han's wife Li Maojuan (Li Ma) is not looking to compromise.

Of course, it's probably not the case that anybody could have made this movie. The story is very straightforward, almost to a fault, but Zhang and writers Li Meng and Wang Tianyi are good at jumping forward without a lot of fuss when need be and making what could be twists meant to shock play as something closer to the inevitable result of an ongoing investigation. Individual scenes are snappy and entertaining in a way that lubricates what could be a deathly-earnest mediation on justice, filed with characters trading rapid-fire overlapping dialogue and dealing with silly misunderstandings so that the clear parallels between every strand where people standing up against bulging and abuse being held accountable for the rules they technically violated are background music rather than a speech. Zhang and company are good at using reactions to make fine points - consider how Ming being sort of comically put-upon as his wife and her brother steamroll him at the dinner table plays very differently from the men in a briefing talking over Lingling.

The cast is also quite strong, enough that you can spend a lot of the film feeling at ease with them and then let that comfort steel your back a bit once the film focuses a bit more. It's strange to watch a movie about miscarriages of justice and think just how much you'd like to see the actors in a broad comedy, but that's what they manage here, with Lei Jiayin able to take character traits that are often kind of obnoxious - Ming is a reflexive compromiser who is lying about working with Lingling to try and avoid trouble - and make him seem pretty reasonable until he can reveal his better self. Of course, he's able to do that in part by playing off Ma Li, one of China's best comic actors who plays Maojuan with such a sharp edge to her affection for her husband that it's not surprising he still gets flustered by her after all this time; if banter is a tennis-match, she's returning every serve effortlessly while Lei Jiayin gives a good impression of watching them go past helplessly. On the other side there's Gao Ye, whose confidence as Lingling seems smoother (although she's clearly used to having to be aggressive because not everyone treats her as well as Ming) and whose teasing is kinder. The movie changes a great deal when Zhao Liying surfaces - for all that the audience gets used to all this being fun, her Xiuping never lets the audience forget that this is life and death for her.

All of this being so execution-dependent leaves it kind of vulnerable to the audience not quite being on the right wavelength when they watch it or slight misjudgments. I suspect that even the things which rubbed me the wrong way for much of the film - the seemingly cavalier treatment of Xiuping's rape for much of the running time as an example - were carefully considered and done with purpose, so that they could perhaps be exposed as taken for granted and part of a clear progression without overwhelming the rest of the story early on. A viewer's mileage may certainly vary on the ending, which features swelling music, an impassioned speech, and people bursting into applause - it's a bit of a cliché to call out a systematic injustice and then immediately assert that this will be handled better going forward, and maybe hits a bit differently in a contemporary Chinese film than, say, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or other Capras.

It's an odd film, really, both in how utterly Zhang Yimou's involvement is reflected less in visual style than understated (almost invisible) competence and in how a movie with this story is seldom this funny. If it's odd, though, it's also oddly satisfying, the sort of movie a viewer often feels too cynical to believe in that actually works the way it's supposed to.