Black Nativity

It amuses me that Regal's weekly email listed Black Nativity as a movie "picked just for you!"; I'm pretty darn Caucasian and as for the "nativity" part, well, no, I'm not religious at all. I figure the recommendation must have been based on having seen a few Bollywood movies there recently - it makes sense to recommend one sort of musical to someone who has been seeing another, right? I wound up seeing it at the Boston Common AMC, not so much out of any desire to deny Regal's prediction algorithms the pleasure of being correct (okay, maybe they don't feel pleasure, but I'd rather they not have this particular data point) as that I was sort of scouting the Downtown Crossing gift tent and Quincy Market for Christmas shopping, at that's the time and location that was most convenient.

I kind of wish I'd gone to the other theater instead, even if their emails would probably recommend I see some of the movies that had cringe-worthy previews before this one (I'm looking at you, A Madea Christmas, Heaven Is for Real, and Son of God), if only because this particular screening had some really annoying talkers. It's one thing when pests sit together in a group and kind of talk amongst themselves, but in this case, they sat in the handicapped row - the one that's level with the entryway, and instead of having a dozen rows, has two seats on either side and two more in the center, with spaces for wheelchairs in between - one per island, and talked back and forth across the space. And they just didn't stop; one lady stopped in front of the one making the most noise while apparently taking her daughter out to a restroom, probably asking them to keep quiet, but it didn't help. I was sitting diagonally behind him with my foot up on the railing, and I really wanted it to slip and kick him in the head.

The really weird thing, though, was that these guys really just didn't seem to get the idea of a musical at all. Every time someone started singing, it was loud comments about crack being wack, or was this supposed to be a dream, or how did characters in two separate cities know to be singing the same song? As a guy old enough to say "these kids today", I may sometimes joke about people not knowing how to watch a movie - as in, giving it their full attention and not acting like they're part of the show - but seeing people apparently actually not being able to process musical numbers, which have been a part of movies for as long as sound, as not being literally what the characters are experiencing but a way to communicate heightened emotion, is something else again.

It was frustrating that I almost considered not writing up the review, thinking that the way these guys kept interrupting the movie even in some of its more dramatic moments was coloring my experience enough that I couldn't just comment on what the film itself did for me. I think I've been mostly fair, although I do wonder if I would have experienced it more emotionally and not been so focused on it as a film if I'd seen it in a jackass-free audience.

Black Nativity

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2013 at AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)

It's not exactly uncommon for people to make musicals as relatively small as Black Nativity, although they generally don't have the likes of Fox releasing them wide or a cast full of familiar faces. The big studios tend to go big when they do something like this, but its the small independent nature of this movie that makes it interesting, even when it does seem to have a split personality.

It opens in Baltimore, where fifteen-year-old Langston Cobbs (Jacob Latimore) and his mother Naima (Jennifer Hudson) are facing eviction. Needing to work through the holidays, Naima sends Langston to Harlem to spend the week with the grandparents he's never met. Though grandmother Aretha (Angela Bassett) is unreservedly happy to see him, "The Reverend" Cornell (Forest Whitaker) is somewhat chilly, leading Langston to scheme for a way to get back home.

At least, that's the bit that most directly drives the story; being in New York with his grandparents naturally also gives him a chance to learn about his family history, but that's something that sort of comes and goes from the story until things start drawing together. The lack of a strong central narrative is something of a problem for this movie; while writer/director Kasi Lemmons seems to be trying for an intimate, character-focused picture, the audience doesn't get much of a chance to know Langston from his words and how he interacts with his environment, so his actions often seem random, and Jacob Latimore just doesn't seem to have the experience as an actor to pull everything Lemmons is trying to do into a cohesive character.

Full review at EFC.

Homefront

Not a whole lot to say about Homefront that I didn't say at eFilmCritic, other than to mention that while I tend to like Jason Statham, and wanted to make a point of how he's probably doing his best acting job since The Bank Job here, I can't say for sure because I tend to miss a lot of the stuff he does that goes straight to video, and for all I know, there may be some underrated gems in there.

Heck, I miss a lot of the stuff that he does that makes it to theaters, because he's done enough pretty crappy stuff that doesn't necessarily even have a good preview that I often wind up skipping his movies, especially when one comes out during a week or season (like this one) where it's easy for it to get lost in the shuffle. I suppose one can't exactly argue with his career choices, but he certainly does seem like a guy who could do better.

Oh, and as an aside: There were a couple emails on Chlotrudis's list talking up James Franco for a more literary project or three that he's done lately, and how he's a favorite. Makes me wonder if his pretty decent turn as the villain here is enough to get some of those guys into the new Statham movie.

Homefront

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2013 at the Regal Fenway #5 (first-run, 4K DCP)

Here's a question: If a by-the-numbers genre movie that otherwise has direct-to-video (or, these days, video-on-demand) written all over it somehow puts together a group of interesting actors who actually play their parts fairly well, does it really matter if this doesn't make for better action? Maybe, maybe not. There winds up not being much to Homefront, but it's a lot less laughable between fights than many other movies of its ilk.

It starts out with a drug bust in Shreveport, Louisianna, where the DEA takes down a biker gang led by Danny Turrie (Chuck Zito) with the help of undercover Interpol agent Phil Broker (Jason Statham - you can tell he's undercover because he has hair and is attempting an American accent). It does not end in an ideal fashion. Two years later, Broker is living a few hours away in Rayville, where his late wife grew up, raising his daughter Maddy (Izabela Vidovic), pretty much retired. Trouble starts when Maddy stands up to a bully at school, because the kid (Austin Craig) has a mother (Kate Bosworth) who has a brother (James Franco) who cooks meth, and having this DEA guy in his backyard could be both a threat and an opportunity.

For as much as Homefront follows a familiar template from its generic title to its familiar story about the super-cop who just wants to live a quiet life remodeling the old house he bought (except that criminals just have to keep poking at him until he is forced to unleash the violence), Sylvester Stallone's adaptation of Chuck Logan's novel is just far enough off the usual beam to be interesting. Lay the plot out, and it's an almost comedically absurd escalation from kids shoving each other on the playground to grownups firing automatic weapons at the climax, but the path between those two events meanders in a way that can occasionally be frustrating, but also amusing. As much as the audience may grumble about not much happening, there's something to like in how this absurdity plays out, from the "girl takes down much larger guy" fight being played out with ten-year-olds to how the missing cat gets played as a tack-on bit to several scenes rather than just a way to show how nasty the bad guys are.

Full review at EFC.

Gathr Preview Series: Cold Turkey

I'm writing this on my way home from my own trip home for Thanksgiving, a pretty quick circuit to Portland, Maine to see my Dad, his wife, and her kids & grandkids, my brothers all being at their respective wives' families' gatherings. That's cool - it's pretty stress-free and the family being away for Thanksgiving generally means they're around for Christmas, allowing me to watch the Awesome Nieces unwrap presents in person.

And there's still a lot of pie.

Not a particularly important fact, that, and you can hardly call it ironic or coincidental; Gathr scheduled their Thanksgiving movie for a couple days before Thanksgiving, and I had a bit of a backlog to get through before I got to this. But then, it's only proper to publish the review for something called Cold Turkey after Thanksgiving dinner, right?

Interestingly, this was one of the better-attended previews that wasn't attached to a live appearance or other sponsor, which seems kind of random. It might be difficult to generate momentum from that, as next week's is pushed fairly late (9pm). I'll be there because it looks like a pretty interesting movie, but it won't fit the "take 350 bus home from work, get off in Arlington Center, get food at Elton's/Retro Burger, see movie" schedule.

Cold Turkey

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2013 at the Regent Theatre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)

Folks from other continents much watch movies taking place on Thanksgiving and wonder why Americans have given themselves and extra week end of annoying travel to share a relatively bland meal and unresolved issues with family - even if many do end with the family members realizing how much they need each other. It's actually a lot more pleasant than that most of the time, but you certainly wouldn't know that from watching the likes of Cold Turkey.

This movie's family is the Turners. "Poppy" Jim (Peter Bogdanovich) and his second wife Deborah (Cheryl Hines) are hosting, as usual, their son Jacob (Ashton Holmes), his daughter Lindsay (Sonya Walger) from his first marriage, spouses Missy (Amy Ferguson) & TJ (Ross Partridge), and Lindsay's kids. This year, estranged daughter Nina (Alicia Witt) is making the trip for the first time in fifteen years, though she and her boyfriend Hank (Wilson Bethel) have an ulterior motive - but then, so do Lindsay and Jacob.

Some movies about family conflicts like to show them as simmering just under the surface before they explode, but to watch the Turners is not just to find their being related as unlikely (facial resemblance doesn't seem to have been a huge factor in casting) but to wonder if any members of this clan actually like each other. They're a distant, miserable bunch, and there's no indication of how the shambling alcoholic that Jim is could ever have ever inspired the sort of affection that has his kids calling him "Poppy" into adulthood. It livens up a bit when Nina arrives, but adding unbalanced and inappropriate to the mix just makes things less boring; it doesn't give the audience much reason to actually invest in the characters.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 18 November 2013 - 24 November 2013

Some long days and some days when work went just the right length to screw plans up, but at least an interesting week.



Stubless: An Adventure in Space and Time at about 7-ish on Sunday the 24th. It's a TV movie, but considering there will be a ticket for another one on next week's page, it only seems fair to include it.

Kind of a quiet week. The company that owns the company that owns my employer had its"Vision Week", which brings a lot of extra people into the office, has some awards given out, some other presentations, and face-to-face time with people I normally deal with over the phone. It throws the schedule out of whack and some guys are real experts in squeezing twenty minutes of information into an hour and a half, but on the plus side, they did pay for food a few times and there is still apparently no thought of packing the operation up and moving it to Texas. I should probably be a little less paranoid about that.

On either side of the week, Bollywood! Monday night's movie was Ram-Leela, which is basically Romeo and Juliet with songs and a whole bunch of new stuff added to the last act; Saturday afternoon's was Gori Tere Pyaar Mein, a fairly standard romantic comedy that could do with being a little more of each. To a certain extent, this is a bit of a sign that there's not a huge amount of new releases and you might as well see everything if you can, but I am having some fun with these pictures.

In between, I did a double feature of The Armstrong Lie & Go for Sisters. As I said in the post, the original intent was to see the latter with a Q&A by John Sayles, but that sold out early. Both wound up being pretty good movies, though I liked Go for Sisters a little bit more.

Sunday was a triple-header: Dallas Buyers Club in the afternoon, pulling An Adventure in Space and Time off the DVR, and then The Visitor at the Brattle. I wound up liking Adventure more than Buyers Club, although the latter may be the more ambitious and dramatic. The Visitor, though... Ugh.

Dallas Buyers Club

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2013 at Landmark Kendall Square #1 (first-run, DCP)

Sometimes I wonder if every interesting true-life story really needs a movie, despite having some of the raw materials for one. Take Dallas Buyers Club: Interesting situation, a couple of roles that actors can do amazing things with, and an idea worth chewing on. The story is more a string of things that happened than something that drives from point A to point B, and sometimes that makes for a bit of distance from the audience.

Just sometimes, though, and if you take the perspective that the rest of the movie exists to give Matthew McCanaughey and Jared Leto a venue for these performances, that's fine. As two different sorts of AIDS patients in the mid-1980s - a heterosexual rodeo enthusiast and a transgendered hustler - they both undergo the requisite physical transformation but also sink into their characters in other ways. There's nothing inauthentic about Leto's Rayon at all, for example; she's got a ton of personality rather than just being a set of familiar mannerisms, and Leto sells her tendency toward self-destruction without making the character even primarily frustrating. McConaughey, meanwhile, is not quite mesmerizing but certainly has an eye on what makes Ron Woodruff fascinating: There's a fierce determination to survive to him that manifests itself in him expanding his horizons rather than narrowing them, becoming a better man but not in a santimonious way - finding ways to hold the disease back is serious work, but it's possible to have fun doing it.

I do wonder if maybe writers Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack and director Jean-Marc Vallée might have been able to make the story more compelling by digging into a possible irony of this story - that the characters' attempts to fight their disease by making an end run around the FDA is, in a way, the same sort of high-risk behavior that led to them contracting HIV in the first place, even as the two main characters' contradictory behavior toward what they put in their bodies aside from medicine after starting the buyers' club leads to the obvious results. Medicine is complicated, and both the FDA's tough standards and the scientific method serve important purposes, but this movie's tight focus on what are admittedly its best parts does occasional lead to it taking things for granted.

An Adventure in Space and Time

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Doctor Who week, HD DVR)

A sort of interesting thing about Doctor Who is that it really doesn't have a single creator. As this TV movie chronicling its birth on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary shows, Sydney Newman (Brian Cox), the head of the BBC's drama department, came up with the idea; someone else wrote the initial script; and first-time producer Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine) and director Waris Hussein (Sacha Dhawan) took it seriously enough to develop it into something that could last.

And it's a pip watching this charming cast play this creation out in a glossy version of 1963 London . It doesn't dig deep into the making-of elements, but it takes a close enough look that one can admire the improvisational nature of making television, especially in those days, especially when you compare the tight sets and even tighter compositions Hussein had to work with on those first serials compared to the open, widescreen picture Terry McDonough gets to give to Mark Gattis's script. It's pretty cool how, after making an obvious point with having Lambert watch footage of the first woman in space, there's still something very refreshing about how she argues for the overtly science-fictional aspects of "The Daleks", intuitively grasping how the things Newman dismisses as juvenile are actually the most mature and powerful parts.

But, ultimately, the focus winds up falling on David Bradley as William Hartnell, the first actor to play The Doctor. It's a part he had every reason to be skeptical about, and which right from the start was probably too much for him. But he grew to love it, to the point where he couldn't understand the younger people he worked with wanting to move on to other things, and his stern but ultimately cheerful personality formed the basis of something that would last fifty years and counting. And his story arc underscores a truth about pop culture that we don't often give much thought to: That if one wants to create something that lasts for generations, at a certain point he or she has to give it up. Maybe not in the literal way that Lambert and Hartnell hand Doctor Who off to other producers and actors, but at a certain point, the creators have to be okay with somebody else saying their lines, writing their creations, etc. It's a hard thing to accept, but who knows if this show becomes more than a curiosity if that doesn't happen?

The Visitor (Stridulum)

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2013 at the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagements, 2K DCP)

It's probably not a good sign that, roughly ten minutes into The Visitor, I noticed that director Giulio Paradisi and his co-writers apparently didn't understand the rules of basketball, as the game at which we meet much of the Earthbound cast had teams going on 8-0 scoring runs without ever seeming to force a turnover. That may be a silly, petty thing to nitpick, but I think it accidentally illuminates one of the movie's problems: The filmmakers don't seem to know how to make something thrilling, passing over the naturally exciting things and filling it in with stuff that just doesn't make any sense.

Ah, you say, but that's part of the charm - it's a bug-nuts Italian sci-fi/horror movie! And in the moments when it gets to be that, like the very first opening scenes with some cool smoke effects suggesting an utterly alien world, it's fun. But so much of it is just hanging around 1979 Atlanta, with a secret society and an extradimensional hero both trying to harness the power of a telekinetic girl (and her mother's womb), and it's surprisingly forgettable. Indeed, the most memorable bit is the finale, which seems tacked on at the last minute as every possible way of obscuring the face of the little girl seems to be used.

Admittedly, I may have drifted off for a couple minutes a few times, but something as creative and insane as Drafthouse is selling this to be should really make that impossible. But despite the trippy previews that are floating around, this is a boring, cheap movie with a few isolated good bits. I occasionally take hits on not "seeing the fun" in bad/schlocky movies, but it's not like I go in expecting not to enjoy it. But at a certain point, bad movies are just bad movies, and acting clever because you recognize The Visitor as weird doesn't actually make it a better movie.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 27 November - 5 December 2013

A Short post last week means longish one this week - both because it's got a couple more days (unless otherwise indicated, runs start on Wednesday the 27th) and because a lot of stuff is opening.

• With kids having the weekend off from school, Disney releases their latest animated feature, Frozen. It's a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, renamed (as Tangled was) because Disney is apparently terrified of people thinking its fairy-tale stories with female protagonists are fairy-tale princess movies. Like Tangled, it's getting some great reviews and has a cartoony CGI look; it also has a Mickey Mouse short attached to the beginning that starts from something Walt Disney himself worked on but didn't finish and goes in crazy directions from there. It's playing in both 2D and 3D at the Capitol Theatre, Studio Cinema Belmont (2D only), Apple, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  It's a musical, and so is Black Nativity, in which a kid from a rough area of Baltimore is sent to live with conservative relatives in Brooklyn for the holidays. Generally-interesting director Kasi Lemmons directs and adapts Langston Hughes's play, with Jacob Latimore, Forest Whitager, Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, and Tyrese Gibson in the cast. It's at Boston Common, Fenway, and Apple.
  
  Another interesting director, Spike Lee, has taken on the unenviable task of making an American Oldboy with Josh Brolin, Sharlto Copley, and Elizabeth Olsen. Good luck measuring up to Park Chan-wook's original. That's at Boston Common and Fenway. Those two theaters (plus Apple) also get Homefront, which stars Jason Statham, has a script by Sylvester Stallone, and features James Franco and Winona Ryder as villains. If it just winds up being a boring action programmer, I'll be terribly disappointed.
• The broadest spread of theaters goes to Philomena, which in addition to playing at the Coolidge also opens at Kendall Square, Fenway, Boston Common, and the SuperLux. It stars Judi Dench as the title character, a woman who gave up her son for adoption decades ago and decides to seek him out with the aid of a BBC reporter played by Steve Coogan. Stephen Frears directs. They (along with Kendall Square) also open the new one by Alexander Payne, Nebraska, a black-and-white road movie with Bruce Dern as an old man traveling halfway across the country to claim a sweepstakes prize with his son.
  
  There are no midnight movies this week, but there is the opposite - a Sunday-morning kid's show of An American Tail, the animated movie produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Don Bluth about the trials and tribulations of an immigrant mouse. There's also a preview of Mandela: Long walk to Freedom, with Idris Elba in the title role, on Thursday night. And while it's a little way out, the Science on Screen show on Monday the 9th is a 35mm print of Who Framed Roger Rabbit with a lecture on cartoon physics from Harvard University Physics Chair Melissa Franklin. I can't see how that doesn't sell out, so pre-order your tickets like I have.
• In addition to Philomena and Nebraska on Wednesday, Kendall Square opens The Great Beauty on Friday for a seven-day run. It's a much-acclaimed new film from Palo Sorrentino, and features Toni Servillo as a writer who has been living the high life in Rome for decades only to find it upended on his 65th birthday
• Print/DCP availability and other issues has cause The Brattle Theatre to rearrange their schedule a bit from what was printed. The first day of their Centennial Celebrations series isn't affected - Wednesday (the 27th) still has two films noir with Alan Ladd, both co-starring Veronica Lake, both in 35mm, with The Blue Dahlia written by Raymond Chandler and The Glass Key based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett. Thanksgiving Day now has White Christmas as the other half of a Danny Kaye double feature with A Song Is Born (the latter in 35mm). Friday now features a tribute to Stanley Kramer with It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which also plays Saturday as scheduled. Sunday's and Tuesday's honoree is cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, and the film is Raiders of the Lost Ark in 35mm. So cancel other plans.
  
  Another change to the schedule is the addition of late-ish-night screenings of The Visitor at 10:30pm on Friday and Saturday; evidently enough people got more of a kick out of it than me to hold it over. On Monday, Balagan & The DocYard team up to present The Punk Syndrome, a documentary about a Finnish band made up of "four mentally disabled guys" (so, not to be confused with The Punk Singer, which opens there on the 6th); there will be a Q&A (conducted via Skype) afterward. Wednesday night at 9pm they show Valhalla, the latest winter-sports film from Sweetgrass Productions; it promises a stronger story than usual to go along with great cinematography.
• All the new American films are pushing the Bollywood stuff out of Fenway for now, but iMovieCafe/Apple Theaters is opening Bullet Raja on Friday the 28th. It features Saif Ali Khan as a man who rises to the top of a gang but is perhaps more charismatic outlaw than cruel thug; Sonakshi Sinha plays the woman who, presumably, brings something better out of him.
• Thanksgiving weekend means that The Regent Theatre busts out the Sing-Along Mary Poppins prints with lyrics on screen. Costumes and kids are encouraged for this event, which has matinee screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Also, take note that this week's Gathr Preview Series screening is at 9pm on Tuesday (the theater is booked for other events earlier in the day). The movie is Night Train to Lisbon, featuring Jeremy Irons as a professor who embarks on a quest to learn more about the author of a Portuguese book who also served in that country's resistance. Nifty international cast, including Charlotte Rampling, Lena Olin, Tom Courtenay, Bruno Ganz, Jack Huston, Christopher Lee, and Mélanie Laurent. Bille August directs.
• The Harvard Film Archive spends much of the weekend (and the coming month) on The Bodies and Souls of Robert Rossen, an overlooked director who wound up villified by both sides during and after the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1940s and 50s. This week's films include The Hustler (Friday 7pm), Marked Woman (Friday 9:30pm), Body and Soul (Saturday 7pm), and Johnny O'Clock (Saturday 9:15pm); all of this week's screenings from the series are in 35mm.
  
  Sunday and Monday wrap up Lhomme with a Movie Camera, with Lhomme there in person for Le Joli Mai on Sunday and Army of Shadows on Monday. The cinematographer worked with heavyweight directors on both: Mai is also part of the Chris Marker series (presented digitally in part, I think, because that's how the new restoration that opens at Kendall Square next week is available); Army incorporates Jean-Pierre Melville's own WWII experiences into his adaptation of Joseph Kessel's novel.
• The Museum of Fine Arts concludes their run of the 2013 UCLA Festival of Preservation with Double Door (Saturday), Supernatural (Saturday), International House (Sunday), and The Chase (Sunday). After that, they start their December calendar with Frederick Wiseman's new documentary At Berkeley (be warned: his look at his the University of California campus is about four hours long and includes a brief intermission). On Thursday the 5th, a retrospective of The Films of François Truffaut kicks off with The 400 Blows (preceded by short film "The Brats") and Shoot the Piano Player; this series will make up the bulk of the month's schedule.
• No "regular" programming at ArtsEmerson's Paramount Theatre this weekend, so maybe we should just consider the Bright Lights series the regular programming and the rest special presentations from now on. Tuesday night's program, "PASSION: An Evening with Academy Award-Nominated Producer Sarah Green doesn't appear to include a film screening, although the Emerson alumnus will discuss the pictures she has produced for David Mamet, John Sales, and Terrence Malick. There will be a movie on Thursday the 5th - documentary A Life Without Words presents a brother and sister in rural Nicaragua who were born deaf and never learned to communicate with formal language as a result.
• The UMass Boston Film Series comes to a conclusion on Thursday the 5th with Mistaken for Strangers. Director Tom Berninger will be on hand after the free screening to talk about his movie, a documentary in which the would-be horror filmmaker accompanied his older brother Matt on his band's tour, despite not being a particular fan of The National's kind of music. I seem to recall good buzz about this one at Fantasia.
• The ICA has two film presentations this week: "The British Arrows" on Sunday is a compilation of award-winning commercials from the UK; it will have a few more screenings later in the month. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer plays as part of the "Art Over Politics" series on Thursday the 5th; this documentary on the Russian protest group will have director Maxim Pozdorovkin there for an introduction and Q&A moderated by Harvard Professor (and artist and writer in her own right) Svetlana Boym.

My plans? Dropping everything for Raiders (obviously), plus the Alan Ladd double feature and maybe It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Frozen is the top priority among new releases, and I may try and fit Homefront, Black Nativity, Philomena, and Nebraska in before doing something kind of overkill-ish for Oldboy.

Gori Tere Pyaar Mein (Girl... In Your Love)

So, apparently Bollywood is a regular thing that I do now. That developed quickly. I guess I might as well, if they're playing at a theater that accepts MoviePass and there aren't necessarily a whole lot of other new options in a given week, as has been the case with much of November.

It's fun, though. I think it's giving me a bit more of an appreciation of musicals, in how even though there is an artificiality about them that can yank a viewer right out of the story if handled clumsily, they're also a chance to see something big and entertaining without it being related to destruction. The trick is to get them to advance the story in the same way an action scene does (or make them good enough that the audience doesn't mind the detour), and while Bollywood movies can certainly suffer from going by the book in how songs are placed - introduce the star with one, have one for when the lovers meet, a duet where they try and one-up each other - there's something very filmic about them here. American musicals are often translated from stage plays, and the songs often reflect that.

The other thing I'm sort of learning as I watch them is how non-homogeneous India is. This movie take place in three distinct locations - Bangalore, Delhi, and a village in Gujarat - and while as near as I can tell, everybody is speaking Hindi (with just enough unsubtitled English thrown in to mess me up because my brain doesn't shift between reading and hearing dialogue that fast), it's an issue. My eyebrow raised a bit when one character asked another if he was really sure about pursuing this sort of mixed relationship. It wasn't a particularly thoughtful moment, but the equivalent discussion seldom seems to play that way in America; we either portray the person asking as a nasty bigot or pointedly act like it's no big deal, and that's with differences that seem, to my untrained eye, much more obvious than the ones here.

As an aside, I was reminded how much India is in many ways several smaller countries pushed together by the other movies playing at Fresh Pond this week, with one being listed under separate names and different art depending on whether the showtime was in Tamil or Telugu. I really wish those were subtitled more often, because it seems pretty clear that I'm only seeing a small slice of Indian cinema and culture (as much as you can absorb that from a place's popular cinema) by only seeing Bollywood productions.

I'm not sure how many more of them I'll be seeing over the next month or so - I've got a vacation coming up and there aren't many weeks with one wide release left in the year. Still, it's been a fun new thing to dip my toes in, especially now that each one being something of a double feature is something I've mostly gotten used to.

Gori Tere Pyaar Mein (Girl... In Your Love)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 November 2013 at Regal Fenway #2 (first-run, DCP)

Gori Tere Pyaar Mein is a movie about a layabout becoming a productive and charitable member of society, and maybe it takes that lesson too well to heart. For all that there are moments of it being sweet, boisterous, or funny, the need to do the right thing (and talk about doing so) overwhelms it. A romantic comedy doesn't necessarily need to be packed full of jokes, but falling in love should probably have a little more fun and a little less duty.

As things start out, Sriram Venkat (Imran Khan) is all about fun - since returning to Bangalore from receiving his education in America, he's been quite the playboy. After the latest disappointment, his parents decide the thing to do is arrange a marriage, and good luck - Vasudha Natrajan (Shraddha Kapoor) is beautiful, intelligent... and in love with someone else, though she lacks the nerve to defy her parents and marry her Punjabi boyfriend. Her social conscience reminds Sriram of the last girl he had a serious relationship with, Dia Sharma (Kareena Kapoor), though he eventually drove her away.

Perhaps the opening half of this movie goes a little more smoothly for fans of Indian film who recognize which actress was second-billed in the opening titles when she shows up on-screen. Those of us who can't quite keep our Kapoors straight might initially think that Shraddha is the intended leading lady while the flashbacks to Kareena's Dia are just "crazy ex-girlfriend" bits, and be confused by how the film continues returning to her (by "might", I mean "this happened with me"). Either way, the jumping back to various points in Sriram's and Dia's relationship is still probably not the ideal way to go about it; the audience's first exposure to Dia is at her least personable, and the moments where she is meant to be warm, funny, and unpredictable seem like the exceptions instead of who she really is. Vasu's attentive skepticism makes the audience to want him to prove himself to her, not the girl from back when.

Full review at EFC.

Double Feature at Kendall Square: The Armstrong Lie & Go For Sisters

Getting to this evening of movies was a day of "not the plan, but I'll take it". It started from the morning, where I didn't catch the bus to the office but figured that maybe working from home would be for the best; it's a lot easier to get to Kendall Square in time for a 6:45pm screening of Go For Sisters than it would be from Burlington (especially with a 4pm conference call scheduled to go past 5pm). And when that turned out to be not quick enough, well, heck, I'll just catch The Armstrong Lie and then see Go For Sisters at 9:40pm.

The reason for wanting to catch those specific screenings was pretty simple; John Sayles would be introducing both and doing Q&A at the first. IFFBoston was the group presenting the event, but their Brian Tamm also gave a shout-out to the Roxbury International Film Festival (focused on films by and about people of color) and the Boston Latino Film Festival, which are two rather appropriate groups to bring attention to, given that this is a movie about two black women teaming with a Mexican-American ex-cop.



He didn't stick around long for the 9:40pm show - as he said, it was past his bedtime, and the guy who brings his coat to the front of the theater is probably ready to go as soon as the film starts rolling file starts playing. He mentioned that his previous film, Amigo, didn't play Boston at all, and thinking back, I don't know if I remember Honeydripper playing here either. Looking at his filmography, I'm shocked by how few I've actually seen - Lone Star was a big deal, and I think I remember going to Sunshine State, but aside from that? I haven't even watched the Eight Men Out DVD I've had forever. I feel like I should have seen more; he's clearly the sort of guy I want to encourage, in that he makes movies about the things that interest him even if they are far away from his comfort zone (and that of the usual American audience for independent film).

I actually could have dropped into the Q&A - I bumped into Brian while coming out of The Armstrong Lie and he offered - but I decided to see the movie first, figuring that watching people talk about something built like a detective story might not be the best way to experience it. Maybe I should have taken him up on it; it's not like there were a ton of twists that would have been ruined by hearing about them first. But you never know.

Brian asked how The Armstrong Lie was, and I said it was pretty good, although I didn't jump to "you've got to see this!" It's interesting enough, and the way Alex Gibney acknowledges his involvement in the story but doesn't make it about him is nice, but I think I would have come closer to feeling the anger some are clearly looking for if there were a tighter focus on the cover-up, in part because I just can't get worked up over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Ideally, sure, I'd prefer a level playing field and wouldn't want someone forced out because they refused to risk their health with something dangerous, but on a certain level, I can't help but wonder if this stuff is really more unnatural than laser eye surgery or baseball players having tendons from elsewhere in their body transplanted to their arms.

Sure, part of this is defensive; Manny Ramirez was the MVP of the 2004 World Series and I am not about to call that October illegitimate, especially to the extent that individual sports like cycling do, where if you go to the Tour de France's website, they show a blank space wherever Armstrong (and, presumably, other competitors caught doping) finished. It strikes me as petty and dishonest to whitewash that part of your sport's history, especially since using transfusions and RBC growth factors was so pervasive at the time.

Ah, well. For all the moments of scolding, I at least was able to find myself surprisingly charmed by the footage of the race itself. It reminded me of the way those who get the day off in the Boston area but don't run the Marathon enjoy Patriot's Day, standing by the street, cheering encouragement to the runners, goofing around, only more so - while the parts of the course actually in Boston have always been cordoned off in my experience, occasionally requiring a long detour (and who knows how crazy the security will be next year), the fans are shown getting right in the road with the cyclists, whooping it up, having a great crazy party. And it lasts for three weeks, with a huge chunk of the country getting to enjoy it!

That's pretty awesome. It can be tough for Americans to kick the idea of the French as snobbish, but it's really cool to watch something like that an remember that there is a goofy, enthusiastic side there as well.

The Armstrong Lie

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2013 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, 2K DCP)

Five years ago, Alex Gibney set out to make The Road Back,a documentary that followed Lance Armstrong's comeback, hopefully to culminate in an eighth Tour de France victory. That didn't happen, but a whole lot of other things did. As a result, when Gibney finished the movie in 2013, it had a new title and a new focus. And yet, the movie it was originally meant to be often pokes through, perhaps more than today's Gibney intended.

By now, the world knows the Lance Armstrong story - a young cyclist who contracts testicular cancer that remains undetected until it spreads throughout his body, but rebounds to win the Tour de France seven straight times while starting what is now the Livestrong Foundation to assist cancer patients, vigorously denies having used performance-enhancing drugs despite their being endemic to the sport, only to later confess and be stripped of all his titles and banned from the sport. His 2008-2009 comeback (he had retired after winning his seventh Tour de France in 2005) was meant to show that he was racing clean, with Gibney documenting it, but...

Like Gibney's other movie to come out in 2013, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, the director serves as narrator, and while he seldom shows up in front of the camera, the making of the film becomes inextricably tied in with the events he is documenting. It's not that Gibney's presence changes what his subjects are doing, but we see where he can and cannot go, and there's no question that his relationship with Armstrong has grown complicated by the time the film has been finished. He's become a journalist with a very personal axe to grind that nevertheless still wants to believe in the man who betrayed him. In that way, he is maybe not quite representing the audience on screen, but he is putting the camera right where many viewers would.

Full review at EFC.

Go for Sisters

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2013 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, 2K DCP)

John Sayles is perhaps the most notable independent filmmaker who falls through the cracks despite being quite accessible. Why is that? After all, he's got Lone Star and Eight Men Out to his name! There are a number of reasons, understandable if not great: He seldom returns to the same themes, genres, and regular cast members. He tackles subjects that interest him which are not only far out of the mainstream, but which he can't own the way someone of the class/nationality/ethnicity of his characters might. And he writes stories that don't feel tight but also don't feel like character showcases. His latest, Go for Sisters, has a bit of all of that going on. That's why people might miss it and also why they really shouldn't.

The title refers to how, back in high school, Bernice and Fontayne were so close that everyone assumed they were family. Twenty-five or so years later, they're reunited when ex-convict Fontayne (Yolonda Ross) is assigned Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton) as her new parole agent. Bernice is aware of the conflict of interest, but before she can get Fontayne a new supervisor, her son Rodney has disappeared and become a murder suspect, so she needs information from the sort of people that she should really be making sure Fontayne avoids. They eventually hire former detective Freddy Suarez (Edward James Olmos), who doesn't look like much but used to be known as "The Terminator", to help them navigate the US/Mexico border.

From the way Sayles presents the detective story, one might be predisposed to think that this is one of those movies where the plot is a necessary evil there to give the cast a reason to talk and, in so doing, act; it doesn't often lead to tricky action or tricky twists. And while the characters' quest to find Rodney certainly does serve as a way to keep the cast interacting with each other, their purpose in following this trail is never far away. There are detours and moments where the ties between Bernice and Fontayne come to the fore, but Sayles actually does a great job of showing how this sort of investigation moves forward by asking the right people the right questions even as the tension and tedium can be tremendously frustrating.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 22 November - 26 November 2013

Up too late writing This Week, fortunately Next Week is pretty short. Literally; with new movies opening next Wednesday, I can shave a couple days off of it.

• It's not quite The Hunger Games or nothing this weekend, but there are certainly a metric ton of theaters playing The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. This sequel sees Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen once again thrown into the arena, although this time with more pointed political machinations behind it. Everything I've heard says it's better than the first movie in every way, which shouldn't be too terribly difficult. It plays at the Capitol, Apple, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), Jordan's Furniture (where you'll get the most out of the scenes filmed in IMAX), and the SuperLux.
  
  Opening on somewhat fewer screens is Delivery Man, which looks from the preview to be a very close remake of the French-Candian film Starbuck, not terribly surprising with the same director in charge. Possibly not a bad thing; I liked that movie even if I don't necessarily see Vince Vaughn in the role. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Boston Common, and Fenway.
  
  Boston Common and Fenway will also be screening the 50th anniversary Doctor Who special The Day of the Doctor in 3D on Monday (Fenway also has 2D screenings), although I think all but the 10pm screening at Boston Common are sold out (and maybe that one, too). Boston Common will also be opening The Book Thief, a drama about an orphaned German girl learning to read just as the Nazis come to power, who helps hide a Jewish refugee along with her new parents.
• Kendall Square will also be picking up The Book Thief, along with a couple of other movies. The one-week booking is the new one by John Sayles, Go For Sisters, with LisaGay Hamilton and Yolanda Ross as two childhood friends whose lives have taken very different turns - one is now the other's parole officer - who team up with an ex-cop played by Edward James Olmos to track down the parole officer's daughter. The words "Sayles's best since Lone Star" have been batted around, and IFFBoston will be hosting a Q&A with Sayles at the 6:45pm screening on Friday; Sayles will also be on-hand to introduce the 9:40pm screening if you have trouble making the early show.
  
  The other film opening is a big-deal documentary, The Armstrong Lie, which started life as the authorized story of his comeback, only to have been shelved and then revived with a completely different focus. It's from Alex Gibney, who is pretty darn good at this sort of thing (and prolific - he just gave us We Steal Secrets earlier this year!)
• The Brattle Theatre has two films playing during the short week. American Promise is some serious long-term documentary work, with Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson documenting the thirteen years that their son Idris and his friend Seun spent in a prestigious private school from kindergarten to graduation. It has the bulk of the times, including a Friday-night visit from Brewster (although that screening is, per the theater's website, completely sold out).
  
  The late show is also an epic of sorts, Drafthouse Pictures's new restoration of The Visitor, a 1979 Italian movie that is kind of bonkers even for 1979 Italian movies: A sci-fi horror story where the villain is an eight-year-old girl. It plays at 11pm on Friday and 9:45pm from Saturday to Tuesday.
• Ram-Leela appears to have done well enough that Fenway and iMovieCafe/Apple Theaters are opening a second Bollywood film alongside it. This one is a romantic comedy, Girl... In Your Love, which stars Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor in a story about a ne'er do well trying to win the heart of an activist girl. Apple also picks up Irandam Ulagam in Tamil and Telugu (where it is called Varna), which appears to be a fantasy romance of some kind. Looks kind of cool, but neither version appears to have English subtitles.
• The Coolidge will be turning things over on Wednesday, and fills some time in between with special presentations, two with guests. For example, the midnight movie this weekend is Maniac Cop 2, an over-the-top 1980s undead-cop gross-out flick with a cast that includes the likes of Bruce Campbell, Robert Davi, Claudia Christian, and Robert Z'Dar. As a bonus, director Bill Lustig will be on-hand to bask in the audience's esteem on Friday.
  
  There are two special screenings Sunday morning: Documentary Khodorkovsky tells the rags-to-riches-to-rebel story of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned in Russia for over ten years and counting; his son Pavel will introduce the screening. And while there is no guest for the Goethe-Institut's German film,Measuring The World, it's only $5 to see Detlef Buck's highly fictionalized story of how two scientists who made great discoveries before their paths crossed in 1828. And on Monday night, there's an NT Live presentation of MacBeth with Kenneth Branagh in the title role and Alex Kingston as Lady MacBeth.
• The Boston Latino International Film Festival is back at Harvard's Tsai Auditorium on Saturday and Sunday with a selection of films from the USA and Latin America, with a particular focus on documentaries and immigration.
• Elsewhere on CampusThe Harvard Film Archive begins a series Lhomme with a Movie Camera honoring French cinematographer Pierre Lhomme. including jumbo-sized feature The Mother and the Whore on Friday, two screenings of Alain Cavalier's Le Combat Dans l'Ile on Saturday, and James Ivory's Maurice on Sunday evening. Lhomme will come visit next week, but in the meantime, they do have two other guests: Film critic J. Hoberman will host a screening of David Lynch's Inland Empire (which figures prominently in Hoberman's recent book Film After Film), and Errol Morris will host a free screening of his new documentary The Unknown Known, including a post-film conversation with Mahindra Humanities Center director Homi Bhabha.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has more entries in the 2013 UCLA Festival of Preservation this week, including That Cold Day in the Park (Friday), Gun Crazy (Friday), Midnight Madness (Saturday), Mantrap (Saturday & Sunday), and Thirty Day Princess (Sunday, preceded by a Laurel & Hardy short).
• ArtsEmerson actually has some film programmed at the Paramount Theatre this weekend, with the 32nd Annual Black Maria Film + Video Festival playing Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm; it's a ninety-minute collection of short films. A few days later (Tuesday the 26th), the Bright Lights series has another set of short films, "OJOBOCA", an experimental 16mm film programs featuring the work of Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy.
• The Regent Theatre has two films this week, both courtesy of Gathr. The Anonymous People plays Monday; it's a documentary on people recovering from addiction, and may be the first Gathr booking I've actually seen succeed in Boston (besides Girl Rising). The regular Preview series entry is on Tuesday; Cold Turkey is a Thanksgiving tie-in starring Peter Bogdanovich as a father whose holiday dinner goes awry when his daughter (played by Alicia Witt) makes her first visit in 15 years.

My plans? Well, I've already got my tickets for Day of the Doctor (10pm Monday @ Boston Common) and Cold Turkey. I'll try to make one of the Sayles screenings of Go For Sisters and probably also see The Armstrong Lie and Delivery Man. I'm also very tempted to make a day trip to NYC to see some of the Fantastic Fest stuff showing at the Drafthouse there, as well, but I'm guessing it would destroy me for the week if I go through with it.

(And, yeah, I will see Hunger Games 2 eventually, though I'm thinking I'll wait until the crowds die down at the furniture store.)