Sundance USA Boston 2012: Celeste and Jesse Forever

Last year, I don't think I heard much (if anything) about My Idiot Brother before catching it at Sundance USA, and it wound up being a fairly pleasant surprise. I may have oversold it a little, but it was a legitimately charming comedy with a nice cast that should have made a little more noise when it was released in August as Our Idiot Brother.

This year, it almost seemed as if the programmers were trying to go for a repeat of that - the movie showing at the Coolidge this year even starred one of Brother's cast members, Rashida Jones, and looked like it could have been funny. It was also picked up for distribution before hitting Brookline, and will likely also be released in August. Unfortunately, I was hearing bad things about it once it started screening in Park City and those warnings turned out to be right. Heck of a bummer, buying a $15 ticket weeks ahead of time and hearing that.

Anyway, I think this is the first festival-type screening since getting my new phone! Let's see how it helps with the Terrible Photography:


Dudes, c'mon, these people paid good money; dress up a little!

Well, not great, but the Coolidge isn't a great environment for this; it looks dark when you're just sitting there, and they always do Q&As off to the side as opposed to on the stage, under the lights.

Kind of fitting, though, considering how dark the picture was. They mentioned it before and after the film; I'm guessing that the Coolidge had to rent a DCP rig for the evening and there wasn't time to get everything to 100% in time for the screening. It wouldn't have made the movie any better, but it's an expensive ticket for that to happen at, which makes a lot of otherwise good organizations look kind of rinky-dink. And I'm guessing it wouldn't have happened with 35mm!

Celeste and Jesse Forever

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 January 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sundance USA)

"I don't like the main character" isn't really a great reason to dislike a movie - there are plenty of disreputable protagonists who are nevertheless intriguing - but in real life, it's not a lot of fun to hang around people who complain despite being the authors of their own misery. That's what Celeste and Jesse Forever too often feels like; it wants to be a relationship comedy with some depth, but it seldom has much beyond the superficial.

Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) have been best friends and lovers for half their lives, and can be almost nauseatingly cute together. It kind of freaks their engaged friends Beth (Ari Graynor) and Tucker (Eric Christian Olsen) out, as this is not, in their minds, the way a couple in the middle of a divorce should be acting. And despite the sources of friction that still show up occasionally, they remain best friends, even if they do seem like they should inevitably be pulled back toward each other. At least, it seems that way until Celeste returns from a tour to promote her new book; the two weeks apart have changed the landscape considerably.

Jesse is an artist who, toward the start of the movie, is more interested in catching some waves than finishing some work for Celeste's public relations firm, while Celeste is a "trend analyst"; the title of her book, "Shitegeist", gives some idea of how reflexively cynical she can be. And while they may not be horrible people, there's not much to them that's actively interesting - they're introduced to us with comedic shtick and the first personality traits of either that make a strong impression are negative. They're hollow shells who make what impression they do manage by having decent actors playing them, and that's the title characters - the supporting cast frequently doesn't even get a chance to rise to the level of "superficial".

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 23 January 2012 to 29 January 2012

I swear, tickets at the Coolidge keep getting bigger. I think they know about this blog and are jockeying for real estate on the screen.



OK, that's because I pre-ordered a ticket for Celeste and Jesse Forever and thus printed it out at home. Meanwhile, I half-suspect that the Brattle just gives out ticket stubs because it would feel weird to go to a movie and not have your ticket ripped.

Well, that and litter-based advertising. Not that the good people who run movie theaters would say they want you to just toss things away, but people seeing those brightly-colored bits of paper with the theater's name on it on the sidewalk or the floor of the bus can't hurt.

Haywire

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 January 2012 in Arlington Capitol #3 (first-run, 35mm)

One might think, based on the casting of a mixed-martial arts fighter in the lead role, that Haywire would be a non-stop action showcase, one more piece of evidence that director Steven Soderbergh can make any genre his own. That it's not the sort of melee-based movie that one would normally see out of Hong Kong or Thailand is initially a bit disappointing, at least until the viewer realizes that it's Soderbergh doing what he does best - with additional ass-kicking.

We start with private security operative Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) sitting in a diner in upstate New York, waiting for a contact who finally comes in the form of her colleague Aaron (Channing Tatum). He, naturally, is planning to double-cross her, but she's ready, escaping with young hostage Scott (Michael Angarano). It's not the typical hostage/captor relationship, though, as she spills every detail about her mission in Barcelona with Aaron at the behest of State Department officials Coblenz (Michael Douglas) and Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas), how her employer and former lover Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) pulled her in to one more mission in Dublin with Paul (Michael Fassbender), and how that led to her stealing his car and having him patch up her arm while she tries to make her way to her father (Bill Paxton).

Soderbergh has made a lot of movies in his career, from tiny indies to big studio productions, and across all genres, but the thread that has run through most of them in one for or another - and been particularly prominent in some of his recent work - is the idea of a sort of observational drama. Haywire, like Contagion, The Girlfriend Experience, and some of his other films, has him standing back and matching his characters' cool professionalism rather than poking at them to figure out what makes them tick emotionally. It can make for dry-seeming movies unless you find process as fascinating as Soderbergh seems to, but the attentive viewer will surely be rewarded. For Haywire, that means showing the audience what may seem inconsequential details like Coblenz and Kenneth negotiating the contract for the Barcelona job, or the agents doing the sort of set-up that would be quick-cut flashbacks in other action movies. One has to watch closely and give special attention to looks that linger for a second extra or twitches at the corner of the mouth.

Full review at EFC.

Celeste and Jesse Forever

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 January 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #3 (Sundance USA, digital)

This will get its own entry in a day or two, but let's just say that, despite being a game effort, it's not very good. The main character is difficult to like and has the frustrating tendency to lag well behind where the audience expects her to be in her development, and she's surrounded by characters who really seem to exist when and for what purpose the plot needs them to exist. This includes Andy Samberg's Jesse, which is especially frustrating, because we hear him talk about problems in his new relationship but never see them. As played-out as those storylines would likely be, they've got to be more interesting than Celeste's self-pity.

The Grey

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2012 in Somerville Theater #1 (first-run, 35mm)

About a year ago, the AMC and Regal cinema chains announced that they were forming their own distributor, both to keep a little more money from ticket sales and to supply themselves with the sort of movies that they felt the studios were ignoring - middle-budget productions aimed at an adult audience. From the looks of The Grey, Open Road is delivering the goods; it's a tight wilderness thriller whose aspirations to be somewhat more actually do elevate it.

A big part of the reason why is that John Ottway may just be the best role Liam Neeson has ever had, Oskar Schindler included. It's a part that requires the comingling of incredible confidence and despair, because it's a real man's role: The type that requires outword stoicism or brusqueness to attempt to cover for how the man feels too much. Neeson's great at that, both as Ottway does all he can to keep his fellow plane-crash survivors alive and at the moments when there's nobody to present a front to and he's overwhelmed.

He's got a strong script to work with from Joe Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, with Carnahan delivering a tightfinal film. He never forgets that this is an adventure film as well as a character study, and keeps the moments between life-threatening danger short and to the point. He also knows how to get maximum impact from his action scenes: Where a lot of directors having people cross a rope over a gap would do the vertigo-inducing shots on the first person to cross and then have the others make it without incident, he reverses the order, never allowing us to take for granted how dangerous it is.

Be warned: The Grey is not the "Liam Neeson punching wolves" movie that the preview implies, but "Liam Neeson facing death with manly resolve is just as good. Also, despite the fact that the movie is produced by two theater chains rushing headlong into digital projection (I think all of the AMCs or Regals in the Boston area are 100% digital), it looks really great on 35mm film; see it that way if you can.

Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia for the Light)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2012 in the Brattle Theatre [(Some of) The Best of 2011, 35mm]

This one will also get its own write-up sometime in the next week, as it's a good film that doesn't have a review at eFilmCritic. In the meantime, it's a good movie that wanders a bit, although that tendency is its greatest strength as much as it's a weakness.

Writer/director/editor/narrator Patricio Guzmán is more known for his political documentaries, so the telescopes in Chile's Atacama desert may seem like an odd starting point for him, but we soon see that the same zero-humidity conditions that make Atacama ideal for stargazing also preserve other types of history (any space enthusiast will remind you that what one sees through a telescope is the universe as it once appeared, not how it is at this moment): Drawings made by pre-Columbian natives are remarkably clear, and old widows can still search for the mummified remains of political prisoners from the Pinochet dictatorship. It turns out to be a masterful way to pull disparate subjects together, and Guzmán's film seems much more focused than other broadly philosophical pictures of its ilk.

Still, it does run on a little bit. The streamlined interview structure of the first half falls aside as he speaks to many survivors of the Pinochet years who basically say the same thing, a metaphor involving calcium doesn't quite gain traction, and everything after the film's most striking image (what seems to be another picture of the moon becomes a skull as the camera pans down) is maybe gilding the lily. Ultimately, though, Guzmán does what he set out to do, making a documentary that can draw an audience interested in one subject in to a film about another.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 27 January 2012 - 2 February 2012

Huh, I haven't done an Oscar Nominations Reaction Entry in six years. I guess I've been better at handling things I can't control.

• The nominations have led to a little stuff popping back up at theaters - The Descendants and Hugo return to Fenway. A few other things that received nominations show up in town for the first time: Albert Nobbs, which features Glenn Close as the title character, a woman who disguises herself as a man works as a butler in a small Irish hotel in the 19th Century for so long that it's become her whole identity. It plays at Kendall Square, Coolidge Corner, and Boston Common. Kendall Square alone gets A Separation, which is not only considered the front-runner for the Foreign Language Film award, but snagged a screenplay nomination for a story of an Iranian woman who sues for divorce, a precarious prospect in the best of times.



• The big release at mainstream theaters is The Grey, which apparently is even better than the previews which make it look like a tense story of wilderness survival would indicate. Supposedly star Liam Neeson and writer/director Joe Carnahan are 2012's first award contenders, enough to make people wonder why it wasn't released a month earlier. At any rate, it's a pretty auspicious debut from Open Road, the distributor formed by AMC and Regal theaters to fill the gaps in what the studios are providing. In addition to those two chains' screens in Harvard Square, Fenway, and Boston Common, it's also appearing at Somerville and Fresh Pond.
  
  There's less fanfare for Man on a Ledge and One for the Money. The former (playing at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square, Fenway, and Boston Common) is a thriller featuring Sam Worthington and Elizabeth Banks as the title character and the shrink sent to talk him down, not knowing that he's serving as a diversion for a massive heist. The latter (at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common) stars Katherine Heigl as the star of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels about an unlikely bounty hunter.



• There's some one-offs at various theaters too: Kendall Square's one-week booking is Crazy Horse, Frederick Wiseman's documentary of the namesake Paris burlesque house. The trailer promotes it as being from the director of La Danse, although I'm guessing that that movie didn't have quite so much nudity as the preview shows.
  
  Boston Common, meanwhile, gets Miss Bala, Mexico's submission for the Academy Awards. It didn't get shortlisted, but it's received good buzz. It features Stephanie Sigman as a would-be beauty queen who finds that it's a more dangerous, corrupt business than she might have thought.



• Are we still on awards? If so, the Brattle's (Some of) The Best of 2011 series provides both opportunities to catch up on nominees and looks at things that maybe should have been nominated. You can catch Le Havre on Friday, World on a Wire on Saturday (with late shows of Attack the Block both days), a documentary double feature of Nostalgia for the Light and Cave of Forgotten Dreams on Sunday, The Interrupters on Monday, a double feature of Beginners and Weekend on Tuesday, the original Japanese cut of 13 Assassins on Wednesday, and a double feature of Bill Cunningham New York and Midnnight in Paris on Thursday.



• Over at the Coolidge, in addition to opening Albert Nobbs, they've got a couple of Friday and Saturday midnights of things I saw at Fantasia last summer but didn't write up full reviews for. The Theatre Bizarre is an anthology film with work by seven directors. Some of the segments, like Buddy Giovinazzo's "I Love You", are darn good; others... Well, less so, as is the way with anthologies. Local director David Gregory (who did "Sweets") will be on hand Saturday night to introduce and withstand interrogation (IIRC, much of the questions for his segment may consist of variations on "what the hell, man? what...the...hell?"). That's upstairs; the midnight show is Battle Royale, the classic satire featuring Takeshi Kitano and a pre-Kill Bill Chiaki Kuriyama. It was mostly a cult sensation in the US because it never had official distribution here, and this theatrical release is in anticipation of it finally hitting DVD and Blu-ray in March (right along the time The Hunger Games shows up in theaters). It's a genuine classic, well worth seeing on the big screen.
  
  Other special programs show up during the week: The Goethe-Institute German film on Sunday morning is Stopped on Track, about a man who finds out he has a terminal illness; on a far less serious note, Monday's Science On Screen program is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, which includes discussion by MIT's professor Edward Farhi on the theory of time travel.



• The MFA closes out their January calendar with the end of their Boston Festival of Films From Iran; the films running Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are all 2011 releases, showing what's going on there now. There's also one last show of the dubbed Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos on Saturday morning.
  
  And speaking of animated films from Japan, they kick of the February schedule on Wednesday with the first few screenings of Castles in the Sky: Miyazaki, Takahata, and the Masters of Studio Ghibli. This touring program is the chance to see some absolutely fantastic films on the big screen in their original language and mostly in 35mm. On Wednesday (1 February), they will be running two of Hayao Miyazaki's more recent features, Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away; the next day features Spirited Away, Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, and Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday.



• ArtsEmerson has a set of nifty programs upstairs at the Paramount Theater this weekend, including a visit from one of their own academics. On Friday night, Asian Cinema scholar Shujen Wang will introduce and discuss When Love Comes, the latest by Taiwanese filmmaker Chang Tso-chi, which focuses on multiple generations of family living together and running a restaurant. They will also have two more entries in their Gotta Dance! series on the American musical, and their rarities: Sunnyside Up comes from 1929 and Delicious is from 1931, very early in the development of the form, and while some of the songs may be familiar, most of the cast has since faded into obscurity. Neither of the two is available on DVD, and Sunnyside Up is a new 35mm print.



• It's a very French weekend at the Harvard Film Archive. They continue their series of The Complete Robert Bresson with Mouchette and L'Argent on Friday night, The Trial of Joan of Arc on Sunday afternoon, Four Nights of a Dreamer on Sunday evening, and Au Hasard Balthazar on Monday. Famed cinematographer and director Claire Denis will introduce Four Nights of a Dreamer on Sunday (she appears as an extra); on Saturday, she will introduce and discuss her own film White Material, as well as a featurette she recently shot, "To The Devil".



• After a few weeks without Hindi-language (or English-subtitled) movies, Fresh Pond gets Agneepath, featuring Hrithik Roshan as an exile returning to claim his home village from the gangsters who have overrun it.

My plans? Well, I've heard fantastic things about The Grey and A Separation, so I'll likely be hitting those. Some Ghibli, definitely (language practice! It's educational!). And both One for the Money and Man on a Ledge look like they could be at least entertaining. Well, here's hoping, at least.

Pariah

This was going to be paired with something else: At first, Red Tails for both having predominately-black casts or A Dangerous Method, which I saw on the same night. But I really said all I had for them in the TWIT entry(*). Then I figured a "first love" pairing with Young Goethe in Love, but my work schedule made that one tough to catch during its one-week booking (and its not going to happen tonight, as the Sundance USA show at the Coolidge and attendant Q&A will likely run long enough that catching the last show will be impossible. That's a shame, really - I wasn't really interested until I saw it was from the same director as North Face, which I liked quite a bit.

(*) Well, not all I had to say, but all I had to say without appearing foolish or ignorant, which is always nice to avoid.

Pariah

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 January 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, 35mm)

Films about contemporary youth are tricky things; as much as many filmmakers would like to make a great one, it's a rare thing for a filmmaker to be both close enough in age to the teenage characters of a story like this to have a clear view inside their heads and have honed their skills enough to tell the story this well. So the word done by Dee Rees here is even more impressive; she's managed to make a pretty fantastic film despite not being much older than her main character.

That character is Alike "Lee" Freeman (Adpero Oduye), a seventeen-year-old girl from Brooklyn with good grades, an interest in poetry, and a family that has its frictions but is more intact than many. The latest and largest source of that friction is Laura (Pernell Walker), a dropout that Alike has been spending a lot of time with; she likes other girls and from what they do when hanging out together, it looks like Alike is starting to lean in that direction. Alike's father Arthur (Charles Parnell) avoids the issue, but mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) decides to lay down the law, banning Laura from the house and insisting Alike walk to and from school with Bina (Aasha Davis), a nice young lady from their church.

The obvious place to start when talking about this movie is Adpero Oduye, who is close to perfect as Alike. Part of it is her look; she's just androgynous enough in appearance to potentially register as a boy in the low-lit opening scenes where she's wearing bulky, shapeless clothes, signalling early on that this isn't a phase, but that she isn't like most girls. A larger part, though, is the attitude she brings to the character; Alike can be a sullen, combative teen, but there's a large part of her that is not truly cynical yet. She's smart both inside and outside the classroom, and her self-awareness makes the character more interesting; we can see that she recognizes the sort of isolation she's heading for.

Full review at EFC.

New from China: The Viral Factor and The Flowers of War

Hey, it's been a while since we've seen China Lion open a film in Boston - Love in Space and My Kingdom back in September. Nobody manned up to get 3D Sex & Zen Extreme Ecstacy, and Magic to Win only played a few cities (5 screens instead of the usual 20-ish). It looks like we're going to miss All's Well Ends Well 2012, which is a shame. I don't know that it looks like a particularly good movie, but it seems weird to me that even when movies with Donnie Yen get U.S. distribution, they seem to take the long way around getting to Boston (where he spent some of his teen years and where his family still lives).

Especially considering that based on the usual terrible sample size of one screening, The Viral Factor did pretty well - the best attendence I've seen at one of their opening weekends since If You Are the One 2, and no walkouts - which I've found is not a given with Chinese movies. The Flowers of War had pretty decent attendence as well, even across the river in Harvard Square, although it's apparently not going to make it to a second week (so, see it in the next couple of days if you're inclined). It would be cool if this gave them some momentum.

The Viral Factor

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, digital)

The Viral Factor aims to be a throwback to the pre-Hollywood films of John Woo, combining stylish action with even grander melodrama. And while director Dante Lam likely has more in common with today's John Woo than the one who made A Better Tomorrow, it's fun to see that type of movie again. It's a sort of action weepy, a bit more enjoyable than it deserves to be.

We open with an international task force including Sean Wang (Andy Tien), "Jon" Man Fei (Jay Chou), and his ex-girlfriend "Ice" (Bing Bai) smuggling a scientist who has bred a new strain of smallpox out of Jordan. This, of course, doesn't go well, with Jon losing one friend due to the other's betrayal. He has one of those ticking time bombs of a brain injury himself, but when his ailing mother informs him that there is news of his father and that he has a brother she never told him about, he immediately sets off for Malaysia. On the plane, he meets Dr. Rachel Kan (Lin Peng), who recommends a neurologist she knows, and once there, he not only reunites with father Man Tin (Liu Kai-chi) and niece "Champ" (Crystal Lee), but finds out that his brother Yeung (Nicholas Tse) is a criminal. Who, it turns out, is being hired by corrupt cop Russell (Philip Keung) and the people who took the biologist - and are having him create a new supervirus.

Almost all action movies try to connect with the audience emotionally by adding a subplot that makes things personal or has the hero dealing with something in his relationships or family. The Viral Factor takes this to an extreme, with the bioterrorists' plot not exactly being relegated a nuisance that interrupts Jon's attempts to bring his family together before it's too late, but still mainly pulling him in because despite being just-arrived in one of the most densely populated cities in Asia, Jon just happens to be connected to Rachel and Yeung for reasons entirely separate from the people who lodged a bullet in his head. The movie barely even tries to get any emotion out of the plot with global stakes until it threatens the Man family directly, although that's not unusual - millions could die in a global pandemic, but threaten the hero's family... It's a set of terrible clichés, but this movie owns them, to a certain extent, by focusing on what would logically be side-stories so closely. There's a Greek tragedy not far beneath the bullets and explosions, and the Man brothers coming face to face with everything in their lives up to this point.


Full review at EFC.

Jin líng shí san chai (The Flowers of War)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2012 in AMC Harvard Square #2 (first-run, digital)

It sort of makes sense when Hollywood makes a movie about something that happened outside the borders of America and Europe but makes a white guy the protagonist - silly, but understandable. When a Chinese filmmaker decides that his Chinese movie about the Rape of Nanking should star Christian Bale - that's kind of weird. But then, a lot of things about The Flowers of War seem ill-conceived, and Zhang Yimou's ability to occasionally make it work only makes it more problematic.

As the movie opens in 1937, the Chinese capital of Nanking is falling to the Japanese in an invasion and occupation just as ugly as its name implies. While the Chinese army crumbles, several parties are converging on a Catholic Church that they hope will offer sanctuary: The late abbot's teenage adopted son, George Chen (Huang Tianyuan), has about a dozen girls from its convent school who were unable to get on the last boat out; a group including Meng Shujuan (Zhang Xinyi), the girl who believed her father would get them out, that was separated in the confusion; Major Li (Tong Dawei), an excellent sharpshooter who carries the only other surviving member of the unit, a boy too young to be much more than a mascot; and John Miller (Bale), an American mortician sent to handle the abbot's funeral arrangements. They'll soon be joined by a dozen ladies from a local brothel, whose elegant de facto leader, Yu Mo (Ni Ni), learned English when she attended a convent school in her youth. It soon becomes very clear that the church and Miller's white face can only offer so much sanctuary - and the guards posted around the gate by Colonel Hasegawa (Atsuro Watabe) are not exactly for the girls' safety.

The opening minutes of The Flowers of War are a breathtaking series of horrors, as Zhang Yimou combines his penchant for striking visuals with increasingly desperate and tragic situations. It temporarily strands the audience in the surreal environment of the world at war, and if the whole movie was like that, it would be an impressive achievement: two hours of randomness, shell-shock, and almost casual atrocity. Of course, that would be difficult to sustain and even more difficult to sell, so things settle down a little, and then the prostitutes show up.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 16 January 2012 to 22 January 2012

Busy at work all week, but do not take the lack of tickets on Saturday for fear of a little snow. Hardy New Englander here.



The snow did have a little effect on my Saturday, as there were only two of us at Japanese class instead of the usual five, and I'm guessing it kept a few people from the Chlotrudis Awards nominating meeting, leading to it running short and being practically over by the time I got there. One of my best classes, though - more one-on-one time, less trying to pick voices out in a crowded room.

Main noteworthy effect - I could at least pick out that some of the Japanese dialogue in The Flowers of War was in the past tense (verbs ending in "-mashita"!) and in the form of a question (sentences ending in "-ka"!). My goal of being able to understand random words in dialogue by NYAFF/Fantasia is seeming possible!

Oh, and what's with moving the switchover from matinee pricing to evening prices from 6pm to 4pm, Regal? Not. Cool.

Pariah

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 January 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, 35mm)

This is an extremely strong feature debut from Dee Rees; it's a rare thing for a filmmaker to be both close enough in age to the teenage characters of a story like this to have a clear view inside their heads and have the skill to tell the story this well. Rees may never make another movie this good, but I hope she gets the chance.

A lot of praise will (and should) also go out to Adepero Oduye, who stars as Alike "Lee" Freeman, a smart girl trying to figure out just what being gay means to how she fits in her family; it's the sort of performance that has to be precisely measured and never feels even a bit off. There's not a weak link in the rest of the cast, either; I particularly liked Charles Parnell as the father (with problems of his own) who seems to know about his daughter but doesn't quite let himself know.

I think what I like most, though, is the way Alike's first relationships are handled. It deserves a little elaboration, but Rees does an exceptional job of establishing that while Alike shouldn't be identified by her sexual orientation, it is a big deal. I'll probably write this up a little more later, and hope to expand on that, because I think it's part of what makes the movie ring true for everyone even if it is a story about ethnic and sexual minorities.

A Dangerous Method

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 January 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, 35mm)

It struck me, when I saw the trailer for this one, that there may be a fair amount of people who just know David Cronenberg from his recent, mainstream work like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, as opposed to his early kinky horror work. It's kind of neat that fans of both might see something familiar in A Dangerous Method, even as it seems a departure for the man.

It is, however, not without its problems. It may presume more knowledge of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) than some in the audience possess, and while Cronenberg and company do a fine job in keeping a movie that is often nothing but pointed conversations moving, it can be a bit fatiguing at times, especially when the script seems to cover the same ground two or three times.

Still, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley are rather fantastic as Jung and patient-turned-colleague Sabina Spielrein. Knightley's work is especially impressive, as her lurching, out-of-control tics are a huge contrast to the precisely controlled affect of the rest of the cast (especially the icy-but-delicate Sarah Gadon as Jung's wife), but it comes off more as a fine mind struggling with an unruly brain than an actress out of step with the rest of the cast.

The Viral Factor

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, digital)

This one got an eFilmCritic review over the weekend; it's a fairly enjoyable action movie that would like to be the sort of operatic action movie that John Woo made back in the late eighties and early nineties, but Dante Lam isn't John Woo and Jay Chou isn't exactly Chow Yun-fat. Still, I appreciate it making the effort, as well as Lam's enthusiasm for smashing cars up.

A couple of funny things - it seems like I've been hearing Dante Lam's name as one of the current wave of Hong Kong action directors for a long time, but this is the first movie of his I've seen, and there's not a whole lot of other stuff in his filmography that really screams for my attention. The exposition toward the beginning was a bit odd for a couple of reasons - one, it's a case of somebody telling other characters things they would already know because they're really talking to the audience; and two, the actor doing so (Andy Tien), has such a good accent in English that he must be fluent, but he repeats the script's awkward grammar precisely. And, I admit, it's a little weird to see Sammo Hung's son Sammy in the movie as a generically good-looking guy; I initially thought Philip Keung was the younger Hung, just because he sort of looks like Sammo.

Full review at EFC.

Red Tails

* * (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2012 in Regal Fenway #9 (first-run, digital)

To see Red Tails is to wish, almost immediately, that it was a better movie. From the very first lines of dialogue, uttered in the middle of a pretty spectacular looking aeiral battle (as charmingly retro opening titles appear on screen), it's very clear that for all the good intentions behind this movie, a great many things are going to fall short.

It's almost impossible to describe just how much of a mess the script is. There are bits where the dialogue is so simplified that it seems to come out of a children's book, but writers John Ridley and Aaron MacGruder don't seem to have any particular idea of what's important and what's not. There's a subplot about David Oyelowo's "Lightning" being a hot head who goes looking for confrontations with racists that comes straight out of nowhere, and another about his wingman "Easy" (Nate Parker) having a drinking problem that has no structure to it whatsoever. There's a POW camp story that could be its own movie but comes and goes randomly here. Director Anthony Hemingway doesn't seem to have the heart to cut a single second of the spiffy effects footage that George Lucas has paid for, even when it serves no purpose or when a little editing could punch an action scene up.

And yet, given the lines they've got to work with, I like Oyelowo and Parker a lot. They're not complicated characters, but the actors are charismatic. And Terrence Howard - his first scene with Gerald MacRaney is two guys doing the sort of beats they hit best, and he makes the entire cast around him better. And when it comes time to get into the air, Lucas's money is spent well - the flying scenes are gorgeous.

It's frustrating bordering on tragic, really, that this project Lucas spent nearly twenty-five years working on isn't what it should be.

Jin líng shí san chai (The Flowers of War)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2012 in AMC Harvard Square #2 (first-run, digital)

Here's one I'm hoping to figure out while writing a longer review on the bus ride home, because it veers all over the place. On the one hand, the opening sequence is absolutely stunning, the sort of thing that makes one wish it was the entire movie. But it soon gets into areas that seem completely and utterly misguided, including scenes between Christian Bale and Ni Ni that are occasionally played for thoroughly inappropriate laughs. And then there will be a moment where that seems to work - it's people trying to remain true to themselves and sane in the middle of circumstances so horrific as to defy imagination.

What Zhang Yimou is striving for seems to be a Chinese Schindler's List, a presentation of the Rape of Nanking that is both as harrowing and as digestible for a mainstream audience as Steven Spielberg's take on the Holocaust. It's not that; the story is often repellant not for what is presented but for how cavalierly the material is treated. Zhang is too talented, though, to make a movie that can be completely dismissed. I can't say I enjoyed The Flowers of War; it's not that kind of movie. I did find myself impressed more often than I wondered what Zhang and company were thinking, though, and that's got to count for something.

That Week In Tickets: 26 December 2011 to 1 January 2012

Man, if I would have finished this on the bus ride home yesterday, I could have actually said I was caught up with TWIT. Instead, I went and saw not one, but two movies at Kendall Square last night.

Still, the plan is going to be to keep up with this in 2012, even if it means some late Sunday nights. For now, I'm closing out 2011 with this busy page:



It's kind of amusing to see Monkey Business just a couple days away from My Week with Marilyn; though the former was part of the Brattle's Ginger Rogers tribute series, it's got a great big picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cover if you buy it on DVD. She's really only got a supporting role in it, and that's kind of being generous with her contribution. Still, it wouldn't be much of a surprise that studios would later build movies around her being sexy the way they previously did around Fred & Ginger being able to dance; she seemed to hit an intersection of child-like innocence and fully-realized sexuality without making it sound creepy.

Michelle Williams does a pretty good job of capturing that in My Week with Marilyn, deliberately making it difficult to see where Norma Jean Baker ends and Marilyn Monroe begins, even while insisting they aren't exactly the same. Of course, I suspect that's a result of the source material, where even though Colin Clark may have felt like he was getting close to the woman, he was still only really meeting the movie star.

The Darkest Hour

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2011 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, digital 3D)

There's a lot of product placement in The Darkest Hour, and I wonder if the filmmakers ever found themselves trying to rationalize all those shots of signage for McDonald's and Starbucks Coffee with Cyrillic lettering. See, they might say, we're doing a movie about an alien invasion, and by showing all of these American things, we're making a statement about how Moscow has, in a way, already been invaded...

It's the sort of thing you almost have to say; otherwise you're looking at a movie that feels like a string of compromises and wondering what you gained by them. It's set in Moscow, but follows a group of Americans almost exclusively for the first half, and never really has them come across cultural or language barriers when more actual Russians show up. It's shot in 3D, but what good is that when the villains are mostly invisible? It needs to end, but wants to leave the possibility of sequels open.

And, on top of that, it's just not very good. There are certainly signs that director Chris Gorak could stage a pretty good action scene given some inspiration, and while the CGI for the aliens could use a little more money thrown at it, the vision of a suddenly devastated Moscow (which appears to be a truly beautiful city) is quite impressive. The movie just can't escape how utterly generic it is, though - it is full of interchangeable characters, the aliens are a bland cross of between familiar grays and Dan Dare's Mekon, and it doesn't add even one original concept to the annals of post-apocalyptic adventure.

I don't think that The Darkest Hour was ever going to be a great movie, but even as sci-fi/horror "product" it fails to stand out from the crowd for much more than a couple of cool shots. Some of the people involved will undoubtedly do good work someday, but this tops out at "kind of slick for a low budget" (if it had a low budget).