In Defense of Liking Battleship

Battleship wasn't my first plan for last night. I was going to go to the premiere-and-likely-only screening of a locally produced action movie, but I wound up running late because I was building the eFilmCritic page for the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival (I think 10+10 might have taken a half-hour on its own!), so by the time I got to Central Square, it was too late to get to the Regent Theatre in Arlington, and since I wasn't going to have gone out into the rain for nothing, I decided to see whatever was playing at Boston Common at a convenient time that I hadn't already seen. That wound up being Battleship.

(There was a whole bunch of stupidity on my part here, from not being a good judge of time from the start, to letting the people getting off the outbound train pass or dawdle in front of the door without just cutting through, to forgetting my umbrella on top of the fare vending machine so that I paid two fares because exiting and re-entering was cheaper and more convenient than buying a new umbrella. That is to say, seeing this movie could have been the capper on a night of me being very dumb.)

That I was looking at NYAFF stuff not only set me on the path to seeing Battleship, but also offered a reminder of why I perhaps shouldn't be completely cynical about it: One of the movies which I put in (and will likely see on a weekend trip to NYC for the fest) is Takashi Miike's Ace Attorney (NYAFF description here), what looks like a dead-on live-action adaptation of a quite frankly absurd Nintendo DS game. It's not the first goofy concept like this that I've made a beeline for coming from Japan, so why shouldn't I run toward Hollywood movies that come from similarly mercenary places, especially if they've got similarly good people involved?

Understand - having Peter Berg, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, et al, doesn't elevate this thing; it's still a great heaping bunch of stupid that winds up being entertaining in large part because everyone involved commits fully to the idea - they're not trying to make something that transcends being based on a board game, and they're not winking at the audience about what a goofy idea the whole thing is. They're making what they hope is an entertaining action/adventure movie while staying true to its source.

And while it's not sneering at itself, it perhaps does take a bit of irony and distance to really enjoy this thing. Part of what's enjoyable is seeing how director Berg and writers Erich & Jon Hoeber translated bits of "Battleship" to the big screen in very visible ways, and they call just enough attention to it for the audience to recognize the source and note that it works better than you could possibly expect. While I smirked a little at the aliens having five ships fall to Earth in the opening, I legitimately loved their peg missiles, and when a ship winds up with a whole line of them across its broadside and then explodes? Well, I felt sorry for the characters, sure, but I grinned. It's just so charmingly literal, as is the last act where Asano's Captain Nagata introduces a way to make the thing into a grid so that he and Taylor Kitsch's Lieutenant Hopper are barking out letter-number combinations for the missiles to fire at.

Of course, there's a whole movie around this, and a lot of it has the same sort of charm. The opening is kind of idiotic, but the particular brand of idiocy seems familiar to the characters, and there's something agreeably goofy about how Brooklyn Decker's Sam does, in fact, appreciate the burrito Hopper gets for her enough to go out with him. The filmmakers love their military people - especially veterans, wounded, retired, and otherwise - but it doesn't come off as either defensive or aggressive. They just show them as capable, dedicated men and women without griping that civilians don't understand or the brass holds them back. Heck, they have a Japanese officer playing a major part in action scenes involving a WWII battleship at Pearl Harbor and don't make a thing about it.

That is, honestly, kind of weird, and I wouldn't necessarily argue with people who see that as something that should perhaps be acknowledged. I, personally, think it's kind of a rebuke to those who say Battleship is Michael Bay-ier than actual Michael Bay movies - no way Bay doesn't seize on that for cheap, tacky conflict/sentiment - but the other side is very easy to see. In between the fun, charming bits, there are a lot of times when the filmmakers are just going through the motions: They've got some of the least imaginative aliens since Star Trek: The Next Generation went off the air, clearly just stand-ins because having any human nation as an antagonist would be bad for business (counterpoint - except North Korea, but the filmmakers slyly note that as absurd). The bit about Hopper asking Sam's father for permission to marry is a creaky plot device with no cleverness to it at all, and the idea that Hopper could be an officer within a year or two of enlisting and yet still be considered a screw-up just doesn't sit right.

Enough is dumb without having charm that I can't imagine myself actually buying Battleship on Blu-ray unless the price drops to five bucks, but enough is simple fun that I do tend to think that the hatred thrown at it is more the result of resenting the idea behind it than actually judging the movie on its own merits. Yes, there are almost certainly better ways to spend a couple hundred million dollars. But I'm not spending a couple hundred million; I'm spending ten, and for that money, I get a big action/adventure movie with a likable cast, decent action, and just enough cleverness to distract from a lot of stupidity.


Seen 2 June 2012 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, Sony Digital 4K)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 June 2012 - 7 June 2012

This is a day late, because I was wiped out last night. And yet, my hits for Friday were pretty good. Who was looking for this and kept coming back because they couldn't find it?

I feel bad, because there's not a whole lot to talk about in terms of mainstream stuff, but I've probably already missed some good stuff on Friday.

• Apparently, Snow White and the Huntsman is a big enough deal that no other mainstream stuff is opening against it (well, technically Piranha 3-DDdoes, but between the simultaneous VOD release and everything else, it's not playing Boston). And you'd think people got their Snow White fix a couple months ago. This one stars Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth in the title roles, with Cameron Diaz as the evil Queen, and is apparently more serious than Mirror Mirror. It plays Somerville, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  Boston Common has a couple smaller openers to supplement it. High School finally comes off the shelf after a couple of years; I saw it at Fantasia in 2010, and thought it was pretty mediocre. It's about a kid at the top of his class who, faced with failing a drug class, concocts a plan by which the entire school will; the best thing about it is Colin Hanks as a bitter teacher. They also pick up For Greater Glory, with Andy Garcia as Mexican revolutionary Enrique Velarde; it's also got Eva Longoria, Bruce Greenwood, Oscar Isaac and Peter O'Toole.
  
  If you want to take the long bus ride to Revere, the Showcase Cinemas there has both For Greater Glory and Battlefield America, which has a businessman doing community service bringing in a professional dance instructor to bolster the misfit kids in their underground dance competition.



• OK, arguably the big opening is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, which features a crazy-good cast (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton) searching for two 12-year-olds who decided to run away together in 1965. I admit, I've been kind of down on Anderson lately, but this screenplay is Noah Baumbach-free, and word has it that it's gorgeous. See it on film, which shouldn't be a problem for right now, as it's playing at the Coolidge and Kendall Square.
  
  The Coolidge also opens Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story, a documentary on the Israeli soldier who led a daring 1976 hostage rescue. It mostly plays in the video room, aside from Sunday at 2pm, when director Ari Daniel Pinchot will be on-hand to introduce and do Q&A.
  
  The midnight shows during June are part of a "Summer Camp" series, including this week's staple Wet Hot American Summer, with Janeane Garafolo, Paul Rudd, David Hyde Pierce, and Michael Ian Black as camp counselors. It plays tonight (hey, you can still make it if you're reading this right now!) and Saturday. The other special presentation is on Monday evening, when the Roxbury International film Festival (which spotlights films produced, written, or directed by persons of color) and Boston Dance Alliance present Scars, a short documentary on two mixed-race dancers in Cape Town, South Africa. It's a preview screening; the festival proper will begin on the 14th.



• In addition to Moonrise Kingdom, Kendall Square opens two others. The Intouchables is from France, and features François Cluzet as a wealthy quadriplegic whose new caretaker (Omar Sy) comes from the projects; apparently it's a comedy! Caretakers also figure in one-week booking Elena, a thriller about a Moscow couple who met when the wife was her husband's nurse, and who (along with her family) must protect her inheritance when the husband's health takes a turn for the worse.



• Down the Red Line at the Brattle, recent IFFBoston alum Keyhole runs through Sunday; it's Guy Maddin's new film, and is as peculiar as those words imply. Jason Patric plays a gangster making his way through his haunted home to find his wife (Isabella Rossellini), who has her naked father chained to her bed. It's just as good as it sounds.
  
  The week has a different show every day. On Monday, the DocYard presents Bay of All Saints, a look at poor neighborhoods in Bahia, Brazil that are actually built on stilts in the bay; directors Annie Eastman and Diane Markow will be there to answer the audience's questions. Tuesday is Balagan day, with a short film program called "Acceleration", featuring imagery that is often too fast for the camera to capture clearly. Wednesday is a sneak preview of Beasts of the Southern Wild, co-presented by IFFBoston, a beautiful-looking bayou fantasy featuring a six-year-old girl facing a dangerous storm. And on Thursday, they've got the Boston premiere of Star Wars: Uncut - not the original movie, but a version where fans around the world were each tasked with remaking 15 seconds, with the results being stitched together.



• The MFA runs on a monthly calendar, so their new Global Lens Film Series actually started today, but both films that ran on Friday will also be presented on Saturday. Those are Albania's Amnesty and Argentina's The Finger; other movies in the series include Iraq's Qarantina (Saturday and Sunday), Brazil's Craft (Sunday), Rwanda's Grey Matter (Sunday and Wednesday), and Morocco's Pegasus (Wednesday and Thursday).
  
  A couple of other movies play mid-week: Wednesday has the first of two screenings of We Still Live Here, a nifty little documentary on Massachusetts's Wampanoag nation re-establishing their language with some help from an MIT linguist. On Thursday night, the Boston LGBT Film Festival co-presents The Sons of Tennessee Williams, which tells the story of how gay Mardi Gras krewes helped open up doors for gays in the South.



• The Harvard Film Archive begins a series spotlighting The Anarchic Imagination of Alex Cox, which runs through next week, and unfortunately, we've already missed two of his more famous films, as Repo Man and Walker played Friday night. There's still plenty of interesting things coming up, though, with Highway Patrolman and Revengers Tragedy playing Saturday and Death and the Compass running Monday (it looks like Repo Chick won't will not be inflicted on us). Sunday is an encore presentation of Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II, for those who couldn't make last week's screening of the Sergei Eisenstein double feature.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has one film program this week, the premiere of The Final Shift, a locally-shot sci-fi/action where a genetically engineered assassin teams up with an aging hitman, on Saturday evening (at 6pm or 7:30, depending on whether you believe the movie's Facebook page or the Regent's website. The trailer looks a little better than many of these tiny indie action movies do, although it also kind of looks like it would play Fantasia on Sunday morning or Saturday midnight.



• The subtitled Hindi-language film at Fresh Pond this week is Rowdy Rathore, which features Akshay Kumar as a conman who has a pretty woman (Sonakshi Siva), a kid who thinks he's her father, a gang of criminals attempting to murder him, and a corrupt politician all fall into his life. Sounds even more like a bit of everything than the typical Bollywood movie, and has the screen to itself all week (although there are no showtimes listed for Thursday night).



• A little bit of second-run shuffling goes on, as FEI moves Dark Shadows from Somerville to the Arlington Capitol, sending Battleship to dock early.

My plans? Moonrise Kingdom, and what the heck, maybe I'll give The Final Shift a shot. There's also a lot at Kendall Square I've been meaning to see, and the Star Wars thing could be fun.

Crooked Arrows

I admit to being kind of curious about this movie from the start, especially since when I saw Seediq Bale last week, there were a lot more posters up than one might expect for a movie that seems more or less self-distributed, including (I think) a table by the escalator.

I was kind of surprised to see it sticking around for a full second week, but it's actually got a wider release coming this Friday. I kind of suspect that it will do a good chunk of its business on group sales, with school lacrosse teams and Native American groups buying a fair chunk of tickets.

Of course, I'll half-joke that the thing that got me into the movie was seeing an ad on NESN which included a clip of Sean McDonough, former Red Sox play-by-play guy, playing himself covering the team. Nice comeback for him; I don't think he's been in a movie since he and Tim McCarver did the play-by-play in the opening sequence of Mr. Baseball.

Crooked Arrows

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 May 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, digital)

Crooked Arrows is a button-pushing sports movie notable for both the sport being played (lacrosse) and the underdog school (a Native American nation in upstate New York). It's likely to be far from the best sports movie or "life on the reservation" movie anyone in the audience will ever see, but it's an amiable couple of hours that doesn't embarrass either of the niches it serves.

Native Americans of the Haudenosaunee nations have been playing lacrosse (also known as "the Creator's Game" and "the medicine game") for hundreds of years, but in the present, the Sunaquot Nation (a fictional equivalent of the Onondaga Nation) high school in upstate New York is getting its butt kicked by Coventry Prep in a pre-season scrimmage. When star player Jimmy Silverfoot (Tyler Hill) comes out with a sore shoulder, manager Nadie Logan (Chelsea Ricketts) inserts herself, only to have her ankle broken in two places. On the other side of the reservation, her older brother Joe (Brandon Routh) manages the casino, whose white developer (Tom Kemp) is leaning on him to get an expansion. A former star for Coventry, Joe gets the council to agree with a caveat - he must take over coaching the team from his father (Gil Birmingham), who describes it as a spiritual quest.

There's a standard template for high school sports movies, and this one never veers far from it: The viewer can check off the coach who's not really a bad guy but has had misplaced priorities, the showboating ball hog, the guy who rides the bench, the girl who loves the game more than many of the players, and so on. Writers Brad Riddel and Todd Baird aren't looking to subvert expectations here, and on occasion, things happen because it's the point in an inspiring sports story where such things happen. The portions of the movie that attempt to deal with the compromises Native Americans must make are even thinner.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 21 May 2012 - 27 May 2012

Fastest I've done one of these in months, if not longer. You can do that when you're only really carving time for Sunrise out of watching baseball:



As I write this, I am learning a valuable lesson along the lines of "when a friend offers you sunblock at a Red Sox game while you're in direct, bright sunlight, say yes." It makes a lot more sense than what Valentine is doing with Lin Che-Hsuan. Sure, he's mostly up as a defensive replacement, but is he so hopeless with the bat that Scott Podsednik and Little Nicky Punto are better options?

Nearly a great game - Buchholz pitched well (evidence in my head that his ability improves as Matsuzaka's return becomes more likely - Daisuke pitched a fine game at Pawtucket on Saturday), Adrian Gonzalez hit a clutch go-ahead home run... and then Aceves blew the save.

After that, it was a pleasant enough walk to Boston Common for Men in Black 3. That movie, by the way, had one of the longest trailer packages I've seen in a while (likely a result of seeing more movies in Arlington/Somerville, where they do tend to just get on with it). A big part of that was the 6-minute Amazing Spider-Man preview, which maybe hasn't made me a total believer in the reboot - it still looks a little Batman Begins-y for my taste, and I really would have liked to see what Sam Raimi, Dylan Baker, Bryce Dallas Howard, and James Cromwell would have done with much of the same material that was set up in Spider-Man 3. But there's little doubt that it's going to look amazing.

And, yeah, I'm joining the "Prometheus Now!" crowd. I've only seen a couple teasers for that before but the trailer made me quite enthused.

Men in Black 3

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 May 2012 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, Imax-branded DLP 3D)

One of the things that's surprisingly pleasant about Men in Black 3 is that it doesn't succumb to the temptation to wheel out Tony Shaloub or everyone else from the first two movies in order to try and recapture every detail of what people liked about them. Certainly, this may be less a matter of intent than practicality - it's been ten years since #2, and some folks just might not have been interested - but [credited writer] Etan Cohen's script does a nice job in reflecting time passing, so that Will Smith's Agent J is more seasoned and this second sequel isn't quite rehashing the same jokes the way Men in Black 2 did.

(Although, is it me, or does the chronology not quite add up? When talking to the young Agent K in 1969, J says they meet again in "24 years", or 1993, when the first movie came out in 1997. And given what we see at the end of the movie, J would have to be about 48 now, or five years older than Will Smith actually is. I suppose that the whole series could have happened "four years ago", but it's not the vibe I get from it.

That said, the script has some logical problems but holds together remarkably well for a movie that had to shut down for a few weeks so that the writers could figure out what the heck is going on midway through.)

By and large, the movie works because Cohen, director Barry Sonnenfeld, Smith, and the cast are pretty good at combining low-key humor with big, snazzy special effects. Rick Baker and company come up with cool, imaginative aliens, and everyone else hits a good spot between taking the weirdness for granted and reacting to it. My personal comedy rule of "nobody in the movie who is not at some point funny" is followed pretty well, including (effective) villain Jemaine Clement and Emma Thompson as the newly-promoted head of the operation.

And it's hard not to like Josh Brolin as the younger version of Tommy Lee Jones's Agent K. On the one hand, sure, it's in large part an impersonation, but it's such a good one (while also being slightly different in important areas) that the audience actually feels itself in J's position - that when K is off-screen and we're just hearing him, it's easy to be fooled into thinking it's entirely the same guy, but then the differences pop up and it's kind of a weird experience. It looks simple, but it seems like something that could have gone wrong.

Men in Black 3 isn't a great movie, but it resides comfortably in the "pretty good" range - the jokes are funny more often than not, the action's decent, the whole thing looks spiffy (including the post-converted-but-planned-for 3D), and it's comfortably familiar without feeling repetitive. A $17.50 Imax-branded ticket was probably a bit much, but it's likely well worth the $11.50 you'll pay at the Arlington Capitol.

One last thing (though it was one of the first things that struck me in the movie): Danny Elfman's Men in Black theme has to be one of his best, most catchy compositions. Not complicated, but it really covers both the humorous and thrilling halves of the property perfectly, from the very first frame of this movie.

Wordless Wednesdays: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

I got kind of lucky with this one; Sunrise was originally planned to be April's "Wordless Wednesday" screening at the Brattle, which mean I would have missed it in order to see Independent Film Festival Boston's opening night, but there was a scheduling issue of some sort and it got bumped to May. Of course, this does mean that I missed a different Murnau last month (City Girl).

I liked it quite a bit, although it did take me until I was actually writing the review to really appreciate its inside-out story structure. That's not to say I disliked it while watching the movie, even if I did look at my watch at a certain point because it seemed like the end of the movie but couldn't be. I found myself thinking that given bits were OK (and noting that it does sort of seem to have that "modular" feeling that many silents have), but because I felt like the movie was past its natural endpoint, I sort of discounted their worth.

A little knowledge, it seems, can be a dangerous thing.

Of course, it is subtitled "A Song of Two Humans", and songs don't necessarily have the same patterns as narratives. It does strike me as somewhat interesting that there's no real "written by" credit like we would typically see today. Hermann Sudermann is credited with the "original theme", Carl Mayer with the "scenario", and Katherine Hilliker & H.H. Caldwell with "titles", and none of those credits really seems to go to the story's structure.

I must admit, I find myself kind of surprised that this isn't available on home video except as an import - Fox put out a limited edition DVD ten years ago, but it's sold out at Amazon. Hopefully this new-ish restoration and a divisible-by-five anniversary year will have it available once again soon.

(Also: for some reason, I was under the impression that this was a long, stretched-out silent, but it's quite a manageable length. I wonder what I had it confused with.)

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 May 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Wordless Wednesdays, 35mm)

F.W. Murnau's Sunrise has an odd-sounding subtitle ("A Song of Two Humans") which marks it as being decidedly from another era, and watching it confirms that feeling. It's from early enough in the history of cinema that its story is iconic rather than generic, but also comes from late enough in the silent era that its technique has been impressively refined. List-makers often call it "great" or "essential", and it's hard to argue with those categorizations.

During the summer, city folk often come down to the country for a vacation, and one woman (Margaret Livingston) has stayed longer than most. It's not so much for the fresh air, though; she's carrying on an affair with a handsome farmer (George O'Brien), who has sold much of his stock and put himself in hock to money-lenders for her. She wants him to come back to the city, but what, he asks, of his wife (Janet Gaynor)? Well, the woman asks, couldn't she possibly drown? A plan is hatched, but the man is not the murderous type, and soon finds himself literally and figuratively pursuing his wife anew.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Sunrise is that the story arguably reaches its emotional climax right around the midway point: Once the man and his wife have observed the young couple's wedding, it is clear that the most important journeys have ended and questions resolved, and it's not long until a perfect fade-to-credits scene appears; you could end the movie right there and it would be perfect, if short. And yet, Murnau and company keep going - in fact, most of the film's most memorable scenes happen after that scene, in complete defiance of conventional structure. It's a testament to the work of all involved that the second half of the film is not just an extended bit of wheel-spinning, but a frequently-delightful portrait of young love rediscovered that is beautiful in its own right. The movie is almost inside-out, and yet it works well enough that the audience either doesn't notice its unorthodox shape at all or wonders why movies have become so formalized.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 25 May 2012 - 31 May 2012

Long weekend coming up, and it looks like it's not going to rain! Which is good, because I've got baseball I want to see and heavy rain stinks for pedestrians trying to get to movies.

• Main opening this week: Men In Black 3, ten years after the not-really-good MIB 2, and... man, have both Barry Sonnenfeld and Will Smith been keeping a low profile lately. Maybe that's why this seems to be sneaking into theaters, despite opening for a holiday weekend in 3D (postconverted). Or maybe The Avengers has just been a juggernaut blocking out all slightly-less-huge movies (fun fact - Men In Black 3 is technically also a Marvel movie, as they purchased publisher Malibu back in the 1990s, but I don't think they've done anything with the property in fifteen years). Opens at the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square, Fenway, and Boston Common in both 3D and 2D. It gets the Imax-branded screen at Harvard Square, but the furniture stores give it a pass.
  
  Also opening at the multiplexes: Chernobyl Diaries, a horror movie set in the area around the Soviet nuclear reactor whose meltdown left miles of uninhabitable land on all sides. Expect mutants! Plays the Somerville Theatre, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway.



• A couple of movies that played IFFBoston take up residence at the Kendall Square Cinema. I can heartily recommend the one-week booking, I Wish, the new film from Hirokazu Kore-eda; it follows a pair of young brothers whose parents divorce has left them living at cities on the opposite end of Japan's southern island, on a quest to make a wish at the point where the bullet trains pass each other. The also pick up Polisse (which I missed because Brian told me this booking would happen, a French drama about a reporter observing the Child Protective Unit within the Paris police. Also in French is Where Do We Go Now?, a comedy about a group of Lebanese women trying to build bridges in their village.
  
  They're also starting to run The Room at 10pm on the last Saturday of every month, but, c'mon, that is the Coolidge's thing (or was, since it's not on their schedule), and you'd think that a theater with the same ownership as Magnet Films could dig out their own wacky cult movies.



• The Coolidge's own late-night show this weekend is Wayne's World, one of the relatively few movies based on a Saturday Night Live sketch that turned out to be a critical and popular success. It's in the big theater at 11:59 on both Friday and Saturday. And that, believe it or not, seems to be the entirety of their special events this week, with the program apparently staying pretty much the same until it turns over next Friday.



• The Brattle continues their Reunion Weekend through Monday to coincide with Harvard's reunion/homecoming. That means double features and late shows of movies celebrating their 25th (Spaceballs & The Princess Bride on Friday, Hellraiser Saturday, Predator Sunday), 50th (Vivre Sa Vie & Jules and Jim on Saturday and The Trial & Lolita on Monday), and 75th (A Day at the Races & Easy Living on Sunday) Anniversaries. Predator is listed as digital, with the rest on 35mm.
  
  During the week, they have a quick group of movies by Wes Anderson: Fantastic Mr. Fox (digital) & The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou play Tuesday, Bottle Rocket plays late Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, and a special preview of his new one, Moonrise Kingdom, co-presented by IFFBoston on Thursday evening. The Wednesday-evening hole in the schedule is filled by the local premiere of For the Love of the Music: The Club 47 Folk Revival, a documentary on the popular and influential 1960s Cambridge venue.



• With the academic year coming to a close, Emerson's ArtsEmerson film programming winds up for a while. The "Festival Focus" selection is Nana, a French film about a four-year-old girl mostly left to fend for herself in a rural area; it won awards at Istanbul and Locarno. It runs Friday and Saturday as does Elena and Her Men, which wraps up "Renoir in Technicolor". It features Ingrid Bergman as a countess torn between Jean Marais and Mel Ferrer.



• The Harvard Film Archive doesn't shut down for the summer, though they are also finishing up a couple of programs. The School of Reis: The Films and Legacy of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro concludes Friday (This Side of Resurrection & Blood) and Saturday (Glória & A Girl in Summer), all created by Portuguese filmmakers who learned from Reis & Cordeiro. The rest of the weekend is the Sergei Eisenstein program - a ddouble feature of Ivan the Terrible parts one and two on Sunday evening, and Alexander Nevsky on Monday.



• The MFA is also wrapping up series at the end of the month, with The Story of Film's various chapters playing out from Friday to Sunday, and two other "Exclusive Screenings " later in the week: Wednesday's Louise Wimmer is a sneak preview of a movie from July's French Film Festival starring Corinne Masiero as a hotel maid; Thursday's Walking in the City is a free selection of short films that tie in with a Wendy Jacob photo exhibit.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has one film program, an evening of animated shorts by Karen Aqua, a local animator who died of ovarian cancer one year ago; proceeds will go to the Ovarian Cancer Fun at Dana-Farber.

Huh, we don't get the animated Disney film from India? Kind of disappointing. Anyway, my plans like include Men in Black 3, Polisse, and Moonrise Kingdom.

This Week Month In Tickets: 23 April 2012 - 20 May 2012

I honestly thought I was only going to be skipping this for one week, but once you've slipped that second time, it's hard not to say "well, I stand a pretty good chance of catching up by the next one". And then... Well, it doesn't happen nearly as quickly as it should, and considering "have a regular schedule" has been a goal, I hate it.

So, let's get it started!

23 April 2012 - 29 April 2012
30 April 2012 - 6 May 2012
7 May 2012 - 13 May 2012
14 May 2012 - 20 May 2012



Independent Film Festival Boston! If you're in Boston, like movies, and have never been... Well, what's wrong with you? It's great movies at great venues with lots of special guests. I'd go a lot even if they didn't think eFilmCritic was worth a pass, and have put my money where my mouth is with a membership. You should too!

I said a lot about the festival in the individual pages, so here's the links to get to them:

• Wednesday 25 April 2012 (Opening Night) - Sleepwalk with Me - Posted 27 April 2012, 1 day behind!
• Thursday 26 April 2012 - Pelotero and The Imposter - Posted 28 April 2012, 1.5 days behind!
• Friday 27 April 2012 - Burn and V/H/S - Posted 30 April 2012, 3 days behind!
• Saturday 28 April 2012 - Time Zero, Knuckleball!, Think of Me, and Booster - Posted 2 May 2012, 4 days behind!
• Sunday 29 April 2012 - Fairhaven, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Girl Model, and Keyhole - Posted 9 May 2012, 10 days behind!
• Monday 30 April 2012 - The Revisionaries and Headhunters - Posted 13 May 2012, 13 days behind!
• Tuesday 1 May 2012 - Paul Williams Still Alive and Rubberneck - Posted 14 May 2012, 14 days behind!
• Wednesday 2 May 2012 (Closing Night) - The Queen of Versailles - Posted 17 May 2012, 15 days behind!

Honestly, I'm more shocked at the quick turnaround between certain days as I am by the delays between others!



For the index for the last three days of IFFBoston, well, scroll up to above the page.

After that, you'd usually see me wanting to take a break from the movies and all, just retreating to the house for a relaxing writing coma, but the Somerville Theatre decides it's time to show the next four James Bond movies in 35mm, and I already had tickets for the Talk Cinema series purchased back in September, and 2 Days in New York wasn't one I was going to miss, especially since I couldn't fit it into my IFFBoston schedule.

And that wasn't even a planned bit of flexibility in the schedule; I don't think which movie was playing that day was announced until after I'd decided to go another direction at the festival.

So, I get out of that, and hop on the Green Line to Fenway to meet my brother, his wife, and their girls for the ballgame. They almost didn't come, as it would be the third weekend in a row that they came down to the city. That the girls (5-and-a-half and almost-2) made it through seven and a half innings was pretty impressive, but they got antsy, and as my brother said, it had the look of something that could go fifteen.

He underestimated.

Basically, the two teams played another whole game after my brother left. It got pretty bizarre by the end, with both teams emptying the bullpen and sending a position player to the mound (and, since they'd been playing the field, losing the DH). This was the first time I've ever seen a game have a 14th Inning Stretch. PA announcer Carl Beane had fun with that and some of the odd substitutions at the end, which is nice, since it wound up being his last; he would have a fatal heart attack while driving four days later. The next game I went to was really peculiar without his voice; he'll be missed.



The game went on so long that my initial plan to see The Avengers afterward was pretty much completely shot - heck, when I got to Boston Common, the next three or four shows were sold out on Sunday night. That's just some ridiculous success. I wound up going to the Capitol the next day, and going back a few days later for The Pirates! and Nesting.

That next game I went to was completely different, and not just because it was a win; it was crisply played and gorgeous out. More like that, please!

The Avengers

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2012 in Arlington Capitol #1 (first-run, Real-D 3D)

As much as The Avengers deserves every bit of praise it gets for being both the culmination of an ambitious plan and an impressive ensemble action movie in its own right (a form that Hollywood really hasn't had much luck with since the likes of The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen), it's not exactly deep; the likes of The Dark Knight and Ang Lee's Hulk are, in their way, much more ambitious than it is. But in a way, that's fitting; as much as comic book fans will often defend their favorite medium by pointing out the emotional storytelling and formal invention that goes on there, 90% of what we buy is people in brightly-colored costumes beating each other up.

Which is fine - that stuff is fun! And The Avengers is the first movie, I think, that really gives an audience that has never read comics an idea of just how much fun it is. It follows the rules of the superhero crossover almost without deviation - something bad happens, the heroes come together to investigate but wind up fighting each other over a misunderstanding, the villain reveals himself, and the good guys then band together before the massive, splash-page-and-property-damage-filled final battle. Heck, at some point, the comic fans in the audience will see that writer/director Joss Whedon is, in a roundabout way, sort of doing Avengers #1, where Loki pit the Hulk against Iron Man and Thor (among others) before everything got sorted.

But the other thing to recognize is that Whedon pulls off the "crossover" element much better than most comic writers have recently - The Avengers picks up on threads from the Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America movies and has them legitimately intersect. The "shared universe" element of comics often gets a bad rap for making the medium "inaccessible" (sometimes you just want to read Superman without needing a primer on the WildStorm Universe!), but when it works it's exciting in a way no other medium has ever really captured before now.

It works here because Whedon does a lot of things right - as much as I like what Ang Lee did, he and Mark Ruffalo really nail Bruce Banner and "the other guy"; we also get a great Black Widow and a pretty terrific take on Captain America assimilating to the modern world. The action is well-done, and the filmmakers are able to go big without ever quite hitting the brain's reality filter.

Marvel pulled it off. I'm impressed.

Damsels in Distress

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2012 in Somerville Theatre #2 (second-run, 35mm)

Boy, this would have been fun to see a couple of months ago with Whit Stillman in person doing Q&A. I was at the front of the line when they ran out of seats during his visit to the HFA! But, hey, there will inevitably be a Criterion Blu-ray with tons of good stuff.

And I'll want it; even though this is Stillman's first movie since The Last Days of Disco almost a decade and a half ago, his cinematic world is relatively unchanged, full of articulate but oblivious people who somehow overcome an utterly ridiculous amount of self-awareness by meaning well and somehow having a youthful innocence despite it. By all accounts, the long gap is because Stillman had actually wanted to do something different - he spent a lot of time developing movies set during the Revolutionary War and in Jamaica that never got funded - but there's not a whole lot of rust on him.

I do wonder if he's somewhat bitter about retreating back into this box, though. As much as the characters from Metropolitan, Barcelona, and Last Days of Disco were sometimes naive to a fault, they were seldom stupid. He's likely not really saying "you wanted more of these young twerps, well, have them!", but it is a slightly different take. As dopey comedies go, though, it's a lot of fun.

Here's hoping the next comes about much quicker.



And after that, we've got a couple in the "well, no-one else at EFC is going to review them" file. I hoped for a little more out of both Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale and Sound of My Voice for various reasons, but sometimes it's just not meant to be.


Whew. So this is what being caught up on ones writing feels like!

(Heads to Brattle)

Talk Cinema: 2 Days in New York

Just in case anybody from Magnolia is reading this and wants to get on me, eFilmCritic, or Independent Film Festival Boston - I'm not breaking the embargo imposed on the IFFBoston screening, because I wasn't there (I saw Think of Me instead) and didn't go to this screening to try and exploit some sort of loophole (I bought tickets for the entire Talk Cinema series last year). Besides, eFilmCritic has an international audience and this has already come out in the UK.

I mean, I'll take it down if you insist because I don't want of those entities to deal with any crap, but can we just take a moment to pause and think about the absurdity of embargoing film festival screenings, especially since every one with filmmakers present includes an exhortation to get the word out? That's basically an implicit amendment to what the guests are saying: "If you liked the movie, please vote for it on IMDB, tweet/Facebook/blog about it -- except you guys who people might listen to; you've got to wait!"


Anyway, now that that's out of the way, this was the last screening in the Talk Cinema series, which turned out pretty good. I likely would have seen most of the ones I got to anyway, and I regret missing the one I did for misreading the calendar. I'll probably do it again next year, although it is a bit of cash for movies that will likely be getting a local release soon enough. The feedback portion can be a mixed bag; the portion that a critic has prepared beforehand is usually pretty good, but I'm a bit skeptical about what we all say immediately after the movie. I need a bit of mulling-over time to really formulate my thoughts, which sometimes only really solidify as I'm writing (and aren't you glad that you mostly just see the result, rather than "I think A, B, and C... oh, wait, C totally changes A, select, delete, new words, control-end, blah-blah backspace backspace backspace..."?), so I don't contribute much.

The conversation at this one was a little like that, a lot of half-formed thoughts. There's a bit of a theme of how liberals can stereotype just as much as the conservatives who are often painted as racists - hence the way Marion's family acts kind of crassly around Mingus - but that sort of petered out, and it took me until I was actually writing the review to connect it less with politics than how these French people view America, kind of a counterpoint to how 2 Days in Paris had fun dashing American preconceptions of France.

I don't recall how many people in the room had seen 2 Days in Paris at all, for that matter; I'm guessing not that many, because the first movie barely came up in the discussion. In fact--

(SPOILERS!) when discussing the matter of who had purchased Marion's soul at auction, the discussion was mostly about what people thought of Vincent Gallo outside the movie. That's fair; it's all of those things that make his unbilled cameo very funny (although maybe kind of inside/obscure, as Marion actually has to say "you're Vincent Gallo" before things start to click), but saying "I hate Vincent Gallo so I hated this part" is kind of frustrating; it's such an over-the-top parody that it should be funny for exactly the reasons you hate him. Still, as much as I liked that gag, I was pretty much expecting it to be Adam Goldberg's character from the previous movie. Jack has sort of been hanging over things a little, much like Marie Pillet's absence has, and while I don't think the story really needed an appearance by the guy, it's a place I could see the movie going.

Or maybe a lot of other people had the same thought, and didn't raise their hands for the same reason I didn't.(!SRELIOPS)

Still, pretty good movie, and while I'm glad I saw Think of Me at IFFBoston - I've got my doubts as to that getting distribution - I do rather wish I'd been able to see Julie Delpy introduce/answer questions in person. (Haven't had time to watch this yet, unfortunately.)

2 Days in New York

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Talk Cinema, 35mm)

Sequels to independent films that didn't really break out are kind of odd things; the audience is as much those who heard the first movie was pretty good as the people who loved it, so even more than with studio productions, they've got to be accessible and familiar, though without actually repeating anything. 2 Days in New York manages this pretty well; it amuses whether you've taken the previous trip to Paris or not.

When we last saw Marion (Julie Delpy), she and her boyfriend Jack were visiting her family in Paris. Now they have a son but are no longer together; Marion and Lulu (Owen Shipman) instead share an apartment in New York City with new boyfriend Mingu (Chris Rock) and his daughter Willow (Talen Riley). Marion is having her first gallery show of her photography tomorrow (where, as a conceptual piece, she will auction off her soul), and has invited her father Jeannot (Julie's own father Albert Delpy) and sister Rose (Alexia Landeau) - who brings a boyfriend, Manu (Alex Nahon), who had been with Marion years ago.

While both 2 Days movies are rooted in the same thing - the hidden tensions between Marion and her boyfriend being brought to the surface and exacerbated by her crazy, crude family, at first glance New York seemed a bit less clever and subversive than Paris, which gleefully demolished the romantic mystique of Paris one horribly racist cab driver at a time - an ambition this movie seemingly does not share. Then it dawned on me that I'm an American, and thus wasn't looking at things from Rose's and Manu's point of view, which has them discovering that New York, Americans in general, and black Americans in particular, are not exactly the anarchic rebels they had imagined. It's not quite the same - Rose & Manu are such broadly-sketched characters that I somewhat doubt that French audiences saw them as surrogates (though, to be fair, Adam Goldberg's Jack was pretty weird, too).

Full review at EFC.