One of the things I tried to do this year, at least initially, is try and stay in one place all day. Which meant wanting to see the movie with Julie Delpy and the new Quay Brothers thing (more on that in a couple days) locked me into the Coolidge for the night. Which was fine; I wasn't going to go for a midnight at Somerville, even though it meant Saturday's midnight would be in Brookline, too, as opposed to the easier-to-walk-home-from Brattle. It also got me into Brothers of the Head, which wasn't really on my list of stuff to check out; "conjoined twin punk rockers in the seventies" is the sort of thing that seems a little too odd for me.
The line and Q&A for Lucy Keyes was interesting; I'm looking at the description and seeing "horror movie", and then I'm standing in line with a whole bunch of kids. It turns out this was made locally, so a lot of families who knew the filmmaker came out, and I think some of the kids were friends of the child actors in the cast. I was fairly impressed with how it was a good family ghost story; it's not a genre people play in nowadays.
Of course, one of those kids saw my Press pass and asked if I wrote for the paper. I said "no, a website", and he didn't say another word. No respect.
Then a quick stop at The Upper Crust, where they were out of pepperoni slices. Now, if you've got cheese slices, can't you throw some pepperoni on them if you're going to be heating it anyway? Please? Ah, well. That was followed by Death Trance, which is a ton of fun. I was kind of dragging by this point; I'd gone in to work early so I could leave early, and I'd been writing stuff up between movies. Long. Day. And then I gave up on the bus too quickly, so had to walk home at 1:30am.
Still, it was the start of a very solid weekend.
Brothers of the Head
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe are documentarians by trade most known for films about show business like Lost in La Mancha. Thus, this adaptation of a Brain Aldiss novel takes on that form. It's not just a case where every problem looks like a nail when you're good with a hammer, though; it's a way to bring the audience into an unusual situation.
That situation is the lives of Tom and Barry Howe, a pair of conjoined twins raised in isolation until a musical impresario more or less purchases the seventeen-year-old brothers from their father in the mid-1970s. Rather than becoming the pop novelty act the man envisioned, the pair pick up a punk sensibility, as Barry's songs especially are suffused with anger and raw emotion; they are getting their first chance to express themselves to the outside world and they're not messing around. It's far from an easy or idyllic life, of course, as the house in which they life includes an intrusive documentarian, a "keeper" who locks them in their room and beats them, and a pretty graduate student studying them who quickly comes between the brothers.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Legend of Lucy Keyes
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
The best ghost stories aren't really about ghosts; a ghost is a concept to ill-defined to really work as the focus of a story that aims to have a real plot and play fair with its audience. Stick a ghost into another kind of story, though, and you can not only add a little extra suspense, but misdirect the audience into thinking they're watching a different sort of movie.
The Legend of Lucy Keyes looks like a horror movie; it gives us a family of of city folk moving out to tiny Prniceton, Massachusetts where father Guy Cooley (Justin Theroux) will hopefully be helping to build a windmill farm, while mother Jeanne (Julie Delpy) is mostly looking for a new start after seeing their youngest daughter killed by a car in a city street. Daughters Molly (Kathleen Regan) and Lucy (Cassidy Hinkle) are in tow. There's some weird people in town, from the too-cheerful woman spearheading the windmill campaign (Brooke Adams) to the creepy woman basically saying that disturbing that land will disturb restless spirits (Jamie Donnelly), to the grumpy farmer next door who fertilizes his crops with awful-smelling clam bellies. Jeanne eventually learns about another Lucy who disappeared some two hundred and fifty years earlier and the girl's mother who is said to haunt the woods
Read the rest at HBS.
Death Trance
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
A few years ago, a movie by the name of "Versus" came out of Japan. Almost revolutionary in its simplicity, it married old-school Hong Kong martial arts style - let there be many well-choreographed fights, and let them come at the drop of a hat - to modern Japanese willingness to throw genre into a blender, stuck a talented young director on it, and pretty much hit people square in the id. That director's gone on to bigger things; now that film's action director, Yuji Shimomura, has taken the big chair for the first time and refined the formula a little more.
As much fun as Versus was, it wore the audience out and then hit us with convoluted backstory. Shimomura and his co-writers know that we're here to see butts kicked, and never loses sight of that. There's story, but it's doled out in manageable pieces between the action scenes. It's also not complicated enough that we feel the need to keep track of a whole bunch of elements to get something out of the action - each revelation means that someone's going to try and get possession of the coffin that serves as the movie's MacGuffin, the guy who has possession will fight him, and then the chase is on again. It's shallow, sure, but the fight scenes are good, and we learn enough to have a rooting interest even though we're given more than two sides, not always easily labeled "good" and "evil". And even if the story often seems like "just enough to get ninety minutes of movie out of fifty minutes of violence", it's also enough to get us to lean forward in our seats a little in the last act when the MacGuffin's about to start MacGuffing.
Read the rest at HBS.
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