The plan on Saturday had been like the plan on Friday - go to Somerville for the animated shorts at noon, hang around there all day, following the schedule I'd mapped out days before, then head to the Coolidge for a midnight show and walk home. Because this is a festival, specifically the IFFB, things didn't go according to plan.
Good reason, though - a whole bunch of people wanted to see Chalk, so it got moved from one of the small downstairs theaters to the big main screen. This meant a forty-five minute delay, which means in collides with plans for other films. So once I get out of that, I head back to Cambridge for Wordplay at the Brattle, then quickly back to Somerville for Abduction.
Happily, all four of the features were very good to excellent. To re-iterate what I said right after seeing it, Abduction is a fantastic documentary that starts out as true crime and becomes an international spy story. It's going to be a big deal if it gets a release.
Chalk
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
It's not necessarily a good thing when folks who should know say a movie is dead on; my least favorite movies are the ones that capture something unexceptional perfectly. Still, when the teachers behind me said that Chalk pretty much nailed the experience of being relatively new at that job, I was glad to hear it. Nothing wrong with the movie making us think about how stressful a teacher's life can be, especially since it's so funny throughout.
Chalk is presented in the half-documentary format of television shows like Arrested Development and The Office: There's little indication that the characters are aware of a camera, and it seemed to have more coverage and close-ups than a real low-budget documentaries would probably have, but makes frequent use of "confessional" and post-shoot interview footage. It follows four teachers in an Austin high school: Mr. Lowrey (Troy Schremmer), a first-year history teacher whose lack of self-confidence is countered by Mr. Stroope (Chris Mass), on his third year whose ambition is to win Teacher of the Year within his first five despite not really being that good at teaching history. The gym teacher, Coach Webb (Janelle Schremmer) would like us to know that despite having short hair and being a gym teacher (and kind of pushy), she is not gay; her friend Mrs. Reddell (Shannon Haragan) is starting her first year as an assistant principal after having been the chorus leader.
Read the rest at HBS.
Wordplay
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
Wordplay is this year's big word-nerd documentary, following in the footsteps of Spellbound and Word Wars. As a member of that constituency, I'm pleased to see that the independent filmmakers of the world are catering to me in this way, and that they're not catering to me with crap, either. Wordplay continues the streak of these movies being highly entertaining.
(Obligatory Boston-based-guy complaint: The constant praise of the New York Times crossword as the gold standard got old for me fairly quickly. The Globe's daily crossword is not the greatest, but on Sundays they alternate between Henry Hook and Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon, who are in my humble opinion better than Shortz. Of course, since the Times owns the Globe, Shortz could very well be their editor.)
Yes, folks, people have favorite crossword puzzle constructors, although the vast majority of people who solve these puzzles probably don't give that much thought to how those puzzles come to be. It turns out that even before landing arguably the top job in American puzzledom, Shortz was a big name in the hobby: He created his own major and curriculum for "enigmatology" in college, and not long after was one of the organizers of the first National Crossword Puzzle Championship in Stamford, CT, which he still heads up today. When he took the job as the Times's puzzle editor in the early 1990s, it was a major shift in direction for the paper - his style of using fewer obscure words and more humor and pop culture was a big shift for the Times.
Read the rest at HBS.
Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
I'm not doing the thing. I'm not saying that Abduction is one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, and certainly the best documentary, just because it has important subject matter. I hate when people do that, whether they be critics, award voters, or just plain snobs. I'm saying Abduction is a great film because it tells a fascinating story in a suspenseful, exciting way, delivering the kind of emotional gut punches we go to the movies for.
If you're going in cold, it starts out like a fairly straightforward cold-case kidnapping story. On November 15, 1977, thirteen year-old Megumi Yokota and her best friend were walking home from badminton practice and went their separate ways. The friend comes home safely; Megumi vanishes as if into thin air. She's initially thought to be a runaway, though her family is at a loss as to why she would leave home. A couple years later, a crime reporter gets a tip that something strange is happening along Japan's west coast: Young couples in their early twenties are disappearing, though one pair escapes. Megumi's abduction isn't thought to be connected, as it doesn't fit tte pattern. It's not until 1997 that the truth is confirmed: Megumi and the others were kidnapped by North Korean spies and shipped in tiny containers across the Sea of Japan to train NK agents to better impersonate Japanese.
Read the rest at HBS.
District B13 (Banlieue 13)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2006 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston 2006)
There are two kinds of action movie in the world. There's the ones that make the audience ooh and ahh and whoop from an adrenaline rush, and then there's the ones like District 13, where you get some of that, but you as often wince, draw a sharp intake of breath, and kind of turn halfway from the screen. You lean over to the guy sitting next to you and whisper "that, mon ami... that has got to hurt."
It's to be expected. We're informed right off the bat that Paris's District 13 is a violent place, so bad that in 2010 it's been walled off from the rest of the city with the police pulling out to just let the riffraff kill each other. Still, there's one guy in there willing to fight for what's right: Leito (David Belle) has intercepted a suitcase full of heroin and is destroying it. This displeases gangster Taha (Bibi Naceri), so he sends henchman K2 (Tony D'Amario) to stop him. There's a big fight, Taha and K2 decide to kidnap Leito's sister Lola (Dany Verissimo), and there's another big fight. The film then skips six months and introduces us to Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), a crack undercover operative (via a big fight), who is sent undercover into B13 to retrieve a neutron bomb that has fallen into Taha's hands, with prisoner Leito as a guide. Big fights ensue.
Read the rest at HBS.
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