Friday, October 09, 2009

This Week In Tickets: 28 September 2009 to 4 October 2009

This winds up being late and it hardly seems worth it, does it? A fair amount of baseball seen, and two previews for which I don't even have ticket stubs:

This Week In Tickets!

Preview screenings for which I am stubless: Whip It on 1 October (7pm) and Good Hair on 4 October (11am)

That first game was not quite what one would call a miserable experience - yes, it was an ugly loss, and just as things were about to get better, the sky opened up and dumped a really remarkable amount of rain on our heads. Fortunately, there was a fair amount of shelter nearby, and we figured that if they restarted the game, we'd be able to grab actual Monster Seats, rather than Monster Standing Room. After about an hour, though, my brother Dan and his wife Lara decided they really should head back home to Maine, and Matt followed. I opted to stay until the end, which wasn't long - I think the game was called off before they reached their car or T stop. Still, it's the principle of the thing.

(Bummed me out, since the team was scoring runs when it ended and other games that Dan and I attended toether included this one and this one. I'm not saying our presense causes awesome comebacks, but it's not a bad sign!)

Friday was me impulse-buying a birthday gift for myself, and that was a lot more fun - beautiful night, great view of the game, Matsuzaka looking more trustworthy than Buchholz at this point. For what those pavilion box seats cost, though, they have what may be the longest line for food in the park.

As to the movies, seeing the game on Monday made me miss the Brattle's preview screening of Whip It, but the IFFB picked up a screening of their own later in the week. Cool, because I wanted to see it, there was a bunch of stuff coming out that weekend, and I knew Saturday was going to be given over to my niece's birthday party (yes, we have the same birthday. I have no excuse to forget hers ever). It's a fun little movie, though I don't know about "good enough to drop out of Drag Me To Hell for".

Whip It

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2009 at AMC Harvard Square #5 (Preview)

That title cries out for an exclamation mark, doesn't it? In a way, so does the movie. It's a pretty by-the-numbers teen girl coming of age thing, though funnier than most. It's got a nice cast, although they're better around the edges, where Daniel Stern, director Drew Barrymore, Zoe Bell, or even Michael Petrillo can take their characters and find some way to make them memorable and unique. Star Ellen Page really doesn't have a chance to do that; there is just nothing new or unique about Bliss Cavendar. That's not the result of a bad performance, but Bliss is almost never the most interesting person in a given scene: Okay, she beats Landon Pigg's completely generic Cute Musician Boyfriend. Maybe Marcia Gay Harden's stage-mothering character, although she gets more interesting once we see her in her postal service uniform.

And I'm kind of starting to suspect that Ellen Page is going to fall into the same category as Matt Frewer and Heather Graham: Good but not really impressive, but you don't realize it at first because they were so perfect in Max Headroom/Swingers/Juno. There were times while watching this that I couldn't help but wish it were made fifteen or so years earlier, when Barrymore could star rather than direct and steal scenes.

A couple weird things about the movie: Drew Barrymore looks like she has the makings of a pretty decent director, especially since she took on a project that would require dealing with fast-moving action as her first project and emerged unscathed. Well, not literally unscathed - she's the one that gets banged up when the script calls for someone to get banged up, which is kind of fun. The credits seemed to play up her contribution by cutting to her even for her directing and producing credits, which feels like they're playing up her on-screen presence more than it warrants.

Also, I snickered to myself about how this is a movie ready-made for the crowds at one of the Austin festivals (or just regular Austin dates) to go nuts over, because (a) Austinites frickin' love Austin, and aren't shy about letting you know this, and (b) this movie presents going to Austin as just a complete escape from everything Bliss doesn't like about her life, and hits all the hipster spots. I suspect that the "yaaah Austin woooooooooooooo!" factor could have driven me nuts (especially the scene in the Alamo Drafthouse).

As such, I was highly amused when I saw that most of the movie is Michigan doubling for Texas in the end credits. Are you no longer indie and cool when it's too expensive to shoot something like Whip It there?
It rains a lotHappy birthday

1 comment:

Vanessa said...

I really wanna watch Whip it! I like Drew and am eager to see what she can do as a director!