Friday, September 24, 2010

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 September - 30 September

Matt's bachelor party last week does in fact hint that a certain other event will curtail my movie-going this weekend. Fortunately, Matt and Morgan are awesome folks so I don't mind. And, besides, my niece has been practicing being a flower girl all summer, so it would be a shame to miss that.

The rest of the Boston area has no such excuse. Go see some movies!

  • The big-ish event this week is Terrorthon 2010, the nine-day horror movie marathon from J. Cannibal and the guys that bring us the annual Sci-Fi marathon. Myself, I would have gone with "The Boston Terrorthon", especially since they've been calling the sci-fi event "Boston's other Marathon" for years, but I imagine that to be the thin line where trademark violation becomes actionable.

    As you might expect, running concurrent with Austin's Fantastic Fest, it's not getting a whole bunch of premieres. But, unlike the extended sci-fi festival in February, it does seem to be running in one of the Somerville Theatre's regular screens, and what I've seen - Dead Snow (no word on whether it's dubbed or subtitled) and The Revenant (with the director apparently coming to introduce/answer questions) - are middlin'-decent. There's a live show Saturday night, but aside from that, it breaks down pretty straightforward: Friday to Sunday is mostly Herschell Gordon Lewis-related stuff (the Godfather of Gore documentary, screenings of Blood Feast, and what is (according to the theater's listings) the remake of Wizard of Gore with Crispin Glover. Sunday to Tuesday, the 9pm shows are local horror - God of Vampires, Next Door, and Drive-in Horrorshow. Monday - Thursday is new-ish indie horror movies: Human Centipede, Dead Snow, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead, The Horde, and The Revenant. Next weekend brings the premiere of Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil


  • It's fall, which means prestige pictures start coming out, and the evidence for that is on display at the Kendall Square theater where they are cleaning house: Only two of its nine screens are showing films that were playing Thursday; six new films open this week. The big two-screen opener is Never Let Me Go, whose preview seems to be attempting to hide that it's science fiction; the one-week warning is on for The Sicilian Girl, about a girl who turns against the mob. Also opening there are French action-comedy Heartbreaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman's Jack Goes Boating, romantic comedy The Romantics, and WWII/Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished. Playing for one night only on Tuesday is Tapestries of Hope, a documentary on African AIDS patients, and the belief that raping a virgin can cure the disease.


  • Never Let Me Go also opens at the Coolidge on the main screen. The video rooms feature Kings of Pastry (special guests on Sunday), and the Manhattan Short Film Festival. The midnight show this weekend is The Breakfast Club, and a season of Talk Cinema starts Sunday with a preview of Stone. Another preview is Wednesday's Waiting For Superman. The really potentially cool thing is the Steamboat Bill, Jr. screening on Monday, with live accompaniment by Peter Blanchette, which also feature a short film.


  • I may not make it to that, though, as the Brattle's CineCaché series begins that night, the successor to the Eye-Opener, perhaps with a few more people attending at the more convenient time. As of this writing, there's no word on what the first film will be.

    Also at the Brattle: The Boston Bike Film Festival on Friday and Saturday; "Framed: Art on Film" on Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday; and a special Elia Kazan event on Tuesday, featuring Martin Scorcese's new documentary A Letter to Elia and Kazan's Panic in the Streets.


  • Mainstream theaters get Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, You Again, and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. Guardians will also be playing in IMAX and 3-D. There's apparently a new, CGI-animated, 3-D Roadrunner & Coyote short ahead of it, although it's not clear wheter that includes the IMAX screenings. I'm not sure whether to be excited or horrified by that. Mostly horrified, I think.

    There are also a pair of sort-of-kind-of-mainstream openings: Catfish, which is apparently some sort of faux-doc thriller (opening at Boston Common and Harvard Square), and The Virginity Hit, a raunchy comedy written and directed by the writers of The Last Exorcism - a change of genre, but apparently also a mock-doc. It's only opening at Fresh Pond and Revere in the Metro Boston area.


  • The Harvard Film Archive has still more Pier Paolo Pasolni on Friday, Sunday, and Monday. Saturday is "A Visit with Jim McBride", an introduction to the famed documentarian.

    The MFA continues last week's series has a couple screenings of 45365 on Friday and Saturday, with a screening of Asbury Shorts on Friday and David Hockney: A Bigger Picture on Saturday.


Not that I'll have time for half of this stuff. Man, one's brother getting married is really time-consuming!

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