Friday, October 01, 2010

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 October - 7 October

Saturday is my birthday and that of my awesome niece Dagny and a second cousin once removed that I rarely see these days (who, despite being my grandmother's niece, is my younger brother's age). This is not a request for gifts, just a curiosity. (Although if you've got a spare cake or Amazon gift card laying around...)

For those not cool enough to have a 2 October birthday (it's not just us; we've got Sting, Mike Rutherford, DS9's Avery Brooks, Bud Abbott, Graham Greene, Groucho Marx, and Mahatma Gandhi on our team), there's some quality stuff to be seen this week(end). Also, some strange stuff. Some things in those categories may overlap.

In fact, when you look at the full line-up this weekend, insane seems to be the overriding theme:

  • Kick it off with the last couple days of Terrorthon. I'll be there tonight to see Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which I maybe could have tried to get into at Fantasia but media restrictions, a projection failure across the street, etc., led to an early return to the sublet apartment. Shows tonight at 7:00, 9:30, and midnight, as well as a matinee tomorrow (Saturday 2 October) at 3:00. There's also a screening of The Revenant on Saturday at 6:15, with the whole shebang finishing up with J. Cannibal's Feast of Flesh X at 10pm, which includes a screening of Night of the Creeps, live music by Planetoid, and performances by Black Cat Burlesque.


  • Remember when I mentioned a few weeks ago when I mentioned there was a crazy-looking Tamil-language robot movie with Aishwarya Rai coming up? Endhiran (aka The Robot) opens at Fresh Pond this weekend. It appears to be gigantic and insane even by Indian standards. I am down for this; who's with me? If you prefer a somewhat more conventional Bollywood romance, Priyanka Chopra is on the next screen over in Anjaana Anjaani. Remember, both of these are musicals and probably north of two and a half hours. Depending on your bladder capability, choose the large or small soda accordingly.


  • The Brattle opens a couple of unusual movies. The genuinely nuts one appears to be the late show, Bunny and the Bull, which runs at 10pm from tonight until Wednesday (6 October). It's an "imaginary road trip" movie from the creator of "The Mighty Boosh". I am apparently getting very conventional/mainstream in my old age, as I can't wrap my head around either of those synopses. This may just mean they're good stuff.

    Before 10pm, they're presenting Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border, where he surveys the presidents of seven Latin-American countries. While making it, Stone caught some flack for being willing to talk to Hugo Chavez, but it's an interesting topic to explore. Tonight's show has a Q&A with panel of Latina experts. It plays through Thursday (7 October). Filling out the schedule are some Twin Peaks episodes Thursday night and the annual Art House fundraiser Sunday night at Oberon, 2 Arrow Street


  • The Coolidge opens an adaptation of Allen Ginsburg's poem "Howl" in the video room (it's also playing in West Newton and at the Stuart Street Playhouse). Education documentary Waiting for Superman opens up on one of the main screens. The midnight series for October is Wes Craven, with Scream playing this weekend. And, if you have kids (or just like unusual, Oscar-nominated animation), The Secret of Kells plays Sunday morning at 10:30am


  • Kendall Square also opens Waiting for Superman. It's a doc-heavy slate for them this week, with documentary-anthology-adaptation Freakonomics also opening and A Film Unfinished continuing. On top of that, the one-week warning is for Last Train Home, which closed out the Brattle's DocYard series a couple weeks ago and is pretty good. Woody Allen's latest, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and the hyper-claustrophobic Buried (which is apparently ninety minutes of Ryan Reynolds in a coffin with just a cell phone to use to try and escape) also pop up.


  • Buried also opens at Boston Common, which is also one of the few places in the area playing Hatchet II. It's getting a fairly wide opening, considering that Dark Sky is putting it out unrated. I'm not sure about the whole "support unrated horror" campaign - I don't think there's a virtue in being unrated versus NC-17, but I'm down for letting a horror movie be what it is. Speaking of risky and unusual horror movies, Let Me In also opens. I adored the original Swedish Let the Right One In - it may have been 2008's best film - but this one's got a heck of a cast and crew, and much of the early buzz is good. A bigger risk is Case 39, which also has a nice cast - Renee Zellweger, Jodelle Ferland, Bradley Cooper - but has also been sitting on the shelf for roughly three years. You've got to think Paramount could have found a release date for that a little earlier.

    And, oh yeah, a little movie about the inventors of Facebook is coming out. I actually walked through the filming of The Social Network a couple times when going to and from Harvard Square, so I'm a little curious, even before considering that this is a David Fincher movie with an Aaron Sorkin script.


  • It's guest weekend at the Harvard Film Archive, with avant-garde Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues in town for a retrospective of his work, from his first feature (Phantom) to his latest, To Die Like a Man. Monday has a preview of Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, featuring director Damien Chazelle and his cast in attendance. It was actually Chazelle's thesis project at VES, so it's a homecoming after taking it to festivals an securing a small upcoming theatrical release.


  • The MFA has a number of interesting things on tap, including The Boston Palestine Film Festival; The Desert of Forbidden Art, an intriguing-sounding documentary about a massive collection of art in Uzbekistan created under the nose of the Soviet Union; and an independent film set almost entirely in a hotel Room in Rome.


  • Finally, at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, there's locally made comedy Boyband tonight (just found out about it; sorry) and a Monday (4 October) screening of Race to Nowhere, which appears to be the flip side of Waiting for Superman, about parents and schools pushing students too hard as opposed to not doing enough.
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