Friday, December 31, 2010

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 31 December 2010 - 6 January

It's New Year's Eve, so, as we flip the calendar to a new page (and hang the new Brattle, HFA, MFA, etc., schedules), it's time to say out with the old, and in with the new...

Oh. It's not. Nothing new opens this weekend. A good time to catch up on what you might have missed with the more busy holidays, I guess, especially if you want to be able to include year-end prestige pictures on your top ten list and have it out soon after the end of the year (not something we'll be worrying about too much here, as the official policy of Jay's Movie Blog is Making Lists is Stupid).

So, anyway, here's a link to last week's new releases; it more or less covers what's in the big theaters this week - even the Indian films and If You Are the One 2 are staying put; the biggest change is that exact times are moving around, and Kendall Square is knocking Rare Exports down to half a screen, ending The Tempest, and adding a third screen for The King's Speech.

Still, there is some movement going on where the repertory screens are concerned:

  • The Brattle continues their 20th Century Fox 75th Anniversary series throughout most of the week. Tonight they finish 2010 off with Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, a 1974 glam-rock adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. I'm sure that it will be restrained and tasteful. Sunday is a classic sci-fi double feature with the original versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Planet of the Apes. I've somehow never managed to see the first one. Tuesday is a new 35mm print of an Ernst Lubitsch comedy, Cluny Brown. Apparently "Cluny" is a girl's name, and this one features a chambermaid who doesn't quite fit into the class structure. In case you missed the sing-along version at the Regent last week, Wednesday's main feature is The Sound of Music; there are also matinees of Heidi. And on Friday, things finish up with The Princess Bride and Young Frankenstein. The latter is a tentative booking and the former is kind of stretching the definition of a Fox film - they distributed it during its original run, but it's been part of the MGM library ever since (although now Fox distributes MGM films on DVD and Blu-ray, so, I guess...).

    There are a couple of holes in that schedule; on Saturday, there is the now-traditional Marx Brothers Triple Play. For $15 ($12 for members), you can start at basically any time and watch three comedy classics in a row. This year, the movies on the schedule are A Night in Casablanca, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races. Monday is the final screening of the first CineCaché program, a preview of the re-release of Todd Haynes's Poison.


  • The MFA is running a short film program as part of First Night; it's free for button-holders and regular price for everyone else. Get down there quick, though, because this 50-minute package has its last screening at 3:45 this afternoon.

    Then the screen there goes blank for the weekend, but starts up again on Wednesday (5 January 2011) with three films that will be rotating slots for the next week: A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory and Views on Vermeer: 12 Short Stories are two anthology films about quite different artists, the former being composed of fragments of short films made by Warhol's lover Williams, while the latter is contemporary interviews with those inspired by Vermeer.

    The third film is Summer Wars; I liked it when I saw it at Fantasia last summer; it's a worthy follow-up by director Mamoru Hosada and writer Satoko Okudera to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Hosada and Okudera have a knack for making stories that are simultaneously sprawling and intimate; they're part of an exciting new generation of animators in Japan that includes the likes of Makoto Shinkai and the late Satoshi Kon. Their latest film is well worth seeing, although, fair warning: Wednesday night's screening is the only evening show; if you can't make it to that, the options seem to be clearing your schedule for a weekday matinee or a 10:30am show a week from Saturday (8 January 2011).


... and that's basically it. My plans for the weekend are mainly playing catch-up around the Fox series and final CineCaché program.

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