Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 January 2011 - 20 January 2011

Happy birthday, Mom. I'd absolutely take you to a movie this weekend if you weren't way down in Florida.

• Only two major films open at the Boston multiplexes today - we are, apparently, spared The Heart Specialist, even though it apparently won the audience award when it played the Boston Film Festival way back in 2006 under the title "Ways of the Flesh" (Yes, I saw it then). We do get The Dilemma, though, and Brian's review at EFC intrigues me because he seems to be suggesting that the terrible preview is miscasting it by just showing the broad comedy I hope so, because I like Ron Howard and the cast enough to want it to be good.
  
  The other major opening is The Green Hornet, and buying a ticket for this is a gamble on whether the January release date is Sony dumping the movie or grabbing a slot where they will have the IMAX and 3-D houses for three straight weeks. The things that make me nervous abot this one are also what makes it interesting - for all "Seth Rogen, crimefighter!" sounds ridiculous, he's apparently made sure to tailor the script toward his director and co-star, and I'm very curious to know what a Michel Gondry superhero movie looks like. The question is whether or not to see it in 3-D; from reading reviews, it seems that the exact same scenes are convincing people that 3-D is either optimal or a disaster.



• Only one film opens at Kendall Square this weekend as they keep potential award contenders in place (sometimes by a thread, with 127 Days playing once a night for a second straight week): Leaving (or, in the original, better-sounding French, Partir), which features Kristin Scott Thomas attempting to leave her bourgeois husband Ivan Attal for the more exciting Sergi Lopez. For a while, I found it kind of amusing and telling that Thomas has more or less moved to France over the past few years, grumbling that there just aren't many parts in English-language movies for a woman of a certain age, a look at her IMDB page shows that she's basically been going back and forth across the Channel for her entire career.



• The Brattle Theatre opens Steven Soderbergh's tribute to Spaulding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine, and runs it through Thursday. Soderbergh is taking films of the famed monologist and cutting them into one virtual performance, after having previously worked with the late Gray on Gray's Anatomy. In a different sort of post-mortem story, Gaspare Noe's Enter The Void plays late shows - 9pm on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; 8pm Monday. Note that although the print calendar lists the full 3-hour director's cut, apparently the only print of that in North America is in New York this week, so the theatrical cut (which runs a mere 161 minutes) will be playing instead. On Sunday afternoon, there will be a special presentaiton of the documentary Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.



• The main shows at the Coolidge - The King's Speech and Black Swan - stay the same, with I Love You Phillip Morris moving to the 14-seat "GoldScreen", but there are some special features to check out. The winter horror series of late shows continues with Dead Snow, a Nazi-zombie movie with a major debut to Evil Dead 2. I didn't love it when I saw it a year and a half ago, but that was on a screener in my living room versus a crowd at the Coolidge. That's midnight tonight and tomorrow; Saturday night also has a midnight show of The Room. Saturday morning has a kid's show of Babe, and Sunday morning is the "Talk Cinema" screening of Bride Flight.
  
  The Coolidge is also running a selection of short films that played the Sundance Film Festival in 2010; the only one I've seen is Don Hertzfeldt's "Wisdom Teeth", but that's worth the price of admission on its own. Here's the list of what's included. It's a nice warm-up for the actual 2011 Sundance Festival, which even those of us who sure aren't going to use precious vacation time to go someplace even colder and snowier than Boston can follow, with five movies playing on demand and the Coolidge hosting a special screening of My Idiot Brother on the 27th (and yes, I don't mind telling you about it now as I already have my ticket).



• Speaking of one-night screening events that I already have tickets to, the Fathom Events presentation on Thursday (20 January) is Gantz, an adaptation of the ultraviolent manga. That's roughly 75% cool, in that it's a fun comic with crazy action, and this showing is actually roughly concurrent with the film's Japanese premiere. That it's being made by the director of the cute Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror is also amusing. The uncool 25% is that it's being presented dubbed. Honestly, who wants that? This is a likely hard-R sort of movie whose main market is people who buy chunks of comics that they read right-to-left for authenticity's sake. We can handle subtitles.



• The MFA has final screenings of Typeface and A Walk Into the Sea this afternoon and evening, but the bulk of the week will given over to The Boston Festival of Films from Iran. The festival runs from today (14 January 2011) to roughly the end of the month, with Mondays and Tuesdays off.



• Yamla Ragla Deewana is the Bollywood film opening at Fresh Pond today - or at least, the one with English subtitles. It's apparently about a Canadian-raised Hindu who learns he has a con-artist family in Varanasi, only to become entangled in his new brother's romance with a pretty Punjabi girl. That's not including the two Tamil-language and two Telegu-language films playing various times without subtitles, of course - I only track what I have the slightest chance of understanding.



• The second-run shuffle has The Social Network hanging on at most of its venues despite being out on video already, so those of us prone to procrastination still got a chance to see it on the big screen. The Somerville Theatre picks up The Tempest, which merits a second chance, while the Arlington Capitol gives Megamind some 3-D matinees. I hope they do the same for Tangled in a few weeks; I wouldn't mind seeing that in 3-D again.

My plans: Maybe get to that first night of Enter the Void tonight, especially if doing so means I have 23 nominations per category at tomorrow's Chlotrudis nominating meeting rather than 22. Get to a cheap-ish AM showing of Green Hornet in 3-D Saturday or Sunday morning. Fit in a couple award contenders in between then and Gantz on Thursday. Catch the Sundance shorts. Maybe actually for real start watching the screeners I've had piling up for the past couple years.