Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 29 June 2011 - 7 July 2011

Someone at Paramount needs to explain to me why, with two big action/adventure franchises due for release in July, the one that features a man dressing up in the American flag is pushed off until almost the end of the month while the one with the talking robots is opening for the Fourth of July? And don't give me any logic about there already being two superhero movies playing theaters right now (with the outside-but-real possibility at the time that the schedule was made that Thor would still be hanging around) - the summer should have been built around Captain America on the 4th of July!

• Instead, we get Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which actually opened at around 9pm on Tuesday. The teaser trailers that played for a long time would constantly trick me into thinking they were for a different movie, and knowing Michael Bay's history with the previous movies in this series would always be a gut kick when I saw his name come up. But, hey, maybe this one will be different - maybe shooting in 3D will force Bay to hold the camera steady and not edit the movie with a lawnmower. It could happen.
  
  The rest of the openings for this week happen on Friday. The big name is Larry Crowne, which Tom Hanks stars in, co-writes, and directs. He plays a blue-collar guy who goes to college after being laid off, and winds up romancing one of his instructors (who is played by Julia Roberts). This is the sort of thing that is right in Hanks's and Roberts's wheelhouses, and I suspect they'll do just fine. Those guys tend to skew a little toward the older side, though, so Hollywood also offers us Monte Carlo, a teen-oriented comedy in which three friends are whisked off to the titular city after one is mistaken for an heiress. I am too old to recognize any of the three leads (I've seen Katie Cassidy on Supernatural, but Selena Gomez and Leighton Meester are stars of shows for younger people), but Andie MacDowell's in it somewhere. Glad to see her getting work.



• Over at Kendall Square, the Friday openings include two graduates of IFFBoston. Page One: Inside the New York Times is a documentary which focuses how the most traditional of traditional media outlets adapts to the new online reality. Trollhunter is a mock-documentary in which a group of students find and follow the man tasked with hunting down trolls for the Norwegian people. Audiences may decide for themselves which is more of a horror movie!
  
  Those have relatively open-ended bookings; the one-week booking is for The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls. This documentary is about New Zealand entertainers Lynda and Jools Topp, a modern day vaudeville act (they sing, yodel, tell jokes and act in skits) notable for being lesbian twin sisters. And though that sounds like a niche act, they apparently have plenty of mainstream fans down under, with this film including a fair amount of footage to show us why.



• The Aap Ka Manoranjan calendar shows two movies opening at Fresh Pond on Friday in Hindi with English subtitles. Buddah... Hoga Tera Baap, from what I can glean, is an action comedy that stars Amitabh Bachchan as a man in his sixties who refuses to act his age, with mayhem naturally ensuing. Delhi Belly appears to be a raunchy (at least by Bollywood standards) madcap comedy involving gangsters, chases, and an arranged marriage. For the weekend (Friday-Monday), Delhi Belly will play evenings while Buddah has matinees; on Tuesday, they swap their 5:30pm and 10pm shows and run that way through Thursday.



• The Somerville Theatre continues their summer series - the midnight film on Friday and Saturday night is Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, with a live pre-show "featuring Kristen Ford Trio, Comedian and MC Mehran Khaghani, and a special HOT FOR TEACHER dance number!". It's on the big screen in the main theater, so that means it will likely be paired with Larry Crowne rather than its logical partner Bad Teacher. The weekend's classic, playing Sunday the 3rd at 11am and Monday the 5th at 5pm & 8pm, is The African Queen, so if you missed it at the Brattle this week, you've got another shot to see it on 35mm film, along with "two Technicolor short subjects"



• Meanwhile, the Brattle continues on with the classics, presenting a frighteningly straightforward schedule this week: Taxi Driver. 4:30, 7:00, and 9:30 from Friday through Thursday (the 9:30pm show is skipped Monday because everybody will be at fireworks anyway, and there are 2pm matinees on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday). It's Scorcese, De Niro, a great supporting cast, and a score by Bernard Hermann.



• The Coolidge is pretty much sticking with what's working this week - Midnight in Paris and Tree of Life on film, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop and Cave of Forgotten Dreams on digital video, and Hobo with a Shotgun at midnight on Friday & Saturday. They, like the Brattle, shut down early for fireworks on Monday.



• Things are quiet at the MFA, too, as they wrap up their "Art on Film" series with an 8pm screening of Big Shoes: Walking and Talking the Blues tonight (29 June) and a 4pm screening of Cameraman: The Life and Times of Jack Cardiff tomorrow (30 June). Then their screens are dark for the holiday weekend, but they open the Boston French Film Festival next Thursday (7 July) with The Women on the Sixth Floor; director Philippe Le Guay will be there in person to introduce his movie about a Paris businessman who hires a Spanish maid in 1960 and has his life turned upside down.



• And, finally, I apparently missed this bit of second-run shuffling when it happened, but the New England Aquarium's IMAX theater is now showing Pirates of the Caribean: On Stranger Tides during the evening (7:15pm Sunday-Thursday, 5pm & 7:45pm Friday-Saturday). This fits their mandate perfectly, as mermaids are marine life, after all! It's cheaper and better looking to see it there than at the Boston Common AMC. Speaking of, they're apparently keeping The Beginning of the Great Revival around for matinees this week, and continue to show Yellowbrickroad Wednesdays at 10pm and Fridays at midnight through the 8th.

My plans? Fairly set - I've got three tickets for the Omni Theater at the Museum of Science that must be used by the 3rd, so I'll be seeing a few science docs on Saturday. I'll probably head north to see family on Sunday, especially since my niece count doubled last night (welcome, Naomi Nicole and Makenna Danielle!). Around that... Probably Trollhunter and Larry Crowne. And, lord help me, I'll likely give Transformers a look even though I skipped the second because that teaser is, in fact, really good, and word is that it will at least look amazing.