Wednesday, April 18, 2012

This Week In Tickets: 9 April 2012 - 15 April 2012

Okay, I'm past having to watch absolutely every Red Sox game that comes on TV. 50%, 75% max will do.

This Week In Tickets!

Not much more to go with here, as all three movies I saw last week (The Lady, Detention, and L!fe Happens) are covered in last night's post. If you're reading this wile they're still in town, they've all got their merits, and it's kind of a drag that the latter two were only playing for one week.

I'd like to talk a little bit more about Detention, just because I feel a little bad about not talking it up as much as I could have earlier. I saw it last year at Fantasia - and, wow, after El Sanatorio and Klovn, that was a good day - and didn't file a review; Jason Whyte already had one on eFilmCritic that was about as positive as mine would have been, and at roughly halfway through, I was falling behind and this was an easy one to punt.

Seeing it again about nine months later, I didn't assign it quite the same star rating; it's got some story issues that weren't quite so obvious the first time through, when I was just trying to keep up. It was interesting that what stuck with me was the sci-fi elements; though I remembered that it was mining Scream territory, my memories were mostly of a surprisingly tight time-travel story. It is that, but that turns up fairly late in the game.

It was good to hear that the fairly sparse audience really seeming to dig it, though. It wasn't promoted much, so I think it had to be stumbled upon, and the folks who did find it were laughing pretty solidly from start to finish. Maybe it'll find a bigger audience on home video, but it would have been really nice for it to do well on film; the director put his own money and heart into this (at the Fantasia Q&A, he mentioned that he was basically directing music videos without much pause between them to pay for it).

Anyway, I liked it, and saw it again in the theater because (a) it does look pretty spiffy and (b) I like to give movies I see at festivals some kind of financial support; I don't know that I'm influential enough that a few good words from me is better than paying for a ticket.


I wound up going from Detention pretty much straight into L!fe Happens, not even getting my ticket ripped. I hope whoever does the counts at the end of the day doesn't have any issue with missing one stub, although I've got no idea what they do with those stubs (when I worked at Showcase Worcester, a fussy older usher did this at the end of the night, and I guess the stubs were used for auditing, but honestly, those were tiny and almost completely unreadable). A double feature like this is when it's a good idea to get that large soda with free refills, although it's a funny thing: Coke Zero is a perfectly acceptable soft drink at the 12oz can size; not bad at all when you get a 20oz bottle, and acceptably wet and non-corn-syrupy as the size of a theater soda, sometime around that 40th ounce, it becomes really disgusting.

Very thin crowd for L!fe Happens. The guy in front of me started talking to himself midway through. It was uncomfortable, but that's kind of who you share the theater with on a Sunday night.

The LadyDetentionL!fe Happens

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