Friday, July 27, 2012

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 27 July 2012 - 2 August 2012

So, how do the theaters in Boston mock me while I'm in Montreal?

    Well, the Brattle mainly does it by offering up Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, the Takeshi Miike remake of a Japanese classic about a samurai who comes to a castle to commit seppuku only to find the local lord is a sadist, from Friday to Sunday. To give you an idea of how prolific Miike is, I will be seeing two of his movies by the time I leave this festival - For Love's Sake and Ace Attorney, so he is almost literally making movies too fast for anybody to see all of them. Note that this presentation is digital but not 3D (as it was shown in Japan), but the latter shouldn't be a huge loss; the original was more talky than action-packed.

    As far as the features on the vertical portion of the schedule goes, the double feature with episodes 7 & 8 of The Story of Film is A Fistful of Dollars - although both will only show matinees on Monday to make room for the week's DocYard presentation of My Reincarnation, a documentary twenty years in the making in which Jennifer Fox (present at the screening) documents the life of a Tibetan lama and his son, who embraces the modern world despite being believe to be the reincarnation of a famous master. The Wednesday "Recent Raves" double feature is a pair of films about children, Japan's I Wish and Belgium's The Kid with a Bike. And Thursday's "International Asskicking" twofer is the pretty awesome District B13 and Mirageman (which I missed at Fantasia, though I dug star Marko Zaror's Kiltro and Mandrill when I saw them there)

  • The Coolidge, meanwhile, offers up Chen Kaige's new film Sacrifice, in which a loyal doctor (You Ge) rescues the last baby of a slaughtered family and plans revenge on the killer.

    Over on the main screen, the midnight film on Friday and Saturday is Arachnophobia, starring Jeff Daniels as a man with the title affliction whose town is besieged by killer spiders from South America; John Goodman plays an exterminator. It's a cult classic. Speaking of classics, Monday's entry in the Big Screen Classics series is legit; The Apartment won Billy Wilder Oscars for picture, director, and screenplay, and features Jack Lemmon as a corporate cog who allows his managers to use his apartment for their trysts, including with girl-of-his-dreams Shirley MacLaine.


  • I must admit, I'm not hugely jealous over what's opening at the multiplexes this weekend: The Watch features a hit-and-miss cast (Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill, Vince Vaughn) as a neighborhood watch group that discovers that there are aliens hiding in suburbia; it opens at the Arlington Capitol, Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond. The latest installment in the Step Up series, Step Up Revolution, has another two young'uns who dance well but come from different social circles fall in love. It opens in both 3D and 2D in the same locations.


  • Two of the three movies opening at Kendall Square are French, interestingly enough. Farewell, My Queen is the new film by Benoit Jacquot and looks at the currying of favor going on in the court of Marie Antoinette as the French Revolution begins; it is certain to be a very good-looking film, with Diane Kruger playing the queen and Lea Seydoux and Virginie Ledoyen as her confidants. The Well-Digger's Daughter, which has the one-week booking, is a remake of an older French film in which a father who venerates his daughter must deal with the girl's pregnancy.

    And while IFFBoston's closing night film The Queen of Versailles references a French landmark, it's a thoroughly American picture, in which a rags-to-riches story heads back to rags in a story of the recession writ large. It's funny and does a surprisingly good job of making its subjects likable.


  • The Harvard Film Archive continues their series honoring 100 Years of Paramount Pictuers with classics like Double Indemnity (Friday at 7pm), The Conversation (Saturday at 9pm), and a Sunday double feature of It's a Gift and I'm No Angel at 7pm. The Buñuel's Mexico series also continues, with El screening Friday at 9:30pm and Sunday at 5pm, The Exterminating Angel running Saturday at 7pm, and The Great Madcap Monday night at 7pm.


  • Over at the MFA, the 17th Annual Boston French Film Festival wraps up from Friday to Sunday with screenings of Bachelor Days Are Over, a Shorts Program, 38 Witnesses, The Painting, Beloved, The Bride Wore Black, All Our Desires, and closing night film A Better Life. Then a new month means new programming, starting with the UCLA Festival of Preservation, which kicks off on Thursday the 2nd with Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Herbert Kline's The Forgotten Village and will run through the 17th.



My plans? Well none of the above, really. But I'm not jealous; I figure on seeing 20-odd cool movies even while working half-days for my day job.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you haven't seen them, you owe it to yourself to see at least one of the Bunuel films. EL is perhaps the cinema's only attempt to depict a Foot-Fetishist priest! And, EXTERMINATING ANGEL is one of the great surreal absurdist films ever made.