Thursday, March 28, 2013

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 March - 4 April 2013

In case you missed it because this one's coming close on its heels, this week's This Week in Tickets. I'll probably skip it next week as I try and catch up with stuff from...

  • The Boston Underground Film Festival! It kicked off Wednesday night and continues through to Sunday, with plenty of nifty and/or messed up features and shorts, including new stuff from Sion Sono & Kim Ki-duk­, plus the highly-touted Cheap Thrills and Big-Ass Spider! as the closing film. The only thing I've sort-of seen is Mondomanila, which knocked me out at Fantasia last year and isn't necessarily something I'll be revisiting..

    It's all at the Brattle, which has programming in a farily similar vein later in the week. For instance, Monday night is a Balagan show, "An Evening with Sami van Ingen", in which the Finnish experimental filmmaker will introduce and discuss his work, with the films presented on 16mm and 35mm. The theater will be closed for a couple of days to recover, and then Thursday they have a one-night-only premiere screening of Thale, in which a pair of Norwegian crime scene cleaners discover a huldra - a beautiful nymph with a tail, and have to figure out where she came from.
  • If you're reading this within a couple hours of me posting it, you may still have a chance to see Where Heaven Meets Hell as part of the UMass Boston Film Series. It's a documentary about sulfur mining in Indonesia, and director Sasha Friedlander will be on-hand to answer questions after the free screening. If that's too-short notice (I'll be better about that in the future!), there's another screening next Thursday, China Heavyweight, with Yung Chang on-hand to discuss his documentary about teenagers in rural China learning western boxing. Also free!
  • The multiplexes are doing a little bit of Thursday opening as well, with G.I. Joe: Retaliation finally showing up after a 3D conversion, including filming new scenes to take advantage of the third dimension, and supposedly bulking up Channing Tatum's role now that folks like him. It's apparently a different bunch of Joes from the original cast, with Ray Park, Lee Byung-hun, and Jonathan Pryce being the main returnees joined by Dwayne Johnson, Bruce Willis, and Adrianne Palicki. It plays the Capitol, Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond in both 2D and 3D, and gets the RPX and Imax-branded 3D screens at Fenway, Boston Common, and Jordan's Furniture through Wednesday (when Jurassic Park's 3D reissue shows up). Fenway also seems to have a screening of surfing movie A Deeper Shade of Blue tonight (28 March), presented by Hawaiian Airlines.

    Also getting early shows tonight but considered to be opening tomorrow are The Host, in which a pretty good screenwriter/director (Andrew Niccol) and a great young actress (Saoirse Ronan) attempt to make a watchable movie out of anovel by Twilight author Stephanie Meyer. Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the books or seen any of the movies, including this one about the alien "souls" taking over human bodies. It also plays the Capitol, Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Tyler Perry' Temptation opens at Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond; it involves a marriage counselor who finds herself attracted to another man herself. There's also a single screening of Tattoo Nation at Boston Common next Thursday (4 April), tracing the tattoo's trasition from scandalous rebellion to commonplace (it also plays The Regent Theatre).
  • Huh, I could have seen two of the movies opening at Kendall Square elsewhere last year: Starbuck was running in its native Montreal last August, and features Patrick Huard as a man who donated a lot of sperm to fertility clinics in his youth, and now finds out he has 533 biological children. The Sapphires was in the UK last December; it's an Australian movie about a girl group made of aboriginal women that performed for troops during the Vietnam war. And the one-week booking goes to Reality, an Italian film by Gommorrah director Matteo Garrone which follow a guy who is apparently charming enough until he tries to parlay that charm into a spot on the local version of Big Brother
  • The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up the fairly nice Ginger & Rosa, featuring Elle Fanning as a girl coming of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis; it (mostly) plays in the screening room, allowing On the Road to spend more time on the big screens. They've also got two midnight shows this Friday & Saturday: A 40th anniversary presentation of Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon on 35mm, as well as 10 Things I Hate About You for those looking for a likable-enough modernization of The Taming of the Shrew for the 1990s.

    Oh, and remember the Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper lecture scheduled for last February? That's been rescheduled for Wednesday the 3rd, with original tickets honored (or refunds available) for this multimedia presenation.
  • No more King Hu at the Harvard Film Archive (although the canceled screening may be rescheduled later this spring), making me sad. Lovers of avant-garde cinema should be happy, though, as Nathaniel Dorsky comes to town for a couple of presentations of his silent short films: "The Illuminations of Nathaniel Dorsky" on Friday evening and "Imagnining the Ineffable" on Saturday afternoon, no latecomers admitted. Different guests arrive on Sunday evening, with Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki present their documentary People's Park, a single-shot look at what people do in a park in Chengdu, China. Monday night's guest is Nicolas Pereda, who will present Greatest Hits, a compilation of movies he made that share many of the same cast members.

    Between those guests, the archive present an introduction to Art Theatre Guild, a radical group of Japanese filmmakers from the 1960s and 1970s. Death By Hanging plays Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon and The Man Who Left His Will on Film plays Saturday night; the program will resume next weekend.
  • The MFA's film program continues what was going on last week - The 12 Annual Turkish Film Festival has various screenings on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday; War Witch continues with single screenings tonight and on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. That last night, it hands the screen over to High Tech, Low Life, which follows two citizen journalists in China as they try to establish that as an idea. Director Stephan Maing will discuss after the Wednesday night showing.
  • ArtsEmerson's film program features movies made in Latin America this weekend, with La Nana playing Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, Joven y Alocada Friday night, Neighboring Sounds Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and Plan B Saturday night. La Nana and Plan B are screened from DVDs, the others from Blu-rays. The theme continues into the Bright Lights screenings, with Tuesday's Mejures Women: We Built the City of Medellin a collection of seven short documentaries about women in that city with a post-screening conference with the filmmakers in Columbia. Thursday's screening will feature director Jae Williams presenting two short films, "Listen" and"Harmony".
  • The ICA will be screening Suticase of Love and Shame on Thursday evening with Q&A by director Jane Gillooly on Saturday evening; it will also play IFFBoston later next month.
  • iMovieCafe brings Tamil comedy Kedi Billa Killa Di Ranga to Fresh Pond on friday, splitting the screen with Telugu action movie Swamy RaRa. No English subtitles.


My plans? Living at the Brattle for BUFF and Thale, then maybe fitting something else in between. Or not, because BASEBALL.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If REALITY is only getting a one week run, I'd drop something else and check it out for certain. The best film I've seen thus far this year. WAR WITCH is quite interesting as well.