Friday, May 17, 2013

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 17 May - 23 May 2013

It's midnight as I start writing this, but I've got a burger's worth of energy in me and want to have the next week's movies sorted out by the time I go to bed in time to get up tomorrow morning. Can the relatively limited slate help me out there?

  • Having just one thing really open wide makes it a bit easier; for the most part, if something is leaving a multiplex, it's to make room for Star Trek Into Darkness. That would be the follow-up to the pretty darn great Trek refresh from 2009, with added Benedict Cumberbatch as the villain and Alice Eve as Carol Marcus. It grabs 2D and 3D screens at Somerville, Boston Common (including Imax), Fenway (including RPX), and Apple Cinemas (which I guess is what we call Fresh Pond now, even if there's no signage yet); it appears to be 3D-only at Jordan's Furniture. That's a bit of a bummer, since pieces of the movie were shot with the big IMAX cameras, but it's not native 3D; here's hoping that the Aquarium will pick it up on genuine horizontally-fed 70mm film sometime later this summer.

    It's not quite the only thing opening at the multiplexes; Boston Common gives a screen to The Iceman, which played IFFBoston a couple of weeks ago but was sort of out of the way because it was the only thing at the Revere Hotel. It tells the story of a killer-for-hire (Michael Shannon) who kept his actual job secret from his wife (Winona Ryder) and family. One screen there and one at Kendall Square. Apple Cinemas has some indie horror for the second week in a row, with Black Rock grabbing a screen. Katie Aselton directs and stars alongside Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth as three old friends who go to an island off the coast of Maine only to wind up hunted. Could be interesting; Aselton's The Freebie was much better than it had any reason to be and indie favorite Mark Duplass worked on the script. It's not clear how trustworthy Apple's website is, but it looks like they're planning on making tweeners like this (too small for the downtown multiplexes, not tony enough for the boutique houses) a regular thing, with American Mary on the schedule for the end of the month. Worth encouraging!
  • Kendall Square, as mentioned, is opening The Iceman; they're also getting another couple of IFFBoston selections. Stories We Tell (which also opens at the Coolidge) is an intriguing-looking documentary from Sarah Polley, which focuses on her digging into her own family history upon learning certain things about her mother. Polley's done a lot of interesting things in a career that started young, and I've heard great things about this one. I can vouch for Sightseers personally; I saw it while on vacation last December and Ben Wheatley's latest black comedy is as hilarious as it is dark. It's listed as having a one-week booking, so get there.

    They're also getting a movie that didn't play IFFBoston; Love Is All You Need features Pierce Brosnan as a widower living in Denmark who falls in with the mother of his son's wife-to-be (Trine Dyrholm) as they head to the wedding in Italy. It should look nice, at the very least. Speaking of pretty, there are screenings of the fully-restored Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra on Wednesday the 22nd. As it's about four hours long, there will only be two screenings (1pm and 7pm), displacing The Reluctant Fundamentalist for the day.
  • Following a sort of chain, The Coolidge Corner Theatre also gets Stories We Tell, with Tuesday's 7pm showing an "Off the Couch" screening introduced by members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society who will discuss it afterward. They also open another documentary, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's, that looks inside the Bergdorf Goodman clothing store. It bounces between all four screens over the course of the week, so check where it's playing before you go so you know whether there are 500 seats available or 14 (The Source Family stays in small rooms, Stories We Tell in big ones, with Mud bouncing around too).

    One of the midnight screenings changes depending on the day as well - Kiss of the Damned plays in the screening room Friday night and in moviehouse 2 on Sunday. That one's a new release with beautiful vampiresses whose world is turned upside down when one falls for a mortal man. It's on a smaller screen Friday because that's when the monthly screening of The Room plays on a larger one (I get the impression that the theater is pretty sick of it, but people keep coming). The main midnight is Tank Girl, which I remember as being pretty awesome, and nobody even knew who Jet Girl Naomi Watts was yet. Also: Lori Petty as the title character and Ice-T as a kangaroo-man. 35mm.

    In less-insane (but still fantatical) special engagements, the Goethe-Institut German film on Sunday morning is Summer Love, with Nina Hoss (from Barbara) as a woman who, having just moved in with the man she loves, wakes up several years in the past with a second chance at her first love. Monday night's Science On Screen program is Terminator 2: Judgment Day in genuine 35mm. Bonus: Thad Starner will be around to introduce it and talk wearable technology afterward; he coined the term "augmented reality" and is one of the guys working on Google Glass.
  • the Brattle Theatre will only be open during the weekend; they'll be spending Monday through Thursday installing that gear we helped them buy with their Kickstarter (DCP projection, new HVAC system). Writer Neil Gaiman & musician Amanda Palmer were involved in that, so the theater is there's for the weekend. There will be double features of movies based on Gaiman's Coraline and Stardust Friday night and Saturday/Sunday afternoon, and double features of movies they'd like to share with each other and us. Saturday, Neil introduces Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers (archival 35mm) and Amanda introduces Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre (also archive 35mm). On Sunday, Neil's movie is Lindsay Anderson's If... (digital) while Amanda chooses Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts. Weekend passes are available, too.
  • All Things Horror's monthly screening is on Saturday the 18th, and while it could be lost in the shuffle of their recent charity screening, Dr. Franeknstein's Wax Museum of the Hungry Dead looks like fun; it's shot locally and looks to have plenty of sex, gore, and comedy.
  • The MFA's film program is still rocking the Samurai Cinema, with Rashomon on Friday, Three Outlaw Samurai and Taboo on Saturday, Yojimbo at various times on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and Seven Samurai on Thursday the 23rd. They've also got three screenings as part of Together Boston: "Sneaker Museum Presents Style Wars Friday afternoon, Wrong Saturday afternoon, and We Are Modeselektor on Sunday afternoon.
  • The Harvard Film Archive has the second week of Revelations of a Fallen World - The Cinema of Arturo Pirpstein this weekend. Ripstein and frequent collaborator Paz Alicia Garciadiego will be present for the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday evening shows, and some of the programs will be unsubtitled; follow the link for more information.
  • The Regent Theatre has been hosting a play for the past few weeks, but starts mixing their shows up again this weekend, including some film. They've got two traveling short-film festivals coming this week, with the 4th Annual Ciclismo Classico Bike Travel Film Festival on Monday and the "LOL Laugh Out Loud" Short Film Festival on Thursday. In between - though it's not listed on their website - Gathr will be have the first screening in a weekly preview series there onTuesday the 21st. The first screening is What Maisie Knew, with Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan as a couple whose divorce is shown from the perspective of their seven-year-old daughter.
  • The Arlington Capitol isn't opening any new movies on Friday, but they will be picking up The Place Beyond the Pines as it leaves Somerville and The Company You Keep as it leaves Kendall Square. They're also one of a whole bunch of theaters opening The Hangover Part III on Wednesday; here's hoping the screenwriters' original plans of killing the characters off goes through!


My plans? Star Trek, Black Rock, What Maisie Knew, probably Kiss of the Damned and/or Stories We Tell.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe that TREK is only showing in 70mm Imax 3D, so, RUN and go see it in that format. It doesn't sound like they will make it available in 70mm non-3D. Still, a HUGE upgrade from milky grey digital projection.

Jason said...

Sadly, the only place near here that can show real IMAX features is the Aquarium, and they don't get things that aren't marine life documentaries first-run. I'm hoping for some time later in the summer.

I always thought IMAX 3D was two prints, though, so you could show 2D by just running one. Is it actually side-by-side with a funky lens?

Anonymous said...

Doesn't Jordan's Furniture have 70mm Imax capability? I did look, and 70mm was only available with both Imax and 3D. And, with film being eliminated entirely, I wouldn't hold my breath for a 70mm only screening any time soon.
GO! And, you will actually see - gasp - REAL BLACK on screen, not to mention CLEAR shadow detail!
Digital projection still has a loooooooong way to go........

Jason said...

I emailed them back in December when I was trying to figure out how everyone was showing The Hobbit, and they said they were digital-only. Maybe that only referred to the midget movies, but it sounded like everything since they installed the new equipment in September was digital.

The pre-show clip I saw before Jurassic Park also omitted the previous mention of it being a film-based system, too.

Worth mailing both them and the Aquarium, I suppose.