Thursday, June 06, 2013

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 June - 13 June 2013

Rejoice, frequent moviegoers! You don't have to see the trailer for The Internship ever again! But you can see an interesting Ethan Hawke double-feature.

  • The first of Hawke's movies is probably one of the most eagerly-awaited movies of the summer. Before Midnight is Richard Linklater's (and Ethan Hawke's and Julie Delpy's) once-a-decade check in on Jesse and Celine, the couple who met on a train in Before Sunrise and reconnected in Before Sunset. Those two movies are legitimately fantastic, and who doesn't want to see what happened after that last finale? It's got the big screen (for the most part) at the Coolidge, including a "Box Office Babies" screening on Friday morning.

    Things by and large stay on one screen without moving around or skipping shows this week, so the main special screenings are the Friday & Saturday midnights, 15th anniversary screenings of The Faculty, with high-school kids discovering their teachers are invading aliens. Robert Rodriguez directs, mainly so that he could learn how to do digital effects for Spy Kids, and it screens on 35mm. There's also a Monday night screening of Our Mockingbird, a sort of preview of the Roxbury International Film Festival, which features a pair of Birmingham high schools, one white and one black, putting on a production of To Kill a Mockingbird. Director Sandra Jaffe will do a post-film Q&A.
  • Hawke's other movie is The Purge, a home invasion thriller with the twist that it takes place in a near-future America where for one night a year, all crime is legal. It's apparently getting good enough buzz that there's a sequel already being planned. It plays Boston Common, Fenway, and Apple Cinemas. Add the Arlington Capitol to that list, and you've got the list of theaters on the T opening The Internship, in which Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play salesmen trying to get a job at Google. They're wacky slobs among the nerds! They spend the entire preview spewing pop-culture references but don't recognize when someone mentions the X-Men!

    In completely random things filling out screens at the multiplex, Boston Common opens The Prey, a French action-thriller just making its way to the States that seems to pack an awful lot of crime into eighty minutes: A bank robber's suspected child-molester cellmate is exonerated, but wait, he may be a serial killer, spurring the robber (who hid the money, natch) to escape to protect his family while being hunted down by the cops. Busy!
  • So, yeah, French movie at Boston Common but not Kendall Square. They do get a couple screens of Before Midnight, but the one-week booking is a different thriller, Wish You Were Here, where four Australians (including Joel Edgerton and Teresa Palmer) take a trip to Cambodia but only three come back. They've also got The Kings of Summer, in which three kids having troubles at home take the "as long as you live in my house, you'll follow my rules" thing seriously and start building their own house in the woods.
  • Over at the Brattle Theatre , The Tarantino Chronicles continues pairing Quentin Tarantino's movies with the ones which inspired them. So Friday brings a double feature of Jackie Brown & Foxy Brown, Saturday Django Unchained & The Mercenary (from the director and star of the original Django), Sunday The Dirty Dozen & Inglorious Basterds, Monday Kill Bill: Volume 1 & Lady Snowblood (screening digitally as opposed to on 35mm), Tuesday Volume 2 and Fists of the White Lotus. Wednesday has the full-length Death Proof and the original Gone with 60 Seconds (replacing Vanishing Point with a pristine collector's print). No double feature on Thursday, but the series concludes with another chance to see Django Unchained.
  • The Regent Theatre repeats "Ain't in It for My Health": A Film about Levon Helm on Sunday, for those who missed the documentary on the Rock & Roll HOFer on Thursday. Gathr's Preview Series moves to Mondays starting this week, with More than Honey playing on the 10th. The documentary examines Colony Collapse Disorder, and features some pretty darn stunning photography of bees close-up.
  • The MFA's program has a number of films from around the world grouped together as the Global Lens Film Series, including Brazil's Southwest (Friday/Sunday), Iran's About 111 Girls (Friday/Saturday), Serbia's apparently-non-horrific The Parade (Friday/Saturday), Kazakhstan's Student (Saturday/Sunday), Chile's Life Kills Me (Sunday/Wednesday), China's Beijing Flickers (Wednesday), Mexico's The Fantastic World of Juan Orol (Thursday), and India's Shyamal Uncle Turns Off the Lights (Thursday); the latter three continue into next weekend. Not part of the series but starting a run mid-week is Mexico's award-winning Post Tenebras Lux, which plays Wednesday & Thursday and also continues into the next week.
  • You can do a Hindi-with-subtitles double feature via the iMovieCafe screen at Apple Cinemas this week, as Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani continues in the main timeslots but Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 plays early and late, apparently featuring the con-artist family from the first attempting to con a guy they don't know is bankrupt. An orangutan is apparently also involved.
  • No sign of Star Trek Into Darkness coming to the New England Aquarium any time soon, but they do add "Great White Shark 3D" to their rotation of marine-life-related featurettes.
  • Screens haven't quite been carved out yet, but This Is the End will be getting a Wednesday opening this week, likely at Somerville, Fenway, Boston Common, and Apple.


My plans? Before Midnight, The Prey, Wish You Were Here, and whatever QT double-features I can fit in. Maybe The Purge, Stories We Tell, and/or This Is The End.

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