Thursday, June 13, 2013

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 June - 20 June 2013

The big news this week: Showcase Cinemas opened a new "Showcase Superlux" near the Chestnut Hill T stop in Newton, which is operating under the theory that people will pay $20-28 for extremely comfortable (reserved) seats, a high-end menu, and table service in the more expensive levels. I won't be trying them out this weekend, but let me tell you - if the seats that include iPads for ordering food are down in front, somebody has screwed up.

  • They're opening up with This Is the End and Man of Steel, which also grab screens at Somerville, Fenway, Boston Common, and Apple Cinemas. The former has a number of popular young comic actors (Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Danny McBride, and many more) playing themselves hanging out in Hollywood when the apocalypse hits; the latter is a new take on the Superman mythos with the writers and producers of the Dark Knight series overseeing things and Zack Snyder behind the camera.

    Man of Steel, as you might expect, is getting a lot of the top-tier screens in the area - the Jordan's Furniture stores, the RPX screen at Fenway, and the Imax-branded screen at Boston Common. Unusually, each of those getting 2D screenings as well as 3D, while the Somerville Theater has managed to land a 35mm print for their main screen (2D, obviously). Unusual, but producer Christopher Nolan's love for film and lack of interest in 3D is well known.
  • In addition to Man of Steel, the Somerville Theatre's main screen hosts two special presentations this weekend. Saturday at midnight, they kick off the Cinema Slumber Party series with Errors of the Human Body, which I missed at Fantasia last year. It looks pretty nifty, a bit of sci-fi horror set and shot in Germany about a scientist whose dangerous work mirrors his collapsing personal life. I doubt they will let us take the "slumber party" part too literally, though, which means we'll have to leave and then come back for Sunday afternoon's "Silents, Please" presentation of The Kid at 1pm on Sunday afternoon. It screens in 35mm with live accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, so it should look and sound great. Note that I only think the slumber party is on screen #1; that's the time that fits, and they seem to be presenting it as something bigger than would fit in the micro-cinema.

    Meanwhile, their sister cinema (The Arlington Capitol) starts their own "Summer Rewind" series, which has 1980s classics at night and kid-friendly matinees. This week, that means Back to the Future at 10:30pm on Friday and Saturday and The Sandlot at 11am on Saturday and Sunday.
  • The Coolidge has midnights every weekend, and this week it's a 35mm print of Fire in the Sky, an alien abduction story that I gather gets downright strange as it goes on. Since it's summer, their Big Screen Classics series is running (mostly) weekly, with the entry on Monday the 17th being Gimme Shelter, initially planned as just a Rolling Stones concert film only to capture the chaos that broke loose at their Altamont concert. It's also a 35mm print.
  • If that's not enough of the Rolling Stones on film for you, the Brattle Theatre has more, with a quick "The Rolling Stones at 50: repatory series. Charlie Is my Darling - Ireland 1965 plays Tuesday, Rock & Roll Circus (with "Get Yer Ya Ya's Out") & Godard's Sympathy for the Devil play as a double feature on Wednesday, and Scorcese's Shine a Light runs on Thursday. Shine a Light is 35mm; the rest are digital.

    Before that, they will be showing Terrence Nance's debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty from Friday to Sunday, with Nance on-hand for a moderated Q&A to follow Saturday's 5:30pm and 7:30pm shows. It's a combination of live-action and various forms of animation set around the moment when a friendship may turn romantic. There will also be a guest on Monday, as director Angad Bhalla visits for the DocYard's screening of Herman's House, a picture that follows a collaboration between an artist and an inmate for a piece of conceptual art.
  • Kendall Square also has guests for Dirty Wars, a documentary that recounts reporter Jeremy Scahill's attempts to learn what sort of off-books operations the Joint Special Operations Command is performing: Massachusetts ACLU representative Kade Ellis will be there Friday evening, while director Richard Rowley and co-writer David Riker be there for the 4:10, 7:20, and 9:50pm screenings on Saturday.

    Another documentary has the designated one-week booking, Pandora's Promise, whose previews have been making me scratch my head by talking about how it's claim that nuclear power could be a cornerstone of a green-energy future is controversial. I keep forgetting that a lot of folks don't see it that way. They also debut two thrillers about undercover agents: The East (which also opens at Boston Common) reunites Zal Batmanglij with Brit Marling, his co-writer and star from Sound of My Voice; this time she plays the undercover agent infiltrating the titular anticorporate group. In Shadow Dancer, Andrea Riseborough plays an Irish wife & mother blackmailed by an MI-5 agent (Clive Owen)to work as a mole. It's directed by James Marsh, who has done some fiction films but is best known for documentaries like Man on Wire.
  • The Regent Theatre just has the one film this week, the Gathr preview screening of The Good Son, the story of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, a lightweight-division boxing champion in the early 1980s whose national adoration disappeared after a knocked-out contender never regained consciousness.
  • The MFA's program continues as it was last week, with Post Tenebras Lux playing single shows Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday and the Global Lens Film Series wrapping up with China's Beijing Flickers (Friday), India's Shyamal Uncle Turns Off the Lights (Friday), Mexico's The Fantastic World of Juan Orol (Saturday), Egypt's Cairo 678 (Saturday & Sunday), and Iran's Modest Reception (Sunday & Wednesday).

    As those programs wrap up, they pick up a couple other movies for brief runs: The Iran Job follows an American basketball player who is brought in by an Iranian team and has a front-row seats to the protests around the recent Presidential Election; it starts Wednesday and continues through the next week. Sign Painters starts its run Thursday; it looks at the history and resurgence of traditional hand-painted signage in America.
  • iMovieCafe brings something called Fukrey to Apple Cinemas, with four college friends getting into various forms of trouble. Not sure how that's pronounced, so I'm not sure quite how crazy a comedy it will turn out being. It's Hindi and subtitled; the other Indian films playing there this week are not.
  • Belmont's Studio Cinema doesn't get any of the new releases, but they do pick up Iron Man 3 second-run. In other second-run shuffling, Now You See Me moves from the Somerville Theatre to the Arlington Capitol.


My plans? Living in Somerville for This Is the End, Man of Steel in 35mm, Errors of the Human Body, and The Kid; seeing The Good Son, and maybe trying to fit the likes of The East, Oversimplification, Shadow Dancer, and others in. Plus I still haven't seen Stories We Tell or Before Midnight yet.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too bad it seems as if there will be no 70mm prints of MAN OF STEEL in Boston. Sad.

And, DEFINITELY go see BEFORE MIDNIGHT and STORIES WE TELL before wasting your time with the insipid THIS IS THE END. Trust me.

Dana Shepard said...
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