Friday, August 23, 2013

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 23 August - 29 August 2013

Folks, it's a great weekend to go to the movies. I say this a lot because I am basically an optimist when it comes to movies (it's more fun that way), but because I saw two of the things that open this weekend at Fantasia and they're both pretty great.

  • The World's End, for instance, is a pretty great sci-fi comedy from the guys that made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz - stars Simon Pegg & Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright - joined by Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike, Paddy Considine, and Martin Freeman. Plus more. It's good peoplemaking a damn good movie, and you can catch it at Somerville, Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Fenway.

    The other thing I saw there is You're Next, which has been awaiting release for a while - it played Toronto and Fantastic Fest in 2011 - but is well worth the delay for Lionsgate to find it a good release date. This one's a home-invasion thriller that twists in clever ways and has a set of surprisingly good performances at its center. This one plays Fenway, Boston Common, and Apple.

    The thing getting the most screens, though, is The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, the latest adaptation of a series of young adult novels about a teenager who discovers that she's a not-quite-human chosen one destined to fight the forces of evil. Lilly Collins was okay in Mirror Mirror; the rest of the cast is young good-looking people, with Lena Headey and CCH Pounder as the character actors getting some work in. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Boston Common, and Fenway.
  • In addition to The World's End, Kendall Square picks up Ain't Them Bodies Saints, with Casey Affleck as a man just released from prison having taken the fall for his pregnant girlfriend (Rooney Mara). Ben Foster and Keith Carradine are in it too. There's also Cutie and the Boxer, a documentary on artist couple Ushio & Noriko Shinohara, that's playing for one week. Of course, that might be five days, as Closed Circuit opens up on Wednesday the 28th.
  • They've also got In a World..., which the Coolidge also picks up for the screening room. Aside from that, there's special screenings starting with The Monster Squad at midnight on Friay and Saturday, which brought the Universal Monstersback for a moment in the eighties, and even those of us who didn't see this Fred Dekkar movie when it came out can remember that Wolfman's got nards for the advertising. It's in 35mm, as is Monday Night's Big Screen Classic, The Blues Brothers, which... Yeah, I think I'd like to see that on the big screen.
  • the Brattle Theatre has the local premiere of Spark: A Burning Man Story, both for those who love the festival and those of us who aren't quite sure just what it is. It runs Friday to Monday, although Friday's the only day it has the screen to itself: There are 35mm matinees of The Princess Bride on Saturday & Sunday, while the Burt Lancaster series has Local Hero (35mm) on Monday and a double feature of Trapeze (35mm) and The Sweet Smell of Success on Tuesday. Wednesday wraps up the Recent Raves summer series with the restoration of Journey to Italy and the most recent check-in on Jesse & Celine in Before Midnight.
  • Cinema Slumber Party is close to wrapping up, but they've got a couple more weeks to go, including this Saturday night's 35mm screening of The Warriors. Not sure, but this seems pretty likely to be the original version rather than the new cut with about a minute more footage and weird comic-book scene transitions. Afterward (or before), go to Scouting New York for an impressively exhaustive comparison of the path the Warriors take and the actual city.
  • The Harvard Film Archive is so mainstream-friendly this summer that they're actually selling t-shirts at the box office. there are designs for The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, which offers Dial M for Murder (7pm Friday, 2D), The 39 Steps (7pm Saturday), I Confess (9pm Saturday), a Sunday night double feature of Jamaica Inn & Young and Innocent, Lifeboat at 7pm Monday with Hitch's propaganda short "Adventure Malgache" as a special added attraction, and North by Northwest on Thursday, and one for Burt Lancaster, although his Centennial Celebration is limited to The Train at 9pm Friday and Verz Cruz at 5pm Sunday this week.
  • The MFA's film program includes a couple screenings of Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan on Friday and Saturday afternoons, and finishes up the Wong Kar-Wai retrospective with My Blueberry Nights, thus far his only English-language feature, on Sunday afternoon. The rest of the week is given to The Boston International Children's Film Festival, which features Meet the Small Potatoes (Sunday morning), Kirikou and the Men and the Women (Sunday & Wednesday afternoons), the pretty darn spiffy A Letter to Momo (Wednesday evening, when even folks sans kids can see it!), Zarafa (Thursday afternoon), Wolf Children - that's the new one by the director of The Girl Who Leapt through Time and Summer Wars (Thursday evening) - and two groups of short films on Wednesday (for 8-14 year-olds) and thursday (5-10 year olds) afternoons.
  • Chennai Express, is displaying some impressive staying power at both Fenway and Apple, although it will be splitting the screen at the latter as iMovieCafe opens Madras Cafe, a "political-action-thriller" starring John Abraham as an undercover agent and Ronnie Lahiri as an investigative reporter; apparently both find a rebel group fronting for an even bigger conspiracy.
  • Gathr Preview Presents continues on at The Regent Theatre, and hopefully this week's good turn-out can carry over to Breath of the Gods, which traces the source of modern yoga, primarily looking at Krishnamacharya's work. It's co-presented by the Arlington International Film Festival and plays Tuesday at 7:30pm. They've also got a film on Wednesday, The Voice of Silence, which is co-presented by the Armenian International Women's Association and presents the life of a survivor of a violent attack.
  • Free and outside: From Here to Eternity at the Boston Harbor Hotel's Music & Movie Fridays and Oz: The Great and Powerful at the Hatch Shell's Free Friday Flicks (also Saturday at Marine Park in South Boston, Tuesday at the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Complex in Roxbury, and Thursday at Pope John Paul II Park in Dorchester). Robbins Farm Park in Arlington has Cars on Saturday, while Hoodwinked is at the Prudential center that night. The Iacono playground in Hyde park has E.T. on Monday. There's a not-yet-announced movie to accompany storyteller Rona Leventhal in the Landsdowne Quad portion of Cambridge's Central Square on Tuesday (Cambridge hasn't announced the film at the Back-to-School Bash on Thursday at Green Rose Heritage Park, either). Wednesday has National Lampoon's European Vacation at North Point Park in Cambridge. Thursday closes out the SomerMovie Series in Somerville's Seven Hills Park with a viewers' choice. (All listings from Joe's Boston Free Films)
  • Belmont's Studio Cinema switches out Planes for Blue Jasmine, while The Capitol picks up The Way, Way Back from Somerville.
My plans? Lots of Hitchcock. Breath of the Gods, Wolf Children, maybe The Blues Brothers and Monster Squad. I haven't caught Paranoia, Chennai Express, or The Conjuring yet. You guys all need to see The World's End and You're Next, though. They're great.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

AINT THEM BODIES SAINTS.

A must see.