Friday, November 15, 2013

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 15 November - 21 November 2013

Man, I thought last week was pretty thin pickings for new releases, but this week is really quiet.

  • One mainstream release on Friday, The Best Man Holiday, the awkwardly-titled sequel to The Best Man which catches up with a good chunk of the cast from the first fifteen years later as they reunite for a Christmas vacation in New York. Can't say I saw the first, but it's a darn nice cast - Taye Diggs, Regina Hall, Morris Chestnut, Nia Long, Terrence Howard, Sanaa Lathan, and plenty more. It's at Apple, Fenway, and Boston Common. Boston Common also has screenings of Oliver Stone's JFK on Sunday and Wednesday.
  • Fenway also picks up Hindi-language picture RamLeela (renamed "Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela" to prevent some sort of religious offense), a Bollywood take on Romeo & Juliet with Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone in the title roles. They are, apparently, from competing crime families; they also sing, of course. It also opens at iMovieCafe, which also opens Masala, a Telegu-language film I can't find much information about.
  • Kendall Square mostly keeps things as it is, but they do have a great film opening as their one-week booking - The Broken Circle Breakdown, a fantastic story of love, loss, faith, and bluegrass from Belgium, of all places. It's quite possibly the best thing the best thing playing this week.
  • The Brattle Theatre has a reasonably conventional opening this week with The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Well, reasonably convention in how it's scheduled versus what it is. That would be the team behind The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek and director Sophie Fiennes, reuniting to talk about how film and ideology intersect. Three films which are used as examples also play alongside it this weekend - John Carpenter's They Live at 9:45pm Friday, Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver at 4:30pm 9:45pm Saturday, and James Cameron's Titanic (on 35mm!) at 4:30pm Sunday.
  • With their portion of the BJFF finished, The Coolidge has a screen free, and they use it to pick up Kill Your Darlings on the Goldscreen as it has left Kendall Square. Can't say I'm a particular fan.

    The midnight movie this weekend is the final cut of The Wicker Man, which has been released in many versions over the past forty years, but this is apparently the one closest to director Robin Hardy's original vision (with the bulk of what needed to be restored found at the Harvard Film Archive). Friday night also has The Room co-star Greg Sestero on-hand to read from his book about the making of that cult classic. Switching from cult classics to the more accepted variety, The Royal Tennenbaums will play at 7pm Monday on 35mm.
  • The Boston Jewish Film Festival has its last weekend from Sautrday to Monday, with screenings at the MFA (Saturday & Sunday), West Newton (Sunday), AMC Framingham (Monday), the Arlington Capitol (Monday), and Hollywood Hits in Danvers (Monday). That means it overlaps a bit with the Boston Latino International Film Festival, which has screenings at Harvard's Tsai Auditorium on Friday and on the Northeastern University campus on Saturday and Sunday.
  • In addition to the BJFF, the Museum of Fine Arts continues showing documentaries and shorts from The Boston Turkish Film Festival on Friday and Saturday. There is a special screening of 2006's documentary Rape of Europa on Wednesday afternoon, with co-producer Robert Edsel on hand to discuss the film about the Nazis looting of art throughout Europe during World War II and the fight to recover, restore, and return them since.

    Wednesday also begins the 2013 UCLA Festival of Preservation, which features 35mm prints from the UCLA film & television archive and will run into December. It kicks off that day with a pair of just-under-an-hour documentaries playing as a double bill ("Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World" & "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer"), while Thursday offers silent melodrama Midnight Madness and Robert Altman's 1969 film The Cold Day in the Park.
  • The Harvard Film Archive has two guests this weekend. Nicolas Rey makes a pair of appearances, presenting his new film differently, Molussia on Friday evening and his first feature Schuss! Sunday afternoon. Chilean director Pablo Larrain. is also in town to present Tony Manero Saturday evening and his recent film No on Sunday; it doesn't appear that he'll be sticking around for Post Mortem on Monday.
  • Once again, Emerson's Paramount Theatre sticks with Bright Lights this week, with just one screening: Goats on Tuesday; it's a coming of age film with a nice cast of actors playing eccentric characters, and both producer Richard Arlook and actor Caleb Horst will be on hand afterward.
  • Just one film screening at The Regent Theatre this week with The Rolling Stones: Sweet Summer Sun - Hyde Park Live playing Friday night. It's what it says on the box, a concert film captured during their live outdoor shows in London this past summer. The Gathr preview series is taking a skip week.
  • The UMass Boston Film Series presentation this week is Black Out, with Eva Weber visiting to talk about her documentary on Guinea schoolchildren and what they go through to get an education despite having no lights to study by. It's at the Campus Center Ballroom on Thursday and as always, admission is free.


My plans? Fairly close to last week, looking at Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyer's Club, and maybe The Best Man Holiday or RamLeela. Maybe give the fancy theater another chance to impress me.

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