This That Week In Tickets: 6 June 2014 - 15 June 2014

Getting very close to being able to just be "this" week, as opposed to "that" one!

The last page I posted mentioned that I opted to do two movies instead of three on Sunday and bumped the last one until Monday; that last one was Hindi movie Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty, and, folks, it was not good. While it's sometimes a relief to see that Hollywood isn't the only place that puts out dumb, ethically suspect action movies, Bollywood makes it even weirder by adding songs.

Tuesday was another movie I had sort of been unable to fit into the weekend, in that I probably could have but with it being a lower priority I figured I might as well wait until Apple Cinemas' cheap Tuesday. And while Ping Pong Summer isn't quite great, it's got its moments, including Susan Sarandon threatening obnoxious teenagers with a fish. One thing I'm not sure I mentioned anywhere is that it's a weird mess of accents - most of the kids in this Baltimore seaside town are pretty blandly mid-Atlantic, but Lea Thompson plays the mother as southern and John Hannah is Scottish. I kind of wondered how they ended up together and there.

The main event for the week, though, was the Museum of Fine Arts's "Enchanting New Cinema from Hong Kong" series. I couldn't quite get to as much as I wanted, but what I did see - Unbeatable & Bends on Thursday & Friday nights and Blind Detective & Boundless on Sunday was pretty great. It is kind of a bit frustrating that these were likely my only chances to see new Dante Lam and Johnnie To films in theaters - I kind of want there to be a sort of off-season New York Asian Film Festival or Fantasia equivalent sometime around December or January to scoop up the movies that don't quite fit their schedule somewhere in the northeast - but I'm really hoping that the MFA makes this an annual thing.

In between, I had a pretty fun Saturday. I started out with How to Train Your Dragon 2, which turned out to be a pretty good sequel to what had been a surprisingly great first movie, headed down the street to Boston Burger Company for one of their delightfully sloppy ranch burgers, and then arrived at Fenway Park early enough to watch some batting practice, which almost never happens. The game itself was kind of a bummer - a 3-2 loss to the Indians where despite the closeness of the score (and the fact that the Red Sox were ahead early), my team never really seemd to be in the game. Still, a sunny Saturday afternoon at Fenway beats a lot of other days.