Friday, February 13, 2015

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 13 February 2015 - 19 February 2015

I posted a few weeks ago that the romantic comedy is ridiculously dormant in Hollywood right now, but, seriously, Valentine's Day and your best bet for romance at the multiplex is the Chinese movie?

Of course it'll probably be snowed out anyway.

  • That could also pose an issue for The Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, which has two more days of "festival" at the Somerville Theatre on Friday and Saturday. Friday night includes the very cool Wyrmwood (Australian zombies with Mad Max DNA), while special effects legend Douglas Trumbull visiting Saturday evening to show short films and discuss his storied career. He'll stick around for the start of the twenty-four-hour marathon that begins at noon on Sunday, introducing and likely doing some Q&A after they show 2001: A Space Odyssey on the theater's spiffy new 70mm system.

    After "SF/40" finishes up, they fill the rest of the schedule with the Banff Mountain Film Festival running from Tuesday to Thursday. There are two programs of outdoor films on the schedule, with Wednesday's being different from Tuesday's and Thursday's.
  • Getting to regular events, the biggest release is Fifty Shades of Grey, an adaptation of the best-selling novel about a woman who meets a corporate mogul into BDSM. The reports of it being a disaster are amazing, from the leads disliking each other to the movie basically not having an ending, so... Good luck with that. It's at the Capitol, West Newton, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux, on a whole bunch of screens.

    Also opening is Kingsman: The Secret Service, an adaptation of the Mark Millar/Dave Gibbons comic about recruits into a spy service which looks like it has Colin Firth sort-of-kind-of playing Harry Palmer, with Michael Caine playing his boss and Samuel L. Jackson as the villain. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.

    As it's the week before the Oscars, AMC Boston Common will be running their two-day Best Picture showcase, with four films each on Saturday and Sunday.
  • Hey, first weekend in a while that the new Chinese movie opens next to Chinatown, at AMC Boston Common. The movie in question, Somewhere Only We Know, also opens at Fenway; it's a romance about a young Chinese woman who goes to Prague to study and discovers that her grandmother did so as well. Its day-before-Valentine's opening is just days after it played Beijing.

    Neither of the Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe movies are subtitled this week - Anegan is Tamil and Temper is Telugu.
  • The Brattle also does romance right, though, with the traditional Casablanca screenings on Friday (tickets still available) and Saturday (sold out). They also have a little fun tweaking Fifty Shades by finishing up the "Reel Weird Brattle: Mad Romance" series at midnight Saturday with James Spader & Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary.

    After Valentine's Day, it's school vacation week, so the Bugs Bunny Film Festival returns, with the "All Bugs Review" playing Saturday matinees, Monday, and Wednesday and "Daffy Duck & Friends" on Sunday, Tuesday matinees, and Thursday. All of those shows are on 35mm, while Tuesday's "Trash Night" - Laser Mission with Brandon Lee and Ernest Borgnine - is probably on VHS or something.
  • Another relatively quiet week at Kendall Square, with Human Capital getting a one-week booking there; it follows two Italian families whose paths cross after a hit-and run.
  • The Coolidge is mostly picking up films that have played elsewhere this week: Whiplash will pop up at 7:15 nightly in the main thetater (mostly), while Two Days, One Night plays the Goldscreen. There's also The Duke of Burgundy playing midnight on Friday & Saturday, which I guess is their very much off-kilter Valentine's Day presentation. The other midnight this weekend is the David Cronenberg Mad Science feature, The Fly, which is a romance of sorts itself.
  • The Harvard Film Archive starts a new series, Grand Illusions - The Cinema of World War I, in conjuction with a two-day conference on he hundredth anniversary of the Great War. This weekend's selections are All Quiet on the Western Front (Friday 7pm), King and Country (Friday 9:30pm), A Fairwell to Arms (Saturday 7pm), Jules and Jim (Saturday 9pm), and The Big Parade (Sunday 4pm, with live music by Robert Humphreville). All are 35mm.

    Sunday evening, they return to Robert Flaherty's films, with a screening of his previously-thought-lost short "A Night of Storytelling", followed by Man of Aran. The short is 16mm; the feature 35mm; there will also be a symposium on "A Night of Storytelling" on Thursday afternoon. Monday features a visit by Jodie Mack with over an hour of 16mm films. Wednesday's "Furious Cinema" presentation is Milos Forman's Taking Off,on 35mm.
  • If you don't want to do the whole sci-fi festival to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Museum of Fine Arts will be screening it Friday, Saturday, and Wednesday. More of The Films of Stanley Kubrick screen during the week - Spartacus (Sunday), Jan Harlan's Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Sunday), Fear and Desire (Wednesday), and Lolita (Wednesday), and Dr. Strangelove (Thursday).
  • The Bright Lights series in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room features The Year We Thought About Love on Tuesday, with filmmaker Ellen Brodsky and the featured "True Colors" troupe - a group of youn LGBTQ actors of color telling their stories on stage.
  • the ICA is screening the Oscar-nominated short films over the weekend - animated on Friday evening and afternoon shows of both animated and live action from Saturday to Monday.
  • Silent film accompanist Jeff Rapsis will be at Somerville's Aeronaut Brewery at 9pm on Valentine's Day, when the craft beer house will be screening Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.
  • It's a school vacation week, so The Regent Theatre in Arlington has Sing-along Shows from Monday the 16th to Friday the 20th, with each day featuring a screening of the 1982 Annie and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.


We'll see what the upcoming fourth big storm in a row does to my plans, but I figure to be at the sci-fi festival Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning; maybe catch Somewhere Only We Know after seeing Isabella Rossellini in Green Porno Friday, and maybe fit Jupiter Ascending in somewhere. I had been kicking around the idea of heading out to Salem to see R100 on Monday, but the storm will probably kill that idea even more thoroughly than likely needing a lot of sleep after the 'thon.

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