Saturday, February 28, 2015

Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal

I've spent some time grumbling about how we get a bunch of Chinese romances in theaters right now but seldom any action/adventure movies, which is a shame, because China does that better than many other places. I suspect that's the result of that being too well known - historically, American distributors would buy these movies up, probably for more than the Chinese studios are making for these day-and-date releases, not to mention getting on the festival circuit and getting a little more publicity there. Still, things are moving faster now, and this is the second action film in three months that Well Go has managed to get into American theaters just a couple weeks after it played China.

Interestingly, their logo didn't appear before the movie, although ones for Village Roadshow and Warner Brothers did, which always strikes me as funny - if big American studios finance a movie, why don't they just distribute it here as well? I kind of get that Warner isn't really set up for limited releases, but it's kind of their own fault for dismantling New Line, Warner Independent, Picturehoue, etc. rather than making use of them.

Anyway, the movie itself is fun, especially since it's one of the first times I've had the same sort of reaction to digital effects that I do to practical ones - not really caring about the shortcomings because I can feel the handcrafting. I tend to reject that sort of argument anyway, in part because I get very frustrated by people acting like anything done on a computer just involves pressing a "Do It" button, but the techniques certainly tend to yield different sorts of results. This has a real Ray Harryhausen feel, what with its crazy monsters and mythological underpinnings. Different mythologies, certainly, but that's sort of the fun.

Heck, it also reminded me of some of the old, genuinely weird movies Garo Nagoshi and Clinton McClung used to show at the Weekly Wednesday/Weekend Ass-Kickings, both in that it was taken from Chinese mythology with little explanation provided in the subtitles for us poor westerners and surprisingly violent for what seemed like a children's fantasy. Those were generally against a fairly featureless desert backdrop and represented Heavens and Hells in fairly abstract ways compared to this, but the DNA is the same. I knew this as soon as we cut to Zhong Kui trying to exorcise a pregnant woman only to have some giant Cerebus thing leap from he loins. It was a reverse angle, but, yikes!


I'll spare you this week's "photo taken of the end credits so I can get actor/character names", because I was darn lucky that the top-line people were even legible, what with the movie being in 3D and all.


Zhong Kui fu mo: Xue yao mo ling (Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, RealD 3D)

Maybe the best way to describe Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal (to give it the full name that appears on-screen) is to imagine if Ray Harryhausen had been born in China, making the sort of weird fantasies that were popular in Hong Kong in the 1970s, only he had access to twenty-first century CGI and performance capture. It's rough and all over the place, but also a fair amount of fun.

It takes place in and around the Tang Empire city of Hu, which is apparently right next door to Heaven and Hell. A once-a-millennium day of reincarnation is approaching, and local god Master Zhang Daoxian (Winston Chao Wen-hsuan) has recruited lord Zhong Kui (Chen Kun) to slay demons, going so far as to sneak into Hell to retrieve the Dark Crystal, a repository of souls stolen by demons. The Demon King wants it back by the full moon, and has sent a performing troupe of demons led by chameleon Xi Wei (Summer Jike Juanyi) and Snow Girl Xue Qing (Li Bingbing) to retrieve it - made more complicated by the fact that Xue Qing is a spitting image of "Little Snow", a seemingly magical girl he met three years ago.

Six writers are credited here, along with researchers, and I've got no idea just how much they have skewed or mangled the mythological figures presented here. What they have done is to cram a lot of it into one movie, from gods to demons and shapeshifters to dragons, with a story that keys on how people have seven spirits and three souls. For all that is shown on screen, there is even more implied; Chinese mythology always seems to imply more levels to the world than one can imagine. The writers never quite make clear just exactly what the souls in the Dark Crystal actually do, although the ultimate stakes are made clear. There are parts of the movie that seem like they had an idea that just didn't fit with the rest of the story, and others where things are barely described - Xi Wei seems to be around or not in completely arbitrary manner.

Full review on EFC

Friday, February 27, 2015

A la Mala

This weekend's solution to the Mad Lib of "Hollywood doesn't make romantic comedies any more but ________ does" is, apparently, "Mexico".

Like the last couple of Mexican movies to pop up at Boston Common, A la Mala is distributed by Lionsgate's Pantelion label, although unlike Instructions Not Included and Cantinflas, any attempt to be Mexican-American is pretty minimal - there are a few English-language songs on the soundtrack, and some English-language phrases slip into the dialogue, but pretty much the whole thing takes place in Mexico City and Spanish is everyone's primary language.

I wonder how much that will help/hurt it at the box office. The 8pm preview show on Thursday night was just me and one other guy, neither of us Latino (well, I can't speak for him, but it wouldn't be my guess), and not being a regular at night-before screenings, I've got no idea how common that is. I suspect that it might make the picture a little harder to sell to a crossover audience, which is too bad; it's funny and genuinely charming.

I'm a little bit surprised that this was the Mexican movie that opened in Boston this weekend; Ana Maria in Novela Land seemed to be getting more publicity online and has more folks a non-Latino audience might recognize (Elizabeth Pena, Luis Guzman, Sung Kang). Maybe if this does well that will show up next week. Seems weird that they'd both target the same weekend, though.

A la Mala

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)

There are a lot of romantic comedies that start from from premises as ludicrous as that of A la Mala, but few of them do as well in selling that starting point. It's a goofy little thing, but it's got a cute couple at the center and makes enough nimble steps along the way to be a great deal of fun.

The idea is that actress Maria Laura "Mala" Medina (Aislinn Derbez) has a side gig - she'll flirt with a woman's boyfriend or otherwise provide enough temptation and distraction for men to determine whether they're worth keeping around. It looks like she can quit when she aces an audition for a new television series, but its producer (Daniela Schmidt) demands one last gig - seduce and then dump her ex-boyfriend Santiago (Mauricio Ochmann), both making him understand how she felt and giving her a chance to swoop in and win her back. The trouble is twofold - Mala and Santiago have already met, and she winds up liking the guy.

That's close to the whole deal, and that's fine. The filmmakers don't undermine their premise's simplicity with subplots that don't matter, nor do they feel a particular need to throw additional challenges in Mala's and Santiago's way (there's actually something kind of clever about how the unwanted ex is built right into the setup, but in a way that doesn't require her to be visible and gate on the audience). Instead, director Pedro Pablo Ibarra and writers Issa Lopez & Ari Rosen spend the bulk of the movie on the pair getting to know and like each other, letting their chemistry fuel the movie without jerking the audience back and forth.

Full review on EFC

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 27 February 2015 - 5 March 2015

The Oscars are over, which means theaters can clean house of the stuff that people are interested in seeing before the awards, and start bulking up with new releases that are more than sacrificial lambs!

  • The big one: Focus, starring Will Smith as a master con artist and Margot Robbie as his beautiful protege, a former lover turned rival. Strange thing to get an Imax blow-up, but that's apparently not just about grand-scale movies as much as milking a couple extra bucks these days. It's at the Somerville, Embassy, Apple Fresh Pond, Jordan's, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux.

    The less-big one: The Lazarus Effect, a Flatliners-looking horror movie with a nice cast (Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass, Donald Glover, Sara Bolger) and an interesting choice of director (David Gelb, who did the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi). Plus, it's 83 minutes, and horror movies that don't wear out their welcome are generally okay in our books. It's at Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.

    Boston Common also opens two foreign films this week: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal is a 3D fantasy adventure featuring Chen Kun and Li Bingbing in a movie that promises to at least look gorgeous (they're also keeping Somewhere Only We Know around while Fenway continues playing Triumph in the Skies). They and Revere will also have A la Mala, a Mexican romantic comedy about an actress who has a side gig where she's hired to tempt unwanted boyfriends into breakups, only to fall in love with her latest mark.

    Fenway will also have a three-day run, from Tuesday to Thursday, of The Drop Box, a documentary about a Korean minister who set up a place where unwanted infants can be left safely
  • The Coolidge really cleans house, getting down to one film per screen, half new, although they move from one to another based upon the day and time, so you'd be advised to check and buy tickets early or miss out when it's in one of the smaller rooms (or not playing in a slot at all). That includes Map to the Stars, a black comedy from David Cronenberg (really!), featuring Julianne Moore as a high-strung actress, John Cusack as a self-help guru, Mia Wasikowska as a scarred personal assistant, and Robert Pattinson driving the limo this time around. It will also have midnight screenings on Friday and Saturday, and Cronenberg will be doing a Q&A via Skype after the 2pm screening on Saturday. Note that he was originally supposed to be there in person, which had the show sell out fast, but there may be tickets now that he isn't travelling to Brookline.

    The other film opening is She's Beautiful When She's Angry, a document about the early years of the women's rights movement (1966-1971) that won the audience award for documentary at IFFBoston last year. It will also have guests over the weekend, with director Mary Dore and guests from Our Bodies, Ourselves introducing and discussing the film afterward for early shows on Saturday and Sunday.

    There's a Talk Cinema screening on Sunday morning, although the film has not been announced. Monday's special presentation is a "Sounds of Silents" show featuring Donald Sosin & Joanna Seaton accompanying the long-thought-lost John Ford comedy Upstream, along with Charlie Chaplin short "The Adventurer". Then, on Thursday, they start a weekly series of French-language films in the screening room with Left Foot Right Foot, a Swiss story of May-December romance and intrigue.
  • Too late to do anything about any desire to see all the nominees before the ceremony, Kendall Square opens Song of the Sea, nominated in the Best Animated Feature category. It's directed by Tomm Moore of The Secret of Kells fame, and similarly looks like a stylish family movie based upon Irish folklore.

    There's also Ballet 422, which follows young New York City Ballet dancer Justin Peck as he is given a chance to create the institution's 422nd original ballet. It may just be ticketed for one week, but so was What We Do in Shadows, which not only sticks around but expands to the Embassy.
  • The Brattle continues Damn Fine Cinema: The Films of David Lynch with a week of mostly 35mm prints: Dune on Friday, a double feature of Wild at Heart & Blue Velvet on Saturday, a reprise of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me & the series pilot (digital) on Sunday, The Straight Story on Monday, Lost Highway on Tuesday, Mulholland Drive on Wednesday, and Inland Empire (digital) on Thursday.
  • The Harvard Film Archive wraps up a couple of series this weekend, with The Lost Worlds of Robert Flaherty finishing with the F.W. Murnau collaboration Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (Friday 7pm) and a collection of short films including the recently-discovered "A Night of Storytelling" (Sunday 5pm). Grand Illusions - The Cinema of World War I includes La France (Friday 9pm), Comradeship (Saturday 7pm), The African Queen (Saturday 9pm), and Four Sons with live accompaniment by Robert Humphreville (Monday 7pm). That means, yes, there are two separate silent John Ford movies on Monday. All films in both programs screen in 35mm.

    Sunday evening, there's a rescheduled DCP screening of Touki Bouki, which was cancelled due to a blizzard a few weeks ago. Then on Wednesday, the weekly "Furious Cinema" presentation is Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Melvin van Peebles's mico-budget grindhouse feature. It screens in 35mm and starts at 7pm rather than 7:30 like the other Wednesday shows.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts finishes the February calendar and The Films of Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Friday), A Clockwork Orange (Saturday), and Room 237 (Saturday & Sunday). Their first program on the March calendar is New Latin American Cinema, which incudes Argentina's Natural Sciences (Wednesday) and History of Fear (Thursday) plus Brazil's Casa Grande or the Ballad of Poor Jean (Wednesday) and Obra (Thursday).

    In between, they're one of the venues for the Boston ReelAbilities Film Festival, screening Here One Day and AKA Doc Pomus on Sunday; check the festival's website for scheduling information.
  • It's a busy week for film at The Regent Theatre in Arlington. Saturday has a Lord of the Rings marathon that runs from 9am to midnight, including themed meals and discussion (register here). Tuesday is the rescheduled screening of King: A Filmed Record from the 10th. Then there are two on Thursday - Irish film Patrick's Day, which was selected by the Manhattan Short Film Festival's Feature Film Project, runs at 7pm. Digging up the Marrow, the new one from local filmmaker Adam Green, runs at 9:15pm. It's a mock documentary featuring Ray Wise as a man who claims monsters are real.
  • The Bright Lights series in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room has a panel discussion about video game culture on Tuesday, following Roger Sorkin's documentary "Joystick Warriors". Then on Thursday, they team with Balagan for a 35mm presentation of Burn the Sea.
  • The UMass Boston Film Series welcomes director Zachary Levy with his documentary Strongman on Thursday; it shows titular subject "Stainless Steel" encountering problems that his physical strength can't solve.
  • The ICA has the program of Sundance 2014 Animated Shorts that played the Coolidge a month or so ago a couple times in March; the first screening is on Thursday the 5th.
  • Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe continues Badlapur with English subtitles this week, but you'll probably need to know Tamil to appreciate Kaaki Sattai and Telugu for Bham Bholenath


My plans: Snow Girl, Focus, A La Mala, Song of the Sea, The Lazarus Effect, the Coolidge silents, Map to the Stars, and maybe Digging into the Marrow. And I've probably pushed my luck re Paddington long enough.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Kingsman: The Secret Service

If you want to claim that I am overthinking things in the review, I won't necessarily argue. Sometime in the middle of his run on The Ultimates, I just got sick of Mark Millar seeming to have nothing more in his quiver than bigger destruction, cheap pop-culture gags, and just generally doing the sort of "mature readers" comics that are basically the same story as the other but with more blood. I dropped Fantastic Four for a few months while he was on it, even though I figure he wouldn't quite go the same route there.

I do not like the guy's work, but I liked the idea of Colin Firth as a Harry Palmer-like spy enough to give it a try, especially since Matthew Vaughn has done good work elsewhere. Ah, well.

Anyway, the over-explaining of the over-thinking involves talking about the end, so scroll down past the excerpt from the eFilmCritic review for that.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

Comic book writer Mark Millar has come up with a good racket in recent years; he may be far from the best storyteller in the medium, but he's unmatched in pitching ideas (usually "familiar concept with a twist that makes it more violent") and self-promoting in a way that gets both readers and Hollywood to buy in early, especially since he's had enough prior success to attract talented collaborators. What comes out the other side is generally good-looking but cynical junk, and Kingsman - talented director Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of The Secret Service, a comic Millar did with talented artist Dave Gibbons - doesn't buck the trend by much.

The film posits a privately-funded intelligence agency that fancies itself knights of a modern-day round table, run by "Arthur" (Michael Caine), with the knights nominating potential replacements when one of their number falls. The deaths of two agents - one in 1997 and one in 2014 - set things up, with "Galahad" Harry Hart promising a favor to the son of the first and nominating the grown Gary "Egsy" I win (Taron Egerton) when the second dies investigating the kidnapping of a climate-change researcher (Mark Hamill). So while Galahad follows a trail that leads to internet mogul and philanthropist Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), working-class Egsy finds himself in a potentially-lethal "job interview" against aristocratic competition.

There are actually kernels of interesting ideas in here, whether they come from the original comic or the screenplay by Vaughn and Jane Goldman: The script isn't cute about hiding that Egsy is very far out of place among the upper-class types that populate Kingsman, and Valentine's scheme is born out of extreme environmentalism. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't have the courage of its apparent convictions. Put aside the fact that for all its early platitudes, it's still set up as a bunch of white guys saving the world from a self-made African-American man and his differently-abled partner (Sofia Boutella) - if class is a thing you're going to give lip service to, maybe having the most principled character be an actual princess isn't the way to go. Or maybe, on the way to attacking Valentine's base to stop his horrifying plan, you could actually deal with how many apparently intelligent people he is able to convince of its necessity. There's a moment of blood and guts near the end that could have been hugely cathartic, but because the movie doesn't let its well-earned resentment actually go all the way to the core, it just wins up being the sort of violence that begs for attention by how extreme the artists are willing to be.

SPOILERS!

I focus a lot on the social class resentment that the movie should be full of but isn't in the review, both because the film makes a point of talking about it early on and because the big supposedly-shocking scene toward the end only works if you go at it from that angle. It's a big deal that needs to be given some weight, but the filmmakers seem to avoid it.

See, I think what they're going for is the idea that blowing up all those heads is supposed to be cathartic - everyone in Washington and other corridors of power, presumably corporate as well as governmental, has basically sold the people out, buying into Valentine's scheme so long as they can save their skins, and thus they're getting what they deserve for doing so. Unfortunately, Vaughn/Goldman/Millar don't make that clear in the movie, and so it basically comes across as just "look how badass the characters/writers are - they killed all those people without blinking!" Which is weak, though, because the reason why Merlin, Egsy, and Roxy are doing this on their own is that they don't know who to trust and who not to, so they're doing this thing as a purely defensive measure. We're supposed to laugh, not actually feel anything.

It reminds me of the last scene of Escape from L.A., except that John Carpenter took a moment to make sure that it was clear that Snake Plissken knew exactly what he was doing. Folks decry how many people he must have killed in that moment, but that actually just made it a legitimately impressive moment - there's conviction to Snake shutting the world down so that it can be built back up, whereas Kingsman is just flailing.

And then the last scene is just people going about their business like nothing had happened, further undercutting what should have been a moment with consequence. Instead, it's just violence whose entire purpose is to make people look cool because they didn't hold back. That only works, though, when there's a sense that the folks involved know what holding back means, and that's something this movie seems to lack.

!SRELIOPS

Monday, February 23, 2015

Timbuktu

This was going to be a two-movie entry on what Oscar-nominated foreign films I could see before the ceremony, even if the timing inevitably meant that it was posted during or after the program, like... now.

Unfortunately, my plans to catch Leviathan Sunday afternoon was thwarted because the Kendall Square theater was closed. The funny thing about that is how 22 February was the warmest day with the least precipitation in almost a month. But, apparently, that created new problems as four feet of snow started to melt.

Winter 2015 in Boston: It screws things up even when it's nice out.

Le chagrin des oiseaux (Timbuktu)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

It's a bit odd that the first film from Mauritania to be nominated for an Academy Award is about Mali, but this isn't the sort of movie that a country generally makes about itself until much later in its history. We're lucky that Timbuktu is getting that extra little bit of attention and wider theatrical release that comes with being an Oscar nominee, at least, as it's a terrific little movie. The combination of earnest tragedy and achingly painful absurdity can be hard to stomach, but it's harder still to look away.

It takes place in and around the ancient Malian city of the title, during the Northern Mali Conflict of 2012, and the new men in power are making sure that things are being done in accordance with the stricter new laws: Women in the marketplace must wear gloves and socks in addition to covering their heads, for instance, and music is strictly outlawed. Enforcement is rather more lax in the sparsely-settled lands outside the city, where laid-back cattle farmer Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pino) plays guitar and floats the idea of giving a forthcoming calf to Issan (Mehdi A.G. Mohamed), the orphaned boy his family has taken in, with wife Satima (Toulou Kiki) and 12-year-old daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed). They cannot entirely avoid the changes around them, though, and it may not just be the tendency of jihadist Abdelkrim (Abel Jafri) and his translator Omar (Cheik A.G. Emakni) to pay visits when Kidane is our walking the property that brings thing to a head.

It's a bit unfair to present Timbuktu as entirely, or even primarily, being about Kidane and his family, although most of us do it because theirs is the story that comes closest to running from start to finish, and also the one where everybody involved has their name spoken out loud. It allows us to build a quick rapport with the group and lets them be a quiet commentary on what's going on elsewhere until their own story ramps up - director Abderrahmane Sissako will do obvious things like cutting to Kidane playing guitar as the jihadists enforce a no-music rule in the city, often underlining that what is happening in the city is not about Islam itself - this family shares the same religion but clearly practices it differently. In fact, one can argue that their travails have little to do with the rebellion besides generally heightened tensions which Kidane perhaps underestimates because they don't affect him like they do Satima and Toya.

Full review on EFC.

Asian Express: C'est Si Bon & Triumph in the Skies

It's a shame "Orient Express" is right on the border of sounding not right, because it's an easy name to give to what is probably one of the most interesting cinema trends in the past couple of years which has really accelerated in the last few months: A great many movies from Asia are now opting to bypass the process of getting picked up by American distributors after their initial runs at home entirely and being booked in North American theaters nearly-simultaneously with their releases back home.

This has been happening for a while - it's standard procedure for Indian movies, for instance, and China Lion has been arranging that sort of run a bit over four years now. But where it used to be an every-few-months thing with Chinese movies, it has been an almost weekly occurrence in 2015, between China Lion, Well Go arranging for quick releases of the action/adventure things they pick up, and various other bookings within weeks of their Chinese openings. This isn't the first time Korean distributor CJ Entertainment has done this kind of release, but I'm having a hard time remembering one that made it to downtown Boston.

I suspect that there are two things motivating this. The first, naturally, is that the Chinese studios in question and CJ Entertainment in Korea are big companies that have reached the point where expansion means breaking out of their home territories. There has been lots of Chinese investment in Hollywood, and while it seems that much of CJ's foreign investments have been closer to home (China, Japan), they have had an American presence for years, both as a distributor and a co-producer, and from the number of times I've seen their logo at Fantasia - and from the way a host there actually commented upon their ubiquity in passing while introducing a film - I suspect that they are viewing festivals like that as a strategy. They want their movies out in front of North American audiences and are being very aggressive in doing so.

The flip side, though, is that these things have to be booked in theaters that have, until recently, been fairly resistant to foreign films. Boston really doesn't have a lot of screens for a city of its size, and the fact that I saw both of these at Regal Fenway during the same weekend (when it also held over Somewhere Only We Know) means that Asian movies were taking up 2.5 out of 13 screens in a downtown multiplex, despite three new American films being released, a couple of strong holdovers from the previous week, and various Oscar nominees keeping a foothold. And from the great crowd for Triumph and the good one for C'est Si Bon, they're putting butts in seats.

Why is that? I suspect that it's in large part a community viewing thing - where most moviegoers are finding reasons to stay home, seeing these movies gives expatriate communities a reason to hit theaters en masse. Theaters need something that draws people to them when the draw toward home viewing is otherwise so strong, and that people in Boston can be sharing an experience with their friends and families in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, or Seoul which they'll be instant messaging about right away, without resorting to piracy, has to be pretty great.

That guys like me who love movies from all over the world get access to them too is just a side benefit, although I'm sure that everyone involved is certainly looking to grow the North American audience for their movies. That can be the long game, though - the student/immigrant audience in major cities is just big enough and enthusiastic enough about coming to the movies that the rest of us are just nice to have. Maybe there won't ever be that much crossover here, and maybe it doesn't say great things about what's going on with the American movie industry that playing Chinese movies in places that wouldn't have considered them a few years back is now a viable option. But, hey, I've been able to see the new movies from Johnnie To, Pang Ho-cheung, and Wilson Yip in the last few months. I'll take it.


On a lighter crossing-borders note, if you pay attention during the 1990s segment of C'est Si Bon, much of which takes place in a California airport, you'll see signs for Oceanic Air. I seem to remember Lost being fairly popular in Korea (Yunjin Kim was an established actress there and still does films there in between her American TV projects), and I kind of wonder how often Korean filmmakers who have an excuse to do so make that reference.


C'est Si Bon (Sseshibong)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2015 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

There is a little bit of Korean text at the start and end of C'est Si Bon left untranslated (at least on the local theater's DCP) that likely says something along the lines of it being based upon a true story or describes how many liberties have been taken. If that's the case, it's okay, and maybe even desirable for those of us who knew pretty much nothing about the Korean folk music scene of the 1960s before seeing this movie: If it plays as a fun little musical romance for us, why ruin that with any extraneous complaints over accuracy?

If you liked Western folk music in Seoul during the late 60s, the "C'est Si Bon" café was the place to be, especially if you were young and into the weekly student championship, where bookish medical student Yoon Hyeoung-joo (Kang Ha-neul) was the champion eleven weeks running until scruffy vagabond Song Chang-sik (Jo Bok-rae) showed up. The two formed an instant dislike, but the club owner saw potential in them working together, although they'd need some sort of buffer. Fortunately, another club regular more intent on becoming a producer, Lee Jang-hee (Jin Goo) has discovered a country kid with a complementary voice, Oh Geun-tae (Jung Woo). He also introduces them to an old school friend of his, aspiring actress Min Ja-young (Han Hyo-joo), and all the members of the "C'est Si Bon Trio" become infatuated more or less instantly. Small wonder, then, that the group would later become famous as "Twin Folio".

Actually, that's a somewhat unfair characterization - writer/director Kim Hyun-seok actually dispenses with the love n-angle material fairly quickly, with the main love story being Geun-tae and Ja-young in fairly short order. It's a fun pairing to watch; Jung Woo plays Geun-tae with an awkward innocence that doesn't prevent him from being able to parry Hyeong-joo's snotty jibes, making for an easy relatability. Han Hyo-joo, meanwhile, is instantly crush-worthy in 1960s fashions and projects an easy charisma as Ja-young, always finding just the right balance between city-girl confidence and a bit of self-doubt. Together, they do a nice job of falling into each other's orbits quickly but taking a while to completely draw together, making for a relaxed, charming story.

Full review on EFC.

Chung seung wan siu (Triumph in the Skies)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2015 in Regal Fenway #3 (first-run, DCP)

There's a shiny new Shaw Brothers logo among the vanity cards before Triumph in the Skies, likely because it's a spinoff of a TV show that ran on Hong Kong's TVB network, which was also founded by the late Sir Run Run Shaw, about ten years ago. It's the furthest thing from the grindhouse action that the name conjures for Western audiences, a slick modern-day drama that plays well enough for those who haven't seen the series and probably a bit better for those who have.

Apparently, that show was built around the tension between Jayden "Captain Cool" Koo (Julian Cheung Chi-lam) and Sam Tong Yik-sum (Francis Ng Chung-yu), but as the series starts, they've gone their separate ways, with safety-conscious Sam one of Skyline Air's top pilots and Jayden flying a private jet. The airline is merging with another headed by the father of pilot Branson Cheung (Louis Koo Tin-lok), who has a history with Skyline flight attendant Cassie Poon Ka-sze (Charmaine Sheh See-man). Meanwhile, Sam is stuck being a consultant to a commercial starring pop star TM Tam (Sammi Cheng Sau-man), while Jayden has caught the eye of party girl Kika Sit (Amber Kuo Cai-jie).

In the background, there's another couple - Tony and Winnie - that I presume must have been part of the show but who wind up very far in the background of the Jayden/Kika story. Despite all three (or four) threads spending a lot of time in England, they almost never intersect except for a couple of conversations between Sam and Branson, and the thread about the merger is not just superfluous but seems odd - why is a presumptive executive of the merged company being moved into the cockpit during what seems like it would be a crucial period for the business? It's often three short films interrupting each other.

Full review on EFC.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Still Alice

This isn't quite the only bit of Oscar-related catch-up I'm doing - there are reviews for two of the foreign-language features coming up - but it's as far as I'll get for the mainstream awards. No American Sniper for me, unless it's the looking like the best thing at the best time at some point after the awards.

A couple of odd things: There was an ad for Alzheimer's medication playing in Kendall Square (where this movie is on screen 1) a night or two later, and that's kind of right on the border of not-cool as far as advertising in movie theaters goes.

The weirdest detail for me, though, was that when Alice attends a conference, her badge has 2016 for the year, which is a sort of curious choice - most of the time, when you see a date on-screen, it betrays when the film was actually shot, and I kind of wonder what the filmmakers were thinking making that choice. Did they think it would take a while to find release?

Anyway, here's hoping that some effective sort of treatment for the disease is approved this year so that this scene looks a little out of date when time catches up.

Still Alice

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2015 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)

Julianne Moore is up for an Academy Award in the category of "Best Performance By an Actress in a Leading Role" for her performance in Still Alice, which is nice, because that's a big part of what the movie is for. Not the award specifically, and I'm certain that increasing awareness and understanding of how Alzheimer's Disease affects those afflicted with it and their loved ones is a big part of its reason for existing as well, but Alice Howland is a part where an actress can show what she's capable of, and Moore certainly recognized that when she took it.

It takes a while for Howland, a Columbia University linguistics professor, to be diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, as a series of memory lapses and moments of confusion add up to something that carries her to seek out a neurologist (Stephen Kunken). Initially her husband John (Alec Baldwin), a research physician, doesn't believe it, but eventually he and their children Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish), and Lydia (Kristen Stewart), have to accept it as a part of their lives and think about what comes next.

Let's start with the obvious: Julianne Moore is worth the price of admission. If the movie his false notes, it's not her doing, as she does an excellent job of showing how Alice is both intimidating intelligent and a warm family woman at the start, with all the overlaps and conflicts that entails, and then adding each step down the road in a way that seems almost effortless. It's a performance that can admittedly sometimes seem a little mannered, but not all the time, and Moore has enough moments where her struggling is subtle enough that the other moments become believably awkward instead of just played big.

Full review at EFC.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Short Stuff: The 2014 Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts

Does it ever cross your mind while watching the Oscars, right about the time that the nominees for the short films are rattled off, just how strange it is that the supposed five best movies under forty minutes come from a wide tame of countries, cultures, and languages, while the supposed five to ten best movies that run more than an hour are all English-language pictures from the United States or the United Kingdom. Why, there's a special category so that films from other countries can get some notice!

Obviously, that's not actually the case, but it does tend to highlight how the Academy Awards sometimes have a hard time with being both Hollywood's industry awards and am attempt to recognize merit among all movies. It's in these down-ballot awards - the foreign films, documentaries, and shorts - where excellence gets a better chance to make it in over familiarity.

Quick links:
"Parvaneh"
"Butter Lamp"
"The Phone Call"
"Aya"
"Boogaloo and Graham"

"Parvaneh"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Consider "Parvaneh", a Swiss film starting Nissa Kashani as the title character, an Afghan immigrant who leaves the facility where she is s staying for the first time s do that she cans send money home to her family via Western Union. It's not as simple as that, of course, a an be she wins up needing local girl Emelly (Cheryl Graf) to help. There's nothing particularly hard to grasp about it, but even expanded to feature length, it's not exactly going to show up at the multiplexes alongside the nominees in the higher-profile categories.

That's our loss; it's an admirably focused little film. Writer/director Talkhom Hamzavi builds a story out of an easily-grasped problem without talking on it, and it allows us to compare the two girls' situations without judging Emelly too harshly for acting more snippy with less reason. Both Kashani and Graf do impressive, natural work; without over-burdening is with specific background, they give us a sense of who these people are and help Hamzavi turn what starts out as a look at how immigrants are often made to feel like outcasts into one of Parvaneh making her first Swiss friend.

"La lampe au beurre de yak" ("Butter Lamp")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

I wouldn't be surprised if many viewers spend "Butter Lamp" wondering if maybe Wei Hu's entry is misplaced, and should be in the documentary category. Even after the last shot, which is obviously planned and delivers a punch that gives the film a twist that is inherently narrative, I wouldn't be totally surprised if much of what we see - specifically, the Tibetan families that an itinerant photographer takes pictures of in front of various backgrounds - was in fact real, or at least recruited on-site and set loose with minimal scripting.

It makes for an interesting experience, at least, especially when seen among a group of other shorts that are telling carefully-plotted stories with beginnings, middles, and ends: Rather than trying to figure out what's going to happen, the audience is observing this group, wondering about these financially-challenged people getting their pictures taken in front of more glamorous backgrounds. We do get to know the various characters as individuals, and that certainly speaks to how well Hu builds his film. It's a soft-spoken culture clash of earthy farmers dreaming of joining a world that has set itself up as an ideal but which doesn't want them, until finally...

Well, you can probably guess. But even if you can, it's a final shot that makes its point as quietly as the rest of the film without seeming too self-satisfied, which would be an easy trap to fall into.

"The Phone Call"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

If "Butter Lamp" was at the esoteric end of what a short film can be, "The Phone Call" is much closer to the mainstream: A story with recognizable actors and very defined structure: Sally Hawkins plays a responder at a crisis hotline who takes a voice from an army veteran (Jim Broadbent) who says he has decided to end it all and doesn't want talking-down so much as company.

If you're seeing all the shorts in the various categories in a quick burst, it's hard not to think of the documentary section's "Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1", especially upon looking at the far less well-appointed and connected space where Heather volunteers. Still, it's a setting that serves this story, heightening both characters' loneliness and the happiness that seems out of their grasp. It also eliminates any distractions from just watching and listening to Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent (almost entirely a voice on the phone) as they play out their story of a woman who wants to help and a man who has decided that he is beyond that. Director and co-writer Mat Kirkby, though mostly a music video guy until now, avoids most obvious flourishes but manages to keep the atmosphere from feeling too suffocating despite mostly being rooted to one desk in one place; it's a short that feels very much alive despite potentially being locked down.

"Aya"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"Aya" also spends a fair amount of time at one or two locations, although one of them is a moving automobile. They get there when Aya (Sarah Adler), at the airport to pick up one passenger, winds up holding the sign meant for "Mr. Overby" (Ulrich Thomsen) when his driver goes to sort out a parking problem, and plays along with his misconception that she's waiting for him after his plane arrives.

It's an amusing little premise, and both Adler and Thomsen do a nice job of presenting somewhat inhibited characters who just might be able to connect even in the not-quite-short window of time they have to drive to his hotel. Adler is especially impressive, doing something kind of crazy but making Aya so tentative that she never seems particularly worrisome. Directors Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis (and their co-writer Tom Shoval) do a lovely job of pacing things as well; it's a fine line between "get on with it" and "no way this happens so quickly" that they negotiate very well indeed. Their crew also deserves some applause as well - there are a lot of shots of the characters talking and driving that would seem impossible to get on a short Israeli film's budget, but the illusion is never broken despite things not getting too flashy.

"Boogaloo and Graham"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"Boogaloo and Graham" makes a nice change of pace from the somber piece that preceded it in the package; it's a story of two kids in 1978 Belfast who are given baby chicks by their returning father (Martin McCann) and, contrary to expectations, latch onto them far more completely than their mother (Charlene McKenna) expects or really wants - it's hard enough putting food on the table without avoiding the chickens who are growing up nice and fat!

It's a cute piece, thanks in large part to Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch, the young actors playing brothers Jamesy and Malachy. They're a brash and charming pair, and do a great job of bringing for the sort of brothers who probably spend most of their time poking at each other but also present a united front that no outsider or even parent can hope to break. McKenna & McCann are along the same lines, the practical mother exasperated by the romantically-inclined father, although there's no doubt of how true their love is, either. The four are familiar Irish archetypes, to be sure, and placed in a well-realized Belfast that is an equally iconic film setting (it's the middle of the Troubles but most of the families are just scraping by, no matter their sympathies). Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, though, and director Michael Lennox adds energy to a piece that could have been by the numbers.


The slate this year is rather good all-around, and I suspect that it will be one of the two movies that are able to grab attention in very different ways - "Butter Lamp" for its anti-narrative oddity or "The Phone Call" with its well-respected cast - that will come home with the award. None would be disappointing, though (I'm especially fond of "Parvaneh"), and all five nominees make for an impressive two hours.

Short Stuff: The 2014 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

The definition of "short film" is broader than some might imagine, and the length of the various programs of short films nominated for the Academy Awards this year demonstrates this: As usual, the documentaries were all a half hour to forty minutes long, requiring they be split into two programs in most theaters; the live-action shorts make for a two-hour block... And all five animated shorts together run 47 minutes.

So, it's hardly surprising that the full program gets padded out with a half-hour more of fine animated entertainment. Among all of these, which is the best (or at least, the best bet if you want to pick up some points in your Oscar pool)?

Quick links:
"Me and My Moulton"
"Feast"
"The Bigger Picture"
"A Single Life"
"The Dam Keeper"
"Sweet Cocoon"
"Footprints"
"Duet"
"Bus Story"

"Me and My Moulton"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"Me and My Moulton" isn't a bad bet; filmmaker Torill Kove has already won the category once and her new one - reminiscing about growing up as the second of three daughters of a pair of modernist architects that she wished were "normal" like the family in the apartment downstairs for parents - is funny, sweet, and occasionally rather clever. This is her third film to be nominated and could easily be her second win.

Part of the reason why is just how smoothly it demonstrates the competing impulses at play: Kove's drawings are simple and unpretentious as opposed to obviously stylized, and she has a great deal of fun with jokes that may seem kind of silly - lots of kids falling off their parents' weird three-legged-chairs - and the message to be taken from it is pretty clear. And yet, you can see that the modernism has influenced her: The animated Torill and her sisters line up precisely, for instance, and architectural drawings give parts of the movie structure. It lets the pride in her family's intellectual eccentricity mingle with her desire to connect more broadly in most every frame, letting what's already a good-looking and funny movie resonate just a little more.

"Feast"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Another reasonable prediction might be "Feast", if only because it was likely seen and enjoyed by the most people, having been attached to Disney's release of Big Hero 6. It really is an adorable little movie, following Winston, a stray dog taken in by a young man who is happy to share his greasy human food with him - at least, until he meets a girl with more sophisticated tastes.

As you might expect from a Disney production, it's a slick little short, although animated in a style more akin to the company's Oscar-winning "Paperman" (which director Patrick Osborne also worked on) than the more rigidly three-dimensional film it played with. It's also the sort of thing that makes one wonder about how editing is done in this sort of production, as Osborne and editor Jeff Draheim love cutting from scene to scene in a way that is so precise that it must be mapped out before as much as pieced together later. It's funny and adorable and it moves, even if the action is often kind of rooted, which is a nifty accomplishment.

"The Bigger Picture"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Of the five nominees, Daisy Jacobs's "The Bigger Picture" is probably the most ambitious, design-wise: She and her animators appear to draw her characters right on the walls of her setting, although arms will stretch out to interact with objects in the foreground. It's a nifty bit of optical illusion - that interaction looks a bit off, and in giving it that sort of three-dimensionality, Jacobs tends to shatter the trick of the eye that results in the two-dimensional drawings scanning as 3D when the viewer looks at them.

It would be nice, perhaps, if the story wasn't roughly as flat as the drawings. It's a fairly simple story about one son being successful out in the world while the other is dutiful toward his ailing mother, although she doesn't seem to recognize him as such. It plays out in just about the way one would expect, only the mother seems batty enough that actions and motivations get rather muddled midway through. It's nifty to look at, though, as much as any of the nominees.

"A Single Life"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"A Single Life" is, more than many animated shorts, one joke, but it's a good one - a woman living by herself receives a strange vinyl record with apparent time-travel properties. In the movie's three minutes, the filmmakers hit most of the variations one is likely to imagine, but just because the gags are the ones that follow most obviously from the premise doesn't mean they don't work.

Because they do; the character model is simple but cheerful, establishing her personality and situation quickly. It's also malleable, which is of great importance with the gags being so visual. The song on the record by Happy Camper is pretty nice as well, and it's not hard to appreciate just how well the filmmakers get in, make their jokes and points, and get out without being overly sentimental.

"The Dam Keeper"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Filmmakers Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tstsumi are inventive right from the start of their short "The Dam Keeper", as the dam in question is not a wall to keep water out but a windmill holding suffocating pollution away from its city of anthropomorphic animals. It's maintained by a young pig, whose attention to its inner workings leave him dirty and still unappreciated by his schoolmates, at least until a cute fox whose charcoal drawings tend to leave her with blackened paws sits next to him on the bus.

It's a wonderful little film, packed with great visual designs and details - it instantly conjures up a makeshift city in a post-apocalyptic world that has gotten too comfortable because it forgets about the smoke outside. Lars Mikkelsen's narration sets just the right tone, and the way the story plays out pulls no punches - the bullies who terrorize the pig are not pompous and ineffectual but cruel and focused, and what happens when he fears he has lost his only friend is genuinely scary and wrenching. The result is dramatic and impressive with just the right amount of softening from the funny-animal setting.

"Sweet Cocoon"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

The first of four "Highly Commended" animated films to get the package padded out to feature length is "Sweet Cocoon", and it's one of the best examples of the French sense of humor I can recall seeing. It's a dialogue-free comedy about a fat caterpillar that just cannot fit inside its cocoon (which I don't think is the way such things work, but never mind that), needing the help of two older beetles. It's slapstick that somehow seems to have a certain level of restraint, whimsical cartooning that nevertheless hasn't had its more adult edges sanded off, and the occasional important bit that's actually kind of mean because there's a belief that you can push a joke further than you can in real life.

I dig it; the five writer/directors who collaborated on it come up with good gags and render them very nicely. Still, while I laughed at how this sort of thing goes from cute to cruel at the blink of an eye, that may not be everyone's bag.

"Footprints"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Another, more specific, recognizable sensibility is that of animator Bill Plympton, who has produced new cartoons at an impressively steady rate for about thirty years now. His latest, "Footprints", is instantly recognizable as his, even if it is one of the trippiest things he's done in recent years.

It starts with a man awakened by a noise outside his door and chasing it, his brain imagining ever-worsening things. There's an eerie edge to it even beyond the basics of the set-up, as Plympton uses the style which has allowed his more comedic cartoons to be edgy to allow his protagonist's world and fears to be shadowy and undefined, even as his growing use of digital tools for compositing and coloring seems to give other elements a more solid presence than some of his earlier works, even last year's feature Cheatin'.

"Duet"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Continuing on the theme of distinctive styles, it would not be completely surprising if you figured "Duet" as being the short in this block that came from Disney - Glen Keane may be directing for the first time, but he's been the character lead for the stars of some of Disney's greatest hits (he was in charge of Belle, Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tarzan, and Rapunzel), and I believe was at one point in line to direct a feature there. Instead, this short was made in association with Google, of all places.

It's a pretty terrific-looking short, about a boy and a girl (and the boy's dog) who have been drawn together since childhood, although their respective devotion to athletics and dance demand a great deal of focus. The style feels like raw pencils with what are often absent backgrounds, but despite that, the film really excels at communicating the pair's story - in a way, it distills the entire thing down to Keane's skills at character design and animation. Things play out to Scot Stafford's soundtrack in perfect harmony.

"Histoires de bus" ("Bus Story")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

The last of the "Highly Commended" runners-up is "Bus Story", from Qubeçoise animator Tali, a tale presented in autobiographical style about a woman who, having always seen school bus drivers as cheerful and important parts of the community takes a job as one only to find that this good cheer can be hard to maintain.

At 11 minutes, it's one of the longer shorts in the program, and it's kind of flatly paced at that; things happen but they don't seem to lead to the conclusion so much as the end is just another event. It also suffers a bit from being what Chuck Jones called "animated radio", with a great deal of narration. The best bits of storytelling are visual, as seasons change with a whump or the narrator's eyes go wide with disaster. the style also fits the blue-collar atmosphere a story about a small-town school bus driver should have, though, with the characters having big hooks for feet and simple, exaggerated faces.


All of the shorts included are fairly impressive, though of the five nominees, "The Dam Keeper" is clearly the cream, and what I'd put down as the winner, although the pedigrees of "Me and My Moulton" and "Feast" may provide it with some competition. But since all are available online (either as a package or in most cases individually), it is well worth checking them out for yourself.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 20 February 2015 - 26 February 2015

Oscar weekend seems to be coming early this year; I really don't think I'm going to get to see all the nominees I want to. And that's not even including the ones where I've been actively dragging my feet (looking at you, American Sniper).

  • For instance, two of the Best Foreign Language Film nominees are opening at Kendall Square. Timbuktu is the first submission from Mauritania; it takes place near the city of the title during a time when Mali's government was controlled by religious fundamentalists. The cattle herders there are typically left alone, at least until something changes. Russia, meanwhile, submits Leviathan, in which a man fights to keep the house he built himself from the corrupt mayor who intends to demolish it. The previews, at least, have been great. It also plays at West Newton.

    The one-week booking is What We Do in Shadows, a mock-documentary about three ancient vampires who infect a twenty-year-old, setting off a severe culture clash. It has been getting some great reviews from the horror-comedy fans.
  • Over at the multiplexes, Kevin Costner seems to follow up Black and White up in short order with MacFarland, USA, where he plays a gym teacher who starts a cross-country team at a California school where most of the students are children of migrant workers. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boson Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.

    For something a little more comedic, there's Hot Tub Time Machine 2, in which most of the folks from the original return to further mess with the past, present, and future. Not having watched the Blu-ray on my shelf yet, I'm not sure whether the reason John Cusack is not returning is obvious or not. It's at the Somerville, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. For the younger set, there's The DUFF, which apparently stands for "Designated Ugly Fat Friend", though star Mae Whitman doesn't exactly fit that profile in this high-school comedy. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.

    The Imax screens in the area shuffle things up a bit - the Jordan's furniture stores drop Seventh Son to give Jupiter Ascending the full slate, while Assembly row ditches both to bring American Sniper back for a week. The latter also has a special screening of Interstellar on Saturday afternoon, with twelve minutes of behind-the-scenes footage.
  • It's astonishing how well quick releases of foreign films appear to be doing right now - both Boston Common and Fenway are keeping Somewhere Only We Know around for a second week, while Fenway also opens Triumph in the Skies the same day as Hong Kong, with Wilson Yip and Matt Chow directing a feature version of a popular TV series; Louis Koo and Sammi Cheng are in the cast, and it looks pretty funny.

    Fenway also opens C'est Si Bon, which isn't French, but Korean; it stars Jung Woo, Jin Goo, and Han Hyo-joo in a romance set against the background of the Seoul folk-music scene of the late 1960s. It's just a couple weeks after it opens in Korea, and this is a trend that I can get behind.

    This has been going on forever with Indian movies, of course, with Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe opening Badlapur this week; it's in English-subtitled Hindi and stars Varun Dhawan s a young man looking for revenge on the people who killed the love of his life.
  • The Coolidge is splitting its screens between a lot of Oscar-nominated movies, both first- and second-run, and it adds Mr. Turner to that list this week. That means there's only room for one or two showings per day of Richard LaGravenese's adaptation of The Last Five Years, featuring Jamie Jordan and Anna Kendrick as a couple who tell their story entirely through song, and in the screening rooms at that. A really small release, considering how many folks seemed to love Kendrick in Pitch Perfect.

    At midnight on Friday & Saturday, they keep The Duke of Burgundy around for another couple of shows, and have the last repertory screenings of the Cronenberg Mad Science series with a 35mm print of Dead Ringers, his creep-fest with Jeremy Irons as identical twin gynecologists.

    Sunday morning has a more cheerful kid's show, with the delightful Babe running on the main screen while the monthly Goethe-Institut German film - a four hour beast by the name of Home from Home - Chronicle of a Vision which is the latest in the long running "Heimat" series - plays upstairs. The Science on Screen presentation of Evil Dead 2 (on 35mm) that got knocked out by the blizzard a couple of weeks ago is rescheduled to Monday.
  • The Brattle has the special 35mm "Looney Tunes Revue" program of Bugs Bunny Film Festival on Friday and Saturday afternoon, with a new DCP restoration of Frank Capra's It Happened One Night playing during the evening. Then, on Sunday, they have their annual Oscar Party. On Monday night, the DocYard will present Ne Me Quitte Pas, a Belgian documentary about two down-and-out friends - one Flemish and one Walloon - contemplating suicide. Directors Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels Van Koevorden will do a Q&A via Skype afterward.

    That same night, they begin their Damn Fine Cinema: The Films of David Lynch program with a 35mm print of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The show's pilot plays for free on Tuesday as part of the Elements of Cinema program (including discussion of how it and film have influenced TV over the past quarter-century). A 35mm print of Eraserhead and a program of his shorts play Wednesday, and The Elephant Man plays Thursday.
  • The Harvard Film Archive continues The Lost Worlds of Robert Flaherty with the 7pm shows on Friday ("Moana with Sound") and Saturday (a 35mm print of Elephant Boy). The rest of the weekend continues Grand Illusions - The Cinema of World War I: First up, James Whale's pre-code melodrama Waterloo Bridge (Friday 9pm) and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (Saturday 9pm), both in 35mm. That is followed by three silent films: The End of St. Petersburg (Sunday 5pm in 35mm), J'Accuse (Sunday 7pm), and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Monday 7pm in 35mm). On Wednesday, the 35mm "Furious Cinema" presentation of Two-Lane Blacktop will be followed by a Skype conversation with director Monte Hellman.
  • It's still February, so The Museum of Fine Arts continues The Films of Stanley Kubrick. This week's films are Barry Lyndon (Friday & Saturday), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Friday), The Shining (Saturday & Sunday), Full Metal Jacket (Sunday & Wednesday), and Eyes Wide Shut (Wednesday).
  • The Bright Lights series in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room welcomes actor Mike Wiley on Tuesday to discuss Dar He: The Lynching of Emmett Till. Thursday's entry is the rescheduled Room 237, a look at the crazy theories that surround Kubrick's The Shining (so, good timing). That presentation will also include director Rodney Ascher's short film "The S from Hell".
  • The UMass Boston Film Series returns on Thursday the 26th with The Possibilities Are Endless, a documentary by Edward Lovelace & James Hall about songwriter Edwyn Collins, amnesic and aphasic following a stroke.
  • The ICA will be screening the Oscar-nominated animated and live-action short films on Sunday (which are also still playing at the Coolidge and Kendall Square).
  • The Regent Theatre has their last Sing-along Shows of Annie and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on Friday.


My plans: Lots of foreign stuff, hoping to fit Triumph in the Sky, C'est Si Bon, Leviathan, and Timbuktu in before the Oscars. Maybe try for Kingsman and the Hot Tub Time Machines. There are also gaps in my movie-seeing history to fill in, specifically Dead Rings and the Lynch movies.

Short Stuff: The 2014 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

It's a rare year that the shorts categories at the Oscars, especially the documentaries, are less than very strong: There are a lot of filmmakers working at forty minutes or less, and while it's far from easy, the sheer volume means that taking five from the top end is going to yield some good movies, and the nominees from 2014 are no exception.

Still, if you're taking five more or less at random, it's pretty amazing that you get two from Poland that are so heartbreaking in such a complementary way.

Quick links:
"Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1"
"Joanna"
"White Earth"
"The Reaper"
"Our Curse"

"Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2015 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre Screening Room (Oscar Shorts, digital)

The likely front-runner in terms of awards is "Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1"; it's not the only one of the five nominees with a worthy subject, but it's the one whose topic is something where people are primed to feel strong emotions without backing away. On top of that, it's a thrilling little film, with director Ellen Gooseberg Kent taking a scenario that doesn't seem inherently cinematic and showing that there's high stakes tension without it feeling exploitative.

That scene is a call center in the state of New York, the only one dedicated to handling social soldiers and veterans, though the rate of such actions among vets far exceeds the average for most other groups. For the most part, Kent opts to show the center's responders in action, taking calls, communicating with an emergency response coordinator by instant message or handwritten note, and then cutting back and forth between those desks as they try to attack the situation from both sides. This plays out several times, in one case from a call that ran for hours, and the professionalism of everybody involved is impressive, especially since it is always clear how draining an experience it is. One of the most memorable images is that of a supervisor making sure that her responder has time to decompress afterward.

Someone watching the film may feel like they need that as well; even the moments when the subjects are doing the usual second-person interviews are more emotional than analytical. It's a heck of a well-done movie.

"Joanna"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2015 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre Screening Room (Oscar Shorts, digital)

One of two from Poland in this category, "Joanna" initially looks like it's less about the titular Joanna than her son Johnny, a rambunctious and creative young boy who certainly seems like he could be quite a handful. The camera spends a lot of time on him, only occasionally showing Joanna as a bit more than a voice from the background asking questions so that he can come to conclusions himself, even after what one might suspect from various clues is made plain: She has cancer, and it seems to be part the point where the family is talking about treatment.

For such a traumatic subject, "Joanna" can seem like an oddly detached film; even after all doubt has been removed, the home movies that have been edited into a 40-minute short subject are almost aggressive in not confronting her death sentence directly, and it can take a little while to really appreciate what both Joanna and director Aneta Copacz are trying to do: Spend as much time together as mother and son as possible, doing everything possible to create laying memories, but without being selfishly indulgent. Joanna is trying to be a good mother, even if that means denying things or trying to keep situations normal. It's distancing and not what the viewer wants to see, but there's strength in it.

"Joanna" is not entirely austere; the scene where his parents tell Johnny what is happening is properly devastating, even though it is shot through a window, from a distance, and is thus silent. It's the right choice; as much as this is a scene that the movie needs, the family certainly doesn't need a camera and microphones in the room at that moment. That is in many ways the key to this movie, and the way its subject acts: They are doing what they can to see something without the close attention causing it to happen differently.

"White Earth"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2015 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Watching feature-length documentary The Overnighters a few weeks ago, I noted that it seemed to start out as an example of how modern capitalism is inhuman before swinging toward a more specific story. "White Earth" spends a little more time in that area, looking at the current oil boom in North Dakota through the eyes of three children - James, brought along by one of the workers and left on his own for most of the day, Allie, a local girl, and Elena, a bright girl in Allie's class - along with Elena's mother Flor, who came north with her husband and has a job cleaning trailers. It's not exactly a look at how they've become a tight-knit community.

But it's not the opposite, either. It is, in fact, a pretty neutral look at the situation, and while it's somewhat interesting to see this through the eyes of children, they are still basically kids, and they don't have much insight or dramatic enough situations that something can be gleaned from what they're saying/doing. It's interesting, but not hefty, while the bits from Flor's perspective seem to cut to what filmmaker Christian Jensen is trying to show more directly.

"La Parka" ("The Reaper")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2015 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

"The Reaper" is another that is built as much around the unusual way it is put together than the import of its topic; it follows a man who works in a slaughterhouse, with the unenviable job of being the one to actually put the animals down. It follows him closely, with the camera angle often so tight that for the bulk of the film's half-hour running time, it is almost impossible to see Efrain as a whole person; he's a hand here, the brim of a baseball cap there, feet elsewhere, and barely connected to the disembodied voice telling the story of how he has worked there for twenty-five years, being pegged as a "reaper" early on.

It's an interesting conceit, and filmmaker Gabriel Serra does well in how he uses it, eventually pulling back to show a little more of Efrain's life and how he relates to the death in his job. Whether it's really interesting enough is the question. There are moments when it seems like Serra is driving at something, although that final destination seems elusive; others when it seems like the style and dreary backdrop of this place is a means of covering that while Efrain's job is singular, that doesn't mean that there is a whole lot to say about it and how he relates to it. There's interesting craft here, but it doesn't quite linger in the way that seems to be strived for.

"Nasza Klatwa" ("Our Curse")

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2015 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

In an odd coincidence, while "Joanna" told the tale of a dying woman by mostly focusing on her son, the other Polish film nominated in this category focuses on the parents of a baby born with congenital central hypoventilation syndrome (aka "Ondine's Curse"), a disease which keeps him from breathing on his own while he sleeps, and it does not start out optimistically: The couple expects a short, hard struggle, followed by tremendous sadness, and their opening comments - with little Leo in the hospital for so long after birth, wife Magda says she doesn't even feel like she's had a baby - are of a dark, somber mood.

It doesn't get a whole lot more upbeat when Leo finally comes home; the film documents just how much worry and frustration is necessary to keep him alive - could you sleep if you knew that all that stood between your baby and death was a machine that didn't exactly look state of the art? - and the way director Tomasz Sliwinski presents it emphasizes that tension in multiple ways: The repeated shots of him and Magda on the couch show them looking more and more haggard, and when they pick the camera and show what is necessary to actually take care of Leo, it is often all the more stressful for how plainly-done it is (my notes include the phrase "oh, god, he can't cry because of the tracheotomy").

I almost feel like I shouldn't spoil that Sliwinski directed the film, because not knowing that had me much more worried for the couple's marriage than was maybe intended. It does, perhaps, earn the couple some points for bravery - how many of us would be willing to show just how fragile our lives had become? - and the fact that one doesn't learn this until the closing credits shows just how well he and Magda do to avoid seeming exploitative or self-pitying. Sliwinski has made a film that is powerful and personal, but is almost never crass. That Leo is a cutie doesn't hurt either.


Unfortunately, the documentary shorts don't seem to be quite as easily available as the animated and live action packages, although it's worth checking your on-demand package for the films either as a group or individually. If I were casting a vote, it would probably be for "Our Curse", although if I were trying to score points in the office Oscar pool, I would probably write in "Crisis Hotline".

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2015 Day #02: Max Mercury, "Painting the Way to the Moon", The History of Time Travel, Uncanny & Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two

Why is it taking me so long to post this? Well, it's a lot of movies, I've been spending a lot of time seeing movies which obviously cuts down into time to write about them, snow has been keeping me working at home and I do a lot of my writing on the bus, but here's the real reason:

The photos below were taken on my tablet. I was the guy holding up his 8.4-inch tablet to take a picture. I'm so sorry.

Before we get to that, a mini-index of shorts and features seen on the seventh:

"Tugger the Ship"
Matt Mercury
"Omega"
"Moon-Lite"
"Painting the Way to the Moon"
The History of Time Travel
Uncanny
Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two

At least not posting until tonight means that I can mention that the director of Matt Mercury sent me an email today and seems to be a genuinely nice guy who was just thrilled to have his movie play somewhere.

Painting the Way to the Moon filmmakers

From left to right, festival director Garen Daly and "Painting the Way to the Moon" producers Adam Morrow, Jacob Akira Okada, and Carlyanna Taylor; Okada also directed. It was an interesting conversation, in that there wasn't a lot of extra information to be had, but they talked a lot about balancing the movie: That Ed Belbruno was great, but he is the sort of hyper-confident person who will assert his version of events strongly enough that you need to see it through another's eyes as well.

Christian Carroll at SF40

Christian Carroll, writer/director/star of Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two, was last up. Not quite the as much fun a conversation as earlier - this audience is not, as a whole, really into the artsy sort of movie he made - but there were enough folks who liked what he did to have a conversation before going home.

Okay... Now that the shameful use of tablets as cameras has been admitted, hopefully the rest will get done more quickly (although I want to write up the Oscar shorts first).

"Tugger the Ship"

* * 1/2 (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

It's no surprise that "Tugger" writer/director Kevin Bertazzon has a background in visual effects and animation; his short has a lot of that, and while it's not necessarily the most eye-popping you'll see, it's bright and colorful in a way that matches its one joke after another pace. Even when the gags are strained or some other shortcoming rears its head, "Tugger" tends to be fun to watch.

That's no small thing. Bertazzon and his cohorts are cramming absolutely everything they have into something the length of a TV sitcom, and the dashing from one thing to another can get to be too much. Of the cast, only one or two are really what you'd call good actors - Reid Koster plays things fairly straight while the rest tend to ham it up, and gets some of the bigger laughs that way - and it sometimes feels like the filmmakers have to frantically introduce new things because the plot and running bags aren't sustainable. But they keep ahead of collapse, and that's more than can be said for a lot of comedies like this.

Matt Mercury

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Attending any genre film festival means you will probably get hit with parodies claiming great affection for science fiction films and television from the 1950s and 1960s but which wind up accentuating their weaknesses or playing as shallow imitation rather than recognizing what made them exciting. Matt Mercury may not be the worst of the bunch, but it's among the more leaden I've seem lately, dragging more in its sixty-five minutes than many serious movies do in twice the time.

The titular Rocket Ranger (Matt Lavine) commands a ship with a fairly small crew - blue-haired navigator Sparx McCoy (Lauren Galley), robot chief engineer Jinky (voice of Heidi Hughes), and an uplifted gorilla science officer. Their latest mission is to stop Professor Brainwave (Bill Hughes), who has been given a massive cranium and a desire to pull the Earth out of its orbit after encountering a group of extra-dimensional aliens. He'll need the help of not just Brainwave's former colleague Dr. Syfer (Rick Corrigan), but his former first officer and lover Mulkress Dunner (Chantal Nicole).

There's enough blame to go around for why Matt Mercury is not much good, and the usual impulse is to not come down too hard on the people onscreen who are likely doing the movie more for love and fun than anything else, but there's little avoiding that star Matt Lavine is a weak link as the title character. He gamely wears a goofy uniform and hairstyle and cheerily plays the fool, but just doesn't display the comic timing or inflection necessary to make his playing dumb funny, and doesn't fare much better when the script tries to paint him as having some emotional complexity. He's not necessarily the worst of a weak cast - most of the actors could use some seasoning - but he's in the most scenes with the least personality on display.

Full review at EFC.

"Omega"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

There's a temptation with short films like "Omega" to discuss them less in terms of the short itself than the feature version that the filmmakers would clearly like to make. This one sets up characters (a combat vet and his worried doctor girlfriend), a situation (a two-talked comet that may actually be a spaceship heading toward Earth), and a cliffhanger, and then cuts off. Wouldn't it be great to know more? Sure! And, heck, maybe an agent or exec or future festival programmer in the audience will feel the same way, leading to money and visibility for such a feature. There are worse strategies in the dog-eat-dog world of independent film financing.

This one is probably a little more deserving than most; director Peter Ninos has a pretty good eye and puts a nice-looking film together. The action isn't big or unusually polished for the film's likely budget level, but it's clear enough for Ninos to be showing what he can do than trying to hide what he can't. Adam Schmerl and Kate Englefield give decent performances, and that helps "Omega" feel a lot more like a real movie than a calling-card demo.

And then you get to the script, which has some problems. It's frequently clunky, giving the cast very basic scenarios to play out and then really stretching to tie them together. Maybe a feature version would be more developed needing to worry less about every second and having an actual ending to build toward. As it is, the gaps are pretty clear. Too bad if the feature never happens, although it's not a bad place to start.

"Moon-Lite"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Writing a children's book is harder than it looks (or at least it must be; I can't say that I've ever put serious effort into doing so). Making a live-action movie, even a short one, that feels like a children's book is even harder. David Dibble does a fair job of it with "Moon-Lite"; what's going on is obvious from the start but there's enough good cheer to make it kind of fun.

As with a lot of movies that try for this sort of flavor, I would kind of like to see it with actual kids to see how they react. I found something a bit of in its sorry of a harmless eccentric ignored by the locals except for one curious youngster; it's so focused on using its characters to impart an idea that it make them I individuals with personalities rather than quirks. Maybe it doesn't need to - it succeeds in what it sets out to do - but I think that could make it more entertaining to adults and perhaps even get kids to empathize more, too.

"Painting the Way to the Moon"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

In a lot of ways, Ed Belbruno's story isn't that different from that of other scientists whose creations are worth discussing: He has a notion, it turns out to be true and useful, but both it and the means to come up with it are unconventional enough to be sidelined - at least until he's recharged his batteries in another endeavor and the ballistic transfer math he specialized in process necessary. It's the details that make it fun.

For instance, Belbruno attributes his mathematical genius to a batch of magic mushrooms that he ingested as a young man. He also claims to have seen a UFO while driving across the country in 1991, and is a creator of a ballet meant to explain how the Earth's unusually large and iron-deficient moon formed. Next to that, the fact that he is also a painter worthy of note beyond his astronomical influences can seem very conventional.

That director Jacob Akira Okada manages to cover that entire spectrum in just under an hour is an impressive feat; longer and less complete documentaries have certainly been made about similarly multifaceted people. There are two keys to this, I think. First, Belbruno himself is not just gregarious and anxious to talk, but good at it. Not all scientists or artists can communicate w what they do without it becoming a lecture, but he describes the periods and cons of the standard Hohman transfer usually used to get shops into lunar orbit along with his fuel-efficient but time-consuming ballistic transfer clearly. It's fun science that doesn't take the focus away from the scientist who is the film's actual subject.

Okada also does a fine job of keeping the movie fun while also acknowledging that Belbruno can often be a stop or two past lovably eccentric. Belbruno will often get just enough time in a segment to come off as a little bit of a loon, and the filmmakers will often cut to other interviews to not necessarily rebut his version of events but give other perspectives. There are plenty of chances to look at his work, which really is rather nice, especially if one has interest in the science influencing it, and scenes of that ballet being performed by a class of kids that really is worth seeing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson appears toward the end to contrast the way Belbruno's two careers manifest, summarizing the previous hour nicely. That doesn't diminish the rest of the material; after all, knowing information is a different thing than seeing the expressions that come from it.

The History of Time Travel

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Mock documentaries are inherently gimmick movies; it is a rare one that does not crash hard up against the form's limitations, and when that happens, it doesn't matter whether the disappointment comes from the filmmaker having to cheat or the presentation just fizzling out. The History of Time Travel inevitably paints itself into a corner, but unlike most cases, that's where it wants to be.

Writer/director Ricky Kennedy presents it as a production of "History Television", and like many productions of the channel's real-world analog, it starts out in World War II, postulating a second letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning of the Nazis' plans to invent time travel along with the atomic bomb. Unlike their colleagues in New Mexico, the "Illinois Project" doesn't find success during the war, but it's cheap enough that it, and particularly scientist Richard Page, continues to receive functioning from the Pentagon, although it may fall to Page's soon Edward to complete his work. Which he does, obviously, as they are making a documentary about the history and ethics of this invention.

If it were just that simple, of course, we would just have to be impressed with how well Kennedy and his cast & crew recreate this sort of program while slipping bits of sly humor into the mix. It's a straight-faced pastiche with plenty of clever detail in its archival photos, interview footage, and other elements that help create a believable world, with very few cracks, although one's mileage may vary on that (for instance, I am okay with using an Atari 2600 in the design, but can't begin to guess why you'd have a Pitfall! cartridge in the slot). It may not be a perfectly slick imitation, but the details are generally well-done, especially the various experts who hit types pretty squarely in the center but still don't come across as bland or generic.

Full review at EFC.

Uncanny

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Uncanny jokes about the Turing Test casually enough to make even longtime science fiction fans marvel a bit at how the phrase has started to enter the general lexicon in the last few years. The go-to reference for this short of thing used to be the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, and its goal of trying to identify a genuine emotional response is the one that takes center stage here. Am interesting setup, to be sure, but also kind of a problem.

The film is built around tech reporter Joy Andrews (Lucy Griffiths) being given an seven days of access to the lab space of David Kressen (Mark Weber), a prodigy who had been designing the future since graduating college at the age of eighteen seven years ago. He shows Joy a bunch of cool stuff - lightweight bone replacements, synthetic skin, prosthetic eyes - and then introduces her to Adam (David Clayton Rogers), who is what you get when you connect all of those innovations to a cutting-edge artificial intelligence. He's evidently sophisticated enough to become envious when Joy starts showing more ingest in the scientist than the science project.

It's hard to figure out exactly why, though, even without playing the stereotypical "she's an attractive, accomplished woman and he's a real nerd" game. David just isn't very charismatic at all, and even without the readily-apparent irony of Adam seeming like the warmer one of the pair, his clumsy social-stuntedness never comes off as endearing enough to really buy Joy being attracted to him enough for it to become a major cog in the plot. It takes all kinds, sure, but there's a spark missing, and neither director Matthew Leutwyler nor writer Shahin Chandrasoma quite seems to have a handle on what Joy seers in him.

Full review at EFC.

Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Christian Carroll hits a couple of things I really like in Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two, enough that I can overlook its faults, probably better than many would. It's a nifty little movie, although there are one or two things that make it a little hard to entirely love.

It starts with Louise McPhee (Adeline Thery), a mute amnesiac staying at the home of her boyfriend Jorge (Carroll) somewhere near Oklahoma City. They met in Paris, where Louise was a street performer whose married boyfriend had just dumped her and Jorge was working on special photographic projects. They fell in love, and together created amazing art. Or at least, that's what's in the vials of liquid material that Jorge users to restore her memory.

That McPhee resembles silent film star Louise Brooks, especially the iconic haircut, is no accident, and is kind of morbidly funny, then, for her to spend large chunks of the movie mute, in addition to the film being shot in black and white. Or, more likely, a filter is applied; that's what is more likely these days, even in a movie that very specifically fetishizes silent films in general and Pandora's Box in particular. That one features Brooks as a woman in a highly mutable relationship, which means Carroll is kind of meta on top of meta here, with the style and the brainwashing and both obscure camera tech and steampunk-inspired virtual reality as the means of control. It can be a little over-clever and extends the metaphor and tendency toward cooler-than-you references toward the end, but if you like this sort of material, you'll probably find Carroll does it fairly well. It's not empty reference substituting for a story.

Full review at EFC.