Tuesday, May 22, 2018

This Week In Tickets: 14 May 2018 - 20 May 2018

Didn't realize until this morning that I kind of missed the chance for a Silence/Quiet double feature this weekend. It was just sitting right there

This Week in Tickets

That Red Sox game on Tuesday was... not great. It was raining all afternoon, the sort where you kind of want to hear that they've postponed the game before you get off the subway, but no. Instead, the bus and train wind up not getting to Fenway me until it's 7:30pm (game starts at 7:10), but fortunately the game is delayed to 8:50, so it's kind of cold and rainy until just past midnight, it's 1am before I get home and I'm still wired from the souvenir soda and my sleep schedule winds up messsed up for the rest of the week.

Oh, yeah, and the Sox lose, too.

The MBTA was slow on Friday, too, so when I got back to Davis it's five minutes before the seven o'clock show, and I figured my movie would be in screen 5 and only crap seats left. So I went to Deadpool 2, and then had a little time to do the grocery shopping before The Great Silence at the Brattle, one of my favorite classic film discoveries in a while.

Sunday, I was finally in the mood for A Quiet Place, and it's pretty terrific. I spent a lot of the past six months deeply suspicious of that one because the initial preview which ran before every movie didn't do much for me, and even when it started to get some praise, there were other things those weekends. Glad it wound up hanging around.

Relatively short week, but more coming. Rough drafts on my Letterboxd account..

A Quiet Place

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 20 May 2018 in AMC Assembly Row #11 (first-run, DCP)

Darn, but that is some high-quality monster movie making. Quality creatures, nifty details as needed, and a back half that is put together in near-perfect fashion. The filmmakers do something I particularly like, in that they tend to point toward the horrible but necessary sacrifice - with a wilderness full of monsters ready to pounce upon the slightes sound, the impending birth of a new baby seems like a no-win situation - but go for ingenuity whenever possible (which isn't all the time). They use kids being a bit behind the audience just enough for it to feel real without the kids seeming dumb.

The small cast is great as well. You usually don't get the likes of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt in this sort of movie, even taking into account that they're married and Krasinski directed/co-wrote the thing. After all, guys like Krasinski usually stick with Sundance-y things like Krasinski's previous two films; having them pop up in something like this is a real treat, as they give rock-solid performances with all the confidene of movie starsand no sign that they'reslumming. Plus, Millicent Simmonds is as good as she was in Wonderstruck, and that's a heck of a pair of movies to start your career with.

I'm glad this one lasted long enough in theaters to be there when I was in the mood for it. It's not just good in any environment, but feeling the crowd afraid to make noise (even though there's usually one idiot who doesn't know any reason but laughter) makes it even better.


Indians 5, Red Sox 3
Deadpool 2
The Great Silence
A Quiet Place

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