Wednesday, June 06, 2018

This Week In Tickets: 28 May 2018 - 3 June 2018

The spread below is clearly the work of an aging dork whose favorite baseball team is doing just well enough to keep him home watching the game rather than going outto see a movie I may be on the fence about.

(There may have been rain, too)

This Week in Tickets

After a pretty busy weekend, I recoveredon the actual holiday and was lucky enough to have Tuesday off too - we kicked off a bunchh of processes at work that we didn't figure would finish until then (mine crapping out midway through). Gave me a chance to see Solo: A Star Wars Story a second time, this time in 2D at the Seaport's premium theater, and that's a good call. It's a pretty good movie, but it's also one where a chance to see it a second time, on its own terms rather than with the baggage you bring in, certainly doesn't hurt. Also not hurting - both screenings were 4K laser, which helps this movie particularly.

It was a quiet rest of the week because a new Star Wars movie sucks the air out of the multiplexes a bit, but I was looking forward to Upgrade. Not one I reallly loved, but it does a few things very well, and the folks who like their bloody 1980s sci-fi/horror should dig it.

Then at midnight, I hit the second and final show of How to Talk to Girls at Parties, which was also kind of neat but ended too late for me to catch the 66 bus halfway home afterward, and I walked much too far trying to find a cab rather than just calling one. Left me pretty wiped on Sunday, and shaking my fist at the sky a little bit when the Brattle announced they would have it at non-midnight hours a week and a half later.

With the big movie out of the way, there's a ton next weekend. Rough drafts on my Letterboxd account, as usual..

Upgrade

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 2 June 2018 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, DCP)

The direct descendant of all those 1980s movies that had a ton of cyberpunk ideas and a matching tendency toward blood and guts, Upgrade at least never seems stuck in that particular past; it's the 2018 version with a little extra snark and a lot more ease in telling this sort of story to a wider audience. It's mean and nasty and only acknowledges that its violence might mess the characters up briefly, slickly and skillfully made by guys who maybe like the splatter a little too much. Not quite my thing

That said, they're good at it, sometimes seeming to use CGI in the background not just because it's less expensive for some things or more efficient for constructing an extremely detailed world, but to emphasize how tactile other parts are. Writer/director Leigh Whannell and his crew are pretty good at staging the Jackie Chan-type stuff that naturally comes from a man out for revenge having a computer that knows everything operating his body, and star Logan Marshall Green gives a great physical performance in all of his movements, even if he (and the rest of the cast, to be honest) are kind of bland as characters.

It doesn't necessarily fizzle at the end, in that the finale is more or less the culmination of everything that has come before, but it's also kind of unsatisfying. Whannell gives it the end that a certain type of sci-fi fan often asks for, but it's unsatisfying, not just because one's instinct is to root for a certain thing, but because everything leading to it winds up feeling like something retroacttively included to justify a gotcha moment as opposed to something that came out of the moment.


Solo: A Star Wars Story
Upgrade
How to Talk to Girls at Parties

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