These Those Weeks In Tickets: 23 April 2018 - 6 May 2018

Four days until Fantasia starts (in July), so it's time to put the final bow on my blogging about Independent Film Festival Boston (back in April and May).





Might as well get right to it, then, without making the dumb mistake I did when writing it on the calendar page above:

• April 25th: Eighth Grade
• April 26th: Crime + Punishment and "Shorts Allston"
• April 27th: Leave No Trace and Rodents of Unusual Size
• April 28th: Tre Maison Dasan, The New Fire, Never Goin' Back, and Don't Leave Home
• April 29th: Nothing Is Truer Than the Truth, We the Animals, The Third Murder, and Beast
• April 30th: The World Beneath Your Feet and Under the Tree
• May 1st: Disobedience and Damsel
• May 2nd: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

The wise thing would be to take a break from movies for a few days, but Avengers: Infinity War had opened during the festival, and by then, folks on social media were already not spoiling but hinting enough at stuff so that you can see the shape of what they were working around, so no sense waiting any longer! Happily, it's pretty nifty, enough to make me feel pretty good about this insanely ambitious 22-film cycle ending with a bang next year.

With that film being an 800-pound gorilla, there was room for two Chinese movies the next weekend: The Trough turned out to be a pretty darn nifty Hong Kong crime story, while A or B was an interesting thriller that doesn't quite work. The sort that's good enough to make one interested in a remake, I guess.

After that,it was easier to get back into the habit of doing these weekly again, while also updating my Letterboxd page as well as the blog.

Avengers: Infinity War

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2018 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)

Infinity War probably won't be the crowning achievement of Marvel's massive experiment in moviemaking, even if the second half turns out to be terrific when it comes out next year. But that's kind of okay; as the first Avengers replicated the feel of a great team-up comic, this one represents the "event" where the scale is much of the point, where the creators are connecting not just threads but genres, with the spies, wizards, superheroes, and spacemen all having to figure out how to play by each other's rules.

So there's not really a great story, and the villain winds up too big to be really interesting (although it could be worse; Marvel's going to get to Kang eventually). Maybe they'll eventually find something that resonates in the center about how Thanos's philosophy and zero-sum outlook is that of a man who lacks imagination and the ability to create, even with all the power in the universe literally in the palm of his hand, the opposite of Tony Stark building new solutions, but it's not there yet. Still, you've got to admire the heck out of a movie that finds a teenage vigilante and his super-scientist mentor stowing away on a spaceship to rescue a wizard from aliens. For as much as Marvel has spent the last few years crossing things over in nifty ways, that's a great job of putting all the things you love together.

Is that kind of a lot for a while, with almost too much action? Yeah, but there's also no denying that these filmmaker are really good at it. The last act is enormous, an action set-piece that spans three solar systems, but it's paced, choreographed and rendered fantastically, and the action throughout isn't too shabby.

The film ends on a combined callback and tease, and given how much Marvel has done well over the past ten years, I wouldn't bet against them taking a movie mostly spent building up a villain who needed it and serving up a satisfying denouement with part two next year. They've done the like before.