The Amazing Maurice

What's "doing well" in theaters for a movie like The Amazing Maurice these days? I saw it on its fourth weekend at Fresh Pond, in a 34-person auditorium that was maybe half-full, and I'd be surprised if it was ever in any larger rooms.over that time. It probably hung around a little longer because most schools in Massachusetts were on vacation this past week and an extra kid-friendly title for matinees couldn't hurt. Still, given how crazy the turnover often is at Fresh Pond - it's a 10-screen theater that is only the closest place for a fairly small area - it's impressive staying power. Most films like this will have two shows a day for a week and be gone.

But this stuck around, and I've kind of got no idea why. Does the Boston area have an unusual number of anglophiles who will say "hey, that's a Terry Pratchett adaptation, I'm in!" without ever seeing a trailer - and is the fact that Apple is a local chain going to make them more sensitive to that, even if they weren't already the place where this sort of thing opened? Did the trailer play before enough other things there to get that audience's attention, like the trailer for The Magic Flute that played before this one? Was it advertised in some way that I, having no kids and not seeing a lot of ads for anything these days, just missed? Would it have played other theaters if the wasn't down 30-odd screens compared to before the pandemic?

I honestly don't know. And does pulling $3M in qualify as a big windfall for Viva Pictures, whose stuff generally seems to go straight to video? Especially as this could sort of be a multiplier for that business, because people might vaguely remember it being in theaters and treat it more like a real movie. Does it count as an overperformance and maybe get director Toby Genkel a look from the bigger studios?

Perhaps, perhaps not. There's so much reporting on the juggernauts that this far more modest thing doesn't get a lot of talk, and likewise, it's hard to say what counts as "success", especially in the current environment. I suspect that this will wind up doing pretty okay by the standards of non-studio animation - it got seven-digit box office, it will probably sell a few more discs^* than usual because Pratchett has fans, and… well, who knows how things go on streaming, although I've got to figure this gives it a little bump.

But I don't know, certainly not well enough to guess as to whether making decent movies at this scale which get this sort of release is sustainable.

^{* A stereographer is mentioned in the credits, so, yeah, I'd like a 3D release, although I suspect that might only happen in the UK and/or Germany.}

The Amazing Maurice

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2023 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/Cambridge #8 (first-run, DCP)

Bold move, small studio, releasing your animated film with a taking orange cat while Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is still in theaters! For all that many may look at this and see an off- brand knockoff, though, it's very much its own thing and does carve out its own space, feeling like it captures just enough of Terry Pratchett's voice to have a distinct appeal. The Amazing Maurice may be a notch below the big boys in some areas, but it's decent all-ages entertainment.

Maurice (voice of Hugh Laurie), as you may have gathered, is a talking cat, which even in the magical realms of Discworld is fairly unusual. He's got a good racket going, showing up in a town along with a rat infestation, drumming up donations for a piper to lead them away. The piper, Keith (voice of Himesh Patel), is in on it, of course, as are the rats, who can also speak. One, Dangerous Beans (voice of David Tenant), tries to convince them to give up swindling, but Maurice prevails, and they're off to a new town. Something is fishy, though - food in the town disappears immediately, as if treats were stealing it, but there are no ordinary, dumb rodents to be found. They, on the other hand, are discovered by the mayor's daughter Malicia (voice of Emilia Clarke), who was already itching to solve the mystery.

Malicia, to this point, had been the film's narrator, the sort that winks hard at the audience because she knows all the tropes, although she's studied harder than the average hero who has learned everything about life from storybooks (she will teach her audience what a "framing device" is and why it's useful). She's rather a lot, to be honest, right on the edge of being the character who ruins the movie both by being the loudest and potentially making it about spoofing other things rather than telling its own story. Fortunately, the filmmakers are mindful of how they mix and match and otherwise divide attention among their ensemble, so that nobody truly takes over or gets crowded out. It also uses its meta winking to drop something kind of important on an audience of unsuspecting kids.

Mainly, it's funny, with a bunch of fun characters from humans to cats to rats that use their broadness to bounce off each other in fun ways, often set up so that one person can be deadpan about how the other is crazy and vice versa without taking sides. It's a smartly twisted take on how talking animal stories would "really" work, what with the non-talking variety tending to eat each other, that nevertheless isn't truly mean, and it's got a good balance of visual and verbal jokes. It's also one of those British cartoons that draws on a ridiculously deep voice cast: Hugh Laurie is smooth but capable of some barbs as Maurice, Emilia Clarke puts enough glee into Malicia's manic know-it-all nature to make her tolerable, David Tenant captures how Beans is a spiritual leader still trying to understand the world, and Gemma Arterton is the good-hearted but no-nonsense Peaches, just to start.

The animation is actually pretty decent cartooning on a budget probably well below what Disney and DreamWorks spend, and smoother than these second-or-third-tier studios often manage (there's a credit or two for stereography, but it didn't play in 3D locally; there's a sequence or two that would probably look good that way but the film doesn't have the too-obvious parallax one often sees when 3D is a high priority). It's got the sort of character design that doesn't exactly feel identifiable as one thing but also isn't quite its own in a lot of places - lots of Disney faces with Aardman noses and spindly Laika legs. The exception is Maurice himself, where the filmmakers have seemingly worked hard to not make him look too much like any other orange cartoon cat from Garfield to Puss in Boots, and seem not to quite know what to do with his toothy mouth before it's time to remember that cats are predators as well as snobs. There are moments when I wonder if it's a bit of a riff on medieval paintings where you wonder if the artist has only heard cats described, which is an interesting idea, but they're fleeting and wouldn't match up with the conventional design elsewhere.

The story is shaggy at times and screenwriter Terry Rossio maybe finds himself a bit tripped up by the end, and maybe not quite sure just how self-referential this should be, but as a whole, it's pretty good all around. The kids in the audience and their Discworld-fan parents both seemed into it, and I must admit, I wouldn't mind seeing this group tackle Pratchett again, maybe poking at something that has been exhausted a little less than fairy tales.

The Old Way

I feel like I've seen more Nicolas Cage VOD-level movies getting a cursory theatrical release at Fresh Pond than I really have - this is really just the third or fourth in a decade or so - but that's still just enough to make me wonder if there's somebody doing the booking for this theater that really likes Cage. It's possible, or more likely, that he's got some sort of "top X markets" or minimum screens count in his contract and this is the place where you four-wall a movie in the Greater Boston Area, especially now that the Embassy is closed. Still, wouldn't you rather imagine that one of the guys who runs the theater that was basically purchased so that Indian films could have a home base is a big Cage fan?

It looked like I was going to be alone at first, but some more folks eventually showed up, one making a comment about whether there was a post-credit scene to this B Western, but if I hadn't stayed to the end, I wouldn't have seen someone credited as a "Bear Safety Officer" despite the fact that there are no bears in the movie. Did a version of the script involve the Briggses encountering a bear on the trail, only to be cut from the final movie? Is this just a standard thing you do when filming on location in Montana because bears are everywhere? It's not like this was ever really in the woods, either - it was pretty wide-open spaces, although I imagine a sufficiently motivated bear could cross them pretty quickly, and there was a kid or two in the cast.

One thing I was kind of curious about but didn't really think to pay attention to was that this was shot at "Yellowstone Film Ranch", and by the end I wondered whether that ranch has multiple wild-west towns or if they redressed one and chose locations carefully, because there are three different towns over the course of the movie, and I didn't check to see if they had the same geography. The last one, I noted, had a restaurant with some pretty modern-looking signage - "café" in slender lower-case letters which would not look out of place in a gentrified Twenty-First Century neighborhood. I'd bet money that this was a working café for tourists who liked the idea of visiting someplace like this but didn't want authentic Nineteenth Century beverages.

The Old Way

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 January 2023 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)

There should be more movies like The Old Way - honest western B-movies running about 90 minutes - being made and playing in theaters. Granted, they should be better than this one, where the makers often seem to know the general shape of the genre but don't necessarily find ways to make it its own interesting movie so much as just presenting the concept of "a nice, no-nonsense kind of Western".

Twenty years ago, Colton Briggs (Nicolas Cage) was one of the most feared gunslingers in the West, but now he's settled down, married to a good woman (Kerry Knuppe) with a bright but odd daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), running a respectable mercantile shop in town. His past is about to catch up with him, though, with James McCallister (Noah Le Gros) recently broken out of prison and leading his gang to the Briggs homestead. Colton doesn't recognize that name at all, but he made a lot of enemies in his younger days, and he'll put a final end to this - even if he has to go through a U.S. Marshal (Nick Searcy) who figures his job would be much easier without a psychopath having a head start on his revenge.

For better or worse, it's a pretty simple story, with the presence of daughter Brooke arguably the biggest wild card of the film. Writer Carl W. Lucas and director Brett Donowho have a tendency to take the most obvious route when it's necessary to get a little extra information out, and the early scenes between Colton and his wife Ruth especially feel like placeholder material put there with the intent of fleshing it out once they'd pinned down how that relationship worked and never really did. It's the sort of thing that highlights how Ruth and Brooke are the only women of any note in the movie, and Brooke comes across as neurodivergent enough that Lucas is writing that rather than a young girl. The music by Andrew Morgan Smith is exactly the sort of music that goes with the wide-open spaces being traversed, and the combination of sharp digital photography and locations that are likely kept squeaky-clean for tourists (as opposed to being built to look lived-in) adds a bit to the "generic western " feel.

A large chunk of the cast is exactly what you want, though, starting with Nicholas Cage once again maybe not doing his best work but giving a minor film more than a lot of other actors collecting a paycheck do (even if he, sadly, only gets to wear entertaining facial hair in the opening flashback). There's a moment early on where his former mercenary turned merchant is stuck listening to a customer's long story where he looks more and more aghast at what his life has become until he seems to seriously be considering whether Ruth will forgive just one little murder that I suspect few actors even go for, let alone nail, and plenty of others he's clearly giving the character more than is on the page. It doesn't always work, which can also be said for what Ryan Kiera Armstrong is doing as Brooke - she and/or the script is much better when how she processes and displays emotion is not the entire point of a scene - but also one the sort where part of the fun is watching Cage go at least a little bigger than is necessarily called for.

ONe of the best things about a good western is a bunch of well-targeted character actors, and this is as That-Guy-rich a cast as you'll find: Nick Searcy, arguably, was born to play no-nonsense lawmen of this type, and McCallister's gang is a thing of beauty: Abraham Benrubi as the hulking but not dumb "Big Mike", Shiloh Fernandez as the cocky junior gunslinger, and Clint Howard as Eustice, all the sort of Clint Howard bluster that makes one think this guy must be one nasty piece of work to have survived so long with how stupid he seems to be. These are the guys that fill out a posse or a gang in good, memorable fashion even if they don't get subplots.

Noah Le Gros, on the other hand, seems like he maybe should have switched parts with Fenandez; he makes for too handsome and charismatic an outlaw to be in a movie that's not particularly about the handsome, charismatic outlaw - there's no place for his charm to go, most of the time. He also gets a big speech toward the end that's supposed to give the audience something to chew on, in how he counts himself as Brigg's child as much as Brooke is his daughter, because Colton's actions made him what he is, but it maybe doesn't quite hit right, given how Brooke's poker face isn't the sort of psychopathy McCallister and Colton display. One can see where the movie is going with it, but it doesn't land like it should.

If those threads had connected, The Old Way would have been a pretty darn good western, the sort that gets to an audience on a gut level despite being of this other, bygone age. INstead, it's mostly the sort of thing an audience enjoys because Hollywood doesn't make enough westerns these days and the tropes are satisfying even if the film itself is not what it could be.

Dilili in Paris & The Parts You Lose

Apple Cinemas Cambridge actually split the 18-seat screen #9 between three movies this week, with something called Semper Fi the third 90-minute movie getting two screenings a day, but I was kind of surprised to see that both of the two I saw were released by Samuel Goldwyn Pictures, which apparently also released them to the on-demand services at the same time. Like I said yesterday, I'm not sure how distribution works these days, but it seems weird for a studio to open two movies on the same day, but maybe it's a perfectly reasonable way to drop things to VOD. It also makes me wonder if Goldwyn is offering their VOD movies to places like this as a package deal. Not a double feature, but the studio recognizing that they can't ask for a whole screen under these circumstances, but maybe a half.

Sadly, neither is very good, although while writing the reviews, I did find one thing that amuses me: For all that I'm annoyed by the name-dropping Dilili in Paris does, it did not occur to me until a couple days later that at one point Dilili is saved through literal name-dropping. You kind of have to respect that.

Dilili à Paris (Dilili in Paris)

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 October 2019 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge/Fresh Pond #9 (first-run, DCP)

I'm not sure how completely an atrocious dub torpedoes Dilili in Paris in its American release, because it's got a lot of other problems, and it's entirely possible that the film's original soundtrack sounds just as flat and repetitive, only in French. Even if that's the case, this is the version that English-speaking kids will see, and while they've probably seen worse on YouTube, the way it's presented makes this film feels far more lazy than it likely is.

Dilili is a girl of about nine or ten who had a French father and a Kanak mother, and stowed away on a ship bound for Paris with a troupe of Kanak performers. Taken in by a Countess and taught the language by Louise Michel, she is disappointed that she is given as much trouble for her dark skin in Paris as she was her light skin in Africa, but on the last day of the troupe's performance, she meets a friendly delivery boy, Orel, who offers to help her see more of Paris from the seat of his tricycle. Orel seems to be a friend-of-a-friend of everybody in Paris, particularly opera singer Emma Calvé, and as such is a good friend to have in a dangerous time - a gang of "male-masters" has been kidnapping young girls throughout the city, and have their eyes on Dilili, who intends to solve the case herself.

Writer/director Michel Ocelot has made a number of films that have charmed audiences at kid-friendly film festivals, perhaps most notably Azur and Asmar, and for this one he recreates early-20th-Century Paris with mostly photographic backgrounds over which he places flatly-rendered characters that often have a certain charm but sometimes move in an odd manner, like the filmmakers are using a library of pre-programmed motions that neither quite mimic human activity nor take advantage of the room animation gives one to exaggerate. It looks like Colorforms, which is a nifty idea to have for this sort of movie, but isn't very expressive and sometimes has Ocelot caught in between, when he needs an original setting or complicate action.

Full review on EFilmCritic

The Parts You Lose

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 October 2019 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge/Fresh Pond #9 (first-run, DCP)

The Parts You Lose is a dreary movie about a boy finding a new father figure in a violent fugitive who seems like a minor improvement from his actual dad, with lots of nothing happening under the sort of grey sky that makes things feel more serious and as such does a much better job of making the film memorable just by being above Manitoba-subbing-for-North-Dakota in February than anything that actually happens. It's the sort of blandly generic movie whose very name starts to vanish even while one is watching it, becoming "The Pieces We Lost" or the like when a person tries to recall something about it.

The first person seen under that sky is Wesley (Danny Murphy), a ten-year-old with hearing impairment bad enough that he has to take special classes some distance away from his already-isolated home. His mother Gail (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) works hard to accommodate him; frequently-absent father Ronnie (Scoot McNairy) less so. The area is pretty quiet, but a fleeing gang of criminals got in a shootout at the local hotel, and one (Aaron Paul) turned up in the middle of the path Wesley takes to his bus, unconscious and bleeding. Unable to get his father's attention, Wesley hides him in an abandoned barn, sneaking food and otherwise helping him heal up.

Does Wesley have any idea how this man got shot? It's a potentially intriguing question; there are multiple scenes where Wesley is naturally less aware of the world around him unless someone goes out of their way to get his attention, and the filmmakers tend to drip information about the first major crimes in the area out in the background without doing much to indicate Wesley is seeing the television or that his hearing aid is picking up some muffled version of the news. Writer Darren Lemke and director Christopher Cantwell are building their movie around an isolated kid who finds one person to connect with, and this would be a good way to show just how alone he is.

Full review on EFilmCritic

2.0

The transformation that the 10-plex at Fresh Pond has undergone since I saw Enthiran there eight years ago is pretty impressive; it's basically just the walls that are left, the the island-style concession stand gone in favor of a self-serve area in the corner, ticket touchscreens in the middle of the lobby, seats replaced twice, and, oh yeah, the first one played on film. I wasn't noting that then, but a few months later at the sci-fi festival, it was one of the 35mm prints and projectionist David Kornfeld put the whole thing on one platter and the three-hour runtime was a bit much for some of the folks there, especially when the word "Intermission" came up and the movie just kept going.

The website's kind of a work in progress, though - there's actually no page that just lists showtimes - you have to go to a movie's page and then look at the sidebar - and I've occasionally had it hang when switching between days. On the other hand, the service fee is just one dollar and it does not ask you to create an account and remember another password or have your credit card information permanently saved on another server. That was pretty helpful when I wanted to make sure I got a decent set at the Tamil 3D screening without a whole lot of rigmarole.

They were also quick to respond when I came down and said the projection was messed up - it was all green and pink like I've never seen before. Is that an alternate 3D process, maybe an anaglyph on, and projectors can just switch between that on the fly? It makes sense, software and data-wise, but I've never seen theaters dealing with it.

Anyway, it meant I got to see Superstar Rajni's special animated "vanity card" twice, and someday I've got to ask the Indian folks at work what his deal is in detail, because I can't think of any American stars who lean into their own egos that much without being hated. But, nope, folks were hooting and screaming when he showed up, and maybe some of it's ironic, but what if it's not?

The movie itself isn't quite the hoot that the first one was, and not just because the first time was my first encounter with the cult of Rajinikanth. Even more than with most Indian movies I've seen, It almost feels like Shankar had two movies he wanted to make, with the evil cell phone movie getting mashed up with the Enthiran sequel, and I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to someone pulling the mobile phone stuff out and remaking that. There's a good horror movie that doesn't need robots at all there, even if robots do usually make everything better.

2.0

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2018 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge/Fresh Pond #3 (first-run, Tamil, ReadD 3D DCP)

The long-awaited sequel to Shankar's Enthiran is in some ways a lot more conventional than its predecessor; with no musical numbers and no romantic comedy subplots, it's less likely to cause the sort of severe whiplash suffered by people who had never seen this sort of masala film but were looking for a big sci-fi action movie. It's still pretty bizarre for folks who don't know what they're getting into, and a lot of fun, if not the insane, jaw-dropping roller coaster its predecessor was.

Life in Chennai has mostly returned to normal since the android Chitti went on his rampage, and his creator Dr. Vaseegaran (Rajinikanth) has recently built a new robot, Nila (Amy Jackson), who is sexy, sardonic, and a bit more bound by Asimov's Three Laws than Chitti was, making Vaseegaran's girlfriend Sana jealous when she regularly phones him. One of those calls gets interrupted by his phone flying away, which is happening all over Chennai, a mystery that stumps everyone from scientists to the government to the executives at the mobile networks, though the audience can probably draw a quick line to Pakshi Rajan (Akshay Kumar), the ornithologist who hung himself from a mobile phone tower at the start of the movie. When the phones stop just flying away but instead start returning to murder people, Vaseegaran says that the best way to fight them would be to reactivate Chitti, although some - notably Dhinendra Bohra (Sudhanshu Pandey), son of the AI researcher who opposed Vaseegaran last time - are prone to disagree.

Enthiran threw a lot of genres into its blender, but it wasn't really a horror movie, and I don't know whether it's thus logical or surprising that the first half of 2.0 turns out to be a good one, in a sort of 1950s way where there's a serious scientist investigating the paranormal - serious in attitude; the pseudoscience he spouts is kind of ridiculous - and a general public kind of perplexed by the strange things happening but not really alarmed. It's got a lot of little things that work - the everyday object weaponized against its users, some striking and eerie visuals, gross kills that are shot in a way that mostly allows one to imagine the worst, and a cell-phone-man monster design that should look silly but is actually genuinely creepy. It builds to the big and genuinely weird, with some big CGI effects that are simultaneously twisted and whimsical and climaxing on a big action scene that is kind of delightful not just for its scale but for how it makes Rajinikanth seeming stiff and less than fluid work in-character as Chitti wreaks havoc.

Full review at EFC.

Less-Than-Ideal Fathers: Papa and The Confirmation

Not exactly a planned double-feature theme do much as one that came about because work compressed the two indie-ish movies that came out this weekend together: I wound up staying late on Friday because I really wanted to get an audit of... stuff... done before the weekend (it is tough to describe my work without making it boring or worrying about spilling inside information), even though much of Sunday would be taken from me so that I could fly out to Texas for a week-long training session. So I stacked movies up on Saturday, coming pretty close to the entire space in between was spent on the T because they weren't all playing in one place. It arguably became a themed triple feature, since I went from The Confirmation to The Witch, and the father in that movie doesn't exactly set a great example.

One interesting note: Two of the three previews before Papa were for movies centered around Asian-American characters, which is a bit unusual; they're a part of the population that can be nearly invisible in theaters. Kind of fitting given the plot of that movie, even if it was mostly a movie about a Chinese guy in America.

Luo shan ji dao dan ji hua (Papa)

* * 1/4 (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2016 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)

There's always something a bit off about movies like Papa - though they are set in America and surround their (in this case) Chinese star with local actors, the filmmakers don't quite know how everyday English sounds or the finer details of the culture, so what seems perfectly reasonable when the movie is shown in Beijing gnaw at am American viewer a bit. Sure, that's kind of background noise for a movie that fuses "unprepared parent" and "green-card marriage" genres and doesn't exactly reinvent either, but it also highlights their issues.

In this case, the poor sap at the middle of everything is Huang Bolun (Xia Yu), a talent agent who came to Los Angeles to find Nina Wang (Yang Zi), a client who went AWOL with Bolun's assistant Jason Chen (Dennis Joseph O'Neil) several months ago, leaving Bolun in deep trouble with Boss Du (David Wu). With Bolun's via about to expire, his friend Ye Qiang (Brother Sway) arranges a green-card marriage to Gao Yunshu (Jiang Shan). Not only is she not exactly what Bolun expected from her picture, but their Vegas wedding and "honeymoon" ends in disaster. That's when Bolun learns that not only does Yunshu have a fifteen-year-old daughter in Coco (Song Zuer), but four other adopted children besides. And while Coco is willing to play along to keep her family from being broken up, ICE agent Alicia Sterling (Macy Gray) smells a rat.

The credits make reference to this being a remake, although even if it weren't, portions certainly play out entirely as expected, right down to Bolun having to balance responsibilities and ambitions when it turns out that Coco is every bit the natural talent that Nina is. Often, both the script and director Zheng Xiao seem to feel as intimidated by the English/Mandarin language barrier as the characters are, never really seizing the chance to build a fast-paced, funny sequence out of the dozens of misunderstandings and bits of culture shock that this situation should produce, often being satisfied to just check the things one expects from this storyline off. The desperation that motivated the sham marriage on both sides never seems evident later on, and pieces like the return of one child's birth mother don't write fit. Right down to an epilogue that seems like a big leap from the scene that immediately precedes it, Papa often feels like the outline of a movie as much as the finished product.

Full review on EFC.

The Confirmation

* * 3/4 (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2016 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #8 (first-run, digital)

The title of The Confirmation doesn't do it a lot of favors, unless the misadventures that is characters go through parallel that particular Catholic ritual in ways that aren't particularly obvious to those of us who don't share their faith. Heck, it implies enough religious material to trigger bad associations with more genuinely faith-based films rather than one that puts that material on the edges of a fairly entertaining, if occasionally worried, father-son piece.

First communion and confirmation is coming up for Anthony (Jaeden Lieberher), although he seems to be in pretty good shape, frustrating Father Lyons (Stephen Tobolowsky) with his lack of sins to confess. Mother Bonnie (Maria Bello) isn't quite as settled, going on an overnight retreat with Anthony's stepfather to work out some issues, leaving Anthony in the hands of Walt (Clive Owen), the boy's father, an alcoholic, chronically-unemployed carpenter. He does have a job coming up, at least until his specialized tools are stolen from the back of his truck. That means the pair are going to have to spend much of the weekend hunting them down, hoping that the various rogues that occupy the local carpentry community are more eccentric than dangerous.

Filmmaker Bob Nelson is making his directorial debut here, although the material isn't necessarily that far off from the work he's likely best-known for; shift the father-son relationship up a generation and make the quest a bit more quixotic, and you've got the bones of Nebraska. This particular sorry may take place in the Pacific Northwest rather than the Heartland, but it's still at home in a small town that has seen better times. Nelson uses that skeleton to a similar end, giving Anthony the chance to discover where he comes from, although having Walt be an active participant rather than just the catalyst is a big boost - he may not consciously be trying to discover or remake himself, but he's certainly on a path regardless.

Full review on EFC.

Jai Gangaajal

I mentioned in the review that I was kind of surprised that this movie wasn't getting a little more notice considering star Priyanka Chopra's current high profile in the USA (and how the producers of the movie have said things along the lines about how it was a trial run or audition for Quantico, sort of easing her into the role of the tough cop), but wondered if maybe that sort of thing worked against her: It doesn't necessarily matter how much Chopra in a sexy dress makes someone's eyes pop out of their head at the Oscars or on Quantico (or the ads for it), the American audience just isn't going to be drawn to her in a subtitled movie, and it's probably not even worth the effort for the theaters showing said movie to make the attempt to reach for the crossover audience. We, as a group, can be shallow.

And, heck, I wonder if her doing so much American stuff gets her out of the eye of the Indian audience, as Apple only has it for a few shows at odd times. Which is fair; I'm pretty sure that it was me and an older Indian gentleman for me at the early show.

I did think of a couple of the Indian guys at work while watching it, though for a reason they'd probably find odd. One is at least second-generation, if not more, and was something close to offended to be told that the most popular sport in India is not cricket, or even soccer, but field hockey, a game played almost exclusively by high-school girls in America. It was a whole thing for at least the rest of the day.

So, I found myself laughing a bit more than I should have when a character was beaten half to death in this movie because the assailant did not use a baseball bat the way they might anywhere else - even in parts of the world where they don't really play baseball, goons seem to find the things, to the point where I wonder if sporting-goods stores report buyers to the police because why else would hey want it? - but with a field hockey stick. But, hey, it was just me and that other guy, who was in the last row 30 feet behind me, so nobody saw it.

Oh, and one more thing: About three of the listings for Indian movies this week had the word "goons" in the official description, which amused me because it's kind of a funny word in America, used less when you mean to indicate a real threat. It just now occurred to me that the word we're more likely to use here, "thug", might be kind of off-limits in India, even if the Thugee cult is pretty much a Western invention.

Jai Gangaajal

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 Match 2016 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #1 (first-run, DCP)

I'm not sure how much of a coincidence it is that Priyanka Chopra's most recent Bollywood film is getting is global release on a weekend when she has a fairly high profile in the United States - she was part of the Oscar ceremonies last week and her American TV show returns to the air this weekend - but it probably doesn't hurt. Those venturing to whatever theater in their city shows Indian films as a result may find themselves a bit disappointed; Jai Gangaajal is a middle-of-the-road cop movie that has the occasional spark but could probably do with a little bit less going on over a little less time.

It starts in a reasonably promising fashion, with Bhola Nath "BN" Singh (Prakash Jha) starting a new day in a house far too nice for an honest Bankipur cop to afford and going to work to find out what MLA Babloo Pandey (Manav Kaul) needs done, pointedly making sure he had nothing to do with the hunt for a lackey wanted for kidnapping and rape. Babloo, at the moment, needs BN to help out his brother Pabloo (Ninad Kamat), currently strong-arming poor villagers and a public market off their land to make way for a power plant. BN's boss sees what's going on and decides to shake things up by resigning everybody away from their corruption centers, but a political ally of Babloo's, Minister Ramakant Chaudhari (Kiran Karmarkar) intervenes, replacing the troublesome captain with Abha Mathur (Chopra), on her first superintendent posting and whose family had received a favor or two. This does not, however, translate into her attacking her job with anything short of complete diligence.

Jai Gangaajal is described in some places as being a sequel to filmmaker Prakash Jha's 2003 film Gangaajal, but it's more a variation on the theme - both feature young superintendents given a corrupt unit and gangsters with relations in politics, but there do not appear to be any characters shared between the two. There are probably a fair number of parallels, though, because the story is fairly standard stuff, with the expected moments of intimidation, the guys at the top getting nervous more because the timing is bad than any belief that the honest cops can touch them, the expected crises of conscience. Jha spends a fair chunk of time on the set-up, making sure a fair number of names and faces are familiar before dropping Abha in the middle of it, but not creating anything really new.

Full review on EFC.

Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong

I think I've seen the preview for this one half a dozen times in front of Chinese movies at Boston Common, enough to be kind of surprised when it only opened up at the Apple Cinemas in Fresh Pond on a half-schedule, although I probably should have guessed why from the fact that it had a name change: It was in the eFilmCritic database as It's Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, but that doesn't get you to the top of the on-demand menu, does it?

I almost wonder if I'd have been better off just getting it on-demand, because they projected it off a Blu-ray and, yikes, it was worse than what we'd been seeing at the Sci-Fi Festival. $9.75 for that, compared to $6.99 to rent it on Amazon. I love the theatrical experience, I'm willing to pay a little extra for it, but you've got to make it better than what I'm getting at home, and a picture filled with artifacts does not cut it. Seriously, Gravitas, send places a DCP - as a viewer, I don't care about how much more a 35mm print costs than a DCP; if you can absorb the cost of hard drive compared to that of a disc, you shouldn't be distributing the movie.

(Makes me worry for the "Rotten to the Core" series Apple's advertising, though - I'm already worried that it will attract a crowd more looking to mock than enjoy, and I don't need The Crow looking like that!)

I really liked it, though, even though it took me a bit of a moment to warm up to the ending:

SPOILERS!

It's not as definitive as that of either Before Sunrise or Before Sunset, and it's really silly to complain that this movie isn't the same as that one, but both of them felt decisive in their own ways. It says good things about the movie that I really wanted "you're going to miss your plane"/"I know", but just stopping minutes before they make a decision seems like an unnatural amiguity.

BTW, what kind of crap is it that neither Before Sunrise or Before Sunset is available on Blu-ray? My DVDs could use an upgrade!

!SRELIOPS

Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2016 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #9 (first-run, projected Blu-ray)

Sometimes, I feel like I'm an easy mark for movies like Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong - they are basically two people flirting for an hour or two while walking around a foreign city, allowing the viewer to play tourist by proxy, and that doesn't seem like much for the pleasure they give me. On the other hand, who doesn't enjoy sightseeing and falling in love? This movie delivers that without distraction but with just enough personality that it doesn't need more.

The star-crossed couple meets outside a bar: Joshua (Bryan Greenberg) is smoking a cigarette and seems kind of annoyed, while Ruby (Jamie Chung), in the city for a business trip, is trying to meet friends at a spot across town but has an old phone without maps. Having been living in Hong Kong for ten years, Joshua offers to walk her there; she accepts, they talk, they seem to connect, but it's not the right time. The next year, they meet again on a ferry, and while it seems that not enough has changed for them to become more than friends, who knows?

Since making the movie, stars Bryan Greenberg and Jamie Chung have married, and this does seem to be a happy case of on-screen and real-life chemistry lining up. Writer/director Emily Ting had them comment on other pairings of white men and younger Asian women, but makes the way these two complement one another more specific - she's often nervous but sharp, while he's settled enough to cover his insecurities by staying in a comfort zone. They're built to draw each other not so much out of their shells but out of their ruts, engaging rather than standing back, and the pair respond to each other well. We only see them separate briefly, but putting them together generates a clear spark that is a little muted otherwise.

Full review on EFC.

Band of Robbers

Hey, it looks like Apple Cinemas picked a good one this time around, both in terms of quality and getting an audience out. They've occasionally been willing to book small movies that are also playing on demand (or be booked for them - I'm never sure whether these are mostly vanity bookings so that the distributor can say it played X amount of screens in certain cities), and usually they're not very good and/or I'm the only one who has purchased a ticket. Honestly, when I saw a good crowd, I just assumed that there was a filmmaker present and I hadn't heard because I never hear about these things when they happen at Fresh Pond. Nope, just a good crowd.

I mention in the review, but it's kind of surprising that we haven't seen more public domain characters like this modernized in the wake of Sherlock Holmes's success. Of course, I gather that this is half of Universal's plan with their rebooted "Monsters Universe", with the Dracula and Frankenstein characters likely serving as cornerstones. I suspect Huckleberry Finn would make people a lot more nervous, though - it is, after all, about something important, and for many kids the first time they encounter the idea that a book can be controversial.

Of course, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are also Exhibit A in how lackluster new material does not, in fact, ruin great originals. I suspect that very few people recall that Tom Sawyer, Detective and Tom Sawyer Abroad exist, and fewer still hold their status as Mark Twain's lesser works against either the classic children's story or the great American novel disguised as a children's story that they follow. Even if most people have less fondness for Band of Robbers than I do,it's not going to do any harm to the reputation of the characters.

Band of Robbers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 January 2016 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #7 (first-run, digital)

Truth be told, I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen more things like Band of Robbers since various Sherlock Holmes projects showed that audiences would go for beloved nineteenth-century characters reinvented for the modern age, if only because producers would find public domain properties very affordable. Sure, you run the risk of being accused of desecrating something beloved, but this take on some of Mark Twain's most popular characters turned out a lot better than one might have expected.

It presents Tom Sawyer (Adam Nee) and Huckleberry Finn (Kyle Gallner) as contemporary adults in their twenties. Huck is a small-time crook just released from prison; Tom a beat cop whose head is nevertheless full of schemes that he tries to sell Huck and his friends Joe Harper (Matthew Gary Gubler), Ben Rogers (Hannibal Buress), and Tommy Barnes (Johnny Pemberton). The latest involves the long-sought Murrell's Treasure, which has supposedly been found by Injun Joe (Stephen Lang) and stashed in a local pawn shop. To be frank, though, Tom's plan is terrible, and that is before Lieutenant Polly (Lee Garlington) sticks Tom with new partner Becky Thatcher (Melissa Benoist) or Jorge Jiminez (Daniel Edward Mora), the gardener at the halfway house where Huck is staying, gets dragged in.

In addition to playing Tom, Adam Nee wrote, directed, and edited the film along with his brother Aaron, and they're probably wise to keep closer to the structure and tone of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer than the potentially heavier material in Huckleberry Finn, although some of that sneaks through in ways one might not expect. It makes for a fun, lightweight caper movie, although the fact that the plans and goals are straight out of children's adventures of an earlier era gives the film a paradoxical maturity. Tom's a little more arrested, Huck's a little more mature, and when it turns out that there is something to Tom's plans, the world seems a little more exciting for it and dangerous because of how monsters like Injun Joe don't necessarily play nice.

Full review on EFC.

Bajirao Mastani

Pleasant surprise: $4.75 Tuesday at Apple Fresh Pond also applies to some Indian movies; considering how pricey they're been at other times, I wasn't expecting that at all, and it probably played into me spending a bit more at the concession stand. Given that this is what cheap Tuesday is for, well-done!

Fun thing about that concession stand: While most places that have pizza at the concession stand have some personal-sized version of one of the frozen brands at the supermarket, Apple appeared to be selling slices from Ma Magoo's at the other end of the shopping plaza, at least from the box that was sitting on top of the warming cabinet. I cannot endorse this practice enough - aside from this being pretty good pizza, who doesn't like local businesses supporting each other like this?

It being cheap night meant the screening was packed, and it didn't particularly seem like Priyanka Chopra was drawing new American fans. Craziest thing - a group that came in after me basically sat around me, even passing popcorn and soda over my lap without even an "excuse me" or some other acknowledgment of my presence. Fortunately, it didn't happen mid-film, although the guy two seats down was checking his phone a lot, often enough in sync with the musical numbers that I wondered if he was downloading individual songs from the soundtrack. Some others (behind me) were taking shots of the screen as numbers started. I get that, but, hey, they've got the internet for that, folks.

(Probably wouldn't have happened if the movie was presented in 3D, which seems like a possibility; the action scenes seemed to imply it as did a few other shots.)

Anyway, not a great movie, although I'm mildly curious to see the other big Bollywood opener from the 18th, Dilwale, in part because I read an article about how the two were kind of reversed in how they opened in India versus other markets, making me wonder if maybe the other would appeal more to foreigners as well as emigrants as was implied.

Bajirao Mastani

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2015 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #3 (first-run, DCP)

I guess it's an improvement that somewhere during the second half of Bajirao Mastani I backed off thinking of it as being a historical romance where nearly everybody is a terrible person, instead considering it one where people are simply selfish, occasionally stumbling into righteousness by accident. It's at least impressively mounted, so even if the love story leaves a bit of a bitter taste in one's mouth, there's certainly enough spectacle to make up for some of that.

As the film starts, Bajirao Ballal (Ranveer Singh) is appointed the new Peshwa (prime minister) of the Marathi Empire based upon his prowess in battle, wit, and political acumen, though it is not an entirely popular choice. In the middle of a mission of conquest, a warrior demands to speak with him; it turns out to be Mastani (Deepika Padukone), the daughter of Raja Chhatrasaal (Benjamin Gilani), whose city is under attack. He diverts to fight that battle, and love soon grows between Bajirao and Mastani. He gives her his dagger, unaware that in her culture a girl is married by accepting such a gift. She, then, follows him to his new palace, Shanivaar Wada, where she is not exactly welcomed with open arms by Bajirao's mother Radhabai (Tanvi Azmi) - or his first wife Kashibai (Priyanka Chopra), and that's before they learn that Mastani's mother is Muslim.

I'm going to guess that if I were steeped more in Indian culture and traditions, the conflicts in this film would have a little more resonance for me, but with that not the case, it sure seems like the romance that the film wants us to root for is yet another preening jackass who wants to have a second lover without considering the effect it has on his existing family and a woman who is fairly ruthless about staking her own claim. The irony, then, is that even if one is inclined to disapprove of their rapidly-established but at least genuine love, the people opposing it are far more horrible. The only truly sympathetic character is Kashi, and her role in this story is frustratingly familiar - to be hurt, told that she is still important to Bajirao despite evidence to the contrary, and to try to make it work because, really, what other options does a woman in her position have?

Full review on EFC.

Away from Home: Victoria and The Algerian

Unintentional theme days are kind of cool, and this one was unintentional, as I didn't realize that the title character of Victoria was a girl from Madrid living in Germany. Nothing nefarious about that, unless this was a decision made so that German filmmakers setting their film in Berlin with an 80+% German cast would have an excuse to shoot in English and thus have a bigger market.

I think it worked - does it get nearly as much attention at film festivals and followed up by a decent-sized American release if it's in German? I honestly have no idea, but I do think this one was helped a bit by the festival bubble. It's pretty good, but I think its specific technical achievements will pay better to a film festival crowd than the average moviegoer, and there did seem to be a bit of an echo chamber effect coming out of Fantastic Fest, at least compared to how much I actually found myself enjoying the movie.

With a stop at the grocery store in between, it was a fairly quick turnaround between one and the next, and there were folks taking photos with the poster when I got there and was the first one into the auditorium. I hoped like heck that they weren't cast/crew members who were going to see that only one person had paid to see their movie on a Saturday night.



Not sure whether these were the guys taking pictures, but they were here to support the movie: Left to right, radio host Jeff Santos, writer/director/editor/producer/other things Giovanni Zelko, and composer James Bartlett. They did a brief Q&A after the film, and though they thankfully never talked about money, the kind of shoestring they were working on was fairly clear: Zelko talked about this taking a long time to get done - a couple years of shooting and a couple years of post-production, which suggests they were doing what they could whenever they had time and/or money - and while Bartlett is studying at Berklee College of Music now, he was a teenager when he scored the picture. It's not unreasonable to cut a movie working that close to the edge a little slack, even if they don't ask for it.

The audience wasn't just me, and I'm kind of curious how many of the dozen or so other people in attendance knew about this beforehand and how - I don't recall any notation on the Apple Cinemas website mentioning a filmmaker appearance, and I didn't see any signage touting it at the actual location. This is the second time something like this has been a bit of a surprise there, and it makes me wonder if this was a case of the movie booking the theater rather than vice versa, with the theater-owners leaving any promotion in the hands of the distributor.

It's not hugely surprising that of the dozen or so cities showing the film this weekend, the director came to Boston; New York and Los Angeles were conspicuously absent on the distributor's website. Given that 23 October is one of three release dates I've seen for this movie (one in June and one in August), I wonder if it played those markets then. Weird delayed strategy, if that's the case.

Anyway, they're both in fairly limited release in Cambridge - Victoria advertised as one week only at the Kendall and The Algerian not only just having a split theater at Fresh Pond, but the evening show switched from 7pm to 9:40pm after the filmmakers split town.

Victoria

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

In certain hands, Victoria might just have been an impressive achievement in logistics for hitting an ambitious set of marks as a single-shot, real-time thriller. It winds up being a fair bit better than that, even if there are moments when one might wish that that there was a bit more than an editor could do for it.

It starts out in a Berlin nightclub, where the girl of the title (Laia Costa) seems to be enjoying herself despite not picking up a whole lot of German in the three months she's been living there. As she's leaving, a group of four locals are being denied entry. One, Sonne (Frederick Lau), seems to really like her, so she hangs out with him, Boxer (Franz Rogowski), Blinker (Burak Yigit), and Fuss (Max Mauff) for a bit. Soon after they part ways so that she can get to her day job, the guys wind up needing help - Boxer owes a gangster (André Hennicke) a favor, and Fuss is in no position to do his part. Which is how Victoria winds up driving the getaway car as they rob a private bank at daybreak.

The gimmick for Victoria is that the whole 134 minutes of action is one single shot, making those of us not exceptionally well-versed in film production wonder just what credited editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm did beyond deciding how to fade in at the beginning and out at the end. It would be a heck of an accomplishment if the characters stayed in one place, but they get in and out of cars to travel between a half-dozen locations in the city. As much as I wonder if this would be consciously or subconsciously appreciated by those unaware of the technique going in, it's hard not to appreciate the marathon work of the cast and crew once you are aware.

Full review on EFC.

The Algerian

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2015 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #4 (first-run, DCP)

It's easy to see the kind of thriller that The Algerian's makers want it to be, so plain on its face that the two or three actors that audiences recognize from more polished material can seem far out of place: Writer/director Giovanni Zelko doesn't camouflage what he wants the audience to get out of his film at all, and it often seems clumsy as a result. The flip-side of that lack of subtlety is clarity, and one can't really argue that he doesn't get what he means to say across.

The Algerian of the title is Ali (Ben Youcef), whose family was killed in an explosion when he was just a boy and is arriving in Los Angeles to study for a graduate degree in engineering twenty years later. Well, that's his cover - two years ago, he was recruited by a man known as "Father" (Said Faraj) to help with the deployment of a certain device. As a sleeper agent, his mission is mostly to live the sort of ordinary life that doesn't get noticed, and that winds up including a number of people he might not want to die in a terrorist attack: Bicycle shop owner and fellow middle-eastern coffee enthusiast Mohammed (Zuhair Haddad); Lana (Candice Coke), a New York transplant he prevents from being assaulted outside a club; local imam Suleyman (Harry Lennix); fellow student Sara (Tara Holt); and Patrick (Josh Pence), a workout buddy down at the beach.

The mind of a would-be terrorist is difficult for an outsider to understand, and it's when Zelko and company try to put hostile words in Ali's mouth that the film is at its weakest, though the later earnest explanations are often just as awkward: Everyone, at some point, blurts out the obvious thing that makes him or her act a certain way, and it seldom feels truly organic, or even like a cathartic contrast to what they have been keeping hidden. All too often, it feels like Zelko has a strong idea of his characters and what they need to do, but not the finesse to have them do it in a less blunt manner.

Full review on EFC.

Piku

Yes, this thing where I occasionally watch Bollywood movies has reached the point where, upon seeing a trailer for this before Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, I recognized the entire main cast and said yes, I like them, I'm in.

Piku

* * (out of four)
Seen 20 May 2015 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #5 (first-run, DCP)

Even if you're not a real fan of Indian film but just sort of generally aware of it (and maybe not even that), the cast of Piku should make you take note: Amitabh Bachchan is an institution who has been popular for decades and patriarch of a major acting family, Deepika Padukone is one of the country's most popular leading ladies, and Irrfan Khan is in tremendous demand in both Bollywood and Hollywood. And, yet, despite what seems like it should be a fun premise, the film is a real bore because this great cast is given nothing to do.

Piku Banerjee (Padukone) is an intimidating, pushy woman working at a Delhi design firm, and she comes by it honestly - her 70-year-old father Bhaskor (Bachchan) is just as disagreeable, and in fact his hypochondria is the only thing that can really push her around. When a brush with mortality makes him decide to take a trip back to the family home in Kolkata, they decide (for various reasons) to take a cab those 1,500 kilometers, but both have browbeat the local drivers so badly that it falls to the taxi company's owner, Rana Choudhury (Irrfan).

The cast probably did not sign on to Piku because of the creative, never-before-seen story, but that's okay; this is the sort of set-up that a great cast and crew can make sing. The trouble is, writer Juhi Chaturvedi and director Shoojit Sircar seem not to realize that they've got a road trip movie on their hands; it takes a thoroughly unreasonable forty-five minutes for the characters to get into into the taxi for a trip that takes a mere half-hour of screen time before another forty-five minutes in Kolkata. The intermission is placed right in the middle of that time on the road with one of the least exciting cliffhangers ever. You can argue that this doesn't have to be a road trip movie, but it should be; the road is where things can happen because everybody is in close quarters and out of their comfort zone, as well as being a natural way to communicate characters in transition.

Full review on EFC.

Similarly misnamed movies imply a themed double feature: Home & Apartment Troubles

$12 double-feature here, even if it was one constructed out of necessity: Apartment Troubles was only playing at 9:30pm, and I wasn't going to go home and then return to the spot where I switch from the bus to the train on the way home from work a couple hours later. Didn't actually mean to do it on "Super Tuesday", when the regular movies are just $4.75 and the 3D ones are $7 - I wanted to support the indie movie with a little more money - but my schedule didn't work out on Monday. So, cheap night.

Stretched out, though - not much time to get from Alewife to the theater, but then better than an hour and a half to kill between movies. Not a whole lot of great restaurant options in the Fresh Pond area even with that much time; pretty much just the Summer Shack which was a little pricier than I was looking for. I wound up at the Bertucci's in Alewife station, which meant two round trips, and it's a weird hike - it feels like there should be a direct path between the station and the theater through a park, but there really isn't, and you've got to either walk down a hill or go a long way around with how the plaza is landscaped.

Still, going all the way around does let you see this:



It kind of amuses me to see that with all the movies they're cramming on to the marquee, the movie that's only showing twice a day gets a full slot, while others get crammed in awkwardly. I think the one I want to see most out of these mash-ups is "Cinderella Follows", although I gather "Selma Paddington" might be an interesting combo as well.

Interesting, if not well-attended pairing, neither of which has a lot to do with their titles - Home isn't really about finding home - it's kind of stretched even in a methaphorical sense - and Apartment Troubles spends most of its time well away from the apartment (although that name is probably pretty VOD-menu-friendly). Glad to see both, though. I've liked Jess Weixler since Teeth and it's a bit odd that we haven't seen her on The Good Wife more this season, as her part would seem likely to grow next year, and it's kind of cool to see her build a starring role for herself. Home was a pretty good kid's movie that reminded me of my sister-in-law saying it can be kind of tough to find "adventure but not violence" for her girls. I am actually kind of impressed just how aggressively non-violent both Home and Cinderella are, and I wonder if it's a matter of both being marketed more directly toward girls that a lot of the other family movies I see or just a swing that things are taking these days.

Home

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2015 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #9 (first-run, digital 3D)

There seems to be an element of forced whimsy to Home, both as the movie starts and from the advertising that preceded its release, like DreamWorks has gone back to when it was desperately trying to recreate the success of Shrek and throwing any two misfits together in the most calculated way possible. It soon reveals itself as something much better than that, full of entertaining moments, good intentions, and genuine whimsy.

It's a story of alien invasion told from one of the invaders' point of view. That would be Oh (voice of Jim Parsons), disliked by the rest of the Boov for both his clumsiness and enthusiasm. The Boov have taken Earth peacefully, relocating humanity to Australia, although 13-year-old Tip Tucci (voice of Rihanna) has somehow been left behind in New York. After Oh's latest mishap threatens to put the Gorg fleet that the Boov have been fleeing, Oh and Tip wind up on the run together, although they're inclined to go in different directions.

That's the plot of of a thriller, except for one thing: The Boov, by and large, are not very bright, with Captain Smek (voice of Steve Martin) especially dim despite the adulation heaped upon him by his people. Even the ones who prove surprisingly capable are people to stumbling just short of their goal, usually in a way that provides some fine slapstick. Even if they weren't, though, the movie is aggressively non-violent: There is never any malice shown toward humanity by the Boov, and the story is set up so that nobody would actually gain from another person being hurt. Smek and the Boov vandalize the heck out of Earth, but one has to work a bit to find their bubble-based technology particularly ominous; it's all lighter than air.

Full review on EFC.

Apartment Troubles

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2015 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #9 (first-run, BD-R)

Screen acting can be such a volatile way of making a living that what is probably the signature absurdity in Apartment Troubles - that a pair of roommates can both be so broke as to face eviction from their New York apartment and whisked away to Los Angeles on a private jet - may not be as far from its makers' reality as it may seem on its face. The only way the movie makes much sense, really, its as a set of anecdotes shaped into a single narrative as best they can be, and that's actually a bit better than one might expect.

Those roommates are Olivia (Jennifer Prediger) and Nicole (Jess Weixler), the first an aspiring actress and the second a would-be artist, both so far beyond on their books that their electricity had been turned off and their landlord (Jeffrey Tambor) is giving them twenty days to get out. One more misfortune is enough to drive them out of town, and while Nicole's wealthy parents have cut her off, the pilot of her father's private jet apparently still l likes her, and her Aunt Kimberly (Megan Mullally) in Los Angeles has said to drop by any time...

Sure, that could happen, and Aunt Kimberly could just happen to be the host of a thinly-veiled copy of America's Got Talent that just happens to be having auditions that weekend. Why not? Prediger & Weixler - credited side-by-side as stars, writers, and directors - do sort of wink at this a little bit, having Kimberly comment that the family is worried that Nicole had grown so eccentric at such a young age, and generally do a fair job of letting things be weird without it becoming something that tries the audience's patience or gets taken for granted. A fair number of their gags are more "off" than funny, but enough work to get more laughter than eye-rolls.

Full review on EFC.

Song One

When writing Next Week in Tickets a couple weeks ago, I half-jokingly speculated that the Indian-American owners of Apple Cinemas doesn't pay particularly close attention to the details of how a film is being released, so they didn't even realize that The Interview had been pulled or that things like Song One or Predestination are getting a same-day release on VOD , which is why those movies get booked there but not anywhere else in Boston. They see the names involved, mark it down, and are kind of surprised when something with Anne Hathaway barely makes a blip.

That's probably not the case; my other speculation is that their set-up and location - ten screens serving a relatively small neighborhood nestled pretty snugly between the Captiol and Somerville Theatres at the end of the Red Line means that they wind up turning movies over more quickly than anybody else in the area, and having a couple screens of Indian films will only do so much on that account.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad they do; $9.75 isn't significantly more expensive then a rental and you get to see it in a theater on a big screen with an audience. It's also important to note that I might not have noticed that it existed at all if not for seeing it pop up a list of the movies playing in the area.

Song One

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2015 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)

There are times when Song One starts to come across as a simple enough romance that its peculiar start fades into the background, and it's odd for that to feel like a good thing. The way the two parties meet doesn't work, and it's the whole foundation of the movie, but there are enough nice moments afterward that work regardless.

After all, it starts with a 19-hear-old musician (Ben Rosenfield), headphones blocking everything out, getting struck by a car. His sister Franny (Anne Hathaway), a graduate student doing research in Morocco, is called home by their mother (Mary Steenburgen), and while she does what she can to help draw him out of his coma, she decides to use the James Forester concert ticket she finds in his notebook. She talks to the musician (Johnny Flynn) afterward, telling him her comatose brother Henry is his biggest fan; he comes by the hospital. And so on.

That whole situation is weird, right? It's weird from Henry apparently only having interest in this one other musician, to Franny hanging around after the show to drop all this on him, to the next day when she asks James to meet her at a show after he shows up to see them at the hospital. Certainly, there are details that make it less off-putting than that sounds, but we don't know Franny well enough when she hits this folk musician with her brother's coma or when she figures a hospital visit is the right time to make a date for it to seem like something natural rather than writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland trying to force her movie's concept. Of course, it's supposed to be weird, but we don't see Franny wrestling with the awkwardness of it much.

Full review at EFC.

The Lookalike

Another month, another attempt to support indie/world tweeners (too offbeat for the multiplexes, too lightweight for the arthouses) playing the Boston area with money. Sometimes, unfortunately, that means you see a stinker, and you do it with just one other person in the room - and to be totally honest, I kind of suspect he wasn't really supposed to be there from the way an usher honed in on him during the movie.

One thing I noticed while looking at the IMDB listing for it - director Richard Gray and writer Michele Davis-Gray are apparently in pre-production on a remake of Audition to shoot and be released next year. Good luck with that, guys. I mean that sincerely - if that's going to happen, I'd rather it be good, and that applies to any movie - and I can almost see how the problems I had with The Lookalike might seem like assets for this one: Starting odd and offbeat and then going very dark indeed was what Takashi Miike did fifteen years ago and it made his name, but he didn't just go dark but nuts, and there was an idea at the center of Miike's film, and I'm not sure that's the case with The Lookalike. There are connected characters, and various bits that may be shocking, but no central thrust to make up for the letdown when the audience realizes that this isn't really going to be fun after a certain point.

SPOILERS!

There's also a sort of secondary ugliness here in how by and large women and to a lesser extent minorities are killed in a very casual, off-hand way, while the white males fight back and need to be taken down. I don't think the Grays really mean anything by that, but it's the sort of thing that seems like it would be part of a discouraging pattern when you look at a lot of this sort of movie.

!SRELIOPS

The Lookalike

* * (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2014 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #9 (first-run, DCP)

To say that The Lookalike starts out kind of charming overlooks what happens in the first few minutes to set things in motion, but it still does well enough in introducing its cast of characters that it looks like the rare crime movie that makes quirky work despite being built a core of bad people doing bad things. That's hard to sustain for the full length of a movie, though, and this one starts losing steam early enough to be a real drag by the end.

There's a girl out there, Sadie, that retiring crime boss William Spinks (John Savage) will pay half a million dollars to sleep with, and having found her, Bobby (John Corbett) and Frank (Steven Bauer) probably have the inside track to taking over his business. Except, well, they screwed up and she's no longer available. Meanwhile, one of Bobby's best dealers, former college hoops star Joe Mulligan (Jerry O'Connell) is looking to quit, having paid his father's gambling debts to Vincent (Luis Guzman), and although on the one hand he could use a little money to shoot that pilot for a cooking show, on the other he's just met a really nice girl, Mila (Scottie Thompson). Back at Joe's apartment, his brother Holt (Justin Long) has a run-in with Lacey (Gillian Jacobs), one of Joe's customers, and they connect. Of course, they're both hiding something as well.

Writer Michele Davis-Gray shovels a fair amount of stuff into the script, sometimes to seeming excess - not only has Mila recently lost her hearing, but she's got a prosthetic leg, for example; she also just happens to cross paths with Sadie early on in a way that brings another player into the story. Oh, and Lacey is apparently a hairdo away from being a dead ringer for Sadie, which is kind of convenient. Still, in the early going, she and director Richard Gray (and the cast) make it work. Things may be in bad taste, but they'll come with a jolt, or the odd incongruities will amuse. Plus, the fact that Joe is far from the only character involved who really doesn't want to be in the business of hurting people may not push grimness away entirely, but the fact the characters have better natures does make things more fun and a bit unpredictable.

Full review at EFC.

Bitter Honey

I suspect that the way Bitter Honey is rolling out across the country is similar to the way films used to release: Book it in a theater, have someone make an appearance if possible, rely on the venue to advertise it locally. On top of that, I'm not sure I can remember another time when I've seen a director visit and do a Q&A for the very last screening; usually, whether it's a festival or a local booking, they'll come to the first. That way, you start off with an event which hopefully generates some word of mouth for the rest of the run. I guess this is just when director Robert Lemelson could make the trip to Boston and New York easiest.

That the visit seemed almost entirely unpublicized was strange, too - I saw that the film was playing for a week in the usual places, and probably would have seen it earlier in the run but for some bad timing, and then, on Wednesday, seeing a Facebook ad that mentioned Lemelson's visit on Thursday. Nothing on Apple Cinemas' website. Crazy, that; it's often like they're using a standard movie theater site template that includes a news feed that often has little if anything to do with what's actually going to play there (many is the time I've gotten excited for a coming attraction only to have it not show). I want to like them a bit more; they're on my way home, have been upgrading their facilities, and seem to make a genuine effort to play movies that would otherwise slip through the cracks, but they don't make it easy sometimes!



Lemelson did an interesting Q&A, rather different than many I've seen. The format was the same, but Lemelson seems to be a different sort of director, an anthropologist first and a filmmaker second. That was the jargon he would toss off, and there wasn't any sort of moment when someone in the audience with an interest in the subject matter asked about doing more along those lines only to be disappointed that the director who had just spent years on one subject planned to move on to something else. Lemelson is interested in the culture of this part of the world, and that was very clear.

One interesting bit that didn't make it into the film might have put things in a bit more context: Polygamy is legal in Bali because it is part of Indonesia, but it exists in a very different cultural place there than it does in the rest of the country. Most of Indonesia is Muslim, whereas Bali is mostly Hindu, and while both cultures apparently have the option for multiple wives, it seems less strictly regulated in Bali than it would be for the Muslim majority. He described it as a source of friction, which I don't doubt.

It didn't make it into the movie, though, in part because the future of this movie is as an educational tool; he spoke about pieces of it already being used in local community centers and the like. It will probably do quite well in that role, even if it's not quite something you'd bring people to the cinema to see.

Bitter Honey

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2014 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #7 (first-run, DCP)

Bitter Honey opens with a bit of informative text, including the fact that it was filmed over a seven year period. It's an odd bit of information to include, because while director Robert Lemelson does a fair job of expanding upon the statistics about polygamy in Bali and how it affects the people involved, it is not nearly as successful at the storytelling aspect which would make the film's time axis genuinely important. Instead, Lemelson concentrates on being informative and lets the audience handle empathy and anger.

As those opening words inform us, polygamy is legal in Indonesia, and is particularly common in Bali, an island with a mostly Hindu population. Ten percent of all officially registered marriages there include multiple wives, and unregistered arrangements likely boost that number even higher. Lemelson presents us with three: Sadra married Purniasiah when they were teenagers and added a "honey" (Balinese slang for a second wife) later; Darma has five wives and seems a prosperous man about town; and elderly royal descendant Tuaji has had ten wives, with five still living and two sisters.

The film does not wind up spending much time with the Tuaji family past the initial introduction, which may in some ways be for the best; described at one point as a "vicious" member of the Nationalist Party back in the day, his backstory is the sort that could derail Bitter Honey into being a different movie (that movie is The Act of Killing and you should absolutely see it). That still leaves Lemelson with plenty of voices to contribute, and though Sadra's and Darma's families' stories are similar in many ways, they do have different shapes: Sadra seems to have basically left Purniasiah to fend for herself while taking a younger wife and Darma (who says he wants a "lively household") has a home that is divided into sectors, with each wife having her own kitchen and rooms for her children.

Full review at EFC.

Snabba Cash I & II (Easy Money & Easy Money: Hard To Kill)

Even though I didn't see Snabba Cash during its initial release in the US a couple years ago, I wanted to. It was one of those unfortunate cases when an interesting foreign genre film opens the same week I went up to Montreal to see a whole metric ton of other foreign genre films, and while I consider that a good trade-off for me personally, I always feel a little guilty, like my eight bucks might be the difference between the next thing like that playing Boston or not.

So, as expected, I was pretty excited to see the sequel opening at Apple Cinemas in Fresh Pond and knew I was going to carve out a chance to see it this weekend, with the intention of supporting it with both money and coverage. That meant it would probably be a good idea to see the first one, which meant an Amazon rental. I splurged and spent the extra buck for HD, but that is something I probably won't do again; somewhere between Amazon, Comcast, my wireless router, the aether, my laptop, and the TV, it was skipping fairly annoyingly until I turned HD off, and I didn't notice any particular drop in quality. It might, I suppose, be worth seeing if a wired connection between the router and the laptop works any better some time, because that's really the only spot I can see for improving the pipeline.

One thing that this proved to me, though, was just how much the way you watch a movie matters. I watched Snabba Cash while writing the review of the night's first movie, Beijing Love Story, and to say that it is not ideal to split one's attention that way during a subtitled movie understates the matter. I liked it, and certainly remembered Joel Kinnaman's performance and that Lisa Henni was the kind of pretty that makes one hope that she has the English language skills and ambition to take a run at Hollywood so that one might see her more often, but wasn't hugely impressed. It probably didn't help that I went in expecting something a little more action-oriented and fast-paced.

A couple days later, though, I wound up sitting in Apple on the second leg of a four-films-in-four-theaters-in-four-cities day and found myself surprisingly engrossed by the sequel. Guess what? A big screen and nothing else in front of you makes a huge difference, even for a movie like this where you're not being hit with massive, overwhelming action. And the thing is, I'm not actually sure it's a much better movie than the first (don't give too much credence to the star ratings below, because they are, as always, somewhat approximate), since I found a lot of things to admire while putting some thought into writing about Snabba Cash; it's just that if you asked me for an off-the-cuff reaction to the two before I started writing, I probably would have had a far better opinion of the second, even if it was influenced as much by things the filmmakers had less control over than I did.

(Worth noting: I think this is the first time I've seen a movie in Fresh Pond/Apple and not been confronted with a center aisle! I don't know if it's just because I'd never seen anything on screen #7 before or if there's been some renovation done, but I liked it!)

As I mention in the reviews, the third film in the series came out in Sweden a couple months ago, and I hope that it's not September 2015 before it reaches America. The reviews I've read of it on IMDB make me a little worried - it is apparently centered more on a character I don't particularly care much about while the one where I really want to see what comes next basically has a ten-minute guest appearance - but given that the original books are apparently even more loosely connected, that's probably what I should expect anyway, right?

SPOILERS! Although, man, from what's been dropped throughout the first two movies and how #2 ended, I really wanted the next one to be JW using the money he finally had at his disposal to find otu what really happened to his missing sister. you can't just leave me dangling like that! !SRELIOPS

Snabba Cash (Easy Money)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2014 in Jay's Living Room (before the sequel, Amazon Instant Video)

Were we paying attention to Scandinavian crime fiction and film before The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? I remember a few festival screenings of Nicholas Winding Refn's Pusher movies, but it's really just the last five years that this material has really started crossing the Atlantic, whether in its original form or as remake fodder. Sweden's Snabba Cash series ("Easy Money" in English) is running a bit slow on both fronts, but both entries that have arrived so far are worth checking out.

Johan "JW" Westlund (Joel Kinnaman) could use a little easy money as the movie starts; though at the top of his class in business school quite popular with the Stockholm party crowd, keeping up with his old-money classmates is draining his bank account. So he drives a cab, and makes that a bit more profitable by ferrying drugs across the city for gangster Abdulkarim (Mahmut Suvakci). A sizable sum of money is available for picking up recently-escaped convict Jorge (Matias Varela) and keeping him hidden, money that could come in handy with courting rich new girlfriend Sophie (Lisa Henni). He also helps the gangsters take over a bank to launder their money, but one of them, Serbian dealer Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic), is hunting for Jorge but also starting to question the life he's leading now that his daughter Lovisa (Lea Stojanov) is in his custody after her mother overdoses.

Toward the end of the movie, Mrado points out that everyone in this business will do whatever will get them the most money, and like many of the best crime stories, Snabba Cash works in large part by giving the viewer a reason to want the characters to do right, even though all the evidence suggests they are at best on the road to amorality. It's a nifty trick - we're given plentiful reasons not to like JW, Jorge, or Mrado, from just being kind of snotty to being killers, but the story (based upon Jens Lapidus's novel) makes sure that there's some sort of human connection that should be able to pull them back.

Full review at EFC

Snabba Cash II (Easy Money: Hard to Kill)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2014 in Apple Cinemas #7 (first-run, digital)

Snabba Cash II was released under the title "Easy Money: Hard to Kill" in the US last week a year and a half after it played in Sweden. This choice of date and title apparently driven by a hope that American audiences would want more of star Joel Kinnaman right away after seeing the RoboCop remake, wanting to get the attention of the folks who saw the original Easy Money movie during its US release but not wanting to reveal it as a sequel to the rest of the population. The cold reality that the title of the original Jens Lapidus novel that serves as the source material, "Never Fuck Up", just would not fly with theaters, was likely also a factor. Whatever the thinking, it got onto a few screens alongside its Video On Demand release, and it's good crime whether you've seen the first one or not.

It's been three years since the end of Snabba Cash, and while Jorge (Matias Varela) is still on the loose, he's returning to Stockholm to visit his dying mother. JW (Kinnaman) is about to have his first unsupervised release from prison, and he has a meeting scheduled so that he and his old classmate Nippe (Joel Spira) can demonstrate a potentially lucrative high-velocity trading safeguard he developed while behind bars, sharing a cell with Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic) - the Serbian gangster holding no grudge against him. Elsewhere in Stockholm, Jorge's friend Mahmoud (Fares Fares) is deep in debt to Radovan (Dejan Cukic), the boss who came out on top last time, but he's got a way Mahmoud can pay it off.

Radovan's business interests include prostitution, which is where Nadja (Madeleine Martin) enters the story, which has at times started to resemble the first one a little too closely at times, what with Jorge being hunted and JW stuck between the legitimate and criminal worlds again. Lisa Henni makes a repeat appearance as JW's girlfriend, helping to create direct ties between the two movies even though it appears the books in Lapidus's "Stockholm Noir" trilogy were more loosely connected. Even without having seen the first movie, though, this is a good crime story set-up, with multiple plots advancing nicely until it finally becomes clear how they are on a collision course. Those plots are not complicated, but they've got a brute-force simplicity that speaks to the immediacy of the characters' troubles.

Full review at EFC