These Weeks in Tickets: 3 February 2020 - 16 February 2020

The Oscars now landing smack in the middle of the Sci-Fi Film Festival can make for some crazy time, especially when there's other stuff too.





With the Oscars just days away, I barely had time to catch the Nominated Live-Action Shorts before the ceremony, and it was a pretty darn entertaining selection compared to the previous year's resolutely grim group. A couple days later, with a busy weekend coming up, I figured it would be a good idea to check out Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which didn't quite feel like my thing at the time, but I was starting to feel a bit under the weather after what had just felt like a "you shouldn't eat the whole pizza" bellyache, so who knows?

Anyway, after that it was time for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, which I basically decided to attack on a film-by-film basis this year, rather than buying a pass and trying to hit everything. Although, surprise, the first weekend was full of good stuff - Eva Green in Proxima on opening night; the not-great Dustwalker, the new Moorhead/Benson film Synchronic, and Sea Fever on Saturday; and then Mattie Do with her new film The Long Walk first thing Sunday.

There was more at the festival that day, but I wanted to catch Downhill as part of the Hitchcock Silents series, and… Hmm, kind of problematic, although the HFA people would talk about how it's not so much Hitchcock being misogynistic, as much as a kind of messed up play star Ivor Novello wrote. That let me out just in time to get home, order a pizza, and watch the ceremony. It was fun to watch Parasite do well! I don't think anybody saw that coming, even those of us who really like Bong Joon-Ho and Korean films in general.

After that, man, my stomach just rebelled in a way I couldn't remember since whatever made me miserable after the flight home from Hong Kong last year, like my stomach was going to burst. I wound up going into CVS to buy some Pepto-Bismol but looked at how it is meant to treat nausea and diarrhea and thought, wait a minute, those things feel like they would relieve some pressure - would this make things worse? So I didn't take it and was better a day or two later. Weird.

I got out of work late-ish on Friday, so only got to the late show, Dead Dicks, which I'd missed at Fantasia, but liked well enough here. Saturday at the festival had a few that looked interesting and wound up different kinds of good enough in Volition, I Am REN, and Blood Quantum.

The next day would have been the Sci-Fi Marathon in previous years, but I opted out this year, instead opting to head to Causeway Street, which seemed to be the last place Uncut Gems was playing at non-ridiculous times. It didn't really do all that much for me, which is a shame, because I'd really liked Good Time and other movies where Adam Sandler actually made an effort. There was a framing thing meant to lead into a Q&A, but it's a long movie and I just wasn't in the mood for more Safdies & Sandler at the moment, so I hopped the Green Line to hit Donnie Yen in Enter the Fat Dragon, and I'm not gonna lie, I probably had more fun with that, even taking into account that Gems isn't really about "fun".

That brings us up to a week ago, with a couple things on my Letterboxd page since.

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2020 in the ArcLight Boston #15 (first-run, DCP Wide Screen/Dolby Atmos)

Harley Quinn is a part of the DC universe that I've always liked more for the creative teams she got more than the character herself, and the current takes on her are kind of a lot more frantic than my favorites. The movie is like that too, a lot more mean-spirited and murderous than the animated series that spawned her, or the upbeat team comic that supplies this film's title and supporting cast.

That's not exactly bad, it just makes this movie much less my thing than it is others'. There's an awful lot to like about it, especially the dueling lunacy from Margot Robbie and Ewan McGregor; they turbocharge any scene they're in with Robbie able to actually make something of this impulsive, mentally unstable lady, even if the moments where the script remembers that she was a talented psychotherapist feel right on the border of being the wrong kind of forced. Robbie doesn't quite suck all of the air out of the room herself, but making the movie from Harley's point of view means the rest of the talented cast is going to have to wait for the sequel to really shine.

On the other hand, the action is poppy and fun, especially compared to the other recent DC movies that have been digital overloads even when not dour. The getting there is an issue - a pretty great sequence of Harley busting someone out of a police station starts too aburptly, to the point where it takes a couple minutes to appreciate the colorful mayhem being served up. It's second-tier superheroes done well enough that you don't need a lot going in, more than enough to work for a couple hours.

Downhill '27

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Bertrand & Susan Laurence)

In this film, Ivor Novello is sent further and further down the social ladder by a series of deceptive, scheming women but is eventually returned home by a group of people of color - though he doesn't actually stick around long enough to thank them - and is able to reclaim the only thing this upper-class wastrel can conceive of as important: the right to represent his school in the oldboys' rugby game.

I kid, a bit, but Roddy Berwick's journey is the sort that a certain sort of man imagines himself as being subject to, punished for being honorable or at worst flirtatious, and you kind of wonder what Novello and co-writer Constance Collier were thinking when they wrote it (heck, what does this thing look like without a woman working on it?). Novello slips into the role easily and brings plenty of charm to bear, and that's a big part of the film's charm: He starts the film with charming ne'er-do-well energy and brings a lot of charm to a part that could be nobly self-flagellating, but that's more or less saved for the last possible moment. There's some classist garbage in a lot of the early films Hitchcock made, and he never quite escaped that worldview, but this is one that looks especially ugly in retrospect, in quite a different way from how it was originally conceived of as being dark.

On the bright side, the accompaniment by the Laurences was a real highlight, bouncy and exciting to start with and able to make the roller coaster work.

Uncut Gems

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2020 in ArcLight Boston #5 (first-run, DCP)

Uncut Gems contains a genuinely great performance by Adam Sandler in the middle of a movie that brought me irritation far more often than the promised tension. It's a strange thing, perhaps bred in part due to expectations generated externally after a few months of both pre- and post-release coverage, but watching this movie, I could see all the things that seem like they should be raising my blood pressure and how the Safdie brothers are setting it all up, but it just didn't click the way it did in Good Time. Maybe it would help if there were some visible amount of good intentions to Sandler's Howard Ratner or something other than selfishness and self-destruction, but he's just a guy one wants to get away from.

Which is good work on Sandler's part - he inhabits this guy completely, using little bits of his screen persona to grab the viewer a little more quickly without ever seeming to coast or force him into a different mold. It's not easy to create a character that does frighteningly stupid and dangerous things and make him feel genuine, and I absolutely believed in him even as he kept digging his hole. There's not a member of the cast around him that ever feels off, whether it be non-actors in heightened versions of their own personae or solid supporting types getting the reactions to Howard just right so that one can see how he's stayed afloat and maybe had some success.

It's just a lot, and maybe I'm just fortunate in not having been close enough to this particular sort of dysfunction for the film to resonate with me. I spent a lot more time wanting the film to end than caught up in it, and when the pre-recorded post-film Q&A was about to start, I bolted for something else rather than stick around for more of this.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2020.09: Volition, I Am REN, and Blood Quantum

There were some things I might have wanted to see earlier in the day, but I wasn't really feeling like going out yet, since as was the case the night before, my stomach was in bad shape. I actually would wind up conking out a bit during Volition, enough to not give it a full review, although as I wrote something up on Letterboxd, I did start to wonder to what extent films like this - things with a sci-fi twist to the plotting but no truly original ideas or standout moments - have become filler at festivals like this. It's at least capable enough, which is an improvement over what similar films in previous editions of the festival have offered, but not quite enough to convince me to get a pass and try to see everything again.



I don't think any of the filmmakers who showed up for Q&As when I made it to the festival were local guys, and Piotr Ryczko is no exception, coming here from Poland with his pretty-decent android-in-a-mental-hospital picture, I Am REN. I wish that I liked it a bit more, because it was clearly a very personal film for him - as with Dead Dicks the night before, it was inspired by real-life mental illness in his family - but it wound up being a case of a movie where I think clarity might have served better than ambiguity.

I'm kind of surprised to see that his original novel is available on Amazon in English, and that the cover comes straight from the film despite having apparently been published before it was shot.

The last film of the day was Blood Quantum, which already had a Shudder logo in front of it, and more people stayed than I expected, considering most would be attending the 24-hour marathon scheduled to start at noon on Sunday, and I'd think you'd want all the sleep you can get! Not necessarily the case, and some were apparently up for a festival party afterward.

Me, I walked home, hit the bed, and felt an odd calm in not getting up early and settling in at the Somerville Theatre for the marathon. It's the first time I've skipped it since it took place at the Coolidge something like fifteen years ago, but it kind of lost its charm two years ago when folks started making lame running jokes during a 35mm screening of Close Encounters, and though I came back last year for the promise of greater involvement by the Somerville's Ian Judge and David Kornfeld and more 35mm, but this year's 'thon seemed like a lot of horror I'd seen recently and nothing being promoted as being on film. So, I figured that instead of pushing myself to stay awake, letting my aggravation with audience members who think they're the entertainment rival my excitement at discovering something new or seeing something offbeat, and using a vacation day to try and stay awake until 9pm so I could be to work fresh the next day, I'd catch up with a couple thing I've been meaning to see and use the vacation day on traveling someplace warm.

So that's a wrap on this year's Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, and a lesson not to see movies - which is supposed to be fun! - out of obligation, either because you've been doing it for a long time or because you want the festival to be a bigger deal or it's on awards lists or what.

Volition

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

It's not a great sign when a time-travel crime movie is this tough for me to stay awake through despite favorable scheduling. This wants to be an intricate puzzle of a movie, setting pieces up and paying off when the plot loops back around, but the curving back on itself never comes off as more clever than obligation, and the picture revealed when you get to the end isn't that interesting. The cast is capable enough and the filmmaking is competent, but only occasionally feels specific.

It's the sort of "neat sci-fi idea that can be done without a lot of visual effects" movie that feels more like the filmmakers asked themselves what sort of movie they could make rather than how to make the movie they had in their head. That sort of film has become the backbone of smaller genre festivals, only now festival-goers have seen the like a few times already, and just doing everything in a professional manner isn't quite enough.

Jestem REN (I Am REN)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

When making a film like I Am REN, it's easy to see two worthy directions for things to go, and awfully tempting to find a way to try both. If you're going to do that, they'd better be equally interesting, or things would have to get more interesting as the film goes on and revelations change perspective. Writer/director Piotr Ryczko, ultimately, doesn't find the best way to put his various ideas together, even though many of them are good enough to keep the movie interesting.

He introduces the audience to the Wirskirska family - father Jan (Marcin Sztabinski), mother Renata (Marta Król), and son Kamil (Olaf Marchwicki), living in relative isolation in a lake house in Poland. One day after Jan goes to work, Renata has a breakdown, and that's when it comes out that Renata is a REN-model android. Such automata are usually decommissioned and replaced after such an incident, but Jan and Kam have a hard time conceiving that, so they go to a compound for treatment - but Renata soon starts to wonder if she can trust her memories.

As straight-ahead science fiction goes, there are a lot of nifty things going on if one takes those elements at face value: The way Renata appears to be seamlessly integrated with that Wiskirska's smart home is a bit of futurism that feels right and also hints at the horror story that this could become if she were to become unstable in a different way, for instance. The idea that someone could be affecting her memory makes her fascinating in terms of both the limitations of an AI's sentience and for how it corresponds to human life in the present, where one can be overwhelmed with false or misleading information with the need to make consequential decisions. There's a fair amount of Asimov's I, Robot in the scenes where Renata visits a pair of therapists, though with a Twenty-First Century view of technology.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Blood Quantum

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

Blood Quantum feels less like a movie than what you'd get if you took the pilot to a television series about the zombie apocalypse and edited it together with the first-season finale, and even if it was a good show, that probably wouldn't be the best way to experience it, at least the first time around. There's a big hole in the middle that can't be filled, and just a general feeling that you can't make the story mean something if you don't tell the whole thing from beginning to end.

It begins on the Red Crow Indian Reservation in Québec, where fisherman Gisigu (Stonehorse Lone Goeman) is understandably alarmed when the fish he catches don't stop flopping around after he guts them. He calls his son Traylor (Michael Greyeyes), the sheriff of the Mi'gmaq nation, although without details, so he's got a lot of other things on his plate as well, from picking up son Joseph (Forrest Goodluck) and his half-brother Lysol (Kiowa Gordon), who managed to get thrown in jail on the other side of the bridge that connects the reservation to white Canada. Ex-wife Joss (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), a nurse, is also getting a number of strange calls, Joseph's white girlfriend Charlie (Olivia Scriven) is pregnant, and by the end of the day, there's apparently a full-on zombie outbreak, with the twist that the Mi'gmaq appear to be immune. Six months later, the reservation has been fortified, but not everybody is happy about the increasing refugee population.

Expand this to a limited series, or just build the movie so that you're not skipping over all the tension between the big violent moments, and you've got a heck of a satiric hook there as the sort of North American white person who opposes accepting immigrants fleeing violence must depend on the kindness of those they've wronged while the Mi'gmaq must consider all the history between themselves and their neighbors - how do you act when you've gone from little power to a position of strength overnight? It's still there, as are a few potentially interesting bits of world-building, but so much has been elided that it's only at half power.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2020.08: Dead Dicks

Got home too late for the first film of the night after a week of weird hours and feeling like my stomach was going to rip in half, but I was looking forward to this one after it being a difficult skip at Fantasia last year (I appear to have chosen Miss & Mrs. Cops in the only slot when both played instead).



So say hello to director Lee Paula Springer and stars Jillian Harris and Heston Horwin, the ladies having come down from Montreal (I suspect Boston feels like a nice respite from the February chill if one starts from there), while Heston is from California. I am something like two-thirds sure that I've seen Ms. Springer around at Fantasia a few times, and not just when her film played last year, which created that slight "out-of-context" tingle in the back of my brain for a while.

The genesis of this movie sounded kind of crazy - she and her husband/directing partner Chris Bavota had another project set up with Horwin, but everything started to fall apart as their phone kept buzzing on the way home from another festival with another blow each time, so they came up with this crazy idea as something that could get made with relatively few resources to not get discouraged by this turn of events. It wound up finished days before it was set to premiere a Fantasia.

I kind of wish I'd gotten to see it there, because apparently some sort of snafu led to this festival receiving a DCP with unfinished effects. Not a huge deal - they aren't crucial - but it's strange they got mixed up like that months later

Dead Dicks

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

I find myself inclined to cut Dead Dicks an extra little bit of slack because here's something just tantalizing and absurd enough about the concept that one wants to see it done even if there's probably no way to make it something one can actually believe in. So while the filmmakers often have some trouble stretching their movie far enough to cover absolutely everything that they want to include, the narrative membrane doesn't quite get so thin as to tear, and that it lives right on the line between "very much independent" and "underground" works to its advantage.

The filmmakers put a content warning about suicide on the front, and the film earns it right away, showing a young man (Heston Horwin) committing suicide. It then moves to his sister Becca (Jillian Harris), who has just been accepted to nursing school with a focus on treating mental illness, the faculty feeling her personal experience will be of benefit. So she goes to work as a bartender, only to receive messages from her brother all night, eventually alarming her enough to go check on him. She does not, as the opening might suggest, find him dead, but just more inconsiderate than usual, walking around naked, cranking the stereo loud enough for downstairs neighbor Matt (Matt Keyes) to threaten calling the police. No, he's called her because there's something on one of his walls that births a new Richie when he dies - and he has killed himself several times that day.

Since death is not permanent within those walls, Dead Dicks is not entirely about suicide itself but mental health in general, magnified. Filmmakers Chris Bavota & Lee Paula Springer place these siblings in a small space and then run Richie through cycles of of highs and lows, thinking he's found a shortcut around dealing with his problems or has been given a fresh start without any actual work on the underlying issues. It leaves the sister who has often taken on the responsibility of dealing with the fallout a bigger, bloodier mess to wrangle - indeed, by the end, it's clear that she is as in need of a chance to hit reset as her brother, as she is just as trapped, with it quite likely that there is no satisfying exit to be found from this situation.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2020.03: The Long Walk

Hey, check it out, Mattie Do in the house!



Kevi Monahan of the Boston Underground Film Festival surprised her with a gift from one of her producers, a little something to toast the end of The Long Walk's festival run. He was clearly hoping it could have gone on a little longer to play BUFF, but the timing probably wouldn't have lined up as well, as Do mentioned she had meetings over the next week for an English-language movie which could potentially fund a few more Laotian films.

It was an emotional Q&A at times; when making the movie, she had recently lost her mother and her dog and was as such determined not to make death look nice in this film - even when it could be seen as a respite or a kindness after long suffering, it still plays hell with the living, and that she succeeds shows what a relatively delicate balance it is; one of the pivotal scenes of the film is largely built on a well-meaning bit of euthenasia that has to ride the line between the audience understanding why the person in question does this but also immediately seeing why a person taking this on is tremendously dangerous, and I don't know if it would have succeeded if she wasn't so determined to not compromise there.

(I'm sure it sounds odd to put those two deaths in the same sentence like that, but from the way she talked, I suspect that putting her dog down was a fairly direct inspiration for that scene, because it meant taking direct control over ending another's life. The ideas come where they come. And besides, I believe we established that she really loves dogs three years ago in Australia.)

Not that the Q&A was primarily maudlin; Ms. Do is an enthusiastic, funny live wire whose jokes often have genuine bite to them, like when she laughs about being a "jungle Asian" rather than a kung-fu Asian or tea-ceremony Asian and how it can as a result in mostly seeing poverty porn when outsiders make a movie about her home. A lot of what she talked about was how it was a wild shoot - parting ways with the original cinematographer early, then hiring a guy at the last minute based upon the recommendation of Synchronic filmmakers Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson. That tightened their schedule, which meant that a lot had to go right toward the end, because you don't get a lot of chances for reshoots when the last few days of shooting involve burning down the house where many earlier scenes had been shot, getting the last shots in town while the agers did their work, and then shooting the scenes you needed after the house had been overgrown with vines and the like. It is worth mentioning that apparently setting a house on fire is not quite so easy as it looks and how the part of the production design/set decoration team that makes things look older are kind of amazing; movie magic that requires a bunch of detailed work that audiences don't see up close but which can boot you right out of the picture if done poorly.

Anyway, Mattie Do is great, and I hope this movie pokes through into theaters, helping her get some of that Hollywood money to make more Laotian films.

Bor Mi Vanh Chark (The Long Walk)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

A fair amount of people might think The Long Walk takes too much time to get to the good stuff, as the really tricky genre material doesn't show up until halfway through. It's a fair critique if that's all you want from the movie, but it's a rich experience getting there.

It opens about fifty years in the future, with an old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) scavenging parts from an old, wrecked motorcycle. He has a reputation for being able to see spirits, one with a basis in fact: The girl who wrecked the motorcycle (Noutnapha Soydara) has been with him since he was a small boy (Por Silatsa), as her body was never cremated. In the 2010s, she was the closest thing he had to a friend, trapped as he was between an angry father (Brandon Hashimoto) and a sickly mother (Chanthamone Inoudome); in the 2060s, he's approached by Lina (Vilouna Phetmany), a young girl who had left for the city, to find out if her missing mother has died. Soon, these timelines begin to cross, and the hermit becomes tangled up in the world around him in more ways than one.

The team of director Mattie Do and her husband, writer Christopher Larsen, do something kind of interesting in how they shift the timeline on this story from past/present to present/future but do not use a technological means for having the protagonist become unstuck in time; it unburdens the story from any colonial baggage it might have picked up even accidentally, letting the filmmakers ground the film in Laotian tradition without having to write around ubiquitous westerners who will try to explain things scientifically. There are still some around, in the present, of course, installing solar panels that are of little practical use to a farming family, but Lina's modernity and uncertainty with tradition, for example, are her own, not the result of external changes. It's an odd situation, sliding the timeline forward so the audience doesn't get caught up in nostalgia or other ways of either discounting or romanticizing the past.

Do tells an intriguing story of sad, kind of selfish isolation here, one that ultimately turns inward in frightening fashion. For a large portion of the movie, it plays out in somewhat conventional if heightened fashion - a young boy with litle life outside his parents loses one and is basically abandoned by the other never learns to connect with others, instead retreating into the company of spirits nobody else can see. The filmmakers see a way for this to be potentially sinister even before the chance to encounter himself as a boy starts letting him tighten his circle, and once that kicks in, those who come to this looking for a time-travel story will marvel at how nicely the film is constructed. There's genuine horror to be found in the shifting timelines and impressive attention to detail; Do does good work in getting big impact out of small things, and subtly changing the look of the film between the present and the future so that we can traverse the gap naturally but still know where we are. This part of the story is done well enough tht some will wish it was the whole film. Underneath, it's more than a puzzle; it's an acknowledgement that loneliness can't be solved unilaterally, and that good intentions can be twisted.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2020.02: The Dustwalker, Synchronic, Sea Fever

I'm not going to lie - with a marquee that wide, I'm mildly disappointed that someone didn't go for the entire (original) title of Birds of Prey, but as you can see, there's just too much else going on at the Somerville to put all that up.

Like I said when writing up the first day of the fest, the opening weekend in particular was a pretty impressive schedule. When announcements started, my jaw kind of hit the floor when I saw Synchronic on the list. Dig back through my stuff, and you'll see that Moorhead & Benson are favorites, and this festival landing their newest is, let us say, a bit more than I have sometimes expected. I'll happily hit it again if it plays Fantasia in July, especially if the directors do a Q&A, because theirs are generally great. I'm a fan, and when I heard the folks behind me saying it was "pretty good for an indie film", my initial instinct was to ask them to show more respect.

Which is fun; there aren't a lot of movie-related things that get me feeling that sort of passionate fan energy these days.

I did errands between the first movie of the day and Synchronic and had been back and forth on seeing the last one, with both winding up a little closer to the DTV/VOD/streaming fare that the festival has generally featured. They're an interesting contrast, though - The Dustwalker feels like something that aimed higher than its level of resources and wound up a mess, while Sea Fever worked to its budget and more or less worked, even if it maybe doesn't have as many big swings. I'm not sure which approach is better, in general, although it's long been what we as science fiction/fantasy enthusiasts have had to choose from at the movies.

The Dustwalker

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

The distributors that pick this Australian horror movie up will likely be able to cut a good enough trailer that the people who stream it wonder why it just doesn't click afterwards, even discounting the visual effects that look a few years out of date. Watching it, I noted that it's been a while since I've seen a film struggle so much to string scenes together, leaving one always a bit out of sync. It feels a bit like someone took a prefabricated monsters-from-space movie kit and didn't read the instructions, just tossing the "extra" bits away after gluing the obvious ones together.

It starts with something crashing outside a small town in Western Australia, taking out communications with the outside world and hitting the man who comes to investigate with some sort of red dust. Everyone naturally leans on Joanne Sharp (Jolene Anderson), one of the town's two police officers, to figure out what's going on, even as she and sister Samantha (Stef Dawson), plan to pack up and move to the city. A lot of people have started acting very strange, though, and geologist Angela (Cassandra Magrath) has found some unusual material in a brand new crater.

The audience never gets a look inside that crater (or it was too quick to register with this viewer) which makes one wonder if the production budget was sometimes tighter than anticipated, like there was no money to either render something that could be the melted remains of a spaceship or even commission one from a local sculptor, at least once the visual effects budget was spent on a dust storm and some under-skin motion on the faces of the infected. It doesn't necessarily feel like something director Sandra Sciberras is shooting around, and there are no scenes later where Joanne and Angela refer to anything particularly specific about what they saw, but it's an odd thing to be missing. Add some rough CGI creature effects, and a picture quickly emerges of a movie whose budget was no match for its ambition.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Synchronic

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

The three previous feature films by the directing team of Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson have earned them a great reputation in sci-fi/horror circles and been the sort of movies that fans build a festival schedule around, but their particular combination of meticulous construction, genre awareness, and emotional tensions has seemingly conspired to keep them from playing to a larger audience. Synchronic seems like a movie that could go wider; it's smart and witty and occasionally exciting without seeming quite so clearly focused on its own intricacy.

It starts with a couple of visitors to New Orleans having a really bad trip when they try new designer drug "Synchronic", and they're not alone - EMTs Steve Denube (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis Dannelly (Jamie Dornan) are finding themselves responding to calls that defy belief more frequently. Getting stuck with a needle at the scene of an overdose has Steve getting some tests that reveal a brain tumor, something he keeps from Dennis, who has problems of his own when his 18-year-old daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides) seems to have been at the scene of another overdose and then vanished.

Where things are going, plot-wise, is clear enough that it's fairly easy to forgive the fair amount of shortcuts and coincidences Benson's script employs getting there, although it creates an odd sort of tension: The mechanism they built requires Steve to be empirical in how he approaches his rescue attempt and for the audience to pick up on details even as the situation is generally chaotic. It's ultimately something that the filmmakers manage to make work, and even play into the personalities of the characters: Steve is smart, but sloppy, an armchair scientist at best, so his stumbling and having to guess right without knowing the whole picture is a match for how he deals with his diagnosis and how Dennis approaches his more conventional search and the strain it puts on his marriage. People don't suddenly get super-competent when they've got a mission, and these guys are used to flying by the seat of their pants at their regular job.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Sea Fever

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

Sea Fever isn't fancy, but it's a rock-solid "danger from the deep" movie which does a good job with a lot of things which aren't necessarily exciting: Working around a limited budget for actually showing the monster, getting the cast to build characters around pretty thin specs and having them work as a bit more than cardboard figures, implying all of the backstory that would explain things. It's impressive craft that nobody in the audience would notice unless filmmaker Neasa Hardiman blew it.

It opens with graduate student Siobhán (Hermione Corfield) in her natural environment - a university laboratory, examining samples under strong lights, ignoring the other faculty and students celebrating something or other behind her. Ah, but a scientist needs experience in the field, so she heads to the docks and the Niamh Cinn Oir, whose married operators Gerard (Dougray Scott) and Freya (Connie Nielsen) supplement what a fishing crew can make by renting spots to researchers. She's impressed by the filtration system designed by engineer Omid (Ardanlan Esmaili) and maybe likes the look of Johnny (Jack Hickey) a bit, though other members of the crew (Olwen Fouéré & Elie Bouakaze) are a bit superstitious about her red hair. Of course, it's hard to argue that her hair is what leads Gerard to steer the boat into restricted waterways, or calls forth the creature(s) that attach themselves to the vessel.

It's not entirely unheard-of to but a character like Siobhán at the center of a monster movie, but it's not usually the way things go; it's usually more entertaining to have her feed information or be an eccentric foil the the person of action leading the fight. Choosing to do so shakes a familiar story up in interesting ways, though; Hardiman takes a lot of beats that you expect to see in the Siobhán/Johnny romance and playing them out in how she and Omid respect each other's technical savvy, for instance. It also reframes a lot of the movie as problem-solving, rather than fighting, which requires a bit less in the way of special effects and gives the audience a little more chance to play along.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2020.01: Proxima

I'm going to try and project as many good vibes about this festival as I can this year, because while we've had issues in the past, the schedule that's been put together for the first weekend, at least, is impressive as heck and Proxima looks like the sort of movie I really like that just misses the cut to playing in Boston. Yes, it's got an actor or two you're familiar with and a filmmaker people have heard of, but we've only got so many screens and it's not like the upscale theaters that have been built here show more grown-up movies as opposed to the same thing with a better wine list. At best, it probably gets the same sort of one-week release as Aniara or Little Joe, because the Kendall is close to MIT and hopes this might get some trade from there.

Anyway, heck of a start to the festival. Here's hoping the rest lives up to it!

Proxima

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

Among the many things that intrigue about Proxima is how the standard narrative of movies like this seem built to push the story, and the audience, in a specific direction. Lots of movies that didn't live up to their potential have made it as easy to joke about them being about "discovering what's really important" as "friends we made along the way" or the like. And yet that construction works, because what counters it? Proxima is at its best when it makes you wonder.

It is, from one side, the story of Sarah Loreau (Eva Green), a brilliant engineer and astronaut candidate at the European Space Agency, who has just been selected for the "Proxima" mission, a year-long stay on the International Space Station with American Mike Shannon (Matt Dillon) and Russian Anton Ocheivsky (Aleksey Fateev) which will serve as a sort of dry run for a mission to Mars. The training at Space City in Russia will be intense, but that is not the hardest part: She has a daughter, Stella (Zélie Boulant), a bright seven-year-old (though dyslexia and dyscalculia make school more difficult), and while it's likely that her ex Thomas Akerman (Lars Eidinger) will step up more than he has, a year is a very long time at that age.

From the other, it's the story of a little girl who has seemed to get through a divorce unscathed but is now faced with not just moving to a new city in a new country, but her mother voluntarily leaving her for over a year. Though Matt Dillon is naturally going to be billed and credited second, young Zélie Boulant is clearly the film's other lead, and she does impressive work for one so young, aided by a script by director Alice Winocour and co-writer Jean-Stéphane Bron that seldom presumes to get inside a child's mind but certainly gives Boulant many opportunities to present all the nervousness and anger that seeming abandonment will cause while also demonstrating the immense, unbreakable love and awe she has for her mother. Children are often pawns or abstractions in movies about parents trying to balance family and career, but Stella is a real kid whose needs and desires are not necessarily simple. Indeed, part of what makes this so agonizing for Sarah is that she and the audience can see the very real possibility of Stella not being destroyed but growing away from her mother.

What can counter this? Obviously, you have to be extremely driven to be an astronaut, almost single-minded, something that kind of seems cute early, as Sarah uses spaceflight jargon as she tucks Stella into bed, or just that she has a daughter named "Stella", a cat named "Laika", and an astrophysicist for an ex-husband, because where else is she going to meet someone? She's so focused that she seems surprised by the ESA assigning a child psychologist (Sandra Hüller) to her family But on top of that, Winocour and Bron do a tremendously impressive job about detailing the special pressures a woman must put up with in this environment - the seemingly dismissive comments Mike makes during a press conference, the male doctor who won't immediately accept her decisions on whether or not to suppress menstruation during the mission, and all of the women who are so much behind her that she's worried about letting them down. It's not something Winocour ever has Sarah address directly, but it's something one can easily see in both her attempts to push herself too hard and her moments of despair.

Eva Green picks that up and runs with it. Winocour taps into how there's something a bit larger-than-life about Green - it's not just that she's beautiful, but she's always projected incredible confidence to go with it, something that translates to Sarah being headstrong and a little intimidating, even to Stella. How does a kid say what she really feels when she's meeting her astronaut mom in the room where they give press conferences during quarantine? Green takes that charisma and makes sure that Sarah doesn't become a villain even as Stella is hurting, while also showing that others emotional investment can be a lot to bear. There are moments when one wonders if this is the first time she's ever felt self-doubt toward the end, a slight variation on the nerves that many films call for at that point.

She does this against an interesting background that could easily overwhelm the film, but never does. It would be easy for the details of the training in Star City to take over the film, but that never happens; Winocour instead makes the specifics interesting but never never overwhelming, and the space between astronaut being just another job and something completely divorced from most of the audience's experience is not so wide as one might think. She and cinematographer Georges Lechaptois also have a real talent for building and finding great shots, from one where Stella wanders off during a press event and winds up in a lunar diorama to a final shot of her watching wild horses from a train, the audience noting the one running with a foal and how often Stella looks up.

It's a real credit to the movie that it can get to that scene without having to do something obvious to tip audience sympathies one way or another, or particularly note that we as a society don't ask the same questions about men like Mike taking on these sort of commitments that we do for women like Sarah. There's never much doubt that the movie is about this, but it seems rare that a film will can be about it in such a clear and elegant fashion.

(Formerly at EFC)

This Those Weeks in Tickets: 4 February 2019 - 24 February 2019

February was a month of long days at the movies when I wasn't feeling lousy, whether they be actual marathons or just multiple movie days.







The week started on Chinese New Year with The Wandering Earth, whose opening that day was kind of a surprise, because it was scheduled for Friday, but there was a spot when Crazy Alien didn't open, and they even snagged the Imax 3D screen for a few days, and that is the way to see it, as it settled in for a crazy-long run there. It would actually delay other things opening at Boston Common that weekend, which gave me a slot to catch Arctic with co-writer Ryan Morrison on hand, so that was kind of a win.

Then came a busy Saturday, doing a sort of double-double feature: First up, two new animated movies: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, which is clever as heck even if it can't quite be as inventive as the first one, and then a trip back up the Red Line to catch Tito and the Birds at the Brattle, which is ambitious in a different direction, but still pretty nifty. After that, it was back up to the Somerville Theatre for a couple from a couple from sci-fi festival, Axcellerator & Ikarie XB-1, the first with plenty of guests and the second something I hope appears on disc before too long, because it was nifty but not as thrilling as one might hope for on movie #4 of the day. Of course, I was back the next day for a 35mm print of the original King Kong.

After that, I headed across the river for a double feature's worth of Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts, which probably could have been put together into one presentation because it wasn't all things just under the time maximum length to be considered a short film as is usually the case.

Wandering Earth screenings started to thin out a bit come Monday, so that there would be a 10pm show of the thing that was going to open Friday, but, of course, that conflicted with another Chinese movie at the sci-fi festival, so I headed down there for Last Sunrise. That meant it was Tuesday before I finally got to see Integrity, and… Well, you could see why that was the movie that got pushed off. It's not great, even with Lau Ching-wan.

The festival didn't have much and it was a pretty busy week for new releases, so I was happy to check out Happy Death Day 2U on Thursday, finding it a fun sequel to a surprisingly good original, and I'd be glad to see it continue even if it wound up nowhere near where it started. I wasn't nearly so enamored of Friday's classier Everybody Knows, which is impressively crafted and pretty good at the straightforward art-house drama it's looking todo.

I was going to spend most of the day at the sci-fi festival on Saturday, but after Chesney Bonestell: A Brush with the Future, I was feeling pretty lousy,,so I just headed home to rest up for the Marathon, and while I can't say I got all the way through without a nap, but it was a bunch of fun seeing Innerspace, Dr. Cyclops, Rollerball '75, Woman in the Moon, Star Trek VI, Annihilation, Source Code, Sunshine, and Escape from New York on the big screen.

After that, it was pretty easy to lay off movies for a few days, but you've got to see the rest of the Oscar-nominated shorts before the awards, so that meant it was time for a Thursday night double feature - first the Animated Shorts, then the Live-Action Shorts, both of which were kind of same-y though in different ways. And opposite, with the animated ones kind of charmingly sentimental and the live-action is nastily dark.

The next night was Korean Film Extreme Job, a whole lot funnier than the Chinese movie with the same plot from last year, although maybe it's just a coincidence, as I've read about an American remake being developed that references this but not Lobster Cop.

Saturday was spent in New York for the second annual Hong-Kong-a-thon, which went from being a Grady Hendrix solo production last year to a Subway Cinema event, and it looks like that's the future for SC, as they're no longer the guys behind the New York Asian Film Festival. At any rate, it was a fun as heck event, with 35mm screenings of Project S, Hot War, Eastern Condors, Beast Cops, Bloody Friday, and Full Contact, and I was so zonked after that that I am more grateful than usual for the steady march of Ringo Lam discs from Hong Kong so I can properly see that last one.

It had me so exhausted that I didn't add anything my Letterboxd page on Sunday, but there would be more to come, including on an actual trip to Hong Kong rather than just seeing HK movies in New York!

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2019 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Maybe not quite so brilliant as the first one, in part because once you're behind the curtain is hard not to go down the road of being too self-aware, but that's almost a distraction. All that going on lets how the "invaders" are more delightfully creative than the supposed majority of the post-apocalyptic scenario slip in, simmer underneath the sibling rivalry material, and then re-emerge as both some of the movie's best jokes and the heartfelt point of thewhole thing.

I wonder, a bit, how kids will take its more literal commentary on its own tricks, but they're often smarter than you expect, and this movie takes full advantage.

Tito e os Pássaros (Tito and the Birds)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2019 at the Brattle Theatre (special engagement, DCP)

I don't know that I was able to really give this one the shot it deserved, but there's clearly a great deal to like about it, from the beautiful background art to the great soundtrack to how they make fantastic imagery with the action at the end. It is, I suspect, one that plays a bit better for those who know the culture better. That's maybe a better explanation for how certain elements seemed off-putting that saying that the filmmakers seem a little bit unsure how to handle the horror elements in a family-friendly film much of the time. It doesn't quite seem to fit,and maybe blending those tones in a somewhat less messy fashion could have made it a much more thrilling sort of adventure.

Happy Death Day 2U

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2019 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)

I suspect that Christopher Landon wrote this movie by taking all the bits he cut from the first because the how of it just didn't matter and gluing them together before tossing the minimum amount to make it a horror movie sequel in. Maybe he's commenting on how horror sequels are just remakes with twists, but that may be giving the parts with a knife-wielding guy in a baby mask way too much credit. That section of the movie is incredibly perfunctory.

It's a lot of fun anyway. Jessica Rothe is still kind of terrific as multiple-murder victim Tree, with room to grow even after starting out a better person despite retaining a sharp sense of humor. A fake-out before putting the ball back in her court has the nice side effect of expanding the supporting cast (or giving people who had tiny roles in the first a chance to steal scenes), and the shift to mostly comedy lets everyone play to their strengths. Given that Landon reworked someone else's script for the first one (by some accounts, almost completely), maybe this is the first time that he's truly making the film he wanted to after having seen something in that original script.

And by the end, it's done something horror series almost never do in becoming downright warm and upbeat. It's kind of got to make the plot nonsense to do it, but there's something amazingly gratifying about how it doubles down on the first's message of how adversity is a chance to become a better version of oneself. I kind of hope that the mid-credits scene indicates a third movie might eventually leave the original scale and genre behind and just find ways for these kids to have weird sci-fi adventures - let Tree and company run roughshod on history, space, clones, monsters, and whatever else Landon can come up with.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Marathon 2019: Innerspace, Dr. Cyclops, Rollerball '75, Woman in the Moon, "Live", Star Trek VI, Annihilation, Source Code, Sunshine, and Escape from New York

Continuing my plans not to get worked up too much about this event from the festival half, I didn't buy a ticket until a fair chunk of the lineup had been announced (and announced as playing on film), and on top of that, the cold I was nursing for the previous days worked into it. I'd pondered just eating the ticket the night before, and when I walked to the theater, I was basically thinking that if I fell asleep at any point, it didn't matter. If the worst parts of the audience started acting like they were the entertainment, I'd try not to stress.

Mostly, though, people were a lot better this year about not trying to improve genuinely good movies by yelling out "door!" or "Mark!" or whatever other silly thing popped into their heads or served as a ritual. I do wonder how much the programmers took it into account this year (I must admit, I'd run a potential movie through IMDB and just not include it if any character was named "Mark").

Anyway, I think this was the first time I've actually put the atomic fireball handed out at the start into my mouth in a long time (the cinnamon helped my sinuses), felt no shame about sleeping through what needed sleeping through, and then didn't do a darn thing when I got home despite the errands I had intended to run.

Innerspace

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, 35mm)

I'm not sure that Innerspace is the most 1980s movie ever made, but it is simultaneously a Joe Dante pulp adventure, a Martin Short comedy, and a Meg Ryan/Dennis Quaid vehicle, all of which were things in the 1980s and into the 1990s but which have rather faded away since, despite never really having had a memorable bomb. It's surprisingly good at all of them, and that's actually kind of a crazy sort of synthesis: Short's band of goofy physical comedy was kind of unmistakable, and it's a bit odd to see it showing up in the middle of this other sort of movie.

Dante and the writers make it work together (it doesn't escape my attention that one is Jeffrey Boam, who would later co-create The Adventures of Brisco County Junior). Even for something with a strange high concept, it's kind of elevated, with genuinely weird villains where it could have gotten away with standard thugs, and deadpan peculiar supporting characters. It's funny in a way that's kid-friendly and eccentric, in some ways a lot more willing to be openly comic-book-y than a lot of the comics that came later.

I also like the way the design and effects teams play with biology without things getting gross or having a rubbery, too-polished look that would come with later CGI technology. ILM does a really neat job on what is billed as "Martin Short's Interiors" even before getting to the funny, surprisingly believable half-sized goofiness in the last act.

Dr. Cyclops

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, 35mm)

I suspect I liked this a little more than the last time I saw it at a genre marathon in the Somerville Theatre. It's utterly earnest and straight-faced, never really trying to be as clever in how it plays with its shrinking technology or character motivations as, say, Innerspace, but it doesn't have to be. As a 77-minute B movie, it doesn't need twists or to do a whole lot more than what it says it will. The cast might be kind of flat at times, but they're effective, and the special effects (mostly scaled-up set decoration and decent matte work) certainly get the job done.

What I thought back in 2013

Rollerball (1975)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, 35mm)

Rollerball was far too ambitious for its own good, although maybe it just seems that way from forty-odd years later. Its strongly felt anti-corporate message feels kind of half-baked when we have actual capitalist dystopias to which it can be compared, and the screenwriters can't really do much with it for all that they talk about this being dangerous and dehumanizing. Points for wanting to have a strong humanist message, but the filmmakers too often make the subtext text but without a lot to say.

It doesn't help that James Caan is James Caan, a mumbler where the dialogue is concerned and just not charismatic enough to seem like this sort of threat to the world order. Caan may be a nice enough guy, but he's always been at his best when there's a layer of slime on him, and his rollerball star doesn't stand out for his general decency or feel like he's the cunning sort of celebrity that can beat the system at its own game. He could still pursue a lost love while being cunning, but what killer instinct he's got is limited to the rink here.

That said, the actual sport of rollerball is presented fairly well here; the movie doesn't have the budget to make it seem like a global obsession of the future (CGI crowds often look fake, but they make a point), but the harsh action and the design that you can see is supposed to preclude long-running superstars makes a kind of cynical sense, and Jewison shoots the film in a way that lets the audience get caught up while occasionally slapping them with how awful it actually is. It sometimes seems like the folks involved have the right idea, but haven't really thought out how sports and capitalism collide in a way that makes the cynicism feel earned, especially from today's perspective.

"Live"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, digital)

One of the award-winning short films from the festival part of the festivities, "Live" is kind of on-the-nose about the topics it's addressing, the kind, and that they're the sort of things that are specifically of more interest to a young actress than her audience. It's very much got a "write/direct/act in what you know" vibe to it, although filmmaker Taryn O'Neill never winds up so far into inside baseball for it to be a problem.

Mostly, she makes a confident movie that knows of what it speaks in terms of the pressure to maintain a persona and constantly produce content, the more lurid the better. The whole thing is quick and idea-focused - it doesn't particularly have a twist or an arc to play out - but it's by and large a good use of that idea, and a fair calling card for an actress not looking to get caught in the future it imagines.

Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, digital)

Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond is a trailblazer in science fiction, not just for the things it anticipates - it is credited with introducing the countdown to the world, among other things - but because it is perhaps the first time that a major milestone in science and discovery is, as far as the writers and directors are concerned, second fiddle to the individual struggles of the human heart, in this case a girl figuring out which boy she likes better, or at least the one that is willing to sacrifice for her.

Not that this Friede is not worth sacrificing for; Gerda Maurus plays her as whip-smart and always carrying herself with the casual assurance of a woman is confident despite knowing what pressures are on her compared to the guys. She's almost certainly worth more than either Wolf (Willy Fritsch), who would run away from the whole planet out of self-pity, or his friend Hans (Gustav von Wangenheim), who is more than a smidge self-centered, although the three have enjoyable chemistry together. Meanwhile, Fritz Rasp is giving the kind of enjoyably slimy performance where one can hear the sneering superiority despite it being a silent.

In some ways, it's kind of a shame that Rasp's character is kind of unnecessary; he's the lingering remnant of how at least the restored version of this film certainly does take its time getting started, with a ton of conspiracy material that ultimately doesn't matter - although, I suppose, this sort of shadowy cabal is another sort of science-fiction trope that the movie anticipates. When Fritz Lang does get to the big set pieces, though, it's impressive as heck, anticipating more of the realities of space travel than one might expect and inventing a lot of the language of event-movie cinema. Frau im Mond is more exciting and modern than one would expect from a 90-year-old movie, even one which could certainly be expected to age badly.

It certainly doesn't hurt that this presentation was accompanied by organist Jeff Rapsis, who always adds something to a silent film but who was clearly working from a place of special excitement here, never flagging despite this movie being nearly three hours long without an intermission. It was an energetic score that kept things moving during the long opening and kicked it up a notch or two when things got igger.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, 70mm)

Nicholas Meyer's Star Trek VI came out at the height of the franchise being willing to pat itself on the back for being the cerebral science-fiction franchise, and truth be told it could probably use a lot less trying to show how smart it is by quoting classics, and a lot more by way of avoiding the dumb plotting that often has heroes and villains alike looking like fools. He's a strong enough director to get away with it, especially the first time through - he has a knack for mixing the familiar and the exotic to best effect, stages nifty action and shoots around a tight budget without drawing attention to the fact, and juggles the large cast well. He and that cast know what all of these characters mean to the audience, and do a fine job playing on that.

And even with the pretentiousness and flaws more evident than when I first saw this in the theater (and when I cringed seeing the dumb material added for home video), it's probably the sharpest of the films in the series and the one that most directly serves as the heir to the show that had Vietnam War stories in the middle of its big sci-fi adventures. For all that it was timely in 1991 for how it was clearly using the collapse of the Klingon Empire as a metaphor for the end of the Cold War, it doesn't feel handcuffed by the metaphor - it still feels current and I suspect it always will for as long as there will be people who have trouble with history moving on past the conflict that defined their lives.

Annihilation

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17-18 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, DCP)

The middle of the night is a pretty good time to see Annihilation - not only is your brain starting to accept strangeness even as it registers shock, but the parts of the marathon audience that might be tempted to be a pain in the ass are starting to sleep a bit. I don't know if it's quite so thoroughly unsettling the second time around - the bear mess me up the way it did when I first saw it - but it's still pretty darn brain-melting when you get to the end. Alex Garland is looking to make the audience feel the absolutely unmoored nature these characters feel as they confront the unknowable, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie do that better.

Maybe 2001, but that's a different sort of unknowable.

What I thought the first time

The Andromeda Strain

N/A (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, 35mm)

Remember what I said about not being ashamed of when I nodded off because I was fighting a pretty strong cold and didn't have anything to prove? This is where it starts coming into play. I don't know when I'll ever get another chance to see this methodical thriller on 35mm film, which is a darn shame; I liked the businesslike-but-intense start and remember once being genuinely freaked out when I caught a bit of it on TV and saw someone not bleeding from a cut, and wanted to see what it all added up to.

Another time.

Destination Moon

N/A (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, digital)

Same here - I was tired and full of snot, I'd gotten about as far as caffeine was going to take me, and it was something like three in the morning. Older-movie pacing and the clipped delivery of serious mid-twentieth-century men wasn't going to do it.

Not helping the impression was that this was a situation where there were two of a few things in this marathon, and a second "first trip to the moon that features drawing matchsticks to see who stays behind" was one more than I needed, especially since this wasn't as good a movie as Frau im Mond. But, they wanted to program something to go with the Chesley Bonestell documentary, and this fit that the best.

Source Code

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, 35mm)

Speaking of doubling up, the festival had a print of Duncan Jones's Moon earlier in the week, and I kind of wish I'd made time for it; Source Code is a reminder that he's closer to the top tier of science fiction/fantasy filmmakers than you might recall. He's able to dig into a strange situation and make the audience feel at home as well as anybody, even if it's meant to be unnerving, on the way to a pretty darn good thriller.

Also: Michelle Monaghan needs to be in more things. Maybe she is and they're just winding up on streaming services, but it kind of boggles my mind that she never became a big star after Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. There's a certain amount of missed-star potential to Jake Gyllenhaal as well, but this movie kind of shows him as maybe being too naturally eccentric to really be a leading man.

What I thought back in '11

Sunshine

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, DCP)

This may have been my first time seeing this since its theatrical release, which is weird, because I loved it more the first time through than I had loved another movie for a while, and given how I got a similar vibe off Annihilation last year, it might have been due for a revisit.

On a second viewing, yeah, I absolutely find the slasher ending a bit messy, especially when compared to how arty Boyle makes the execution at spots. Much like Annihilation, I think that's at least part of the point - coming this close to the sun, all too well aware of their mission's impossible stakes, the filmmakers are trying to show the audience that all sorts of madness are not just likely but inevitable here, but a guy just going nuts and killing people seems almost prosaic next to the overwhelming power of the sun.

Still, heck of a cast, memorable sights, and a genuine feeling of desperation to the all-life-on-Earth stakes. That last bit doesn't come across as well as it could sometimes - it's just too big and the monomania Chris Evans's Mace displays of monomania are usually reserved for smaller things, so it's almost surprising that they actually work at an appropriate scale.

My 2007 review at EFilmCritic

Escape From New York

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/44, DCP)

I must admit, there's a level on which I like this movie's sequel more than the original; Escape from L.A. is up front about its satirical intent, and if this one is playing the same sort of game, it's bone-dry parody that can easily be mistaken for the real thing. Escape From New York feels serious despite playing on thin stereotypes, not quite getting the vibe where the lawless prison of Manhattan is vibrant and free compared to the outside. Heck, Snake Plissken is a stereotype himself, a bad-ass action caricature that we'd snicker at a filmmaker trying to present as a worthy protagonist otherwise. Even when you can see them playing it broad, it doesn't feel like jokes.

On the other hand, this group is just so darn good; John Carpenter, Debra Hill, Nick Castle, and Kurt Russell have made plenty of great movies in various combinations, and they've got a good cast with them. This film may not completely deserve its reputation as a classic - or maybe it's just more a relic of its time than it initially appeared to be - but it's still a solid B movie: A clever idea that combines capable execution with moments when it at least touches what it's capable of.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2019: Axcellerator, Ikarie XB-01, King Kong '33, Last Sunrise, and Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future

I knew, going into the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival this year, that I would be seeing less - several years of underwhelming selections, frustrations with technical gaffes (and weather-related cancellations), and the increasing number of worthy other options to see in mid-February made it seem like I was committing more than I should. In recent years I've run myself ragged trying not just to attend the festival I want to be great more than any other, but trying to see the Oscar-nominated short programs, watching the big Lunar New Year blockbusters from China, and the increasingly strong movies released during February by the usual suspects was too much. But I didn't think I'd cut it own this much.

Part of it was also work taking my time, but part of it was just going to the site, watching trailers, and thinking "I have seen something awful close to this movie before and with more put into it" or "the fans of such-and-such will enjoy that documentary". Maybe there were some hidden gems in there, but when your trailer makes me think "so, it's basically Jumper without the star power of Hayden Christenson"... Well, that's not a great sales pitch.

Anyway - guests!



Left to right, from Axcellerator that's actors David Johnson, Sam J. Jones, and John James; writer-director David Giancola, cinematographer Georgia Pantazopoulos, and David Porter, whose post-production house handled much of the sound work. That place is local, much of the film as shot in Vermont, and Jones was there because a documentary about him and the rest of the cast of Flash Gordon played the night before.

Anyway, they talked about wanting to make a real 1980s-style movie, and I guess this was that. Giancola would return during the marathon to accept an award, and go on about how this festival respects genre film, and… I dunno, like I say every year, there's lots of really good genre festivals, and I guess it's nice that this one gives folks a chance to feel appreciated, but I have a hard time downshifting for it.

As an aside - you can't really see it well in this picture, but I think this was my first time in one of the downstairs theaters since they renovated them last October, and it's nice. Seats are a little bigger, though not the full recliner the screen is a full Panavision aspect ratio (I think they moved a wall), and it just looks spiffy and well-lit before and after the shows. We've lost the owls, but, gosh, Q&As are going to be nice during IFFBoston.



My last film of the week wound up being Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future, with producer Christopher Darryn, writer/director Douglass M. Stewart Jr., interviewee Douglas Trumbull, and editor Kristina Hays on hand. One of the things that came up was that Bonestell had done a mural for the Museum of Science which was later found not to be a terribly accurate depiction of the lunar surface, and was as such taken down, though the artist would create another work. The original mural is being restored at the Smithsonian, as it still have value as art even if it's not accurate.

It was one of those Q&As of pretty specific interest, whether intended or not. Some folks arrived less to learn about Bonestell than to have their fandom stroked a bit, which is fine, and other times what I suspect was a more general question kind of got into the weeds with Trumbull and Hays talking about specific post-production software and such. But, hey, someone just starting out having a legend like Trumbull chatting with her as an equal has to find that pretty cool.

I was originally intending to stay for more that evening - I feel bad about collecting a button from some of the filmmakers who would have the 7pm show - but you get back to the whole "hey, these kind of look like generic alien visitation/found-footage-time-loop trailers" situation, and my cold started walloping me enough that I figured I"d be no fun for the people sitting next to me and I could use some sleep before the marathon the next day.

Hopefully things work out that I'm feeling more like seeing a bunch of movies at the festival next year, but I must admit that I tend to treat a pass as something of an obligation (either a festival gives me one as media and reviews are the way you repay them or I find myself insistent on getting value for money), and even if I may have paid more going a la carte this year, it didn't have me resenting the bad ones nearly as much.

Axcellerator

* * (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

Axcellerator is one of those movies that straddles the border of irreverence and parody, to the extent that its makers would probably, upon being asked which it was, ask what you wanted it to be. There are worse offenses a movie can commit than landing in that grey area, especially since it's got the energy and most of the charm it needs to pull either option off, but every once in a while it does something dumb enough that you can't help but wonder what it could have been if some of its ambition and enthusiasm had made its way into the script.

Said script has Dane (Ryan Wesen), the son of a car thief who was apparently legendary in small-time-crook circles, stealing the car that his father had targeted when he had the fatal heart attack, only to have a mad scientist try and do so at the same time - one who was seemingly being tailed by every domestic security agency the United States has. One chase and explosion later, Dane is magically back home in New York, because the invention everyone was after is a brainwave-reading teleportation device. They're still after it, even though it's somewhat wonky, with the head of one faction (John James) springing psychopathic tracker Brink (Sam J. Jones) from prison against the wishes of the other (Maxwell Caulfield), and a double-agent (Sean Young) playing both sides. Said wonkiness has saddled Dane with traveling companion Kate (Laura James), so they decide to head back to her home in Arizona the old-fashioned way. Good thing Dane's father taught him a trick or two.

Why? Well, she's got a dog at the vet, and though I can't recall anybody in the film actually say that this is why they're going back to Arizona, it's the closest thing to a sensible reason for someone doing anything in the movie. The script is actually kind of impressive in how it covers the whole range of dumb, but eventually the filmmakers seem to just run out of even bad explanations and handwaving, appealing to a higher power and treating that like it's supposed to be satisfying. It's frustrating to watch, because there's no moment where details feel like they're fleshing out characters and themes, as opposed to being nuisances.

Full review at EFilmCritic

Ikarie XB 1

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

This was a Janus release, so I'm figuring that there will eventually be a Criterion Blu-ray or it will get a couple of playdates at the Brattle or somewhere like that, and maybe then I won't be zonked from it being my fourth movie of the day and apparently nod off during the only moments of the movie where anything of consequence actually happens.

Jindrich Polák's film is certainly interesting for being a fairly elaborate piece of science fiction for Czechoslovakia in 1963, well-designed with the sort of dusky monochrome photography that can make otherwise garish designs look cool, but it's also the sort that doesn't do a whole lot to distinguish its mass of crew-cut guys in uniform, personality-wise - even the one who goes mad more or less does so because of outside stimulus rather than a particularly interesting storyline - and apparently lands on "sleep through it" as the best possible way to deal with the interstellar perils.

I'll give it another chance, should the opportunity come around; its Eastern European roots often lead to fantastic visuals, and there's a genuine excitement for exploration and discovery that the militaristic analogs in Hollywood often lack. There could be an idea or two buried in there that I just wasn't able to see that day.

King Kong (1933)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, 35mm)

It's been a few years since I last saw King Kong and I think that's sort of the ideal way to handle things - wait a couple years, see it on film with an audience, and be reminded all over again that it's actually a no-screwing-around monster movie, surprisingly ruthless in its violence and often sexier than you might remember as well. It's surprisingly intense and the stop-motion effects enhance this fact in surprising ways, in that the artists were pretty good at switching from a live actor to a doll without the audience noticing, so that the action which was a little removed is suddenly dangerous.

The bits without the ape straddle a line between charming and hokey (and not always a charming hokiness), and I must admit, I find it kind of amusing that the same folks who were making loud points of running down how Peter Jackson's remake before the movie started were also the ones laughing the loudest at all the unnatural-sounding material that Jackson and company took great pains to patch up. It's enjoyably pulpy material regardless, and you can't help but admire how the filmmakers walk a fine line between pushing off the good stuff and keeping things moving.

Full review from back in 2013

Last Sunrise

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

Do they know something in China about how the Sun is about to screw humanity over in some incredibly catastrophic way, or is it just a coincidence that two films which take that as a starting point have come from that part of the world in relatively rapid succession? It's probably nothing, but you wonder. Last Sunrise is a far less bombastic take on the idea than The Wandering Earth, the small indie version that has more to say about two people at the end of the world than the event itself.

The first to get wind that something is up is Sun Yang (Zhang Jue), a freelance astronomer who has noticed small fluctuations in our local star's luminosity that remind him of another star that somehow disappeared, although his emails to Wang Yun (Wang Dahong) - the solar-power entrepreneur whose open-source astronomical data shows the anomalies - get shut out. When the sun starts to flicker before outright vanishing, though, Wang sends Sun an address at which to meet - but to get there, he'll have to split a ride with neighbor Chen Ma (Zhang "Ran" Yue), who has a car but has never actually been close to the reclusive Sun Yang.

The nuts-and-bolts science fiction of the story isn't necessarily important in that writer/director Ren Wen isn't going to have Sun Yang and Chen Ma spend the movie chasing details down, but there's something reassuring about how how Ren doesn't take it for granted or completely brush it away. The cataclysm itself is striking without being a big visual-effects demo, and the explanation that Wang Yun offers is satisfying in that it doesn't minimize this huge event despite putting any chance of doing anything about it well out of reach (like Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem, it reminds me a bit of Asimov's The Gods Themselves, which is not a bad influence to have). There's enough future tech sprinkled around the first act to establish the film's world as a bit ahead of our own but not so much that Ren can't make it familiar.

Full review at EFilmCritic

Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)

Sometimes, watching a movie like Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future, I wonder what the line is between "documentaries" and "educational films", or if one is a subset of the other. The film Douglass M. Stewart Jr. has made serves its purpose in describing Bonestell's career to people who may not know about this particular artist well enough, and if it comes off as more equivalent to a chapter in a middle-school textbook more than the sort of non-fiction that people read for pleasure, that's fine. It would be nice if the film created the sort of rapt fascination that Bonestell's work did, but it gets the job done.

Bonestell, born in 1888, did many related jobs over the course of his life, from architecture to creating matte paintings for the movies - he worked on designs for the Golden Gate Bridge and created matte paintings for Citizen Kane - but where he had the biggest impact was on space art. His illustrations for both pulp covers and glossy mainstream magazines were praised for both their striking layout and their exceptional eye scientific accuracy. His presentation of the solar system would inspire later artists, scientists, and engineers alike.

These are no small accomplishments, and there doesn't necessarily need to be a great story to go with it, though Bonestell may have one of those as well. You can see bits of it, but Stewart tends to present it as a pile of facts that don't necessarily build to a narrative, especially as the film covers his early years, which include a lot of moving around and a series of marriages that include two to the same woman. There's a lot going on, but the film is focused on his art and as such does not delve deeply into his life as its own story, but also spends relatively little time on how that side of his history informs his art, but aside from a few comments about how his being in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake had an effect on some of his more apocalyptic works, there aren't many lines to be drawn.

Full review at EFilmCritic