Is it just me, or is anyone else watching Brian Tamm's intro to these movies, especially the ones labeled "Generic Somerville" or "Generic Brattle", and seeing if they map to where they think the films in question would play during an in-person festival? For instance, I could absolutely see The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet playing the Brattle, while you head back to Somerville for A Reckoning in Boston. Maybe not scheduled for screen #1, but one of the odd-numbered side-screens, at least until a bunch of people with some connection to the production show up and are standing in the rush line, and it eventually moves up.
There'd also be a filmmaker Q&A that results in me having to use the "horrible photography" tag and gets into enough issues for long enough that I eventually have a hard time separating what was part of the film and what wasn't for the review, but not this year. Maybe in 2022.
Anyway, this is getting too late for these two to still be available via the festival site, but I'm A Reckoning in Boston will be on PBS later this year, and hopefully some streaming service or three will pick up The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet. It's odd and slight enough to disappear outside its home territory of Argentina, but as I say in the review, I'm impressed with its attitude toward randomness and chance. We're not wired to handle that particularly well as a species, from imagining gods to personify forces of nature to looking for scapegoats, and I often find the phrase "everything happens for a reason" kind of horrifying when it's meant to give comfort, whether it makes people think there was something they could have done to not deserved misfortune or that some jerk deity is being cruel to toughen you up for later. It's not healthy to think that way, but human brains are pattern-recognition machines, so it's awful hard not to.
Reckoning takes the other side - that there are reasons for the challenges Kafi and Carl face, a system designed to help those already with an advantage (maybe they have what they do "for a reason"), but in a way, that makes it the yin to Dog's yang - some things are random and some are part of a pattern, and being able to distinguish the two and act appropriately is one of the most valuable skills one can have.
El perro que no calla (The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet has maybe the strangest mid-film detour I can recall, surprising me as I watched it although I'll bet that two-weeks-ago me put this film on the schedule because the description hinted at it. Even before that, it's a movie that's as amiably eccentric as its title, well worth a look before it finds the most peculiar way it can to tell what could be a fairly conventional story.
The dog, Rita, doesn't seem particularly difficult as the audience meets her, but that's because her person, Sebastian (Daniel Katz) is home; apparently she whines non-stop when he's at work, to the point where the neighbors gather to complain. He tries taking her to work, and though Rita is well-behaved, it's apparently one of those offices afraid that anything out of the ordinary will be a slippery slope to chaos. So he's soon taking a job on a farm, with plenty of room for Rita to run. But that doesn't last, sending Sebas on other stops, until he sees a woman (Julieta Zylberberg) at his mother's wedding, also dancing by herself on the other side of the floor. They connect, and then…
Well, you've got to see what happens next to maybe believe it, but up until then, it's a well-above average guy-looking-for-his-place sort of movie. A big part of why it works so well is that star Daniel Katz plays Sebas remarkably straight-down-the-middle, even in the early scenes where he's sort of playing a straight man against the petty folks who have a problem with his dog. There's something a bit introverted and isolated about him, even when he's happy, but seldom with an abrasive sense of superiority. It's a performance built out of how he carries himself rather than what he does or says (and he doesn't really say a lot), and is especially complemented by Julieta Zylberberg and Valeria Lois, the former often a female reflection while Lois is the sort of confident, well-integrated-into-her-space mother that makes someone like Sebas seem a bit more uncertain.
As generally likable as Sebastian is, filmmaker Ana Katz recognizes that seeing him quietly be somewhat dissatisfied and move on could wear on an audience if drawn out too long, so not only does she keep the film itself short (a tight 73 minutes), but she makes sure that no individual segment ever wears out its welcome, telling a little vignette and then jumping on to the next stop, giving them just enough time to have meaning but to also let them be transitory. The crisp black-and-white photography proves flexible enough to reflect her main character's moods - almost always feeling a little gray and overcast, not at home among the office's harsh fluorescents, finding some quiet warmth in agriculture. There are a few animated segments which feel like how Sebas would process major shifts in addition to probably covering things this small picture doesn't have an effects budget for - though the production gets impressively creative when things take a weird twist in the last act.
Some may check out at the last act twist that literally comes out of nowhere, but I must admit to being impressed at just how thoroughly the filmmakers embrace that randomness as a theme. Sebastian might have been on the road to a predictable life had his neighbors not had a problem with his dog, but that sends him in a new direction, as does everything from what happens at the farm to meeting a girl to just helping give a stalled truck a push. But chance is not entirely something that happens to individuals; sometimes it's massive and completely unpredictable, a world-changing event that is absolutely an unfair thing for a screenwriter to drop into a script, but those things happen, arguably with increasing frequency, and they're not always timed to be what starts a story.
Those seeing this movie at a virtual film festival in 2021 don't need to be reminded of that, of course, although I'm curious about just when Ana Katz and her collaborators came up with this idea and shot it, just in terms of whether it's reflecting the world or the world is validating its thesis. Either way, there's insight to its oddity, and even the events before the big one are a fascinating way to treat chance as a real part of our lives beyond just chalking things up to fate or finding them cute and quirky.
Also at eFilmCritic
A Reckoning in Boston
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
The title of A Reckoning in Boston suggests a confrontation with a somewhat definitive finale, but I don't know that anything has particularly changed in the city. In some ways, filmmaker James Rutenbeck gets caught between scales here, but then, that's where a lot of stories end up, especially when they involve race or poverty - it's not hard to see the large forces at work, but most stories are going to be about surviving them rather than bringing them down.
Filmmaker James Rutenbeck has been in the business for around 30 years, settling in the Boston area, and has taken to teaching "Clemente Courses" in the neighborhood of Dorchester. That's a program designed to give inner-city adults exposure to the humanities that they might not have received before. Two Black students in particular catch his attention - or at least agree to be filmed - in 2015: Kafi Dixon, a bus driver for the MBTA with a growing interest in urban farming, and Carl Chandler, caring for grandson Yadiel while his daughters concentrate on their education.
Kafi's story is the one most clearly entwined with the larger issues Rutenbeck points out early on - she's a state employee facing eviction and also working so that other women in the city can be more self-sufficient, but empty real estate is increasingly previous in Boston, and developers certainly have their eye on the parcel where Kafi has started her first farm. Rutenbeck points out that of the thousands of mortgage loans made as working-class neighborhoods gentrify and the Seaport is just developed out of whole cloth, only a trivial number are going to Black families. She doesn't feel that she's being taken seriously as she talks to people in city offices trying to make her farm official. Rutenbeck's empathy is clear, and though he makes a certain amount of effort to be invisible, he recognizes that this is impossible; having a white man with a camera in the room, even potentially, changes the environment, and he's not shy about expressing anger at how much this is the case.
Carl, meanwhile, is seldom in the middle of confrontations as dramatic as Kafi, which means they spend a little more time focused on his time in class, and the viewer quickly gets an idea of just how sharp he is, at one point spotting a hierarchy in ancient Egyptian art while his classmates are still seeing more surface-level properties. As with Kafi, one quickly gets a sense of much the filmmakers like and respect him, but it also highlights the extent to which one can find brains almost anywhere, but folks like Carl and Kafi don't get the same sort of encouragement when young and don't have the opportunities to climb out of a hole the way white people with just a little more money do.
There are moments when a viewer might suspect that Rutenbeck might have started out making a movie about the Clemente Courses program itself, and how studying philosophy and art can be just as valuable as the job-training programs that often seem more directly practical, if only because it gives one a better understanding of the big picture, as the reading is often used for transitions, and there's talk of economics and the city's racist history around busing. There are plenty of related stories that might be more dramatic, but Rutenbeck makes the choice to center Carl and Kafi whenever possible, making sure that when he includes himself or something more abstract, it's in a way that speaks about them, rather than positioning the teachers as saviors.
Has Boston particularly changed in the six years since production started? It doesn't seem that way; what reckonings have occurred have been more or less at the individual level. Not everybody is necessarily going to have the sort of determination Kafi and Carl show, although it certainly suggests that the right mindset and set of tools can make a big difference.
Also at eFilmCritic
Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts
Sunday, May 09, 2021
Sunday, January 11, 2015
This That Week In Tickets: 22 December 2014 - 28 December 2014
My cunning plan for using vacation time this year: Take the week of Christmas off and see if I'd be better off shopping during the hours when other folks are working than on the weekend or in the evening. It's not a bad plan, although it works best if you have a high-end chocolate shop to finish things off with.
Also helpful: A nut shop, toy stores, and a puzzle & game store. Believe it or not, I didn't hit the Red Sox team store.
After the first day of Christmas shopping, I went to the Brattle for their "Alt-Xmas" screening of Batman Returns, and that was an interesting experience; I didn't remember just how weird it was. After finishing the shopping on Tuesday, I decided to go with the Shane Black Violent Christmas Marathon while wrapping presents, getting through Iron Man Three and The Long Kiss Goodnight before finishing at 2am. I had The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ready to go, but didn't need them... Well, not then.
Wednesday afternoon - Christmas Eve - started off with Chinese import Love on the Cloud, which is an enjoyable romantic comedy, although it is a little too frantic for its own good. After that, a quick trip to the comic shop, put everything in the bag, set off for the train station...
And watch one of the three paper bags I had stuffed full of gifts fall apart because it was raining pretty hard and they were apparently highly compostable. Gather them up, get to Central Square, realize there will be no catching the Downeaster, so take the Red Line to South Station... and have the second bag split in half as I'm standing up. Happily, the other folks on the train both held the door and got me some canvas & plastic bags, but, man, was I ground down by the time I got to the bus. I wound up spending the night re-wrapping almost everything at my mother's house, wishing other people would come to me for the holidays just once (well, twice - it did happen once, seven years ago).
But, the brothers with the adorable nieces make the rules. We made a circuit Christmas morning - first to see Travis, Jen, and their awesome twin girls, who have apparently been watching Brave a lot lately and thus wanted bows and arrows like Merida. That should be fun! Then to my grandparents, then to Dan & Lara and their girls, who have gotten old enough to really like games, really starting to care about the outcomes. I wound up staying over there, helping put stuff together, reading to them, and finding that these girls can do one thing for a good long time if they are into it.
Friday, I headed back to Boston, and having nothing in the fridge, figured I had to go out to the fancy theater where they serve dinner in order to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in HFR 3D. Couldn't find a seat I liked in the really fancy section (so no steak), but they served a pertty passable burger up front. The movie... Well, at least now Peter Jackson can maybe go back to making stuff that's actually interesting.
Saturday's film was chosen on the basis of "The Gambler hasn't been reviewed on EFC, so I'll take it", and it was pretty good, some of the best work Mark Wahlberg has done, although it seems to work very hard to be clever.
Sunday was a much busier day - I used one of the gift cards I got for Christmas to see Exodus: Gods and Kings in 3D. It doesn't quite manage to transcend its weak source material the same way Noah does, but there's no doubt that Ridley Scott is a guy who knows how to use that third dimension (Prometheus was similarly gorgeous but dumb).
After that I went to the Art of the Brick exhibition at Faneuil Hall, which was pretty neat. The early sections, where Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya was reproducing & reinterpreting famous works, were okay, but the more he starts creating on his own, the niftier it got. And there was a dinosaur!
Last stop of the day (and vacation) was down the Green Line to the Coolidge, where I hoped to see Citizenfour but couldn't get there in time to buy a ticket for the 14-screen room it was playing in, so went for The Imitation Game instead. That was pretty good, although I suspect that the fact that we're getting major prestige biographical pictures about the likes of Alan Turing is a little more impressive than the actual movie itself.
It was back to work the next day, but sill a very productive week of family-seeing, niece-spoiling, and movie-watching.
Batman Returns
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 December 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Alt X-Mas, 35mm)
A few minutes into the Brattle's Christmas presentation of Batman Returns, I was willing to trade all three of Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batmovies for one more by Tim Burton with Michael Keaton, back when they were at their peaks. That's impossible, obviously, and I had talked myself down to maybe something like two for one by the climax, but was delighted to find that it was both weirder and more fun than I'd remembered it being.
I think it's a fairly reasonable reaction to have as the film starts and the audience gets reacquainted with Burton's Gotham City, an expanse of towering, interconnected skyscrapers with similarly-scaled status that looks like somebody built Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the 1920s and it's been decaying ever since. There's an opening that establishes Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot as an impossibly bad seed, though his parents' secretive attempt to dispatch him is similarly awful. Then it's the present day and garishly costumed villains are unveiling magnate Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) at the behest of the adult Cobblepot (Danny DeVito) while Batman (Michael Keaton) is busy with goons.
This vision of Gotham is probably the best ever put on film, and not just because it is full of references to silent movies I love (and remember, this was before Metropolis had the two restorations that returned it to its deserved prominence). Burton and his team create a city that is larger-than-life and run-down at the same time, but in a balanced way. As clearly as one can see that this is not a great place to live, even from aerial shots, it's not quite a post-apocalyptic hell, either. Better than any other adaptation - or indeed most runs on the comics - the filmmakers create a city that people would believably stay in, even as it drives them insane.
That's the other thing that works impressively well - Batman's villains get locked up in an asylum rather than a prison, and both DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer (in the role of Catwoman/Selina Kyle) are fantastic at being quite mad. It's different flavors - the Penguin is a murderous sociopath even if his rage is understandable, while Catwoman, afraid of nothing having survived a fall that should have killed her, is slowly losing her mooring to humanity (Pfeiffer is great - she makes a funny self-referential line into something also quite heartfelt). A lot of Batman's instability happens via production design - look at how empty Wayne Manor and the Batcave feel - though Michael Keaton complements Pfeiffer well as a troubled man also trying to be sane but not quite sure he knows how.
In some ways, that exposed the main issue not just with Batman Returns, but with most of the superhero movies of its era: There is a Bruce Wayne-shaped hole in the middle. The popular wisdom was that they were only as good as their villains, and while Marvel has made a mint in recent years focusing more on the heroes than their adversaries (quick, name an Iron Man villain!), Burton and his screenwriters focus so strongly on the villains that sometimes Batman can be shoved to the side of his own movie, leaving Michael Keaton with very little to do and less resolution at the end.
So he mostly stands around, posing in fight scenes that are relatively stiff, but still fairly lively. As things escalate, Burton and company make the action simultaneously bigger and weirder, and while things frequently threaten to careen completely out of control, there's always a sense of grand tragedy to go along with the absurdity of the situation. It's strange and sort of grotesque, but there's nothing that doesn't actually fit, especially in this insane setting.
And that's why, despite Christopher Nolan's "Dark Night" trilogy being more thought out and grounded, I can't help but think that this movie is the one that represents Batman best on-screen. It reflects the heightened reality comics can do almost as easily as realism, and I would love to see Gotham City's madness approached this way again.
Full review at EFC.
Iron Man Three
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Believe it or not, revisiting a film on video a mere year and a half after I've seen it on the big screen - and thus having the Blu-ray only sit on the shelf for about a year - is actually fairly quick for me. It's not quite enough time to be surprised because I don't remember the details any more, although there's still room to remember great bits and discover new details I didn't catch the first time through.
The good news: Iron Man Three holds up. It's a great big fun adventure movie that does an impressive job of navigating how these films will work in a post-Avengers world, gives the supporting cast plenty to do, and has some great big action scenes. It's also very much a Shane Black movie, and I really hope that all the big franchises - Marvel, DC, Star Wars - will continue doing this well in allowing guys with distinctive voices to use them even while being part of something bigger.
Anyway - my opinion hasn't changed much since I originally saw it; it's still highly recommended.
"Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Since I had the Iron Man Three BD already in and the TV series was going to be starting up in a couple of weeks, I figured I may as well give this a spin.
Who knows whether it was serving as a preliminary pilot for the series at the time or if it became one afterward, but it is certainly a fun fifteen-minute adventure story, setting up a situation, introducing a cast, and playing out a bit of action at a quick, exciting pace. It's great to see a supporting character who was able to grab a spotlight on her own get a check-in, especially since Hayley Atwell was set up to be left behind by the rest of the Marvel franchise. It's quite easy to see from how much of a kick this turned out to be why everyone involved would decide they wanted more.
The Long Kiss Goodnight
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
I don't know if I'd seen this one since it's original theatrical presentation (and, man, that means I may have paid for VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray copies of it; enjoy your residuals, folks), and that's not surprising; I like everyone involved but somehow never considered it a great movie.
Since then, I've come to know and love the pulp that serves as inspiration to writer Shane Black a bit more; it's a different movie once you've learned about Hammett and Chandler, even though it's no pastiche. Still, it's got the sort of borderline incomprehensible and silly plot that sort of private-eye story often featured because the writer was really more interested in everything around it. That "everything around it" is good stuff - Geena Davis as an amnesiac suburban mom discovering what kind of background she had (and then reconciling the two once her old persona returns to the fore), Sam Jackson as a low-rent private eye, and Brian Cox as a cynical old bastard who still might be the most honest man in an intelligence community crawling with self-serving sharks.
It may actually be Davis's best role (says the guy who hasn't actually seen Thelma & Louise); she splits her time as "Samantha" and "Charly" almost evenly, giving both aspects distinct characterizations and then doing a fine job pulling them together. Then-husband Renny Harlin handles the action well, and his tendency toward kind of overdoing the violence actually matches up well with Black's pulpy tendencies: It makes for a movie that's big, kind of ridiculous, and kind of crude, but which has an eye on what it's going for and never loses sight of it even while the audience is enjoying the explosions.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2014 in Showcase Cinemas SuperLux Chestnut Hill #3 (first-run, RealD HFR DCP)
Well, that's over with.
That something akin to relief is the dominant emotion at the end of a series made by a filmmaker I'm still fairly fond of is unfortunate, and I hope someday that the machinations of how Jackson wound up directing this Hobbit trilogy rather than just serving as a producer, and how it wound up split into three parts (it was just going to be two when filming started, if I recall correctly), and how something fans thought would be a great addition became a bloated obligation... Well, I hope a great book comes out of it. It wound up being just decent movies.
Why is that? Personally, I think it was having too close an eye on The Lord of the Rings. The original The Hobbit was a fantasy made with kids in mind, and whenever Jackson is building a kids' movie, these things are an awful lot of fun. There's a great deal of pure silliness in the destruction/escape from Lake Town, for instance, and the moment when Martin Freeman's Bilbo steps up and says he is the one who has been hiding the stone that Thorin (Richard Armitage) has become obsessed with, because he just wants everybody to get along, is played with a beautiful earnestness. There's joy to it, even if tragedy comes later.
But whenever the film starts looking toward setting up The Fellowship of the Ring, it feels like a distraction. This is material that is not going to pay off by the end of this movie/trilogy, but there's nothing in the details that gives us a new perspective on what we saw ten-plus years ago. It's just seeing it played out, and it messes with the tone of this one, padding it needlessly.
So we forget that there is some great action in here, a really good performance by Martin Freeman, a genuine moment of delight when Billy Connolly shows up as a dwarf prince - even if it does lead to the question of why the heck he hasn't been in all three movies - and a goofy Stephen Fry. The 48fps photography looks a bit odd at ground-level, with the sets probably needing a lot more detail to give the eye enough to look at with all that clarity, although when the action and 3D-centric scenes kick in, it looks beautiful.
So, we're done. Maybe now Peter Jackson can get to do his Tintin movie, or even better, his first movie that really comes from his own head in almost twenty years.
Exodus: Gods and Kings
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #12 (first-run, RealD DCP)
I joked above about Exodus having to deal with weak source material - say what you will about the Bible/Torah/Koran, but folks have been finding some worth in it for thousands of years - but I do think it's kind of unavoidable when tackling the Old Testament to have trouble dealing with how bloodthirsty its God is. Within the movie, Moses talks about how the Israelites "wrestling" with their deity isn't the same as opposing it, and I think that director Ridley Scott and his writers do want to do some of that wrestling, but don't quite have the nerve. This film is not Noah, where Darren Aronofsky was unafraid to draw parallels with the modern world, let the audience ponder what both what that kind of blind obedience to a vengeful God makes you as a man and the horrors that can come through interpretation.
Instead, there's an empty irony in how Christian Bale's Moses starts out disdaining prophecy but becomes the subject of one. There's a subtext about how God's terror attacks upon Egyptian civilians is what is ultimately effective, compared to Moses's more traditionally honorable campaign, but it plays as just a rendering of Judeo-Christian mythology, not an examination of its message. As a result, a fairly talented cast has nowhere to go but into melodrama.
That said: Wow, can Ridley Scott make a beautiful movie. Just like with Prometheus, which was similarly dumb but pretty, he uses 3D to excellent effect, building a wonderfully realized ancient Egypt, creating a sense of space during action scenes, and otherwise rendering quite frankly amazing spectacle. It's almost a pity that he didn't use it to do something not attached to a myth that is rather problematic in modern times, because while an Egyptian melodrama not connected to the Old Testament might not have sold as many tickets (and might have caught even more deserved flack for its very pale cast), it could have been a story that wasn't so boxed in.
The Imitation Game
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, RealD DCP)
The Imitation Game caught some flack for how it doesn't follow Alan Turing's life all the way to the exceedingly bitter end, although I think that's somewhat undeserved; by the time it finishes, there can be zero doubt as to how the homophobic laws of the time devastated him. Despite not rubbing the audience's nose in the last days of Turing's life in the most complete way possible, it gets its point across.
Up until then, it's quite the intriguing film, as it manages to be a great many things to a great many people: A historical thriller, a drama about what it means to be discriminated against, whether as a gay man or a scientifically-inclined woman in a society that does not have a place for you, a character piece. Because history is messy and screenwriter Graham Moore didn't feel the need to streamline it into something more comfortable, The Imitation Game sometimes feels like it is trying to do too much: The moral choices to be made after Enigma is cracked are a whole movie on their own, as is the story of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), a brilliant mathematician in her own right who becomes Alan's beard and closest friend.
Knightley is great, although I'm still not quite sure what to make of Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. Early on, there seems to be a reason for his broadness, like he's trying to play up his arrogance as a smokescreen to hide his homosexuality, but eventually the realization hits that he is that guy, and it becomes a little harder to be sure what to make of him in that case. It's a flashy role, one which for better or worse plays into the popular perception of Cumberbatch's on-screen persona, and by the time the film ends, I'm not quite sure whether that helps or hurts, or whether it's a fair criticism or not.
One thing I did like, that I'm not sure the folks who haven't done a lot of science, math, or computer work may not appreciate, is how much of the film is about understanding Turing's mindset in building "Christopher": Our normal approach to a problem is to try and solve it ourselves, whereas Turing proposes finding a way to automate the process, to understand the problem and take the mechanical parts out of human hands and leave them to a machine that can do them quickly and by rote without getting bored or distracted and thus making mistakes. As someone who has done a lot of that as part of my work, it's nice to see that communicated so strongly.
Also helpful: A nut shop, toy stores, and a puzzle & game store. Believe it or not, I didn't hit the Red Sox team store.
After the first day of Christmas shopping, I went to the Brattle for their "Alt-Xmas" screening of Batman Returns, and that was an interesting experience; I didn't remember just how weird it was. After finishing the shopping on Tuesday, I decided to go with the Shane Black Violent Christmas Marathon while wrapping presents, getting through Iron Man Three and The Long Kiss Goodnight before finishing at 2am. I had The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ready to go, but didn't need them... Well, not then.
Wednesday afternoon - Christmas Eve - started off with Chinese import Love on the Cloud, which is an enjoyable romantic comedy, although it is a little too frantic for its own good. After that, a quick trip to the comic shop, put everything in the bag, set off for the train station...
And watch one of the three paper bags I had stuffed full of gifts fall apart because it was raining pretty hard and they were apparently highly compostable. Gather them up, get to Central Square, realize there will be no catching the Downeaster, so take the Red Line to South Station... and have the second bag split in half as I'm standing up. Happily, the other folks on the train both held the door and got me some canvas & plastic bags, but, man, was I ground down by the time I got to the bus. I wound up spending the night re-wrapping almost everything at my mother's house, wishing other people would come to me for the holidays just once (well, twice - it did happen once, seven years ago).
But, the brothers with the adorable nieces make the rules. We made a circuit Christmas morning - first to see Travis, Jen, and their awesome twin girls, who have apparently been watching Brave a lot lately and thus wanted bows and arrows like Merida. That should be fun! Then to my grandparents, then to Dan & Lara and their girls, who have gotten old enough to really like games, really starting to care about the outcomes. I wound up staying over there, helping put stuff together, reading to them, and finding that these girls can do one thing for a good long time if they are into it.
Friday, I headed back to Boston, and having nothing in the fridge, figured I had to go out to the fancy theater where they serve dinner in order to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in HFR 3D. Couldn't find a seat I liked in the really fancy section (so no steak), but they served a pertty passable burger up front. The movie... Well, at least now Peter Jackson can maybe go back to making stuff that's actually interesting.
Saturday's film was chosen on the basis of "The Gambler hasn't been reviewed on EFC, so I'll take it", and it was pretty good, some of the best work Mark Wahlberg has done, although it seems to work very hard to be clever.
Sunday was a much busier day - I used one of the gift cards I got for Christmas to see Exodus: Gods and Kings in 3D. It doesn't quite manage to transcend its weak source material the same way Noah does, but there's no doubt that Ridley Scott is a guy who knows how to use that third dimension (Prometheus was similarly gorgeous but dumb).
After that I went to the Art of the Brick exhibition at Faneuil Hall, which was pretty neat. The early sections, where Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya was reproducing & reinterpreting famous works, were okay, but the more he starts creating on his own, the niftier it got. And there was a dinosaur!
Last stop of the day (and vacation) was down the Green Line to the Coolidge, where I hoped to see Citizenfour but couldn't get there in time to buy a ticket for the 14-screen room it was playing in, so went for The Imitation Game instead. That was pretty good, although I suspect that the fact that we're getting major prestige biographical pictures about the likes of Alan Turing is a little more impressive than the actual movie itself.
It was back to work the next day, but sill a very productive week of family-seeing, niece-spoiling, and movie-watching.
Batman Returns
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 December 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Alt X-Mas, 35mm)
A few minutes into the Brattle's Christmas presentation of Batman Returns, I was willing to trade all three of Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batmovies for one more by Tim Burton with Michael Keaton, back when they were at their peaks. That's impossible, obviously, and I had talked myself down to maybe something like two for one by the climax, but was delighted to find that it was both weirder and more fun than I'd remembered it being.
I think it's a fairly reasonable reaction to have as the film starts and the audience gets reacquainted with Burton's Gotham City, an expanse of towering, interconnected skyscrapers with similarly-scaled status that looks like somebody built Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the 1920s and it's been decaying ever since. There's an opening that establishes Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot as an impossibly bad seed, though his parents' secretive attempt to dispatch him is similarly awful. Then it's the present day and garishly costumed villains are unveiling magnate Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) at the behest of the adult Cobblepot (Danny DeVito) while Batman (Michael Keaton) is busy with goons.
This vision of Gotham is probably the best ever put on film, and not just because it is full of references to silent movies I love (and remember, this was before Metropolis had the two restorations that returned it to its deserved prominence). Burton and his team create a city that is larger-than-life and run-down at the same time, but in a balanced way. As clearly as one can see that this is not a great place to live, even from aerial shots, it's not quite a post-apocalyptic hell, either. Better than any other adaptation - or indeed most runs on the comics - the filmmakers create a city that people would believably stay in, even as it drives them insane.
That's the other thing that works impressively well - Batman's villains get locked up in an asylum rather than a prison, and both DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer (in the role of Catwoman/Selina Kyle) are fantastic at being quite mad. It's different flavors - the Penguin is a murderous sociopath even if his rage is understandable, while Catwoman, afraid of nothing having survived a fall that should have killed her, is slowly losing her mooring to humanity (Pfeiffer is great - she makes a funny self-referential line into something also quite heartfelt). A lot of Batman's instability happens via production design - look at how empty Wayne Manor and the Batcave feel - though Michael Keaton complements Pfeiffer well as a troubled man also trying to be sane but not quite sure he knows how.
In some ways, that exposed the main issue not just with Batman Returns, but with most of the superhero movies of its era: There is a Bruce Wayne-shaped hole in the middle. The popular wisdom was that they were only as good as their villains, and while Marvel has made a mint in recent years focusing more on the heroes than their adversaries (quick, name an Iron Man villain!), Burton and his screenwriters focus so strongly on the villains that sometimes Batman can be shoved to the side of his own movie, leaving Michael Keaton with very little to do and less resolution at the end.
So he mostly stands around, posing in fight scenes that are relatively stiff, but still fairly lively. As things escalate, Burton and company make the action simultaneously bigger and weirder, and while things frequently threaten to careen completely out of control, there's always a sense of grand tragedy to go along with the absurdity of the situation. It's strange and sort of grotesque, but there's nothing that doesn't actually fit, especially in this insane setting.
And that's why, despite Christopher Nolan's "Dark Night" trilogy being more thought out and grounded, I can't help but think that this movie is the one that represents Batman best on-screen. It reflects the heightened reality comics can do almost as easily as realism, and I would love to see Gotham City's madness approached this way again.
Full review at EFC.
Iron Man Three
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Believe it or not, revisiting a film on video a mere year and a half after I've seen it on the big screen - and thus having the Blu-ray only sit on the shelf for about a year - is actually fairly quick for me. It's not quite enough time to be surprised because I don't remember the details any more, although there's still room to remember great bits and discover new details I didn't catch the first time through.
The good news: Iron Man Three holds up. It's a great big fun adventure movie that does an impressive job of navigating how these films will work in a post-Avengers world, gives the supporting cast plenty to do, and has some great big action scenes. It's also very much a Shane Black movie, and I really hope that all the big franchises - Marvel, DC, Star Wars - will continue doing this well in allowing guys with distinctive voices to use them even while being part of something bigger.
Anyway - my opinion hasn't changed much since I originally saw it; it's still highly recommended.
"Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Since I had the Iron Man Three BD already in and the TV series was going to be starting up in a couple of weeks, I figured I may as well give this a spin.
Who knows whether it was serving as a preliminary pilot for the series at the time or if it became one afterward, but it is certainly a fun fifteen-minute adventure story, setting up a situation, introducing a cast, and playing out a bit of action at a quick, exciting pace. It's great to see a supporting character who was able to grab a spotlight on her own get a check-in, especially since Hayley Atwell was set up to be left behind by the rest of the Marvel franchise. It's quite easy to see from how much of a kick this turned out to be why everyone involved would decide they wanted more.
The Long Kiss Goodnight
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
I don't know if I'd seen this one since it's original theatrical presentation (and, man, that means I may have paid for VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray copies of it; enjoy your residuals, folks), and that's not surprising; I like everyone involved but somehow never considered it a great movie.
Since then, I've come to know and love the pulp that serves as inspiration to writer Shane Black a bit more; it's a different movie once you've learned about Hammett and Chandler, even though it's no pastiche. Still, it's got the sort of borderline incomprehensible and silly plot that sort of private-eye story often featured because the writer was really more interested in everything around it. That "everything around it" is good stuff - Geena Davis as an amnesiac suburban mom discovering what kind of background she had (and then reconciling the two once her old persona returns to the fore), Sam Jackson as a low-rent private eye, and Brian Cox as a cynical old bastard who still might be the most honest man in an intelligence community crawling with self-serving sharks.
It may actually be Davis's best role (says the guy who hasn't actually seen Thelma & Louise); she splits her time as "Samantha" and "Charly" almost evenly, giving both aspects distinct characterizations and then doing a fine job pulling them together. Then-husband Renny Harlin handles the action well, and his tendency toward kind of overdoing the violence actually matches up well with Black's pulpy tendencies: It makes for a movie that's big, kind of ridiculous, and kind of crude, but which has an eye on what it's going for and never loses sight of it even while the audience is enjoying the explosions.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2014 in Showcase Cinemas SuperLux Chestnut Hill #3 (first-run, RealD HFR DCP)
Well, that's over with.
That something akin to relief is the dominant emotion at the end of a series made by a filmmaker I'm still fairly fond of is unfortunate, and I hope someday that the machinations of how Jackson wound up directing this Hobbit trilogy rather than just serving as a producer, and how it wound up split into three parts (it was just going to be two when filming started, if I recall correctly), and how something fans thought would be a great addition became a bloated obligation... Well, I hope a great book comes out of it. It wound up being just decent movies.
Why is that? Personally, I think it was having too close an eye on The Lord of the Rings. The original The Hobbit was a fantasy made with kids in mind, and whenever Jackson is building a kids' movie, these things are an awful lot of fun. There's a great deal of pure silliness in the destruction/escape from Lake Town, for instance, and the moment when Martin Freeman's Bilbo steps up and says he is the one who has been hiding the stone that Thorin (Richard Armitage) has become obsessed with, because he just wants everybody to get along, is played with a beautiful earnestness. There's joy to it, even if tragedy comes later.
But whenever the film starts looking toward setting up The Fellowship of the Ring, it feels like a distraction. This is material that is not going to pay off by the end of this movie/trilogy, but there's nothing in the details that gives us a new perspective on what we saw ten-plus years ago. It's just seeing it played out, and it messes with the tone of this one, padding it needlessly.
So we forget that there is some great action in here, a really good performance by Martin Freeman, a genuine moment of delight when Billy Connolly shows up as a dwarf prince - even if it does lead to the question of why the heck he hasn't been in all three movies - and a goofy Stephen Fry. The 48fps photography looks a bit odd at ground-level, with the sets probably needing a lot more detail to give the eye enough to look at with all that clarity, although when the action and 3D-centric scenes kick in, it looks beautiful.
So, we're done. Maybe now Peter Jackson can get to do his Tintin movie, or even better, his first movie that really comes from his own head in almost twenty years.
Exodus: Gods and Kings
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #12 (first-run, RealD DCP)
I joked above about Exodus having to deal with weak source material - say what you will about the Bible/Torah/Koran, but folks have been finding some worth in it for thousands of years - but I do think it's kind of unavoidable when tackling the Old Testament to have trouble dealing with how bloodthirsty its God is. Within the movie, Moses talks about how the Israelites "wrestling" with their deity isn't the same as opposing it, and I think that director Ridley Scott and his writers do want to do some of that wrestling, but don't quite have the nerve. This film is not Noah, where Darren Aronofsky was unafraid to draw parallels with the modern world, let the audience ponder what both what that kind of blind obedience to a vengeful God makes you as a man and the horrors that can come through interpretation.
Instead, there's an empty irony in how Christian Bale's Moses starts out disdaining prophecy but becomes the subject of one. There's a subtext about how God's terror attacks upon Egyptian civilians is what is ultimately effective, compared to Moses's more traditionally honorable campaign, but it plays as just a rendering of Judeo-Christian mythology, not an examination of its message. As a result, a fairly talented cast has nowhere to go but into melodrama.
That said: Wow, can Ridley Scott make a beautiful movie. Just like with Prometheus, which was similarly dumb but pretty, he uses 3D to excellent effect, building a wonderfully realized ancient Egypt, creating a sense of space during action scenes, and otherwise rendering quite frankly amazing spectacle. It's almost a pity that he didn't use it to do something not attached to a myth that is rather problematic in modern times, because while an Egyptian melodrama not connected to the Old Testament might not have sold as many tickets (and might have caught even more deserved flack for its very pale cast), it could have been a story that wasn't so boxed in.
The Imitation Game
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, RealD DCP)
The Imitation Game caught some flack for how it doesn't follow Alan Turing's life all the way to the exceedingly bitter end, although I think that's somewhat undeserved; by the time it finishes, there can be zero doubt as to how the homophobic laws of the time devastated him. Despite not rubbing the audience's nose in the last days of Turing's life in the most complete way possible, it gets its point across.
Up until then, it's quite the intriguing film, as it manages to be a great many things to a great many people: A historical thriller, a drama about what it means to be discriminated against, whether as a gay man or a scientifically-inclined woman in a society that does not have a place for you, a character piece. Because history is messy and screenwriter Graham Moore didn't feel the need to streamline it into something more comfortable, The Imitation Game sometimes feels like it is trying to do too much: The moral choices to be made after Enigma is cracked are a whole movie on their own, as is the story of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), a brilliant mathematician in her own right who becomes Alan's beard and closest friend.
Knightley is great, although I'm still not quite sure what to make of Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. Early on, there seems to be a reason for his broadness, like he's trying to play up his arrogance as a smokescreen to hide his homosexuality, but eventually the realization hits that he is that guy, and it becomes a little harder to be sure what to make of him in that case. It's a flashy role, one which for better or worse plays into the popular perception of Cumberbatch's on-screen persona, and by the time the film ends, I'm not quite sure whether that helps or hurts, or whether it's a fair criticism or not.
One thing I did like, that I'm not sure the folks who haven't done a lot of science, math, or computer work may not appreciate, is how much of the film is about understanding Turing's mindset in building "Christopher": Our normal approach to a problem is to try and solve it ourselves, whereas Turing proposes finding a way to automate the process, to understand the problem and take the mechanical parts out of human hands and leave them to a machine that can do them quickly and by rote without getting bored or distracted and thus making mistakes. As someone who has done a lot of that as part of my work, it's nice to see that communicated so strongly.
Friday, April 26, 2013
This Week Month In Tickets: 25 March 2013 - 21 April 2013
So, between BUFF at the start of this four-week period and the chaos at the end, and being busy seeing movies and baseball in between, this has slipped. Sorry. At least there's nothing coming up to keep it from happening again...
Oh, right, IFFBoston started tonight. Well, let's hope it doesn't slip quite so much.
25 March - 31 March
1 April - 7 April
8 April - 14 April
15 April - 21 April
Not going to lie - when I left for the last day of BUFF, I was hoping that they'd be using green tickets for passholders that day. Wouldn't that have looked cool? Instead, they used purple, but also just took them instead of ripping them instead of waving us in. It's like they don't care how an obscure blog looks at all!
As you can see, it was a busy week - Lore on what I think was its last week in town, Spring Breakers, and all five days of the Boston Underground Film Festival (count 'em - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!). Plus, apparently, it was Easter or something on Sunday. Apparently that's a thing.
Spring Breakers
* * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)
While waiting in one of the two or three lines necessary for to get into BUFF the next night, I heard a group of people dissing Stoker and praising Spring Breakers, and, man, I had a hard time imagining people being more wrong. Actually, I can - Spring Breakers is not an actual terrible movie, just one that failed to impress me.
This is where I half-expect people to tell me I didn't get it, but I think I did - I just didn't like it. Sure, writer/director Harmony Korine exaggerates the whole "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon by using actresses known for their wholesome Disney Channel material and pushing the exploitation story from semi-innocent/supposedly-empowering half-naked-girl-power into straight-up psychopathy. That's kind of clever, but it's also just about of the end of what Korine does with it. So, ha-ha, bros, that tacky thing you idiots go for is actually really vile, and I've managed to lure you into a movie that insults you by making a satire almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
It's just mean, and it's not mean to go along with an interesting story - I never cared about what James Franco's character was up to as a local gangster, nor the self-discovery of the four girls who fall in with him. It's just stuff that happens, and all Korine has done is to mock something everybody mocks already. Sure, it's better-shot and the girls (Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson) play their parts well, but, honestly, it's a parlor trick, and a boring one at that.
Stubless: Renoir at the Coolidge (10am, Sunday 7 April 2013)
After a festival, it's nice to decompress for a bit, spend some time just writing and watching baseball on TV. Well, fat chance. Starbuck was only going to be playing for that one week, Thale only for the one night, and then the Brattle did their Schlock Around the Clock even the next weekend. At least that was a fun event, with lots of spiffy 35mm prints. Thale was okay, although I hoped for a bit more from it. Starbuck was also pretty charming; I wound up quite fond of it. And while Renoir wasn't great, it certainly looked great.
I considered going to more of Schlock Around the Clock, actually, but...
Evil Dead (2013)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)
... I wanted to see the new Evil Dead with an opening weekend crowd after the sun went down and that's when I had my chance. Horror movies, like comedies, are best with a crowd to feed off each other's reactions, so even when you don't necessarily like the way other people in the theater act, it's what you have to have.
The kind of funny thing about this verison of Evil Dead is that it kind of suffers for being an "Evil Dead" movie, at least if you're familiar with the source material. Director Fede Alvarez, his writing partner Rodo Sayagues (and an uncredited Diablo Cody) put together a fine spam-in-a-can movie, no dobut, but they've also built it around Mia (Jane Levy) trying to quit drugs cold-turkey, and that suggests a story where you don't necessarily know how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is in her head. Of course, we know what Evil Dead is (and we've seen how this one opens), so that specific suspense isn't really there even though the cast is good enough to play it. There's still some more depth to the story - it ultimately becomes about being there for family as much as just random mayhem - but the dismemberment is what you're there for.
Still, Alvarez and company are able to keep this a damn fine experience in grueling horror even as they wink at the source material, tending to fake the audience out - we gird ourselves against what we remember from the original movie only to have things veer off in a new gross manner. One of the fun things about the Evil Dead series is that everybody gets to play both hero and villain at some point, and another is the copious blood, which Alvarez doesn't stint with. It's not the most original horror movie, but it is pretty intense for something with a studio behind it.
Stubless: Jurassic Park at Jordan's Furniture Reading (2:15pm, Sunday 14 April 2013)
My first trip to Fenway Park this year was a heck of a way to spend an evening - what started out as a pretty good game with the Red Sox appearing to have things in hand wound up having a pretty miserable rain delay in the middle, and then the end featured an epic ninth-inning collapse. You leave the ballpark kind of stunned after that.
But, before that, I did a couple of nights seeing things by interesting directors. Sharply different results: The Host made me downright angry at how the apparent terribleness of the source material seemed to take down a decent filmmaker in Andrew Niccol, while Christian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills wound up being right up my alley, an insistent indictment of religion, although one that seems to lead the audience to its position rather than browbeating them.
It was back to Kendall Square on Saturday night for a double feature, although that wasn't the original plan - I'd originally gone to Boston Common to see 42, only to find the showtime that worked for me wasn't in MoviePass's database. So, turn around and head back to Cambridge, pick Koch based on starting time, a likely short run, and a director Q&A, follow that up with From Up on Poppy Hill, because it's a quick turnaround.
Sunday started out as 3D-day, where I used a voucher to see the cheap show of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and then hopped a train and bus to make it to Jordan's Furniture just in time for Jurassic Park in Imax 3D. A little grocery baseball on TV and I was ready to see The Company You Keep to round the week out. I had no idea that I would kind of need to store moviegoing up!
Kokuriko-zaka kara (From Up on Poppy Hill)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #18 (first-run, DCP, English Dubbed)
When this movie got booked, I found myself grumbling a bit - while the company that distributes the movie is called "GKids", Studio Ghibli's films do have a substantial adult audience that generally prefers to see them subtitled, and since you'd no longer have to wrangle two prints to show both English and Japanese versions (even if a DCP doesn't have the subtitling and soundtrack options of a DVD, handling two hard drives shouldn't be difficult). But, no, not even the 9:10pm show is subtitled.
At least this time it's a pretty good dub. Part of the reason for it, I think, is that the screenplay (by, among others, Hayao Miyazaki) feels a little less formal than other Ghibli films involving teenagers - at least in the English-language version, these kids quip and joke with each other, and the girls aren't particularly shy or demure, even when they've got a crush on a boy. And while much of the voice casting is decent but low-key, Beau Bridges really should do more anime dubbing; he nails the bigger-than-life personality of a certain character type perfectly.
Amid all the fun, the movie throws up some serious obstacles to its first-love plot, and while it could be all gnashing of teeth, it's maturely matter-of-fact, with one character even stating that he's not going to act like he's in some TV melodrama. Director Goro Miyazaki and the writers turn the screws a little bit, recognizing that sometimes knowing something awful isn't as bad as not knowing whether something awful is true. The resolution is somewhat pat, but it's something the movie has quietly earned, so the audience isn't likely to mind.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, Real-D 3D)
What a peculiar thing G.I. Joe: Retaliation is - it's a direct follow-up to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, picking up on that movie's ending, but pretty much wiping the slate clean, character-wise. It's the ultimate example of the brand beign the drawas opposed to the cast or filmmakers. And, honestly, I don't really think the first needed such a complete purge - it has its weaknesses, but it was fun more often than not.
This one has a decent cast of Joes - I'm generally not going to complain about Dwayne Johnson and Adrianne Palicki starring in a movie - but the ninja stuff is kind of a waste of Lee Byung-hun, despite containing the best action scene in the movie. Bruce Willis is kind of superfluous; I can't see how the movie would be much different without him. The trouble is the villains. Johnathan Pryce, playing a master of disguise who has replaced the President of the United States, is entertaining, but clearly not the alpha villain; Luke Bracey's Cobra Commander is generic and off-screen through much of the movie.
Plus, the climax is off in every way possible. Forget the question of just how the ninjas wind up being brought into Cobra's inner circle pretty much overnight; that might be boring and easy to cut. We don't get that big special-effects scene of London being devastated until late in the last act, when having it earlier could have really defined the stakes more than "the one guy who came back from the first movie dies", and it makes the Joes' response look kind of small-potatoes.
Jurassic Park
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (20th Anniversary re-release, Imax-branded 3D)
Guys, Jurassic Park is still pretty darn awesome. Sure, it hits some of its themes without subtlety, and the characters Steven Spielberg inherited from Michael Crichton's novel are kind of thin. As a guy who loves science, I kind of hate Crichton's distrust of it, here personified in the most obnoxious way possible by Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm. But the filmmakers set out to create the best action/adventure featuring dinosaurs eve, and they succeeded.
When you've got some time, take a look at the first big action scene, when the T-Rex attacks the jeeps, and kind of marvel at how great Spielberg is at putting it together. He takes what had been kind of a funny scene - the characters being disappointed that the dinosaurs aren't showing up - and then builds the tension up just enough so that we're ready for the big jump into all-out action. There's horror movie gore in it as the goat's leg lands on the jeep, freaking the kids out, and then once the T-Rex shows up, it's a masterfully composed sequence: The dinosaur's head pushes the car, the people scramble to stay behind it, pushing down on the overturned car makes it harder to get out, this motion leads to the edge (which appears to go down forever due to a nifty 3D effect), which Alan and Lex have to climb down, leading to the car... There's a ton of moving parts, but Spielberg and cinematographer Dean Cundey always have the exact right angle to show what's going on without resorting to slow motion or just having two things smash into another and calling that action. It's one thing leading to another clearly and quickly, and right in the middle, Spielberg injects some of the themes that define his work, with a panicky Lex crying "he left us!" - referring to the lawyer who had been sharing the kids' jeep, but remember that she and Timmy are on this trip because their parents are going through a divorce, so this big action scene how has this very human dimension injected into it without reducing the crazy science fiction stuff to a mere metaphor.
Seriously, that's one of the best action sequences ever made. And there's two or three more like it coming, including some virtuoso editing when Grant & the kids are climbing the fence while Ellie & Muldoon are trying to switch the power on with Malcolm & Hammon on the other end of the walkie talkie. "Clever girl!" The can full of embryos becoming a fossil itself. "Let's hope they don't figure out how to open doors!" Tyrannosaurus Rex living up to its name. And it still looks darn good twenty years later - some of the animatronics may be a bit stiff, but the filmmakers never overreach what they can do. The 3D upgrade is nice, although only rarely a big deal. It's a shame Jordan's doesn't run genuine sideways-70mm IMAX any more; the digital projection was occasionally fuzzy, especially with things in the middle distance that maybe should have been more clear.
Then again, I was in the second row looking up at a six-story screen because I arrived just a couple minutes before showtime. Not complaining - I didn't haul my butt out to Reading to not have life-sized 3D dinosaurs in my lap - but, man, I wish Colin Treverrow was shooting the next sequel with the big cameras. That would be genuinely awesome.
Stubless: Still Mine at Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (10am, Sunday 21 April 2013) and Buster Keaton Shorts at the Brattle Theatre (7:30pm, Sunday 21 April 2013)
Also stubless: Everything horrible that happened this week. I'd figured on going to see something downtown Monday evening, but a couple of bombs at the end of the Boston Marathon scotched that. I said it elsewhere on the blog, but it's worth re-iterating: What kind of monster attacks the Marathon? The elite runners are from every country, ethnicity, and culture; the rest are just ordinary people doing something very difficult, often as a way to raise money for charity. I went straight home instead, and then mostly continued a busy week as normal until I got text messages on the way out the door on Friday, telling me to turn on the TV. That's when I heard of the mess the previous night and that the T wouldn't be running. I let WCVB run, but mostly went into the back room and tried to work.
It wasn't really an act of defiance, trying to do normal stuff; I just get antsy doing nothing. I went to Antiviral after the "shelter-in-place" order was lifted, because I wanted to see it and the Saturday midnight show was out of the question (I wanted to see Still Mine there Sunday morning, and the folks at the theater probably wouldn't let me spend the night). I was glad to see a fair amount of other people out that night; if we were making a statement, I guess, it was that as much as the attack angered us, we were going to treat it as an irritant, rather than life-changing.
I wouldn't be free of it right away; I had tickets for Saturday's ballgame, where security was tighter than usual but the pregame ceremonies were, as usual on such a big day, excellent. That's the game that will probably become known as the "our fucking city" game, which was actually great baseball in addition to being cathartic: David Ortiz came back from injury, Mike Napoli and Daniel Nava continued murdering baseballs, and Clay Buchholz continued to be a beast. I did have to to scratch my heads at some of the drunks doing "USA!" chants - I mean, I love my country, but this was a local attack, with the man who had been captured a citizen. It's okay to be provincial at times, even if an "us versus them" mindset generally does more harm than good.
Anyway: Movies happened again after that; I headed to Boston Common for Oblivion, then slept fast enough to get to Still Mine in the morning - got there early but was seated at the last moment, having waited like half an hour for a crepe and a smoothie. I limped home because my new shoes were digging into my ankles in a really painful way (#BostonStrong!), re-emerging just in time for Not So Silent Cinema's Buster Keaton Shorts, because Buster Keaton.
Antiviral
* * (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run/@fter Midnite, digital)
I wanted to like this movie more than many I've seen in some time; Brandon Cronenberg's first feature has him doing the same sort of grotesque, satirical body-horror that his father made his name with but has eventually moved away from. And Cronenberg fils certailly has enough cool ideas to be worth watching, but he also doesn't seem to have his father's skill at teasing a story out of it that makes the audience shake as well as squirm.
Antiviral isn't really boring, at least, but it is kind of nonsensical. I can deal with a world where people eat 3D-printed meat grown from the DNA of celebrities and pay to contract their recent illnesses; I don't know where faking one's death makes any sense in it, though. The motives of the characters seemed vague rather than alien. The late bits about corporate ruthlessness didn't quite have the teeth of the attacks on celebrity culture.
I'm kind of torn on whether I wish Caleb Landry Jones and Sarah Gadon had better characters to play, too. Gadon, especially; she was good in Cronenberg pêre's Cosmopolis last year, and her character here has the potential for a tragic arc disproving the "celebrities are not people" assertion from earlier on in the movie as she suffers out of the limelight, but there's an argument for keeping her cryptic as well. It doesn't quite work out for me, though - I see the ideas, but I have a hard time getting excited about them.
Oblivion
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)
Here's something to ponder - if Oblivion had come out thirty-ish years ago, I would have wanted all the toys from it. Today, big sci-fi epics are so common that there's no toy line for this at all, despite it being full of cool and merchandisable things.
Kind of surprising, because it sort of feels like the kind of movie that's built to sell toys; it's a bunch of not hugely original ideas pieced together in a fairly capable form. Actually, "fairly capable" undersells it - co-writer/director Joseph Kosinski executes this movie very well indeed - he stages actions scenes that look cool and are easy to follow, and knows how to give something expressionless and mechanical genuine menace. He deploys Tom Cruise well, and while Cruise may sort of be aging out of this sort of movie (he's noticeably older than his female co-stars in close-up), he has an easy charisma in the part, as much as you can when you start a movie with "after a mandatory memory wipe..."
The story fits together, more or less - it's easy to find holes but just as easy to smooth them over (though I think I might have preferred it without the opening narration). It's a shame that they couldn't come up with a more clever line for the climax than the one f-bomb PG-13 allows. The music by M83 is pretty great - it's modern and driving without feeling particularly unusual (Kosinski apparently has a knack for this; the Daft Punk soundtrack was arguably the best part of Tron: Legacy). The supporting cast is nice, although there's no question that the movie is about Tom Cruise with a side of Morgan Freeman.
And, man, there is stuff in it that would make great toys.
Buster Keaton Shorts
Weird thing - I think I've seen all four Buster Keaton shorts presented relatively recently. Within the last couple years, anyway. I've already got reviews for "The Goat" and "One Week" elsewhere, so I'll leave those to be read in those posts (the one which includes "The Goat" has just been crazy popular over the last few weeks; I'm guessing someone linked to it when talking about the Somerville Theatre's upcoming silent series). But let's get to the other two!
"The High Sign"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Not-So-Silent-Cinema, digital)
A thoroughly goofy short which has Buster tossed off a train, disrespect some cops, then stumble into the service of both a fiendish secret society and the man they intend to assassinate while working at a shooting gallery, and then fight villains off in a house filled with secret passages and trap doors. All within twenty minutes! It's a remarkable dense bit of silent comedy, with more intricate set-pieces than many current features have.
Some bits of the setting and humor are dated, but nothing that relies on Buster's ingenuity both as a filmmaker and a character. It's actually an amazing bit of filmmaking, both technically and in pacing, even if it does include some jokes early on that are only amusing, rather than gut-busting.
"Cops"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Not-So-Silent-Cinema, digital)
"Cops" once again finds Buster Keaton in trouble with the law, as he was with "The Goat", this time as a love-struck but trouble-finding young man whose attempts to make enough money to woo the mayor's daughter find him accidentally committing a number of crimes, until finally the city's whole police force is after him.
Like almost all Keaton films, it's frequently very funny, especially since Keaton has a knack for escalation, even within the confines of a short. Some of the gags here aren't necessarily among his funniest - some are undoubtedly funnier in the context of the 1920s, some just have a set-up that victimizes people in a way that's not entirely amusing - but it's got a pretty good chase or two, and it's quite funny to watch Buster dig himself into a bigger and bigger hole.
Made it this far? Have yourself some Horrible Photography!
That there is Not-So-Silent Cinema, taken from the Brattle's balcony. Kyle Tuttle plays banjo, Brendan Cooney is on keyboards (he also composed the scores), and Andy Bergman plays clarinet & jaw harp.
One of the reasons it's always fun to see silent movies is that with new accompaniment, it's not quite like seeing a new movie, but it's a new experience. For instance, NSSC puts a lot of bluegrass into their scores, a fun and energetic sound for comedies like this which feels more or less period-appropriate, especially in the more pastoral shorts. Cooney is also an entertaining narrator, tossing in information that may or may not be true but is fun to hear nevertheless.
They're a fun group. Their main April tour has completed, but their website shows a few early-May shows in Newton and Bethlehem, PA, if you happen to be in that area - a trip well worth taking.
There, the end. Now, to write up Next Week and then get to working on IFFBoston stuff!
Oh, right, IFFBoston started tonight. Well, let's hope it doesn't slip quite so much.
25 March - 31 March
1 April - 7 April
8 April - 14 April
15 April - 21 April
Not going to lie - when I left for the last day of BUFF, I was hoping that they'd be using green tickets for passholders that day. Wouldn't that have looked cool? Instead, they used purple, but also just took them instead of ripping them instead of waving us in. It's like they don't care how an obscure blog looks at all!
As you can see, it was a busy week - Lore on what I think was its last week in town, Spring Breakers, and all five days of the Boston Underground Film Festival (count 'em - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!). Plus, apparently, it was Easter or something on Sunday. Apparently that's a thing.
Spring Breakers
* * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)
While waiting in one of the two or three lines necessary for to get into BUFF the next night, I heard a group of people dissing Stoker and praising Spring Breakers, and, man, I had a hard time imagining people being more wrong. Actually, I can - Spring Breakers is not an actual terrible movie, just one that failed to impress me.
This is where I half-expect people to tell me I didn't get it, but I think I did - I just didn't like it. Sure, writer/director Harmony Korine exaggerates the whole "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon by using actresses known for their wholesome Disney Channel material and pushing the exploitation story from semi-innocent/supposedly-empowering half-naked-girl-power into straight-up psychopathy. That's kind of clever, but it's also just about of the end of what Korine does with it. So, ha-ha, bros, that tacky thing you idiots go for is actually really vile, and I've managed to lure you into a movie that insults you by making a satire almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
It's just mean, and it's not mean to go along with an interesting story - I never cared about what James Franco's character was up to as a local gangster, nor the self-discovery of the four girls who fall in with him. It's just stuff that happens, and all Korine has done is to mock something everybody mocks already. Sure, it's better-shot and the girls (Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson) play their parts well, but, honestly, it's a parlor trick, and a boring one at that.
Stubless: Renoir at the Coolidge (10am, Sunday 7 April 2013)
After a festival, it's nice to decompress for a bit, spend some time just writing and watching baseball on TV. Well, fat chance. Starbuck was only going to be playing for that one week, Thale only for the one night, and then the Brattle did their Schlock Around the Clock even the next weekend. At least that was a fun event, with lots of spiffy 35mm prints. Thale was okay, although I hoped for a bit more from it. Starbuck was also pretty charming; I wound up quite fond of it. And while Renoir wasn't great, it certainly looked great.
I considered going to more of Schlock Around the Clock, actually, but...
Evil Dead (2013)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)
... I wanted to see the new Evil Dead with an opening weekend crowd after the sun went down and that's when I had my chance. Horror movies, like comedies, are best with a crowd to feed off each other's reactions, so even when you don't necessarily like the way other people in the theater act, it's what you have to have.
The kind of funny thing about this verison of Evil Dead is that it kind of suffers for being an "Evil Dead" movie, at least if you're familiar with the source material. Director Fede Alvarez, his writing partner Rodo Sayagues (and an uncredited Diablo Cody) put together a fine spam-in-a-can movie, no dobut, but they've also built it around Mia (Jane Levy) trying to quit drugs cold-turkey, and that suggests a story where you don't necessarily know how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is in her head. Of course, we know what Evil Dead is (and we've seen how this one opens), so that specific suspense isn't really there even though the cast is good enough to play it. There's still some more depth to the story - it ultimately becomes about being there for family as much as just random mayhem - but the dismemberment is what you're there for.
Still, Alvarez and company are able to keep this a damn fine experience in grueling horror even as they wink at the source material, tending to fake the audience out - we gird ourselves against what we remember from the original movie only to have things veer off in a new gross manner. One of the fun things about the Evil Dead series is that everybody gets to play both hero and villain at some point, and another is the copious blood, which Alvarez doesn't stint with. It's not the most original horror movie, but it is pretty intense for something with a studio behind it.
Stubless: Jurassic Park at Jordan's Furniture Reading (2:15pm, Sunday 14 April 2013)
My first trip to Fenway Park this year was a heck of a way to spend an evening - what started out as a pretty good game with the Red Sox appearing to have things in hand wound up having a pretty miserable rain delay in the middle, and then the end featured an epic ninth-inning collapse. You leave the ballpark kind of stunned after that.
But, before that, I did a couple of nights seeing things by interesting directors. Sharply different results: The Host made me downright angry at how the apparent terribleness of the source material seemed to take down a decent filmmaker in Andrew Niccol, while Christian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills wound up being right up my alley, an insistent indictment of religion, although one that seems to lead the audience to its position rather than browbeating them.
It was back to Kendall Square on Saturday night for a double feature, although that wasn't the original plan - I'd originally gone to Boston Common to see 42, only to find the showtime that worked for me wasn't in MoviePass's database. So, turn around and head back to Cambridge, pick Koch based on starting time, a likely short run, and a director Q&A, follow that up with From Up on Poppy Hill, because it's a quick turnaround.
Sunday started out as 3D-day, where I used a voucher to see the cheap show of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and then hopped a train and bus to make it to Jordan's Furniture just in time for Jurassic Park in Imax 3D. A little grocery baseball on TV and I was ready to see The Company You Keep to round the week out. I had no idea that I would kind of need to store moviegoing up!
Kokuriko-zaka kara (From Up on Poppy Hill)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #18 (first-run, DCP, English Dubbed)
When this movie got booked, I found myself grumbling a bit - while the company that distributes the movie is called "GKids", Studio Ghibli's films do have a substantial adult audience that generally prefers to see them subtitled, and since you'd no longer have to wrangle two prints to show both English and Japanese versions (even if a DCP doesn't have the subtitling and soundtrack options of a DVD, handling two hard drives shouldn't be difficult). But, no, not even the 9:10pm show is subtitled.
At least this time it's a pretty good dub. Part of the reason for it, I think, is that the screenplay (by, among others, Hayao Miyazaki) feels a little less formal than other Ghibli films involving teenagers - at least in the English-language version, these kids quip and joke with each other, and the girls aren't particularly shy or demure, even when they've got a crush on a boy. And while much of the voice casting is decent but low-key, Beau Bridges really should do more anime dubbing; he nails the bigger-than-life personality of a certain character type perfectly.
Amid all the fun, the movie throws up some serious obstacles to its first-love plot, and while it could be all gnashing of teeth, it's maturely matter-of-fact, with one character even stating that he's not going to act like he's in some TV melodrama. Director Goro Miyazaki and the writers turn the screws a little bit, recognizing that sometimes knowing something awful isn't as bad as not knowing whether something awful is true. The resolution is somewhat pat, but it's something the movie has quietly earned, so the audience isn't likely to mind.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, Real-D 3D)
What a peculiar thing G.I. Joe: Retaliation is - it's a direct follow-up to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, picking up on that movie's ending, but pretty much wiping the slate clean, character-wise. It's the ultimate example of the brand beign the drawas opposed to the cast or filmmakers. And, honestly, I don't really think the first needed such a complete purge - it has its weaknesses, but it was fun more often than not.
This one has a decent cast of Joes - I'm generally not going to complain about Dwayne Johnson and Adrianne Palicki starring in a movie - but the ninja stuff is kind of a waste of Lee Byung-hun, despite containing the best action scene in the movie. Bruce Willis is kind of superfluous; I can't see how the movie would be much different without him. The trouble is the villains. Johnathan Pryce, playing a master of disguise who has replaced the President of the United States, is entertaining, but clearly not the alpha villain; Luke Bracey's Cobra Commander is generic and off-screen through much of the movie.
Plus, the climax is off in every way possible. Forget the question of just how the ninjas wind up being brought into Cobra's inner circle pretty much overnight; that might be boring and easy to cut. We don't get that big special-effects scene of London being devastated until late in the last act, when having it earlier could have really defined the stakes more than "the one guy who came back from the first movie dies", and it makes the Joes' response look kind of small-potatoes.
Jurassic Park
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (20th Anniversary re-release, Imax-branded 3D)
Guys, Jurassic Park is still pretty darn awesome. Sure, it hits some of its themes without subtlety, and the characters Steven Spielberg inherited from Michael Crichton's novel are kind of thin. As a guy who loves science, I kind of hate Crichton's distrust of it, here personified in the most obnoxious way possible by Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm. But the filmmakers set out to create the best action/adventure featuring dinosaurs eve, and they succeeded.
When you've got some time, take a look at the first big action scene, when the T-Rex attacks the jeeps, and kind of marvel at how great Spielberg is at putting it together. He takes what had been kind of a funny scene - the characters being disappointed that the dinosaurs aren't showing up - and then builds the tension up just enough so that we're ready for the big jump into all-out action. There's horror movie gore in it as the goat's leg lands on the jeep, freaking the kids out, and then once the T-Rex shows up, it's a masterfully composed sequence: The dinosaur's head pushes the car, the people scramble to stay behind it, pushing down on the overturned car makes it harder to get out, this motion leads to the edge (which appears to go down forever due to a nifty 3D effect), which Alan and Lex have to climb down, leading to the car... There's a ton of moving parts, but Spielberg and cinematographer Dean Cundey always have the exact right angle to show what's going on without resorting to slow motion or just having two things smash into another and calling that action. It's one thing leading to another clearly and quickly, and right in the middle, Spielberg injects some of the themes that define his work, with a panicky Lex crying "he left us!" - referring to the lawyer who had been sharing the kids' jeep, but remember that she and Timmy are on this trip because their parents are going through a divorce, so this big action scene how has this very human dimension injected into it without reducing the crazy science fiction stuff to a mere metaphor.
Seriously, that's one of the best action sequences ever made. And there's two or three more like it coming, including some virtuoso editing when Grant & the kids are climbing the fence while Ellie & Muldoon are trying to switch the power on with Malcolm & Hammon on the other end of the walkie talkie. "Clever girl!" The can full of embryos becoming a fossil itself. "Let's hope they don't figure out how to open doors!" Tyrannosaurus Rex living up to its name. And it still looks darn good twenty years later - some of the animatronics may be a bit stiff, but the filmmakers never overreach what they can do. The 3D upgrade is nice, although only rarely a big deal. It's a shame Jordan's doesn't run genuine sideways-70mm IMAX any more; the digital projection was occasionally fuzzy, especially with things in the middle distance that maybe should have been more clear.
Then again, I was in the second row looking up at a six-story screen because I arrived just a couple minutes before showtime. Not complaining - I didn't haul my butt out to Reading to not have life-sized 3D dinosaurs in my lap - but, man, I wish Colin Treverrow was shooting the next sequel with the big cameras. That would be genuinely awesome.
Stubless: Still Mine at Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (10am, Sunday 21 April 2013) and Buster Keaton Shorts at the Brattle Theatre (7:30pm, Sunday 21 April 2013)
Also stubless: Everything horrible that happened this week. I'd figured on going to see something downtown Monday evening, but a couple of bombs at the end of the Boston Marathon scotched that. I said it elsewhere on the blog, but it's worth re-iterating: What kind of monster attacks the Marathon? The elite runners are from every country, ethnicity, and culture; the rest are just ordinary people doing something very difficult, often as a way to raise money for charity. I went straight home instead, and then mostly continued a busy week as normal until I got text messages on the way out the door on Friday, telling me to turn on the TV. That's when I heard of the mess the previous night and that the T wouldn't be running. I let WCVB run, but mostly went into the back room and tried to work.
It wasn't really an act of defiance, trying to do normal stuff; I just get antsy doing nothing. I went to Antiviral after the "shelter-in-place" order was lifted, because I wanted to see it and the Saturday midnight show was out of the question (I wanted to see Still Mine there Sunday morning, and the folks at the theater probably wouldn't let me spend the night). I was glad to see a fair amount of other people out that night; if we were making a statement, I guess, it was that as much as the attack angered us, we were going to treat it as an irritant, rather than life-changing.
I wouldn't be free of it right away; I had tickets for Saturday's ballgame, where security was tighter than usual but the pregame ceremonies were, as usual on such a big day, excellent. That's the game that will probably become known as the "our fucking city" game, which was actually great baseball in addition to being cathartic: David Ortiz came back from injury, Mike Napoli and Daniel Nava continued murdering baseballs, and Clay Buchholz continued to be a beast. I did have to to scratch my heads at some of the drunks doing "USA!" chants - I mean, I love my country, but this was a local attack, with the man who had been captured a citizen. It's okay to be provincial at times, even if an "us versus them" mindset generally does more harm than good.
Anyway: Movies happened again after that; I headed to Boston Common for Oblivion, then slept fast enough to get to Still Mine in the morning - got there early but was seated at the last moment, having waited like half an hour for a crepe and a smoothie. I limped home because my new shoes were digging into my ankles in a really painful way (#BostonStrong!), re-emerging just in time for Not So Silent Cinema's Buster Keaton Shorts, because Buster Keaton.
Antiviral
* * (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run/@fter Midnite, digital)
I wanted to like this movie more than many I've seen in some time; Brandon Cronenberg's first feature has him doing the same sort of grotesque, satirical body-horror that his father made his name with but has eventually moved away from. And Cronenberg fils certailly has enough cool ideas to be worth watching, but he also doesn't seem to have his father's skill at teasing a story out of it that makes the audience shake as well as squirm.
Antiviral isn't really boring, at least, but it is kind of nonsensical. I can deal with a world where people eat 3D-printed meat grown from the DNA of celebrities and pay to contract their recent illnesses; I don't know where faking one's death makes any sense in it, though. The motives of the characters seemed vague rather than alien. The late bits about corporate ruthlessness didn't quite have the teeth of the attacks on celebrity culture.
I'm kind of torn on whether I wish Caleb Landry Jones and Sarah Gadon had better characters to play, too. Gadon, especially; she was good in Cronenberg pêre's Cosmopolis last year, and her character here has the potential for a tragic arc disproving the "celebrities are not people" assertion from earlier on in the movie as she suffers out of the limelight, but there's an argument for keeping her cryptic as well. It doesn't quite work out for me, though - I see the ideas, but I have a hard time getting excited about them.
Oblivion
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)
Here's something to ponder - if Oblivion had come out thirty-ish years ago, I would have wanted all the toys from it. Today, big sci-fi epics are so common that there's no toy line for this at all, despite it being full of cool and merchandisable things.
Kind of surprising, because it sort of feels like the kind of movie that's built to sell toys; it's a bunch of not hugely original ideas pieced together in a fairly capable form. Actually, "fairly capable" undersells it - co-writer/director Joseph Kosinski executes this movie very well indeed - he stages actions scenes that look cool and are easy to follow, and knows how to give something expressionless and mechanical genuine menace. He deploys Tom Cruise well, and while Cruise may sort of be aging out of this sort of movie (he's noticeably older than his female co-stars in close-up), he has an easy charisma in the part, as much as you can when you start a movie with "after a mandatory memory wipe..."
The story fits together, more or less - it's easy to find holes but just as easy to smooth them over (though I think I might have preferred it without the opening narration). It's a shame that they couldn't come up with a more clever line for the climax than the one f-bomb PG-13 allows. The music by M83 is pretty great - it's modern and driving without feeling particularly unusual (Kosinski apparently has a knack for this; the Daft Punk soundtrack was arguably the best part of Tron: Legacy). The supporting cast is nice, although there's no question that the movie is about Tom Cruise with a side of Morgan Freeman.
And, man, there is stuff in it that would make great toys.
Buster Keaton Shorts
Weird thing - I think I've seen all four Buster Keaton shorts presented relatively recently. Within the last couple years, anyway. I've already got reviews for "The Goat" and "One Week" elsewhere, so I'll leave those to be read in those posts (the one which includes "The Goat" has just been crazy popular over the last few weeks; I'm guessing someone linked to it when talking about the Somerville Theatre's upcoming silent series). But let's get to the other two!
"The High Sign"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Not-So-Silent-Cinema, digital)
A thoroughly goofy short which has Buster tossed off a train, disrespect some cops, then stumble into the service of both a fiendish secret society and the man they intend to assassinate while working at a shooting gallery, and then fight villains off in a house filled with secret passages and trap doors. All within twenty minutes! It's a remarkable dense bit of silent comedy, with more intricate set-pieces than many current features have.
Some bits of the setting and humor are dated, but nothing that relies on Buster's ingenuity both as a filmmaker and a character. It's actually an amazing bit of filmmaking, both technically and in pacing, even if it does include some jokes early on that are only amusing, rather than gut-busting.
"Cops"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Not-So-Silent-Cinema, digital)
"Cops" once again finds Buster Keaton in trouble with the law, as he was with "The Goat", this time as a love-struck but trouble-finding young man whose attempts to make enough money to woo the mayor's daughter find him accidentally committing a number of crimes, until finally the city's whole police force is after him.
Like almost all Keaton films, it's frequently very funny, especially since Keaton has a knack for escalation, even within the confines of a short. Some of the gags here aren't necessarily among his funniest - some are undoubtedly funnier in the context of the 1920s, some just have a set-up that victimizes people in a way that's not entirely amusing - but it's got a pretty good chase or two, and it's quite funny to watch Buster dig himself into a bigger and bigger hole.
Made it this far? Have yourself some Horrible Photography!
That there is Not-So-Silent Cinema, taken from the Brattle's balcony. Kyle Tuttle plays banjo, Brendan Cooney is on keyboards (he also composed the scores), and Andy Bergman plays clarinet & jaw harp.
One of the reasons it's always fun to see silent movies is that with new accompaniment, it's not quite like seeing a new movie, but it's a new experience. For instance, NSSC puts a lot of bluegrass into their scores, a fun and energetic sound for comedies like this which feels more or less period-appropriate, especially in the more pastoral shorts. Cooney is also an entertaining narrator, tossing in information that may or may not be true but is fun to hear nevertheless.
They're a fun group. Their main April tour has completed, but their website shows a few early-May shows in Newton and Bethlehem, PA, if you happen to be in that area - a trip well worth taking.
There, the end. Now, to write up Next Week and then get to working on IFFBoston stuff!
Monday, April 15, 2013
The Company You Keep
I don't have a whole lot to say about this movie beyond what's in the review; The Company You Keep is what it is - an enjoyable movie with a very impressive cast. From reading the description of the book as I created an Amazon link, it looks like director Robert Redford and screenwriter Lem Dobbs did a good job of reconfiguring it, downplaying the suspense aspects and giving room for the performances to take over, while also compacting the story, at the very least. It does make me somewhat curious to hear what a fan of the original novel thinks of it.
Anyway, I'll just let this post be the "yes, I live in Boston but am okay" post after today's events. It's naturally had me distracted all afternoon, to say the least - although I was off at work in Burlington this year, I've gone to the Patriot's Day Red Sox game in previous years, once or twice even winding up in Copley Square around the time the bombs went off. This isn't about "it could have happened to me", though - I'd like to think that despite not always showing it, I'm empathetic enough to be disgusted without it. It's more a case of wanting to know why someone bombs the Boston Marathon. It's an event that people from all nations, ethnicities, faiths, and social strata take part in. Many use it as a way to raise money for charity. What evil thing can it possibly represent?
At least I don't feel dirty posting this tonight, just because this is the thing I was writing on the bus this morning and writing movie reviews keeps me sane better than watching news coverage that goes wall to wall without a lot of information I can use dribbling out; this movie doesn't have much sympathy for the terrorists who used violence in the past, even if there is a bit of a redemption arc at play.
On a lighthearted note: In one of the first scenes of the movie, Susan Sarandon's character stops at an Esso station, making me wonder if she was hiding out in Canada all this time. No, she was apparently making her way from Vermont to New York. Kind of struck me as weird, seeing as movies usually make a little more effort to disguise obvious differences between where they shot and where they're set, and that would have been an Exxon station on this side of the border.
The Company You Keep
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run, 2K DCP)
The Company You Keep can play a bit like a brute-force attack at times - sure, it's kind of slow at times and eventually the audience winds up a couple steps ahead of the protagonist, but every ten or fifteen minutes, Robert Redford will throw another great actor from his generation at the audience, perfectly cast and with at least one scene that makes them warmly received. You can only take so much of this before wearing down and enjoying the movie quite a bit.
Decades ago, a bank guard was killed in a robbery carried out by Weather Underground members, and three of the four perpetrators got away. One, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), has just been captured on the way to turn herself in, and while she won't give any of the others up, both the FBI and young journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) find a trail that leads to Jim Grant (Redford), a public-affairs attorney in upstate New York. As they get closer to sniffing out his secret, he starts looking for Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), the member of this group of "Weathermen" that never settled down.
Grant's and Shepard's quests will take them halfway across the country, and while it may occasionally seem like it could be done in fewer steps, would you eliminate the ones where Richard Jenkins or Nick Nolte show up, so that their characters can reminisce with Redford's, debating about what they did back in the day and how it figures in their lives now before pointing him to the next stop? No, those scenes are gold. Maybe you could do without Shia LaBeouf's reporter, make this a more conventional thriller with Terrence Howard's FBI agent the main pursuer. But then you don't get the jailhouse interview where Sarandon's and LaBeouf's characters face off with their generations' different forms of principle - or at least, you'd have something very different with either Howard or Anna Kendrick (playing a junior agent) on the other side of the table.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Anyway, I'll just let this post be the "yes, I live in Boston but am okay" post after today's events. It's naturally had me distracted all afternoon, to say the least - although I was off at work in Burlington this year, I've gone to the Patriot's Day Red Sox game in previous years, once or twice even winding up in Copley Square around the time the bombs went off. This isn't about "it could have happened to me", though - I'd like to think that despite not always showing it, I'm empathetic enough to be disgusted without it. It's more a case of wanting to know why someone bombs the Boston Marathon. It's an event that people from all nations, ethnicities, faiths, and social strata take part in. Many use it as a way to raise money for charity. What evil thing can it possibly represent?
At least I don't feel dirty posting this tonight, just because this is the thing I was writing on the bus this morning and writing movie reviews keeps me sane better than watching news coverage that goes wall to wall without a lot of information I can use dribbling out; this movie doesn't have much sympathy for the terrorists who used violence in the past, even if there is a bit of a redemption arc at play.
On a lighthearted note: In one of the first scenes of the movie, Susan Sarandon's character stops at an Esso station, making me wonder if she was hiding out in Canada all this time. No, she was apparently making her way from Vermont to New York. Kind of struck me as weird, seeing as movies usually make a little more effort to disguise obvious differences between where they shot and where they're set, and that would have been an Exxon station on this side of the border.
The Company You Keep
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run, 2K DCP)
The Company You Keep can play a bit like a brute-force attack at times - sure, it's kind of slow at times and eventually the audience winds up a couple steps ahead of the protagonist, but every ten or fifteen minutes, Robert Redford will throw another great actor from his generation at the audience, perfectly cast and with at least one scene that makes them warmly received. You can only take so much of this before wearing down and enjoying the movie quite a bit.
Decades ago, a bank guard was killed in a robbery carried out by Weather Underground members, and three of the four perpetrators got away. One, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), has just been captured on the way to turn herself in, and while she won't give any of the others up, both the FBI and young journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) find a trail that leads to Jim Grant (Redford), a public-affairs attorney in upstate New York. As they get closer to sniffing out his secret, he starts looking for Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), the member of this group of "Weathermen" that never settled down.
Grant's and Shepard's quests will take them halfway across the country, and while it may occasionally seem like it could be done in fewer steps, would you eliminate the ones where Richard Jenkins or Nick Nolte show up, so that their characters can reminisce with Redford's, debating about what they did back in the day and how it figures in their lives now before pointing him to the next stop? No, those scenes are gold. Maybe you could do without Shia LaBeouf's reporter, make this a more conventional thriller with Terrence Howard's FBI agent the main pursuer. But then you don't get the jailhouse interview where Sarandon's and LaBeouf's characters face off with their generations' different forms of principle - or at least, you'd have something very different with either Howard or Anna Kendrick (playing a junior agent) on the other side of the table.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Friday, February 08, 2013
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 February - 14 February 2013
Well, in practical terms, this actually covers a shorter period, as there will effectively be no movies today (8 February) because of the blizzard and some studio movies will be opening next Thursday for Valentine's day. That just means we've got to do more in less time!
(Note: I haven't been calling theaters, so even if there's no notes on them being closed don't just assume that they're open and show up. Seriously, don't go outside if you don't have to; it may not look like much now, but everyone swears this blizzard will be an actual blizzard!)
My plans? Mostly living at the Sci-Fi Festival, though I willlikely hit Lore and try for Lost in Thailand as well.
(Note: I haven't been calling theaters, so even if there's no notes on them being closed don't just assume that they're open and show up. Seriously, don't go outside if you don't have to; it may not look like much now, but everyone swears this blizzard will be an actual blizzard!)
- The Boston Sci-Fi Film Fest is at the Somerville Theatre this week, a run-up to next weekend's marathon. It looks even more uneven than most specialty festivals, with a pretty well-received French-Canadian film (Mars et Avril) opening the fest but some rough selections later and one notable movie dropped at the last minute. Still, there is often a gem or two hidden amid the rest. Note that the blizzard will see the theater close at 6pm on Friday, so the opening night screenings will be rescheduled (the Somerville Theatre website says Saturday, but the festival site has no details).
It's a busy week for the Somerville; they'll be presenting two performances of The Vagina Monologues on Saturday, and on Valentine's Day there are two special screenings beyond the festival: Girl Shy, a pretty darn funny Harold Lloyd silent in 35mm on the big screen with Jeff Rapsis on the organ. There's a short, too, and it should look pretty good, between Dave Kornfeld likely digging the super-bright lamps out and Lloyd having taken good care of his films. Those looking for something a little more daring may want to head upstairs where Faith Soloway's Lesbian Cinema Schlock Treatment has its first(?) monthly show with Claire of the Moon getting what looks like a highly specialized live MST3K-ing from the local musician. - In first-run presentations, Somerville opens Identity Thief, as does Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond. It features a couple reliably funny people (Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy) as a victim and perpetrator of credit card fraud, with the former trying to bring the latter to the police and both running from even worse folks.
Looking more promising is Side Effects, the latest - and possibly last - film from Steven Soderbergh, with Rooney Mara as a woman put on an experimental new drug by her psychiatrist (Jude Law) only to find the cure may be worse than the disease. It plays the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common. Personally, I think Soderbergh will do another movie in a few years (not counting the Liberace biography he's doing for HBO), but he's earned a rest if he wants it.
With a little more in the way of screens to fill, Boston Common also opens Lost In Thailand, a hit comedy from China starring and directed by Xu Zheng (whom Chinese film fans may remember from Crazy Stone, Crazy Racer, and Love in the Buff). He plays a businessman trying to meet up with a stockholder in Thailand before a rival despite one of those laid-back traveling companions who make everything go wrong. - Kendall Square is closed on Friday and wn't open until 6pm on Saturday. It mostly keeps the same line-up. The new addition is pretty noteworthy, though: 56 Up, the latest installment of a series of documentaries made for British television starting in 1964, when a group of seven-year-olds were interviewed. Director Michael Apted has been revisiting those that still wish to participate every seven years since, so this is the eighth check-in with the group. Kind of an astonishing accomplishment, really.
- That movie will open at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in two weeks; this week, they pick up Quartet and the Oscar-Nominated Live Action & Animated Shorts (joining the documentary shorts that are already playing. Those don't start until Saturday, as the Coolidge is closed on Friday in anticipation of the blizzard.
Its Saturday screening is also canceled, but Mary Poppins will still play as a Sunday morning kids' show.Sunday morning has a second movie featuring kids, but Lore is likely not for them, as the Talk Cinema presentation is about five children of Nazi SS officers making their way across Germany in the wake of World War II to join their grandmother and facing their parents' legacy.(Note: Lore has been postponed until the 17th)
For the Saturday midnight screening (the Friday one is canceled), they continue Blaxploitation History Month with Sugar Hill, with Marki Bey seeking revenge on the gangsters that killed her boyfriend with voodoo - specifically, bringing forth zombies (in the original meaning of the word) to do her bidding! There's also a special "Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper" lecture by Scott Freiman on Monday night, which would normally be when "Big Screen Classics" is presented, but that series return will instead be on Thursday, so that Rebecca, the gothic romance that was Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, can run on Valentine's Day. - The Brattle is also closed on Friday, meaning that the "(Some of) The Best of 2012" series loses How to Survive a Plague and The Raid. It has a busy Saturday, though, with two double features: Animated monster movies Paranorman and Frankenweenie in the afternoon and noteworthy directors sending limousines across a city (Leos Carax's Holy Motors and David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis) in the evening. Those will be introduced by members of the Boston Society of Film Critics, who will have their awards ceremony and a screening of How to Survive a Plague on Sunday evening, with director David France joining them. Another director, Carlo Guillermo Proto, will be on-site Monday to screen and discuss his documentary El Huaso as part of the DocYard series. That one follows a retiree who takes up competing in rodeos in case his short-term memory problems are a harbinger of full-blown Alzheimer's, which he has decided he would not live with.
For Tuesday through Thursday - well, it's Valentine's Day, which means Casablanca on 35mm! The actual Valentine's Day shows will probably sell out, so buy tickets in advance; there are also Premium Tickets available for couples that include special gifts. - The Arlington Capitol will be closing at 6pm Friday and opening late at 4pm Saturday, and will have another week of Capitol Classics double features mid-week, this set valentine-themed: Mystic Pizza & Four Weddings and a Funeral on Tuesday the 12th, Untamed Heart & The Apartment on Wednesday the 13th, and Moonstruck & A Fish Called Wanda on Thursday the 15th.
- The Harvard Film Archive will be closed on both Friday and Saturday, but will continue their mini-run of Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. The snow wipes out two screenings in the Raoul Walsh retrospective, but the one that remains, High Sierra on Sunday night, is a pretty good one, with a script by John Huston and Humphrey Bogart as a thief on the run with Ida Lupino. There's also a free VES screening of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone on Tuesday night.
- ArtsEmerson has a film, stage, and music program called The Next Thing Festival (TNT for short) over the next few weeks, and the film programming this weekend is a preview, with this weekend focused on "lighting the dynamite". Films scheduled include Brazil (35mm) Friday evening, Zabriskie Point (DVD) Friday night, Far From Heaven (DVD) Saturday afternoon, Swimming to Cambodia (DVD) Saturday evening, The Bride of Frankenstein (35mm?) Saturday night, and Month Python and the Holy Grail (Blu-ray) Sunday afternoon.
- The MFA has cancelled film programming on Friday and Saturday (sorry, Tiny Furniture fans), but The FIlms of Stanley Kubrick continues once the snow stops falling, with Lolita and Spartacus on Sunday and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Thursday. If you've seen the trailer, the way that subtitle is pronounced probably makes it seem even less apt for the 14th.
- iMovieCafe opens Special 26 (Special Chabbis on IMDB), which features Akshay Kumar as a thief who masterminds a jewel heist involving a gang of 26 who posed as tax collectors based on a real life incident. It also features Manoj Bajpai, Jimmy Shergill, Anupam Kher, and Kajal Aggarwal, and is written and directed by Neeraj Pandey. That's in Hindi with English subtitles, and shares the screen with Telugu film Mirchi and Tamil film Viswaroopam, neither of which appear to be subtitled.
My plans? Mostly living at the Sci-Fi Festival, though I will
Monday, April 09, 2012
Losing Control
Let's start with the standard Horrible Q&A Photography before getting to the fun stuff:
Okay, not much to see here - writer/director answering questions, house lights don't go up enough, white screen and black outfit probably mess with my camera phone as much as anything. Pretty standard stuff. Sure, she answered questions like a great sport, but the really important image to remember is this one:
That'sMs. Dr. Weiss standing by the line to buy a ticket on Sunday night, asking if folks were there to see Losing Control, and saying, hey, they should, it's funny and the other movie that they might have been coming to see will still be there tomorrow, but this was the last time she was going to be there to do a questions & answers session afterward, and you wouldn't want to miss that opportunity, would you?
I've gone to more than the occasional screening with a Q&A, and by and large, they're only for selected shows and the filmmaker is sort of kept off to the side until it's time for the introduction. From what I could see of the signage outside the theater and what was posted on the movie's Twitter account, she did this all weekend, from the 11am show to the 9:40pm one, and then went across the way to Tommy Doyle's (which had Losing Control-themed drinks on the menu) to hang out with the audience some more.
And she was still full of energy and enthusiasm as I made my way in to the movie, telling folks at the concession stand that she'd try to stall a little so they'd have time to get in for the start, because the start is really good. By my count, that's like a dozen shows in three days' time. You just don't see that very often - by the time an independent film like this hits theaters, the director is a couple years away from making it and her mind is halfway to the next thing - and it really left no doubt that this movie was her personality coming out on screen.
From the Q&A, it seemed to work for them - I gather only Jiro Dreams of Sushi did better at the theater since Friday - and the movie will likely get to hang around another week, maybe get some good word-of-mouth, and open in more cities as a result. Here's hoping, it's a fun little movie, the folks involved seem pretty nice, and I kind of love that it's a "women doing science" movie without making that a plot point.
I'd also be kind of curious how some of the Boston stuff plays elsewhere. There's only a few really local bits (especially since most of the movie was filmed in L.A.), but the duckboats and the hat that may only help you in Brookline made me laugh.
Losing Control
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 April 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, digital?)
I try not to get too worked up about science in movies, but given that Losing Control is about a scientist trying to apply the scientific method to her personal life and the title is a pun that you kind of need to know a little bit of science to appreciate... Well, shouldn't inconsistent results in the control group of her experiment have been a bigger issue? Sure, a chunk of the audience won't care, and probably shouldn't. They will likely just find this an entertainingly off-beat movie, and it's pretty successful on that count.
The young scientist whose experiments are having the wonky results, preventing her from finishing her Ph.D, is Samantha (Miranda Kent); for some reason, whenever it's time to present her spermicide that only targets sperm carrying a Y-chromosome, the control group is unusable, and the ability to reproduce is making her question everything. This includes her five-year relationship with boyfriend Ben (Reid Scott), so while he is on a fellowship in China, she sets out to prove that he's the one empirically - by testing a larger sample, so to speak.
Good plan? Not really, and when you get right down to it, the fact that the control sample is unreliable is only one of many parts of the script that doesn't quite make sense. Other parts are telegraphed pretty early or otherwise built out of pretty broad stereotypes; it's a screwball comedy with the emphasis on the screwy. That said, writer/director Valerie Weiss never makes any pretenses about it being something else; and the somewhat heightened environment works for it more often than not. By my usual crude litmus test for such things - how many characters exist only to advance the plot without actually being funny? - the movie is as focused on making the audience laugh as one could hope for.
Full review at EFC.
Okay, not much to see here - writer/director answering questions, house lights don't go up enough, white screen and black outfit probably mess with my camera phone as much as anything. Pretty standard stuff. Sure, she answered questions like a great sport, but the really important image to remember is this one:
That's
I've gone to more than the occasional screening with a Q&A, and by and large, they're only for selected shows and the filmmaker is sort of kept off to the side until it's time for the introduction. From what I could see of the signage outside the theater and what was posted on the movie's Twitter account, she did this all weekend, from the 11am show to the 9:40pm one, and then went across the way to Tommy Doyle's (which had Losing Control-themed drinks on the menu) to hang out with the audience some more.
And she was still full of energy and enthusiasm as I made my way in to the movie, telling folks at the concession stand that she'd try to stall a little so they'd have time to get in for the start, because the start is really good. By my count, that's like a dozen shows in three days' time. You just don't see that very often - by the time an independent film like this hits theaters, the director is a couple years away from making it and her mind is halfway to the next thing - and it really left no doubt that this movie was her personality coming out on screen.
From the Q&A, it seemed to work for them - I gather only Jiro Dreams of Sushi did better at the theater since Friday - and the movie will likely get to hang around another week, maybe get some good word-of-mouth, and open in more cities as a result. Here's hoping, it's a fun little movie, the folks involved seem pretty nice, and I kind of love that it's a "women doing science" movie without making that a plot point.
I'd also be kind of curious how some of the Boston stuff plays elsewhere. There's only a few really local bits (especially since most of the movie was filmed in L.A.), but the duckboats and the hat that may only help you in Brookline made me laugh.
Losing Control
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 April 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, digital?)
I try not to get too worked up about science in movies, but given that Losing Control is about a scientist trying to apply the scientific method to her personal life and the title is a pun that you kind of need to know a little bit of science to appreciate... Well, shouldn't inconsistent results in the control group of her experiment have been a bigger issue? Sure, a chunk of the audience won't care, and probably shouldn't. They will likely just find this an entertainingly off-beat movie, and it's pretty successful on that count.
The young scientist whose experiments are having the wonky results, preventing her from finishing her Ph.D, is Samantha (Miranda Kent); for some reason, whenever it's time to present her spermicide that only targets sperm carrying a Y-chromosome, the control group is unusable, and the ability to reproduce is making her question everything. This includes her five-year relationship with boyfriend Ben (Reid Scott), so while he is on a fellowship in China, she sets out to prove that he's the one empirically - by testing a larger sample, so to speak.
Good plan? Not really, and when you get right down to it, the fact that the control sample is unreliable is only one of many parts of the script that doesn't quite make sense. Other parts are telegraphed pretty early or otherwise built out of pretty broad stereotypes; it's a screwball comedy with the emphasis on the screwy. That said, writer/director Valerie Weiss never makes any pretenses about it being something else; and the somewhat heightened environment works for it more often than not. By my usual crude litmus test for such things - how many characters exist only to advance the plot without actually being funny? - the movie is as focused on making the audience laugh as one could hope for.
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston (and beyond) 9 July - 15 July
BOSTON
I've got no reason to complain about not being able to get to all this over the next seven days; I will, after all, be in Montreal, where it promises to be slightly less like an oven, seeing a bunch of movies that may not make it to local theaters at all, about twenty of them. Still, what's playing back home looks to be pretty decent:
NEW YORK
Racing Dreams opens at the IFC Center. It's a pretty good documentary, the best thing I saw at the Boston Film Festival last fall before bailing on it. I found out afterward that my friend Laurel did some behind the scenes work on it. Thus, it gets a few extra cool points and a little bit of a push from me. I'm sure that this could increase its box office by seven bucks or so.
FANTASIA
I'll try to be doing daily updates, but in case I don't, and you're curious about what I deem of interest (or, good heavens, want to meet up with the press-pass-wearing dork in the middle of the third row who speaks terrible French), here's the plan:
I've got no reason to complain about not being able to get to all this over the next seven days; I will, after all, be in Montreal, where it promises to be slightly less like an oven, seeing a bunch of movies that may not make it to local theaters at all, about twenty of them. Still, what's playing back home looks to be pretty decent:
- Yet another Independent Film Festival Boston 2010 alumnus opens at Kendall Square, Perrier's Bounty. It's a snazzy-looking Irish thriller with a great cast, and one I skipped at IFFBoston because I figured that the nifty Irish movie would play Boston a bit sooner than this. It's got the one-week warning on it, though, so I hope that I can prevail on you fine people to go see it so that maybe its run can get extended a couple times, when I'm back on the 29th, I'll have a day to see it.
(Seeing that it's only opening with two shows a day, I'm not holding my breath!)
I'm less worried about missing The Girl Who Played with Fire. It's also opening at the Boston Common AMC and in West Newton (and Coolidge Corner next week). Seeing how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo managed to hang around the Kendall for three months, right up to its home video release (and still continues at the Arlington Capitol!), I suspect this one will last at least three weeks somewhere. Interestingly, West Newton also has Dragon Tattoo hanging around for one show a day, but it's at 8:30pm, so you can't do an in-order double feature. - Also opening at the Kendall and at the Coolidge is the 50th Anniversary re-release of Breathless; it's a one-week engagement at the Coolidge, and likely at the Kendall. If you want to see it, don't wait too long.
Midnights at the Coolidge, another "The End Is Nigh" flick, the original Mad Max. Well, the first film, at any rate; the Coolidge website doesn't mention whether it's the original Australian soundtrack or the one dubbed with American accents that Warner released alongside The Road Warrior.
Oh, and they're showing Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen Monday. I do believe that there's a sort of rule that you've not allowed to call yourself a movie lover if you're in town when this plays on the big screen and don't attend. - It's good to see that the acquisition by Starz hasn't changed Anchor Bay too much. They've apparently looked at their records, seen that they haven't extracted twenty bucks from each of Sam Raimi's fans in a couple of years, and decided to remedy that by putting The Evil Dead out on Blu-ray next month. Of course, that means new prints have to be struck, and one of them plays the Brattle over the weekend: 10pm Friday, Satruday, and Sunday; 8pm Monday.
Also at the Brattle this week: Inglorious Basterds, Friday through monday; a free double feature of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus at 11am Saturday morning, a preview of Winnebago Man on Tuesday, a panel discussion of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird (with a screening of the film) on Wednesday, and the annual Trailer Treats Party (with Trailer Smackdown Contest) on Thursday. That's a fun night, and just a good week's worth of stuff. - The Somerville Theatre continues their rock & roll movie series with Madonna: Truth or Dare on Monday and Tuesday, and Stop Making Sense on Wednesday and Thursday.
- Movie at the Arlington Regent Theatre! One I'd really like to see, for that matter - Waking Sleeping Beauty is a documentary about Walt Disney Feature Animation's renaissance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by all accounts an honest and not-always-complimentary one, despite being distributed by Disney.
- And, of course, the bigger studio movies open all over the place: Despicable Me is the animated 3-D movie of the week, and Predators looks to bring the action. It actually looks like a pretty good weekend, especially by Summer '10 standards. The trailers for Despicable Me look like pretty good cartooning, at least in the clips I've seen, although I imagine that having a third 3-D movie come out within a month's time is going to strain the capacity in a lot of areas. At Boston Common, it looks to be added to the line-up at the expense of The Last Airbender, which is probably a good thing for both, in that Airbender was apparently hastily and half-heartedly converted to 3-D in post-production.
I'm also hoping Predators sticks around until I make it back. I'm not a huge fan of the franchise, or even the first movie (despite it being Schwarzeneggar and McTiernan), but Nimrod Antal has made a couple better-than-expected movies in Vacancy and Armored, and I suspect that he can do something pretty darn impressive with the money Fox gave him and Robert Rodriguez.
There is also a Grease sing-along playing AMC Boston Common. I would make some sort of snarky comment, but I haven't seen Grease, and for all I know, it's the best movie ever. I doubt this, and doubt that I'd enjoy a sing-along version of even, say, Disney's Beauty and the Beast (why, no, I haven't seen Rocky Horror Picutre Show, despite it playing Harvard Square every Saturday night).
NEW YORK
Racing Dreams opens at the IFC Center. It's a pretty good documentary, the best thing I saw at the Boston Film Festival last fall before bailing on it. I found out afterward that my friend Laurel did some behind the scenes work on it. Thus, it gets a few extra cool points and a little bit of a push from me. I'm sure that this could increase its box office by seven bucks or so.
FANTASIA
I'll try to be doing daily updates, but in case I don't, and you're curious about what I deem of interest (or, good heavens, want to meet up with the press-pass-wearing dork in the middle of the third row who speaks terrible French), here's the plan:
- Friday 9 July: Phobia 2 and Secret Reunion in Hall, then across the street for The Clash and Rubber in De Seve. Why? The first Phobia ("4bia") was pretty darn good, Secret Reunion matches the director of Rough Cut with the star of Thirst, Clash is from the makers of The Rebel, and Rubber looks demented. Plus, I'm not a huge fan of Herschell Gordon Lewis, so the tribute to him isn't a big deal to me.
- Saturday 10 July: Running back and forth across the street between Mandrill (DeSeve), First Squad (De Seve), Gallants (Hall), The Message (De Seve), and Mutant Girls Squad (Hall). Why? Well, I'll have seen many of the opposing films (Down Terrace, The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, and Ip Man 2), I want to see First Squad more than Evil: In the Time of Heroes (though Greece has yet to be stamped on my horror passport), and Mandrill more or less locks me into it.
- Sunday 11 July: Starting in Hall with Alien vs Ninja and Technotise: Edit & I, then we see whether I'm more in the mood for Irish horror in Outcast or Korean erotic drama in A Frozen Flower. After that, I'll see if I'm still up for the I Spit on Your Grave remake. Why? Technotise is one of the films I'm building my schedule around (Serbian animated sci-fi with a Eurocomics style), so everything else is working around that.
- Monday 12 July: After I get out of work, it's all Hall - Crows Zero 2, At World's End, and The Revenant. Why? Gotta see the festival's only Miike film, At World's End looks nifty, and I can see Golden Slumber later.
- Tuesday 13 July: Mai Mai Miracle in De Seve, then over to Hall for Le Grand Chef 2 and Tears for Sale. Why? I liked the first Le Grand Chef.
- Wednesday 14 July: Kuroneko in De Seve if I get out of work on time; Gintama andHeartless in Hall, and then likely Feast of the Assumption: The Otero Family Murders in De Seve. Why? Seen and loved Marwencol. Plus, the Zappin Party is a tough split between "awesome" and "not just too campy, but also in French" for me.
- Thursday 15 July: Possessed in De Seve, Merentau in Hall, either We Are What We Are or T.T. Syndrome, and then maybe Lemmy. Why? Because word on the Indonesian martial arts movie is that it's got spectacular action, I'm not yet sure whether I'm more down for Mexican cannibals or Serbian slashers, and despite having already seen Air Doll, Lemmy wasn't something I even considered seeing when it played at IFFBoston, just on a "I've never listened to Motorhead" basis.
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