This Week In Tickets: 25 January 2016 - 31 January 2016

This week, right here? This is the last time I was caught up last year, and I don't see how I avoid the same sort of falling behind like crazy in 2016.

That's because it's the last week before a festival, and I hit those hard. This week was almost calm in comparison, although seeing all six movies at different venues was a neat trick.

First up was the Somerville Theatre for The Revenant, a case where hearing too much about it beforehand may have skewed my reaction a little more toward the negative than the film deserved, but that happens sometimes. Impressive as heck in some ways, though.

A couple days off, then to the Bright Screening Room in the Paramount Theater for The Final Girls, which zipped through theaters and VOD so fast that it barely had any chance for me to be aware of what turns out to be a fun little movie before the Emerson alum who directed it came back to his alma mater for a screening. Compared to that quick entry and exit, Mojave, in its own way a sort of genre movie about movies, had a long, luxurious four-day stay at the Bratte.

Saturday was spent trying to get caught up on other things, and I almost didn't make it to Appropriate Behavior at Uforge in Jamaica Plain. That was a Chlotrudis screening to showcase a Buried Treasure nominee, although it fit pretty well into the "shouldn't be buried, not quite a treasure" category.

Then, on Sunday, I planned on a pretty quick double feature, which would have worked if I'd just stayed in one place, but I misread times and thought I could leave the Boston Common screening of Jane Got a Gun and use my Christmas gift card for Kung Fu Panda 3 at Fenway, but they didn't line up and I wound up going home and back again for the latter. Didn't mind - it was enjoyable - but I've got to plan that sort of thing better.

The lesson I learn looking at this page? Always get two programs when you go to an unticketed film series, one to keep and one to cut up. Doesn't The Final Girls look cooler than Appropriate Behavior?

The Revenant

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 January 2016 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)

It can be surprisingly easy to hear too much about a movie, absorb that, and basically have the actual experience of watching it be confirmation bias. I heard a lot about how The Revenant was a lot of beautiful but empty tragedy, to the point where that's what I was looking for and inevitably found. I think I would have found it to be such anyway, especially at this length.

Don't misunderstand; there's a lot that is just stunning about this movie; the opening attack sequence, with so much happening while the camera moves about, is one of the most amazing things of its sort that you'll ever see. It also helps that is at the beginning, so that when director Alejandro González Iñárritu does that one more thing a few times within it, the bit of suffering or mutilation that goes beyond what's necessary to communicate the level of danger and violence always present on the frontier, it's still shocking, where later on Iñárritu has repeated the technique so much that is hard to see it as anything other than a blunt instrument on his part.

He uses a lot of blunt instruments, making Leonardo DiCaprio's Hugh Glad very verbal for much of the movie and having Tom Hardy grunt for less obvious reasons (I wonder if Hardy is drawn to thick-accented, nearly-inarticulate characters, or if that's just how the industry has seen him since Bronson). The film is filed with beautiful but stark landscapes, and it sometimes seems like the only character who is more than a wind-up toy walking in a straight line is Will Poulter's Bridger, a young trapper who winds up attached to Hardy's John Fitzgerald and seems to struggle with his basic decency because he knows that he will likely die if left behind, and thus must be somewhat willfully ignorant of the ruthless measures Fitzgerald is taking.

One other thing that seems a bit off is how Native Americans are used in the film, particularly the one character who is there just to help the white guy and then get killed one he's no longer useful. Taken in aggregate, it's better than most movies do, but these guys especially seem to be fairly extreme stereotypes as individuals. In another movie, it might not be so frustrating, but Iñárritu is so obvious in his simple focus on noble suffering that nothing and nobody gets a chance to become more than a means toward that, even if the cast and crew is doing great work to support it.

Appropriate Behavior

As much as I know that a gallery space is the natural home of independent film presentations like this - way too off the beaten path to get anything like a run, but not obviously the work of a respected-enough artiste to play a bigger venue - it feels like a weird place for me to be, even if I would have liked to move some of the stuff on their walls to my own and a twitter-friend works at and/or exhibits at Uforge, where the Chlotrudis Society is showing a few of the "buried treasure" nominees this winter. I'll be missing the next one, but take a look at what's under "events" to see if you've got a moment.

I probably won't see enough to be able to vote in this category, which is a bummer, but I get really busy with other movie stuff when the rest of the group sees a wide-open period for catching up. I do kind of hope the next one is a bit brighter - this looked really dark, with some scenes seeming like complete blackness.

If I do get to another one, I'm going to have to remember to give myself more time to get out to Jamaica Plain. The Orange Line isn't bad, but I didn't take Google Maps seriously when it said the half a mile from the station would take fifteen minutes to walk, but JP has some twisty roads.

Appropriate Behavior

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 February 2016 in Uforge Gallery (Chlotrudis, projected DVD)

Movies like Appropriate Behavior are good checks for figuring out just to what degree you are becoming a grumpy old person. Do you find the main character whiny and irritating from the start? Do you get over it? Certainly, the filmmakers have a fair amount of say in this, especially in terms of overcoming those issues and becoming reasonably entertaining, as this one manages.

It follows Shirin (Desiree Akhavan), who is just breaking up with girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson) as things get started, although a fair amount of time will be spent looking at that relationship from start to finish. Shirin has not told her parents (Anh Duong & Hooman Majd) that she's bisexual, and she's not exactly putting her M.A. in journalism to good use, either. Her friend Crystal (Halley Feiffer) does get her a line on a job, though, although teaching an after-school movie-making class to five-year-olds is probably not her dream career.

Desiree Akhavan writes and directs in addition to playing Shirin, and it often seems like one of those cases where the filmmaker has taken "write what you know" to heart even though they don't have the age or experience of doing anything but studying film and making film/TV/web videos. So there's a lot of chatting, bonding over what people dislike, and general obliviousness that takes a while to come across as self-aware; self-centered characters in a relationship (or just out of it) that doesn't have enough warmth or scope to matter to an audience.

Full review on EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 11 March 2013 - 17 March 2013

Chlotrudis Awards stuff dominating my movie-watching time, for good and ill.



Stubless: The three movies I saw to vote on Chlotrudis's Buried Treasure Award (Beauty Is Embarrassing on Monday, Alps on Tuesday, Sound of Noise on Thursday, all in my living room); and Ginger & Rosa (Sunday at 10am in Coolidge Corner #2).

I think this may be the first year of voting in the Chlotrudis Awards when I've actually seen enough of the movies in the Buried Treasure category to actually vote in the category. I still missed Breathing, but five out of six movies that are, by their nature, difficult to see is not bad, especially when you're the only movie lover in North America without Netflix.

I didn't have quite the busy weekend I initially intended. The two King Hu pictures on Friday night were a start, but were also a lot at the end of the work week. Saturday wound up being a bit of a spring cleaning day, and I didn't feel like I'd make the end of A Touch of Zen, let alone The ABCs of Death - especially with a 10am screening of Ginger & Rosa, which wound up being pretty good, on Sunday morning. After that I went for The Call, trying two theaters before I could get MoviePass to work, and then just barely had time to grab some groceries and a much-needed shower before it was time for "the Trudies".

As usual, it was an amusing enough evening, eventually serving as a wake for the Boston Phoenix, which abruptly ceased publication a few days earlier. It's long been a friend to the organization and film in general, and it's tough to imagine the Dig completely filling the void it leaves.

A lot of the people presenting the awards were from the Phoenix, or other local organizations, and maybe it was because that paper closing means that its critics are, temporarily, just enthusiasts like us, but the thing about the Chlotrudis Awards presentation that has struck me as weird ever since I started attending really stood out: Why don't we, as members, give out our own awards? On one level, it doesn't really matter - folks are only rarely there to pick them up - but as much as it's cool to have guests there validating us as being worthy of the critics' and programmers' and officials' respect, the usual set-up where Chlotrudis members stand on stage, introduce someone else, who reads off the nominees and announces the winner kind of feels like we're stepping aside or making sure that someone with authority speaks for us. I think it would actually be much cooler if the members were standing side-by-side with the guests, rather than ceding the stage.

The awards themselves were a pretty reasonable lot. For a small group like this, just getting seen give a movie a lg up, especially since that lets people discuss it on various forums and boost visibility. So I wasn't surprised that The Perks of Being a Wallflower wound up getting a lot of awards; it got a push. And I can't complain about stuff getting a push, as the movie I nominated for Buried Treasure, A Simple Life wound up winning, despite only one or two of us having seen it before the nominating meeting in January. It gave me a weirdly personal stake in the evening's festivities, which I'm sure the folks who nominated the other films up for consideration must have shared. When that got announced as the last and biggest prize of the night, well, what could I thing but "Suck it, losers!"

I kid, especially since a lot of people at the after-party seemed to be implying that they voted strategically - apparently they saw this having momentum and, having liked it pretty well, voted for it perhaps over their first choice; based upon the number of people who did that, it seemed like Sound of Noise could easily have won. That's why you vote your conscience, folks.

The reception afterward was OK, although I found myself having to leave to get some lobby air after a while - aside from the usual difficulties in being able to hear in a crowded room, it was one of those evenings where something just seemed to assault my sense of smell. In this case, it was cucumbers - normally inoffensive enough, but had me recoiling in full get that away! mode.

It was cool to actually hear people talking about reading and looking forward to what I wrote, though. As much as I write in part because it's the best way for me to organize my thoughts on something, I do like knowing people read it, and looking at the page views on this and eFilmCritic often has me wonder how many are people actually reading and how many are spiders or other robots doing little but cataloging the web. A couple of folks mentioned (one or two actually enthusiastically) reading my reviews and, no joke, that felt really great.

Potential Buried Treasures: Beauty Is Embarrassing, Alps, and Sound of Noise

As I mentioned before, I'm generally not very good about actually seeing the nominees for the Chlotrudis Society Buried Treasure award, in part because I hate watchinig movies like they're homework. I could be seeing something I'm really interested in, or doing something else, after all. But, since I made the effort to get one movie nominated this year, I decided not to make someone else see a movie to vote on the award if I wasn't willing to do the same.

It does somewhat skew the perception of the movies, though. I strongly suspect that I would have hated Alps anyway, but would I have disliked it quite so much if I didn't resent it for making me put off watching Justified? Probably not. I also think I would have liked Beauty Is Embarrassing a bit more if I had found it on my own, perhaps fitting it into my IFFBoston schedule last year. It's actually the sort of documentary I want to see more of in that it's informative and positive rather than an attempt to sway one's opinion or elevate a guy who makes a mess of his life - but when I have to watch it, those elements make it seem sort of slight.

It probably also didn't help that somewhere between Amazon sending a stream out, my computer decoding it, and it traveling down an HDMI cable to my TV, the picture seems to get too dark. This wasn't really a problem with Sound of Noise, but there were large chunks of Alps where I really can't see what is going on.

Still, it got me able to see enough to vote by the Friday deadline. The awards ceremony is this afternoon at the Brattle Theatre; if you're in the area, it's a kind of fun show, and with any luck, we'll see A Simple Life win the Buried Treasure award (with Oslo, August 31st also an acceptable victor).

Beauty Is Embarrassing

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (PBS Independent Lens, HD)

Wayne White seems like a nice fellow, thoroughly well-adjusted and funny without the wackiness necessarily seeming too much like a put-on. That may make Beauty Is Embarrassing a relatively unique entry in the genre of artist documentaries, which all-too-often ask the audience to believe that because someone can use a paintbrush or guitar, their substance abuse or self-centered nature is somehow interesting. Of course, this means that it's up to White and his art to keep the audience interested, and, well, they're nice enough.

White is probably best known for designing the sets of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, a cramped, surreal, and wonderfully silly environment that netted him three Emmy Awards. That was twenty years ago, but he's been keeping busy since, often with a series of words painted on found landscape paintings. He's also worked in cartooning, puppetry, and animation.

There's not necessarily a lot of drama in White's story; he started drawing at an early age, and while each step he took in his life moved him further from his Tennessee roots, he generally seems to find some measure of success and contentment in college, New York, and Los Angeles without much bitterness toward what he's leaving behind (though it doesn't happen overnight). Director Neil Berkeley does find a certain amount of tension there, mainly during a return home and reunion with a fellow artist who stayed there - not so much tension between them, but White seeming a little more reticent and with interview comments about the southern paternal figure being something he always rebelled against and something that makes it into his work. There are some entertaining plays on that - a scene where he dances a barefoot jig after saying nobody considered him particularly southern until he left the south which is as much a play on Yankees' stereotypes as a swipe and the big Lyndon Johnson mascot head he and son Woodrow build plays into - but it's worth noting that they were literally manufactured for the movie.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Alpeis (Alps)

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)

It's not crippling for a movie to have a peculiar, almost preposterous premise; the weird ones are often the best kind. It helps a lot if that premise is realized in an exciting manner, though, and Alps sucks any possible thrill from the telling that it can.

The story follows four people in Athens - a gymnast (Ariane Labed), her coach (Johnny Verkis), a nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia), and a paramedic (Aris Servetalis) - who form a group called "Alps" (the paramedic calls himself "Mont Blanc" as the leader) that offers a service in which they impersonate a dead loved one for a few hours every week. Of course, there are already existing tensions within the group, and sometimes it can be easy to lose oneself within this sort of role-playing.

It might be easier for the audience to lose itself if director Girogos Lanthimos didn't play everything so completely straight, though. The aliases acknowledge that this arrangement is peculiar, and there is naturally a point where things start to fall apart, but for most of the film, the characters go about their business as if this was perfectly ordinary, with the audience observing how they go about it but never seeing how it bumps up against more traditional means of mourning a loss. Sometimes, treating the outré as ordinary allows an audience to connect it to an absurdity in ordinary life, but the closest this movie comes is letting the audience compare the Alps' drilling with how the coach torments the gymnast, but that sort of student-coach relationship is hardly the sort of thing that requires an unusual metaphor. Instead, not letting the strange thing be strange just means there's little to do but watch the details.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Sound of Noise

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)

A little bit of IMDB link-following as I prepared to write up The Sound of Noise has me somewhat more curious than usual about how it played and was perceived in its native Sweden. Was it a Six Drummers feature with a lot more plot than their usual shorts, or was it considered a funny detective movie with antagonists that fans of goofy percussion might recognize? It doesn't really matter, as the end result is great fun, but I'm curious nonetheless.

It's not the drummers that get the movie started, though, but Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson), the head of Malmo's anti-terrorism squad, which would be impressive to most families, but he comes from a family of musicians, with his brother Oscar (Sven Ahlstrom), a conductor and one-time child prodigy, much favored over tone-deaf Amadeus. When he recognizes the ticking outside an embassy as not a bomb but a metronome, he doesn't realize that perpetrators Sanna (Sanna Persson) and Magnus (Magnus Borjeson) are planning a four-act opus of musical anarchy, "Music for a City and Six Drummers", with four other comrades (Marcus Haraldson Boij, Johannes Bjork, Fredrik Myhr, and Anders Vestergard) joining in.

Amadeus Warnebring is an interesting creation; a lot of movies would make the cop who hates music because of something in his past a cartoonish monster, receiving either his comeuppance or an unlikely conversion at the end. Amadeus is sympathetic, though; the scenes where he is unable to connect with his family will likely strike some as familiar, as will the idea of not loving something everyone assumes you should even though, yes, you "get it". Nilsson plays his part straight, but doesn't make him so uptight that audiences can't like the guy, and is pretty funny when the action starts to drive him around the bend.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Potential Buried Treasure: Oslo, August 31st

It probably marks me as a bad member of the organization, but I almost never vote for the Chlotrudis Awards' Buried Treasure award. You have to see all five of the nominated movies (or, in years with six, five of six), and ever since seeing Chicago solely because it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, I've tried to avoid seeing movies as a matter of obligation. That movie was probably not as terrible as it seemed to me, but laying out money when you're not really enthused about that thing specifically certainly makes it seem worse.

I've been able to justify it to myself somewhat because I honestly don't care who wins awards. I tend to think that the value of awards is less in actually naming one movie or performance or book or song or whatever the best of the year than in creating a reason to shine a bright light on the nominees. A list of several noteworthy things is useful, but can quickly be forgotten. Make it a competition, though, and people start talking, and there's also a window during which people will make an extra effort to check the nominees out, and that's good for everything.

So, I don't really care who wins other than being disgusted when it's something that clearly didn't belong on the list of nominations in the first place. But, this year, one of the nominees for Buried Treasure is my suggestion, getting on there despite my being the only one to see it, and it's the most difficult for the voters to see. It probably won't get close to winning - I can very easily see it being the sixth for people seeing five out of six - but I'd rather not seem a complete hypocrite later on when folks say they went out of their way or spent some money to see it and I say, yeah, I didn't bother with the award after that.

So, now I'm up to 2/6, and kind of wondering if others whose horses are in this race (so to speak) find themselves approaching it the same way I am - basically, the other nominees have to knock the one I already decided should win off. The other categories work that way too, though not as starkly, and I find that it certainly feels less fair than choosing one after having seen them all, even if I generally trust my judgement well enough to think I'll choose the right thing for the right reason.


Anyway, that's enough of that. One thing I noticed that wasn't really germane to the review was that it seemed to stay light out pretty late during this movie - the characters didn't seem to be under artificial lights when they noted it had passed midnight. I didn't think Oslo was far north enough to have midnight sun in any case, and August 31st is much closer to an equinox than a solstice anyway, so that shouldn't be a big deal in any case. That's a minor thing, though; I've got another, rather spoilery question about the end and structure of the movie that I've put after the review link.


Oslo, August 31st

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Some of the Best of 2012, 35mm)

Oslo, October 31st starts out with various off-screen voices describing their memories of the city in question, and even when the imagery that goes with those memories is of something like a building being brought down, it's vibrant and alive. When it's first seen in the present, through the eyes of the main character, though, it's all motionless construction equipment. It's time to rebuild after the implosion, but how to do that may take some consideration.

The man who needs to rebuild is Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), who has spent a fair amount of time in a rehabilitation facility for his drug addiction; he's been given a pass to go into the city for a job interview. That's not until later in the day, though, so in the mean time, he might as well visit some people - an old friend, his sister, maybe a few others as one name leads to another - and the family home. Of course, it's impossible to forget that this is where Anders lived as he succumbed to his demons the first time.

The very name of this movie gives it bounds; it's not going to move far from that time and that place. What's interesting, though, is that co-writer/director Joachim Trier never makes those implied limits feel close or to give them undue importance to the characters within the movie. The extent to which there is not a ticking clock is almost shocking; Trier spends most of the first third of the movie on a conversation between two characters that kicks themes around but doesn't really push Anders through the story, and the time of day or how long it is until Anders is expected back is almost irrelevant in each particular scene. If Trier is making points via where in Oslo each segment takes place, it's not immediately obvious to this non-Norwegian. And yet, as much as the story seems to be contained by its title, there's also a sense that the environment and the passage of time is affecting Anders; it's important without being overtly so.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

OK, you were warned up top, but SPOILERS!


I feel stupid even asking this question, but the opening scenes of the movie (after all the Anders-less memories of Oslo) actually come last chronologically, right? I base this mainly off the idea that when Anders tries to commit suicide by walking into the pond with rocks in his pockets, he backs out by shedding his coat and leaving it at the bottom of the pond, which means he either has multiple similar coats or that this takes place after he wears that coat throughout the rest of the movie.

I want it to be that way, because I'm basically an optimist, and that means that after he relapses, he despairingly tries to kill himself, but ultimately decides he wants to live, and maybe that's the decision that will stick going forward. If the whole movie is chronological, then it's just an industrial-powered downer - the suicide attempt is followed by him going out into a situation he's clearly not prepared to handle, and the trip to his dealer and eventual fall off the wagon are inevitable. And since one of the later revelations in the movie is that most of the action actually takes place on the 30th, that makes what happens in the wee hours and morning of the 31st more important and definitive, whether it be backsliding for good or bottoming out and finally starting the real climb out of the pit.

I think the repeated shots at the end tend to support the idea that those first scenes come last, although the girl in his bed at the start suggests otherwise. I also think that Trier created this ambiguity very carefully and deliberately, and not just because ambiguity and downer endings are often considered sophisticated. Structuring the movie that way emphasizes how this sort of addiction is a repeating cycle, almost a loop that someone gets stuck in. That the movie ends on a series of shots very close to those at the beginning suggests such a thing, but introducing what looked like inconsistencies so that that scene can be approached in both directions - well, that almost makes the whole movie into a moebius strip, with an almost science-fictional time loop that is going to take some extra effort to break out of.

Or, I'm looking so closely at it that I'm missing something really obvious that says I'm full of crap. Can't dismiss that as a possibility.

!SRELIOPS

Coming Soon (or Now Playing): Preview screenings of The Oranges and Keep the Lights On

Ah, fall, when the film preview programs start. Both Talk Cinema and CineCaché (in its previous incarnation as the "Sunday Eye-Opener") used to run at the same time, and they operate in a similar manner - introduction, movie that will open soon in the boutique houses, discussion. Talk Cinema goes with higher-profile films and the discussion tends to be more moderated (depending on which local critic is on stage, it can be more about his/her opinions than the audience going back and forth); CineCaché often digs a little deeper and has a much more informal interaction.

The first Talk Cinema and second CineCaché of the season (I missed the first a couple weeks ago) were both kind of middling experiences. The movies themselves were both pretty close to average in one direction or another, where you can't exactly call them bad or point out crippling mistakes, but which are fairly forgettable. Believe it or not, boutique films can be mediocrities despite the cultivated image as something the smart folks appreciate and the masses hate, and that's the case with both The Oranges and Keep the Lights On; some good work but little spark.

The post-film discussions were a little muted, too. I didn't get any Horrible Photography, but director Ira Sachs was present, and I don't know about you, but that makes me a bit uncomfortable when the movie isn't well-above average. The director who realizes and admits that his movie isn't all he wants it to be is rare (for instance, Michael Biehn admitting The Victim's failings at Fantasia this year), so while you can get some insight into the inspiration and process, it puts a real chill on "I kind of thought the movie was boring".

In some ways, the Talk Cinema discussion was just as weird; the guy leading the discussion spent a lot of time talking about how he spent a lot of the movie's first half confused and weirded out over who was which character's kid, and a few members of the audience agreed. The argument appeared to be that Alia Shawkat is more likely to be the daughter of Oliver Platt and Alison Janney than Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener, and I'm not sure I buy that - I think if Shawkat was placed next to Keener as much as Laurie, it's not such a big deal - but even aside from that, this is a movie with the most definitive narration you can imagine at the beginning. Were you guys just not paying attention or what?

Anyway, kind of a weird couple of screenings. The Oranges opened at Kendall Square today, and Keep the Lights On opens there next week; the next CineCaché is Headshot on the 15th (I'm excited and hoping for 35mm because I missed it at Fantasia and Thai films always look fantastic), and the next Talk Cinema on the 21st has not yet been named.

The Oranges

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2012 in Coolidge Corner #2 (Talk Cinema, 35mm)

The Oranges isn't bad as "stripping the sheen from suburbia" movies go. It's just kind of lazy, apparently satisfied enough with the number of jokes that get a chuckle to let a talented cast coast as things amble on toward a soft ending. Those who dislike it will probably disdain it for its premise, while most will likely just forget it quickly enough.

After all, the characters at the center seem standard enough in two families that live across the street from each other in West Orange, New Jersey (or is it East Orange? doesn't matter). David Walling (Hugh Laurie) and Terry Ostroff (Oliver Platt) are best friends, and have been for a long time; David's wife Paige (Catherine Keener) and Terry's wife Carol (Alison Janney) are close as well. Daughters Vanessa (Alia Shawkat) and Nine (Leighton Meester) were too, until high school. Nina has been living on the west coast for a while, but a bad breakup sends her home for Thanksgiving, and her mother Carol is eager to set her up with Toby Walling (Adam Brody). And while Toby's nice and all, it's his father that winds up connecting with Nina.

Give a lot of credit to Hugh Laurie and Leighton Meester - this is a particularly discomfiting May-December romance, and it would be easy for these two characters to come off as nothing but selfish or oblivious to others' feelings. They are, of course, but Laurie and Meester also play the characters with enough overlapping areas of charm and self-awareness that the audience can believe that this guy and that girl are going to see something in each other rather than it being a cynical matter of the universe throwing a pretty blonde half his age at a guy whose marriage is on the rocks. Hugh Laurie, especially, manages to takes the moments meant to show that David is old and smart enough to know better and still come out not looking like an ogre.

Full review at EFC.

Keep the Lights On

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché, video)

Keep the Lights On is the sort of semi-autobiographical movie that just goes to show that one's real-life drama, even if translated to the screen without a hitch, is not necessarily compelling for others. Director Ira Sachs goes for honesty here, and does well by it, but perhaps could have added something else to the mix.

The Sachs surrogate is Erik Rothman (Thure Lindhardt), a documentary filmmaker originally from Denmark but living and working in Manhattan. As the film starts, it's 1998, and a lonely Erik meets Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth) on a phone sex line. Erik is lonely despite being close with his sister Karen (Paprika Steen) and collaborator Claire (Julianne Nicholsonn), so he and Paul are soon together, but Paul's issues with secrecy and addiction will put a strain on the relationship.

Not enough of a strain to actually end it, though, though so Erik and the audience are in for ten years of ups and downs, and if you've ever had a friend who was in an extended bad relationship, this is kind of like that. It's not always in a crisis, but the problems aren't improving, so it just runs in a loop that may be a sort of agony for the ones involved but is mostly frustrating for those on the outside looking in. That's where Keep the Lights On spends most of its time - Paul's an addict, Erik's immature, and periodic two year jumps don't show much in the way of change.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 12 March 2012 - 18 March 2012

Last week was just dead.



It turned out to be a bad week for getting out of work early enough to go to the movies, and going to a later show would have meant waiting around somewhere, and not much seemed worth that. The weekend wound up being built around fixed things - see the first screening of Life Without Principle so that I can get a review up in time for the second, Japanese class, the daily 35mm showing of Chico & Rita, Chlotrudis Awards - and wound up without a lot of wiggle room.

The Chlotrudis Awards were fine, as usual; I had less stake than usual as a voter because what I'd seen didn't align very well with what was nominated. There were a lot of categories where I had only seen one or two nominees so didn't vote; the Buried Treasure, where you're required to have seen all nominated films to cast a vote, is one I seldom vote on because I learned that I almost never enjoy movies seen as homework or out of obligation.

Besides, as I mentioned to someone at the post-ceremony party, the value of awards isn't in the winner, but in how the existence of the ceremony gives the nominees prominence for a month or two. Nominations for awards are valuable as a manageable list of things worth seeking out or discussing in various categories; the actual winner may receive 21% of the vote in a field of five and is, in the case of awards like these, often comes down to which movie was most-seen (if a lot of people are voting based on the three out of five they've seen, the movie that gets into the most threes has an advantage).

Yes, I recognize the apparent contradiction in those two paragraphs. I'm an outlier, if I haven't seen a nominee before the list is made, I've probably chosen not to for one reason or another. It does still give me a little extra push to see something when I get the chance, though; I might have passed on Beginners at the Brattle otherwise, for example.

Atom Egoyan was the Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and was a nifty guest, as was his wife (and a previous award winner), Arsinée Khanjian. IFFBoston generally and Adam Rothman specifically were great choices for recipients of the "Cat's Meow" award, with their tenth annual festival coming up in just a month or so. I did bail on the after-party after about an hour or so, as it appears I get even less out of standing around with a bunch of people talking at once and drinking now, and having someone running around taking pictures just increases my agitation.

Chico & Rita

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2012 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (second-run, 35mm)

For all the elements in Chico & Rita that seem like they should make it more exciting (animation! jazz! passion! globetrotting! jealousy! revolution!), it turns out to be a strangely inert movie. It's fairly unique - non-fantastical period romances are not the usual subject for an animated feature - and yet seldom gives the audience the feeling of something they've never seen before.

An old man shines shoes on a city street, returning home at the end of the day to listen to a program of decades-old music on the radio. The song takes him back to sixty years earlier, when Chico (voice of Eman Xor Oña) was a piano player from rural Cuba trying to break into the Havana jazz scene. He and best friend/manager Ramon (voice of Mario Guerra) start the evening with a couple of Yanqui tourist girls, but when Rita (voice of Limara Meneses) takes the stage, he knows he's found the perfect partner in more ways than one. Of course, being passionate musician types, the title characters have the tendency to be their own worst enemies, and as such eventually make it to New York separately, where their reunion proves just as tempestuous as their first go-around.

How somebody feels about this movie likely correlates well with how he or she feels about its central relationship, and I must admit to not feeling the love. Chico and Rita seem well-matched, but a romance that can drive a feature-length movie has to be more, and this movie never gives us a reason to think that this is one for the books. The characters are both too cool to start with, so their meeting never seems to throw one or the other off their game, and the passion they react with later never seems earned. As musicians, their work doesn't seem more brilliant together than apart (audience members with a greater appreciation of jazz than I have may dispute this, but it needs to be much more striking). It's the sort of shallow romance that seems like preparation for The Real Thing, but the movie instead expects the audience to accept it as that.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 14 March 2011 to 20 March 2011

I would just like to say, to all those reading who may have attended the Chlotrudis awards or found the musical number on YouTube, that I did not attempt to nominate The Human Centipede: First Sequence for "Best Ensemble Cast". I haven't even seen the thing!



(As always, click on the tickets to jump to that film's write-up)

As always, the Chlotrudis awards were good fun, although it's always amusing how the guests never seem to know what they're getting into. Here's the list of winners; it's not a bad group.

Barney's Version

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2011 in Arlington Capitol #6 (second-run)

Looking at the IMDB page for Barney's Version, I find myself much more interested in the little, trivial bits than the movie itself. For instance, ubiquitous Canadian actor Maury Chaykin shows up in a tiny role, presumably just to keep busy for a couple of days. Barney works on the set of a Canadian TV show which stars Paul Gross as an RCMP constable, amusing for those who will always remember him from Due South, and the on-screen directors are played by Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. The director of the film itself, Richard J. Lewis (no, not the self-pitying stand-up comic), shows up in a late scene as a pathologist, there to figure out the circumstances of the title character's life.

Clever bits all, and Barney's Version is, by and large, a movie made up of clever bits and pieces that doesn't quite add up to a whole. Part of that's by design; one of the main threads in the present day is how the title character (Paul Giamatti) is losing his memory, which means that there's a very real possibility that the mystery that occasionally pops up is one that can never be solved (only Barney knew, and now that's going). Nifty idea, almost no execution. And then there's the set-up in the past, which interestingly does interesting things with Barney's first two wives - a wonderfully acted of betrayal and guilt in Rome, and a perfectly stifling picture of Barney retreating into conformity in Montreal - which gets us to the meet-cute with Rosamund Pike's Miriam and the possible murder. That's a nifty way to get the movie to a very conventional place.

The conventional place is where the movie spends most of its time - Barney becomes a blandly jealous and inattentive husband, Miriam is better than he deserves, and neither their courtship nor the eventual collapse of their marriage is nearly as interesting as what got the movie there.

Paul

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2011 in AMC Boston Common #13 (second-run)

One thing Paul has going for it: It's back-loaded. The end of the movie features a bunch of snappy gags leavened with a little bit of earned sentiment, pop culture gags that actually work, and generally snappy back-and-forth that almost feels like the movie was shot in sequence and the cast and crew have finally clicked. That more likely means that I as an audience member have just gotten used to director Greg Mottola's and co-writers/co-stars Nick Frost's and Simon Pegg's rhythms. Well, that and the start of the movie being a bunch of tired "look at the nerds" bits.

The end winds up being impressive enough to more than make up for the start, and it's a pretty slickly-produced movie to boot. The gray alien of the title looks pretty good for a mid-tier comedy, and Mottola and company come up witha good look for the movie that gives an idea of the grandeur of the American west but also feels like a movie as opposed to the real thing, a nice compromise for a film that is in many ways a love letter to genre flicks.

This Week In Tickets: 25 January 2010 to 31 January 2010

Unreal. I go pretty much all last year without losing a ticket stub, and this year I've lost two in the first month. I'm guessing that this one either wound up tossed in the trash with the little slip the concession stand at AMC Boston Common gives you so that you can claim your mozzarella sticks when they come out of the kitchen, or somehow slipped out when Matt and I went to the Elephant & Castle for lunch. There was a lot of paper moving around there.

I managed to keep a lid on a minor horrified reaction when I gave Matt the Red Sox tickets I got him and his finacée for Christmas, because he placed them in his wallet and folded them. They're going to be in rough shape three months ago, when the time comes to actually use them.



(It's a little amusing that the piece of paper that tells you how many MovieWatcher points you have - 393, a neat trick considering you get two per movie - has an exhortation to join MovieWatcher. Since that's the one I got when watching Edge of Darkness, it can sub for its ticket stub.)

Mostly empty space, since the Friday night Mystery Team with filmmakers in attendance was sold out by the time I got there, and the Chlotrudis Society nomination meeting ran long enough for me to miss Saturday's. It was fun, although I'll have to get there earlier next time, as when there are only a few seats left to choose from, the already-high probability of being caught in the middle of a conversation about cats climbs frighteningly close to certainty. Here's the results; sometime later this week I'll post my thoughts on them compared to the Oscar list.

One thing I'm a little disappointed that I missed was the AfterDark horror fest; unfortunately, it's just too difficult to get out to Revere for movies that, at least in recent years, have been far under the radar. The year it was at Fresh Pond, I actually went to Fresh Pond for quite a bit of it, but I'm kind of surprised that they can't get it booked someplace closer to Boston proper than Revere. Does it really draw such a small crowd that the Somerville, Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square Cinema, and the Coolidge all figure they're better off not giving it a screen? If so, I'd be surprised if they had any sort of theatrical release before the DVD release next year.

Edge of Darkness

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2010 at AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run)

Based upon the previews to this, I wondered a couple of things: Did Mel Gibson listen to anything but Kennedy speeches while working on his Boston accent? If so, bad choice, because I don't believe that anyone outside that family actually speaks that way. Also, how much Ray Winstone are we going to see, because he looked aces in the previews.

I suspect that there was more of Winstone's character in the original BBC miniseries, and not just because six hours of time lets you see more of everybody. At times we seem to be a bit too aware of the streamlining; it's the sort of movie where they'll show the villains discussing something and then cut to Gibson's Thomas Craven knowing it. It's not that he couldn't; it's just that you can see the filmmakers trying to save a little time.

It's a good role for Mel Gibson, who has been laying low for a while; he plays this sort of tough guy well. For much of the movie, I was thinking that it was too bad he hasn't played Mike Hammer (yet), as the plot of the movie reminded me of Kiss Me Deadly: Detective who tends to work as a blunt object winding up way over his head, dealing with conspiracies and nasty nuclear material. It works in large part because Gibson does great hard-boiled; give him a line filled with pulp and he will sell the heck out of it. And while I imagine that you could cut Winstone's character, I'm glad they didn't, because the scenes of them together are gold; two different varieties of tough guy who understand and respect each other, and thus aren't trying to outdo one another.

Police, Adjective

At one point, I wasn't sure I was going to get to this. I missed the Chlotrudis screening earlier in the week (I just can't do Monday movies, it seems), and the snow came down like crazy on the bus ride from Waltham to Cambridge; crazy wind and the amount of white stuff just jumped. Must have been a passing squall, though. This, naturally, comes just a couple days after the temperature climbed high enough to melt what snow was left on the ground. New England weather.

I don't have much to say about this that isn't in the review, other than mentioning that the similarity between this film's last act and that of the director's previous work, 12:08 East of Bucharest, didn't really occur to me until I did a quick scan of eFilmCritic to see if I'd reviewed that one. It really is kind of striking, now that I think of it. I may keep it in my pocket as ammunition for tomorrow's Chlotrudis nomination meeting for when people make the inevitable drive-by comments on Avatar (and I know they'll be coming; even otherwise classy, intelligent people can't resist trying to imply that they're better than the rabble by making snarky comments about something popular). See, this art-house guy is kind of a one-trick pony too; you just happen to like that trick.

Speaking of which, I should go fill out my nomination form. Sadly, I don't think Police, Adjective pushes me quite to the 110-eligible-movie level, so I'll only get 21 nominations per category rather than 22. I will attempt to use them for good.

Including nominating Sam Rockwell for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in one of my favorite movies of the year - because I can and he deserves it!

Politist, adj. (Police, Adjective)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)

The title of Police, Adjective comes from a scene almost at the end of the movie, and based upon the definitions read out in that scene, it's interesting that the film was not named "Police, Noun" or "Police, Verb", at least if one is into self-referentiality. The first description of the world "police" as an adjective refers to a type of movie, and while this one technically fits the category, it tends to focus on different aspects of police-work than the typical procedural.

Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is a young detective in a smallish Romanian city. He is currently assigned to tail Victor (Radu Costin), a high-school student whose smokes a bit of hash with a couple of friends, one of whom - Alex (Alexandru Sabadac) - has ratted him out to the police, saying Victor's brother supplies him. Cristi has been following Victor for a week, and though he figures that they technically have enough to bust the kid for distribution, he doesn't want to move in with a sting just yet: It doesn't net him the brother they figure is the real dealer, there's something off about why Alex would squeal, and, besides, why bother when no other country in Europe prosecutes for this anyway?

While most procedurals involve surveillance and stake-outs to some extent, they tend to focus on the moment when something is about to happen, or play up the stultifying boredom of it by showing time passing. Writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu takes a different tack here, giving us many scenes of Cristi taking up a spot in the background while the teenagers do their thing, then wordlessly following as he trails them. Proumboiu and cinematographer Marius Panduru frame things carefully, almost exquisitely, to keep the tail on one side of the screen while the person being followed is at the other edge. We pick out tradecraft without being told - how Cristi tries to keep another person between himself and his target, or how to allay suspicion when a third party starts noticing that he's hanging around. It's an intriguing combination of interesting and tedious, and even though the we aren't given the message directly, we start to notice how just how much time and resources are being spent on this one kid.

Despite the precision present in how Porumboiu presents his police-work, in many ways it is the other half of the title that he is truly concerned with. Not adjectives specifically, but language. The above-mentioned scene between Cristi and his boss (Vlad Ivanov) is, in some ways, the culmination of others where characters ask each other to speak plainly, or Cristi and his wife Anca (Irina Saulescu) debating the meaning to a song's lyrics. There's another scene between them where she points out that out that the grammar in his report is out of date, that what had been two words was now supposed to be one, according to the Romanian Academy. So when all is said and done, we've got the curious idea that laws are made out of language, but language itself can change for political reasons.

That's something to chew on, although even without the way the dialogue occasionally goes into oddly formal territory, it's interesting to watch these debates play out on the face of Bucur's Cristi. Bucur doesn't feel the need to do much to ingratiate Cristi with the audience, allowing the character to come off as fussy or demanding. There's the constant implication that Cristi is smart, but in a bit over his head, and even if the audience doesn't always quite warm to the man, we can find ourselves empathizing with him about his questions, even as we sometimes have trouble deciding whether they are emotional or intellectual. He's given good characters to play against, too - Irina Saulescu manages both intellectualism and warmth as Cristi's wife, while Ion Stoica is a simple presence as the fellow officer he shares an office with. And while I believe that Ivanov only has that one scene, it's a big, meaty one that he absolutely dominates.

I notice, upon re-reading what I wrote about 12:08 East of Bucharest, Porumboiu's previous film, that it too was built around one big scene, staged in a fairly similar way: What amounts to a long-held shot of three men involved in a relatively formal discussion. It's a format that works for him, apparently, although I think it works better here because the scenes leading up to it are much more focused - there can be no doubt that this is Cristi's story - and it leads directly to a conclusion. Indeed, what could be a stiff, purely intellectual story winds up somewhat fascinating by how well Porumboiu and Bucur put us in Cristi's shoes.

It still winds up being rather on the formal side; those looking for a conventional crime movie will likely be disappointed. It offers plenty of food for thought for those with a fair amount of patience, though, whether it be ethical or intellectual.

Also at EFC

Boston Fantastic Film Festival: ­Mercy

Brattle Theater creative director Ned Hinkle chose Mercy for the Sunday Eye-Opener program that the Brattle and Chlotrudis Society co-present in part because he felt it was something of a failure, but that the way it failed and what it was striving for might make for interesting discussion. It's not a bad idea to occasionally screen what you know is a bad film in a series like that, although I think he might have been surprised by how much we as a group did not like it.

One thing that I found interesting, considering how part of Chlotrudis's charter is about watching films actively, is how much people seemed to have trouble articulating why they didn't like Mercy. A couple got in good lines about how little they liked the film, but specific details why were a little harder to come by.

Which is interesting, when you compare it to the popular perceptions of the art-film-loving crowd - that they/we enjoy tearing things down but never have anything good to say. This screening was just one example of how the opposite frequently seems to be true more often.

Mercy

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival / Sunday Eye-Opener)

When Martin Landau was promoting Ed Wood, he was asked a question about what it was like to do a movie about the worst director in history. He corrected the interviewer, saying that the worst thing a movie could be is boring, and Wood never made a boring movie. I haven't seen nearly enough of Mercy director Patrick Roddy's work to say whether or not it's typical, but he has certainly made at least one boring movie.

Gary Shannon plays the title character, John Mercy, out of prison on parole after twenty-five years and an apparently changed man. His parole officer (Charles McNeely III) doesn't really believe in John's reformation, and expects to see him back in jail soon. He's given a nondescript job and a nondescript hotel room, told that any screw-ups there or drug or alcohol use or missed appointments will send him back to jail. He meets Eve (Shelley Farrell), a nice-enough seeming girl, while having a club soda at the local bar, but initially keeps his distance. He doesn't really know what to make of the outside world.

Once the situation is set up, Roddy and company spend a good chunk of time demonstrating just how isolating and repetitive John's life is, and it's one of those situations where the filmmaker maybe does his job a little too well. There's a montage that seems to take forever of John sleeping in his spartan hotel room, going to work, operating a machine press, walking back through an alleyway filled with prostitutes and a street preacher, siting at the bar, and repeat, although it probably only takes ten minutes or so in reality. The audience gets the point, sure enough, but there's going to be a fair-sized chunk of that audience who wind up just checking out completely, even when things do start moving.

In fact, the first time John appeared on screen with his hand bandaged, I cursed myself for having apparently fallen asleep and missed the part of the movie where, finally, something happened. That was not the case, though - these are mysterious off-screen injuries. That's where the horror/suspense part of the movie comes in - is it Eve who injured him? The ghost, presumably of the girl whom he killed all those years ago, that he sometimes sees though no-one else does? Someone or something else? Trouble is, even if you're still interested, the movie doesn't really seem to be. There's never a very strong feeling of suspense or even mounting dread. Roddy does do a pretty good job going for the gross-out later, though.

To give Roddy his due, he's got some skills with the camera. He's going for a noir feel, and the crisp black-and-white photography is quite nice. He's also done a fine job with locations and production design to evoke the feel of the era. His artsier choices - dubbing animal noises over the poor/homeless people in the street, using almost no extras in other scenes - may work better for others than it did for me. Garry Shannon gives a pretty nice understated performance as John, although Shelley Farrell isn't so solid as Eve (as the screening's host mentioned in the discussion, it takes a better actress to play a bad actress well).

The idea is that Mercy is only superficially a thriller, though underneath it's a film about isolation and alienation. Unfortunately, the surface isn't very thrilling, and what's underneath isn't so clever as it tries to be.