This Week in Tickets: 13 February 2023 - 19 February 2023 (A Couple of Classics)

It was a pretty good week for seeing movies on the big screen, new and old.

I started off with the first of a couple Film Rolls things from South Korea - EXIT on Monday night and lucky Chan-Sil on Thursday, which are both relatively recent and at completely opposite ends of that country's film industry.

On Tuesday, I hit the night-before showing for Marlowe, which has a darn good pedigree - Sam Neill playing literature's second-greatest detective with Neil Jordan directing a script by William Monahan and a cast that includes Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, and Colm Meaney - but which is missing one important name in Raymond Chandler, alas.

It was back to the Common the next day for the new 3D rerelease of Titanic - I made a point to skip the Valentine's Day crowd for that one - and it's kind of mind-boggling that Cameron has only made a couple features (plus some documentary work) in a quarter-century since then, although all those movies are the sort of grand epic that few other people seem to have the ability to do.

Come the weekend, it was a couple days of noting how multiplexes seem to have grown even more hostile to folks catching two, especially if you're cutting across town. I happily caught Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the big screen at the Coolidge - the schedule out from said "screening on digital and 35mm", although I didn't see where the 35mm times were, took the 66 back to Harvard Square to pick up the week's comics, and then wound up hanging around and grabbing a bite to eat at the Smoke Shop in Kendall Square so that I could make it to the 9:15pm show of Living, which was the most convenient time, since I'd dilly-dallied in seeing it.

And I don't just mean I'd waited until it was almost gone from local screens - I could have seen it in Dublin back in November, as that's when it was released there and in the UK, but apparently I had better things to do some evenings, though I can't imagine what.

Then, on Sunday, I'd kind of hoped to pair something else with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the 4pm showtimes for the Imax 3D presentations really don't lend to that. But that's okay; Sunday is crossword & grocery shopping day, after all.

The ticket kiosk ate my ticket, by the way, which is why all that stuff is written in on the page. Not as bad as Assembly Row just not having them, but, c'mon, your loyalty program's name is Stubs, and I need my stubs!

One disappointment aside, a fun week! This coming one looks interesting as well, so catch the first draft of this blog on my Letterboxd or wait around for me to consider things a bit.


Eksiteu (Exit)

Seen 13 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I will, of course, go longer on this one when I reach it in the Film Rolls queue, but it's a thoroughly fun action/adventure that I could probably recommend to the family members with kids even if it's not specifically made for them. Fun, friendly, always moving forward and fairly non-violent once the inciting incident is over; I think I really would have enjoyed seeing it on the big screen, but it had it's miniature North American release right at the end of Fantasia and skipped Boston anyway. I'd feel kind of dumb if I could have seen it in Montreal, so I won't be looking that up.


Titanic

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #14 (25th anniversary, 3D Dolby Cinema DCP)

I'm not sure I've seen this since the original release, and might not have gone to an anniversary re-release without the 3D conversion because, like with Avatar, it is very easy to forget how effective James Cameron's movies are in the moment one you've got a little distance, seen them shrunk to the size of a television, and started to break them down into pieces. The man is a precision crafter of motion pictures, though, and knows how to make a classic story work for a broad audience as well as anybody.

Which is kind of funny - the spectacle has been the hook for Cameron since The Abyss in 1989, with story often considered secondary because he doesn't necessarily surprise or break new ground. And yet, for as much as the grandeur and obsessive detail of this movie's production design isn't nearly so overwhelming as it was 25 years ago, it never feels like it's been passed by. There's a command of the form and knowledge of what rings true here, taking a simple enough story that almost anyone can relate and finding the little details that make it feel alive. One never feels like he's switched over to "blockbuster mode" when the catastrophe and visual effects begin to take center stage, and he uses great action work and some horrific imagery to communicate the scale without changing the type of movie.

And, boy, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are great here, both at a spot to make a big leap after a few impressive parts and both exactly what the film needs, full of youthful energy, their characters more polished and rough around the edges than one might expect, and almost effortlessly in love. Cameron's going for simplicity here means they can't really work at explaining or justifying that - the audience just has to believe it - and they hit that mark. That they'd go on to excel in more cynical material enhances how perfect they were at this time, in a way; you can see them as newcomers who still have some illusions here. A special supporting cast shout out to Victor Garber, whose modest engineer is achingly tragic.

The conversion to 3D is nice, if mostly understated; I'm not sure if they did it anew with the upscale or if it's the one from the last re-release a decade ago. It shines a bit of a light on the rare digital effects that haven't aged as well as the rest throughout the film but impresses in the last act - the extra depth and mechanical structure is nice throughout, but when the stem is vertical and the camera looks down, one sees why they'd do this. The 4K upgrade is mostly impressive a swell, aside from a couple shots where it doesn't quite take; Paramount is going to sell some good looking discs later this year.

As they should. It's easy to forget just how great this is, because it hasn't really been imitated enough to be better than its imitators and romance as a genre doesn't get much respect. But it works like crazy, even when that's harder than it looks.


Chansilineun bokdo manhji (Lucky Chan-sil)

Seen 16 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Blu-ray)

The idea of this movie that I had in my head - director Kim Cho-hee, who had spent much of her career as producer for Hong Sang-soo, making a feature about a producer who suddenly has the art-house figure she'd been working with drop dead - had more potential to be a satire that bites the hand that feeds it than Kim goes for. I'm not disappointed that she went the way she did, but no matter how warm and charming this film is, I kind of still want that other one.

As an aside, the Blu-ray edition is gorgeous from packaging to video, and the simple song over the end credits is weirdly catchy. I really wish there were more English-friendly releases like it.


Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (special engagement, DCP)

I just saw this a few years back (have we really been doing pandemic stuff for three years?), and I once again wonder if Ang Lee would have used flashbacks if the de-aging tech had been available when this came out, and what that would have been like. I think he can be trusted with it as much as anyone, but it's tough to imagine the movie being any better.

Indeed, this film is close enough to perfect that I really don't have that much to say about it: It's some of Michelle Yeoh's and Chow Yun-fat's best work, and what's kind of amazing about that is just how reserved the pair are and how much time they spend basically as sleuths working a case as opposed to would-be lovers totally focused on one another, just really beautiful jobs of revealing who they are through what they do.

And that's considering that what they do is often revealed through impossible action, with Lee and Yuen Woo-ping just making the fact that this group can run up walls and fly feel perfectly natural even though the way they stage it is telling: Chow's Li Mu Bai is a master, defying gravity casually; Zhang Ziyi's Jen is the prodigy, so even if it comes easy to her, she clearly likes to show off; Yeoh's Yu Shu Lien is not quite in the same refined air as Li, so you see her working at it, but always get the feeling that, among normal people, she's one of the best, and never actually looks bad next to the preternaturally gifted folks she meets.

Anyway, I love this movie, and am reminded why every time I see it. I don't know that the new restoration being touted is actually newer than the 4K disc I watched last time, but I have no problem with Sony coming up with a thin veneer of "look, we're going to cash in on Michelle's Oscar buzz". Hopefully they'll have a chance to do so with Chow and Zhang in the next few years.

What I wrote in April '20


Living

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

Living is just an exquisitely constructed and photographed film from start to finish. The opening made me wonder why we don't present the main credits like that any more, and I want to know how they managed the trick where it looked like the photograph at the funeral was about to come to life, as if imbued with its subject's new found vitality. At the start, there is also a seamless transition from nostalgic grain to painfully sharp digital capture with rich dark shades, and a formal rigidity to the shots throughout that threatens to crush the viewer but only if they allow it.

There are folks who don't necessarily like to see the filmmaker's hand so clearly, but in some ways, that seems the whole point of the film - the characters need to see the forces that are pushing them into unfulfilling situations, not necessarily out of malice, but inertia, propriety, and fear of blame if something goes wrong. Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro often seem to be tipping their hand so that the audience can recognize it applying to them as well. There are metaphors for this sort of control throughout; note, for instance, how Mr. Williams doesn't quite get the knack of the claw game, while the less set-in-her-ways Miss Harris is able to pull her rabbit out.

In the middle of all that, is Bill Nighy, his wiry figure and precise diction the perfect representation of a man who simply doesn't register, but it doesn't take much for him to become a version with a little joie de vivre, even if the flip side is palpable sorrow despite practicality about how much good it does. He's a perfect fit for the role, especially when he is seen as a template for almost every other male character in the movie, from Alex Sharp's newcomer who could choose not to go down the same road, to how the burlier figure and loud clothing Jamie Wilkes sports as Talbot marks him as Williams's opposite.

For a moment, it seems to go on a bit too long, but there's a certain self-awareness in that, as those left behind have to face how their memorable gesture may not last, and one must find new ways to keep oneself on a good path when the system is built to move one away from the daring. Yes, you may feel like it's time to coast out, but you don't really have that option.


Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)

People often fairly complain about how fake and weightless some of these movies are, but consider this: Maybe it's just because he's a good actor, but Michael Douglas looks like he's having the time of his life imagining what weird creatures will be digitally composited into his scenes and being a giant nerd about ants in this movie. Other guys with his resume would obviously be wondering how it came to this, but I'm not sure anybody is having quite as much fun as him, although Michelle Pfeiffer sure looks like she's going to enjoy getting to be a sci-fi badass as long as she can.

That aside, Quantumania is a pretty good Marvel movie, not breaking new ground but delivering the goods folks have ordered. By now, you've kind of got to meet these things where they are - yes, this will sacrifice some things that would make it a better individual film for the epic material; there's going to be a sky full of visual effects in the climax even if it maybe would have worked better with a tighter focus. But, the folks making it also know how to make a solid, entertaining adventure with enough danger to make you consider whether Paul Rudd is signed for more movies and enough wisecracking to grease the wheels without it quite becoming cringe material. It hits its marks and the guys doing creature work are clearly having as much of a blast as the folks at the top of this three-generation adventure.

Is it mostly solid, competent work built to look good on an Imax 3D screen? Yeah, and it probably only really transcends that when Jonathan Majors is putting in the work to establish Kang the Conqueror as a worthy foil for the next few years of Marvel material, tweaking what we've already seen on Loki for something more overtly villainous but the sort of confidence that feels human as well as formidable. I'm eager to see where he pops up next in these movies.

At a certain point, I imagine most folks get in a rut writing about Marvel movies, because they are unusually consistent and unambiguously commercial in their storytelling. I probably gave this an extra quarter-star because I like 3D goofiness, the way this particular Marvel crew seems to value kid-friendliness a bit more than the rest (really, this is probably a couple easily-replaced cusswords from being a straight PG), and, heck, I even still kind of like Bill Murray showing up and doing Bill Murray. These guys know what they're doing and don't screw it up.

New-ish releases: Eternals and Ghostbusters: Afterlife

WIth a bunch of festival reviews backed up and piles of discs in my living room, I was kind of tempted to just let the people whose sites are built around reviewing this sort of movie have them (or even just mainstream films in general), but for Eternals particularly, there seemed to be a lot of talk not of the film's relative merits but about what it means for Marvel, or whether it was good or bad by the standards of a Marvel movie (or good or bad at being a Marvel movie), etc. That's kind of horse-race stuff, though, as bad in movies as it's been in sports and politics.

That's especially true because I think Eternals is at its most interesting when you can most completely divorce it from the rest of Marvel and see it as its own epic fantasy. As much as Chloe Zhao does an impressive job of quietly embedding "why didn't these guys help fight Thanos" into the film and using it as a catalyst, it's housekeeping rather than something which bolsters its own story. To talk about Marvel in general when Eternals is rich on its own is a bit of a waste.

And Eternals is rich!

<SPOILERS!>

There's been a fair amount of talk about how Eternals probably won't play the lucrative Chinese market in large part because it's got a pair of gay characters that can't easily be cut around or dubbed into "roommates", or because Zhao is on the government's shit list because of some relatively innocuous comments she made in an interview years ago. True as that is, it kind of glosses over the basic fact that this Chinese woman used a bunch of a multinational corporation's money to make a movie which at its core is about people coming to grips with the idea that not only are their leaders lying to them, but that they've been formed and conditioned to be what those leaders find useful to the extent of not even exposing themselves to fight Thanos.

And as I get into in the review, it's not just about China. The last act is built around something that I feel like everybody struggles with, the idea of not knowing what to do when your religion or state and its leaders, the people and institutions one uses to define and guide morality, are in conflict with what one's own ethics say. In the movie, Sersi casts her lot in with doing right by humanity, Ikaris maintains faith in his gods, Sprite follows Ikaris more out of personal affinity than faith, and Kingo bugs out, refusing to involve himself in the fight. I've seen people complain that Kumail Nanjiani disappears from the movie at this point, but I feel like it's one of the most true if frustrating moments of the film - it's not long after Kingo has made a joke about the Eternals being capable of cowardice after Phastos is startled by a loud noise, but it's a cowardly act that is pervasive in human society, trying to think of oneself as above the fray or not taking sides. It's the cause of great turmoil in the world, and when Eternals gets down to wrestling with it, it achieves more of the mythic nature that superhero stories often try to claim despite mainly copying symbols. It's the really good Jack Kirby stuff.

(And while we're in spoiler space, let me just say that I hope that our heroes are able to use the equipment at the Forge of Worlds to print off another Gilgamesh loaded with the original's memories before it's destroyed and taken off the table as a plot device. Maybe another Ajak, too, but let's find a way to bring Don Lee back!)

<!SRELIOPS>

Ghostbusters: Afterlife, meanwhile, isn't nearly as deep in its themes, but I kind of feel like it's being dismissed as nostalgia and an overcorrection for how Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot activated some of the worst portions of modern fandom. It is that, but it's easy to leave it at that, and that doesn't tell the whole story. After all, it's bad nostalgia, deploying its familiar material as punchline rather than setup, seldom finding a way to twist it into something new that speaks to its Gen-Z heroes (and the audience of the same age). It undercuts the process of telling an exciting or funny story.

The thing is, there's something fascinating about how it engages with its audience(s). On the one hand, Jason Reitman and company often don't seem to realize that there's no need to bring back the mythology of the first movie, because as near as I can tell, nobody really gave a damn about Gozer and Zuul and Gatekeepers and Keymasters. That was weird Dan Aykroyd stuff before most people realized how weird Dan Aykroyd could be, goofy enough to keep the movie going and just a solid-enough pastiche of Weird Tales material to give the climax some stakes while still focusing on the comedy, not anything that really meant much to the audience.

Or did it? A few months ago, there was some back-and-forth about some film site or other claiming Ghostbusters wasn't primarily a comedy but a supernatural adventure with a lot of jokes, folks my age being aghast at that stupid take, and back and forth. My sympathies are solidly with the "of course Ghostbusters is a comedy" crew, but I wondered about the age of those saying otherwise and how they experienced it. You don't have to be much younger than me to mostly know Bill Murray as a sad-sack character actor whose characters are even sadder because he's dryly funny and there's the cultural residue of comedy on him rather than a comic actor who matured. And while the film and director Reitman were notable for the way they combined fantasy action and comedy at the time, the way they did it seeped into Hollywood. There isn't much distance between Ghostbusters and Guardians of the Galaxy, or between that and the rest of Marvel, and someone growing up on those films and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn on TV. are naturally going to see it through that lens.

I started thinking of that after encountering a group of Ghostbusters cosplayers at the Fluff Festival one year, because as much as I'd seen Ghostbusters comics and heard the theme played by marching bands on a regular basis when I lived right in Davis Square, that was the first time it really occurred to me that this franchise had that kind of fans, not just folks who laughed at the jokes and moved on. I still don't really get it as a fantasy franchise, but it is out there, and they're having fun, so whatever.

Heck, it feels like the post-credit scene is all about that:

<SPOILERS!>

It's kind of a weird scene, featuring Annie Potts and Ernie Hudson, not really related to what happened on screen or setting up the next film much at all, although it does touch on a few references to what the OG Ghostbusters have been up to. It's probably not expensive, but it must have taken some effort to film, because there's not another scene in this spacious Manhattan office. What's intriguing, though, is that as Winston Zeddmore is talking about how he has thrived since his time with the Ghostbusters, you start to wonder to what extent this is Ernie Hudson talking about how that movie was a watershed moment for him, a working actor who didn't have the sort of recognition Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, Moranis, Weaver, etc. did but was trusted to be part of that ensemble, and how it gave him both the line on his resumé and confidence to become the trusted character actor he became.

And then, once that's done, it also feels like it's a little bit about fandom in general and Ghostbusters fandom in particular, a tight and supportive community where you meet friends and other folks on the same wavelength. Maybe you don't even produce bad fanfic that is nevertheless appreciated, but there's something to not being just a lonely weirdo.

<!SRELIOPS>

Does it make Afterlife a good movie? No, not really; it basically uses a lot of Sony's money and the fact that the cast and crew are all consummate pros to smooth out the fact that there's just not much to the whole thing. But I at least understand and kind of respect where the impulse to make this movie is coming from a little more.

Anyway - here's to trying to at least talk about what's interesting or what just doesn't work with even big movies versus what it might mean for other movies down the road and the massive companies that own the properties!

Eternals

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon)
Seen 10 November 2021 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Jack Kirby's comic book series The Eternals was published by Marvel Comics but only retrofitted into the shared universe later, and not always well (one gets the idea later writers would have more use for the grand mythology than the individual characters), and one often gets the sense that the movie adaptation would be better off outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well. Though not perfect, Chloe Zhao's film is grand fantasy with its own big ideas, and is at its best when one doesn't have to worry about it fitting into another framework as this month's apocalypse.

Seven thousand years ago, it tells us, the Celestial Arishem deposited ten heroes from the planet Olympia in Sumeria to protect the emerging human civilization from the Deviants, monsters from deep space driven to consume intelligent life. Through their guidance, the city of Babylon would grow into humanity's first great civilization and they would travel the world hunting down the Deviants, their names becoming part of mythology, until the creatures were defeated and leader Ajak (Salma Hayek) told them to explore the world they had saved. Or so they thought - the Deviants have re-emerged, seemingly targeting the Eternals themselves, starting in London where Sersi (Gemma Chan), with the power of transmutation, and eternal child Sprite (Lia McHugh) are only able to fight one off with the return of flying powerhouse Ikaris (Richard Madden). This calls for getting the band back together - warriors Thena (Angelina Jolie), Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-Seok aka Don Lee), and Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani); telepath Druig (Barry Keoghan); engineer Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry); and fleet-footed Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) - but the evolved Deviants are not the only surprise awaiting them.

Ten is a large number for either the major figures of a pantheon or a superhero team, especially when you're starting from scratch rather than pulling previously introduced characters together, and it takes Zhao and her co-writers time to introduce everyone and let the audience soak in the scale of their mission, to the point where it's fair to wonder if they've bitten off more than they can chew: The detours into the past are crowded and go on kind of long for what they tell the audience but seldom give those viewers a feel for how they and humanity are interacting and changing each other over that time. Zhao uses action well, in that there's seldom a fight that doesn't change the direction of the story, but it still sometimes feels like those scenes are there to break up a lot of talking.

Even if Chloe Zhao's jump from intimate, near-documentary films to millennia-spanning epic isn't always smooth, one can still spot the woman who made The Rider and Nomadland in this movie, especially when layers get peeled away and the characters start asking themselves who and what they are when they're not protecting humans from Deviants. As the film barrels toward its finale, one can see its demigods having crises of faith and she plays it out honestly and smartly there, with room for many permutations of some hope for the humans they represent as she drives it home. There's plenty going on, but the film's last act resolves into characters asking the question of what to do when one's religion and its leaders seemingly conflict with what one thinks is right, and if that's not exactly what Jack Kirby had in mind when he created these characters, it's the sort of grand idea kept larger than life but made into an easily-swallowed adventure story that made him the king of comics.

It's also gorgeous, even if its location-shot golden-hour vistas and unified costume design aren't exactly classic Kirby. In some ways, the world has caught up with him - the big square spaceship that has no business just hanging in midair has become its own sort of cliché now - but the filmmakers create nifty combinations of earthy or ancient mythology and the science-fictional spin that Kirby put on the ideas. The latter in particular pop in 3D and giant screens, and Ramin Djawadi's score does something similar in how it pulls together a number of influences to at least get close to being epic iiib a global manner.

The large cast is also used quite well, although its definitely a case where the simpler characters around the edges get more chance to make a splash than the folks in the middle. Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, and Lia McHugh are easy to like as the folks whose connections drive the plot, but they seldom make it feel big enough that a breakup 500 years ago is the sort of fantasy melodrama that could change the course of human history. Meanwhile, Salma Hayek's empathetic leader, Bryan Tyree Henry's frustrated builder, and Angelina Jolie's traumatized warrior have clear automatics, and personal favorite Don Lee is given the chance to both demonstrate great punching-monsters and being-generally-charming skills.

Eternals is stylish and self-contained enough that one can't help but wonder what it could have been if Zhao had the chance and inclination to go full-Kirby on it. On the other hand, the stuff in the end-credit buttons sure looks like it could be a whole lot of fun when these characters intersect with the greater Marvel Universe.

Also on eFilmCritic

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 November 2021 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)

There's a line, somewhere around 1978 or so, where folks on one side experienced the original Ghostbusters as a great, kind of crude big-budget comedy with a disappointing sequel in the same vein (maybe the first adult-skewing comedy their parents let them watch); on the other side, people who watched The Real Ghostbusters on Saturday mornings, had toys, games, comics, all sorts of stuff that goes with a light adventure franchise, even though most would circle back around to the original movie. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a movie very much for the latter audience, and that's fine - they buy more movie tickets, after all - but once the filmmakers went that route, they could have made a much better movie.

This movie opens with a man encountering some sort of spirit in the American heartland, chased from a mine to his farmhouse, apparently passing from the encounter. From there the scene moves to New York, where single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) is telling her landlord that she'll be able to pay her back rent when she settles the estate, but it's apparently too late for that. So it's into the car and off to Oklahoma with son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and daughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), only to find it's a dirt farm. As they settle in, with Trevor crushing on Lucky (Celeste O'Connor), a waitress at the local diner, and probably-somewhere-on-the-spectrum Phoebe making friends with fellow nerd "Podcast" (Logan Kim) and science teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) at summer school, the town is being shaken by earthquakes and both kids are finding odd junk around the farm. Gary recognizes Ghostbusters tech from when that was a thing back in the 1980s, but who ya gonna call given that the Ghostbusters haven't been a thing since before the kids were born?

It's not necessarily a bad hook for restarting Ghostbusters as a going concern after the recent remake wound up being a dead end for reasons that had relatively little to do with its actual quality, although in using it, filmmaker Jason Reitman (son of original writer/director Ivan) and co-writer Gil Kenan necessarily play things rather more straight than the original movies did. They're not looking to spoof the convention of how the initial film has been all but forgotten despite it being a juicy target that this film is uniquely positioned to skewer, possibly because doing so would undermine the franchise potential by calling attention to the wrong bits of absurdity in the premise. There are jokes, but it's the comedy of a Marvel movie, where the gags smooth the way to the next bit of plot, rather than vice versa. The bits with Phoebe thrown by the fact that Podcast is the weird one and Trevor being a tongue-tied goober around Lucky are cute, and there's some enjoyable CGI mayhem from a bunch of marshmallow-sized Stay-Puft Marshmallow Men, but the gags are secondary to the coming-of-age and coping-with-loss storylines Reitman and Kenan are going for.

The trouble with that is, real life has kind of boxed the filmmakers in - even if they avoid saying things like "the Spengler farm" for much of the runtime, Harold Ramis is the death they have to write around, and doing so means extrapolating a whole arc for his character that doesn't quite seem to fit the existing timeline (was he a divorced father before the first movie?) and requires a lot of backfill by way of not-entirely-convincing exposition because flashbacks are out of the question. One could hand-wave that away, but the movie leans harder and more precipitously on callbacks to the original movie as it goes on, crowding out the new ensemble - Kenan & Reitman really have no idea what to do with Lucky despite Celeste O'Connor having the charisma that makes it obvious why Trevor falls for her immediately - and completely missing the chance to build something new. The villains in Ghostbusters weren't entirely unimportant, but none of their details were nearly as important as them being the sort of weird fantasy Dan Aykroyd was into. There could have been something here - ancient gods attempting to return contrasted with kids chafing at a dying town frozen in time - but the filmmakers are just doing "let's see them again".

What's kind of surprising - but maybe not - is that despite making something that is more primarily an adventure story, Jason Reitman doesn't use those characters and images nearly as well as his father did. Ivan Reitman had to work around miniatures and stop-motion, but there was grandeur and horror mixed with absurdity in the way he staged his film's climax that having some of the same things in a medium shot just doesn't deliver, even with some new digital enhancements. Maybe it's a natural result of the son shooting with the knowledge that 99% of the audience will be seeing this on a small screen after a three-week theatrical run and building for that while the father was aiming at months in theaters with home viewing a compromised side hustle; maybe it's in how even "run-down" Summerville, OK is presented as an idealized setting compared to scrappy 1980s New York. Either way, Afterlife doesn't have the juice as a supernatural adventure, even if director of photography Eric Steelberg does get to shoot some beautiful Alberta scenery and Reitman's team does stage a few neat action bits, most notably the kids' first joyride in the Ecto-1.

Those kids are a likable enough group that it would be fun to see what they can do with filmmakers more interested in building around them. Mckenna Grace does pretty well with making Phoebe expressive and understood despite her being described as not being obviously so, and she's a fun pair with Logan Kim, though what either of these two is doing in summer school is left as an exercise for the viewer. Finn Wolfhard and Celeste O'Connor make their half-sketched characters more fun to watch than they might; hopefully they'll have more to do in a potential sequel. Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd are cute together and when playing off Grace.

Like I said at the top, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to hit differently depending on what someone associates the very idea of "Ghostbusters" with. Fair enough. Still, if you're going to make it more adventure than comedy, and introduce a group of young characters with potential exploits of their own, that would seem to call for a lot more creativity and forward-looking than this movie manages.

Also on eFilmCritic

War!: 1917 and Liberation

Will wonders never cease - AMC accidentally set the times for a couple of movies in such a way that you could build a thematic double feature without having to kill an hour in between!

It also gave me a nice chance to check out the new Dolby Cinema screen at Boston Common, which is basically the same as the ones at Assembly Row and South Bay, except maybe smaller - the screen's a good size, but it doesn't seem particularly deep, with just fifty or sixty seats. Not bad, considering they're recliners and all, and even the first row isn't right up under the screen, but kind of a shock when it pops up in the app, compared to the old-school auditoria next to it which seat a couple hundred.

After that, it was downstairs to screen 1, where I was apparently the only person catching the 10pm show of Liberation despite being right next to Chinatown. Not necessarily surprising, considering it's only playing three cities in the U.S. (New York, Los Angeles, and Boston); a good chunk of exhibitors must have taken a look and figured the audience would say "nah", even without a good number of movies hitting screen this week after the post-Christmas lull. I don't know how much it being obvious propaganda played into it, but it was kind of strange to be reading social media about the Taiwanese elections (a rejection of closer ties with the Mainland) and then seeing what would become the Taiwanese flag used for this movie's villains, even if most are played as misguided more than evil.

The previews were an odd batch, too; usually, when there aren't enough Chinese-language trailers on the hard drive, it's just big action movies, but this was mostly a reel of foreign-language films with award hopes. Most look pretty neat, especially Les Miserables, which I am surprised and delighted to see has more or less nothing to do with the musical. On the other hand, the last was for Dante Lam's new one, The Rescue, which looks like it's as big as Operation Mekong and Operation Red Sea, but which also had its trailer pretty badly dubbed into English. I wonder if the studio is going to try to push this particular Chinese New Year picture onto more screens around the world, even if I'm pretty sure that this particular theater will be showing it in Mandarin.

1917

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)

It occurred to me, when I first heard this was put together a certain way, that I would have liked to go in without knowing, even though that's kind of an odd, meta way to approach watching and thinking about a movie. Still, it's very difficult to just get caught up in things the way one is meant to in these cases, rather than watching what the camera does and guessing how many objects in the foreground are effects meant to hide seams. Rather than drawing me in and not giving my mind time to jump elsewhere, it had me thinking about a lot of things that weren't on screen.

Maybe it improves on a second view, once that's out of one's system. I suspect that once you get past that and the often stunning cinematography/lighting/design, 1917 is a capable-enough war movie of the new school, careful to foreground the horrors lest the audience get too excited by the ticking clock. Sam Mendes wants the audience invested but not excited, and that's a very fine line for him to walk. The film often feels calculatedly random, like everything happens in such a way as to reinforce the idea of chaos, and outright cheats in others, such as how sound design is very important for much of the film but a whole division in trucks can just suddenly be right there.

It's still too good to dismiss, of course - Roger Deakins and company do amazing work, Mendes's decisions may be cynical but they're effective, and the cast is terrific up and down. There's something about the tendency to cast great, recognizable character actors as the officers in this, like we're expected to trust Colin Firth or Mark Strong rather than question things, although, again, it works; it's one of the best little roles Strong has had recently (he is so much more interesting when not playing villains).

Liberation

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

Coincidentally arriving in a few American cities the same weekend that 1917 opens wide, Liberation suffers from opposing faults. It's busy to the point of frenzy rather than meticulous, rushing through every cheap play for audience sympathy it can with bigger firefights and explosions coming at a rapid pace just in case that's not enough. It's lurid but made to please crowds, even though the filmmakers aren't that great at making the action effective. It's one of the tackier bits of recent myth-making to come from the Chinese movie industry, which is saying something.

Starting out in January 1949, days before the Tianjin campaign that would serve as a turning point in the Chinese Civil War, it initially introduces the audience to a team of Communist soldiers aiming to infiltrate the city to help get artillery sightings, because the revolutionaries aim to take the city with relatively little damage. Cai Xingfu (Zhou Yiwei) has other reasons to lead this mission - wife Xiuping (Yang Mi) is still in the city. Among the Nationalists, Director Qian Zhuoqun (Philip Keung Ho-man) is especially cruel, lording his power over entertainer Yan Mei (Elane Zhong Chuxi) and locking up quartermaster Yao Zhe (Wallace Chung Han-Liang) for a ferry accident, though he is using the aftermath to attempt to push that Nationalists into a harder line. Zhe attempts to escape with six-year-old daughter Junlan (Audrey Duo Ulan-Toya) only to run headlong into Cai's mission, and the two would be at odds even if it weren't likely that Cai's son Jifeng was on the sunken ferry.

There's a lot going on and the filmmakers spew it at the audience in rapid-fire manner to start, efficiently and earnestly talking about firing solutions that will not in fact be a major part of the film, finding the hackiest possible way to reveal Yan's hatred for Qian, and letting major parts of the story just hang there uncommented upon. It puts Yao Zhe directly at the center of the action but doesn't particularly do much to establish his interests and loyalties beyond his daughter, to the extent that it's easy to initially peg him as a spy rather than someone pushed up against the wall. Things start to shake out later on, but initially viewers are likely to have their attention on the wrong things, and when characters show up later so that there can be action in more places, it's hard to be sure whether they've been introduced but offscreen until needed or if they're new.

Full review on eFilmCritic

Terminator: Dark Fate

I've got a bad habit of not buying tickets for the IFFBoston Fall Focus in advance (because who knows what's going on a week from now, right?), so by the time I was checking things at work on Friday, Marriage Story was already sold out, but like a lot of those movies, it'll be out in regular theaters soon so catching it isn't quite urgent. So, what the heck, let's see the new Terminator.

It's bad, of course, and is bad in the same way the previous sequels have been: It's the same movie, more or less, with a powerful sensation of running in place. I joke often about how other franchises reboot and this one restores from the backup they made after T2, but they can; I don't really miss any of the directions various people have taken some then as they're thrown out. And I'm fairly sure I won't miss this when the next group to get their hands on the Caralco library decides to keep going because these sequel rights are the most valuable part of that acquisition. Nobody seems to regret any of the retcons other than The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and I haven't heard that much lamenting its consignment to alternate timeline status this time around. The fans must have gotten it out of their systems with Genisys.

Terminator: Dark Fate

* * (out of four)
Seen 1 November 2019 in AMC Assembly Row #2 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)

This Terminator is such a nullity and retread that I can't even bother to type a joke I've been making to friends about just what sort of retread it is again, like it would make me just as lazy. Dark Fate somehow manages to be a paradox of pointlessness - a sequel that draws what life it can from its predecessors but which has nothing new to offer, even as it explicitly notes that it's just doing the same thing with different names.

So now "Skynet" is "Legion" and they've sent a Terminator "Rev-9" (Gabriel Luna) back to kill Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who works in an automobile plant in Mexico and seems as innocuous as Sarah Connor was thirty-five years ago. The rebels send back Grace (Mackenzie Davis), whose cyborg augmentations allow her to put up much more of a fight than most humans would against a killer robot - though they probably still would have been dead in fifteen minutes if Connor (Linda Hamilton) didn't show up. She's been hunting Terminators full time since one that had apparently been around for years found and killed her son in 1998, after "Judgment Day" was supposed to have happened. She's been receiving text messages about where time-traveling killing machines will materialize for years, but coordinates tattooed on Grace's body will finally lead her to the person sending them.

It would take depressingly little editing to tweak that description to describe four other Terminator movies or the TV show, and while it's not inherently bad to follow a formula, this series has spent the past twenty years having no idea how to handle the way it has lived past the date of its future doomsday and just doing the same thing anyway. A more ambitious movie could do something with that, making a point of how the point is not a single savior but rather the steady work of pushing the apocalypse back, or playing with how The Terminator was the product of Cold War fears of Mutually Assured Destruction, so maybe by now we're talking about troll-bot server farms hastening environmental disaster, but this is not that movie. The filmmakers do the minimum to upgrade to the twenty-first century, and why bother when the first couple movies are out there?

Full review on EFilmCritic

Checking out AMC South Bay: Greatest Showman & Dolby Star Wars: The Last Jedi

It's been three and a half years since the last theater opened in the Boston area, with AMC Assembly Row starting operations just a few months after the Showcase Cinemas SuperLux in Chestnut Hill, both replacing nearby theaters that had closed some time earlier. There has been a lot of upgrading since then - Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Kendall Square have all put in new seats and revamped their concession stands in that time - and the new multiplex in South Bay represents the first in a wave of openings in Boston that doesn't just represent equilibrium or rearrangement: In addition to these 12 screens, there are new multiplexes expected in the Seaport (per Fandango, in as little as a week and a half!), North Station (although that still seemed to be all construction when I was there on the way home for Christmas), and near Ruggles during 2018, with two new screens coming to Harvard Square later. It's exciting for those of us who love going to the movies.

Or at least, potentially so.

It does not escape my notice, for instance, that what is screening at AMC South Bay during its first few weeks is a subset of what is screening at AMC Boston Common, three stops up the Red Line. Odds are that this will also be the case at Showplace Icon in the Seaport and the ArcLight on Causeway, based on what they're playing at their other locations, although, granted, it can be tough to tell at this time of year, when there's a lot of overlap between the mainstream and the boutique houses. There does not seem like a lot of indication that the people opening these theaters have any particular plans to set them apart by what plays there.

On the other hand, maybe sheer saturation will force that to happen. It already has, to a certain extent, as Boston Common has started catering toward the nearby Chinatown audience and playing more small films in the past few years as the places at Assembly Row and Fenway got fancier and siphoned some of the audience for the blockbusters off (and, at the same time, they have not updated the seating to put fewer people in each screen). I wonder how these places will go about differentiating themselves in a year's time, when there are something like a hundred screens easily accessed by the T, twice what there was five years ago.

Because that's not something AMC South Bay is looking to do right yet.



It's surprisingly nondescript from the outside, silvery rather than AMC's usual red and white, and also around the corner from the big sign at the top of the post - you need to look for it a bit once you get off the bus. Transit access is, thankfully, pretty good - I took the #10 bus from Andrew Station on the Red line to get there in the afternoon (the #16 also makes that same two-stop trip; the #8 connects to Kenmore and Ruggles), but it was a pretty easy walk back to Andrew when Star Wars got out at 10:15pm and I didn't feel like standing around in the cold. There's a ton of parking at the shopping center if that's more your thing. It's still kind of sparse inside the lobby, something I suspect will change a bit once more people know it's there (or if I visit one a weekend instead of a Tuesday afternoon/evening, albeit one during school vacation).

There were some bumps once inside - not only was MoviePass not yet recognizing the theater, but the first ticketing kiosk I used rejected both of my credit/debit cards, although it kept my seat reserved, meaning I had to choose another, less optimal spot when I got to one that would let me pay (I probably could have actually sat in D7 rather than C7). When going to the concession stand for Star Wars, we all wound up forming one meandering line for several stations, with the manager hollering to form five but no ribbons up yet.

I didn't get a photo of the upstairs lobby, and it's kind of a weird set-up - the escalator comes out in one corner, near the self-serve candy case along the right wall, with the concession stand along the back, and following the wall counter-clockwise, you go from the candy to the grab & go popcorn & nachos, to the pick-up for hot food (and maybe where you order it, although it wasn't manned on Tuesday), then the liquid-not-entirely-unlike-butter dispensers, the check-out, and the Coke Freestyle machines. I suspect that there are free-standing candy cases which can be brought out on busier nights - the one there was way too small for a 12-plex - but where you would order, say, mozzarella sticks or hot dogs is not obvious, though based on the only menu screens being on the right-hand side of the stand, it's probably near where you would pick up (in a surprising omission, they did not have the chicken tenders or chicken & waffles that are the best things at other AMCs). It seems badly designed, potentially making one walk back and forth through a crowd of people or wait in line with one's rapidly-cooling food as the clock counts down toward the movie actually starting, tempted to just make a run for one's seat. The soda machines proved a bit finicky, as well - aside from their always seeming short on ice no matter where I find them, one was spurting in a way I'm surprised didn't get my hands sticky.

Don't dock the place's rating too hard for most of that, though - it's been open just over two weeks, and there's kinks to work out, although the design of the concession stand doesn't seem quite so easily remedied. Most everybody there is new, even if some managers or team leaders did transfer from Boston Common or Assembly Row.

Once you get past the soda machines, you get to an area with the bar (showing local sports with the sound on, which is different from the Macguffin'ses other local AMCs) on the left and the premium theaters on the right. I'll get back to them. A right turn after that leads to screens #3 through #12.



This is what one sees upon entering screen #5; the curved screen isn't a bad size. Like Assembly Row, there's a front section with a mild slope, a moat where you'll find the handicapped seating, and then a much steeper main section. I, as usual, opted for the front, a bit disappointed that the seats in that section don't recline the way they do at Assembly Row (and where, arguably, it's most necessary). The Greatest Showman was still watchable from row C, although it used up pretty near my entire field of vision sitting in the center.



That's the back section from the front, and if you'll pardon me being a bit of a curmudgeon, I find myself a little more worried about the trade-offs of this type of seating a little more each time I got to a theater arranged this way. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the recliners and cup-holders and comfy seats as I'm in them, but I also can't imagine this sort of plush seating when I go to see a concert or a sporting event. It seems like it would be subtly isolating, maybe not in a way that's immediately obvious, but if you want to see something with a crowd, there's a difference between having the reaction two feet away on either side and three feet away, with fewer voices filling a room of the same size.

I know, movies aren't concerts or basketball games, and when I'm seeing something of somewhat more limited appeal, I kind of expect people to sit in a checkerboard pattern but... Opening night, packed house for a horror movie or comedy or thing like Star Wars or Avengers where you're going in part for the communal reaction, do you want it diffuse like that? I struggle with this question, and it really makes me hope that Boston Common and the indies stick to old-school seating, even if it is a little less comfortable. The way a tightly-packed auditorium can enhance a movie is a thing I don't think people will recognize they miss when it's gone - it's just too counter-intuitive given how much emphasis recent cinema construction has placed on creature comforts (which, again, I enjoy a lot!) and competing with the home theater experience. You've got to not only weigh something concrete against something intangible to worry about it, but you've got to be pretty fanatical about the theatrical experience as well.

I may be wrong about all of that, though. At any rate, these standard screens are a pretty acceptable way to see a movie, right on par with the ones at Assembly Row and Fenway.

After a few minutes poking around the shopping centers for new shoes and such, I came back to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi on the Dolby Cinema screen, which is the main thing that sets AMC South Bay apart from other local theaters. It cost me $11 because Stubs members pay $5+surcharges on Tuesdays, so that makes it about a $20 ticket most evenings. I wound up in the second row center, much like when I saw it in Imax 3D at Assembly Row. Screen #2 at South Bay is a nice, jumbo-sized screen, and even the front rows recline (although not as far back as I'm used to with that sort of seat).

It's the presentation that is supposed to make Dolby Cinema special, as it does with Imax, RPX, and all the other premium formats, and although I can't say definitively that this is the second-best digital screen in the area (after the 4K laser Imax screen at Jordan's in Reading) because I haven't been to the XPlus/MX4D screens in Revere, it's very nice. The surround sound is terrific, both in terms of thudding bass when TIE fighters blow up and impressively directional effects. It's a little more difficult to quantify the picture to my eyes, but it certainly appears 4K sharp compared to the lower-resolution digital Imax screens at Boston Common and Assembly Row, and the claims of more vivid colors and deeper blacks certainly seem to have merit. I do wonder if this necessarily moves the needle for a lot of people - it is hard to explain the difference HDR can make to non-obsessives, for instance, and while the Dolby pre-show brag reel points out how dark its black is versus standard projection, culminating on a "the projector is still on!" text and voice-over over a dark screen, it's not something a lot of folks think about. I know folks who make blacks the center of their "why film is better than digital" arguments, but even if someone does get it, do they agree it's worth a $6 up-charge? Or more, if they're looking at the difference between MoviePass and $20? I've got no idea right now; ask me in February when I'm deciding which screen I want to see Black Panther on.

I probably won't wind up at South Bay very often, although that's as much a matter of geography as anything - I live near Davis, so getting to this place means taking the T past the Somerville Theatre and AMC Boston Common, and it's a much shorter ride to the basically identical AMC at Assembly Row. But if I lived in Dorchester, Roxbury, and other parts of the very much underscreened southern part of the city, I'd be some kind of thrilled to have something much closer to my neighborhood.

Greatest Showman

* ½ (out of four)
Seen on 26 December 2017 in AMC South Bay #5 (first-run, DCP)

I feel for Hugh Jackman and everyone else who can both act and sing - there was something magical about the classic movie musicals of decades past, and every once in a while you see one that does something great with the form. But too often, their desire to do a musical leads them to sign on to things like The Greatest Showman, where they idea seems much more exciting than anything that could come of it. There may be a fine moment or two in the final film, but it spends most of its time somewhere between bad and unwatchable.

Initially, it just seem thin, which isn't necessarily a problem. Indeed, more films could do with sprinting through the foundational stuff the way this one does, having young tailor's son Phineas Barnum (Ellis Rubin) meet and fall for Charity Hallett (Skylar Dunn) with little more than a sight gag and a montage before they're grown, played by Jackman and Michelle Williams, and raising two adorable moppets (Austyn Johnson & Cameron Seely) of their own. It plants enough of a seed of an inferiority complex to be referenced later without giving the whole opening act over to a different cast or investing too much in any one specific symbol, and if it drags, it's still a good job of seemingly delivering all the depth certain elements appear to need.

Still, that efficiency can easily turn into just not doing necessary work. The film gets to a moment when Barnum and the audience are looking out the window of his soul-crushing office job and sees a landscape divided between another building filed with sad drones and a cemetery, and while the filmmakers obvious are still trying to get to the good stuff, it hasn't earned that shot yet. Admittedly, I hate that image more than most - it tends to smack of condescension when not used with care, like the artist can't bear imagine punching the clock the way his or her audience does, and this film has spent roughly twelve seconds on trying to show that Barnum is not suited for that sort of life. It's one of the first of many times that director Michael Gracey and writers Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon rely on familiar patterns rather than specific actions to build the story, but one that feels particularly weightless: It's where they could have shown sort of spark within Barnum, but instead just serves as the set-up for a little off-screen opportunism on Barnum's part.

Full review at EFC

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

* * * * (out of four)
Seen on 26 December 2017 in AMC South Bay #2 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)

On first viewing, I said The Last Jedi was the best Star Wars since the original and didn't really think my opinion on that would waver, and I'm glad to see that, on a second viewing, I still think that. Indeed, I'm willing to accept the argument that it is the best of the series, as it's got more going on than the first one did, but you've got to give A New Hope credit for what a lightning bolt it was at the time and how the new one needs the rest to build on while the first just needed itself.

It may work better the second time through - it's thematically rich enough to reward digging a little deeper, based on what one saw or read before, and not being so eager to find out What Happens Next lets the more relaxed parts breathe. It doesn't hurt, I suppose, to not be watching through 3D glasses makes the length a little more comfortable.

So, it's still great. I'll probably watch it one more time in theaters, and really cannot wait to see what Rian Johnson does with the entire galaxy far far away to play with.

Full review at EFC