This Week in Tickets: 24 February 2020 - 1 March 2020

Huh. See if you can spot the weird thing on the tickets below.



Because the printed tickets at Boston Common now appear to lack certain bits of useful information after they've been torn (which makes how they've stopped updating the signs for which movie is on which screen at the theater even more screwy), it may not be obvious that Call of the Wild on Tuesday and The Invisible Man on Saturday were on the same screen, but the price apparently went down $1.50 in between. For what it's worth, I was in seat B10 both times, so that's not a factor, and I wouldn't think the difference between a 7:00pm and a 7:15pm show is either. Is it just a quirk inside the AMC Stubs app, does Disney/Fox insist on more money from premium screens leading to higher prices (something I would think we would have heard people freaking out about before now), or did they actually cut prices? I've seen cases of theaters charging more on the weekends, but this just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

(Both movies - pretty decent, although I was probably never going to really like the CGI dogs in Call.)

Not much in between, in part because the internet access crapped out at work on Thursday and Friday, so I killed a lot of time coming home at hours when they don't run a lot of buses between Burlington and civilization, which I had to make up later, and then on Saturday I miscalculated how much time a lot of work being done on the MBTA would add to me getting places before falling back to The Invisible Man. I was a bit more prepared on Sunday, although when I got to Baghdad Thief at Fenway, I was the only person who didn't speak Arabic which meant nobody else was bothered by the lack of English subtitles, which is always an interesting experience. After that, it was down the C Line to the Coolidge, to catch the pretty darn delightful EMMA. on their big screen.

I'm heading off on vacation in a few days, so I don't know how much chance I'll have to update my Letterboxd page with new stuff, although it's quite possible I'll have enough time to kill in airports to finally catch up on a lot of reviews from last July.

EMMA.

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2020 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

There's an impressive sharpness to this version of Emma that I don't recall from other adaptations, like director Autumn de Wilde and screenwriter Eleanor Catton want to make sure that all of the class-conscious material gets in rather than softening it to make the title character more sympathetic or the whole situation more relatable to an audience where those barriers have subsided (though not completely fallen). It sometimes makes the audience work a little harder than they might have expected for what seems like such a simple story. But the rewards aren't inconsiderate.

Consider, more than anything, how well Anna Taylor-Joy comports herself as the title character. There's a harsh arrogance to her that she can't ever let be completely subsumed beneath smiling, genuine good intentions, but can't ever let those look false either. There's genuine horror every time she recognizes the worst in herself, but it's elastic enough that she can backslide a bit, having to see the same thing from other angles before really learning, until she finally collapses upon realizing just how awful she has been. She comes of age by fits and starts and without a defining tragedy, and never quite loses the audience despite how often she has to screw up badly and hurt people to do it.

There are similar performances all around her striking a lot of the same notes or complementary ones - Callum Turner making the absent young man she's had a crush on feel like a male version of her worst qualities dialed up just enough to wrangle but not enough to repulse, for instance, while Johnny Flynn plays Mr. Knightley as someone who has already shaken off a lot of the same bad habits. I wondered, afterward, if Bill Nighy was supposed to play her father as sundowning; he's humorously energetic in his first appearance but seems to grow more fragile over the days and year. Mia Goth's Harriet is appropriately guileless and admiring without ever quite seeming foolish, and I like how the hair and makeup people emphasize how she's not adorning herself the way Emma is. The plainness of her bedroom is an obvious contrast to the Woodhouse and Knightley homes, but just homey enough to not make her an object of pity.

De Wilde is a photographer when not shooting films and music videos, and she delivers impressive attention to detail without ever getting too showy. It's a nice looking movie that is happy to let its design get weird on occasion while still being beautiful, and that makes it a delight to look at even when it's not featuring Taylor-Joy being fantastic.

Not the ideal way to watch Baghdad Thief

Many years ago, after posting something about enjoying an Iranian film and how it was a different perspective on the region than we usually get in America, someone pointed out that such films are generally made for French film festivals, and that most of the people there were watching Egyptian action movies, romantic comedies, and the like. So, while you could learn something from them, you were often getting the face they were planning to show to the world.

So, I was kind of excited to see Baghdad Thief and The Money booked in Boston this weekend; I can't remember mainstream Egyptian films playing here before. Unfortunately, the timing didn't work out - the subway was out of commission near both Alewife and Fenway, so I had to choose one or the other, and went with Baghdad Thief at Fenway.

The Regal and Fandango websites both said "Subtitles". There were no subtitles, except for when somebody was not speaking Arabic. After about five minutes or so, I realized what was going on, but what was I going to do, go out to the front desk and ask them to interrupt the show for all the folks there who did understand the language when it clearly wasn't booked for me? Seemed like kind of a jerk move even for an $18 ticket, so I figured this wasn't a hugely complicated movie, so I'd ride it out.

And I got the gist, although some of the more specific bits didn't sink in. Better luck next time, hopefully.

Liss Baghdad (Baghdad Thief, aka The Thief of Baghdad)

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2020 in Regal Fenway #6 (special engagement, DCP)

So, obviously, I'd have more to say about the film if it had English subtitles, but it didn't. Which did not exactly stop me from enjoying it so much as it highlighted the extent to which a lot of genre films use the same template or are a little bit of exposition tying action scenes together. They scratch an itch, and this one did fine by that.

It is, from what I could tell, a fairly amiable action/adventure story, with a hero, a sidekick, and a headstrong love interest who actually knows the ancient history that will help them on their treasure hunt. There's a rival and a villain or two, and most everybody seems to do their parts well enough, with Muhammed Emam mostly looking good in the action scenes and Yasmin Raeis cute and kind of sassy. There seem to be more jokes about Emam's Yousif about to hit Raies's Salma in response to her being pushy than you'd see in a Western movie, which isn't cool, and it doesn't escape my attention that the villains tended to speak English to each other when they weren't addressing Yousif, which is how I picked up a few details of the plot I wonder, idly, how often that is used in these movies to mark the bad guys. It's also interesting to see Baghdad come across as just another city rather than some war-torn hellhole when the plot takes Yousif and company there. I don't know how much was shot on location and how much is Cairo redressed, but it's not the view Hollywood often gives us these days.

Production-wise, it's mostly smooth but not Hollywood-slick, maybe a notch above VOD quality. One of the things I could read in the credits indicated different stunt teams, and it feels like this played a huge part in the film often seeming to be of variable quality - the Cairo-based team was pretty decent, but director Ahmed Khaled seemed to need to work around some of the others a bit, and they didn't always mesh with the VFX work. We're used to slicker in America, but I don't think it's far off some other markets.

I do really wish there'd been subtitles, so that I could get an idea of how a lost-treasure movie plays when the Egyptians are the heroes rather than the sidekicks (often played by westerners wearing fezes). Hopefully the next time one of these shows up, it will be more tourist-friendly, or maybe I can find a good list of things available on Prime.

The Square

Another last-minute-before-it-leaves-theaters posting, and I'm not sure whether I'm cutting it closer than I planned or less so. After all, I was going to see this on Monday, but with director Jehane Noujaim on hand, that sold out well before I could get there from work and get in using my usher membership. Then the plan was Wednesday, which meant I would have to turn a review around right quick in order to be able to post "hey, this is pretty great" before it left the Brattle Theatre after a week. Then the Regent Theatre canceled the Tuesday night screening of Black Out because, like most of the Boston area, they over-reacted to a storm that wound up depositing about three inches here. So I pushed seeing this up, even if I had trouble finding time to write afterward.

Fortunately, it's not quite a "see it tonight or be out of luck" situation; the Coolidge has picked it up for a week in their cozy little GoldScreen room, so folks should be able to see it there from the 24th to 30th, and possibly beyond. It's also on Netflix, but unfortunately not Amazon - understandable, what with Netflix being the distributor, although it may make seeing this Oscar nominee a little more difficult if you're like me and one of the last holdouts not using Netflix because, good lord, look at the pile of Blu-rays you haven't watched.

Still, you should see it, and not just so that you can maybe do a little better in your Oscar pool.

The Square (Al Midan)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, digital)

The Square doesn't necessarily look like much as it starts; just some people who happened to have a camera in the right place at the right time. Make no mistake, that is an incredibly useful thing for a documentary to have, and often produces the most memorable moment in that sort of movie, but is a foundation? Not usually. Most, though, don't (or can't) keep having the camera in the right place, either to continue capturing history or the personal narratives of the people involved, not to mention filmmakers who can assemble all of this into something that's more than just a series of events strung together.

Director Jehane Noujaim introduces us to six activists who were at the original January 2011 demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square right off the bat, though she does not spread attention evenly among them. Pierre Seyoufr and Aida Elkashef, for instance, will have recurring but minor roles in the film; musician Ramy Essam is somewhat more prominent, and not just because his protest songs liven the presentation up. The main focus falls upon three other men: Ahmed Hassan is a young man who has lived his entire life under Hosni Mubarak's corrupt regime and desires a true democracy; Magdy Ashour is a father of five and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Khalid Abdalla is a British actor (best known for The Kite Runner) whose parents are Egyptian expatriates. And while their peaceful protests soon lead to Mubarak's resignation, the next step proves to be far more complicated and less friendly.

Noujaim's specialty is placing viewers right in the middle of a situation, and while there are some clips from new programs used to fill in a little more background, the majority is captured right in the thick of things, either in the midst of the action or in the subjects' homes. Sometimes Ahmed is the one holding the camera, sometimes Noujaim or one of a half-dozen other cinematographers and camera operators - some of whom are, themselves, part of the revolution, and likely recording not just to make a movie but in case video is needed as evidence. And while the claim is often made that good journalism means a strict separation between reporter and subject, the overlap here allows Nojaim to capture what is going on among the revolutionaries without filter. There is so little barrier that even when Ahmed or Khalid looks into the camera and speaks directly to the viewer, it does not feel like the interview footage with various army representatives, nor does it seem like breaking the fourth wall, making us included in the conversation rather than just privy to it.

Full review at EFC.