These Weeks In Tickets: 2 November 2009 to 29 November 2009

Is this thing on? It has been a weird month, what with Google's automated routines apparently deciding that my blog has the characteristics of a spam blog and shutting access off. Naturally, they did that on a Friday afternoon, so my response that no, I'm a real person creating real content probably wasn't even going to get looked at until Monday.

Another weird thing happened on that Saturday, when I received the latest issue of weekly British comic 2000 AD in the mail, despite the fact that I neither ordered it nor subscribed to it. At first I thought it was a gift subscription, which brings the question of who the heck knows I like that and will pay to have it airmailed to me every week - while a lot of people know I like comics, 2000 AD is pretty esoteric in the U.S. But then none came in later weeks, so it was an apparent one-off, which just seems even more random.

And then on Monday, I had to put a picture on the intranet at work, so I stuck it on Facebook and Twitter. I now hate my camera on multiple levels - it's a heavy 2 megapixel job from 2001 with a cruddy 2x optical zoom, but it won't do me the favor of breaking so I can replace it with a clear conscience - it's just too rugged to explode when I drop it. Plus, I hate having my picture taken, and self-portraiture is even worse - I got acutely nervous taking that stupid shot.

On top of that, the flash apparently brings out the gray in my hair. Wonderful.

(Since writing that, I've purchased a phone that appears to be a better camera than that old thing, in addition to being an MP3 player and handheld internet device)

The blog being offline means it hasn't been a useful tool to raise money for and report progress on my entry in the Brattle's 2009 Movie Watch-a-Thon. More or less the entire tally is visible below, aside from an Eye-Opener entry on 1 November and a couple at the Kendall on 30 November and 1 December. So the final tally is 5 at the Brattle (which are supposed to count double), 25 elsewhere, and 2 screenings for the BSFFF selection committee (which you can choose to count or not, as they were events I was invited to). If you want to donate/retroactively sponsor - and you do, the Brattle is a cause worth supporting if you like movies, especially if you're in the Boston area - you can do so through this page.

So, a lot of movies to get through. Let's hit these guys week-by-week:



Stubless: Welcome to Academia (8 November, 11am, Brattle)

The Damned United

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2009 at Landmark Embassy #3 (first-run-ish)

One often hears talk of frequent collaborations between actors and directors, or maybe actors and producers, or writers and directors, but the frequent pairing of actor Michael Sheen and writer Peter Morgan, as near as I can tell always in fact-based dramas with Sheen playing some actual figure, is unique in cinema. Perhaps there's nothing more too it than Morgan having an interest in this type of story and Sheen being the sort of chameleonic actor who sort of resembles a lot of people, but it works. As much as I loved The Queen, I love The Damned United almost as much.

As befitting a topic that causes as much enthusiasm as English Football (soccer for us colonials), The Damned United is a far more raucous, foul-mouthed movie than The Queen and Frost/Nixon; most of its characters still have one foot solidly in the working-class lives from which they came.. And as much as I hate discussing a sports movie and saying "but it's not really about sports" - I mean, nobody feels obligated to say something like "but Bright Star isn't really about poetry" to establish the story as being worth telling - there's very little actual footie in the movie, and even someone as unfamiliar as I with the nuances of "the beautiful game" can see what the filmmakers are trying to prove there.

No, The Damned United is a nigh-brilliant example of Greek tragedy, where Brian Clough's obsession with a perceived slight by Leeds coach Don Revie (Colm Meany, who invests the role with a passive-aggressive combination of sophistication and spite) drives him to push his team and himself to incredible heights - and, just as surely, set himself up for a massive fall. It is a splendid study of the almost psychotic drive that people in highly competitive fields like sport, politics, and, yes, show business require to succeed, even though they are almost always self-destructive in the end.

And it does so without ever getting introspective and navel-gazing about it. It's an exciting, entertaining way to tell that story.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2009 at AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run)

This should have been funnier, I think. It's got a top-notch cast, including a couple in George Clooney and Kevin Spacey who truly excel at the sort of deadpan comedy that is this film's bread and butter. Jeff Bridges is a kick. Ewan McGregor isn't bad at all, but the "what's a Jedi Knight?" shtick gets old fast. It's almost as if the movie becomes constrained by its reality - it can be funny, absurd, and crazy, but not enough where the astral projecting, telepathic soldiers are ever going to be truly real to McGregor's character, or us.

Still, there are bits that are absolutely worth taking away from the movie. There's a moment I absolutely love where Clooney's character sincerely apologizes to an Iraqi man who has suffered at the hands of both Americans and his own countrymen, and it delivers a one-two punch of seeming strange followed by the realization that there is something deeply wrong with the world if that sort of humility and decency is unusual. The movie is peppered with other bits and asides that are much funnier, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy-style, but that's probably the one which will stick with me.

The Box

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2009 at AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run)

I saw this one in a surprisingly packed auditorium considering how it sort of died at the box office, and it wasn't the greatest audience. I've never liked Chris Parry's idea of using pennies to discourage talkers, but I would have been up for it if I thought my aim was good enough to put a ding in the phone of the guy a couple rows in front and a few seats to my left. Still, I can't completely complain about the audience not sitting with church-like reverence, since the girl who said, about three-quarters through the movie, that it was "fucking creepy as fuck" pretty much nailed it.

Richard Matheson's story "Button, Button" is a great little morality tale, and when he adapted it for the 1980s edition of The Twilight Zone, he reconsidered the ending so that it ended on a perfect little ironic zinger. Richard Kelley preserves the core of it, but he fills in the world around it - honestly, to excess; a perfect short story is buried under explanation and elaboration. But, for a good long chunk of the movie, that's okay, because Kelly really does have a knack for finding the most unnerving way to do it. There's barely a moment in it where you think, well, there could be a perfectly logical explanation for that. Nope, the characters are adrift in a world both out to test their virtue and make every memory of normalcy seem out of reach. Pretty much the whole movie is one long, intriguing, disturbing, tingly feeling.

Now, Kelly overreaches, just as he did in the Director's Cut of Donnie Darko and in Southland Tales, and finally pushes us just a bit too far at the very end, but if you like freaky movies, he has banked a heck of a lot of credit by then.

Welcome to Academia

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 November 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Eye-Opener)

I'll be portions of this movie are a riot if you've ever been involved in faculty politics, either as a participant or as a hapless grad student caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately, it often seems to require very specific familiarity, because as just things that are (apparently) typical of that environment, well, it's not very funny. There's two or three jokes that are returned to over and over again, and they don't really build. For instance, Callie Thorne as the man-hating womyns' studies professor is just about as crazy at the start as she's going to be, when a slow burn might have worked much better.

The big problem is that James LeGros, as the character unexpectedly promoted to Dead over others who covet the job, and is supposed to be the sane center of the film, almost never does anything. He's not more clever than expected, or humorously put upon. He's just there, when the movie needs him to either be Job or an active participant in the story. Jess Weixler fares a little better as his favorite grad student who suddenly becomes the proxy target for other jealous faculty, but just as she's established a good comedy vibe, the movie gets serious on her.



Stubless: Slimed (11 November, 9-ish, Somerville Video Room), The New Year Parade (15 November, 11am, Brattle)

Slimed

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 November 2009 in the Somerville Theater Video Room (SF/35 selection group screenings)

I'm not sure how much it's appropriate to talk about these films, but since I'm pretty sure that this one won't get chosen for the festival, I feel pretty good about giving it a thumbs-down. Admittedly, I'm the guy in the room who has just about lost all tolerance for deliberate camp unless it's done very well, but even the folks who liked that seemed to hate this one. It's stupid and lazy, and seems to think it's a virtue.

What's almost frustrating about it is that somewhere about halfway through, they seem to discover comic timing, and the occasional bit starts working. Hopefully this group's second movie will reflect that experience, but there's no need to subject people to what they went through to gain it.

Tian bian yi duo yun (The Wayward Cloud)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Tsai Ming-liang: Then and Now)

I formulated a theory about Tsai as I watched this movie: All the discussion of him as a highly-intellectual auteur, and his presentation as such, is a smokescreen. He's just a guy trying to make silent/burlesque-style comedy, and has an extremely weird sense of humor. That plays even less well commercially than art-house films, so he disguises his goofy productions as art pieces.

I'm mostly kidding about that but there's a nugget of truth to it, too: The Wayward Cloud is in fact a very funny movie, and while I await a future Criterion Blu-ray where I can go over it and extract nuance, I do think that the best way to experience it the first time is to just sit down and enjoy it as a comedy, because it really is extremely funny, rather than worry about parsing it for intent or meaning. That can come later, and maybe it will make the movie even better.

That said, I still think the "comedy made by a guy with a weird sense of humor" explains the last act best. Yes, there may be some meaning to what's going on, but I think it makes a lot more sense if Tsai is just kind of out there, giggling over something terribly inappropriate.

An Education

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (first-run)

I've long advocated that the Academy establish a Saul Bass award for outstanding opening credits, and An Education, with its upbeat music straight out of Charlie Brown specials and doodling over a peppily-edited montage that establishes just the barest hint of discontent, has one of the year's best. The movie that follows does a pretty good job of living up to it. Every single step of the story is easily predicted from the beginning, of course, but the cast is fantastic to a one. Star Carey Mulligan is just as good as promised, and Olivia Williams is particularly fine in her small role. It's a Sunday drive of a movie, familiar but still an enjoyable path to go down.

One odd thing that stuck out was the numerous references to the casual anti-semitism of the time. I'm sure that they're an accurate reflection, and when it first shows up, it reads as Alfred Molina's Jack trying to show that he's at least striving for his family to become more sophisticated (in that he says something "common" and then stumbles backing away from it), but when it reappears coming from the mouth of Emma Thompson's headmistress, well, then it's a thing.

Black Dynamite

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (midnight)

Huh, Michael Jai White is funny. Hilarious, even. Who knew?

The sort of parody that Black Dynamite engages in - replicating a genre that is less than stellar flaws and all (especially the flaws!) - is one I usually have pretty harsh words for. It's generally either the product of laziness (like Slimed and half the shorts we've screened for the BSFFF) or just seems disrespectful. The people who made those old movies that the parody's filmmakers often claim inspired them weren't trying to make something unintentionally hilarious, and if you're trying to honor their work, you really should do it by making the best movie you can. I'm talking to you, Larry Blamire.

Black Dynamite works because the filmmakers, as much as they're doing a warts-and-all recreation of seventies blaxploitation, don't ever use that as an excuse to slack off. When the characters talk, it's genuinely funny, and instead of trying to be bad actors, they're selling their lines with perfect comic timing. And for as ridiculously over-the-top as many of the action scenes are, they're actually shot better than the fight scenes in a lot of conventional action movies; White is a good enough screen fighter that he doesn't want to look bad.

Sure, maybe the last couple of segments are a little much, but I get the impression that the filmmakers knew they might never get another chance to make a movie like this, and made sure that they could cram every idea they had in there. And it's better for a movie like this to be overstuffed than have missed opportunities.



Stubless: The Foundling (18 November, Somerville Video Room, 7.30pm), an Eye-Opener they'd prefer I didn't mention by name or discuss since it's still a rough cut but which I didn't like all that much (22 November, Brattle Theatre, 11am)

The Foundling

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 November 2009 in the Somerville Theater Video Room (SF/35 selection group screenings)

So, speaking of stuff that I should probably keep under my hat, I'm kind of worried about the line-up for the festival part of February's Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. I'm tending to be the wet blanket in the room because I don't like camp that much, but that's not the problem with The Foundling. It's serious but not very good, really in any facet, but it's one Izzy seemed to feel was borderline. Some others praised the acting, which I just can't see. It's one of those movies that folks shy away from saying sucked because the intentions are good, it's unusual to see either a science fiction film or a western centered around Asian-American women, and just looking at it, you can see that the filmmaker did the very best she could with limited resources.

Still... You're asking people to pay the same amount for this that they would for a "regular" movie. And while a regular festival audience may find learning about new filmmakers enough, I don't know that this sort of film festival is the sort where good intentions and perhaps being a filmmaker to watch are good enough for the audience. I think each entry really needs to do something well, and The Foundling doesn't have that.

The Boat That Rocked (Pirate Radio cut)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 November 2009 in Regal Fenway #5 (first-run)

I probably should have known to be a little wary when the preview for this movie, aside from changing its name from the nifty-sounding "The Boat That Rocked" to the generic "Pirate Radio", spent a good chunk of time announcing that it had music from a bunch of great classic rock groups on the soundtrack. That's nice and all, but the target audience has most of that stuff on CD, and the time period rules out much in the way of new stuff (if groups being broken up and artists being dead didn't do an even more thorough job). So, Universal was basically selling it on what a great job the people who did the music clearances did. And while I'm sure they worked hard, if that's what you're using to push a movie with this cast, it sort of suggests that the movie isn't nearly as funny or clever as a movie with this cast and pedigree should be.

And, sadly, it's not. It's never bad, especially when it pulls out weapons like Billy Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Emma Thompson, but the truly great moments have a little too much space between them, and director Richard Curtis never quite manages to communicate the excitement of the era and how playing rock & roll like this was such an act of rebellion. The heck of it is, with modern American radio becoming as soullessly corporate as the day's BBC was stodgy, this movie could have really said something to people, but doesn't quite get there. Not that I expect Brit Curtis to think in those terms, but if the energy had been there, it would have been a nice side-effect.

The movie was recut from the original UK version for its US release, since the lengths was apparently a factor in its disappointing performance across the pond (which, I guess, makes the name change a little more palatable). One thing I think might have gotten garbled in the cut is how Tom Sturridge's Carl, the teenager sent to apprentice on the boat, at one point suspects Nighy's character is his unknown father, not far from when he is being set up with said character's niece. Maybe this was re-ordered for the US release, or something was cut, but it seems like there should have been alarm bells going off for someone.

The Parallax View

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Gordon Willis: The Man Who Shot the Godfather)

Pretty darn decent as paranoid 1970s thrillers go. The action set-piece that plays out in the beginning is a bit of a classic, although jarring to modern sensibilities: It plays out with no music, and is actually over pretty quickly, although not in a "came out of nowhere" way. It's just understated, acknowledging that this sort of chase wouldn't necessarily last very long.

The rest isn't quite up to that level; Warren Beatty is decent but not great, although Hume Cronyn is a treat as his crusty newspaper editor. It does serve as an interesting time capsule about paranoia and attitudes then and now. People still seemed to really believe in the press as an important check on government and industry ambition. Somehow the secret organization at the center seems both tame and extremely unlikely. And, get this, a man could just walk onto the runway, get on a plane, and then buy a ticket in the air, like he was on the commuter rail.

Not bad, and as befits a film presented in a series about the cinematographer, it certainly looks nice.



Bronson

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 November 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

Let's talk promotion and trailers again. I saw Bronson listed in the IFFB catalog and the picture used was a reddish image of Tom Hardy, stripped to the waist and looking tough. I figured, okay, I'll give that a pass. Then I see the crazy, colorful preview and think, huh, that might be worth a look.

In the end, Bronson winds up a so-so story told rather well. It's eye-popping to look at, and having the title character narrate as a stage show proves compelling and surprising far more often than it seems gimmicky. It's still very simple - young man gets sent to jail, discovers he likes to fight and is good at it, and is so committed to it that the sentence of seven years (and likely out in four) winds up becoming over thirty years spent in solitary confinement. But it's entertaining to watch, even if that's not the sort of story one usually goes in for.

Precious (based upon the novel Push by Sapphire)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2009 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run)

At some point while watching Precious, I remarked to myself that watchiing the movie was remarkably like being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer. That's not meant as a criticism; the life of Clarice "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is remarkably like being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer, and she certainly starts the movie ignorant enough that her way of communicating her life would like be akin to... Well, you get the idea. So, to a certain extent, every ham-fisted symbol or device is evidence that director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher are doing a good job of capturing Precious's perspective. Still, there are times when it doesn't quite feel like cleverness as just fumbling.

Still, the cast is top-notch. Gabourey Sidibe is excellent as Precious, as is Mo'Nique as her monstrous mother. Paula Patton and Mariah Carey provide good support, as do the group of actors playing Precious's friends. They're all quite natural, and no matter how awkward the storytelling sometimes may be, the acting is absolutely worth seeing the film for.

Mr. Skeffington

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2009 in the Brattle Theatre (Epstein Brothers)

The Epstein Brothers' most famous screenplay is, of course, Casablanca, but there's an argument to be made that the movie is fantastic in spite of the script, rather than because of it. After all, its events are absurd, but the acting and snappy dialog make up for it. Mr. Skeffington isn't quite so peppy, covering thirty years in its two and a half hours, and the star-crossed romance between Bette Davis's Fanny Trellis and Claude Rains's Job Skeffington is far from being Rick & Ilsa.

Still, it's not bad. Claude Rains, Walter Abel, and Marjorie Riordan are all charming in their parts, and there's a nice scope to it. Bette Davis, on the other hand... Well, Fanny soon becomes a singularly unpleasant character, and she gets saddled with some astonishingly horrific prosthetic makeup.

Red Cliff (edited from Chi bi and Chi bi xia: Jue zhan tian xia)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

Surprisingly, considering that the American release of Red Cliff has been cut just about exactly in half from what it was in China (where it was released as two movies totaling five hours), it's not simply one action scene after another. That's not to say it's not action-packed - it is, with Woo staging a few battle scenes that are nothing short of breathless - but not at the expense of the story.

The main attraction, of course, is the action, and we know what we're getting into from the start, when a loyal general takes a baby prince from its dying mother, puts him in a sling, and starts hacking up members of Prime Minister Cao Cao's army; from the moment we see the sling, we know there's badassery ahead, and we'll have single men taking on armies, literally controlling the battlefield, and an entire armada set on fire. Woo works his repertoire into this wuxia film, right down to the doves.

I'm hoping that when Magnolia releases this on home video, the entire two-part film will be on the Blu-ray, because although Red Cliff is suitably epic as is, there are points that could definitely use some fleshing out; in particular, Takeshi Kaneshiro's master strategist tends to seem to be ahead of Zhang Feng-yi's Cao Cao too much of the time; hopefully the entire story contains more back-and-forth, and perhaps a bit more of a story arc for some of the other characters.

Ninja Assassin

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2009 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run)

It's good to see that fake fake blood technology has improved since the Zatoichi remake, because the folks in Ninja Assassin do plenty of slicing and dicing. There's plenty of real fake blood, too, and even the some of the CGI weapons look pretty good. It's not the same sort of awe-inspiring action seen in Red Cliff, but there is something nice about how director James McTeague and company aren't messing around - there's been little if any thought given to how this could possibly secure a PG-13. Ninja movies should be this bloody and violent.

And it's good that it has that going for it, because even if it's not quite rock-stupid, it is the sort of action movie where every moment where fake blood of one sort or another isn't spurting is pretty much filler to lead us to the next. The characters are thoroughly generic, and there isn't even an obvious twist toward the end. The ninjas seem to have some mild supernatural abilities when McTeague and company think it would look cool - although I argue that ninjas actually being stealthy rather than seeming to impossibly step out of shadows with a shimmer would actually be cooler.

Ninja Assassin also seems to suggest a corollary to the multiple-ninja rule - that is, although one ninja is an unstoppable, undetectable killing machine, an army of ninjas is basically cannon fodder. It's as though a given geographical area has a limited pool of awesomeness to be drawn upon, so when you have many ninjas, they only get a little awesome each. Ninja Assassin posits a much stronger awesome field than most movies, as even groups of ninjas prove to be pretty fierce, but it also suggests that the field is polarized, with positive and negative awesome. Rain's title character thus has an advantage because he's the only one using the positive awesome field, while all the other ninjas are splitting the negative.

Sunday, Indie Sunday: The New Year Parade and (Untitled)

Ha! I'd totally forgotten what the eye-opener was for this week when I tried writing them down in the book both to remember for when I had to put a TWIT post together and when I tried to use it as documentation for the Watch-a-thon.

And, yes, I am once again participating in the Brattle's Movie Watch-a-thon. This blog should have been a great way to keep track, but, well... Anyway, donations can be made at my FirstGiving page. As of now (12:01-ish, 1 December), the tallies are:

5 @ the Brattle, 4 of them eye-openers;
24 elsewhere;
2 screening nights for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival selection comittee.

Brattle movies count double, the screenings maybe don't count at all, depending on how generous one feels.

The New Year Parade

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 November 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

The glib description of The New Year Parade is that divorce is hard on everybody - not just parents and children, but everyone else caught up in it, including the parade orchestras. Fortunately, the movie itself isn't glib, just honest and extraordinarily well-made, given how truly independent this independent movie is.

It opens with television coverage of Philadelphia's Mummers Parade, a New Year tradition where various musical clubs march and are scored on their performances. The South Philadelphia String Orchestra didn't do so well this year, but that's not all that's on the minds of some members - Mike MacDougal (Andrew Conway) is bothered by the fact that he didn't see his daughter Kat (Jennifer Welsh) in the crowd at the usual place, although his son Jack (Greg Lyons), also a member of the orchestra, tells him that's hardly surprising, since their mother Lisa (MaryAnn McDonald) wouldn't want to come, considering the separation. It sets the next year up as a struggle, not just for the band, but for the MacDougals.

Divorce sucks. It is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, to be avoided at all costs - by the time a couple gets to where the MacDougals are, it may be the best thing they can do. Still, nobody enjoys the process, and director Tom Quinn has put together a series of scenes that capture how helpless and angry the whole thing makes a person feel, as well as how it skews even seemingly unconnected things. I can't personally look at any particular scene and say, yes, I've been there - everyone's experience is different; I was away at school and missed much of the everyday tension when my parents split - but there's not a single one that doesn't feel genuine.

That is, in large part, due to the excellent performances by the cast. The acting is doubly impressive when you consider that many of the cast members had no previous acting experience, and may not do anything else. Take Jennifer Welsh, who is fantastic as as Kat; this movie is the teenager's debut, and she has since gone to college to major in sculpture and perhaps become a high-school art teacher. She's completely genuine, whether because of that or in spite of it. Part of it is because much of what we see is her doing things, rather than talking about them, but she doesn't ever over-emote when given dialog or a scene that is about showing how Kat feels. Similarly, MaryAnn McDonald had no experience, and while she winds up with the smallest part of the four family members, she gets the job done.

Andrew Conway and Greg Lyons, meanwhile, were already performers of different sorts - Conway a tango dancer and instructor, Lyons a musician - so it's a bit less of a surprise when they impress. Lyons is particularly good, looking maybe a little older than his character's twenty-five years (or how young working-class men actually look, outside of Hollywood), capturing the character's passive-aggressive vibe beautifully: He's going to be the good son, and maybe he doesn't even realize that he's trying to show who has the moral high ground. He makes Jack very much Mike's son in that way; Conway manages to give Mike a well-realized combination of pent-up aggression and desire to do right by his family. He's great in the scene where he seems to snap; he's a little scary, enough to make us a little nervous around him even though all indications are that he hasn't done anything wrong.

That's the family drama part of the movie, which generally takes the forefront, with the scenes of the band preparing for the next Mummers Parade providing background. Quinn uses it well; it never threatens to overtake the MacDougals' story, and serves as a nice reflection of it, as the tension between father and son start to form cracks in the band. It provides an interesting and unique background, though, and Quinn has obtained excellent access. During the last act, with New Year's approaching, Quinn blurs the line between narrative and documentary footage, showing the preparation.

To be totally honest, there were moments when I might have liked to see more of that; it's unique and interesting. But they're just brief moments, where we want more, which in no way detracts from what the movie is offering us.

Also at HBS.

(Untitled)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 November 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

It is easy to make fun of the art world, especially those on the edge (or fringe, depending on how you feel about it). It's a little harder to do it well; just because something is mockable doesn't mean that the mockery is funny. What (Untitled) does that's kind of impressive is to make sport of its eccentric artists while still maintaining some sort of appreciation for them.

Two of these artists are brothers. Josh Jacobs (Eion Bailey) is commercially successful; his works are soothing circle-filled images that hang nicely on lobby walls and in medical practices. His brother Adrian (Adam Goldberg) is a musician whose compositions are harsh and atonal, mostly using unusual sounds, although he has a regular clarinet (Lucy Punch). The date Josh brings to one of Adrian's sparsely-attended performances is Madeline Gray (Marley Shelton), a pretty gallery owner who, unlike nearly everyone else, seems to get what Adrian is going for, and invites him to perform at her gallery, where she's having a new show for Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones), whose work combines absurdity and taxidermy.

Director Jonathan Parker and co-writer Catherine DiNapoli get in a great deal of jokes at their characters' expense, and they are generally pretty good ones. A lot of them are familiar: There's the collector (Zak Orth) who seems to be trying to buy respectability without having any sort of actual taste, and the minimalist (Ptolemy Slocum) whose work is so minimal and manner so affected that he must be pulling off some sort of scam. Barko's works are pure frozen slapstick, while Adrian is deadpan earnest; there is no doubt that he has carefully considered every jarring sound, with that seriousness and disdain for musical convention bleeding over into various disastrous day jobs. Madeline's outfits are bizarre but perhaps calculatedly so. Parker hits the sweet spot with it, though - he doesn't aim to gross the audience out or make them uncomfortable, just get a laugh from how weird it is.

For all the movie is getting laughs at this stuff, though, it's not dismissive. Orth's and Slocum's characters are kind of sad and ridiculous, but there's a certain awkwardness to each of them that engenders a bit of our sympathy. Adrian gets to explain atonal music in a way that makes a certain amount of sense. There's pathos to how Josh wants both commercial success and respect. And Madeline is sometimes delightfully tricky to get a read on; there's a clearly mercenary side to her, but she also seems genuinely excited by art. For a movie that makes hay out of how silly the art world can seem to insiders and outsiders alike, (Untitled) has a fair amount of respect for them.

In some ways, that either holds the movie back or makes it hard to classify. It seldom misses when riffing on the avant garde types, but it takes its characters just seriously enough that it sometimes goes a while between jokes. It dabbles in several potential romantic triangles, but never really commits to making one the main thing to drive the story. I don't mind that, really - it means that (Untitled) doesn't give us whiplash going from comedy to melodrama and back, and lets us believe that what we're seeing go on is exaggerated but not to the point of being unrecognizable.

That atmosphere is sold by a cast that hits the balance Parker is trying to strike between weird and likeable. Marley Shelton manages to be the target of jokes without Madeline (mostly) coming off as a either ditz or ice queen. Adam Goldberg works his deadpan drawl to excellent effect; he sells a lot of silly scenes by playing them completely straight. Vinnie Jones works against type, playing a pretentious artist rather than a guy who could explode at any second. Eion Bailey makes Josh a little shallow and oblivious without being pushy about it. Lucy Punch, meanwhile, is adorable and quite frequently manages to serve as the movie's straight man without ever seeming like she doesn't belong among the crazy artists. And I wish Parker and DiNapoli had given Ben Hammer a bigger role - he shows up in one scene toward the end and absolutely owns it as Adrian's musical idol.

(Untitled) is a lot like its characters - kind of silly, but basically nice, despite eccentricities. Maybe it could have been sharper satire, but that could have easily backfired, resulting in something not nearly as enjoyable as this movie.

This Week In Tickets: 28 September 2009 to 4 October 2009

This winds up being late and it hardly seems worth it, does it? A fair amount of baseball seen, and two previews for which I don't even have ticket stubs:



Preview screenings for which I am stubless: Whip It on 1 October (7pm) and Good Hair on 4 October (11am)

That first game was not quite what one would call a miserable experience - yes, it was an ugly loss, and just as things were about to get better, the sky opened up and dumped a really remarkable amount of rain on our heads. Fortunately, there was a fair amount of shelter nearby, and we figured that if they restarted the game, we'd be able to grab actual Monster Seats, rather than Monster Standing Room. After about an hour, though, my brother Dan and his wife Lara decided they really should head back home to Maine, and Matt followed. I opted to stay until the end, which wasn't long - I think the game was called off before they reached their car or T stop. Still, it's the principle of the thing.

(Bummed me out, since the team was scoring runs when it ended and other games that Dan and I attended toether included this one and this one. I'm not saying our presense causes awesome comebacks, but it's not a bad sign!)

Friday was me impulse-buying a birthday gift for myself, and that was a lot more fun - beautiful night, great view of the game, Matsuzaka looking more trustworthy than Buchholz at this point. For what those pavilion box seats cost, though, they have what may be the longest line for food in the park.

As to the movies, seeing the game on Monday made me miss the Brattle's preview screening of Whip It, but the IFFB picked up a screening of their own later in the week. Cool, because I wanted to see it, there was a bunch of stuff coming out that weekend, and I knew Saturday was going to be given over to my niece's birthday party (yes, we have the same birthday. I have no excuse to forget hers ever). It's a fun little movie, though I don't know about "good enough to drop out of Drag Me To Hell for".

Whip It

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2009 at AMC Harvard Square #5 (Preview)

That title cries out for an exclamation mark, doesn't it? In a way, so does the movie. It's a pretty by-the-numbers teen girl coming of age thing, though funnier than most. It's got a nice cast, although they're better around the edges, where Daniel Stern, director Drew Barrymore, Zoe Bell, or even Michael Petrillo can take their characters and find some way to make them memorable and unique. Star Ellen Page really doesn't have a chance to do that; there is just nothing new or unique about Bliss Cavendar. That's not the result of a bad performance, but Bliss is almost never the most interesting person in a given scene: Okay, she beats Landon Pigg's completely generic Cute Musician Boyfriend. Maybe Marcia Gay Harden's stage-mothering character, although she gets more interesting once we see her in her postal service uniform.

And I'm kind of starting to suspect that Ellen Page is going to fall into the same category as Matt Frewer and Heather Graham: Good but not really impressive, but you don't realize it at first because they were so perfect in Max Headroom/Swingers/Juno. There were times while watching this that I couldn't help but wish it were made fifteen or so years earlier, when Barrymore could star rather than direct and steal scenes.

A couple weird things about the movie: Drew Barrymore looks like she has the makings of a pretty decent director, especially since she took on a project that would require dealing with fast-moving action as her first project and emerged unscathed. Well, not literally unscathed - she's the one that gets banged up when the script calls for someone to get banged up, which is kind of fun. The credits seemed to play up her contribution by cutting to her even for her directing and producing credits, which feels like they're playing up her on-screen presence more than it warrants.

Also, I snickered to myself about how this is a movie ready-made for the crowds at one of the Austin festivals (or just regular Austin dates) to go nuts over, because (a) Austinites frickin' love Austin, and aren't shy about letting you know this, and (b) this movie presents going to Austin as just a complete escape from everything Bliss doesn't like about her life, and hits all the hipster spots. I suspect that the "yaaah Austin woooooooooooooo!" factor could have driven me nuts (especially the scene in the Alamo Drafthouse).

As such, I was highly amused when I saw that most of the movie is Michigan doubling for Texas in the end credits. Are you no longer indie and cool when it's too expensive to shoot something like Whip It there?

Good Hair

I feel just a little silly having my opinion of Good Hair being one of the main ones eFilmCritic goes live with tomorrow; it's not as if I am close to its target audience. After all, I'm white, male, and my concern with hair care is minor at best: I buy whichever 2-in-1 shampoo is on sale at the supermarket when my previous bottle is empty, and I get a haircut when it starts getting in my eyes. I'm certainly in no position to tell anybody that this movie is important, though it is entertaining.

I can say that one thing about it amused me more than it might amuse others. When I was a kid, my mother operated a hairdresser's shop out of our basement, complete with chair, sink that had a lip designed for resting one's neck, and the works (it was a bit hard when her boys started paying for someone else to cut our hair, even if we were at college in Worcester or Syracuse). So I grew up with the smell of permanent waves in the house on a regular basis, and that was nasty. I didn't realize it was also painful, but the part that made me think "huh, that's odd" is that I'd always associated it with white people trying to get their straight hair curled - here, it's much more about black people getting their curly hair straightened.

Good Hair

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 October 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

There's a whole lot of interesting information in Good Hair, presented well, but it wouldn't be half the movie it is without its writer/producer/star, Chris Rock. Not just because the movie was his idea - someone else likely would have made a movie about what having "good hair" means in the African-American community - but because his personality turns out to be a perfect match for the material.

Early on, Rock explains that the film has its origins in one of his daughters asking him why she doesn't have "good hair", which turns out to have a specific meaning among African-Americans, especially women, that Rock hadn't fully grasped: Straight. Silky. Fine. Basically, like a white woman's. His curiosity piqued, he sets out to learn as much about the phenomenon as he can, going from the Bronner Brothers hair care convention in Atlanta, Georgia to a temple in India, talking to celebrities, businessmen, activists, and the crowd at the local barber shop to find out what good hair means to them.

What the film shows us is not necessarily anything that has been particularly hidden, but is certainly interesting when connected over the course of an hour and a half. The numbers are downplayed, so it's almost possible to miss the comment that though African Americans make up around one eighth of the population of the United States, they are responsible for the majority of the spending on hair care. Indeed, the economics of the industry are curious, as we see that women of relatively limited means often spend thousands of dollars on their hair weaves, and very few of the businesses catering to the market are actually black-owned. Al Sharpton has a point when he talks about the community putting their repression on their heads - and that's even without demonstrating how nasty the chemicals in "relaxers" and perms are.

In the hands of some filmmakers, this film would be wall-to-wall anger, but director Jeff Stilson (who co-wrote the film with Rock and two other credited writers) and his star don't go for a strident tone. Maybe they just don't see the value in calling a large part of their target audience foolish, though it need not be so calculated. While the filmmakers will frequently insert a barbed bit of commentary into the narration or captions, the scenes where Rock interviews or converses with his subjects are almost universally friendly. Certainly, you can tell where Chris Rock (and, by extension, the film) comes down on most subjects - he doesn't hide his delight when interviewing Maya Angelou, who has never had her hair relaxed, and he's obviously alarmed at things like toddlers getting perms - but the film doesn't give a very hard sell. Rather than telling the audience what to think, it's quite content to give the audience something to think about.

Chris Rock is a big reason why this goes down easy - aside from being funny on his own, he appears to be a good interviewer. It's not surprising that he can get Ice-T to tell a good story, but his talks with actresses Nia Long and Tracie Thoms are actual conversations rather than opportunities to perform. He's also good talking with businesspeople, hairdressers, and men on the street, often getting them to say interesting things without ever feeling like he's ambushing them or setting them up.

That's not all Rock, either - Stilson, the other writers, and editors Paul Marchand and Greg Nash do a good job of putting the film together. It's quite possible that the filmmakers knew exactly what what they wanted to do before they ever shot a frame, but they certainly do a good job of making it appear that they followed their curiosity: A comment about how few of the exhibitors at Bronner Brothers are black-owned leads to a visit to the makers of Dudley's Hair Relaxer; a visit to India to find the source of the hair in weaves has a similar jump-off. When Rock brings up how many black men are attracted to white women, and whether being able to run one's fingers through their hair without disturbing the weave was a factor, it seems like something that just occurred to him. That feeling of spontaneity gives the film credit when it hits bits that seem a little forced (a skit of Rock trying to sell genuine African-American hair to salons, a hairstyling competition) - or when people bust out the n-word, which is more or less guaranteed to cut some audience members' comfort in half.

Of course, the film arguably isn't for white males such as myself; it's about what the desire for "good hair" costs the African-American community culturally and financially. I can't say how well it does that, just that it does a good job of putting its information together and making the experience entertaining.

This Week In Tickets: 21 September 2009 to 27 September 2009

Before reviewing last week's tickets, a couple notes on series going on and screenings coming up here in the Boston area:

* The Brattle will be hosting a preview screening of Whip It tonight (28 September 2009) at 7pm; doors open at 6pm; it's open to the general public but Brattle members get to go in first. Up until Saturday, I was planning to go; then my brother IMed me to say he had an extra ticket for tonight's game atop the wall. So, hey, I'll catch up with Whip It in regular theaters sometime.

* The Brattle and The Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film kicked off the semi-annual Sunday Eye Opener series yesterday; though anyone who wasn't there has missed the first, it's still a pretty good deal to see films early or without distribution: $50 for the general public, $30 for members of either organization, $20 for members of both. Individual screenings will run $10.

* 826 Boston is hosting a fund-raising screening of Where the Wild Things Are on Monday, 5 October. It's bit pricey - $30 general admission, $100 VIP - but screenwriter David Eggers will be there for a Q&A. The VIP tickets not only get you seats in the section that is usually roped off, but also admission into a pre-screening cocktail party with Eggers at the Ritz-Carlton. Proceeds help 826's mission to help kids write.



Not a lot going on during the week, and didn't really want to go out on a rainy Sunday. Surrogates was the thing I was most excited about this weekend, as I had greatly enjoyed the comics and was especially tickled to find that they were shooting in Boston last year. I don't know how many folks in the audience were aware of it, but everybody seemed to get a kick out of seeing scenes take place just a block or two away from the theater.

A little CGI or set dressing to fill in an empty storefront in Downtown Crossing might have been appreciated, though. It looks like that Barnes & Noble that closed down a couple years ago will never find a new tenant, and will be across from a big hole in the ground for a couple years.

(Another bummer: I had to turn around and tell people to shut up, and should have done so much earlier. The theater is not your living room, people, and I didn't pay for my ticket so I could listen to you!)

The Informant!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 September 2009 at AMC Boston Common #11 (First-run)

The Informant! feels a little bit like a movie that's a victim of being based on a true story. The first half or so is the bouncy, very funny movie that the previews have been selling, and it's a treat. Soderbergh and company do a really quite exceptional job of making something that could be very dry - an investigation into price-fixing of corn by-products - and build a very amusing comedy out of it, with fine performances by Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, and Scott Bakula.

The trouble is, Damon's character was more complicated than that, and while we'd seen some of his odd way of thinking with the tangents his mind goes off on while other stuff is happening on screen, we suddenly get a lot more of it. We get scenes suggesting that the pathological lying has a physiological route, but no follow-up, and a jump forward that includes some weirdly expository dialogue (although that may also just be the way this guy talks). It feels like an odd break.

Surrogates

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 September 2009 at AMC Boston Common #18 (First-run)

Surrogates should have been a better movie - it's got an interesting sci-fi premise, the right star in Bruce Willis, and a good director in Jonathan Mostow. The action is pretty good, and it's even clever at times - I love a scene where the cops are questioning a group of corporate flacks, and there's maybe a little extra stiffness to how Radha Mitchell walks. Even in a future where everyone can present themselves as Hollywood-beautiful, you can see the differences between the haves and have-nots.

That's why the moments when Surrogates isn't inventive are so frustrating. that scene ends on a crude line from Willis's Tom Greer that deflates it a little, and the movie ultimately falls back on saying that this new technology is bad/wrong/etc. in a very black and white way. The final minutes, especially, leave no time to explore the shades of gray and interesting questions about the trade-offs that made the rest more interesting than the average action movie.

To be fair, that may come from the original comics - I'll have to pull my copy out and give it a look - but it's still disappointing, either way.

Suspiria

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 September 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagement)

The description of this movie in the Brattle's calendar contains an unusually candid phrase, that Suspiria is "almost solely responsible for Argento's canonization into the pantheon of legendary horror directors". I don't know that it's even actually a good movie itself, but it is at least a memorable one: The lush colors of the gorgeous settings pop off the screen, especially on the Technicolor print that the Brattle ran. The soundtrack is bold electronica by The Gremlins, and the story is crazy events piled one on top of the other.

It is beautiful, though. Utter nonsense, but striking enough that it doesn't really matter.

This Week In Tickets: 6 April 2009 to 12 April 2009

Not a lot of movies seen this week, as baseball started, and that's been getting a lot of my attention. Not that it's been a particularly great week to be a Red Sox fan - opening day rained out, the game I went to cold and miserable, neither pitchers nor hitters (not named Kevin Youkilis) looking very good.

On a baseball & movies note, Sugar is really good. The post may have been buried under this one, so it's worth noting. In the Boston, it's playing at the two Landmark Theaters and the Regal Fenway (given their location, they may as well fill screens with something baseball-related until the big guns start hitting in May (even if it does have subtitles).



Not a lot to talk about here, but I can direct you to a few more of my SXSW reviews on EFC:

* Sin Nombre
* Women in Trouble
* The 2 Bobs
* Observe and Report

That last one just in time for its regular release. Out of five reviews on EFC, I'm the only guy who doesn't like it. One thing I do find myself noticing, reading all the positive reviews: None of them make any sort of case that the movie is actually funny. It's daring and dark and edgy and uncompromising, but not much said about why it will make people laugh or entertain them. Humor's a subjective thing, I know, but was everybody just so stunned by what Jody Hill got Warner Brothers to pay him to do that whether or not it was actually funny was beside the point?

Sauna

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2009 at the Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye-Opener)

I didn't realize, going into the Eye Opener this week, that Sauna was made by the same team that had done Jade Warrior a couple years earlier. I don't know if that would have affected what I thought about Sauna, but I might have had something to add to the conversation afterward. It's an interesting body of work director Antti-Jussi Annila and writer Iiro Kuttner are putting together, as both movies take relatively obscure bits of Finnish culture and history (at least, obscure to us non-Finns!) and build perhaps unexpected genre films around them.

I don't know if it fully works with Sauna, although I certainly would be interested in watching it again with both a previous viewing under my belt and Jade Warrior in the back of my mind. It's a pretty darn engrossing film, if only for the relationship between the two brothers - one a warrior, one a scholar - as well as how they deal with the Russian team that they must work with in order to chart a border after a long war between Russia and Sweden (Finland being a part of Sweden at the time). Things start to get strange once they arrive at a village in the middle of a swamp, populated by the exact number of innocent souls warrior brother Erik (Ville Virtanen) has on his conscience, and academic Knut (Tommi Eronen, who starred in Jade Warrior) becomes obsessed with a sauna there which pre-dates any other settlement.

Annila seems to have cut his movie to the bone (it's 85 minutes including credits), and he maybe could have left a little more flesh on there. It's the sort of movie where the metaphor is fairly clear, but not as specific as it could be, and the mechanics are vague even beyond the point where being inexplicable adds to it being scary.

That said, there is a flat-out awesome make-up effect at the end, the sort of think Clive Barker would look at and nod approval of in terms of being messed up (but unlike his Cenobites, it's a pretty simple, straightforward design).

This Week In Tickets: 2 March 2009 to 8 March 2009

I'm getting ready for my first trip out to the South by Southwest festival this Friday, so TWIT will be up Friday morning as there's no way I'm lugging my scanner to Texas or constructing pages while I'm out there. But for now...



You know, that's a pretty darn solid week. Two Lovers wasn't very good, but everything else had something to recommend it. My only real complaint was that the 104 bus took forever to arrive on the way back from the furniture store; one of those situations where if you knew two just weren't going to show up, you'd take the subway. But once it's late, it must be just around the corner, right?

Also, I wish I'd been able to get to more of the "9 x Quine" series at the Harvard Film Archive, but Watchmen ate Saturday and I opted for Phoebe on Sunday. I'm definitely going to have to become a member of the HFA, since the price is pretty good (you save money if you go to three special events and eight films a year); I've been going there a lot more, lately.

Pushover

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (9 x Quine)

I wrote a review of this three years ago. I liked it then and maybe don't like it quite as much now, but I'm still fond of it. Kim Novak is delicious in the role that introduced her, although Fred MacMurray's businesslike, barking fall from grace doesn't quite hold up as well. What I do still love is the meticulous way it sets up its action; not many movies these days would spell everything out with floorplans that the viewer is encouraged to memorize and follow along with for the rest of the movie. Nobody ever turns right when they should turn left; which is great attention to detail.

Drive a Crooked Road

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (9 x Quine)

Eddie Shannon (Mickey Rooney) knows cars - how to fix them, build them, and drive them. Girls, that's another story - his short stature, nasty scar, and shy demeanor has served to keep him away. So the poor guy doesn't stand a chance when Barbara Mathews (Dianne Foster) and her roughly eleven feet of legs comes into the garage where he works and asks for him by name...

... Actually, I just wanted to write that line about Ms. Foster's long, long legs. If I wind up writing a full review of this, it's going in there, and may work its way into another one. They certainly make an impression, although the rest of the movie isn't bad, exactly, just a little ham-handed. It's interesting for being a film noir with a script by Blake Edwards, who would become known for much lighter fare.

I also think that this would be prime remake material - the plot, which involves a group of bank robbers recruiting Shannon because their bank robbery requires getting through a remarkably twisty road at an impossible rate of speed, is a good one. And the automotive action isn't bad for 1954, but a twenty-first century viewer can't help but wonder how much more they could have done even ten years later.

Watchmen

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2009 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run)

What do you MEAN, no Star Trek trailer? Do I look like I care about Harry Potter?

</NERD RAGE>

And, you know, if nerd rage over the Watchmen movie ends there, they've done all right. I've got no complaints about the new ending, which is a logical enough way to do it, since it allows a time-consuming subplot to be excised and does wind up saying something interesting about Dr. Manhattan.

As well as the movie does a lot of things, there are a couple of faults to it as an adaptation: The first is that it seems to miss one of Moore's points from the book, that there are no superheroes, just flawed and oftentimes perverse men and women. The one true superbeing becomes inhuman, and the closest thing to it comes awful close. Here, though, we see the characters engage in enhanced fisticuffs, destroying the rooms they fight in, rather than seeming terriby human and vulnerable as they do in the book. Excising certain scenes means we miss a big part of Rorschach's personality.

The other thing is that, as much as Watchmen is deservedly called a graphic novel in terms of scope and structure, it's also a comic book. One thing I was struck by when reading it for the first time last fall is how much each issue is very self-contained. Watchmen #4, which tells Dr. Manhattan's story, is perhaps the best single issue of any comic ever written, and even as a chapter in a book, it's haunting and tragic and whole. In the film, there's no pause of any kind between it and what happens before and after, and while director Zack Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse put it on-screen more or less unmolested, the sudden shift in narration and style makes it seem like an odd section of the movie, not the grand thing it was before.

Of course, those are things coming from someone who is familiar with the book through recent experience. I'll be interested in hearing what my brother Matt thinks, as he intends to swipe my copy of the book after seeing the movie. It's still a good story told pretty well, and that's before getting to the soft spot I have for any movie that gives Matt Frewer a part well suited to him.

Sita Sings the Blues

I heard of Sita Sings the Blues around Christmas, from this entry in Roger Ebert's blog. (If you're not reading Ebert's journal, you really should). I was ecstatic to see that it would be playing the Museum of Fine Arts in March, only to be chagrined to realize that I would be out of town at SXSW for most of it. I was planning on bailing on work early on Thursday, taking the 2:30 bus from work to get to the 4:30pm showing.

Happily, the Brattle showed it as part of its eye-opener program, in a beautiful 35mm print (you can buy one yourself at the website, if you've got a spare five grand lying around). Don't miss it.

Sita Sings the Blues

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2009 at Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye Opener)

There's no such thing as bad publicity. Sita Sings the Blues is an extraordinary independent animated film, and while those are far from a dime a dozen, they have a tough time getting distribution and attention. Even with a glowing entry in Roger Ebert's blog, it might have disappeared. Some legal hassles over the publishing rights to eighty-year-old recordings got it a little extra visibility, and prompted filmmaker Nina Paley to forgo conventional distribution and instead make it freely available.

The main story of the film is based on portions of the Sanskrit epic of The Ramayana, specifically the parts involving Sita (voice of Reena Shah), the wife of exiled prince Rama (voice of Debargo Sanyal). She is devoted to him, dutifully awaiting rescue when kidnapped by nine-headed Ravana (voice of Sanjiv Jhaveri). Things get cold after the rescue, though, with Rama growing distant, unable to trust that the twins Sita is carrying belong to him. In the present, a San Francisco animator (voice of Jhaveri) gets an offer to work for six months in India, but is cold to wife Nina (voice of Paley) when she comes to be with him, eventually sending her an email saying not to come back when she's on a trip to New York.

This is not a definitive version of the Ramayana; a trio of shadow puppet narrators (voices of Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya) argue boisterously while trying to recall the details, including Sita's proper name. It is, instead, Nina Paley extracting the elements of the mythology that speak to her, combining them with American blues to create something both fantastic and true, heartbreaking and tremendously entertaining. It is one of the smartest uses of mythology recently seen, removing the myth of Sita from the twin rigidities of scholarship and scripture. That the storytellers cannot agree on the details shows the power of mythology - the stories are larger than life, well-known but malleable.

Paley's respectful of the myths, but her other source is just as interesting, if an unconventional match. The late Annette Hanshaw gets the "starring" credit, providing Sita's singing voice via recordings from 1927-1929. It's a great voice to (re-)discover; she could infuse those songs with great joy and sadness. Even songs that might be happy on the surface can become plaintive as she sings them. Despite the sorrow she can communicate, there's also a wonderfully youthful innocence in her voice, making her a perfect match for the unconditionally loving young Sita. That also comes through with the way she squeaks "that's all" at the end of songs, putting punctuation to the film's musical numbers.

Those musical numbers not only have an unusual sound - much of the rest of the movie is scored with Indian synth-pop that might not be out of place in a Bollywood movie - but also a particular look. The musical numbers are slick, all round shapes pivoting off each other, looking like very good Flash animation with bright digital coloring. Sita herself is composed of perfect circles, from the palms of her hands to her breasts to her facial features; even her hair is overlapping circles. Paley uses three distinct art styles to tell Sita's story, with Sita having different character models in all of them: The circular model already mentioned, a traditional hand-drawn style as the story is told between musical numbers, and illustrations cut out of a book for the scenes with the narrators. On top of that, there's the jittery, cartoony style (with collage backgrounds) that Paley uses to draw her own experiences, and other styles used for specific scenes. It's a stylistic stew, and Paley only occasionally overlaps them, so we seldom think of the difference in style as we're watching the movie.

For all the talk of ancient mythology, classic blues, and masterful animation, what makes Sita Sings the Blues a great movie is its light touch: Paley does not particularly play for the audience's sympathy in the autobiographical segments; she recognizes that her pining for Dave doesn't paint her in the best light, and doesn't wallow. It's more about having the audience see that even today, women are vulnerable to the same bad habits as in "A Long Time Ago, B.C."

The movie is also very, very funny. The narrators argue, pointing out that a lot of trouble could have been averted had Sita taken her first chance to escape rather than dutifully waiting for Rama to rescue her. There are dancing monkeys, twenties blues set to cartoon mayhem, and funny antics with Nina's cat. There's also a hilarious three-minute intermission that breaks the fourth wall even more than the narration. 82-minute movies don't need an intermission, of course, but this one is packed with enough pure entertainment for a much longer movie, to go with its brains and beauty.

It's a fantastic movie, held up from a conventional release by copyright laws (though the Hanshaw performances have entered the public domain, the publishing rights are not). At this writing, there are still 45-odd special bookings and festivals coming up, but Paley has also made the film available, free viewing/download, or purchase at her website (http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/) in a variety of formats (though donations are appreciated). There's nothing to lose by looking, and an amazing film to be found.

Also at EFC.

Family fun - Horton, CJ7, The Forbidden Kingdom, and Son of Rambow

One last gasp before starting the IFFB stuff (and then a likely massive catch-up post).

It saddens me a little that HBS/EFC had no reviews for CJ7, even though I didn't love the film; I can't be the only guy there who thinks a new Stephen Chow film is a big deal, can I? Of course, I suspect it didn't get far out of the big cities anyway (it's already long gone from Boston), so maybe not as many people had the opportunity to review it, or did it for some other paying gig.

At least The Forbidden Kingdom opened well, because it's a fun action-adventure that I'd happily use to introduce folks to Jackie Chan and Jet Li if I knew someone age-appropriate. I did feel like a bit of a dummy when I read some of the other reviews, of course - was I the only person who didn't immediately twig to some of the casting (he said, trying to avoid spoilers, even though every other review he's seen lays it right out without worrying about it)?

Horton Hears a Who!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2008 at Regal Fenway #10 (first-run)

So, it turns out adapting Dr. Seuss well is possible, although like any adaptation, you wind up with something much different in feel from the source material. The story's still there, but part of the appeal of Seuss is stopping to examine some crazy detail he put in, or getting caught up in the cadence of his rhymes. You can't quite do that with movies; they run at a set pace that doesn't allow the audience to explore until home video, and the running time of a feature means that more words have to be put in, until the rhymes are nearly swallowed.

Judged on what it is, though, Horton Hears a Who! is a fun movie. Blue Sky captures the look of the storybooks without being quite so enslaved by it as the live action films have been. Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell both give lively vocal performances, and the story touches on the idea of faith and how we handle things we cannot explain without being too heavy-handed about it. That's pretty impressive.

Cheung Gong 7 hou (CJ7)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2008 at Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

CJ7 was a mammoth hit in Chinese theaters, but didn't produce much of a blip in the U.S. There's just no place for it; parents don't bring their kids to movies with subtitles and the ever-shrinking audience for foreign films would rebel if it was shown dubbed. They won't make it a sleeper hit because they don't see kids' movies. So it slips through the cracks, which is unfortunate - so many kids' movies are terrible that it doesn't make sense to dismiss a good one just because people are speaking Chinese.

Dicky (Xu Jiao) is the poorest boy at his private school; the film opens with him trying to sew his sneakers back together. As so often happens, he's not just picked on by the other kids but treated like crap by most of his teachers. His construction-worker father Ti (Stephen Chow) spends every dime they have on the school, so they live in a hovel near the dump. One night, while searching that dump for a pair of sneakers for Dicky, Ti stumbles across something that came from a crashed alien spaceship. He doesn't realize it, but the toy he gives Dicky is an impossibly cute alien with strange powers ("CJ7", since the rich kid boasts of having a "CJ1" robotic dog).

Chow writes and directs as well as acting, and like his other recent films (Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle), he's using a lot of digital effects. They don't look look completely real, but they're not supposed to. Chow has always been a performer who has tended toward broad physical comedy, so it's not surprising that not only is CJ7 full of rounded surfaces and hyper-cute design, but Chow engages in a lot of Loony Tunes-style slapstick with it. CJ7 is highly malleable, pulls tools out of nowhere, and when he gets kind of beat up, cartoony springs poke through the surface. The story's got large chunks of E.T. in it, but a lot of the stuff with the creature/robot is closer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

Even when CJ7 is not on screen, the vibe is something of a live-action cartoon. One bizarre scene toward the beginning has Dicky and Ti competing over who can squash more cockroaches in their kitchen (between this, Ratatouille, and Enchanted, I'm wondering where the meme about vermin being family movie fodder came from). There are students at Dicky's school who shake the ground when they lumber into the scene, and his math teacher Mr. Cao (Lee Shing-Cheung) is a thoroughly hissy snob, who stops just short of pulling out a pair of tongs when circumstances force him to handle something that Dicky has touched. On the opposite side of the fence is the almost impossibly beautiful and friendly Miss Yuen (Kitty Zhang Yugi), who brings the requisite innocent sex appeal to the film.

Then there's Xu Jiao, who delivers some pricelessly funny reaction shots. She's not subtle, and in a lot of movies she'd be dismissed as a child actor trying to skate by on being cute. It works here, I think, though someone would need to have just slightly less tolerant of kids mugging for the camera for it not to. And, yes, those pronouns are right; Stephen Chow's son is played by a girl. This isn't unprecedented (it happens in animation all the time), and the audience will likely hardly notice it; it's just an odd choice.

Chow himself takes a back seat to Xu, playing Ti as generally a good dad without being anything close to saccharine. Folks expecting a lot of him may be disappointed. His work behind the scenes is pretty good for most of the film, but it does seem to come apart a bit in the end - after an hour or so of fun, CGI-enhanced slapstick, the movie decides to get serious and be heartwarming, and that leaves the ending kind of a downer on the one hand and kind of random on the other.

Kids might not mind that, though, and that is who CJ7 was made for. The question is, just how many English-speaking kids are likely to see this movie, even if it is a lot better than much of the stuff being sent their way?

Also on HBS.

The Forbidden Kingdom

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 April 2008 at AMC Boston Common #18 (sneak preview)

I don't know if an attempt to measure such things objectively would actually find that the audience with which I saw The Forbidden Kingdom enjoyed the obligatory scene where martial arts masters Jet Li and Jackie Chan pummel student Michael Angarano in the name of training more than they usually would. You'll forgive us if we took a certain amount of sadistic joy in it, though - after all, no-one came to the movie to see him, and it's fun to see the movie acknowledge that.

Angarano plays Jason Tripitikas, a South Boston teen who loves his chop sockey movies. A group of bullies forces him to help rob the shop where he gets his import DVDs, and after the owner is shot, he winds up in possession of a golden staff that fans of the genre and those who watched the prologue will recognize as belonging to the Monkey King. It somehow pulls him back in time to ancient China, where he's told the story of how the Jade Warlord (Collin Chou) tricked the Monkey King, freezing him as a statue until his staff is returned. That job's too big for James, but he does meet up with drunken master Lu Yan (Chan), revenge-seeking orphan Sparrow (Liu Yifei), and a mysterious monk (Jet Li). Together, they attempt to reach the Warlord's fortress atop Five Elements Mountain, though he has sent white-haired Wolf-Witch assassin Ni Chan (Li Bingbing) after them.

It is easy to mock The Forbidden Kingdom for casting Jet Li and Jackie Chan in the same movie and having them technically be supporting characters to the American kid. There's probably a line of less-than-ideal compromises that have to be made to get to that point - it takes Hollywood money to make it happen, Hollywood money means Hollywood producers, and Hollywood producers means it has to make money in America, so shoot it in English with a central American character so that the previews don't look too foreign. It's forgivable, though, in part because the movie did, in fact, get made, and in part because John Fusco's script wears its love for these movies on its sleeve. He makes Jason an annoying name-dropping fanboy, but he drops good names. Fusco tailors his script to his cast, giving Jet Li chances to do both quick hand-to-hand combat and wire-fu, while Jackie Chan gets to reference what is likely his most beloved work (the Drunken Master movies) and do his "using whatever is near at hand" shtick. Heck, we got a "Journey to the West" movie when I'm certain that at one point, some American studio exec said "what's all this 'Monkey King' stuff; can't they just be rival cops?"

That's not saying it's a great script; it's frequently sort of awkward, and the Boston scenes feel a little rote. There are great huge information dumps, although I do like the way Fusco and director Rob Minkoff quietly toss the basis for a clever plot twist into the middle of a long-winded retelling of the Monkey King myth. That one bit of misdirection makes up for a story that seems to be cobbled together from several sources. It's worth noting that despite the presence of a time-traveling American teenager, this is probably the sanest Journey to the West movie I've seen; be relieved or disappointed as you will.

Enough about the script, though - Jackie Chan and Jet Li fight! How cool is that? Pretty darn cool, actually. I must admit to being a little worried during Chan's early scenes; combine Lu Yan's bulky hair and more shots from behind than usual, and he could have been doubled as he was in bits of Rush Hour 3. The Chan-Li centerpiece dispels those fears, though; they're both in good form, and Minkoff makes sure the audience gets a good look at them in action. Fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping keeps things going at an exciting pace and does a good job of blending their styles - Chan's drunken boxing is a fun contrast to Li's more violent fighting. The two are clearly having a blast, and that's conveyed to the audience. There are probably a couple places this sequence could have stopped, but the movie lingers on it; after all, this is what the audience came for.

The pair acquit themselves well enough when they're not fighting as well. Chan seems more comfortable being funny in English than in many of his other movies; Jet Li does a nice job of making his character seem human as well as being a testy man of mystery, as well as being surprisingly funny in other scenes. Anganaro sometimes does perform his role a little too well - he's sort of fan that collects and catalogs, but hasn't yet moved beyond that superficial level, and that's kind of annoying. Liu Yifei is a bit tough to get a handle on, since Sparrow is given an odd way of speaking, referring to herself in the third person in a sort of disengaged manner. I wish Li Bingbing had the chance to do more of the heavy lifting as the villain; as much as Collin Chou hams it up a bit, he never seems as ferocious as she does.

I'm glad The Forbidden Kingdom turned out to be as good - and as much fun - as it is. Aside from not knowing whether we'll ever get to see Chan and Li work together again (it took a bunch of North American money to make it happen and Chan's not getting any younger), I want it to remind audiences how much fun this style of movie is. Last year gave us the depressing one-two punch of Rush Hour 3 and War; hopefully this signals a return to martial arts stars actually putting on a great show on the big screen.

On HBS along with five other reviews.

Son of Rambow

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2008 at the Brattle Theatre (sneak preview/Sunday Eye Opener)

Son of Rambow knows kids. You can tell from the opening credits, where a twelve-year-old boy runs through the neighborhood, only stopping long enough to cause mischief, or when the little sister of the other main character simply can't stand still even though her jumping around might distract from the two people talking. The movie shares its young cast's surplus of energy, and even though it's got adult wisdom to it, the end result's never a lecture.

The kid running across town after sneaking a VHS camera into a cinema to record First Blood is Lee Carter (Will Poulter), a brat who lives in the back of a nursing home with his brother Lawrence while their mother spends her time in Spain with her new husband. He soon meets his polar opposite in Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) when both are sent into the hallway during school - Lee for being a disruption, Will because his family's strict religion means he's not allowed to even watch the documentary being shown in geography class. Will already loves to draw, and when he winds up accidentally watching the Stallone movie while hiding from Lee's brother, it's like nothing he's imagined before. Soon the pair are shooting their own sequel together, even though that means hiding the project from Lawrence (Ed Westwick) and Lee's mother Mary (Jessica Stevenson). Meanwhile, the arrival of a group of French exchange students, particularly ultra-cool Didier (Jules Sitruk), is blowing other kids' minds the same way the movie blew Will's.

Among other things, Son of Rambow is a love letter to the movies, making them as much as watching them. We see Will stunned and amazed by his first movie-watching experience, transported into another world where a scarecrow can come alive and be the villain in the movie they're going to make. He's already been making flipbooks, and soon he's drawing scenes in his Bible that evolve into storyboards. Will and Lee are about as far from cool as kids can be, but once the word gets out about what they're doing, Didier and his crew suddenly want to hang out with them, because what's as cool as making a movie? Of course, once Didier joins up, it doesn't take much to read the next scenes as a riff on going from small independent films to big studio works, with more people on the set than you can handle and demanding stars taking charge.

Writer/director Garth Jennings doesn't spend so much time talking about movies that he shirks his duty to make a good one, though. This is basically a coming-of-age buddy flick at heart. Will and Lee are a fine pair of opposites: Lee is a pint-sized thief and con man, Will's a sheltered kid who dives in head-first because he's never had this sort of outlet for his creativity before. They make a good team, whether Lee is taking advantage of Will in a Tom Sawyer manner or just busting out laughing at some of the screwy stuff that Will does. Their misadventures are honestly funny, with a perfect level of whimsy. Jennings is also very good at presenting physical comedy and genuine peril differently, which becomes a factor toward the end of the movie. I love things like the repeated sound of cheering when Lee is kicked out of his classroom, and how it lightens up a potentially heavy moment toward the end.

The most important thing Jennings and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith do, though, is get great performances out of Milner and Poulter. The movie would likely disintegrate completely if we ever stopped believing they were genuine early-eighties kids. One false note, whether it be a script that was too self-aware or a young actor who can't just relax and play on-screen and the movie would be a goner, just adults who couldn't get the kids quite right. Happily, that never happens. Will Poulter is especially terrific; he makes Lee the sort of kid that would drive the adults who had to deal with him absolutely insane but shows the audience he's not really a bad kid (there aren't any really bad kids in this movie's world). Bill Milner finds just the right notes to hit for Will; he's as much a regular kid as his unusual environment will allow. He never plays Will as stupid, or even ignorant - he's just uninformed.

The movie belongs to Milner and Poulter, but the rest of the cast is good. Jules Sitruk is pretty darn hilarious embodying everything about the eighties which has become embarrassing twenty years later. Jessica Stevenson is just right as Will's mother; there's a whole other movie about how she and Neil Dudgeon's fellow sect member Joshua implied whenever they're both on screen, although Jennings keeps it implied, so as not to distract from the kids or make the film too harsh or easy a condemnation of the characters' beliefs.

I can't say for sure that kids will love this movie; there weren't any at the screening I attended. The former kids there got a real kick out of it, though, and there's enough straightforward fun without talking down or over-reliance on nostalgia that there's no reason for them not to have a good time.

On HBS come 2 May, along with at least one other review.