Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 26 August 2016 - 1 September 2016

I don't actually think that the various film venues and programs should be consulting with each other and checking my social media feeds to know what works best for me is, but twice in the last couple of days I've thought like that - once when realizing the screening of Police Story 2 the Brattle added would bump against something else, once when I realized I didn't have to work around the one show of Time Raiders last weekend.

• Still, having to work around something this weekend means that it's time for one of my favorite Boston movie events of the year, Films at the Gate, where the Asian Community Development Center shows Chinese movies outside on the Greenway, following martial arts demonstrations and shorts. They're going for deeper cuts this year - documentary Pui Chan: Kung Fu Pioneer on Friday, recent Herman Yau production Woman Knight of Mirror Lake on Saturday, and Shaw Brothers action-comedy The Kid with a Tattoo. Head on out, get some snacks in Chinatown, and have a ball.
  While in the Chinatown area, you can catch Time Raiders in either 2D or 3D at Boston Common, and while it's got some serious problems, it might look pretty cool in 3D. If your tastes run toward Korean, Boston Common also opens The Tunnel, in which a man is trapped in a collapsed stretch of road. It's got an all-star cast (Ha Jung-woo, Bae Doo-na, and Oh Dal-su), and filmmaker Kim Seong-hoon made the pretty fun A Hard Day.
• End-of-summer is generally a place where people don't get excited about what's coming out, although there seems to be some excitement about Don't Breathe, which was the closing-night film at Fantasia and comes from Evil Dead remake director Fede Alvarez, who sends some kids to rob a blind man's home, which proves a spectacularly bad idea. It's at Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway (including RPX), Revere (including XPlus/MX4D), and the SuperLux.
  
  More typical: The thing people thought might be an Oscar contender but might be a cut below that line. That's what Hands of Stone looks like, starring Edgar Ramirez as Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran and Robert De Niro as his trainer. That's at Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere. Then there's the not-very-good action movie, Mechanic: Resurrection, with Jason Statham returning as a generic hitman character and Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Alba, and Michelle Yeoh cashing checks. It plays Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere.
  
  There are a bunch of little one-and-two-off shows in theaters this week too. Revere has animated toy tie-in Welcome to Monster High on Saturday morning, a TCM presentation of The King and I on Sunday and Thursday, and the "premiere party" for Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers on Tuesday. Rob Zombie's latest, 31, also skips a regular theatrical release and shows Thursday at 7pm in Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere. The Imax-branded screens, also shake things up, with Assembly Row keeping Suicide Squad in 2D and 3D, Boston Common playing The Jungle Book (3D) in the afternoon and Jason Bourne in the evening, Jordan's Natick going with Bourne all day and Jordan's Reading showing The Secret Lives of Pets (3D).
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up Hell or High Water, which also expands to the Embassy and Revere and sticks around the Kendall and Boston Common. There's also a surprisingly wide release for Southside with You, a romance that chronicles the day-long first date between Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson back in 1989; they seem to have done all right for themselves since. It's at the Coolidge, The West Newton Cinema, Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Fenway.
  
  The August Animals Attack series presented by the Boston Yeti waps up this weekend with midnight shows of Piranha II: The Spawning on 35mm Friday & Saturday night; it is technically James Cameron's first directing credit although to ask him they mostly needed a Canadian listed as director to get tax benefits. Cameron would later direct a seuel to Monday night's big screen classic, Alien, though I would argue that Ridley Scott's original is still the series's best by far.
• On top of Southside with You, Kendall Square brings in A Tale of Love and Darkness, Natalie Portman's first feature as writer & director as well as playing the mother of Amos Oz (Amir Tessler) in an adaptation of his stories of his youth in Palestine after his Jewish family fled there to escape the war in Europe. Also opening there is Miss Sharon Jones!, a documentary on an R&B musician who broke through relatively late and battle illness alongside the release of her anticipated new album.
• Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond is the venue for IFFBoston Closing Night film The Intervention, a very funny ensemble company from Clea DuVal in which she and several other friends hosts a weekend getaway to tell her sister (Cobie Smulders) that she really should divorce her husband. They also have Natural Selection, which looks to be an indie drama about a high-school kid being pushed toward the point of explosion.
  
  Several Indian films open as well, including A Flying Jatt, starring Tiger Shroff as a bumbling Bengali superhero. Hey, he may have action-star potential. No listings for subtitles on Telegu-language romantic comedy 100 Days of Love or Maalik, an Urdu-language film from Pakistan with writer/director Ashir Azeem starring as a special forces soldier who becomes entangled in politics; I don't recall seeing films from Pakistan there before. Ditto for Bichagadu, which plays Sunday morning and Monday evening, or Janatha Garage, also Telegu and opening Wednesday.
• The Brattle Theatre spends much of the weekend playing host to The Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, which runs from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon and has guests at almost every screening. Lots of interesting, off-beat stuff there.
  
  Along with that, The summer repatory series all wrap up this week, though in pretty fine form: Saturday offers a late-night double feature of Police Story 2 on 35mm and a new DCP restoration of Snake in Eagles Shadow. The final Femmes Fatales of Film Noir double feature on Monday & Tuesday jumps into color with Leave Her to Heaven & Gone Girl; while Wednesday's "Under the Influence" pairing is The Hateful Eight and Cut-Throats Nine, both on 35mm. Kiki's Delivery Service & My Neighbor Totoro finish up "Kids International: A GKids Retrospective", though both will have weekend matinees as well.
• The Regent Theatre will be the home for The Witness, a film about the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese in broad daylight and her brother Bill's attempts to find justice after new information surfaces fifty years later, all week long. Saturday night's screening will be followed by a Q&A including Bill and cinematographer Trish Govoni
  
  
• The Harvard Film Archive heads into the Rouben Mamoulian retrospective's homestretch as the summer calendar nears the end with a bunch of classics: Golden Boy (Friday 7pm), City Streets (Friday 9pm), Queen Christina (Saturday 7pm), We Live Again (Saturday 9pm), swan song Silk Stockings (Sunday 4:30pm), The Mark of Zorro (Sunday 7pm), and High, Wide, and Handsome (Monday 7pm). All films are on 35mm.




• The Museum of Fine Arts has five films rotating this week: Bulgarian parable Viktoria (Friday/Saturday), Korean documentary My Love, Don't Cross That River (Friday/Saturday), new addition The Other Side, which combines documentary footage and a fictional story for a look at paranoid backwoods Louisiana (Friday/Sunday/Thursday), 1982 German sci-fi noir Kamikaze '89 (Saturday/Sunday/Thursday), and Eva Hesse, a documentary on the short-lived 1960s sculptor.




• The ICA will have a special outdoor screening of A One Man Show, a Grace Jones concert video with a live performance by Neon Music and a DJ set by Light Asylum's Shannon Funchess on Friday.




• Outdoor movies are winding down (aside from Films at the Gate), but Joe's Boston Free Films shows a couple chances to see Ant-Man, along with Some Like it Hot and others.

I've got a couple of baseball tickets this week, so it'll be harder to get to everything, but I'm looking at The Tunnel, Don't Breathe, A Flying Jatt, Southside with You, and some time at the Gate.

Films at the Gate (and Brattle): Fearless Hyena, Come Drink with Me, and The Boxer's Omen

Have I mentioned before that I love Films at the Gate? I do, unreservedly. I missed Saturday's screening, but I think it was raining that day anyway.



I don't know if the lanterns are there year-round, or if that was part of the decoration, but it's a nifty look. I didn't get any pictures of the opening presentations, alas, which is a shame because while I didn't make it for the lion dancing, there was some nifty things. Including an videotaped greeting from Donnie Yen, who stopped by an ACDC event early this year. But did Iceman open in the Boston area the next week? No. It did not. This continuing to happen boggles my mind.

I was also glad to see that Come Drink with Me was one of the selections; I think it was the only one from the Harvard Film Archive's King Hu series from last year that I missed, and while the Blu-ray (or even DVD) wasn't exactly up to the level's of the HFA's 35mm prints, it's still a pretty great movie.

Speaking of great 35mm prints, I got to the second leg of the Brattle's "Reel Weird Brattle" program this week; all of the movies are on 35mm from the American Genre Film Archive, and if they all look as nice as this one, it's a pretty good reason to stay up late. They'll be handing out pins with each one, and I'd say "collect them all", but it's a bit late for that (hey, I can't either; I'm missing at least two by being out of town). I think this is the only Chinese one, but if they're all this nuts...

Xiao quan guai zhao (The Fearless Hyena)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)

The Fearless Hyena is noteworthy in large part because it is Jackie Chan's first credited movie as writer and director as well as star, and given that "screenplay by Jackie Chan" never exactly became something that drew people to movies, it's not surprising that the story is fairly perfunctory. On the other hand, Chan's greatest skill as a director - getting out of the way of his own fight choreography - is visible from the start.

In this one, he plays Shing Lung, a lazy young man who would rather gamble that practice the kung fu of his grandfather Peng-fei (James Tien Jun), especially since said grandfather has said not to use it in public. He doesn't quite think he's doing that by running a scam with Ti Cha (Lee Kwan), head of a bogus kung fu school. Still, it attracts the attention of both Yen Chuen-wong (Yen Shi-kwan), the warlord determined to eradicate all practitioners of this style, and beggar "Unicorn" (Chan Wai-lau), secretly a master himself.

There are a lot of movies with the basic template of The Fearless Hyena - establish the villain, establish the student, make it personal, train under an unyielding master, and then build up a big fight for the finale. A lot of kung fu movies from the 1970s look like this - not studio-bound like Shaw Brothers films, but often taking place in big empty spaces, or likely-reused town sets - and have the same rhythms. Jackie Chan being in charge means that this is done with slapstick bits, even when things take the inevitably more serious turn.

Full review at EFC

Da zui xia (Come Drink with Me)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)

Cheng Pei-pei was cast in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because Ang Lee remembered her fondly from the films she made as a young woman, with several articles specifically mentioning this one, also a signature film of King Hu. It would be Hu's last for Shaw Brothers before moving to Taiwan, regarded as both a pivotal moment in the wuxia genre and a great film in its own right. It is not an undeserved reputation.

It starts out with a caravan being ambushed, with government official Zhang Buqing (Wong Chung) taken prisoner by rebels including "Smiling Tiger" Tsu Kan (Lee Wan-chung). In response the their demands, his father sends his other child, the Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), to negotiate his release - that is to say, rescue him. She takes up residence in the local inn, although the other non-bandit guest - "Drunken Cat" Fan Tai-pei (Yueh Hua) - may prove ally or hindrance.

Hu made a number of films set in inns - most notably, Dragon Inn - and sometimes entirely constrained to them, although Come Drink with Me is rather open. It still has some of the moments that Hu (and others) would return to off and on, generally playing more as straight-up action with relatively little intrigue, including not making a big deal out of folks initially thinking Golden Swallow is a man. In some ways, Hu is doing what the greats often do in influential movies, presenting things with a casual confidence that later imitators don't quite have.

Full review at EFC

Mo (The Boxer's Omen)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Reel Weird Brattle, 35mm)

The Boxer's Omen seems like two extremely different movies made into one, much as one character is... No, that metaphor is not quite right, and I am not going to spoil one of the more jaw-dropping moments of complete insanity that this movie offers up, even though that would likely still leave several dozen for the viewer to discover. It is a downright strange movie wrapped in something conventional and almost unrelated, a fine midnight movie if there ever was one.

The boxer is Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei), who challenges Thai kickboxer Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung Sze) after the latter's dirty and illegal moves seriously injure Chan's brother. That will be in three months, which is good: Both before and after coming to Thailand to issue the challenge, Chan Hung has had visions which lead him to a Buddhist temple where the monks tell him that their abbot was his twin in a former life, which means that he must become a monk and fight the black magician who cast a killing spell on the abbot for slaying the magician's student...

To say this makes no sense is more than a bit unfair; there is actually a pretty simple "you killed someone close to me and I shall have retribution!" logic going on with all the back and forth, so all the motivations are easy enough to buy into. As to all the reincarnation, transformation, and the evil wizard who seems to be hanging out in the same room as his arch-nemesis... Hey, I don't know that much about Buddhism; this could make at least as much sense as the exorcisms in western horror movies! In all seriousness, On Szeto's screenplay seems to run on completely arbitrary rules, seeming less the result of one or two writers than something handed off between four or five each instructed to the nuttiest thing he or she could come up with. Somehow, he and director Kuei Chih-hung make this flow better than it has any right to.

Full review at EFC

This Week In Tickets: 9 September 2013 - 15 September 2013

Quiet week - actually quieter than I'd like, but that's how it works sometimes.



Things started off well enough, with Closed Circuit on Monday - not a great movie, but decent enough. It was odd watching it after pulling the first couple episodes of Silk off my DVR; the set for the main courtroom at the Old Bailey looked identical, and both had this American having a little bit of a difficult time puzzling out the British legal system. All the British mysteries and Law & Order: UK and Rumpole I've seen, and I'm still not quite sure what a solicitor does.

Even though I've got a ticket stub for And While We Were Here for Tuesday, I opted not to put it in the scrapbook since the 7:30pm show was done by 7:45. It was a weird situation where all the music and background noise was coming through, but none of the dialogue. At first, I thought it was a stylistic choice, but soon it became clear that it was a technical problem. I used to have the same thing happen with my DVR, and sometimes a reset would work, but the folks at the theater weren't going to go nuts with $4.75 worth of ticket revenue on the line. Annoying, but I wasn't in position to ask a whole lot. It gave me the chance to listen to the Red Sox game with Pedro Martinez in the radio booth, and that's always great. Later in the week, I hoped to see Fruitvale Station at the Capitol. Never managed to make the 6:15pm show, though.

After that, it was the weekend, and Films at the Gate time. It was a fun series this week with a couple of neat surprises, although it wasn't until midway through the third movie that I realized that there was a kung fu romantic comedy theme going on with Mismatched Couples, Heroes of the East, and The White Dragon. Since Boston Common was nearby, I opted for double features on the weekend, and was pleasantly surprised to have a guest in the theater for Things Never Said on Saturday. Neat happenstance, that, as I only saw that because I had MoviePass issues for the show fifteen minutes earlier. No worries, though, I could see The Family on Sunday, which was not a great decision.

Ah well. The week after has already started out well and looks like it could be a good weekend.

Films at the Gate 2013: Mismatched Couples, Heroes of the East, and White Dragon

I mention it every year, but I love Films at the Gate. I'm not sure if I was there for the first one, but I try to go to at least a couple nights every year because the idea - watching classic kung fu movies outside in Chinatown - is an obvious good time and because it's a fun event without much pretense that isn't poking fun at itself. The idea is to build community, so even if this doesn't become a big deal, it's still a success if everyone has a good time, and it's not selling out just because it no longer takes place in a vacant lot.

The just-for-fun nature of it maybe makes my suggestion from last week that China Lion or Well Go should maybe get in contact with ACDC (or vice versa) to use this as a bit of a platform ill-informed; as much as I, as a guy whose main concern is getting to see movies on a big screen, think that this would be an awesome way to build some word-of-mouth for the Chinese films that play Boston and make it easier for that to happen, the event's not really about movies, and I can see both the distributors or the press and cinephiles who might not now pay close attention to the event freaking out over the little kids running through the audience, under the screen, etc. Then again, maybe they'd dig it and donate a few bucks, making it a win-win.

After all, who wouldn't want to have their movie screened after a pre-show that includes kids swordfighting:



I forget exactly which group/school this was on Saturday, but every screening had a couple of martial arts or dance demonstrations beforehand, and while some seemed thrown together, others were pretty impressive, no matter what the age of the participants.

One thing I couldn't help but notice was that this year's event was held a week or two later than previous years, which was just long enough for it to not only start getting a bit chillier out, but for it to get dark early enough that there was actually a fair amount of dark-time between the last demonstration and the 8pm starting times, so they had to dig up a few things to fill some time. Fortunately, one was this:



That's toward the end of a segment produced by a local TV station back in 1985 on a local kid by the name of Donnie Yen who had gone to Hong Kong to try and make it as a movie star. It leaves a few things out - the portion of the story where Donnie's mother, Master Bow Sim Mark, is basically sending him off to a strict martial arts academy to keep him out of trouble, for instance - but it's an amusing time capsule.

Remembering that part of the story, I also think that there's a need for an action comedy US/China co-production to be made where Yen and Mark Wahlberg were buddies until Yen's mother sent him away and now either one or both are cops who meet again when they need to work together to bust a gang or stop a drug pipeline... But all the crap from twenty-five years ago keeps popping up. That you could probably find footage of both breakdancing and Forrest-Gump it together so that they were breakdancing rivals in Boston would just be icing on the cake.

Make it happen, Hollywood/Beijing/Hong Kong!

And to think, I had been considering skipping out on Mismatched Couples because I saw it at one of the old Weekly Wednesday Ass-Kicking shows - I think it was tied with Taoism Drunkard on how amused Garo Nagoshi was just talking about it - and accurately remembered it as being not very good. I would have missed not just this but a surprise guest:



That's Mandy Chan, who plays a character in Mismatched Couples credited just as "Colorful Punk" on IMDB, though he's a bit more noteworthy than that suggests. Both IMDB and HKMDB seem to have him almost vanishing from the film industry after 1997, with one credit as a gaffer/key grip on a 2011 short which seems to have been shot here in Boston (someone in its cast hasbit parts in movies that were shot locally), so I guess he's been here for a few years. When introducing him, the ACDC folks mentioned he was doing action choreography on what sounded like a small local crime film.

There wasn't a lot of time or energy for a Q&A, which is too bad - I would have dug hearing what he was up to now or maybe some stories about what the movies are like for the guys who don't become stars - and how a guy whom I presume was from Hong Kong wound up here. That his HK credits stopped in 1997 makes me wonder if he left around the handover.


At any rate: It was a fun weekend at the movies, and if you like this sort of thing, why not come next year? And if you like Chinese movies, it's a pretty good week - The Grandmaster is still going to be hanging around at Apple/Fresh Pond, and My Lucky Star starts at Boston Common.


Ching fung dik sau (Mismatched Couples)

* * (out of four)
Seen 13 September 2013 on the Rose Kennedy Greenway (Films at the Gate, digital)

Mismatched Couples is not very good. At all. And since I'm a person who doesn't really believe in "so bad it's good", I can't recommend it. However, this kung fu-breakdancing-teen-romantic comedy is from 1985 is so bizarre, such an exaggerated representation of its garish time, and such a strange contrast to what some of the people involved would do later, that it produces a sort of stunned awe at its very existence, and that feeling has enough in common with how one feels when a movie genuinely succeeds at what it's doing that I can see where the idea of "so bad it's good" comes from.

This one features a twenty-year-old Donnie Yen, in just his second movie, as Eddie, a teenager who lives to breakdance. He winds up befriending unemployed, starving Chinese Opera performer Mini (Yuen Woo-ping) and sneaking him into his apartment, where his cousin Stella (May Lo Mei-mei) agrees to help hide him from his sister Ah Ying (Wong Wan-si), an imposing woman who runs the family fast food business. Eddie's got a crush on Anna (Anna Kamiyama) but that means dealing with both her kind-of butch friend Sue Lynn (Shirley Tan) and Stella's jealousy. There's also a rival breakdancer (Kenny Perez) and a lunatic (Dick Wei) who thinks Eddie is some sort of kung fu master and wants to challenge him.

I'm not going to lie: Even though this is the second time I've seen this movie (with, admittedly, about ten years in between), I still didn't really get that Kenny and the crazy kung fu guy were separate characters. Even after looking at IMDB and another more specialized website, I still have a hard time believing it; you can stitch their scenes together into one character arc. Similarly, the whole "Stella is jealous of Eddie" thing makes me wonder if the English subtitles are tremendously misleading - are Eddie and Ah Ying only half-siblings, with Stella her cousin and thus not blood relations, is someone adopted, or was that just less of a taboo in eighties Hong Kong? I suppose they could just be using "cousin" in the same way "auntie" and "uncle" often are, but otherwise, ick.

Full review at EFC.

Zhong hua zhang fu (Heroes of the East)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2013 on the Rose Kennedy Greenway (Films at the Gate, digital)

Heroes of the East is an unapologetic (but effective) exercise in giving the audience what it wants, and what it wants is Gordon Liu Chia-hui fighting Japanese martial artists. It sets the situation up, makes things stay on that path, and then ends the moment that there aren't any more fights to be had. That there's other types of genuine fun in there as well is a nice bonus.

As things start, Ah To (Liu) is feigning illness to avoid the marriage to the daughter of one of his father's Japanese business associates that had been arranged when he was just a child. Things change when he actually gets a look at Yumiko "Kung Zi" Koda (Yuka Mizuno), who has grown into a great beauty. And while you'd think that both being martial arts enthusiasts would bring them closer together, she's not impressed by China's wussy kung fu while he finds her judo and karate crude and the clothes she wears to practice immodest. Soon, she's run back home to Japan and the letter he sends to get her back also brings back her grandmaster (Naozo kato) masters of kendo, karate, nunchuku spear, sai, judo, and ninjitsu - the latter, Takeno (Yasuaki Kurata), an old boyfriend.

That is, for those counting, seven fights for Ah To, not including all the spontaneous battles that break out with Kung Zi, an attempt to surreptitiously learn drunken boxing, and various other bits of sparring. There is a lot of kung fu in this movie, to the point where it might get wearying, but the variety that is baked into the premise is a big help. Even when the audience is facing three or for action sequence in a row, Ah To chooses a new technique or weapon to counter each one he faces, and the action crew (headed up by director Liu Chia-liang) does a fine job of giving each fight its own rhythm and personality distinct from the one that came before, with the ultimate multi-part battle between Ah To and Takeno a suitably big, enjoyable finale.

Full review at EFC.

Fei hap siu baak lung (The White Dragon)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 September 2013 on the Rose Kennedy Greenway (Films at the Gate, DVD)

I'm not sure I'd call The White Dragon a spoof of the wuxia genre, although there seems to be a bit of that going on. It's more a case of Wilson Yip and company mashing up anything that might entertain them and hoping audiences enjoy the goofy anachronisms as much as they do.

It's not unusual for a movie like this to have a blind assassin running around, murdering those whom he believes are wrongdoers, but when Chicken Feathers (Francis Ng) - so known for announcing his presence by strewing them about before and after a kill - attacks the headmaster of the local boarding school, he runs straight into the White Dragon, sworn protector of justice. Things don't go well for her, and she has to transfer her powers to student Phoenix Black (Cecilia Cheung). This is a total bummer for Phoenix - it turns out superpowers give you pimples which can only be dispersed by doing good deeds, and those really cut into any time she might have with cute Second Prince Tian Yang (Andy On), whom she's just managed to get to notice her! And that's before she gets injured fighting with an archnemesis she didn't even ask for and winds up stuck at his secret base!

There's a long history of reluctant heroes, super or otherwise, in every medium - "refusing the call" is one of the stages that the Joseph Campbell "Hero With Many Faces" passes through - but the one who is just annoyed by the whole thing rather than angst-ridden is a type that we don't get much in America. It seems more popular in Japan than anywhere else, but the same clash between a historic cultural emphasis on duty and modern individualism exists in China, and it lets Yip and co-writer Lo Yiu-fai make Phoenix a bit of a brat, which is a pretty good way to keep funny bits coming.

Full review at EFC.

Kung Fu Weekend: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Snake in Eagle's Shadow, The Young Master, and Shaolin Temple

I love Films at the Gate. I've mentioned this before, right? But it bears repeating: It's one of the Boston area's coolest events, with the nice properties of being free, specific to its community, and distinctive. The night I saw The Young Master, I think there were about five other free outdoor movies playing at various points around Boston (pretty spiffy in its own right), but all of them were sort of consensus classics that you can likely see with better projection at the Brattle or Coolidge once a year, which can't be said about these.

That said, I kind of wish I'd hit Chinatown on Thursday as opposed to the Brattle; I have yet to see Master of the Flying Guillotine (the Gate film), but was tempted by the 35mm in Harvard Square versus the projected DVD. It turned out to be a bit of a trade-off; the print of 36th Chamber was fairly red, at least for some reels, and Eagle's Shadow looked nice but was dubbed (and not even with Jackie Chan's voice!).

As cool as it is that the turnout for this has become large enough that the vacant lot really isn't large enough anymore, it's kind of disappointing that, in my experience, this sort of crowd doesn't seem to come out when Chinese movies play the mainstream theaters. To a certain extent, I get it - a lot of folks in Chinatown don't have huge amounts of money, and the closest movie theater (AMC Boston Common), while it does pick up Chinese movies every once in a while, is also the most expensive. There's a good chance that they'll be playing two Chinese movies this coming weekend - the Imax 3D presentation of Flying Swords of Dragon Gate and the day-and-date release of The Missing Bullet, but matinee price on regular movies is $10, and an evening ticket for Flying Swords is $18! Given that, I'm not surprised that attendance is often sparse, and when something does stick around for a second week, it's often for one show in the cheap $6 "AM Cinema" slot.

You know what would be really cool, though? If next year, one of the companies trying to do theatrical releases plunked down a small sponsorship and included one of their movies, especially if it's something due out on video soon that might not have played Boston as part of its release. I'm thinking specifically of Starry Starry Night from China Lion, although both Indomina and and Well Go have had stuff only play NYC/LA as well. Or we could get really crazy and ask the Weinsteins to let Dragon or Reign of Assassins or the like out of their vault...

Heck, even if China Lion just put together a trailer package for upcoming movies like The Missing Bullet and Bangkok Vengeance, they could help a couple of community programs a lot and get promotion for their fall slate. It's certainly worth thinking about for next year, I think.


Anyway, more about the movies themselves - it was kind of amazing to watch these four movies, which covered roughly five years, and see how radically kung fu movies evolved over that time period. 36th Chamber is a classic Shaw Brothers Shaolin Temple movie, very much following the injustice-training-revenge template, very much a show piece for star Gordon Liu, but often just as much about athleticism and technique as really telling a story with the action. Then come the Jackie Chan movies, with Jackie moving away from both the Shaws and Bruce Lee with his comedy kung fu. In addition to seeming a lot less stagebound than the Shaw stuff, the martial arts here really seems to come from the character rather than shape him. Then after that you get Jet Li, takes the naturalism Jackie Chan and his group (including Sammo Hung an Yuen Biao) introduced and increased the brutality of it

As much as we know what Hong Kong action is, it's amazing how a relatively short period of time transformed it so strongly.

Shao Lin san shi liu fang (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (International Ass-kicking, 35mm)

Shaolin Temple movies just don't care about traditional dramatic structure, do they? Or maybe it's different between East and West, but it's hard not to get the feeling that if 36th Chamber were remade in America, Gordon Liu's San Te would demonstrate more personal growth through the movie, rather than mostly "leveling up". There would be a chance for him to forsake personal revenge even as he served justice.

For better and worse, though, this really isn't that movie; it's much more about martial technique than Buddhist philosophy. That's cool enough, though; Liu and the various monks he spars with are quite good at that, and there's an enjoyable perseverance in San Te's attempts to best his masters. The big fights toward the end are enjoyable too, even if they do involve suddenly recruiting a whole bunch of new characters.

Of course, that's the case when San Te arrives at Shaolin Temple, too; 36th Chamber occasionally feels like bits of three different Gordon Liu movies stitched together. Not such a bad thing, really, especially as long as you're there for the fights.

Se ying diu sau (Snake in Eagle's Shadow)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (International Ass-kicking, dubbed 35mm)

Ah, it's naive young Jackie Chan, working and living in a martial-arts school that treats him poorly because he's inept at fighting, at least until he befriends a secret kung fu master who teaches him the snake style, making him a target because the practitioners of the eagle style want to eliminate it due to some multi-generational feud.

A goofy premise, but let's face it, fans still have trouble with people who enjoy the same thing in different ways. I, for instance, think the people who enjoy dubbed martial arts movies because they like laughing at things that seem low-rent are monsters for a variety of reasons, but I shouldn't begrudge them the fun they were having with this screening. After all, treating the filmmakers' with respect wasn't going to make Eagle's Shadow a particularly intelligent, multi-layered film compared to the excuse for slapstick and fights that it is.

And it's tough to deny that "slapstick and fights" are things that Jackie Chan and director Yuen Woo-ping do very well. Both Chan and Yuen Siu-tien are fun to watch fight; they project personality amid the punching and kicking as well as anybody has ever done. And there are some moments that are just enjoyably bonkers, such as when the Russian missionary (Roy Horan) is just the first of what seem like countless Eagle-clan agents. There's a joyful sense of abandon even while the technical work is very impressive.

Shi di chu ma (The Young Master)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2012 at Chinatown Gate (Films at the Gate, projected DVD)

This is Jackie Chan's first film as writer/director as well as star, and, well, even thirty years later, Jackie isn't really outstanding as a storyteller. He can choreograph and shoot the heck out of a fight, but even for these movies, you need to do a bit more than that. The funny thing is, it's not Chan having trouble with the non-action parts that gives this movie its biggest issues.

Sure, the story meanders in somewhat sitcommy fashion, with Chan becoming a fugitive through a misunderstanding but having more comical misunderstandings with the police chief (Shih Kien), his son (Yuen Biao!), and lovely daughter (Lily Li) than intense chases. Even if The Young Master probably wouldn't work as just a straight-up farce, it's got a fun, pleasant set of characters that makes for a laid-back movie. Chan's not really a bad writer/director here - he doesn't ever forget where the story started as he strings action scenes together - but even for a martial arts comedy, things often feel very lightweight.

In fact, his biggest problem at times to be that he's too reliant on his action skills. Though there are a fair number of entertaining fight sequences here, the ones that bookend the movie both seem very self-indulgent: The lion dance competition at the start seems to need a little more context to justify its length and define the stakes, and the final battle with Whang Ing-sik's character seems like an eternity of Whang beating the crap out of Chan with shoehorned-in comic relief from Feng Tien; as impressive a marathon as the fight is, it kind of dilutes the good stuff.

Shao Lin Si (Shaolin Temple)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2012 at Chinatown Gate (Films at the Gate, projected DVD)

And we finish things off with Jet Li's first film, another take on the familiar Shaolin Temple story, although the storytelling, production values, and action choreography are wholly different and more modern-seeming than 36th Chamber, even if it was made less than five years later. It's an impressive-as-heck debut for Li; he's a fully-formed screen fighter and a decent, charismatic actor from the start.

But, wow, his Chieh Yuan character is kind of a jerk here, isn't he? Gordon Liu's San Te at least seemed to be somewhat absorbing the lessons of Buddhism, putting in the work, and convincing the abbots that there was merit in at least clandestinely/indirectly fighting against tyranny; this guy flouts the temple's rules, comes and goes when it's convenient for him, and brings violence and death down upon his benefactors for what often seems less like principle than his own personal feuds. There's one character constantly berating him for being ill-suited to this life, and the blood-soaked finale seems to prove him right more than proving Chieh Yuan noble.

This is the sort of thing that wouldn't really take that much nuance to fix, but that seems to be in short supply here: The production is focused on doing the fights well (which it does) and looking great. The first martial-arts film in decades to shoot in mainland China, and at the actual site of the Shaolin temple to boot, it's kind of beautiful, more than impressive enough to make up for its flawed characterization.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 August 2012 - 30 August 2012

While Hollywood has stretched the summer movie season earlier every year - I believe it begins in mid-April now - the late August/early September period still seems to be a dumping ground of sorts. There's some good-looking stuff coming out, some that is less certain, and some that is just bizarre.

• But let's start with the fun! Films at the Gate starts Thursday the 23rd and runs through Sunday the 26th, with a different kung fu flick each night at 8pm, with short films and live martial arts and dance demonstrations beforehand. All films play outside, at the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway near the Chinatown Gate (nothing in the vacant lot this year), and cover 35 years of action from Hong Kong's biggest stars: "Jimmy" Wang Yu in Master of the Flying Guillotine on Thursday, Jacking Chan writing/directing/starring/choreographing The Young Master on Friday, Jet Li in Shaolin Temple (his first film!) on Saturday, and Donnie Yen in Ip Man 2 (which has a pretty great fight scene with choreographer Sammo Hung) on Sunday. Grab some takeout from a local merchant and have some fun!



• The Brattle has their new schedule out (check it up, there's cool stuff), and wraps their previous one this week. They start out with a new 35mm print of Daisies, an absurdist Czechoslovakian film from 1966 "widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema"; it's got the screen to itself from Friday to Sunday.
  
  All sorts of series on the vertical schedule wrap up after that: Monday completes current DocYard series with director Michael Collins and producer Marty Syjuco in town for Give Up Tomorrow, which documents the conflict between two women on opposite sides of a Filipino death penalty case. "The Story of Film" also finishes Monday and Tuesday with episode 15, which leads into Tuesday's double feature of Mulholland Drive and Inception (the latter of which also has a Monday matinee). The "Wordless Wednesday" feature sort of wraps "Recent Raves", as Hugo has certainly brought Georges Meiles's "A Trip to the Moon" back to the forefront; a newly-restored print plays with The Extraordinary Voyage, a 60-minute documentary that chronicles the restoration. And "International Asskicking!" finishes on Thursday with one of its most famous and influential entries, Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon.



• Across the river at the Coolidge, they open up Robot & Frank, which true to its name offers up Frank Langella as an elderly man none too fond of his new caretaker; the twist to this Sundance sleeper being that the caretaker is a robot and Frank used to be a cat burglar. It mostly plays the larger screen and also opens at Kendall Square.
  
  Also playing the large screen is the last of their "Terror-ble 2" shows, Psycho II, which might not be in the same ballpark as the original, but is a surprisingly clever inversion of it. It plays midnight on Friday and Saturday, as does Bronson, with Tom Hardy as the title character in Nicolas winding Refn's stylish story of Britain's most violent and outrageous convict. The large screen also has another "Big Screen Classic" on Monday, this week featuring Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut Reservoir Dogs (note that this is the last weekly screening; the series returns on September 24th).



• In addition to Robot & Frank, Kendall Square opens the critically-acclaimed Compliance for its one-week booking; it's about a manager at a fast-food restaurant who is told that one of her employees is a thief and to detain her and is based on a real-life incident that demonstrated just how much people will defer to apparent authority. They also have Cosmopolis, the new film by David Cronenberg which stars Robert Pattinson as a Wall Street financier who watches his virtual world collapse even as things are going mad outside his limousine's windows. It also plays at Boston Common.



• Aside from that, it's kind of a dodgy week at the multiplexes. The most promising opening looks to be Premium Rush, which seems to have received little attention despite a pretty capable writer/director in David Koepp and a decent cast led by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Shannon. It's a pretty straightforward chase movie, with a bike messenger picking up a mysterious package and being pursued through Manhattan, and plays the Arlington Capitol, Boston Common, and Fenway. The other chase movie opening, Hit & Run, actually snuck into theaters on Wednesday and features Dax Shepard (who also writes & directs) as a former getaway driver in witness protection who hits the road with his girlfriend and winds up chased by both his old gang and the feds. Fun supporting cast, too, with Kristen Bell, Tom Arnold, Bradley Cooper, and Kristin Chenoweth. It plays Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  There's also a pretty generic-looking horror movie opening at Boston Common and Fresh Pond, The Apparition, with a poltergeist of sorts that becomes more powerful the more it's feared haunting a young couple. And for some reason, both theaters are opening 2016: Obama's America, even though I'd be kind of surprised if these conservative-leaning documentaries ever did very well in Boston.
  
  A few movies will try to get an extra jump on the Labor Day weekend next Wednesday, including Lawless, something called "The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure" (cue my brother telling me that his girls can't wait), and maybe sci-fi action/adventure The Day, which is distributed by WWE Films despite not appearing to have a single wrestler in the cast.



• It's almost all Paramount's 100th at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend. Dark City plays Friday at 7pm (the 1950 film noir with Charlton Heston and Lizbeth Scott, as opposed to the other one); Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Warriors at 7pm and 9:30pm, respectively, on Saturday; "Cheat" with live piano accompaniment at 5pm Sunday, with S.O.B. at 7pm; and Days of Heaven at 7pm Monday. The only exception is El Bruto at 9:30pm on Friday, a story of class warfare that wraps up the "Buñuel's Mexico" series.



• The MFA spends the weekend alternating screenings of two movies: Side by Side, Christopher Kenneally and Keanu Reeves's examination of the movie industry's transition from film to digital, and We Won't Grow Old Together, a reissue of Mauriece Pialat's 1972 film about a five-year romance between a couple with a 20-year age gap that has a number of break-ups and make-ups. On Wednesday the 29th, they keep Side by Side but otherwise start up a new rotation, with Oslo, August 31st - about an addict skipping a job interview to visit old friends - notable both for being much-acclaimed and being booked last-minute when its playdates at another theater fell through (it will also open in Somerville on August 31st, appropriately enough). Documentaries Sushi: The Global Catch and Better Than Something start on Thursday, with the directors of the latter (which spends a week with garage rocker Jay Reatard) on-hand for the Thursday & Friday screenings.

My plans involve some baseball (I bought these tickets back in January, so I can't give up), some kung fu, Cosmopolis, and Robot & Frank. I have never seen Reservoir Dogs, so I probably should get on that, too.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 17 August 2012 - 23 August 2012

Hey, looks like a fun week at the movies coming up, including some quality festival catch-up and an event that makes me smile every time.

• I have no regrets about not seeing ParaNorman at Fantasia; I knew it would be getting a wide release within a couple of weeks and Sunflower Hour. So I'm looking forward to seeing this stop-motion animated comedy-adventure about a kid who can see ghosts being the only defense the world has when all hell threatens to break loose. It plays at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway in both 2D and 3D, and I'm kind of surprised that so many prime slots are going to 2D - these guys did Coraline, so good 3D is a legit selling point.
  
  I guess that's to leave more screens for The Expendables 2, which brings back pretty much the whole cast of the first and then some (not a lot got expended, I guess). I'm guessing lots of big dumb action and stuff blowing up, and I'm cool with that. It plays Somerville, Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common. Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common also open Sparkle, with a young woman trying to become a star in Motown-era Detroit. It's noteworthy for featuring the late Whitney Houston as the mother.
  
  The Odd Life of Timothy Green opened at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway on Wednesday; it has a couple unable to conceive discover a magical child. Boston Common opens Celeste and Jesse Forever, a well-intentioned but frustrating drama featuring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg as a divorcing couple that is having some trouble letting go; it also plays Kendall Square. Fenway has a TMC digital presentation of Singin' in the Rain on Wednesday the 22nd.



• The other two films opening at Kendall Square are pretty good, though, and both played IFFBoston earlier this year. 2 Days in New York is Julie Delpy's follow-up to 2 Days in Paris, and features her and Chris Rock as a Manhattan couple raising children from previous relationships, with Rock playing the straight man as Marion's family visits from France. Also arriving from France is The Imposter, a fascinating documentary that tells the story of a Frenchman in his twenties who pretends to be a missing American teenager returning to his family. It pulls off the nifty trick of becoming a mystery once it's put all the facts on the table, and is only scheduled for a week, so go see it!



• Oh, film schedulers, why do you torture me with things scheduled opposite each other that force hard choices? Films at the Gate starts on Thursday with Jimmy Wang Yu writing, directing, and starring in Master of the Flying Guillotine, aka One-Armed Boxer vs The Flying Guillotine, a signature role that makes his appearance in Dragon (release this, Weinsteins!) all the more cool. It's a favorite of Quentin Tarantino and many others, and begins four nights of films shown in a vacant Chinatown lot and the nearby greenway with live martial arts and lion-dancing demonstrations beforehand. So, of course, it's the same day as the Brattle having a great kung fu double feature at the Brattle as part of their International Asskicking series: Gordon Liu in 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Jackie Chan in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, a 1978 picture directed by Yuen Woo-ping.



• Before that, the Brattle has Restless City playing Friday to Sunday, a story of African immigrants in New York City falling in with criminals and falling in love. It's apparently noteworthy for not having an outsider character for audiences to latch onto and being shot beautifully. After the sun goes down, it's an H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Tribute for the horror icon: A double feature of cool locally-made pastiches The Whisperer in Darkness (done in the style of an early talkie) and The Call of Cthulhu (done as a silent) on Friday (with FX guy Dan Novy doing Q&A in between), The Dunwhich Horror on Saturday, and John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness on Sunday. Unfortunately, being unable to get a print of Stuart Gordon's From Beyond, means the Friday and Saturday late-night shows are cancelled. And if you can't catch the Lovecraft double feature on Friday night, it also plays the Regent Theater at 7:30pm on Monday the 20th (the actual date of Lovecraft's birth).
  
  After that, the vertical schedule continues. The Monday/Tuesday double features with The Story of Film are My Own Private Idaho and Starship Troopers (an odd twin bill, to be sure!), with no DocYard or Balagan screenings to bump them. Wednesday's Recent Raves screening is Whit Stillman's long-awaited return, the witty Damsels In Distress. And, as mentioned, Thursday has some quality International Asskicking from 1970s Hong Kong.



• The Coolidge gets Searching for Sugar Man a week after the Kendall; it plays in the video rooms. The midnight show on Friday and Saturday is Critters 2, continuing a series of perhaps under-appreciated sequels from the 1980s. And Monday's "Big Screen Classic" is The Wild Bunch, in its uncut 35mm glory.



• The Harvard Film Archive keeps on as it was: Single showings of Jean Renoir'sGrand Illusion from Friday to Sunday. 100 Years of Paramount Pictures the same days, with Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero Friday at 7pm, Jonatahn Demme's Citizen's Band Saturday at 9:30pm, and a Veronica Lake double feature of This Gun for Hire and The Blue Dahlia Sunday at 7pm. A Buñuel's Mexico screening of A Woman Without Love on Monday.



• Over at the MFA, the UCLA Festival of Preservation wraps up on Friday with Cecil B. DeMille's 1935 version of The Crusades, with the rest of the schedule not beholden to any particular theme: Come Back, Africa, a 1960 documentary on Apartheid, on Friday and Sunday; On the Bowery (followed by "The Perfect Team", a documentary on making the realist 1956 drama), on Saturday and Thursday the 23rd; and Side by Side, a documentary by Christopher Kenneally (with Keanu Reeves, of all people, conducting interviews) on the move of the movie business from film to digital, which will continue occasional screenings over the next few weeks.

My plans? A fair amount of baseball, ParaNorman, Expendables 2, maybe getting to some of those things I've been meaning to catch at Kendall Square, and Thursday night kung fu, though I'm not sure whether I'll go for Chinatown's atmosphere or the Brattle's 35mm prints.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston (and elsewhere) 27 August - 2 September

Let's start (and end) with something actually kicking off before most movies open on Friday, with time spent on stuff that played Fantasia, because (as usual) I won't be free of that until well into September:

• Films at the Gate comes a little earlier than usual this year, but with one of its most interesting line-ups. After a curiously Donnie Yen-free line-up last year, the martial arts superstar we can claim as our own returns as part of the ensemble in the pretty terrific Bodyguards and Assassins on Thursday. Friday night's show is the original 1978 Drunken Master, with Jackie Chan as Wong Fei-hung under the direction and choreography of Yeun Woo-ping. Saturday night's show is a 1961 animated Monkey King feature from the Wan brothers (according to the site, China's Disney), Havoc In Heaven. And Sunday is Children of Invention, a pretty darn good indie shot in Boston's Chinatown, Somerville, and elsewhere around town. It played IFFBoston last year.
  
  Thursday and Friday night's movies are in the vacant lot next to the Chinatown gate; Saturday and Sunday moves to the Rose Kennedy Greenway just on the other side. Take-out from local restaurants is welcome and encouraged, all shows start at 8pm, with demonstrations of lion dancing, kung fu, and/or Tai Chi during the 7pm hour. And, hopefully, the rain that has soaked Boston all week will clear up.



• The one-week warning at Kendall Square is for Centurion, Neil Marshall's Roman-era action thriller that I badly wanted to see at Fantasia but passed on in order to see the much less likely to screen theatrically Sawako Decides, Rinco's Restaurant, and Boys on the Run. Marshall has yet to make a bad movie. Also popping up from Fantasia is the first half of the Mesrine duology, Mesrine: Killer Instinct, with Vincent Cassel as one of France's most notorious outlaws and Gerard Depardieu as his mentor. Folks who have seen both (the second, Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One, opens next week) tell me that this is the big action movie of the pair.
  
  Also opening at Kendall Square are Flipped, Rob Reiner's pre-teen romance that could be either a return to form or a treacly mess, and Soul Kitchen, a German comedy about a German-Greek family restaurant.



• Another Fantasia feature is opening on mainstream screens, and despite a final scene that I kind of have trouble with, The Last Exorcism is excellent; I'm already anticipating Patrick Fabian getting screwed during awards season because many voters wouldn't even think of looking for a Best Actor nominee in a horror movie. I can't offer quite the same level of excitement for Takers, which seems to have been trailered forever and has a decent but nondescript cast.
  
  Also opening is an "extended cut" of Avatar, although in the Boston area it will only be playing on digital screens (including the IMAX-branded screen at Boston Common); the genuine IMAX screens continue to show Inception (in Natick and Reading) and a mix of documentaries and Twilight: Eclipse (Aquarium). Last chance to see that in IMAX, kiddies, as it ends Sunday.



• The Regent Theater in Arlington has a potentially nifty event for those who like music movies: The Isle of Wight 40th Anniversary Film Festival will be screening all eight documentary/concert films Murray Lerner shot during the Isle of Wight music festival in late August, 1970, with subjects from Miles Davis to Jethro Tull to the Who to Jimi Hendrix. The Regent's website doesn't say whether these will be screening on film or video, which could be a big deal if you're only seeing one film (a single film is $10, but the prices go down until 5 or more is $30).



• The Brattle winds down their summer schedule with Cabaret-inspired films on Friday (double feature of Chicago and All That Jazz), Saturday (a 1931 3 Penny Opera matinee and double feature of New York, New York and Liza with a Z), and Sunday (matinee of The Loved One and double feature of A Single Man and Chris & Don: A Love Story). Monday's DocYard screening is The Philosopher Kings, a documentary about university custodians with director Q&A afterward. The Tuesday Noir 100 double feature is scheduled to be The Big Combo and The Sleeping City, both featuring Richard Conte, but who knows what the distributors will actually send? They also play Monday afternoon.
  
  Wednesday's Best of the Aughts double bill is animated(*), featuring Selick's Coraline and Miyazaki's Spirited Away. The latter also plays Thursday afternoon, with There Will Be Blood playing Thursday evening. Milkshakes, I'm told, will be available at the concession stand. Sadly, this is only the case on Thursday.



• It's also fairly quiet at the Coolidge - the digital rooms are swapping Life During Wartime out for Farewell, the "Cops in Heat" midnight on Friday and Saturday is Beverly Hills Cop, and they've got the Grease sing-along Friday at midnight and Monday at 7pm, complete with costume contest. Wednesday, The American gets a head start on the weekend.



• The Harvard Film Archive has more of The Human Comedies of Eric Rohmer Friday, Saturday, and Monday; Hou Hsia-hsien's A City of Sadness plays Sunday night. The MFA spends the weekend on the last of their Restored Prints, Odd Man Out by Carol Reed, and more Charlie Chaplin. Wednesday starts short, scattered runs of two documentaries: IFFBoston selection Kimjongilia, for those like me who are endlessly fascinated with North Korea, and Nobody's Perfect, about those born deformed due to the effects of thalidomide.



• And, finally, it's not reaching Boston, but new silent film Louis (yes, that's what I said - "new silent film") is playing five cities in seven days, starting tonight in Chicago (continuing to Detroit, North Bethesda, MD, NYC, and Philly). For these five shows, there will be live musical accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis, Cecile Licad, and an all-star jazz ensemble. I'll be bailing on work Monday so that I can see it in the Apollo Theater. I'm kind of happy to be ending two months in a row with cool silent screenings (and it looks like the Coolidge is angling to make it three in a row).

(*) Though the Brattle's animated selections for best of the 2000s are both fine films which complement each other, it's worth digging into the DVD/Blu-ray pile this week to remember Satoshi Kon, who died earlier this week after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. Kon made animated movies for grown-ups, and all four of his features - Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika - are well worth your time; the first and last are particularly brilliant. Sadly, both Millennium Actress and his television series Paranoia Agent appear to be out of print in the US, and there has yet been no word on how or if his last project, The Dreaming Machine, will be finished.

Paprika is on Blu-ray. It's gorgeous. Enjoy it and weep that we will get no more.