This Week Month In Tickets: 22 April 2013 - 19 May 2013

And here I honestly thought that IFFBoston was going to be a "delays stuff three weeks" festival at most, though I guess I didn't really take into account just how many other movies I would get to that needed reviewing. But we're there now, and it feels good to be caught up..

22 April - 28 April
29 April - 5 May
6 May - 12 May
13 May - 19 May



I think I mention it on the Independent Film Festival Boston Opening Night write-up, but due to me being kind of linear, I didn't really start thinking about getting my ducks in a row for that festival until I was finished writing up everything for the Boston Underground Film Festival, which took long enough that the link for press accreditation on IFFBoston's site was gone by the time I tried to use it, so I wound up buying a pass like the civilian I mostly am. I probably could have saved some money and just bought tickets to the 17 movies I wound up seeing, but I like getting to make decisions on the fly too much. Being the first to sit isn't bad, either.

The festival itself was pretty good; only a few movies I loved but plenty I liked. I saw fourteen movies these first five days:

24 April: The Spectacular Now
25 April: Tokyo Waka, Wasteland
26 April: Soft in the Head, A Hijacking
27 April: Secundaria, Night Labor, Computer Chess, Oxyana, V/H/S/2
28 April: The Defector, Remote Area Medical, The Act of Killing, Berberian Sound Studio

I meant to do a little bit more cramming before the event started, but it didn't happen outside of Trance. That's fine; a day to rest up doesn't hurt either.

Trance

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run, 35mm)

Wow, it feels like a long time since I've seen Trance, much longer than the actual four weeks. That's got to make it count as a bit of a disappointment, as director Danny Boyle does everything he can to sear its crazy story into the audience's brain with his trademark style of quick-cut, colorful scenes. It just isn't quite good enough.

Give him credit for what he does; this is a movie that spends a lot of time on people sitting around asking each other questions, and even with plenty of flashbacks, that can be kind of a dull process. So while writers Joe Ahearne and John Hodge weave in a fair amount of present-day intrigue, Boyle and his crew do what they can to keep the buried memories of James McAvoy's Simon engrossing. It helps that they get one of McAvoy's more interesting performances, in that even before we start digging into his past, Simon doesn't just seem like the guy more interesting people are contrasted with. Vincent Cassel has long experience playing this sort of tough guy and knows what he's doing, and while she seldom really grabs the screen, I don't know if I'm capable of not liking Rosario Dawson in a movie.

The big issue, I think, is that this is a thriller whose plot is stretched to the breaking point. The high concept of a guy who is part of a heist injuring his head and thus needing to have the location of the stolen painting retrieved via hypnosis is a good one, and I kind of like the question implicit in the resolution of just who among the main characters was abusing and exploiting the others most egregiously. Getting there required twist upon twist, though, some of which did a real number on suspension of disbelief. It took a simple story and made it into a Rube Goldberg device, and that's a perilous thing to do.



First up: The last two days of IFFBoston, which ran a day shorter than it has in recent years. Kind of a bummer, that, but it didn't seem to be for lack of decent movies to show.

29 April: Some Girl(s) & Willow Creek
30 April: In a World...

I got a bit lucky in terms of my movie choice; I could very well have seen Twenty Feet from Stardom during the festival, though it would have meant a bit of back-and-forthing on the Red Line and minimizing my flexibility in other places. Plus, while I didn't outright state a "no performer docs" this year, as the festival wasn't nearly as packed with them as it had been in previous years, that was still kicking around in the back of my mind. Still, I wasn't disappointed to see Talk Cinema pick it up and I actually thought Twenty Feet from Stardom and In a World... made a fine double feature.

In between, well, I'm guessing I watched some baseball, wrote some, and otherwise just wound down before paying the fees necessary (new release + RPX + 3D) to see Iron Man Three on one of the spiffier screens in Boston proper.

Iron Man Three

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2013 in Regal Fenway #13 (first-run, 3D RPX DCP)

I kind of love this one, even if it does reveal a few flaws in retrospect. In part, it's because I'm a person who really liked Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the idea that Marvel decided not just that using their big franchise to re-team Robert Downey Jr. with Shane Black was a good idea, but that they should let him make a Shane Black movie without messing with his voice too much was something that made me smile throughout. But even more, it's that this is a genuinely fun movie. It's got big, crazy action but also a really sharp sense of humor; it gets family-friendly tropes in without feeling like it's neglecting its grown-up audience; and the cast really seems to work well together.

One of the greatest things that I think Black does (along with co-writer Drew Pearce) - and there are many, from the tossed-off explanation of why the Avengers aren't getting involved (the government "doesn't consider this a superhero situation" and by the time Tony realizes it is, it's too late) to how the women have genuinely important roles to clever henchman dialogue - is that he uses the big action sequences not just as spectacle, but as things which really define character:

SPOILERS!

The first time you really notice it is when the Mandarin destroys Tony's mansion, and he tells the Mark 42 to assemble - around Pepper. Would the Tony of even Iron Man 2 have done that? No, he was too much of an egomaniac. But after The Avengers, he not only cares enough about Pepper that getting her to safety is his first priority, he trusts her to do it for herself. Also: This scene shows the proper way to use a piano to take out henchmen - take that, Superman Returns! Then there's the great barrell-of-monkeys scene, which is just an amazing aerial stunt on its own, but which also defines Tony's character perfectly: Faced with thirteen people falling to certain doom and told he can only carry four, he's going to use his brains and technological know-how to figure out a way to save everyone in a non-negotiable time frame. Then, in the big, climactic finale, he tells Pepper he'll catch her, fails, and is then surprised (but not disbelieving) when she pops up and takes the bad guy out herself. It's a great moment showing that they are partners who trust each other that not a lot of couples in action movies really get.

And while we're here in spoiler-land, I've got to say that I kind of like the way the movie handles the Mandarin - or at least, I agree that they couldn't really go any other way. In 2013, you're not going to have a traditional yellow-peril villain, not with China being the fastest-growing economy and movie market in the world, especially not with their DMG Entertainment funding a large chunk of it. So, sure, use the villain most closely associated with the comic book character and potentially tie off the Ten Rings storyline since there's a very real possibility that there will be no Iron Man 4, but do it in a way that makes the ugly xenophobia and nationalism inherent in the character a dangerous distraction. I don't know if it necessarily had to be Ben Kingsley in the role - couldn't they have found some Eurasian actor who could do the requisite funny accent? - unless the idea was that he could be spun as Middle Eastern when the movie plays in China.

Now, bringing up AIM and not having there be a funky yellow beekeepers' outfit in sight, that's a disappointment.

!SRELIOPS

So, all in all, a pretty darn entertaining movie which stands a good chance of being my favorite of the summer - though, happily, it's still early.



And we are back on the horse post-festival! It's more or less a given that if you show a silent movie, I will make every attempt to be there, and the Coolidge's "Sounds of Silents" program is one of my favorites, especially when they bring in Berklee's Film Scoring class. Of course, getting from Burlington to Brookline by 7pm is a challenge, so I always get seats with this sort of view:



... but it's generally still cool. The students do a nice job, and Our Hospitality certainly doesn't suffer for it. I kind of wish I'd gone to the screening of The Thief of Baghdad at Somerville on the 12th instead of the Red Sox game I did make; not only did I wind up eating a few tickets because getting people rounded up is difficult (and there really isn't a window at Fenway where they'll exchange five seats up in the bleachers for one seat at field level), but it was a pretty crappy loss, too. Coolest thing was that I was one seat diagonally away from the red seat, so... Yeah, not really cool.

To be fair, it was Mother's Day, which leads me to the question... Whose genius idea was it to release Go Goa Gone, Aftershock, and No One Lives on that weekend? I mean, really, who's bringing their moms to that? I mean, sure, Peeples, I can see, but the other three?

Our Hospitality

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sounds of Silents, digital w/ live music)

It's been a couple of years since I last saw Our Hospitality (with Jeff Rapsis at Somerville), and silent comedies especially can kind of warp in one's mind over time: The really great bits of physical comedy come to stand out, and the dangerous stunts stick as well, while some of the bits that fill time in between kind of fade away or get remembered as funnier than they were. Our Hospitality is still a very funny movie, and indeed among the best of Keaton's pictures to rely on characterization as much as physicality, but some of the bits didn't hit me quite as well this time.

Of course, it could partially be the different score, too. Seeing a silent movie is unique in that something that is such an important part of the experience - and one that's heightened for silents, because it doesn't have to stay out of the way of dialog or sound effects - changes radically between viewings. Our Hospitality is a tricky one, because it's got the dead-serious opening that has to quickly become rather airy comedy before getting kind of dark but just as absurd. The Berklee kids did a pretty good job of it, though, just as Buster did.

My 2011 review on EFC



Stubless: Black Rock at Apple Cinemas #5 (7:45pm, Friday 17 May 2013)

Another lost ticket after the one from a week before, and the surprising thing is that I wasn't even wearing the pants whose pockets seem purpose-designed to spill their contents when sitting in any seat that reclines just a little bit. The next time I go to the store to buy some pants, I'm going to see if the store's employees have recommendations on that subject, or at least have a chair in the changing room where you can test this.

Speaking of seats, the Somerville Theatre tore the seating out of their smaller theaters and replaced them after IFFBoston, something I was happy to check out with The Great Gatsby. Verdict: Nice just for their newness as opposed to being worn out, and probably just enough of an upgrade in width and leg room to make a difference without really hurting capacity. The arrangement is slightly different, as well; where before screen #5 had a big center section and two wings about three seats wide on the other sides of the aisles, they've now all been pressed together,with the aisles along the walls.

Thursday was the Brattle's quickly mounted tribute to Ray Harryhausen with Jason and the Argonauts and the original Clash of the Titans. It yielded a fair amount of polite applause every time Harryhausen's name appeared on-screen, and they got pretty decent prints, too. I won't lie, though - I kind of expected the opening for the Kevin Sorbo Hercules series in front of each of them ("In a time of myth and legend, the ancient gods were petty and cruel, and plagued mankind with suffering. Only one man dared challenge their power...").

Saturday didn't quite work out as planned - I bought a ticket for Star Trek Into Darkness at Jordan's Furniture in Reading online, figuring it would be sold out by the time I got there, but got on the T later than I should have, so as soon as the Orange Line was traveling above ground, I was tracking the bus I'd need to catch on my phone, eventually getting off at Wellington and taking the train back into town when I saw I'd lost the race, settling for seeing it on the lesser Imax-branded screen at Boston Common. Then at night, I cut it pretty close to see Kiss of the Damned, only to have it not show up on the MoviePass app. So, a fair amount of money spent on movies that I shouldn't have had to spend, but the results were OK.

Sunday I slept until noon and didn't even leave the house because I got caught up watching baseball.

The Great Gatsby

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2013 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, Real-D 3D)

When the trailers for Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby started appearing, I was rather intrigued, if only because I remember not enjoying it very much when I read it in high school - and seeing the adaptation starring Robert Redford in Mia Farrow didn't help. Thus, seeing the previews with fast cars, plenty of gaudy production design, well-used 3D, and Leonardo DiCaprio looking almost as energetic and pleased with himself as he did in the concurrent previews for Django Unchained assured me that Luhrmann was doing his damnedest to make this material not boring.

By and large, he succeeds. Gatsby is a blast to watch, making fine use of Luhrmann's tendency toward excess even when he is also making a point about how hollow it is. It can be a tough balancing act; for instance, the the ever-watching eyes from the optometrist's advertisement can be blotted out by the shot showing Manhattan surrounded by a sort of wasteland (which I love). He is just the right guy to understand the vigorous romanticism in Jay Gatsby, who thinks in terms of grand gestures and has managed to build himself up so much that he can't help but trust in his ability to keep making his fantasies real.

As for the problems... Well, the movie is still a version of The Great Gatsby. I love Carey Mulligan and she fits the part of Daisy perfectly, but Daisy is kind of a tough sell to a modern audience; her porcelain weightlessness makes one wonder why this is the girl who causes such an obsession, especially when Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker is standing right next to her all the time. Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is perhaps the template for the frustrating character whose job is to observe the really interesting one from the audience's perspective. And Luhrmann tends to use a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, which is understandable, but they're always describing something we can see or really should be able to pick up from the characters' expressions or actions, or at least words. When narration is going on, it feels like nothing is happening, and that happens all too often.

Still, it's a beautiful movie that at least gives me the idea that I maybe shouldn't have judged this story so harshly at sixteen, and that's something.

Jason and the Argonauts

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 May 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Ray Harryhausen, 35mm)

I was never a huge Harryhausen fan growing up. We didn't have the television channels, repertory cinemas, or well-stocked video stores that lead a kid to develop a love of this material in my corner of North Yarmouth, Maine, and by the time we did,I was maybe smart enough to be impressed at what he did with the materials available to him, but not necessarily to really imprint on it. It's led me to develop a fairly healthy suspicion of nostalgia which I honestly think serves me pretty well.

But, man, is what he does in Jason and the Argonauts kind of amazing or what? In a lot of ways, it's not so much the meticulous creation of stop-motion animation that does it, but the way he incorporates it: There is great compositing, matching of movement and lighting, and fine attention to detail for when it's necessary for something to be built in two scales. And unlike a lot of effects work, his effects sequences are always well-directed - he knew when sudden and subtle movements were appropriate. It makes for surprisingly seamless work, even to the modern eye.

As to the movie itself.. Well, that's the part where I have a little more trouble. It is, like many of the movies Harryhausen worked on, aimed at a fairly young audience, and it kind of inherits the nonsensical nature of both the original mythology and the relatively unsophisticated nature of that sort of genre film. It also bumps up against a problem mythology-based films have a hard time avoiding - the gods are, by and large, capricious jerks, so trying to fit their actions into a sort of reasonable motivation is almost impossible, while also being so powerful that it's no wonder the classical theater which used them gave us the term deus ex machina.

Still, plenty of fun, with a cast that includes future Bond girl Honor Blackman and future Doctor Who Patrick Troughton.

Clash of the Titans (1981)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 May 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Ray Harryhausen, 35mm)

Before this movie started, I half-jokingly tweeted that it came out in 1981, when I was seven years old and very much enamored of Greek mythology, so why the heck had I not seen it before now? Huh, Mom & Dad?

A few minutes in, I figured the answer was nudity, although apparently this was rated PG from the start, even though in today's environment it would probably get an R for skin (or be re-edited, or more likely still never show a nipple at all) and a PG-13 for violence. It plays as somewhat more adult than Jason and the Argonauts, and I think that's a bit of a downfall for it - the greater intensity of the action and open references to sexuality clash against some of the more broadly played bits (including the goofy robot owl), and the dumb mythological plotting that hurts Jason becomes even more noticeable here.

Still, there's no denying Ray Harryhausen does some pretty amazing things. Calibos, for instance, is an amazing creation, fully good enough in some of the full-bodied scenes to convince me I was seeing a man wearing prosthetics rather than an animated model. Pegasus works; I'd be shocked if the CGI models in the recent mythological movies worked better. And action scenes where animation and live-action have to interact are often pretty seamless.

I can't help but see the flaws now, but I would have eaten this up as a kid. Ah, well.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Closing Night: In a World... plus! Twenty Feet from Stardom

Aaaand, done, sixteen days after the festival. It probably could have been a couple days earlier, but Talk Cinema's last program screening before summer break was one that had played during IFFBoston (good thing I made other choices on Sunday!), and it's kind of a sensible thing to pair with the festival's closing night program, so I'll act like it was a festival screening that just got delayed.

Of the two movies about female voices, Twenty Feet from Stardom was the better one. It's got the advantage of being able to tell several stories rather than just one, and really has its mind set on what it wants to talk about. It also doesn't hurt that the ladies in Twenty Feet are by and large creating things that the audience loves - a lot of classic songs get mentioned over the course of the film - while the voiceover folks are fighting to do something people at best tolerate.

One other thing about Twenty Feet that's not in the review, but it did help me develop a bit more of a respect/fondness for Bruce Springsteen. I've got friends who are absolutely nuts about him - when a new tour is announced, they'll spend a couple of weeks plotting out who's going to but how many tickets for which shows, and do they want to see some of the ones outside the immediate Boston area, and do they have signs ready to request "The Fever" (and that's nothing compared to when a new album drops) - but to me he's just been sort of pretty good. Still, it's neat to see him discussing these singers' history and just what a good set up backing vocals does for a song enthusiastically but knowledgeably. So often, rock & roll, like comedy, is treated as something that's basically instinctive, and it is to a point, but the guys who do it really well and who last the way Springsteen has know what they're doing, and have probably put a lot more thought into what works, artistically and commercially, than you might assume.


Well, anyway, back to the festival proper. I showed up for this closing night show pretty late, nearly 7:45pm for an 8:00pm scheduled start. Normally, that's pretty good, but it's also about when they assume the passholders who haven't yet shown aren't coming and start selling tickets to whoever was in the rush line; I wound up getting in just before that happened. Working in Burlington can stink. Sometime, I'm going to spend a couple of weeks even when I don't plan on seeing anything at the Coolidge figuring out which is the best route: Get off the Red Line at Harvard Square and take the 66 bus, or continue on to Park Street and take the Green Line's C train. Now, the 66 is such a frustrating part of the MBTA as to have inspired a belligerant parody twitter account that most people say captures the experience perfectly, but the C line is really underrated as a pain in the ass - you can easily wait twenty minutes for one at Park Street while a half-dozen B line trains go by, and while the Cleveland Circle stop-at-every-intersection-and-go nature isn't as pronounced as it is for the Boston College trolley, it's no fun. I need to solve this with science.

Sorry for the T-angent. Anyway, I did get there, was able to find a single seat front and center (where I like to be, anyway), and catch a few potato chips that were tossed into the audience to slake my "not eating until 11pm at least" hunger. I was pleased to see Bobcat Goldthwait and friends grab some seats in the front left-hand section of the theater; it seems relatively rare to me to see higher-profile film festival guests actually attending movies other than their own, but I like to make a note of the guys who wait in line and sit in the audience with us civilians; they're genuine fans. I just kind of hope that the guy directly behind me who was planning a "bad movie night" with his friends and suggested Goldthwait's movies didn't see he was there, because otherwise... Well, not cool.

As it was the last night, the traditional thanking of the sponsors and was followed by the introduction of the staff and special guest (a la opening night) and, shall we say, random distribution of prizes:



Charming lady, Lake Bell, but she really doesn't have the arm Casey Affleck does. I also must admit, I miss the days of Harmonix being a sponsor and Nancy faking that she was going to throw a deluxe Rock Band set into the audience and cause serious injury. A lot of the big-name sponsors were gone, for that matter, and as much as not seeing the same Ford and Jet Blue ads twenty times was a fair trade for not having door prizes, it's a bummer that the festival was a day shorter than it was last year. I don't think the quality of the films shown suffered - even if I gave out fewer four-star reviews this year, that's more personal taste than feeling like they were having to settle for second-tier stuff.



So, Lake Bell introduced her movie, we watched, she came back and answered questions. Having a Q&A follow a movie does odd things to the experience, as it's hard to not conflate them. If you really like the filmmaker who answers questions in a witty, informative way, it can skew what you think of the movie, and what they say about the plot that wasn't shown in the movie can get stored in your brain like it was. If, as was the case with In a World..., the judgments and reactions to the film's strengths and weaknesses can color how you think of the filmmaker as a person, which is kin of uncomfortable and, really, downright unfair.

So, as much as I'm sure Ms. Bell's a great person, the answers she gave to some questions rubbed me the wrong way a bit more than they should have. Consider: The previous night, I more or less let the discussion of music choices in Some Girl(s) go in one ear and out the other; this night, the way she explained that some songs were favorites that she associated with the themes sounded random. Unfair of me. She also talked about trying to avoid Los Angeles landmarks and not showing people using smartphones to keep the movie from being tied to a specific time and place, and I think that was kind of silly - it's a movie about people who narrate movie trailers that specifically mentions Don LaFontaine having died a few years ago - where and when else is it going to be set?

Still, I liked her; she was cheerful and enthusiastic, and had as good a laugh as anyone when the obvious question of what the heck the trailer for this movie would look like came up. It was fun hearing that she did a lot of phone voices herself - sometimes with the engineers adjusting things, sometimes with her just using different tones and accents. I kind of wish she'd done that more in the movie - heck, in more movies she does - because it's something both she and the character are good at, and that's what you want to see.

And with that, it's time to put IFFBoston to bed for another year... And start looking for apartments in Montreal for Fantasia!


In a World...

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Funny thing; even when trailers starting with "in a world..." supposedly happened all the time, I don't ever recall hearing it enough to snicker when it did show up. Still, the very fact that people act like it was ubiquitous makes it a good title for a comedy set in the competitive world of voice-over narration - the audience knows exactly what it's about when they hear the name. It's a shame, then, that the movie itself doesn't always seem quite so clear on what it's trying to accomplish.

While the voice most of us identify with movie previews belonged to Don LaFontaine, In a World... gives us Sam Sotto (Fred Melamed) as the clear #2 and heir to LaFontaine's throne. His daughter Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) lives in his house is sort of in the same business, working as a dialect coach since she has a fantastic ear for accents. With Sam's much-younger girlfriend Jamie (Alexandra Holden) moving in, Carol winds up crashing with her sister Dani (Michaela Watkins) and her husband Moe (Rob Corddry). She also winds up getting a couple of voice-over jobs, and may be in a position to get the most coveted job of all - a trailer for an adaptation of a hot series of young-adult novels, previously expected to go to Sam's protégé Gustav Warner (Ken Marino), where those three words will be used for the first time since LaFontaine's death.

That may seem like a small and silly thing to fixate on, but that's what makes it potentially such great material for a comedy: It practically guarantees eccentricity from its characters, puts them in odd situations, and the very fact that what they're gunning for is so seemingly trivial makes the lengths that people will go to achieve it even funnier. Writer/director/star Bell seems to get that most of the time, especially as she loads up the film with truly oddball characters. Carol "collects" accents and practically has her hair stand up on end whenever she hears a grown woman talking like a teen valley girl (especially Jamie), Gustav is bizarrely self-centered, and everyone at the recording studio where she works is full of people who would be misfits anywhere else - including and especially sweetly awkward sound engineer Louis (Demetri Martin). It's an ensemble with a lot of potential.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Twenty Feet from Stardom

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 May 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, digital)

I kind of wish Twenty Feet from Stardom hadn't just come out and said that the story of backup singers is the evolution of popular music over the last fifty years, from gospel-trained black voices pushing stiff WASPs out of the spotlight to hyper-layered multitrack recording creating technical perfection at the cost of spontaneity. Oh, it tracks, right down to Phil Spector being a great producer but a human turd, but I was feeling so good about having figured that out myself a few minutes earlier. And while someone who actually knows something about music may disagree with this thesis, they'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy the stories of the talented ladies (mostly) used to illustrate it.

They include Darlene Love, who as part of The Blossoms was one of the first groups of black background singers in the studios, and who has gone through seemingly every possible up and down since then. There's Dr. Mable John, now a minister, and Claudia Lennear, a sex symbol back when she performed behind Ike & Tina Turner and the Rolling Stones. Lisa Fischer and Tata Vega are tremendously talented vocalists who flirted with solo careers but may have found their niche in harmonizing. And then there's Judith Hill, who was to have her big break on Michael Jackson's "This Is It" tour and is now weighing the benefits of steady work as a back-up singer and how it could keep people from thinking of her as a solo artist.

The business of music, after all, is a capricious thing, and the movie is filled with stories of people either missing their windows for a solo career - which, especially if you're an African-American woman from a working-class background like most of the film's subjects, can be vanishingly small - or having their ambitions be, by all appearances, actively thwarted. Director Morgan Neville does well to track that with the evolution of the music business, but he also doesn't make it so specific to that one industry; the subjects frequently talk about it in pragmatic enough terms that anybody who has ever felt stuck in a dead-end job or seen what they do automated is going to understand where they're coming from.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 06: Some Girl(s) and Willow Creek

15 days behind, for those keeping track.

It took me a bit of time to get to the theater on Monday, for reasons I don't quite remember. The festival folks announced fairly early on that Willow Creek would be moving to the Somerville Theatre's main auditorium to accommodate the demand, but something odd was going on with the line for the 7pm-hour shows too. I was sort of up in the air on which one to see then anyway - I made Blackfish and Touchy Feely lower priorities because they already had distribution, and then sort of found myself choosing between Some Girl(s) and The Beautiful Game pretty much on-the-spot, figuring the one that started earlier would be less likely to bump up against the Willow Creek at 9:30. They also did the lines a bit differently than usual, and I think were letting things in in an unusual order.

So, of course, Some Girl(s) started late and had a Q&A I hadn't been expecting afterward:



It was executive producer Nick Horbaczewski, and producer Q&As are kind of weird. They're seldom the people you really want to talk to; and even though there are often a number of things where they may have better knowledge of the process - casting, locations - it always feels like you're getting second-hand information even when they answer a question on their area of expertise. Still, he did seem to be the right guy to talk about how they were able to get a lot of name actors for a tiny production because of how much they wanted to be in a movie based on one of Neil LaBute's plays.

I was getting a bit antsy by the end; I didn't particularly like the movie but the auditorium was full of theater people who knew a great deal about the play or had acted in it and were thus full of specific questions and observations. Apparently the sequence with Zoe Kazan's character is often cut when it's performed; partly for length and partly for ick. Other fun trivia was that LaBute was involved but hands-off; apparently director Daisy von Scherler cut a lot out of the text because it's a long play, but the only thing LaBute asked to be re-instated was one character saying "yes." No, I don't know where. There was also a fair amount of discussion about music, which sort of left me in "yeah, whatever, if you say so" territory. I don't know a lot about music.

And then I was able to get out and duck into screen #1 which was already seating for Willow Creek. It meant I was sitting up front by necessity as much as choice, but that was good for getting pictures.



Bobcat Goldthwait is kind of awesome, and he seems to be pretty fond of this festival, giving Boston the World Premiere even though he probably could have done Tribeca if he wanted to. It's his third time here, after World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America, and he mentioned being really pleased with how supportive IFFBoston is to people who work outside the system. And despite being a fairly recognizable name, that's what Godthwait is - he's made a movie with a crew he found on Craigslist, and this one flew so far under the radar that it didn't have an IMDB entry until just a week or so before the festival.

And you can't say he's not committed; his introduction to the movie was kind of odd; he had apparently had spinal surgery the previous Friday and was still taking some painkillers ("Is the mike cutting in and out, or is that me?").



After the film, he brought up stars Alexie Gilmore and Bryce Johnson, who were pretty much the entire cast aside from the real-life locals. Both had worked with Goldthwait before, and that familiarity is probably huge for a project like this, which is mostly improvised and shot way out in the middle of the woods, where you might not have to deal with Bigfoot, but there's bears, mountain lions, the other sort of bobcat, and "river people".

As anyone who's seen the film will probably imagine, they spent a fair amount of time talking about the big centerpiece scene, which rather than being an elaborate set-piece was one 19-minute take of Gilmore & Johnson inside a tent as strange noises, shadows, and pokes at the fabric go on in the background. He said they shot it three times, using the second (the other two might make killer DVD extras, IMHO), while he was actually outside, running around the tent and making noises for his cast to react to. I'm trying to remember if I've ever heard of another movie being filmed that way, with the director just trusting letting the cast run for what's an important scene not just in terms of being scary but in terms of character. He had pretty tremendous praise for his cast in that scene, and I can't say I blame him; that thing is really impressive.

(Here's a video of at least some of the Q&A)

Bobcat stuck around for the closing night screening on Tuesday, which was pretty cool, as it's always fun to see a festival's guests enjoying the event rather than just treating it as promotion. The guys right behind me were talking about having a bad movie night with the Bobcat Goldthwait Collection, and I wanted to turn around and say "dude, he's right over there and can probably hear you!". He makes weird and oftentimes-uncomfortable movies, but I've certainly liked what I've seen from him.


Some Girl(s)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Based upon Daisy von Scherler Mayer's film version, Some Girl(s) is a play with a rather tortured premise, and I suspect that actors who like a challenge are drawn to it for that. Sure, Neil LaBute gives them all the words they could want, but it's ultimately on them to make it work. It's a fairly daunting challenge, and one that may work better on stage than screen.

The premise involves a writer (Adam Brody) who is about to get married flying across the country to visit a number of old girlfriends before the big day. They include high-school sweetheart Sam (Jennifer Morrison), no-strings-attached lover Tyler (Mia Maestro), one-time teacher Lindsay (Emily Watson), best friend's kid sister Reggie (Zoe Kazan), and Bobbi (Kristen Bell), who may be the one who got away. He means to make some apologies, but these things may be better off not revisited.

This is an obviously stupid idea. Well, in real life it is; for a play, it's a potentially nifty device to set up five of the sort of extended one-on-one scenes that are what that medium does best. The trouble is, once the meeting with Sam is an awkward disaster, most reasonably intelligent people would recognize it was a bad idea and give up on it; doing the same thing five times without offering any sort of explanation until the end is the sort of thing that can try an audience's patience if the individual scenes aren't riveting enough to overpower the basically silly premise. And while the explanation that does come has been foreshadowed, it's the kind of thing that feels more like a writerly quirk than something particularly telling.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Willow Creek

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)

Ever since The Blair Witch Project kickstarted the boom in found-footage horror a decade and a half ago, there's been a tendency to make the form ever more elaborate, until the likes of Cloverfield and Trollhunter are basically special effects blockbusters in disguise. Every once in a while, though, someone strips the form back down to its roots, and Bobcat Goldthwait does a damn good job of it with Willow Creek.

Willow Creek, as those who know their cryptozoology will tell you, is the town closest to Bluff Creek, where the famed Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot was shot in 1967. Jim (Bryce Johnson) is a firm believer that there are Sasquatches in the woods; his girlfriend Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) is not. She's a good sport, though, so when Jim wants to spend a weekend camping in those woods, the city girl goes along, helping him shoot video of both the town and the wilderness.

Goldthwait appears to be a genuine Bigfoot enthusiast, which may explain why the people of Willow Creek (where Bigfoot is a cottage industry much like UFOs are in Roswell, New Mexico) were generally willing to play along, with Gilmore and Johnson the only actors playing roles as Kelly and Jim wander around town, meeting up with local "experts" and eccentrics. It gets the audience that doesn't know anything about the legend up to speed in a manner that is respectful and irreverent - the believers are given their due, with Kelly's willingness to crack a joke a fun complement to Jim's unbridled enthusiasm.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 04: Secundaria, Night Labor, Computer Chess, Oxyana, and V/H/S/2

Only nine days behi... Oh, wait, the clock just struck midnight. Ten days behind!

Saturday was kind of a wacky day - I got my usual slow start, for a festival weekend day, and would spend some time bouncing back and forth between venues as the day went on, although there was more than enough time scheduled between "blocks" that it wasn't hard to get from one thing to another.

It was a day for busy lines, too - though it's usually easy enough to keep everyone at all five movies at the Somerville Theatre in one line during IFFBoston, they had the Much Ado About Nothing folks broken out during the afternoon, as the cult of Joss Whedon can get folks out for this sort of targeted event. The real surprise was around 9pm; while I waited for Oxyana: I sort of assumed the big crowd was for The Hunt, but apparently The Dirties brought out a big crowd; I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffled it from screen #2 to #5 to fit more people in. It was a rowdy crowd, too, for a movie that didn't really seem to leap off the page of the program for me.

Didn't have time for dinner - Boston Burger Company was packed, and I didn't want to wander much further from Davis Square (probably should have hit Tasty Burger after Computer Chess) - so I grabbed some snacks at the concession stand and Ian (the Somerville's manager) greeted me by name. That always freaks me out a bit - I don't post a lot of pictures of myself online or go introducing myself, so folks recognizing me means I've got to be pretty pretty ubiquitous. It's tough to get to the concession stand during the festival, since you'll often have everybody trying to fill a theater in a five minute period, and as I may have mentioned, with a lot of climbing over people and going back and forth in the theater, not to mention the merch cart and general loitering in the lobby. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that the theater ought to have a pushcart to sell some basics to folks waiting in line, but there's probably not enough sidewalk as there is.

OK, movies and guests!



There you have director Mary Jane Doherty, the composer (whose name I didn't get and can't find because the film's web and IMDB pages are shells), and producer Lyda Kuth. Ms. Doherty is a professor at BU, so there were a number of her students in the audience - meaning folks got called on by name and there were some inside jokes during the Q&A. It was a pretty friendly crowd.

SPOILERS!

The most interesting questions, naturally, revolved around the film's main subject Marya defecting to the United States at the climax - did she know what was going on? Did she assist? Did it make finishing the movie with Gabriela and Moises more difficult? No, no, and obviously. She said a couple of interesting things about the situation, though - for one, apparently defecting is almost considered an inevitable part of a ballerina's career in Cuba - every talented dancer walks away from a touring company eventually, although this was the first time a student had done so. The other was that before that happened, the movie was shaping up more as a sort of visual poem, but this is the sort of event that immediately puts everything that came before into a new context - that scene where Maryara's prize money is taken by the school goes from being about how poor Cuba is to how that sort of authoritarian system can push its talented youth away.

It turned out, I was seated in front of a Cuban ballerina. Not Maryara - she's apparently busy in Orlando as a lead dancer in that city's company - but someone who was able to leave Cuba by dint of her mother being Spanish and having dual citizenship.

!SRELIOPS

Add Cuba to the list of places I might like to visit someday, though - every movie I see shot there makes it look so lively, even where it's very poor. The Talk Cinema people do a trip to the film festival, but I think I'd rather wait until the country is more open and on its feet; I'd rather not engage in poverty tourism.



Man, is that the best picture I got of Computer Chess producer Andrew Finnigan (I think), actor Gerald Peary (better known as a local film critic and teacher), and the Brattle's Ned Hinkle? Let me check the phone...



That's better. Anyway, Gerry made a more impassioned plea than usual for folks to donate some money to IFFBoston, stating (not incorrectly) that it's kind of crazy that the festival is in its eleventh year and the folks in charge are still all volunteers, probably burning all their vacation time from their day jobs on this event (between spending a week running it and heading out to other festivals to scout potential selections).

I don't want to spend too much time on the Q&A (or this movie in general), because it kind of annoyed me, highlighting that this time it was mostly improvised (compared to Bujalski's previous films, which were actually tightly scripted but had the awkward stumbling feel of improvisation). It was the kind of discussion that served to push some of my buttons, with a lot of how they were casting people who already embodied the characters, and need a lot of nerds, so who are the nerdiest people you know - well, editors! The movie already had the sort of Big Bang Theory attitude I don't like - where the filmmakers are making the same mocking jokes about nerds as usual, but by throwing a few references in they expect to curry some favor. Combine this with a precious essay in the program and it's become pretty clear that this filmmaker's stuff is just not for me.



Oxyana director Sean Dunne, executive producer Colby Glenn, and (I think) co-producer Cass Marie Greener. No, I don't know why I get better shots from my phone than my real camera at this festival.

Anyway, they seemed like a really great group of folks, with a lot of respect for the people in their film that didn't seem insincere in the least. Like their movie, they were admirably straightforward and plain-spoken about what was going on down there, getting into why they thought towns like Oceana were mostly dealing with prescription drugs rather than meth or harder stuff (isolated enough that it's not yet worth expanding into the area) and why dealing with the problem was so problematic (a real "pray it away" attitude. As I mention in the review, I might have liked hearing some of that in the actual film, but that would have been hard to do with the people involved telling it in their own words.

So, that's Saturday at IFFBoston. Next up: A nearly-as-busy Sunday!


Secundaria

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

For someone who has never been to the ballet, I sure tend to find a lot of movies involving the combination of art and athleticism fascinating. Maybe it's the way that the intense discipline necessary to master the form naturally creates great drama as well as great beauty; maybe ballet is a tough enough sell to many Americans that what manages to make it on screen is exceptional. Either way, Secundaria is quite the strong documentary, even if some of its most interesting material isn't about the ballet itself.

Ballet is a big deal in Cuba, and vice versa, even if the island is best known for other styles. Many of the world's foremost companies have Cuban performers taking lead roles, though, with many of them trained at an internationally-renowned academy in Havana. This film follows three who entered the three-year program in 2007: Maryara, who lives in a small apartment with her mother and brother and rides a bus for an hour each way to get to the school; Gabriela, who by contrast comes from a comfortable background (her mother is a hotel accountant and her father is in the military); and Moises, a new friend of Maryara's who comes from one of Havana's poorest neighborhoods. At the start of each year, students are ranked by how they perform in a competition, and while Gabriela is one of the most heralded talents, Maryara surprises by coming in second for the whole school.

That's the story's starting point, and filmmaker Mary Jane Doherty sticks with these characters for the full three years rather than the more common path of choosing, say, a freshman, a senior, and a graduate and following them in parallel. It works out nicely; it means that the various threads don't play as disconnected while it seldom seems forced when the group interacts (although I half-suspect that the decision to make Moises one of the central characters was made later).

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Night Labor

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin had two features at IFFBoston last year; I saw the one about teenage Russian models in Japan rather than the one about the attempt to open a fish-processing plant in Maine. The latter would have been a natural complement to Night Labor, to the extent that I almost wonder if this film is constructed out of unused footage from the other.

The film focuses almost entirely on one man, Sherman Frank Merchant. He's the sort of fellow who looks his age and then some; there's evidence of a lot of hard living and cigarettes on his face. Now, he clams in the afternoon, eats his catch for dinner, and then works the night shift at the plant. He doesn't talk much, but he doesn't seem to have too many people to talk with.

And so, Night Labor is a documentary that is almost 100% pure observation. We watch Merchant go through what seems like a typical day, with no narration and no particular attempts to add context. Even when Merchant says something, it's not really directed to the camera as much as it's an under-his-breath muttering that brings Popeye to mind when the audience feels generous and that guy wandering the street or riding the bus who is so disgusted or enamored with something that he has to say it out loud. How much the audience enjoys the movie may be directly proportional to how much they see as interesting details and demonstrations of processes with which they weren't previously familiar versus how much seems like banal minutia.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Computer Chess

* * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

I think I'm done with Andrew Bujalski. I've seen three of his four films, and even the one I kind of liked didn't really impress me. And while I can see some merit in the ones like Computer Chess that bore me to frustration, it's not enough. This thing is just not clever enough to go without a story.

Sure, it sort of looks like it has a story: In the late 1970s/early 1980s, there's an annual convention where the developers of various chess-playing computer programs set their creations against each other round-robin style. The winner will play host and chessmaster Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), although at the time, the idea that a computer could defeat a human being is ludicrous. Among the competitors are a team from MIT that includes Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) and Tom Schoesser (Gordon Kindlmann); one from Cal Tech that includes Shelly (Robin Schwarts), the only girl in the tournament; independent operator Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), who apparently hasn't booked a room; and a privately-funded team with Martin Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins). There's also a sort of swingers' group sharing the space, and... cats.

Bujalski and his cast of what are, for the most part, non-actors (Wiggins and Paige have prior credits but have been doing other things lately) create a few memorable characters, and a great many others that run together. As is often the case, there's a certain authenticity to their performances, especially since they are by and large editors, computer programmers, and others who can easily handle the retro-technical terms. Paige gets the most memorable character, with Papageorge just cynical and snide enough for his being thwarted to be entertaining but not quite enough to really get on the audience's bad side. Riester's Peter winds up drifting toward the center of the story, and he does project a likable everynerd quality.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Oxyana

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Addiction to prescription medication is hardly limited to rural America, but it thrives there. The reasons why communities like Oceana, West Viginia have such a serious problem with painkillers like Oxycontin are far from the first concern of this movie, which concerns itself almost entirely with showing the effects, becoming a tragic study in human frailty.

Director Sean Dunne builds the film almost entirely out of interviews with local residents; some are functioning addicts, some are dealers, some are relatives who have tried to get their loved ones into rehab but to no avail. There's a man suffering from cancer and the wife who is determined to go down with him. Young men who left for a little while after graduating from high school who came back to find their friends dying at an astonishing rate, and a dentist shocked at his patients' prescription requests. There's a couple of scenes with the district attorney and other officials, but not many; this isn't a story about enforcement.

They're country folks, in general, plain-spoken and not particularly prone to seeking anyone's pity. They spell out the reasons why they think drug abuse has become so endemic in towns like Oceana both as a trend and for themselves personally, and that they can communicate this clearly is somewhat unusual for movies about addiction: There's no metaphor to it, just a simple description of how each feels on and off oxy that makes it more easy than usual for the viewer to put themselves in their positions. Though the idea of "Appalachian Fatalism" is brought up, this tendency to think it's impossible to win brought on by (among other things) decades of exploitation by the coal industry never feels like the end of their arguments; there's a sad willingness to accept responsibility.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

V/H/S/2

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)

To call last year's V/H/S uneven would be generous; while it managed "pretty good" in a couple of segments, it was awful in more. Still, the good thing about commercially successful anthology films is that sequels need not be encumbered by prior entries' failings, and V/H/S/2 is a great example of this: The new segments feel tighter, more creative, and scarier than last time, with the new filmmakers inspired to top what came before and the returnees opting to step up their game.

The opening/wraparound story - "Tape 49" by Simon Barrett - is still kind of stupid; as the premise is apparently that these VHS tapes unleash monsters and/or make their viewers homicidal just by being VHS, and for all the format's shortcomings, I think you have to be a cinematographer to have that reaction. It's more fun than last time, though - the obnoxious bros from last time out have been replaced by a co-ed team of private investigators (Lawrence Michael Levine & Kelsey Abbot), and their pulpy banter is a definite step up, with the whole deal of them recording themselves watching the tapes they find actually making a reasonable amount of sense.

The first one they watch, "Clinical Trials" by Adam Wingard, has a premise borrowed from movies such as The Eye by the Pang Brothers: Guy (Wingard) is outfitted with a prosthetic eye which records everything it sees as part of its engineers' QA process, only to discover that he's now seeing things that normal people can't. Simple premise, but fun - Hannah Hughes soon pops up as a hot, sarcastic mentor figure and Wingard works plenty of good jumps and a fairly impressive escalation into the short's runtime. My biggest complaint is that it feels less like a complete short film than half a feature, stopping rather than ending just when things are starting to get good - or, alternately, getting out before Wingard has to build a boring mythology and get predictable.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 03: Soft in the Head and A Hijacking

I grumble about how late these festival posts are going up - and now that we're approaching the weekend and its four-plus-movie days, that's only going to slow down - but there was a benefit to that here. Friday night, I liked Soft in the Head a lot less and A Hijacking quite a bit more, so it was good to give my thoughts a little more time to marinate. The reviews, I think, are better as a result, although the analysis does sort of push away the initial reaction that people tend to want as a movie recommendation.

Then again, my first reaction for Soft in the Head involved the word "retarded".

Specifically, I said that it was going to be a challenging review to write because I'd need to find non-offensive synonyms to describe one of the movie's characters. Which probably makes the use of that word even worse, because then you're using it to specifically describe people rather than as just a vaguely insulting thing. I tweeted this, and found it kind of amusing that both the production company and lead actress Sheila Etxeberria favorited/retweeted/followed. Were they taking it as a compliment, that the character of Nathan was such an believable evocation of someone with cognitive challenges? It certainly wasn't (only) meant that way; it was meant to convey frustration, too. Of course, they may have been mocking - "look how terrible this person that still says 'retard' is!". Or I may be reading way too much into folks just clicking on my tweet a couple of times.

I guess Nathan is meant to be autistic, although I only really know that because the film's website describes the character as "borderline autistic", which understates the matter; there are some scenes where that's the case, but as a whole he seems much more handicapped than that. Interestingly, the festival program's description of the movie also gives a description of Etxeberria's Natalia that doesn't really jibe with how I saw her. I find both of those cases kind of interesting, in that neither may be a deliberate attempt to influence how the audience views what's going on but they can't help but do so, and I think that's sort of cheating. Sure, reviews and criticism do the same thing, but with both of these at least quasi-official, it's easier for the viewer who reads them to mentally integrate them into the movie, maybe making it something that the film, taken completely on its own, is not.


Nathan Silver, Nechama Kessler, Carl Kranz, and Sheila Etxeberria

Folks showed up, which was nice. Writer/director Nathan Silver is the fellow with the eyepatch, along with his mother and two of the main actors. It wasn't really a great Q&A - they answered the expected questions about improvisation, shooting in sequence, how many are actors and how many are real-life analogues that the filmmakers found and cast all right, but otherwise, things kind of rambled. That's fitting, I guess, as this was a movie with a simple outline that evolved rather than being carefully constructed, so there just weren't going to be definitive answers. Still, it often seemed indulgent, and I wondered a bit whether the light crowd had a fair number of friends and family members, just from the level of familiarity displayed (and at times required) during the session.

Silver had another movie playing the festival the next day; I opted for something else. And, sadly, nobody came from Denmark to do a Q&A after A Hijacking.

Soft in the Head

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

I don't feel bad about not particularly liking Soft in the Head, but one of the reasons I don't like it bugs me. I look down on its characters, which means I probably look down on their real-life analogues who are less fortunate than I am, and I don't want to be that guy. Understand, the movie has a ton of other problems, but that it's about folks who don't look like movie stars with five o'clock shadow shouldn't count against it.

Natalia (Sheila Etxeberria) is out on the street after a smacking-around and ejection by her boyfriend; she stops by her friend Hannah's family dinner, makes a scene there, and eventually winds up in the apartment of Maury (Ed Ryan) - not as a one-night stand, but because he has cots in his living room for folks he finds in the street. Hannah (Melanie J. Sheiner) does take her in, but her brother Nathan (Carl Kranz) has a crush on her, which causes all sorts of problems what with him having mental issues and her not being Jewish. And, well, a hot mess.

Most of the characters in this movie are a bit of a disaster - Natalia, Nathan, some of the folks bunking out in Maury's apartment - and it's not necessarily just having made bad choices, but something baked-in. At least one character is clearly mentally ill, Nathan is at the very least in the Asperger's area of the autism spectrum (frustrated viewers may use less charitable words). And while that does make them different from what one typically sees on-screen, it doesn't necessarily make them interesting. Nathan, as he's portrayed, is not likely to make a decision that the audience can really spend much time considering, and Natalia is impulsive to the point of randomness. How do you tell a story with that?

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Kapringen (A Hijacking)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Unless a filmmaker is exceptional at drawing things out and tossing in new perils when the previous threats are starting to wear thin, compact is a very good thing for a thriller to be. Another exception is when the tension is actually built out of waiting for a response; the audience actually needs to feel it drag a bit then. That's why a funny thing happens with A Hijacking - its crisp, efficient 99-minute runtime winds up making it feel taut and impressive as one initially watches it, but somewhat hollow as it winds down.

MV Rozen, a Danish-flagged cargo ship on the way to Mumbai, has been taken by pirates off the coast of Africa. Though advised to hire an outside negotiator by expert Connor Julian (Gary Skjoldmose Porter), CEO Peter Ludvgsen (Søren Malling) takes on the job himself - this is, after all, what he does. On the other end of the satellite-phone link, cook Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk) is pressed into service as the voice of the crew by the pirates' negotiator, Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), since the captain is in rough shape. It is, as all involved soon learn, a situation designed for stalemate.

The film deserves a fair amount of praise, and a great deal of it deserves to be laid at the feet of the cast. It's a talented ensemble, and nobody playing a major part takes the easy way out by playing their character as a villain or falters at making their character someone the audience can understand, no matter different his background may be from the viewer or the other characters. Pilou Asbæk plays the guy that the audience can most likely easily relate to, an everyman whose job just happens to be in the middle of the ocean, and he quickly establishes Mikkel as an affable fellow (even if he's not completely even-tempered) in the scenes before the pirates board, giving him a solid foundation to become frazzled, frightened, and angry later on. Søren Malling does a nifty trick, giving Peter a level of hubris that is undeniable without it crossing the line to arrogance or callousness. It would be easy for this hard-nosed one-percenter to become the "real villain" of the film, but he doesn't, and that's not just what writer/director Tobias Lindholm has him do but how Malling does it. Abdihakin Asgar, meanwhile, manages a neat job of playing Omar right on the line between being a reasonable person and being a guy whose job is to seem like a reasonable person. Lindholm doesn't follow him the way he does Mikkel and Peter, but that we can buy into him when we know his function is impressive.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 02: Tokyo Waka and Wasteland

Both of these films were in The Somerville Theatre's #4 screen, and if you're the sort who tends to take note of these things (or have just paid attention to recurring things on this blog), you know what even-numbered screens there mean - center aisles, no leg room, looking way up if you wind up near the front. During the festival, I'll tend to be one of the first ones in, grab an aisle seat, and then get climbed over right up until the movie starts. Part of it's my fault, but part of it's "why can't you people hit the concession stand and the restroom before taking your seat like I do?"

At least some of that, apparently, is going to be eased in the coming week as they've announced that they're installing new seating with more leg room in screens #2-5 as soon as the festival's done, which will bring tears of joy to regular customers' eyes. I suspect that probably means losing a row or two of seating, but that will likely only really hurt during festival week, but as someone who spent what seems like half ost of the past week in screen #4, I don't mind; I honestly can't imagine what folks larger than my 179cm (5'10") think.

Anyway, enough about the venue - movies!



No, I don't imagine that the new arrangement will do anything about festival-week Horrible Photography. Hey, it could be worse; John Haptas has a weirdly-shaped head in the pictures taken on my camera rather than my phone. As you can see, he and Kristine Samuelson came to introduce and discuss their movie, although it's short and simple enough that there wasn't a great deal to discuss. They apparently spent some time traveling in southeast Asia, looking for a movie to make, eventually finding both a comfort level and a topic when they hit Tokyo and observed the crows.

One thing Haptas mentioned that I think we all know but tend not to give a lot of thought is that you can make up for not having much in the way of material resources with time. For him, that means sitting on top of a building next to a tree all afternoon if that's what it takes to watch a pair of crows build a nest out of stolen coat-hangers, while other filmmakers can edit until things are just right or render their CGI in great detail because they're not staring at a staked-out release date. Of course, there are other pressures that make time translate into expense, but I suspect they're less onerous than one might think for the truly independent.

One thing I do kind of wish I'd asked during the Q&A was how threatening they intended the crows in their movie to be. I don't know if it's a flaw that they kept finding ways to present them as worrisomely intelligent and adaptable, letting that stew, and then popping up a shot that wouldn't have felt out-of-place in The Birds without ever really paying that tension off - the tension was probably a non-universal and accidental side-effect - but I swear, I spent half of that movie expecting a really horrible attack as opposed to the relatively mild ones they found in their stock footage.

Tokyo Waka

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

It's not uncommon to watch a documentary and say that the scale is in-between the usual levels, neither comprehensive nor truly a broad introduction. Tokyo Waka at times seems to be around those extremes, covering an extremely specific topic but without a great deal of detail. It's often pretty and kind of interesting, and that may be all someone wants from a movie about Tokyo which focuses on its crows.

And Tokyo does have a lot of crows; a city official says that roughly six hundred crow attacks are reported each year, and attempts to reduce that number by capturing and humanely killing them often seem to have the result of making the next generation of these unusually clever birds even smarter. Cities provide them with a dynamic environment for nest-building and scavenging, and an architect suggests a couple of reasons why Tokyo may draw them more than usual: It's a very three-dimensionally-complex city with many nooks and crannies, and the average residential building has a mere thirty-year lifespan, meaning there are always a great deal of construction sites.

The engineer isn't the only person co-directors John Haptas & Kristine Samuelson talk to; there are students, zookeepers, artists, keepers of a Buddhist temple, street-food vendors and a young homeless woman living in the park. Some are experts, some are just people who have encountered crows in their lives, and others just appear to be people that the filmmakers met while living in Tokyo who may have an interesting story to tell. The interviews may not often be particularly revelatory but usually have at least one interesting nugget of information (for instance, I have a hard time imagining a tent city in an American park getting regular mail delivery).

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Wasteland

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

What, exactly, is the difference between a crime movie and a caper movie? Scale? The intricacy of the plan? Do the characters being a notch more charming or less working-class change the classification? Or is this just a distinction that vanishingly few people care about? Rowan Athale's Wasteland, you see, is right on the border, centering on the one big score but still getting kind of dirty on the way.

There's a saying that prison gives petty crooks a chance to learn the skills to become career felons, and that may be the case with Harvey (Luke Treadaway), emerging after a year behind bars with a potential business opportunity in Amsterdam and a plan to raise the stake that involves robbing the man who set him up, local gangster Steven Roper (Neil Maskell). He brings in three friends - best mate Dempsey (Iwan Rheon), tradesman Charlie (Gerard Kearns), and hot-headed Dodd (Matthew Lewis) - but while he's learned a thing or two inside, most of them aren't even small time, and maybe not completely sold on packing up and leaving Leeds, let alone England, behind. It may not matter, since a well-bloodied Harvey is explaining everything to a CID detective-inspector (Timothy Spall).

Athale's story is firmly in film noir territory, though it lacks a classic femme fatale (Vanessa Kirby's Nicola is an ex-girlfriend who wants Harvey on the straight and narrow). It's a distinctively English one, though, with regional accents that it might take Americans a few minutes to get used to and a setting that still feels industrial even if industry has by and large been gone for a while. There are areas on Harvey's plans that are actually marked "wasteland" but the empty pubs and industrial spaces where the friends meet tell the story of the place as well as anything. It's not completely barren yet, but it might be on its way.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Opening Night: The Spectacular Now

First day of the festival! Well, it was four days ago (five by the time this gets posted), but seeing a bunch of movies doesn't leave one a whole bunch of time to write about them. Trying to more or less go in order when this is the opening night picture also turns out to be tough, but we'll get to that later.

I was actually running behind from the start; I usually attend on a press pass, but I missed the deadline for applying this year. While eFilmCritic has had its challenges over the past year, it's not like I was worried about not getting accredited; I just tend to be very sequential, and by the time I'd finished with all the reviews for the Boston Underground Film Festival, the deadline had passed. Thoroughly embarrassing, but it's not like I mind giving the IFFBoston people money. They're all-volunteer and do great work; it's not like they're getting rich off these donations/purchases (and I can't say I'd mind if they did).

I continued running late because of work - whole day of nothing, then emails with needs at 4:30pm - so when I arrived to pick up my pass, there wasn't any need to queue up, just head straight in and find myself a row well-off-center in the front row, and enjoy the theremin.



Not sure how this became a thing, but it has; I think there's been theremin before opening night for five years now. It's always cool, though.



If you've been coming to the festival for a while, you know these folks by now: Brian Tamm, Adam Roffman, Christine Harbaugh, Nancy Campbell, and Dan McCallum. The fellow on the right may also be familiar; it's Casey Affleck, who was announced as a "Creative Consultant" a couple months back. As an outsider, I don't necessarily know what any of the folks involved do, specifically, and that seems like an even more nebulous position. Still, having a guy with that sort of name recognition in Hollywood might help them bring in more prominent narrative features.

Also, he's a decent arm. One of the things that they do at the start of the opening and closing nights is give away previous years' t-shirts (and some new ones) by throwing them into the crowd, and getting them into the balcony is rare. I don't know if Casey got one up there, but I saw him wince after one toss, so I'm guessing that someone wound up with a t-shirt by catching it in the face.


Adam and The Spectacular Now's James Ponsoldt (director) & Michael H. Weber (screenwriter)

Anyway, that's the festival; what about the movie? It's pretty good, although it took me a while to write the review, just out of being busy. The film itself made it a bit tricky, too - at one frustrated point, I figured it was an example of how a movie could be good without actually being interesting. It's a somewhat unfair judgment, which reflects the way I feel about coming-of-age movies more than anything - basically, they really have to be something special, because otherwise, they're kind of as same-y as genre films are often accused of being, at least in the broad strokes.

The Spectacular Now

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP?)

It's hard enough to try to review the first films to play a festival, writing a paragraph at a time between other screenings, but something like The Spectacular Now makes it even more difficult. It's does almost nothing wrong and the cast is pretty great. It's easy enough to recommend, though, managing to be quite good if not quite, well, spectacular.

Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) was just dumped by his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larson) over something that seems innocent enough, although given how quickly she's paired up with star athlete Marcus (Dayo Okeniyi), she might have just been looking for an excuse. Upset, Sutter gets drunk, and is found passed out the next morning by Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley) on her paper route. They start hanging out together.

Kids grow up so fast today. Time was, you'd get movies about troubled teenagers and movies about alcoholics driving their lives into the ground, and they'd be separate movies made for separate audiences. This two-for-one deal of a movie hardly chronicles a new phenomenon, and it's certainly not the first time I've seen teenagers drinking on-screen, but I don't know if it's ever been so central to the characters rather than just a reaction to other things going on. In fact, it still mostly plays that way - it's not about people feeling like they need to help Sutter get sober, so the audience will tend to look elsewhere for some other root to his issues until it eventually becomes clear that this is something pervasive, not a weekend-binging reaction.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 26 April - 2 May 2013

I really need to sleep after that massive This Week Month in Tickets, so let's race through this.

• The Tenth Annual Independent Film Festival Boston has begun and it is fantastic. Go to their website, scope out all the great stuff playing, and remember that I recommend Sightseers and The Hunt wholeheartedly, having seen them in the UK last fall. The Festival runs at the Somerville, and the Brattle all weekend, with single shows at the former Stuart Street Playhouse (now the Revere Hotel's "Theatre1") on Monday and the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday.
• That Closing Night presentation at the Coolidge Corner Theatre is In A World..., but they've got other noteworthy stuff as well. Granted, their main opening is Hava Nagila: The Movie in the screening room, a documentary on a song which is a bit of Jewish kitsch. They also pick up The Company You Keep in 35mm, which should look pretty nice.
  
  In terms of specials, one noteworthy one is Sunday morning's Goethe-Institut German Film, Hannah Arendt, with Margarethe von Trotte as the Jewish journalist whose coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial was not what anyone expected. It's a preview, with a regular run scheduled for July. Yet another Jewish-oriented event comes Monday night, with Alicia Svigals performing her new score to silent movie The Yellow Ticket with pianist Marilyn Lerner; there will be other multimedia components and a post-film panel discussion. The weekend's midnights are David Lynch's Lost Highway as part of the "road trips from (to?) hell" series, and Quentin Dupieux's awesomely absurd Wrong, both on Friday and Saturday.
• If you're at the festival or can't stay up late for Wrong, the Brattle will be playing it on Wedesday and Thursday (1 & 2 May) as part of a double feature with Dupieux's equally but differently bizarre Rubber. That's after spending the weekend as one of IFFBoston's venues, and shutting down Monday & Tuesday for a quick between-festival rest.
• If the indie stuff isn't your bag, the multiplexes have some powerfully mainstream openings. Pain & Gain is apparently a "smaller film" for Michael Bay, but it's still crammed with big stars (Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Ed Harris) in an over-the-top story about not-so-bright bodybuilders kidnapping a Miami mobster. It plays the Arlington Capitol, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Presumably The Big Wedding is female-oriented counter-programming, with a decent ensemble (Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfrien, Robin Williams) in a remake of a French farce about a divorced couple who fakes still being together for their son's weding. It plays Boston Common and Fenway.
  
  Interestingly, the multiplexes go different directions to fill some extra screens before Iron Man 3 wipes everything clean with night-before shows on Thursday. Fenway picks up The Company You Keep and is also the only place on the T opening Arthur Newman, with Colin Firth as a man who fakes his death to start a new life, romancing Emily Blunt, who has done something similar. Boston Common, meanwhile, opens Mud, with Matthew McConaughey apparently continuing a string of great parts. He's hiding out on an island in the Mississippi, but looking to reunite with his girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon). Neither, apparently, has room for Tai Chi Hero, to which I say boo! I totally would have caught a Friday midnight around the festival!
• Kendall Square also has Mud opening, along with two movies that seem like a potential double feature: The Angels' Share, a comedy from Ken Loach (really!) about a parolee who gets involved with distilling whiskey and an attempt to steal a rare cask, and My Brother the Devil, where brothers of Arabic descent in London walk the line between crime and a better future. Oddly, Devil is the one marked with the one-week booking while Angels' is supposedly open-ended.
• It's fairly quiet at the MFA's film program. There are three Samurai Cinema screenings Harakiri on Friday night, Kwaidan on Wednesday the 1st, and Ran on Thursday the 2nd. There's also an afternoon screening of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast on Tuesday as part of their "Myths, Folklore, and Fairy Tales from Around the World" course.
• The ICA has the opening night film of The Boston LGBT Film Festival on Thursday night with Bye Bye Blondie, a new film by Virginie Despentes about two middle-aged women trying to rekindle their teenage affair. Supposedly it's lighthearted, despite Despentes's track record. The festival will continue at the ICA for a few more screenings and also settle in at the Brattle and MFA.
• the Harvard Film Archive has two screenings of Paolo & Vittorio Taviani's new film Caesar Must Die on Friday (6pm) and Sunday (5pm). They also continue the L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema series, with a pair of features from the 1990s - Compensation at 9pm Friday and Daughters of the Dust at 7pm Saturday - and three different collections of featurettes at 9:15pm Saturday and 7pm Sunday & Monday.
• iMovieCafe goes with Telugu-language Shadow for the most part, although with a couple screenings of Gunde Jaari Gallanthayyinde (also Telugu) mixed in during the weekend.
• While the Somerville Theatre is booked up for IFFBoston, the Arlington Capitol picks up Oz: The Great and Powerful; it will return (along with Evil Dead, Spring Breakers, and Scary Movie 5) when the festival leaves on Tuesday.

My plans? Living at IFFBoston, and then decompressing afterward, although the Wrong/Rubber double feature is tempting.