Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 23 March 2012 - 29 March 2012

One movie hitting multiplexes this weekend, and I'm not saying it's a big deal, but there are an astonishing number of things attempting to ride its coattails. I, personally, picked up a Blu-ray set of Battle Royale on Tuesday and the new volume of Gunslinger Girl on Wednesday.

There's something really creepy about there being a "killing teens" bandwagon. I'd mock, but I'm clearly on it even with without being particularly interested in the movie everyone else is trying to take advantage of - which kind of makes me worse than the rest, doesn't it?

• So, yeah, tons of chances to see The Hunger Games if you are so inclined; it looks to be taking up fully half of Regal Fenway's 13 screens, as well as two at Fresh Pond, two in Harvard Square, five or so at Boston Common, and one at the Arlington Capitol. The story apparently has kids from various regions selected for a fight to the death, Most Dangerous Game-style, as a means of pacifying the 99%.



• On the other hand, you may feel more interested in a festival film. The Irish Film Festival Boston runs from Thursday the 22nd to Sunday the 25th; opening night is at the Brattle Theatre and the rest of the shows at Somerville. It's not all new-new stuff - I saw A Film With Me In It the year I went to SXSW (2009), but some looks interesting. And as soon as the Irish festival is over, the Underground one starts, with John Dies at the End kicking off The Boston Underground Film Festival on Thursday the 29th, back at the Brattle.



• There's plenty of good stuff in between at the Brattle as well. The weekend features a double feature of old-school Hitchcock with The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps on Friday and Sunday, with The WAM! Film Festival (for "Women, Action, & the Media") in between on Saturday. The Boston Jewish Film Festival proper takes place in the fall, but the organization will be presenting a special screening of Dolphin Boy on Monday evening with director Dani Menkin in person to introduce and answer questions. Tuesday is Balagan night, with Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder in person to present their "projection performance" Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure. No guests on Wednesday, when the monthly "Wordless Wednesday" program kicks off with the first Oscar winner for Best Picture (and, until this year, the only silent to win the prize), 1927's genuinely fantastic Wings.



• Across the river, the Coolidge picks up The Salt of Life in one of the video rooms while opening Footnote on the main screen most days and on 35mm all week. It's actually got a fairly unusual set-up - a father and son are both Talmudic scholars, one of whom is recognized with a reward meant for the other. I'm a bit worried that, because this was Israel's nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, it will be all serious as opposed to comically absurd.
  
  Speaking of absurd, the midnight show this weekend is David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. That may be unfair, but the TV show ticked me off back in the day. On Saturday, it's joined by Everything Is Terrible Presents: DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez!, which is, apparently a remake of The Holy Mountain composed entirely of VHS found footage of dogs (with a live stage-show element). Also combining film and live elements is Saturday morning's kids' show, the 5th Annual BEEP Young Kids' Big Music Party, featuring local guys Philip Alexander & the Family Band and Oren Rosenthal.



• The Kendall also gets Footnote, along with three other movies. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, which tells the tale of an avant-garde musician who underwent a series of surgeries to make himself more like the woman he loves. Director Marie Losier will be in town on Wednesday to introduce the film and face interrogation after the 5:30pm and 7:30pm shows.
  
  The other two movie come from France - Free Men is a WWII drama about the unlikely friendship between an Algerian immigrant and a local Jew. It's the one with the one-week booking scheduled. And finally, there's Delicacy, which despite the listing on Google is not about unicorn hunting, but Audrey Tautou as a young widow who begins a relationship with her subordinate at work.



• ArtsEmerson continues the "Gotta Dance!" series this weekend with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat, which runs at 6pm Friday and at 2pm and 8:30pm Saturday. It's paired with one featuring "the Yiddish Fred Astaire", Leo Fuchs, as American Matchmaker plays Saturday at 6:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. In between is The Heretics, Joan Braderman's exploration of the works and influence of The Women's Movement's Second Wave.



• The Harvard Film Archive starts their weekend off with a visit from Claude Lanzmann, best known as the maker of the sprawling Holocaust documentary Shoah, who will screen "The Karski Report" on Friday; it's an expansion of his interview with Jan Karski from that film. Saturday and Monday are taken up by Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies, with a new print of Davies's The Long Day Closes Saturday at 9pm, Distant Voices, Still Lives following at 9pm, and "The Terence Davies Trilogy" (three linked shorts from the start of his career) on Monday at 7pm. Sunday features the finale of their Béla Tarr series - The Man From Londay at 4:30pm and Wreckmeister Harmonies at 7pm.



• The MFA has several screenings of In Search of Haydn, one of a regular series of documentaries by Phil Grabsky that presents the life and work of a composer via interviews with and performances by today's musicians. Surprisingly, that's not the "Friday Night Films" selection; Night of Silence is, with director Reis Çelik on hand to discuss the film afterward. It's part of the Boston Turkish Film Festival, which also includes Toll Booth on Saturday and Shadows and Faces on Sunday. Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening also feature the last two screenings of Yves Jeuland's three-hour documentary Being Jewish in France.



• The big Hindi movie opening at Fresh Pond this weekend is Agent Vinod, a big-time action adventure movie featuring Saif Ali Khan as the title character and the lovely Kareena Kapoor as his leading lady. There's apparently a little bit of controversy in that it's not opening in Pakistan, although the filmmakers claim it's free of anything likely to offend India's neighbor.

My plans? Maybe wait until the crowd clears out after the weekend for The Hunger Games, hit BUFF and John Dies at the End on Thursday and probably do some catch-up over the weekend and in between (whether in theaters or that massive pile of discs next to me). Oh, and I'll try to get to Wings, because it's great, although I've already got it on Blu-ray.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 March 2011 - 31 March 2011

It's festival time! Two noteworthy festivals begin in Boston tonight (well, one in Boston and the other in Cambridge, and the one in Boston soon moves to Somerville, but you get the general idea), and unfortunately it's hard to make both of them, let alone the other worthwhile things playing this weekend.

• The bigger festival is The Boston Underground Film Festival, in its lucky thirteenth year. The annual orgy of strange and transgressive cinema will be occupying to screens at Kendall Square, and it's actually possible to see every feature there with a little effort - the only things not having repeat showings are today's opening night screening of Hobo with a Shotgun and Lucky McKee's The Woman on Friday (the 25th). Other notable features (to me, at least) are Indonesian exploitation documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed (paired with an example of the genre, Twilight People); Chop, from the writer of Deadgirl; two bits of madness from Japanese cult directors in the shape of Sion Sono's Cold Fish and Yoshihiro Nishimura's Helldriver; recent Chlotrudis honoree Larry Fessenden presenting (and appearing in) James McKenney's Satan Hates You; and Argentinian post-apocalyptic dark comedy Phase7.
  
  Some of these may not seem totally underground - Phase7, for instance, comes pretty directly from SXSW - but few are likely to show theatrically elsewhere, and the environment can be raucous. For a festival of its size, it's extremely well-run, with a well-thought-out schedule and a great option for those who would like to see a lot of movies for not a lot of money (the $35 "recession special" pass, which gets you into all the encores from Monday the 28th to Thursday the 31st). The films themselves may not be for everyone, but many are surprisingly good.



• The other festival this weekend is Irish FIlm Festival Boston, which opens tonight (Thursday the 24th) with Parked at the Stuart Street Playhouse before moving to the Somerville Theatre for Friday through Sunday. If you're going, be careful with your schedule; its shows sometimes have about ten minutes of turnaround time in between, which means one starting late can mess up the rest of the day.



• Just to potentially confuse matters, Kendall Square adds White Irish Drinkers to Kill the Irishman on its marquee. Writer/director John Gray will be introducing/QA-ing the Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon shows, but remember - the festival at Kendall is the Underground. Irish is in Boston and Somerville.



• Also opening at Kendall Square and the Coolidge Corner Theatre is Win Win, a Sundance comedy starring Paul Giamatti about a part-time high school wrestling coach who thinks he has found a way to parlay that into a payday. It's got a nice supporting cast, too, including Amy Ryan, Melanie Lynskey, Jeffrey Tambor, and Bobby Cannavale.
  
  The Coolidge also opens Orgasm Inc., a documentary about shady goings-on at a pharmaceutical company searching for a Viagra for women. A "classic" intersection of horror and blaxploitation plays midnights Friday and Saturday with Blacula. The Goethe-Institut Sunday morning movie is Mahler on the Couch, a comedy about the composer driven to consult Sigmund Freud over his wife's infidelities. And Monday night, there is a special presentation of Gen Silent, a locally-produced documentary about homosexual elders facing a return to the closet in order to get by in the assisted living system.



• It's a relatively quiet week in the mainstream theaters, with just two new releases. Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch gets a whole bunch of screens, including most of the premiums. It's certainly spiffy-looking, with every frame looking like it was taken out of an exceptionally cool comic; whether there's steak to the sizzle - or just cheesecake - seems to be a different question. For the kids, the adaptation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules appears pretty close to exactly one year after the movie of the first, but what can you do - there's five books in the series and kids grow up so quick. Boston Common also picks up Jane Eyre on a pair of screens, and reduces The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman to one show a day (at an awkward 5:10pm at that).



• The Brattle, Harvard Film Archive, and ArtsEmerson seem to be handing things off between each other during the coming week. First, the Archive will have Aaron Katz in town on Friday and Saturday; he'll introduce his new film, Cold Weather on Friday and a double feature of his two previous films, Dance Party, USA and Quiet City; the Brattle opens Cold Weather on Wednesday for a five-day run that stretches to Sunday April 3rd. I'm looking forward to this one; Quiet City was pretty good and Cold Weather is described as having a big Sherlock Holmes influence.
  
  With Katz at the Archive, the Claude Chabrol series moves to the Paramount Theater on Friday and Saturday, with 2004's The Bridesmaid and 1970's La Rupture playing both nights (but not, I don't think, as a double feature). The series concludes Sunday evening back at the Archive, with 1975's Pleasure Party.
  
  Before it gets Cold Weather, the Brattle has a set of interesting screenings. Friday through Sunday, they will alternate a new print of Sally Potter's gender-bending fantasy Orland with early and late screenings of Black Swan. On Monday, Independent Film Festival Boston hosts a special (and free!) preview of Super, James Gunn's comedy about a loser who becomes a superhero to impress his girlfriend; Gunn will be there for your edification and interrogation. And on Tuesday, the DocYard has director Darius Marder on-hand with Loot, a documentary about World War II vets who stole and hid treasures during their service and the amateur treasure hunter helping them to recover them.
  
  ArtsEmerson sticks to the classics for their family-friendly Saturday afternoon show, with a pairing of Albert Lamorisse's "The Red Baloon" and "White Mane". On Sunday night, they present their regular Avant-Garde Showcase; "Images of Nature, or The Nature of the Image: Canadian Artists at Work", eighty minutes of experimental short films culled from forty years of Canadian explorations of film and the environment.
  
  Which just leaves the Archive, who on Monday will have visiting lecturer Dominique Cabrera in person for Folle Embellie, in which a French asylum is evacuated as German troops approach during World War II. Their schedule also lists Ross McElwee present during a VES screening of Bright Leaves on Tuesday the 29th; no guests are expected for Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness on Wednesday, which is to be expected, as it is a Japanese silent film from 1927.



• The MFA wraps up their Francophone Film Festival Friday night (the 25th), but starts the Boston Turkish Film Festival tonight. Twelve different features an a collection of short films will screen intermittently between now and 10 April. There will also be screenings of Mahler on the Couch on Saturday, rescheduled from two weeks previously (the tickets from 11 March screening will be honored), and Bill Cunningham New York, a preview screening of a documentary on the 80-year-old fashion photographer.



• It's a bit out of the way for car-less people like me, but the Monogamy opens at the West Newton Cinema. It's about a wedding photographer who starts a service in which people hire him to stalk them. Odd. It's only playing two shows a day out there in the suburbs, so it's really being buried. Also out in the burbs, Oxy-Morons continues its unlike run, down to one show a day at 10pm (and weekend midnights) at the Showcase Cinema in Revere.



• Stuart Street hasn't put their schedule for tomorrow out yet, so the second-run shuffle looks pretty small - Biutiful opens at the Arlington Capitol.

My schedule is pretty simple - I'm at BUFF all week. Say hi if you see me, though I likely won't recognize you. I may try and catch one of the early shows at Boston Common on Saturday or Sunday, or use the open day in my schedule on Wednesday for something else, but I suspect sleep will be a more attractive option.