This Those Weeks In Tickets: 5 February 2018 - 18 March 2018

Well, I wasn't going to allow myself to fall behind like this, but festivals and vacations and such got us here, catching up on six weeks:

5 February - 11 February
12 February - 18 February
19 February - 25 February
26 February - 4 March
5 March - 11 March
12 March - 18 March



Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool was only in town for a week or so, and it got a little attention because it was expected to get some Oscar nominations for Annette Bening or at least Elvis Costello, and they both had an argument. Still, well worth a watch. It probably would have made sense to hit the sack immediately afterward, but instead I opted to put a pin in the first leg of my plans to watch all my discs of entries in series that I haven't finished with The Vanished Murderer, which... wasn't good. A real disappointment, honestly.

After that, it was time for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, which was as always a mixed bag. The opening weekend included Junk Head & Ayla on Friday; Flora, The Gateway, and Andover on Saturday; and Kill Order on Sunday. That's not a festival schedule that entirely fills the weekend, but I also tried to catch all of the Oscar-nominated shorts. I missed the docs - you've really got to buy ahead of time when stuff's in the GoldScreen - but I did manage to catch the Animated Oscar Shorts as well as the Live Action Shorts.



The next week was also pretty much all festival, with Beyond Skyline on Monday; Space Detective & Darken on Tuesday; Before We Vanish & Tangent Room on Wednesday; Division 19 & Paradoxical on Thursday; Framed on Friday; and Closer Than We Think, Muse, and Canaries on Saturday. That's a busy week, but one of the reasons I am kind of down on letting it eat an entire week is that we're starting to see a lot of Chinese New Year releases, and I was only able to get to two of the three that came out that weekend - The Monkey King 3 and Monster Hunt 2 - around the festival.

And then, after the "festival" part was over, it was time for the Marathon! As I say in the roundup, I kind of got to the point where I decided that the event probably wasn't for me anymore early this time around, because who wants to see movies with people who think they can make a Spielberg classic better with their call-outs, especially if so little is going to be on film? Supposedly, the Somerville Theatre will be playing a larger part next year, but we'll see how it's looking closer to the time. Anyway, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Time Machine '60, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, "Haley", The Lost World '25, Marjorie Prime, and Bride of Frankenstein got us to midnight...



... and Shivers, Night of the Living Dead, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", World WIthout End, The Little Shop of Horrors, Yellow Submarine, Army of Darkness, 20 Million Miles to Earth, and Looper got us to noon or so.

I half-considered doing another movie during the afternoon, but figured I'd be better off doing laundry, packing, and such before heading out on vacation - at one point, I actually planned to get on a plane that evening and let the whole "being exhausted from being up 36 hours" help me sleep on the flight and beat jet lag, but I didn't go that route. Instead, I headed to New Orleans, which isn't entirely my bag - a lot of the cool tourist stuff is in the French Quarter, which is bigger on drinking and noise than I am. Pretty great food, though, and I had fun visiting Steamboat Natchez, The National WWII Museum, The Louisiana State Museum (well, the ones that were in NOLA and open: The Calibdo, The Presbytere, The 1850 House, and The Jazz Museum at the Old Mint), The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, a swamp tour, Preservation Hall, the Sculpture Garden, and jazz at Snug Harbor. A full week, and I ate beignets the way I eat poutine in Montreal, at a rate completely unsustainable if they were common in the Boston area.

And, yeah, I saw a couple movies while I was there, both because I'm not drinking after dark the way a lot of tourists are and because I was feeling kind of spoiler-averse. So I went to Black Panther on Wednesday and Annihilation on Friday. There was only really one cinema particularly close to the hotel, Regla's "Cinebarre Cafe", which charges premium prices (or at least, enough for MoviePass not to cover it) and has table service, but doesn't really feel that much like a fancy spot in the theaters. Decent enough, though, and the movies were pretty darn good.

Black Panther

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 21 March 2018 in Regal Canal Place #9 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Separate the Marvel stuff from this movie - and, believe it or not, you can do that fairly easily; you really don't need Captain America: Civil War even though important setup happened there - and you've still got something pretty terrific: An African-influenced bit of science fantasy that manages to balance two concepts extremely well. Black Panther's Afro-futuristic setting both asks us to imagine a world where Africa wasn't colonized and developed independently with all of its resources and, for those who would point out that this is a fantasy, it wrestles with the idea of what obligation the fortunate have to the less fortunate, and what the best course is when that good fortune comes after a lifetime of denial.

It's a non-DC superhero movie, so you can guess where it will land to a certain extent, but it's also a pretty great bit of pulp entertainment, with great big action that draws from both totemic fantasy and dizzying science fiction, set mainly against beautiful African (approximating) vistas but traveling enough to have fun set-pieces in London and Busan. Writer/director Ryan Coogler occasionally slows things down enough to both get some background out and let a character articulate his or her point of view, but it never becomes drab, and even the characters who supply a lot of the jokes are seldom played for fools. The movie never gets dumb to have fun.

It's also got a cast worth loving; Chadwick Boseman and Martin Freeman return from Civil War and both kick things up a notch as the title character and the token American ally (although, I must admit, as a fan of the comics I much prefer Everett K. Ross as a State Department liaison in way over his head than as a CIA operative), but Michael B. Jordan makes a pretty darn charismatic villain, the trio of Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, and Letitia Wright are great as the warrior women who have their king's back in different ways, and even the smaller roles are well-filled.

Annihilation

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 23 March 2018 in Regal Canal Place #6 (first-run, DCP)

Right now, I think Annihilation is pretty darn good, and I'm only half-joking when I say that I want to see what I think of it after it's given me a few new varieties of nightmare. That is to say, it may wind up seeming even better.

And, make no mistake, it is pretty great as it sinks its audience into a situation that finds something more to disturb in every moment - a returning husband who is just demonstrably more shaken and traumatized in every moment until he starts shaking apart, a team of people who are not only all damaged goods but seemingly aware of it in the least reassuring way possible, chimera-like plants and animals that display a certain beauty despite verging on the unearthly... and then it starts in with the things that are more obviously horrific, split right down the middle between the familiar and the really terrible idea executed extremely well.

Then things get weird.

Much of this movie reminds me of Sunshine, the screenplay writer/director Alex Garland wrote for Danny Boyle, especially how both feature rational, capable people more or less destroyed by getting too close to something that they can't possibly grasp, whether it be the awesome power of the sun or an incursion onto Earth by a life form that not only may lack comprehensible motivation but which may be so different that the lecture Natalie Portman's Lena gives to her students about the cell being the basic building block of life may not apply. It's also got a nifty cast, an aesthetic that veers between practical and impossible while using piercing light to put the audience off-guard, and a last act that is visually stunning but also challenging in how it pushes into bizarre situations without much in the way of explanation at all.

Indeed, it's so willing to trust the audience to catch up then that it makes the blemish of its framing device a little more noticeable; maybe the flashbacks/forwards help the audience identify with Lena more because they see something in her relationship with her husband, but it both could have come out in conversation with the other characters and seems kind of small, conventional potatoes against the rest of what's going on. It's hardly a problem (though the film only going that far is apparently why some of the producers and its studio lost a certain amount of faith in it), especially when it's so great otherwise



My flight back was fairly early on Tuesday morning, although I was soon headed back downtown because Federal Express wouldn't deliver a parcel with my Red Sox season ticket package while I was away, and that meant going halfway back to the airport. The FedEx facility is pretty near the seaport, but Icon was only open for the very early and very late shows that day, so I couldn't give it a look. Weird schedule. So I wound up headed to Boston Common to do a double feature of Game Night and Operation Red Sea, not yet aware that the latter would have a pretty impressive run there.

I mostly let go of scrambling to see all the Oscar nominees before the ceremony, because feeling like I was fulfilling an obligation would probably lead me to not actually enjoying Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name even if I wouldnormally go for them. I did wind up going for the Documentary Shorts, although their length and scheduling meant seeing the first three at the Coolidge on Thursday night and the last two at the ICA on Saturday, where they wound up playing in reverse order, confusing some of the folks there. I might have done that double feature, but I'd already purchased tickets for a different double feature a few weeks earlier, with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying The General and A Page of Madness at the Somerville Theatre.

Sunday would be Oscar Night, but instead of catch-up my matinees were a couple of foreign oddities. I got up early to take the T out to Brookline for the Goethe-Institut screening of Wild Mouse, which I might not have prioritized if the Wilde Maus roller coaster in Wiener Prater hadn't caught my eye when I was on vacation in Vienna last fall. That's probably not the best reason to see a movie, but, on the other hand, if that can be a reason for you to see a movie, you really should make the effort. After that, it was up the Green Line for Detective Chinatown 2, and then home for the Oscars. Which were fun; I like the positive vibe Kimmel brings to it and years where, even if one movie wins a lot, nothing really dominates.

The General (1926)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 3 March 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Alloy Orchestra, digital)

I know the Alloy Orchestra uses this to get people to come out for the back end of a double feature which is somewhat more esoteric, but it's nevertheless a great experience on its own - a fantastic movie and they've honed their propulsive score to perfection.

Other than that, what to add to the other times I've talked about this movie? It's a ton of fun, the choreography and stuntwork is fantastic, and even in an era where we probably want to be a little more conscious about presenting the Confederacy as heroes, there's something absurd enough about the way Buster Keaton presents them to make it go down a bit easier.

Full review at EFC (from 2004).

Kurutta ippêji (A Page of Madness)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen on 3 March 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Alloy Orchestra, digital)

Ever since learning about the Japanese tradition of narrated spent films, I've wondered if seeing something like A Page of Madness without a benshi is a bit off the original intent. It's a fascinating film to watch and the lack of intertitles makes it feel like a pure, abstracted silent, but maybe it wasn't meant to be quite so abstract.

It's intriguing nonetheless, spending most of its time in a mental hospital where a humble janitor seems to have more empathy for the patients than either the doctors or their visitors, particularly a woman who seems to have snapped after losing a child. It can sometimes straddle a fine line between gawking and sympathy in how the inmates are observed, and the story could occasionally use that narrator as it presents alternate outcomes.

It's often striking, though, especially for how willing the filmmakers are to muddle which side of the bars one is on from shot to shot. There will often be no visual signifier to distinguish looking out and looking in, which both makes it easier to see insanity consume the seemingly sane and to wonder about often this sort of commitment is less helpful than convenient, or if the cruelty toward the patients is more dangerous than their afflictions.

The Alloy Orchestra were quite good, as usual, even if certain bits of the score did seem a bit more awkwardly "oriental" than is comfortable from western performers, although that diminished the deeper one got into the film.



The next week was a little more relaxed, starting with a sort of mini-theme that nobody involved would have planned: On Tuesday night, I hit the Brattle to see Skyfall on 35mm film as part of their series on Oscar nominated winning cinematographer Roger Deakins. It looked fantastic, obviously, but it also served as a bit of a contrast to Agent Mr. Chan the next night, which was a straight up James Bond spoof, something a little less relevant in an era that has already seen the "Bond Begins" of Casino Royale.

The weekend was about going to theaters I don't hit that often. Early Man was down to just matinee shows in the small room at Fresh Pond, and it's a bummer it didn't have more success here; it's quality work from Aardman, although I didn't realize that it had been a decade since Nick Park's last directing credit. Later that evening, I headed to the Seaport to catch Red Sparrow on their big "Icon-X" screen, and returned the next morning to see A Wrinkle in Time in 3D. The picture is extraordinary (for digital), although that's really not the place to go to see how kids are going to react to that movie.

Skyfall

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 6 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre #1 (Roger Deakins, 35mm)

There are a lot of reasons why Skyfall is an all- timer as far as James Bond movies are concerned, but it was playing the Brattle as part of a Roger Deakins series, so you'll forgive me for mainly focusing on how it looks amazing. It was on film, too, a pleasant surprise considering that it's not always a sure thing that actual prints exist when the movie is of such recent vintage.

I am, personally, very glad that this one in particular was good, because my second viewing was actually in London, at the Imax theater not far from Parliament where some of the action took place, the sort of thing that sticks a movie in one's head just a tiny bit more.

One thing that really struck me was how it disassembled both classic Bond and the newer pictures in order to ultimately arrive at a version of the franchise that is both traditional and very modern. It's an impressive balance that they couldn't really achieve again with Spectre, and I hope like heck that Danny Boyle can hit this spot for Daniel Craig's expected last go around.



The next week would be pretty quiet - it snowed again, so I didn't mess around for a couple of days - but it led to a decent weekend: I caught Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story on Friday night, which I enjoyed, and then Tomb Raider on Saturday, heading out to South Bay because they had the cheapest 3D show. Probably won't be doing that much in the future; it's a hike and I like the way that the theaters are set up at other places a lot better than that spot.

Tomb Raider (2018)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 17 March 2018 in AMC South bay #6 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

I wouldn't say that Tomb Raider doesn't deserve Alicia Vikander; it's got the makings of a top-flight adventure series despite being a second run at something adapted from a video game and having someone like Vikander in the lead can only help. But it absolutely needs her; in an age where new big-screen pulp shows up every week and only a few have truly great action or effects, someone who can grab the audience between the running, jumping, and punching is a must.

Tomb Raider isn't one of the great ones; its story is one part lost-parent quest and one part vague, almost incidental conspiracy. The filmmakers show only the vaguest interest in the mythological story being chased down, the sort is moved forward by people doing something dumb just to make things happen, and it absolutely involves a collapsing floor that is apparently not a big deal on the way out of the trap-filled tomb. The action is fine but often uncreative; you'd think they would pick up some guys to help with that during a stop in Hong Kong.

There's no denying it's got all the pieces, though, with a star who always makes her scenes worth watching improving a film that, even if it seldom hits the highest heights, seldom screws things up. With a supporting cast for the first that includes Kristen Scott Thomas, Walton Goggins, Nick Frost, Dominic West, Daniel Wu, and Derek Jacobi, some of whom could come back, it's certainly well-placed to be a decent film series if the producers fine-tune it in the right ways.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival Days #10-11: The Thon!

And so, the long road back to getting this blog current begins by looking back to February, and something just a bit under 24 hours worth of science fiction films with an unusually late start time after all the blizzard activity. Remember that? Boy it sucked!

I'll be better prepared to deal with it next year, if only because I'll be living I now live a block away from the Somerville and am able to use my own bathroom if I so choose, and not looking at a 45-minute walk should the state shut down public transit again. Which, if I recall correctly, was the case on Sunday, although by then the snow had mostly stopped coming down and folks were shoveling out. It wasn't actually terrible to sleep in on that day and then walk to Davis Square in the middle of the street because people were staying off the roads. I gather I was the exception, though, because it was a relatively sparse crowd, especially in terms of the old-timers. Which is a shame, because they're the ones with the strong emotional attachment to the event, whereas I'd mostly be grumbling about being out fifty bucks if I couldn't make it.

That's kind of why I've really had little trouble pushing this set of reviews out for months until it can't be much more than a set of quick hits; there just isn't that much for me to say about it anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like going every year, because it's seeing a lot of films from my favorite genre in a relatively short period of time, but it's not a time when I see friends whose paths I don't otherwise cross, I'm not likely to discover something new and exciting there, and even the rituals I like (and, guys, you have some stupid traditions) have become sort of old hat - the sort of thing where whoever is up on stage is asking for a reaction rather than provoking one. Now that I've done the running diaries and been there enough that there are no surprises left, there's just not much to say that I haven't said at some point in the past decade and a half.

That's no knock on those for whom this is one of the biggest film events on the calendar; a lot of the examples I might use for events that excite me a lot more involve traveling at least to New York (or Montréal, or Austin, or San Francisco...), and there aren't a lot of us who are going to do that for movies. Also, I started going at 26 or 27; it might have gotten a nostalgia lock-in had I moved to Boston earlier. It's no Fantasia for me, but I can see how it might be someone else's big deal.

Snowpiercer

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

If nothing else, Snowpiercer yielded the best tweet of the festival:

Snowpiercer is a damn lie. A train that runs in the snow? I can't suspend my disbelief that much. #sf40

— steve spezzano (@spezz) February 15, 2015

Four Nine months later, it's still making me chuckle.

The film itself remains pretty great as well, one of my favorites of 2013, a fantasy that is more continually inventive than almost all others sharing its grimy, dystopian aesthetic. I read complaints on the message board afterward about how it threw away good characters, but I tend to see that more as director Bong Joon-ho and the cast got the audience to care more about short-timers and cannon fodder than many do. It's a pretty terrific movie that, despite being in English, was probably both too Korean and too French to be a massive hit, but I wish it had been given more of a chance in America.

Full review on eFilmCritic, post about seeing it in France here

2001: A Space Odyssey

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 70mm)

I don't know if the Somerville Theatre will be getting this same print back in September when they show it again, but I'm going to be one heck of a lot closer to the front row than the balcony when I see it then. I've been fortunate enough to see this movie on film a number of times, and it has yet to be less than thoroughly engrossing. This time around, a good part of that was related to the previous night's presentation by Douglas Trumbull (who also did a brief Q&A after the feature), admiring how the film's effects work really holds up.

As truly great as 2001 is from a technical perspective, that's not why I find myself l liking it more every time I see it. Stanley Kubrick captures the highly practical, mission-focused nature of space exploration, but omits a great deal of the curiosity and passion that drives it, and while that leaves much of the film dry and procedural, it also means that the ultimate confrontation with the unknown is neither a triumph or a warning, but a reminder that this sort of encounter is beyond human understanding. It's Kubrick and Clarke looking at the mysteries of the universe and refusing to reduce them to a comprehensible scale.

It's kind of an interesting choice, given that directed evolution and the attempts by junior species to match their progenitors is a major part if the movie: While David Bowman is seeking the ancient astronauts who created and placed the monoliths, he is reliant on HAL, who is still rather akin to the proto-humans at the start off the film - capable of a great many things, but still needing shepherding (even if that takes the form of a hard reset). None of these steps are completely analogous, at least from our limited human perspective, and it's taken me a few viewings to start to grasp 2001 beyond the exceptionally executed hard science fiction which makes the finale not seem like hippie psychedelia with more apparent than actual depth.

I still kind of think that, admittedly, although I also suspect that might not be a bad way to approximate getting to a place that the human mind can only partially comprehend.

What I thought on seeing it in 2008, at SF/33

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

Some year, I'm going to see this on 35mm with live accompaniment and really have the time to write about it properly. This does not seem to be that occasion.

Then again, that may be saving me from writing something truly embarrassing. As with 2001, this is a movie that clearly benefits from being seen under the best circumstances with time for reflection, which the marathon doesn't exactly provide. And, who knows, maybe by the time I can write about it, I'll be in a spot where I genuinely like the last act, rather than worrying that is excusing the earlier inconsistencies in the crudest way possible.

The last time I saw this, a year and a half ago.

Fantasticherie di un passeggiatore solitario

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, digital)

This was the film scheduled to play on "sorry, we forgot the movie, and don't be so negative!" Tuesday, and it probably would have been a better fit there than the main marathon. The filmmakers' ambitions seem just a bit higher than what they can actually accomplish, which can be kind of rough for an audience that has just sat through the films that were masterful to accept. Writer/director Paolo Gaudio seems to have ideas about saying big things and creating a narrative that spans multiple time periods, but doesn't quite have the innate or learned skill to knit them together so that the trio feel like a unit.

Still, "not as good as the previous three movies" is a tough standard to hold any film by a fairly young director to, and I suspect that given a more fitting venue and slot, Fantasticherie would create a fairly decent impression. Gaudio and his crew make fairly good staging decisions within a limited budget, for instance, and the mythology being built up is just interesting enough to keep the audience curious. There is some nice work by the cast, though often more among the secondary characters than the leads.

I suspect that the audience probably would have responded better to Boy 7 in this slot, as may have been the original plan (but who really knows what was up with that mess). It's the sort of movie where my good feelings toward it are less an impulse to praise than to encourage - keep working at this and you'll eventually make a good movie! - but it is better than most movies in that category, even if it's hard to tell next to the classics.

Them!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

I think we passed midnight at some point during Them!, and I'm not sure that's entirely appropriate; it's more a matinee than late-night movie. I wonder if it might have played at around 2pm were the marathon on its usual schedule, and what the reaction might have been.

Them! is an interesting case in terms of how this sort of 1950s B-movie is perceived. It is, when you look at it, pretty goofy: It's got a an exclamation point in the title, and giant man-eating ants are a pretty ridiculous monster even if you've never heard of the square-cube law. That probably would have gotten it sneered at back in 1954, but later generations could look at its cast of characters - cops, scientists, and soldiers - and treat it as just another one of the dozens of similar, mockable movies that studios and independent producers made during the period, and maybe even assume that is among the worst, because giant ants.

But here's the thing: This movie was able to become well-known and emblematic of its era in part because it's executed better than most of its contemporaries. Allegedly-smart people doing stupid things is kept to minimum, and the writers seldom take their eyes off the prize for a silly and conventional subplot. The visual effects absolutely look sixty years old, but they seldom seem sloppy, with corners cut because the audience for this sort of movie isn't worthy of respect. That extends to director Gordon Douglas, who could stage fine action scenes and had no problem with going for genuine scares, doing a pretty fair job of attaining them.

In short, Them! is good enough to get booked, shown on TV, and remembered years later, good enough to be the one people remember when looking back. It will often get associated with the more typically poor work done at the same time, but deserves a bit better.

Moonraker

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

Moonraker, on the other hand, is roughly as bad as its reputation, close to the nadir of the James Bond franchise during the Roger Moore years: Making a stab toward pop-culture topicality with its Space Shuttle-centered plot, bringing back a one-off character from the previous film and realizing the same shtick doesn't usually work twice, and crossing the line between grandiosity and self-parody without being nearly funny enough to make it work.

Its worst sin, though, is probably being boring. The scenes of Moore blithely and blandly walking around and discovering the (uninteresting) villain's plot are even more leaden than usual, the ogling beautiful women feels more like just a thing these films are expected to do than something genuinely lascivious (where Bond being a bit of a creep is a sort of forbidden pleasure), and the finale... I just feel sorry for it and everyone involved. It's the Bond franchise trying to do Star Wars, but without the speed and energy that Lucas and his crew brought. I'm not sure how much James Bond was thought of as a gold standard in action/adventure versus something commercially successful, but it really should have been trying to top what was being done around it, rather than coming off as a pale imitation.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

I may have wound up nodding off at some point during this one - it was getting to be that time of night - because I honestly don't remember how Klaatu wound up at the boarding house befriending Helen. I suspect that may be for the best - I can't think of a way that leaving one's spaceship and insanely powerful robot unattended in the middle of Washington wouldn't come across as silly - but it's necessary in order to see Klaatu as human, or his planet's equivalent, rather than as just a patrician messenger.

That's something the movie needs desperately, because otherwise it seems to be either struggling with its own message or so keenly committed to it that it cannot step outside for a moment to really make the most important observation plain. Sure, the story is well-known - alien comes to Earth and warns that his people will sterilize the planet should we not disarm, and it's very anti-war and the metaphor that the Cold War will lead to the end of the world is right there - but the part that is often overlooked is that he does this with a threat of violence; in the 1950s, we recognized the danger we faced but could not think of any alternatives; even peaceful, advanced cultures could only function at the point of a sword. It seems Klaatu backs down just because he realizes that all of humanity does not to deserve to be destroyed, especially pretty single mothers and their curious sons, rather than recognizing that the whole system is crazy. Or maybe I'm missing what everyone else can see instinctively.

Still, that high-minded material which hints at thematic richness as well as a good moral for the end of the story is relatively rare for the genre on film, and having it married to the skillful execution that this movie features is rare. Part of that comes from Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal being more than a hair or two better in the main roles than you might expect from something that looks like a well-intentioned B-movie, but a large part is on director Robert Wise, a steady-handed workhorse who didn't necessarily put a stamp on his movies but was so good at everything that he rarely made one that wasn't worth watching, and occasionally ones that were great.

Big Trouble in Little China

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

It was more early than late when this one started, so you can understand the crowd being a little more reserved, not even considering those who were grumbling about it having no place at a science fiction marathon. I have to admit, though, that I spent a lot of time wondering why the people in the crowd most prone to quote along weren't doing so. Didn't they have this whole thing memorized?

Apparently not; this is a highly-specialized genre audience. Whether they were into it or not, though, this is still a tremendously entertaining action/adventure, with director John Carpenter and the writers basically dropping a couple of Americans into the middle of a crazy Hong Kong-style fantasy and Kurt Russell thankfully realizing that he's playing a goofball who doesn't really belong and happily being the butt of every joke. Jack Burton would be an easy character to dislike under certain circumstances, but Russell really hits the spot where he can be skeptical and obtuse but still a likable lug. It may overshadow a bit how he is basically the sidekick to Dennis Dun's actual hero, but that's part of the fun. I do kind of wish we saw more of Dun in other movies later on, although some of the other Chinese-American character actors (James Hong, Victor Wong) did become more familiar.

I've always liked this movie, ever since first seeing promos for when it played on Fox, but I liked it even more this time, having seen a few more of the flat-out crazy Hong Kong flicks it resembles versus straight martial-arts action. Carpenter and the gang really seemed to get it here, so that even if it wasn't the audience's favorite genre, there's still no excuse for not saying "son of a bitch must pay" along with Jack Burton at the appropriate time.

The Iron Giant

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

This is still pretty fantastic, and in some ways the narrative that has built up around it has done the rare service of making sure that is reputation is neither over-inflated nor diminished: Its dedicated fanbase never really exploded in later years, certainly not to the point where one could misremember the film as a hit, and while director Brad Bird has made a number of films since, this was his only cel-animated feature, so it doesn't blur into a body of work. The Iron Giant is just its own still-wonderful thing.

And it really is still great. It was a singular movie for its time, as studios which had started feature animation divisions to try and replicate Disney's early-1990s success were shutting them down upon realizing a reputation and infrastructure built over decades would take time to equal, an environment that doesn't seem likely to spawn a movie that means something to its makers. Instead, this thing's heart is all over the screen, whether in terms of being nostalgic for old monster movies or boyhood itself, and the discovery that a person can be something other than what is expected of him, even if it's hard for fifty-foot alien robots.

It's getting received one of those theatrical single-night bookings this year that well-remembered movies occasionally get, with extra footage being advertised. That made me sort of curious, although not quite enough to see it again. Besides, it's awfully close to perfect as it is; how likely is it that new scenes will make it better?

This Island Earth

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

I recall there being some talk, when Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie came out, that This Island Earth either didn't deserve to be the subject of the characters' mockery because it was too good or was at least something that would look good on the big screen rather than being too rough to look at for that long. I must admit to leaning far more toward the latter point of view myself. It's got better production values than many of its brethren, but in terms of being a quality movie, it's no Them!.

This is mostly because it somehow manages to be both boring and nonsensical. What seems like a really unconscionable time is spent on getting the characters to the point where they finally realize that the secret project they're working on its sort of fishy, perhaps because they are so bland individually and as a group that they don't have any life before the film to compare it to. Then things turn, but before the audience has any time to really get into exploring the crazy new world the kidnapped Earth scientists find themselves in, they're escaping and turning around. It feels like 75% stalling, 10% good stuff, 15% an escape that really highlights the issue of why these guys with a faster-than-light spaceship need human scientists. Given that they're almost all giant brain, my only conclusion is that their various cognitive centers have grown too fast apart to be any good for thinking.

It does look pretty good for its period, there's not much denying that - even the special effects where you can see the strings at least display creativity and enthusiasm. There just isn't much time when the guys writing, shooting, and acting out seem nearly as invested in making something exciting to watch as the ones building it.

Edge of Tomorrow

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

There is not much about this film that isn't a lot of fun. Tom Cruise, making use of both the parts of his screen persons that make one want to cheer and those that make one want to punch him in the face? Excellent. Emily Blunt being both great at action and the film's heart? Yep. Fun sidekicks and supporting ensemble? Got it. A script that both comes across as a fun, videogame-derived gimmick but still has emotional stakes and authenticity? Believe it or not. Well-done action, too.

Maybe the only weakness, if it has any, are the fairly generic aliens; they're busy and have the over-articulation you sometimes see from CGI beasties and never really feel like an intelligent race (a common issue with alien-invasion movies that want to use the aliens as a sort of background element). Given what a fun action/sci-fi movie it is otherwise, that's acceptable.

What I said last summer.

The November Man, starring Pierce Brosnan as Not James Bond

I suspect that if you looked at the filmographies of the other actors who played James Bond, you'd find a much higher ratio of "parts which play off having played James Bond" to "time spent playing James Bond" than Pierce Brosnan has. George Lazenby practically makes that a division by zero error, after all. It doesn't seem that way, though - this really seems to be Brosnan's thing, enough that when I started seeing posters for The November Man, my first thought was "again?", which by a strictly numeric perspective was kind of unfair.

Part of it, I think, is timing. Brosnan being replaced in the role coincides fairly well with the big rise in populist movie criticism that blogging, podcasting, and the like made possible. There are a lot of us (you are reading the scribblings of a database developer with spare time, after all) writing about pop culture that would like some hits, which has us writing about material less highbrow than would have made it into film criticism journals back when print was king, and both the writers' and readers' tastes are much more mainstream, and as hobbyists, we're not doing a while lot to educate ourselves on what happened before we were born/watching movies, especially if we went to school to study computers rather than film and/or writing.

That said, I do think that more people spending more time writing about movies, and reading about the ones they love, has made some smarter, more thoughtful movie fans and changed the way studios make movies, at least a little. In decades past, a producer wanting to make The November Man a box-office hit might have shied away from Brosnan, not wanting to confuse the mainstream audience; now they figure that there are viewers for whom this subversion is a selling point, and a cottage industry of folks willing to explain why it's cool to whoever might have been confused.

On other hand, Brosnan's position among the actors to play the role is unique. Sean Connery originated the role, and to a large extent, it is what he made it. Connery subverting expectations would almost have been dishonest and a betrayal, like there was nothing genuine to the part in the first place. Besides, Bond made Sean Connery into SEAN CONNERY, a superstar whose own image was as big as that of the character, and just as much a topic of any subtext.

After that, you have George Lazenby, who does a straight-faced wink at the audience in his first scene and is basically a stand-in. It's unfair, as he made one of the best movies of the series which could have had an impact on the character, but his one-off-ness and sparse later career makes him and On Her Majesty's Secret Service something to be referenced, not commented upon.

As for Roger Moore - well, he's not James Bond. I jest, a bit, as I've been a bit outspoken about not caring for him in the role, but for a while, he was as much The Saint as Bond, and when memory of that TV series faded, his Bond became such an outlier compared to the less campy takes on either side. Him referencing his time as Bond feels second-hand, a spoof of a spoof, and he even described it in those terms himself. Plus, he aged out of playing Bond-like characters rather quickly, it seems.

Timothy Dalton's an interesting case, because his tenure was short and undeservedly unpopular, and I think it took some time for him to be appreciated, and by the time he was, he'd aged out of Bond-ish roles himself and gained a somewhat separate fandom for material like Flash Gordon and The Rocketeer which are rather different from his cool take on 007. So when he does up on Chuck in a Bond-derived role, it's as much about how Timothy Dalton is funny and makes everything better as playing against type.

Brosnan, though, is an interesting case in that his emergence in the part came after enough of a period of inactivity that he could be James Bond to a new generation, defining it without being seen as a reaction to what came before in a way that Lazenby, Moore, and Dalton couldn't, but not winding up bigger than the role like Connery (the same applies to Daniel Craig, but it's early to talk about his legacy). circumstances had him being compared and contrasted to Bond before he ever dawned the tux, as he was originally expected to take the part for The Living Daylights, but was under contract to NBC, making Remington Steele arguably his first meta-Bond.

I think he's got more of a bone to pick with the part, though. I'm not a particular fan of his run, but he's got some great moments in them that suggest he would really have liked to get Daniel Craig's scripts; if memory serves me, he tended to play the part ever-straighter as the movies got more ridiculous. He actually did The Tailor of Panama, a John le Carré spy story, before he was done playing Bond, and there were persistent [overblown] rumors that he and Quentin Tarantino would do a by-the-book adaptation of Casino Royale before MGM locked down the rights. He eventually did The Matador and now this.

So, why is all this prologue worth talking about? Basically, because The November Man does serve as sort of a response to the Bond series, especially as they were when Brosnan was in the lead. His tenure lasted roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, so while his movies were more serious in time than some of what came before, it was a matter of taste. Espionage movies were escapist and abstract, with terrorism a local problem rather than a global one, and the Tom Clancy stuff we saw on TV during the gulf war seeming cool. Everything else was bubbling up under the surface, but we didn't see it.

Even by the end of the century, perceptions were starting to change - real spies were not nearly so capable as 007, apparently, nor nearly as gentlemanly. And while Devereaux is still quite the super-spy, he's ever trait we may not like about James Bond turned up to 11 - dismissive, cruel, willing to use his license to kill indiscriminately - close to a psychopath let loose on the world. And he knows it -

SPOILERS!

When administering the coup de grace, he isn't taking about ethics, doing things the right way and avoiding the death of innocent people. He's protecting the world he knows and understands, even if it is a screwed-up system teetering on the brink. There's no place for him in a peaceful world, or even one like the religiously-aligned conflict the villain describes.

!SRELIOPS

It's an impressively cynical take on the genre, and probably nearly as far from Bill Granger's series as it is from Bond. But it's at least executed well-enough, despite its rough patches, that I wouldn't mind seeing another, especially if they keep this one's time.

The November Man

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 August 2014 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)

The November Man is, at times, an impressively taut spy thriller, clearly owing a debt to James Bond even if you put star Pierce Brosnan aside, though it plays up the murky, cynical aspects much better. But while it's pretty good, it's also a movie where the title can seem unclear even after someone has a line that starts with "we called you 'the November man' because". The filmmakers tends to use ambiguity for good more often than bad, and that's the line between an enjoyably nasty thriller and a potential classic of the genre.

Five years ago, CIA operative Peter Devereaux (Brosnan) retired after after an operation he and protege Mason (Luke Bracey) carried out had an ugly ending despite being technically successful. There's always one last job, though, and in this case it's extracting Natalia Ulanova (Mediha Musliovic), a source he developed in Moscow years ago who has explosive information on Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski), expected to be the next president of Russia, at the behest of old friend Hanley (Bill Smitrovich). The operation is another mess, and soon Devereaux is back in Belgrade with Mason hunting him on behalf of sinister CIA official Perry Weinstein (Will Patton), Federov's assassin Alexa (Amila Terzimehic) trying to erase everyone who knows the details of his past, and everybody trying to get local caseworker Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko) to help find Mira Filipova (Nina Mrdja), the Chechen refugee who can burst everything wide open.

It's not the most complex spy story ever seen, but it is one with a lot of elements in play, so it's genuinely impressive how well director Roger Donaldson and the writers tell the story via action. That doesn't necessarily always mean violence or that people never talk to each other, but Donaldson and company seldom stop the characters actually doing things to stage a fight that's all spectacle or explain the situation to the audience. Everyone's skills, attitudes, and next steps are easy to pick up from what they're doing and how. It's something very gratifying to see in an action movie, and even when a scene is just people talking, there's push and pull so that there's still a feeling of motion. There aren't necessarily a lot of show-stopping "this must have been an expensive logistical nightmare to film" scenes, but there is a steady stream of God chases and shootouts, enough to say something about Devereaux and Mason.

Full review at EFC

British (and Danish!) movies in British Cinemas: Sightseers, The Hunt, and Skyfall

When I went to London for vacation, I sort of had it in the back of my mind that I'd like to see Skyfall while I was there - James Bond in his home territory, so to speak - but didn't actually have plans more more. Sure, I'd look to see what was playing there that wasn't likely to hit the US for a while/at all. I wound up staking out four movies - Gambit, The Hunt, Great Expectations, and Sightseers. Great Expectations didn't happen, but Sightseers was quite the pleasant surprise - having liked both of Ben Wheatley's previous films, being able to see this one well before its first US screenings at Sundance was a nice bonus.

I was also (pleasantly) surprised to see just how wide an opening it got in London, and what a push it seemed to be given: There were posters at every tube stop, while the Curzon Soho was filled with promotion for the movie. Sure, it's a home-grown picture, and I've really got no idea what the major distributors in the UK are and how well they usually do getting movies on screens, but... Well, it's a weird movie, even by dark-british-humour standards.

I also tend to get the impression that the screen churn in the UK is pretty fierce - Great Expectations seemed to lose a lot of showtimes between its 30 November opening date and when I left on 9 December. It seems due, at least in part, to the lack of multiplexes; the nearby site with the most screens seemed to be the Cineworld where I saw Sightseers, a six-plex. It seemed like a lot of places would open the same movie, and then attrition would happen based on how things performed in that neighborhood (heck, The Hunt was playing all over the place, although that seemed to be a deal between its distributor and the Curzon chain). Movies would open up with single off-peak showtimes in some places.

The theaters themselves were pretty nice, though. I certainly wouldn't mind if a place like the Curzon Soho opened somewhere in Cambridge; though the admission price was steep (£14.50 for an evening show, or $23.20 assuming a 1.6 exchange rate) - stupidly, I didn't realize I could use the London Pass there until a couple days later - the snack bar was moderately priced good stuff, and the bar/café/lounge areas were quite the nice places to wait. They offer memberships, too.

The BFI IMAX is apparently the UK's largest screen, and it's impressively big, maybe a little larger than the New England Aquarium's IMAX screen. I was running too late to really scope the amenities out, but it had a bar/café that was packed right up until it was time for the show to start, and though run by Odeon, it wasn't quite so self-service as the place where I saw Gambit. Like that theater, there was assigned seating, and they put me right next to a couple despite the whole row being open two minutes before showtime. I spent the movie in C17 rather than C18; hope they didn't mind.

More fun with concessions: They don't put ice in your soda unless you specifically ask for it, and the cheese dip used for nachos at the BFI IMAX was creamy and roughly seventy-four times as good as the hyper-processed yellow stuff American theaters use. American theaters: Get your act together on this! Also, you are offered a choice between "Salty" and "Sweet" when ordering your popcorn, and I mildly regret not trying the latter at some point, because what is that? Just popcorn with sugar on it?

Anyway, it turned out to be a fun and busy moviegoing week considering that you'd think I would have other new and different things to do.

Sightseers

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 December 2012 in Cineworld Fullham Road #6 (first-run, digital)

Ben Wheatley's previous two films weren't everyone's cup of tea, and he hasn't exactly gone conventional with Sightseers. It's quite often as funny as it is twisted (or, perhaps, vice versa), overflowing with strange, messy, disturbing romantic comedy.

Tina (Alice Lowe) and Chris (Steve Oram) are going on holiday after being together for a few months, despite the protestations of Tina's mother Carol (Eileen Davis). Odd, considering the pair are in their mid-thirties, but it comes as no surprise that neither has dated much; they've got that way about them. As much as Tina's the one who has seldom left her mother's side, Chris's outsized reaction to someone at the tram museum littering is the first hint that their caravan trip through minor tourist sites in the English countryside is going to be far out of the ordinary.

(Note for my fellow Americans: "caravan" is British for "camper" or "trailer".)

The term "dark comedy" covers a lot of ground, and Sightseers manages to walk most of it. It's one thing for the audience to laugh at something that is objectively horrible because the joke has been set up so well, and the movie does that often and well (often setting it up as the opposite of a joke). That's impressive, but perhaps the niftier trick is how Wheatley and co-writer/co-stars Lowe & Oram twist things so that the audience winds up seeing the road-trip/romantic comedy movie from a decidedly skewed perspective. The weird focus is funny, but not in a snarky, laugh-at-the-form sort of way. The filmmakers are very careful not to drift into parody or cool amorality.

Full review at EFC.

Jagten (The Hunt)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2012 in Curzon Soho #2 (first-run, digital)

One of the main characters in The Hunt (Jagten) is about five years old, and there are times when Thomas Vinterberg's movie almost seems aimed at her, explaining in clear detail why she should never tell a lie. It's not for pre-schoolers, of course; it's a grown-up movie about grown-up things. Vinterberg simply chooses to show how caprice and hysteria can ruin a good man's life rather than engage in it.

Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) is, almost unquestionably, a good man; only his ex-wife bears him any ill will. Formerly a teacher at a now-closed school, he works at a day-care center where the kids all love him. One is Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), the daughter of his best friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen). In fact, Klara starts to get a little too attached, and when Lucas attempts to establish proper boundaries, Klara tells one of the other teachers that Lucas exposed himself to her.

Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindhom don't quite tell the story in a completely straight line - the point-of-view switches between Lucas and Klara during the first half with an occasional detour to Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), Lucas's coworker and potential girlfriend, and a fair amount of the second half puts Lucas's son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm) front-and-center - but there's often a somewhat procedural feel to the movie. It's a "victim procedural" more than a "police procedural", with cops, lawyers, and other officials only rarely drifting through the scene, but a large part of what makes the movie an interesting watch is seeing how this sort of investigation works and where it goes wrong. It's like watching dominoes fall in slow motion as questions meant to bring out the truth sometimes seem to have the worst possible effect of planting misinformation in characters' minds.

Full review at EFC.

Skyfall

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2012 in the BFI IMAX Theatre (first-run, digital Imax)

As I said seeing it a month ago, Skyfall is pretty terrific, a gorgeous action/adventure movie bookended by a pair of especially fantastic action sequences. The script is maybe not quite so great on second blush - a friend wants to know why Bond didn't hit the deck if he could hear M and Eve on the radio in the beginnning, but, hey, melee going on. SPOILERS! I'm more interested in why the heck Q plugged Silva's laptop into the network rather than not only disconnect it from everything but work on it in the tightest Faraday cage he could find.

That sort of thing is kind of the heart of the movie's problem - nobody in it is really good at his or her job. Bond goes to interrogate someone - dead before he can ask a question. The girl dies quickly. M - dead. Family estate and beautiful car - blown up. Spies' covers blown. I guess Kincaid did OK, but... !SRELIOPS

It's still a frequently thrilling adventure that's well more than I expected from Sam Mendes, and I like that it attacks the lack of sentimentality required of this sort of espionage head-on.

One last thing: By the time I saw this, I'd gotten just familiar enough with the Underground to laugh at how the train that Silva crashed apparently had no passengers despite it being the middle of the day and to notice, when the two got out of the tube afterward, that Silva exited via Embankment while Bond came up out of Westminster, and unless a lot more time passed than the movie implied, he actually should have beaten Silva to Parliament.

(Yes, I am nitpicking public transportation in this movie. I must admit, though, that I'm impressed that the producers actually used nearby stations)

This Week In Tickets: 5 November 2012 - 11 November 2012

I joke about living at the Brattle during programs like this, but this week shows just how true that can be. I've got it in the back of my head to treat the Universal Centennial program like a film festival and come back with full reviews, but I'm pretty sure there's just no way to get to everything I want to.



The one time during the week I went anywhere else was on Tuesday, when I worked from home on purpose (it's usually a matter of missing my connection at Alewife) so that I could get to the polling places. Not that one vote in Massachusetts was going to affect the outcome of the Presidential election, but it also couldn't hurt. That it got me able to (just) make a 6:40pm screening of Holy Motors was gravy. Kind of lumpy gravy that isn't quite so hot as you'd like it to be, but worth a try, and I'm glad I saw it then because Kendall Square was cancelling a bunch of shows over the weekend to fit more screenings of Lincoln in. This sort of thing happened before digital, but I imagine copying a DCP from one computer to another is a heck of a lot easier than screwing around with interlinking projectors.

Around that, lots of Universal classics. I finally saw the Spanish Dracula, finding it decent but mostly a curiosity (although I like the Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi Dracula more than I love it). The Brattle had Universal's first feature, Traffic in Souls, coincide with their "Wordless Wednesday" series (it would have been a double feature, but one digital file/DVD was missing). Thursday was a double feature, but the scheduling meant I missed one - boo to a bunch of VHS found footage taking the 9pm slot so you had to be at the theater by five to see The Good Fairy! boo! - and almost considered giving My Man Godfrey a pass, but come on! Similar double-feature scheduling meant I only saw the James Whale Show Boaton Friday, but a double feature of similar films noir, Black Angel and Phantom Lady was no problem on Saturday, even if I did have to wait a bit to see Tremors afterward.

I actually feel bad for missing the Western double feature on Sunday, but I was kind of wiped out after hitting Skyfall and the grocery store and a couple more errands. I'd seen both of them before anyway, but still...

Dracula (1931, Spanish)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, 35mm)

To a certain extent, the Spanish-language version of Dracula is almost better as a legend than an actual movie: Little-seen before being restored in the mid-nineties, one could pass around second-hard descriptions of a more gothic atmosphere coming from shooting at night or superior performances without actually confronting the reality - every lost or secret film is better in the imagining, or as a reward for tracking it down.

Most viewers will spot the biggest difference before the film starts running, though: The more familiar version starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning runs a tight 75 minutes; this one is nearly a half hour longer, and while 104 minutes is not an unusual length for a modern film, consider that the two were made from the same screenplay (give or take a Spanish translation); the Spanish version is 40% longer than the English. And you can tell; seeing them as a double feature, the Browning version feels relatively tight, while George Melford's is much more relaxed, to put it mildly. It drags in the middle, and while Melford, co-director Enrique Tovar Avalos, and cinematographer George Robinson make a movie that arguably looks better than Browning's, one will be hard-pressed to find an extra minute in it that feels like it was left out of the other. The opening scene is fairly telling; it feels like it is following the script very literally, while Browning and his cast had chances to improvise and tighten things up.

I do suspect that the cast here is generally better than its English-language equivalent; Barry Norton's Juan Harker is less a block of wood than David Manners's John, for instance. The tragic exception, unfortunately, is Carlos Villarias as the title character. He actually bears a fairly striking resemblance to Bela Lugosi which is only accentuated by placing him in the same costume and doing the makeup the same way. And that's what he's up against: Despite the producers' initial reluctance to cast him, every choice in pre-production was made with Lugosi in mind - and the script was based upon a play in which Lugosi had excelled - and while there are signs of a potentially more active, virile count in Villarias's performance, it's hard to shake the impression that he's imitating Lugosi, even if the reality is that he has little choice in the matter.

And so, the Spanish-language Dracula has a hard time emerging from the shadow of its brother, though it might be impressive enough if seen on its own.

Dracula (1931, English)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, 35mm)

For all that the "Spanish Dracula" sometimes pales in comparison to this version, the classic version is not without its faults. The story is thin and sometimes unbalanced; the cast sometimes struggles to give their characters personalities rather than just fill needed spots in the story. Even cut much tighter than the Spanish version shot at the same time, getting from Renfield meeting the Count to Team Van Helsing actually fighting him seems to be a bit of a trudge.

On the other hand, it's got Bela Lugosi in his most iconic role, and that's something you can build a movie around. Like many roles of this type, actually seeing Lugosi in the part after years of imitations and parodies is, if not quite a revelation, a reminder that the performance became famous for being able to hook the audience, even if it was at times more theatrical than a modern audience is used to. Lugosi's Dracula is seductive, not for being overtly sexed-up, but for his absolute certainty that he can take what he wants, so that when Edward Van Sloan's Van Helsing gets something even resembling the upper hand on him, the reaction is so shocked as to be almost feral.

Van Sloan makes a valiant effort to compare with Lugosi, but it's almost a fool's errand. The only other actor who even comes close is Helen Chandler as Mina, who gets interesting once she starts to turn (even if it does mean a lot of "I'm so scared!" hand-wringing. Browning also makes a movie nearly as atmospheric as Melford, and the "almost" isn't a bad thing - he certainly seldom allows that atmosphere to mire him.

Like a lot of Universal Monster movies, Dracula comes across as more influential than perfect from eighty years later, but that influence shouldn't be taken lightly - so much of the modern horror genre (and the vampire genre in particular) takes its cues from this movie, and while it can seem old-hat today, it became that way by being hard to improve upon all at once.

Traffic in Souls

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, digital)

You can't have a proper one-hundredth anniversary series without screening the studio's first feature, and Universal certainly seemed to set its pulp roots down early with Traffic in Souls, a 1913 potboiler that certainly looks remarkably quaint by today's standards but at least does the job it sets out to do.

It's not perfect by any means. The second half of the story runs on pure coincidence, as the heroine gets a job that puts her in a position to find out where her sister is AND her girlfriend is a cop AND her father is an inventor who has created just the thing they need. It's made up for, though, since those things don't actually solve the case but put the characters in position to do so, and the movie executes the crime/thriller parts afterward pretty darn well. It's a silent, but a fun crime movie.

And there's something about the way that it's definitely a product of it's time that is quaint but not cutesy: Despite the movie being about forced prostitution, the closest it comes to even approaching titillating or overtly sexual is in its opening minutes (which is pretty darn tame and innocent), and for the rest of the movie the whole subject is so taboo that the heroine loses her job because of what is presumed about her sister and the crime is never referred to by anything less oblique than "white slavery". The finale is "Crime Does Not Pay!" stuff that is pretty vicious retribution.

The audience for this sort of movie a hundred years ago, apparently, was not particularly forgiving.

My Man Godfrey

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, 35mm)

The two stars of My Man Godfrey aren't quite polar opposites, but close enough to make one worry that the movie will be less "opposites attract" than trying to fit the proverbial square peg into a round hole. Carole Lombard, after all, was the prototypical dizzy thirties dame while this movie sees William Powell at his most classy and sophisticated, even when drunk or homeless. Fortunately, the movie is constructed brilliant, allowing them each to do their own thing, allowing for a clash when those respective things bump against each other but never giving the audience any reason to not love them for what they are.

The script by Morrie Ryskind & novelist Eric Hatch is darn clever in other ways, too: At least from seventy-five years down the road, it seems to strike an ideal balance between acknowledging the reality of the Great Depression while also offering the fantasy of escaping it. The rich may often be silly, but there are enough good people among them to keep the movie from being patronizing or a matter of class warfare. The impropriety of the central love story is acknowledged without a lot of hand-wringing and ultimately handled in a charmingly casual way.

Plus, you know, that cast. William Powell and Carole Lombard are really a perfect pair for a screwball comedy, a mismatched pair who manage the rare trick of bantering wonderfully despite having completely different voices. She boosts the slapstick and silliness (and remains lovable despite her character's silliness and selfishness), while he adroitly maneuvers around it. A whole raft of enjoyable supporting characters pop up just as long as needed, most entertainingly Eugene Pallette, who seems like an Edward G. Robinson prototype as the relatively sensible head of the screwy family that takes Godfrey in.

I love this movie. It reminds me of spiderweb, looking thin and flimsy but actually remarkably strong; despite the wispiness of the plot and how much empty space there seems to be, the end seems to be exactly what everyone, from the characters to the audience, deserves.

Show Boat (1936)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, 35mm)

I've said before, I'm not really a musical guy - it's a genre that oftentimes has very little middle ground between brilliance and its opposite. This version of Show Boat manages to fall into that gap, although I like it more than I don't.

In a lot of ways, it's a weird movie (and, presumably, play) structurally: Though it's mostly the story of Irene Dunne's Magnolia "Nola" Hawks, it starts out with a pretty clear focus on Helen Morgan as Julie LaVerne, spending a lot of time with the woman who must be removed for Nola's story to start, and it's got what seems like an extended epilogue on the other end that follows Nola's daughter Kim's career on the stage. It's got some scale, and is probably better than a simple fast-forward, but it leaves the scale sort of in-between.

Plus, there's the seventy-five-years-later way of looking at its attitudes toward race. It's probably progressive for its day, with a pretty clear disdain for the anti-miscegenation laws that are used as a plot device and Nola having what seems like an honest love of "Negro music". It's just a shame that fondness is expressed via a blackface performance, the sort that makes one wonder just what the heck people were thinking a hundred years ago. The stereotyped speech of Paul Robeson and Hattie MacDaniel (plus, he's lazy and she's a big loud busybody) doesn't much help.

And yet, I still missed Robeson when his part in the movie was done; not only does he have a natural charisma and charm, but he's got the best couple of songs. He's also the character whose singing voice sounds the most like his speaking voice, and the disconnect for the rest of the cast is something that I found rather distracting. In my mind, the songs in a musical shouldn't be isolated performances, but a continuation of the characters expressing their emotions, so it should still sound like them.

Black Angel

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, 35mm)

Black Angel is a fun little mystery that occupies a space between what we now call film noir and a more traditional mystery story, with Dan Duryea and June Vincent playing a couple thrown together by circumstance: Her husband has been convicted of killer his ex-wife, so the sweet young housewife teams up with the alcoholic songwriter to investigate a different suspect. It's the kind of story that could be played both a lot lighter or darker than it is and still make for an interesting movie, and it might be fun to see what different filmmakers would do with Cornell Woolrich's novel.

This middle ground is pretty good, although it might have been interesting if the focus wasn't quite so much on Duryea's Martin Blair compared to Vincent's Catherine Bennett. There's fun angles to play with her; such as how far she would go with the character she is playing on this quest fueled by devotion to her husband, or whether the life she is leading could prove seductive. On the other hand, one does kind of have to admire the restraint and devotion screenwriter Roy Chanslor and director Roy William Neill show by not going there much: This is a whodunit, and those storylines don't resolve murder mysteries.

Kind of a shame; Duryea and Vincent have great chemistry together, and it would be fun to see if she can play certain morally ambiguous notes as well as he did. It doesn't hurt that they have Peter Lorre as a prime suspect, and he plays an oily gangster-type so well, with enough more personality than is typical to be make his scenes more fun than expected.

Phantom Lady

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, 35mm)

Phantom Lady is, in a way, a demonstration of just how hard a good mystery can be to construct: The opening sequence seems tremendously unlikely on its face, but that's what it takes for a murder to become a puzzle worth reading about, and the steps needed so that an amateur is the one to investigate and solve it... Well, it's unlikely.

But it's fun. It's fun in large part because director Robert Siodmak, working from a screenplay by Bernard Schoenfeld and a novel by Cornell Woolrich -- hey, wait a second; it's not wonder the plots of these two movies seems so similar, if the same author is cranking out the same sorts of stories under pseudonyms!

Anyway, Siodmak does a nice job of having Ella Raines not play plucky would-be sleuth Carol Richman as dopily love-struck throughout, but allows her to realize alongside the audience that you don't do this far for a good boss. It's a bit more nuance than is given to Franchot Tone as said boss's best friend who soon winds up working with her on her investigation - he gets a memorable entrance but he and Siodmak give him a bit too much of a twitch later on.

Still, I like the way the screenplay works; rather than playing it as a fair-play amateur detective story, it lets the twist happen as early as possible and has fun playing it out, and manages to do so without making its heroine look the fool.

Tremors

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 November 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Universal Centennial, 35mm)

The advertising for this movie's slot in the Universal series played it up as a guilty pleasure, which is fair, I suppose, but also does it a disservice. As much as director Ron Underwood and his co-writers S.S. Wilson & Brent Maddock go for the gag quite a bit and build their characters broadly, it's hard to find a single place where they made a bad decision when making this movie.

Sure, on the fifth viewing or so it becomes somewhat clear just how little screen time the "graboids" actually have, but that actually works in their favor as a reflection of just how well they have captured and in many ways improved upon the 1950s creature feature: The filmmakers are working with limited resources but deploying them well. What seems like the best innovation is how they twist the standard character types: The scientist is also the cute girl, and refreshingly not super-capable in every discipline; the heroic hired hands are kind of doofuses; the everyman characters get picked off fairly early, leaving the film to be populated by the eccentrics who would normally die just after being proven right. It's something Maddock & Wilson address more explicitly in later direct-to-video sequels and spinoffs, but part of what makes Tremors funny also makes it work: It's about the oddballs who have to do their own thing rather than the great masses of mainstream folks who can attack a problem with numbers.

Plus, Michael Gross seems to be having such a blast on his vacation from Family Ties. The bit where he looks back at his fortified compound and lists everything he's salted away to survive World War III only to follow it up with "...underground. God damn monsters." cracks me up every time.

Skyfall

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 November 2012 in Regal Fenway #13 (first-run, RPX digital)

Do we need another full review of how terrific Skyfall is, re-introducing classic elements to the Bond franchise while maintaining the more "realistic" and hard-edged style that the Casino Royale reboot gave it, slavering absolutely earned praise on Roger Deakins's fantastic cinematography? No, probably not. The Brits got it a week or two before us and they've been flooding the internet with that sort of thing just as they absolutely should.

But, man, it's all true, and then some. Deakins, especially, has shot an absolutely gorgeous picture, albeit one that looks very digital, but it's more a style than a shortcoming here. Daniel Craig continues to give what is the definitive performance as Bond, letting the audience see how the secret agent lifestyle wears on a man, presenting the occasionally snappish Bond of Ian Fleming's novels more than the smooth, unflappable character of the movies. It's downright terrific to see Dame Judi Dench given something to sink her teeth into as M, and I hope future movies give us more of Naomie Harris as Eve, the getaway driver who just does not give one single damn about anyone else on the road.

The action is concentrated into sequences on either end, and both of those are pretty fantastic. The opening gambit is delightful in how it just piles one cliffhanging stunt after another on, making every bit of the chase bigger than the last and giving Craig (and his stunt doubles) the chance to make things look simultaneously hard and easy. It's also fun how the finale flips the typical Bond movie script, with 007 playing defense during the big final assault on the secret hideout.

By the end of the movie, it finally feels like all the "origin story" elements of the reboot are over, and that's good, because as much as I appreciate the renewed focus on the Bond of Fleming's novels, and as much as modern genre writing emphasizes making characters personally involved, it wouldn't be a terrible thing if James Bond was just the guy who MI-6 detailed at the first sign of a superterrorist building a space laser for a couple movies, rather than someone personally connected to every facet of the story. It can make the villain's motivation too small or the hero too little a man just doing his job or caught up in something bigger than he is.