First Silent Show Since…?: The Flying Ace

Yes, I paid good money to go see a movie that I not only have on the shelf, but where I contributed to the disc's crowdfunding campaign, but it had been quite some time since I've seen a silent in a theater - if I'd been to one since coming back from vacation to Massachusetts theaters closing down in 2019, I don't recall it - and not having watched the disc, I figured that maybe the aerial action would look good on the big screen. Let's just say that they didn't exactly have a large budget for that sort of visual effects making movies for Black audiences in Jacksonville, Florida.

Still, nice to see Jeff Rapsis again: From Jeff's mailing list, he's been accompanying silent movies closer to home in New Hampshire over the past year or so, but I think this is the first place he's been at you can reach via the T in a while. Hopefully he and the Somerville Theatre are planning to restart "Silents Please!" later this year.

There was some fun discussion around the movie. It's famously one of the few surviving features with a Black cast and was presented during Black History Month. Jeff talked about it and other movies like it seemingly taking place in a parallel universe where there were Black airmen in World War I and where the United States had Black people in leadership positions. I suspect that in most cases it wasn't that extreme - there were plenty of enclaves of Black prosperity that ran parallel to white equivalents in the early 20th Century - but I'm guessing that didn't extend all the way to Black-owned railroads.

Also, while I don't recall seeing that many Black folks at the event, there were a handful of Deaf people, with some of the discussion happening via translated ASL. The Deaf community isn't the primary audience for these silent shows, but it must be an enjoyably different experience that watching modern films not designed to be captioned in a theater.

The Flying Ace

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2022 in the Arlington Regent Theatre (special event, projected Blu-ray with live accompaniment)

The Flying Ace exists as a curiosity these days, a film notable less for its particular merits than because it has avoided disappearance when almost no other Black-led silents have. It is at least a worthy survivor - maybe not a great film, but one you can see audiences enjoying, whether playing as a feature or in 12-minute chunks as a serial.

Title character Billy Stokes (Lawrence Criner) doesn't appear until the second reel; before that the action takes place in a small town train station run by Thomas Sawtelle (George Colvin), where the a courier carrying the railway's payroll is waiting for his transfer, security light because it's not the usual day. The stationmaster's daughter Ruth (Kathryn Boyd) is finally getting a chance to fly with local aviator Finley Tucker (Harold Platts), though she's still cool on his repeated proposals. The courier's payroll is robbed, though, with him disappearing. It's fortunate that Stokes, a flying ace recently returned from Europe, is willing to take on his old job as a railway detective - he flies in to investigate officially, while longtime mechanic and partner Peg (Steve "Peg" Reynolds) arrives undercover as an amputee hobo.

As a mystery, The Flying Ace is kind of threadbare at times; one knows part of it as soon as Tucker is introduced with a caption mentioning he has a "mysterious source of income". It nevertheless works as a detective story because it's fun to watch the war-hero railroad sleuth gather clues and use his wits, steadily pressing forward rather than tripping up. For a film where the studio gave exhibitors the option of presenting it as a serial - the restored version has "Part X" cards throughout - it's relatively patient and methodical, not depending on a sudden peril or twist showing up every ten minutes as a cliffhanger. Stokes plugs away and shows his smarts, but it's not hard for the audience to follow along.

The production values can vary from stretched to absurd; filmmaker Richard E. Norman is able to squeeze a fair amount of production value out of the limited budget he must have had, with the film benefitting from a certain straightforward simplicity. The aerial action is fooling nobody - when the characters are aloft, it's always the same shot of two torsos and the plane's fuselage, with the painted background suspiciously static, and a daring mid-air rescue almost comical in its staging. The lack of artifice feels comfortable and familiar, at least, and never calls attention to itself as amateurish.

It's also a nice cast, the sort where everybody clearly understands the assignment and does it. Lawrence Criner and Kathryn Boyd are charismatic leads with casual chemistry, and Harold Platts handles the move from superficial charm to cold menace well enough. The only real fuss comes from Steve "Peg" Reynolds, and even he does the scene-stealing bits built around him being exceptionally capable despite looking like a worn-down bumpkin with a missing leg like it's no big thing, selling the heck out of stunts and an impressively tricked-out cane.

It's a script that certainly could have been made with a white cast - race is a complete non-issue here - and if it had been, it would have been the sort of programmer that gave audiences a satisfying version of what they came for even if it doesn't blow them away. In that case, it might have been considered so ordinary as to be forgotten. As a curiosity, on the other hand, it winds up being an interesting example of the sort of entertaining movie that filled cinemas week-to-week in the twenties compared to the noteworthy cream which is regularly programmed today.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Farming

Sometime I'm going to have to go back and see just how often a movie being obviously four-walled at the Regent coincides with Indian holidays having Fresh Pond full up with imports and not able to give movies with this profile - festival appearances, small but not microscopic distributor, a few recognizable names - their two shows a day. It's Diwali, so Momentum has to go with the Regent as a backup, and there may have been three of us in a theater designed to hold much more than three. You can feel the contractual obligation in the release - I suspect the studio is subsidizing two employees, and neither one is even opening the concession stand

It's not a terrible movie, though. The basic topic is good enough that a similar short was Oscar-nominated this year, and it's the sort of passion project that gets noteworthy people to sign on and can make the folks involved raise their game. I don't know that I'd be terribly interested in seeing Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje direct another movie and I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't want to - he may really just have wanted to make this one - but he does enough here to make the possibility interesting. And I can't say I didn't get what brought me into the theater - Kate Beckinsale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw give strong performances; indeed, I'm not sure I've ever seen Beckinsale better.

Anyway, it's got one more day at the Regent and it's available on VOD (click below! I'm so close to a payout!), and it's something different. I certainly don't regret catching this one despite the low-ish star rating.

Farming

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2019 in the Regent Theatre (first-run, digital)

Farming is clearly a labor of love for filmmaker Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje - he's previous made it as a short and his name is all over the end credits - and you can see that he's got the ambition and drive to make a great film on a subject that is very important to him. Unfortunately, the story he uses to explore the broader subject may be a bit too much for an actor directing his first feature - between the sheer amount of what's going on and the main character who has difficulty communicating, the film never quite gets across everything that Akinnouye-Agabje wants to say.

The title comes from the practice where immigrants to the United Kingdom would place their children with white, working-class foster parents while they worked and studied (presumably in close quarters inhospitable to children). Enitan Bada was placed with Ingrid Carpenter (Kate Beckinsale) in 1967, when he was just six weeks old. By 1975, Enitan had half a dozen "siblings", and if he was a withdrawn, unusual child in the Carpenter household, he was utterly unprepared to return to Nigeria with his parents. He is sent back to Tilbury, and eight years later Enitan (Damson Idris) has so internalized the racism to which he's been subjected that he starts running with a group of skinheads, though leader Levi (John Dagleish) treats him more like a pet than a compatriot.

That "Eni" would wind up running with skinheads certainly seems like a great, powerful hook for the film - a similar story was Oscar-nominated in the Best Documentary Short category earlier this year - and Akinnouye-Agbaje plays that part of the film as raw as he can. He never lets the skinheads seem like people who ironically understand what it's like to be marginalized and ostracized in the same way that Eni does; they're monsters through and through, sometimes presented like zombies in the menacing way they surround their victims or how broken faces don't much faze them. Levi isn't charismatic in a way that is likely to attract the audience, but brutal enough to cow Eni, whom he regards the same way as his pet snake. John Dagleish captures that ridiculous and threatening sneer, and Damson Idris does a fine job of both showing Enitan imitating it and showing incoherent devastation as he is continually and inevitably rejected.

Full review at EFilmCritic

Marjorie Prime

I mention in the review that this movie would probably seem most at home on television or in a screening room - it seems perfectly suited to the Coolidge's GoldScreen and I'd be pretty thrilled if they picked it up in a week or two - although for as cavernous as the Regent Theatre in Arlington is, it kind of works because it's a place that only shows movies occasionally right now, so you're going out of your way to see something unusual. It's a weird thing, how that sort of context interacts with the actual movie in one's head, and especially appropriate here. It's arguably the sort of thing you shouldn't really consider when discussing or critiquing the film itself, but the fact that this is a movie that is often about memory that point out that our memory of something is often actually the memory of the last time we remembered it, and not just a clean dip into a pristine databank, and the where and how becomes important. Not that it's ever not important, but maybe I'm inclined to think a little bit more about it for having to go out of my way and see it with a small group in a big theater.

That said, it's good enough that I'd rather more people see it. Unfortunately, it's got the sort of booking that makes word of mouth almost impossible to generate; the fourth and final screening in the Boston area is at the Regent Theatre in Arlington at 4pm today, barring someone else picking it up. Check it out if you can; it's impressive enough to merit some eyeballs even if that location flies under the radar.

Marjorie Prime

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2017 in the Regent Theatre (special engagement, digital)

Marjorie Prime doesn't seem like much to start (and seems misnamed to boot), a strange case featuring a director whose previous film seemed much more ambitious and a cast where many had been a big deal not so long ago only able to scrape together enough to do something that looks amateurish and flat. It never really escapes the shackles of its stage-bound roots - it even feels like the lights go down between acts - but by the end, that's something an audience may be willing to talk itself into as a positive, that a lack of filmic flourish allows the ideas to stand on their own.

Certainly, you can see where that's the plan, as the very opening scene gives a hint of how malleable memory can be, as Marjorie (Lois Smith), an 85-year-old woman whose mind is decaying, converses with a hologram whose AI is modeled on her dead husband Walter (Jon Hamm), and a dull conversation about going to see My Best Friends Wedding becomes an example of how the truth as people know it changes by accident and design. The film delves into this, talking about human and machine memory, subtly showing the AI being upgraded but never becoming perfect, performing a couple of hard twists as it finds other iterations of the premise articulated in that first scene. Writer/director Michael Almereyda, adapting a play by Jordan Harrison, doesn't try to sneak this in; he has his characters interrogate this new technology directly and among themselves, showing its flaws but also, in parallel, showing those of the human mind, very particularly these characters.

Marjorie is not along with Walter Prime, after all; daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and her husband Jon (Tim Robbins) have moved in with her, as has caregiver Julie (Stephanie Andujar), now that Marjorie needs twenty-four hour care. The film seldom expands beyond that circle - Marjorie's granddaughter is pointedly never shown - it doesn't necessarily have to; that core cast is pretty sharp. Jon Hamm gets the short end of the stick somewhat, only seen as the original Walter in one scene, and mostly spends the movie relatively flat and affectless; it's a capable portrayal of a computer program designed to project patience, but deliberately unvaried. Lois Smith also gets a more narrow than expected range of material as Marjorie, in that the audience never sees her swerve from good days to bad as her mind deteriorates, but rather the horror of knowing she is losing herself. It's careful, unglamorous work, though she does have some later scenes that make interesting contrasts to what both she and Hamm were doing before.

Full review on EFC.

This That Week In Tickets: 10 November 2014 - 16 November 2014

A relatively not-busy week, but with a lot of love, even if some of it is my love of pancakes.

For instance, Wednesday had me stopping at the Regent Theatre on the way home for the first time in a while. The movie was The Canal, an Irish horror movie with a bit of potential that was just destined to disappear among the hundreds of decent but not exceptional genre movies that one can find on the streaming/on-demand service of your choice at any given time. Someday, I should find a way to organize a Tuesday Night Thrills series there - it's a good-sized theater with a lot of open dates, and I figure there's got to be a way to get some of these fun movies on the big screen where they belong, barring a small distributor just renting the place for the night like this.

Thursday night involved killing some time until the relatively late start of The International Pancake Film Festival, as there was a somewhat more prestigious event earlier in the evening. And once the doors were open, there was the need to serve a pancake to everyone in the Brattle, and who wants to be the one to kick kids playing 8-bit videogames off a movie screen? As you might imagine, a good time was had by all.

Late buses, IIRC, delayed seeing the new Johnnie To movie until Saturday, but that still meant I got to see Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 at about the same time it came out in China, which is undeniably cool. I wound up looking it quite a bit until that stupid ending, and no amount of reading that it's a pointed jab at hyper-capitalist China is going to get that taste out of my mouth.

Sunday's double feature was fun, though, starting with the last film in the Somerville Theatre's "Silents, Please!" series, The Strong Man. Both Jeff and Dave talked about how Harry Langdon was a strange sort of aberration, a guy who was tremendously popular for a couple years of the silent era despite being a strangely minimalist performer but largely forgotten after. As Dave put it (I paraphrase greatly here), Charlie Chaplin would react to a strange situation with pathos, Buster Keaton would engineer his way out of it in dating fashion, Harold Lloyd would rise above it like a heroic underdog... And Langdon would do nothing. Dave said that in all his years projecting films, this was his first time projecting Langdon. So, a bit of an oddity, and Dave, Jeff, and Ian all said they'd be going for deep cuts again next year.

That was followed a little later by The Theory of Everything, a basic but enjoyable biography of Steven and Jane Hawking. Nice performances by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, and I'll probably never get tired of repeating the awed wonder 15-year-old me would feel at a theater not necessarily full of crazy sci-fi fans who got and laughed at the Doctor Who reference.

The International Pancake Film Festival 2014: Animation, Puppetry, and Pancakes

Seen 13 November 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (special event, 16mm & digital)

This is a profoundly silly event - really, one of the silliest you'll see that doesn't get very close to mockery, which is a good thing, because who wants to be making fun of pancakes? I don't know if I'd have them at the concession stand at my hypothetical theater, because this:



... is just asking to get knocked onto the floor and have the syrup make a famously sticky surface even worse, let alone that it may involve people using knives in the dark, but it wasn't a bad change from the usual cinema snacks at all. I just wish I'd had time to go through the line twice, since this took a while:



That there is a kid playing a custom video game based upon the Festival's previous postcards and posters on a piece of hardware older than he is. Well, more likely some sort of HTPC with a custom case mod, but whatever - it's playing pixel-y games on a screen built for much higher resolution, providing entertainment as kids with twitch reflexes much better than their elders tend to flop while folks ten-plus years older clear all three levels because they know the mechanics and expect to work in the crazy precision that old games require.

(There was talk of the game being online, but I have not been able to find it yet.)

There was one other bit before the festival program pepper, three 16mm (I think) shorts from some archive or other. They... Well, they were not exactly from major studios' animation departments, which meant that "Buck & Pepito's Pancake-Taking Cure" was just not that funny, especially when you consider that what was probably meant to be a fairly progressive spirit at the time, with American and Mexican kids as friends, still come across as kind of icky stereotypes, along with the jokes being weak. Chuck Jones was said to have figured out the precise length, to the frame, that every bit of a Roadrunner cartoon needed to be for maximum comic effect, while these guys have not. You can see what the slapstick is going for, and how it's just not making it. After a vintage Golden Griddle commercial, there was another cartoon with a relaxed pace, "The Emperor's Oblong Pancake", although that one worked a bit better for me. It's not quite "The Emperor's New Clothes" with pancakes, but it's in the neighborhood, and it has the sort of dry, lay-the-joke out sort of wit that I can see kids going for. It reminded me of stuff I saw and liked as a kid, and did so without making young-me look silly.

The stuff in the regular festival package was kind of a mixed bag, and I won't run down them individually because it is no fun saying that a couple young folks didn't make a great short film. You can look at the various entries below (where I can find links), but I will say that I looked "The Shrove Tuesday Speech", "Flapjack Smash!", and "Sea Battles" quite a bit (perhaps not coincidentally, these were the stop-motion entries), while "Mr. Bear Googles How to Make Pancakes... But Gets Drunk Instead" is exactly the low-fi literal spin on the title you'd expect and done well.

"Attack of the Evil Pancacke"
"Frogboy"
"Sea Battles"

The Strong Man (1926)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 November 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please, 35mm)

When a modern film lover stumbles across The Strong Man, it is almost certainly as an early work of Frank Capra, with something between mild surprise and retroactive retroactive acknowledgment that his career extends back to the silent era. At the time, it would have been different, with Capra a relatively anonymous name directing the new one from top-five comedian Harry Langdon. Today, Langdon is all but forgotten, but the film itself is nifty to see, an entertaining and representative example of a body of work, no matter what direction you approach it from.

It starts during The Great War (in 1926, there would not yet be a reason to attach a Roman numeral), where Belgian infantryman Paul Bergot (Langdon) is kept going by letters from American pen-pal Mary Brown, although his defense of his position against a hulking German officer is more luck than skill. After the war, the pair come to America together, with Paul an assistant to strongman "Zandow the Great" (Arthur Thalasso), with Paul not quite realizing that his beloved has a very common name. After a few misadventures is New York City, the pair land a gig upstate, where the Prohibition-era "social club" that booked them is opposed by the abutting church's pastor "Holy Joe" (William V. Mong) and his pretty (but blind) daughter (Priscilla Bonner).

No points will be awarded to audience viewers who guess where this is going in the long or short term; Capra and the various writers tread paths that, even in the mid-twenties, were probably fairly predictable. That's okay, though; the material is in both Langdon's and Capra's wheelhouses. It's maybe not necessarily a natural mix - though his collaboration with Capra marked Langdon's greatest commercial successes - but Langdon's somewhat passive brand of physical comedy and Capra's fondness for moral crusaders who succeed in part because most people are decent (along with the belief that the Universe favors justice over the long term) kind of reinforce each other - things don't work out entirely without effort or setbacks, but there's a certain joy to the serendipity that drives both.

Full review at EFC.

The Canal

Hey, haven't been here in a while:



Unfortunately, I didn't get the picture of the marquee earlier in the day, when it said "WED - IRISH HORROR FILM". It made me giggle (and also vaguely curious as to whether it was one I'd seen at Fantasia earlier in the year), but at the same time, I wondered if maybe there wasn't something to doing it that way. Because, to be blunt, The Canal was not on my radar, and I suspect that my radar for this sort of thing is better than that of many. You put that up on the marquee of the Regent, and there is a reasonably good chance that I presume it to be a band. "Irish Horror Film", though? That might get someone in the door.

I didn't have it on the "Next Week" list, even though it apparently played on both the 5th and 12th. The first week, it was apparently very much a last-minute booking, with just enough time for the guys at the Regent to get in contact with the Boston Irish Film Festival and have them send something out to their mailing list (which, I gather, brought a decent crowd for the first screening), and the listing apparently just disappearing at the wrong time for me to see it last week. It wound up being me and half a dozen or so other people, although it was just me until awfully close to showtime.

I did wonder a bit about booking it for a couple of screenings two towns outside Boston, though. One friend suggested that it might have been contractural - it had to get into a certain number of theaters as part of the sale to the distributor, but I'm not sure a tiny label like Orchard is in a position to promise anything, and doing this kind of minuscule release if they'd implied bigger might not be great for the reputation.

My own theory is that, in a weird way, this sort of booking is actually advertising for the video on-demand release. After all, the VOD menu on your cable service or even Amazon (and other services like it) is kind of terrible, a big list of movies that are all close enough in type and quality that they all blur together. So how do you get yours to stand out from the pack? Ads, I suppose, but I half wonder if it isn't cheaper to rent a place like the Regent for a couple nights, let the guys who like going out to the movies enough to comb through those listings find it, pay money, and talk about it later. Heck, I didn't love the thing, and I'm blogging about it, which is more than I've done for the more interesting movies I've found on-demand whilemaking a link to Amazon.

Sure, that's the explanation that boosts my ego a bit, but it's still worth a thought, especially combined with that "WED - IRISH HORROR FILM" marquee. There are a lot of movies available to us these days, and sifting through them is almost impossible. Sometimes a generic description is actually more useful than a title (especially when the canal in question is neat, but not important enough for me to make much mention when reviewing the film), and it's quite possible that word-of-mouth these days may be more important for just presenting a film's existence than its goodness.

The Canal

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2014 at the Regent Theatre (special presentation, digital)

The Canal opens with a bit that's almost too clever for its own good, with film archivist David Williams (Rupert Evans) standing on stage and asking an audience full of unruly children if any want to see some ghosts, finishing the introduction with a sort of "here we go" before the main titles roll. It's an odd thing, because the movie isn't particularly self-referential after that, and while it's nice to see filmmaker Ivan Kavanagh going for honest, relatively undiluted scares, there's a bit of a seems that the movie could use something to grease the rails a bit, and maybe a little more of that could have done it.

Soon after that scene, David is moved into a new house with his beautiful wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra) and, eventually, their son Billy (Calum Heath). He seems to enjoy his work, at least until one bit of film from 1902 crosses his desk. It's from the police archive, and shows scenes from the investigation of a grisly murder that happened at his house. That's unsettling under any circumstances, and just not a good thing to have running through one's head when ones five-year-old soon is hearing noises at night and one's wife is probably having an affair with a wealthy client.

Every once in a while I get the itch to try and write a screenplay, but the middle part scares me off. I'm not saying that clever set-ups or thrilling climaxes come easy, but they seem more likely to be the product of inspiration than what connects them, which seems more obviously like hard work for the filmmaker and can, if he or she is not careful, seem that way to the audience. Kavanagh sometimes seems to struggle with this with The Canal; it runs around in circles as David points cameras at prospective ghosts a lot or panics and sends his son and the nanny (Kelly Byrne) back and forth based on where the last thing to freak him out was. As in a lot of horror movies, elements can seem somewhat randomly thrown together rather than supporting a central idea.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 17 March 2014 - 23 March 2014

Quiet week, what with being busy at work and having a good chunk of my weekend claimed.

Not particularly complaining, mind you: There have been weeks at work when I have worried I'm not doing enough to be kept on, and the weekend was a chance to see a whole bunch of my immediate and extended family, if the reason for it is because my youngest brother and his wife are moving to Chicago for a new adventure and everybody who lives in the area is looking to wish them well. I won't lie - even though I didn't see Matt & Morgan as often as I'd like given that we can get to each others' houses with one bus line and a bit of a walk, it's going to be kind of different not having them nearby.

So, that made for a quiet movie-going week. I went to the Belmont World Film series to catch Ilo Ilo on Monday, which was kind of weird at first for much the same reason that the previous week's trip to West Newton was (the first leg of the trip out there was, once upon a time, my commute to work), but it was neat to visit the Studio Cinema in Belmont and catch a pretty decent film from Singapore.

Because the send-off party was at another brother's in Maine, it ate a bunch of the weekend, so I had to schedule my movie-going around that. That meant catching both Particle Fever and Grand Piano on Friday night, but those were both good choices: The former is as inviting a documentary on searching for the Higgs Boson as you're going to get (and, happily, still playing in Boston), while the latter is a thriller with a ridiculous premise that does a much better job than you might expect in using how unusual it is to the film's advantage.

After that, I went to Maine and spent some time verifying that my nieces are the cutest nieces as well as seeing all my brothers, many cousins, et al. On the way, we stopped at this place in the New Hampshire border, because Matt really likes pinball. I did manage to clean his clock at Burgertime, though.

I got back home just in time to head out to Arlington for what turned out to be the last in the Gathr Preview Series, Hide Your Smiling Faces. Pretty good way to go out, though it's a shame it was never able to get much traction.

Up next: The Boston Underground Film Festival.

Gathr Previews: Hide Your Smiling Faces

I must admit... I was kind of surprised to be greeted at the screening for Hide Your Smiling Faces with a comment about how I was there for the last hurrah, if only because they had charged my credit card for another three months of membership just the week before. Apparently, the decision to shut the series down happened quickly - there's still a page for it on Gathr's website, and TBD listings for four screenings, including one tomorrow. A representative was still coming to screenings and offering memberships just a few weeks ago.

It's not surprising, though - I have been the only person at some of these screenings, and only a few times has the crowd been able to pack the Underground, much less the actual Regent Theatre. I can only guess why it didn't work out in Arlington - for one, it's in Arlington, and for many in the Boston area, that's the wrong direction to ask many people to travel for an evening's entertainment after work; for another, there seemed to be very little attempt to reach out to the various groups that might be interested in seeing independent movies early (or, in many cases, in the only theatrical screening they'd get) in the Boston area. I presume that the other twelve or thirteen venues had similar situations and turnouts, which is a shame. There were some duds among the movies shown, but some very good ones as well.

Supposedly, they are looking at reviving the series in the fall, possibly on a different schedule than weekly. I'll miss it, but I'm kind of shocked it survived this long.

Hide Your Smiling Faces

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2014 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Previews, digital)

Dead things appear early on in Hide Your Smiling Faces, as three kids poking around an abandoned building find a dead bird and do not exactly treat it with respect. It's a good starting point for writer/director Daniel Patrick Carbone's first feature, a fine look at rural kids confronting mortality.

Those three kids are Eric (Nathan Varnson), his younger brother Tommy (Ryan Jones), and Tommy's best friend Ian (Ivan Tomic). It's summer vacation, they're old enough not to need a whole lot of parental supervision, although you can argue whether that's a good or bad thing when Ian shows the brothers his father's pistol. The man chases Tommy and Eric away, and a few days later, Eric and his friend Tristan (Thomas Cruz) find Ian's body.

This could be the start of a mystery story, and maybe something like that is going on behind the scenes, but Carbone keeps the focus clearly on the kids' perspective, so if there's talk of an investigation, it's not filtering down to that level. Instead, the fact of Ian's absence takes the focus rather than the circumstances, and in some ways it seems to be affecting Eric more than Tommy. Part of that may just be the fact that Eric has Tristan to play off, and a story that goes in an interesting direction there. For the most part, summer goes on, but there's a pall, and added significance to everything from learning to swim to the mean neighbor threatening their dog.

Full review at EFC

Gathr Previews: Next Goal Wins, The Forgotten Kingdom, On My Way

I missed one Gathr preview series during the sci-fi festival, and I was actually kind of disappointed about that one; Adult World with John Cusack, Emma Roberts, and Cloris Leachman looked like it could be entertaining. On the other hand, that was the night of Bunker 6 at the festival, and that was one of the best, so I'm guessing that in the duel of Things I Had Prepaid For was won by the proper presentation.

The next week was an interesting one - I had done the 24-hour marathon from noon Sunday to noon Monday, and spent the afternoon kind of woozy, although I was able to pick up a second wind in time for Next Goal Wins. Fun little movie, although it was kind of amusing that the Regent guys filled as many seats as they could by contacting local youth soccer programs and seeing if they'd be interested - only to be a little surprised at all the swearing Thomas Rongen and the other coaches did. On the bright side, I didn't hear anybody complaining about the transgendered player who figures prominently in the documentary, so that was good.

The 24th was my first time in the new "Regent Underground Theatre", which is part of the Dance Inn next to the main theater. It's an odd little space, next to the rehearsal area, with folding chairs and café tables set up ahead of a stage area with the screen in the back. It says something, I suppose, that seeing a movie there feels genuinely unusual, what with the open area to the left and obvious evidence that it's not purpose-built for this function; not so very long ago, movies like The Forgotten Kingdom would have been exclusively shown in places like that, or wherever a film club could set up a screen and a 16mm projector. Now we go to something like that and ponder whether paying $10 for the experience is a good value in comparison to paying roughly the same amount to rent it as a new release on Video On Demand or via Amazon Instant Video.

It was back upstairs yesterday for On My Way, with folks from Belmont World Film handing out programs for their upcoming series, which I thought was kind of odd, as that one is also scheduled for Mondays, albeit over at the Studio Cinema in Belmont. It turns out that won't be the case; instead, the Gathr Previews Bookings look to be shuffled to Sunday through the length of that series. It looks like it's going to be really tight for Tiger Tail in Blue this week - the theater is booked until 8pm, so the movie will be starting at 8:15 - although it will be back to the regular 7:30pm time for The Raid 2: Berandal on the 16th.

I'm a bit of two minds about this - on the one hand, this makes it a bit more difficult for me to get there, as I'll be trying to fit it into my weekend rather than hopping off the 350 bus early, but I suspect that it might be more enticing for the people who don't go directly past this theater on public transportation every day. Gripping hand is that it does get this away from the other Monday-evening programs, whether in Belmont or at the Coolidge.

At any rate, this is proving to be a fairly resilient series, and it does seem to be starting to gather regulars aside from me. It also seems to be getting some slightly better movies right now - there was a pretty barren period late last year, but I am kind of excited about The Raid 2 - which can only help going forward.

Next Goal Wins

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in the Regent Theartre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)

Next Goal Wins is an inspirational sports story that follows a familiar enough template that if it were fictional, we might be tempted to roll our eyes at just how far the filmmakers were pushing it. This kind of extreme-underdog story does occasionally happen, though, and one of the great things about sport is the way that it occasionally serves this kind of story up. The story of American Samoa's national team is a button-pushing crowd-pleaser, sure, but it's a darn good one.

The American Samoan side, you see, was infamously bad at soccer. They were 0-32 in FIFA-sanctioned matches, with the most infamous loss coming in 2001, when they lost to Australia 31-0, an absurd score for a game where the point totals are usually in the low single digits. The film picks up ten years later, with a volunteer coach attempting to lead this team of amateurs in their first international competition in for years. When that doesn't go so well, they turn to help from the US Soccer Association, which helps them hire fiery Dutch coach Thomas Rongen, who helps recruit Samoan-American Rawlston Masantai & soldier Ramin Ott to join captain Liatama Amisone Jr., Jaiyah "Johnny" Saelua, and redemption-seeking goalkeeper Nicky Salapu.

It's easy to forget just how difficult sports can be at the highest levels, not just for spectators but for the coaches. There are a ton of laughs to be found in how both Rongen and volunteer coach Larry Mena'o react with mounting levels of frustration and profanity, not having realized just how far below their expectations a national team could fall (amusingly, the parents who brought their young soccer-playing kids to the screening I attended did not anticipate the amount of swearing involved). It's what makes Salapu kind of a fascinating story; he's probably the best player in his Seattle rec league, for example, and during the clips of various matches, the commentators almost seem sorry for him, implying he's a good keeper who is not helped by a porous defense or being just a cut below the pro-quality guys he's facing. It helps firmly establish what a lot of sports movies can't, that just making a respectable show against some of these other teams is in some ways just as good as a victory.

Full review at EFC

The Forgotten Kingdom

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2014 in the Regent Theartre Underground (Gathr Preview Series, digital)

Anybody who has ever owned a globe or a world map has probably found himself or herself curious about Lesotho; the small landlocked kingdom in the middle of South Africa is one of only two or three nations in the world to be completely encircled by another. And while director Andrew Mudge's new film set there doesn't necessarily give much insight on how that geography affects life there, it's still a fine, intimate story set in a place many in the audience haven't even visited cinematically before.

It starts out in Johannesburg, where Atang Mokoenya (Zenzo Ngqobe) is spending his twenties getting into trouble. A trip out to the township for a rare visit with his father reveals that the man has died, and has already set money aside for a burial back in the village in Lesotho where Atang was born. He intends to return to the city after the funeral, but seeing childhood friend Dineo (Nozipho Nkelemba) gives him his first reason to stick around a little longer, while other things will also prevent a speedy return to the city.

It's actually almost comical at times how Atang finds reasons to get off a bus although Mudge has something a bit heavier in mind to get him to have a greater appreciation for his father and the land he called home. It's far from subtle - at the start of the movie, he's using a European name and eager to sell the mementos that have been handed down to him and even get some money by downgrading the casket - and at times, it's quite forced, as when Atang takes a job in a textile plant for no apparent reason. Sure, it has been mentioned that his father once had that sort of job, and Atang does need to be kept occupied while some other things happen elsewhere, but that's a reason for Mudge to put him there, not for Atang to go along that path.

Full review at EFC

Elle s'en va (On My Way)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2014 in the Regent Theartre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)

At one point in On My Way, Catherine Deneuve's Bettie looks at the kid singing some English-language song in the passenger seat, then at the freeway outside the window, and grumbles that she feels like she's in America. It's a funny bit that nevertheless makes me wonder if the road trip, and therefore the books and movies chronicling same, is a particularly American phenomenon, seldom seen in countries that connect their urban areas with quality passenger rail systems. A bit of a shame, if so, because On My Way is a fine example of the freedom that sort of story brings.

Bettie, being French - Miss Brittany for 1969, in fact - didn't really intend to go on a road trip, of course. Frazzled from running a restaurant that is starting to run worrisomely late on its bills, she is further stressed out when he mother Annie (Claude Gensac) makes sure Bettie know that her longtime lover has finally left his wife, but for a 25-year-old girl, and take a quick drive to clear her head. And keeps driving, because this is the sort of situation that makes one start smoking again, but it's hard to by cigarettes on Sunday except at a bar. Then... well, is the next day, and her daughter Muriel (Camille) calls, asking if she will come pick up her son Charly (Nemo Schiffman) and bring him to stay with his grandfather (Gérard Garouste) while she travels for a job interview. And then...

Well, a number of other things happen. Bettie does not particularly have adventures as she makes her way around her corner of France - what happens probably doesn't even rise to the level of misadventures - but she does have encounters. Some are very brief, such as the people at the food truck who let her charge her phone, and some go on for long enough to form some sort of a bond, if a temporary one. In many cases, things seem to go easier with lesser connections, but there is generally someone worth meeting at each stop and a nifty little scene as Bettie stop and speaks with them.

Full review at EFC

This Week In Tickets: 3 February 2014 - 9 February 2014

Running less late that last week! What can I say, there's a festival and snow. You'd think the latter would help me get writing done, but that's not actually the case. I need my time on the bus.

Stubless: The Pretty One at the Regent Theatre, Monday, 7:30pm. Someone different was working the box office, and he actually took the ticket I printed out from Gathr's website rather than recognizing me and handing me a traditional ticket. It was backward and weird! Pretty decent movie, though.

After that, the only movie-seeing that I really had time for during the week was a double-feature of Oscar-nominated Documentary Shorts at the Coolidge. They've been swapped out for the live-action and animated ones, but they're worth seeing even if you're not going to watch the ceremony - these sorts of awards aren't perfect, but they don't exactly do a bad job of highlighting some of the best entries in a given year.

There were some short programs during the first three days of the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, and I'll probably catch up with them later. The features were generally decent-to-good; for every totally amateur thing like opener The Nigerian Frequency, there was something nifty like LFO. Also playing during those days: Dust of War, Animosity, SOS: Save Our Skins, and Inverse.

I missed the first part of the first short on Saturday because apparently just seeing movies straight from 3pm to 11pm isn't enough for me, and I had to make an matinee detour to Showcase Cinemas in Revere to see The Attorney. Honestly, I felt obligated; I grouse enough about that this sort of Asian movie not playing the Boston area enough that when one does show up, I really have to support it with dollars, even if it means a three-leg journey on various MBTA services. It is, admittedly, a little further than I might have gone for a similar movie not starring Song Kang-ho, but it's an enjoyable legal drama.

I also found another hole in the festival schedule to head two stops down the Red Line and see Drinking Buddies at the Brattle. It was a tight squeeze getting back to Somerville in time for Inverse, but worthwhile. Kind of an odd coincidence to open and (almost) close the week with two movies where Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston both play potential boyfriends to the same character, for a somewhat broad definition of potential boyfriend.

Next week's edition of this is probably going to be really short, because I've been living at the Somerville theater for this festival all week. But, then, I've actually got to write stuff up to get to that point.

Drinking Buddies

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2014 in the Brattle Theatre ([Some of] The Best of 2013, DCP)

I wouldn't say I've necessarily become a fan of Joe Swanberg's from seeing his last couple of films; I've got no particular desire to do any sort of deep dive through the seemingly dozens of micro-budget features he has done over the last few years to watch him hone the technique that got him to Drinking Buddies. He's definitely worth keeping an eye on for the future, though, especially when he's got a cast as solid as the one here.

The main group - Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, and Ron Livingston - are pretty strong, especially Wilde and Johnson. They're playing best friends and co-workers that one would expect to be pairing up in almost any other movie, and the point of this one is guessing whether or not it's inevitable. It's a fun thing to play with - watching them interact with each other, you do find yourself looking at them that way and knowing that they're feeling the attraction, even though there is this whole other group of relationships that would be upset. It actually makes the idea of calling it "attraction" a lot more reasonable than it often is, potentially pulling them off course.

There's not a lot of story here, in part because there's not a lot of drama. Swanberg mentioned during his Q&As at Fantasia last summer that he doesn't write much dialogue, especially for his actresses, because how is he going to know what a woman would really say. It actually holds up much better than most improvised movies, which probably meant that he did a pretty good job of keeping everyone on point. That helps a lot; it means Drinking Buddies seems to come to an honest resolution rather than just stopping after taking some sharp turn, which is a big part of why it's worth recommending.

(Wait - why is Jake Johnson clean-shaven on that DVD/Blu-ray cover?)

Gathr Preview Series: The Pretty One

Was it a bit weird to come to the Regent on Monday for the screening? Well, not really; that's actually when it was held at the start. I will say, though, that it was weird to get into the auditorium and find people... Well, not actually in my seat, but in the ones directly in front of it. I suppose I could have just sat in the usual place, but just plopping down right next to a group of strangers in an auditorium that holds 500+ people would be kind of weird.

The screening was still in the main room, as it turned out. Indeed, the guy at the ticket booth wasn't sure what my prattling on like there was another was about. Next week's has a note about it being in the "Regent Underground", so the folks who make it (I'll be at the sci-fi festival) may be in for something new.

The Pretty One

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2014 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Previews Presents, digital)

It sometimes feels like Jenée LaMarque could have done more with The Pretty One; the idea of one identical twin taking the place of the other is certainly not new, but it's the sort of plot device that can play differently with each new iteration depending on the actor and character(s). Zoe Kazan certainly give this picture a solid place to start, and while she could have been given opportunities to do more, there's value in how she and the filmmakers never actually make a wrong step.

As the film starts, Laurel and Audrey (Kazan) have been living separately since high school: Confident Audrey sells storybook houses in the city, while mousy Laurel still lives with their widowed father. On their birthday, Audrey treats Laurel to a makeover, which is why there's some confusion at the hospital after the girls are involved in a head-on collision, leading to an initially-amnesiac Laurel taking her sister's place.

There is, of course, a job, a boyfriend (Ron Livingston), a best friend (Frankie Shaw), and a cute neighbor (Jake Johnson) to consider, but a grieving sister with a head injury explains away a lot, and while it can sometimes feel like hand-waving, it's often kind of a relief that LaMarque doesn't bog things down with much focus on the mechanics of Laurel avoiding discovery or their being some sort of exterior reason why she should. You can have those and still make a movie about a girl lacking in self-confidence to the point where she feels like she's more useful filling someone else's place and using that new perspective to figure out what her own role should be, but they do have the tendency to overwhelm. This movie takes the occasional short cut, but it seldom loses sight of its goal.

Full review at EFC

Gathr Previews Series: Wajma (An Afghan Love Story)

My subscription to the Gathr Preview Series runs out in mid-March (not bad for a three-month membership purchased in September; cancellations and skip weeks must have caught up), and I must admit that at this point I'm not certain whether I will renew it or not. Then again, the decision may be taken out of my hands, as the Regent is scaling the program back starting tomorrow, and who knows if it will still be going on when it's time to renew?

For now, it will still be weekly, but the screenings are moving to Mondays, and rather than being in the 500-plus-seat theater, they'll be in a smaller screening room downstairs which I didn't know existed until the staff mentioned it before the show. That's potentially an issue for me, just because there are many other film programs in the area that take place on Monday: The Coolidge's Science on Screen and Big Screen Classics shows, for instance, or the DocYard presentations at the Brattle, or even Harvard Film Archive screenings. As I said back when this program started almost a year ago, it won't do well by making me choose between even some of their more promising features and Raiders of the Lost Ark in 35mm.

As to the new room... Well, we'll see. This last screening was an unfortunate example of the number of things that can go wrong between a venue that doesn't primarily show movies and a distributor that certainly has its own faults: The heat conked out mid-day, so it was just getting back to habitability when I arrived at 7pm, the movie occasionally froze a bit, and then in the last ten minutes just completely crapped out, dropping to the Blu-ray player's menu screen two or three times before the projectionist had to pull out a back-up machine and disc, which looked like it might have been a DVD. This isn't the first time this has happened, either.

I don't say that to imply that anybody involved is doing anything wrong - for the amount of movies the Regent shows, it probably doesn't make sense for them to invest in a full DCP system, and for the scale that Gathr seems to work on, I don't know if they could afford to supply something more reliable than a Blu-ray disc. And it's not as if they haven't tried to grow this program; I see it advertised, and I've heard the folks at the Regent express their frustration about not getting people to come out. I think it just might be untenable. The Regent is out of the way, but where else would you put this program? Sure, most weeks it could fit in the Somerville Theatre's micro-cinema, but that doesn't give you a lot of room for growth.

It's a shame. Tomorrow night's screening, The Pretty One with Zoe Kazan, looks like it should be a little more of a draw, but other movies featuring people the audience has heard of have just played to me and maybe a few others. We'll see how it goes.


As to this specific movie, I liked it, even though it is fairly rough in some spots. I do sort of wonder who the target audience is, like I do with many movies from the middle east: Was it made for a local Afghani audience, or the French financiers? Wajma was apparently submitted as Afghanistan's entry to the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, so I doubt it's anywhere near as far from local favor as the "Iranian" films that often seem to be targeting western art houses more than local cinemas, but the moments when it seems especially down on the options available for women locally make me wonder just how well it has been received in its home country.


Wajma: An Afghan Love Story

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2014 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Previews Presents, digital)

Depending on where in the world it plays, Wajma be titled "An Afghan Love Story" or use that as a subtitle. It's a somewhat ironic one, as those hoping for a romance that brings either cheer or enjoyable sadness will walk away with their desires unfulfilled. Instead, it delivers an unsentimental look at where being head-over-heels can lead in some parts of the world, and does so with impressive clarity.

Wajma (Wahma Bahar) is twenty years old and lives in Kabul with her mother (Brehna Bahar), grandmother, and brother; her father (Haji Gul Aser) works in another part of the country, clearing minefields. She's applied to law school but also has a crush on her brother Haseeb's friend Mustafa (Mustafa Abdulsatar). It's reciprocated, and it seems like just a matter of time before their families officially arrange a match, so they discretely go out and spend some time together unchaperoned. One thing leads to another, and highly conservative Afghanistan is not the best place to be when those things don't happen in the proper order.

What follows is not the entire list of horrors that one reads about women being put through in middle-eastern countries; in fact, upon reflection, it's actually relatively mild, in that one is more likely to be taken aback by the intent behind a blow rather than the physical damage it does. The fascinating thing about it is that, while foreign viewers will likely come away wondering if every man in Afghanistan needs a punch in the nose, Wajma seems like it could actually play to the local audiences that identifies with the likes of Mustafa or Wajma's father without much, if any, alteration: There's one line in which a prosecutor refers to "this backwards country", but it could very well have an unexpected nuance in Persian. Even the most sympathetic male character argues matters of fact instead of morality. I doubt filmmaker Barmak Akram's actual intention was to make a movie about a good man who deals with his slatternly daughter as mercifully as he responsibly can, but that perspective is surprisingly visible and not explicitly rebuked.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 31 January 2014 - 6 February 2014

If you read this regularly, you'll notice that when a film's theaters are listed, certain ones go toward the front of the line, mostly independently-owned theaters. One of them, the Somerville Theatre, is turning a hundred years old soon, and it's worth reminding folks why that place is awesome: The projection is great, they are constantly upgrading even little things like the recently rebuilt concession stand, and there are quirky things (like the load-bearing piano) throughout that are not the result of trying to be hip, but just accumulating a century of history, both public and internal. It's going to be fun celebrating their birthday.

• The Somerville Theatre doesn't have it's birthday until 11 May, 100 days from now, and they are having almost daily events, which include live music, theater, three film festivals, and plenty of movies spanning the life of the theater, all on 35mm. This weekend, they start at the beginning with three silent programs, featuring Jeff Rapsis on the piano. Friday at 8pm is extra special, with a Mary Pickford program that includes the feature Sparrows and the shorts "The Dream" and "Their First Misunderstanding", with the latter extra-special not just because it's Pickford's first credited film, but because a 35mm print was found in a New Hampshire barn seven years ago after the film was considered lost for almost a century, and this is the first time it's been publicly screened in 35mm since. Saturday night features Lilian Gish in D.W. Griffith's Way Down East, and Sunday afternoon is the first Oscar winner, Wings.
• That's going to cut into their first-run screenings, but it's still kind of quiet on that front. The new one from Jason Reitman, Labor Day, in which Josh Brolin plays an escaped convict who hides out in the home of an agoraphobic divorcée played by Kate Winslet. It's at Apple, Boston Common, Fenway, and the SuperLux. There's also That Awkward Moment, wherein three friends pledge to stay single only to each fall in love soon after. It's at Apple, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  It looks like the Imax folks knew I, Frankenstein would tank, because Gravity was put back on the schedule for Imax 3D bookings even before the other one opened. It gets the big screen at Boston Common. They also have Groundhog Day on Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon/evening, which is cool, what with Sunday being Groundhog Day and all.
• Kendall Square has been playing the preview for Gloria fairly frequently. It's a well-awarded romantic comedy from Chile with Paulina Garcia as a middle-aged woman who is young at heart and is falling in love with a former naval officer. It was Chile's submission for the Oscars, but was not actually nominated. They do have some nominees, though,with the 2014 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts and 2014 Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts. They're splitting a screen, and running for at least two weeks, so you can either do a double feature or catch them separately.
• The other Oscar-nominated shorts are playing at The Coolidge, with the 2014 Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts playing in two programs in the screening room (two, because documentary shorts tend to push right up against the 40-minute limit for short films). They've also got a 35mm print of Trouble Every Day , Claire Denis's 2001 take on vampirism and the study of the human libido; it plays at midnight on Friday and Saturday.
• That one was just at the Brattle Theatre a day earlier, and they switch from vampires to (Some of) The Best of 2013 this week. Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (35mm) & Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said play as a double feature Friday & Saturday, although Saturday also has a 10pm late show of The Visitor. Sunday's twin bill is black-and-white ensemble casts with Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess and Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing. Monday night is Matías Piñeiro's Viola, about a group of actors in Buenos Aires performing Twelfth Night, while Tuesday features the unorthodox commercial-fishing documentary Leviathan. Wednesday's double feature is Night Across the Street & Museum Hours, while Thursday has Wadjda, the story of a Saudi girl who wants to buy a bike. Members of the Boston Society of Film Critics will be on-hand to introduce the films on Friday, Sunday, and Thursday evenings.
• The Harvard Film Archive has in-person appearances by French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie for two screenings, No Rest for the Brave on Sunday evening and Stranger by the Lake (digital), his latest film, on Monday. Before he actually arrives, they will be playing the two features he made in between, Time Has Come (Friday 7pm) and The King of Escape (Saturday 7pm).
  
  A film from the Late John Huston series helps fill in the gaps, with The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean playing at 9pm on Friday. There is also the end of the Complete Andrei Tarkovsky program, with a second screening of Mirror (Saturday 9pm), and a double feature of two of his shorter works, "The Steamroller and the Violin" & Voyage in Time, at 4:30pm on Sunday.
• The Regent Theatre is reconfiguring how they present the Gathr Preview Series, with screenings moving to Monday and apparently taking place in a smaller "Regent Underground" theater downstairs. The funny thing is, the next couple actually look like higher profile films that might be able to draw some people, starting with The Pretty One, which features Zoe Kazan as identical twins; one is much more confident and outgoing, but the other assumes her life when she dies. It's also got Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston. Note that right now, the Regent's website has a 7pm showtime and Gathr's says 7:30pm; hopefully that clears up in the next couple of days. They also start a short engagement of Bob Marley:The Making of a Legend on Thursday the 6th; it runs through Saturday the 8th and features long-lost footage of Marley's early career.
• ArtsEmerson actually has some film programming at the Paramount Theater this weekend, with four screenings of documentary Fire in the Blood between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. It describes how pharmaceutical companies made it difficult for AIDS medication to be available in developing countries and how a coalition chose to fight back. The Saturday evening show will also have a reception beforehand and a Q&A (via Skype) with director Dylan Mohan Gray afterward. The Bright Lights series has just one screening this week, with Louis C.K.: Oh My God playing Thursday the 6th.
• New month, new calendar for the film program at The Museum of Fine Arts. February features The Films of Lars von Trier throughout most of the month, starting with Epidemic and The Element of Crime (both Saturday & Wednesday); Medea plays Wednesday & Thursday while Europa has its first screening on Thursday.
  
  There are two non-Trier films on Sunday as part of the ReelAbilities: Boston Disabilities Film Festival - Andrzej Jakimowski's Imagine and Michelle Chen Miao's Son of the Stars (with a panel discussion afterward) - and both are free, and presented with open captions and audio descriptions. ReelAbilities will feature other screenings in the area every day from 30 January through 6 February; check the schedule on the site for details.

My plans? Silents in Somerville, Oscar-nominated shorts, watching Wolf of Wall Street or Her while everyone else is watching the Super Bowl, and maybe fitting some other catch-up like Blue Jasmine in around that. And, hey, it might not be wise to pass up a chance to see Gravity on Boston Common's largest screen, either.

Gathr Previews Presents: Kids for Cash

Before the movie, the folks at the Regent asked if I had any pull with the Gathr people, so that they could get something a little more upbeat in the series - Summer in February was admittedly a downer and this sort of movie can be a hard sell as well. I kind of wish I'd realized that Black Out was the next one in the series; what I remember of it from Fantasia is that it's actually a fun, fast-paced caper, and I'm looking forward to giving it a second shot, as I was wiped the first time.

One thing that I was a bit curious about once this movie had a little more time to sit for me was the demographics of Luzerne County - I think all of the kids shown as victims in this movie were Caucasian, and I wonder if this is generally representative, a reflection of who was willing to talk to the filmmakers, or unintentional bias from trying to show that the teenagers sentenced were good kids who didn't deserve this. It doesn't really matter for this movie individually, but if you expand its themes to the problems with America's for-profit incarceration industry and the juvenile justice system in general, that's an issue that will come up and deserves examination.

And I think those are broader themes that do deserve an audience's attention - as bad as what Mark Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan did was, the bounty system that the phrase "kids for cash" conjures up isn't the root problem the way that jail as an answer to every societal ill (and a for-profit industry to facilitate it) is. Kids for Cash tells its story well enough, but eventually drifts too far from the bigger picture.

Kids for Cash

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2014 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Previews, digital)

"Kids For Cash!" makes a great tabloid headline - heck, it looks good on a broadsheet when something akin to the scandal that this movie documents is discovered. It may not be the best title for this particular film, though - aside from only sharing the same subject as William Ecenbarger's similarly-titled book, it winds up limiting compared to the various issues that director Robert May brings up over the course of a somewhat scattered film.

That is the phrase that entered the public consciousness a few years ago, though, when Luzerne County, Pennsylvania judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan were accused of sending juvenile offenders to a correctional facility they had a financial interest in for minor offenses. The stories we hear from roughly a half-dozen of the hundreds of victims are terrible. There are, however, elements that may not exactly argue that there's another side to the story, but that the characterization of it as a simple transaction is not entirely accurate.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this movie is the way that May covers all of the angles, including ones that are seldom seen in the same film. Yes, he talks to a number of the kids who were imprisoned, as well as their parents, those involved in their defense, and the reporters who worked on the story for the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. There are man-in-the-street (well, man-in-a-diner) interviews and visits to a local talk-radio show. But, fascinatingly, there is also plenty of face time with Ciavarella and Conahan; even though we see footage of one of the parents screaming at Ciavarella outside the courtroom about how her son is dead because of him, both parties participate in the film. It's almost disconcerting, given how "___ declined to be interviewed" is such a staple of the documentary where the focus might be even the slightest bit contentious.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 6 January 2014 - 12 January 2014

Indication that it's a new year: The desk calendar fits differently on the scanner.



First full week in work and otherwise on a regular schedule in over a month, which was in some ways tough getting used to an in some ways reassuring; it was sort of easy to lose track of the days of the week. And the weather didn't make it any easier - the first couple of days were cold, much nastier than the days at the end of the previous week when all the sca-a-a-ry snow was coming down. It made the title of Tuesday's Gathr screening, Summer in February, a bit of a tease, and made any moment spent outside waiting for the bus to or from Arlington, not much fun at all. The movie itself, at least, wasn't bad, a decent costume drama that interested me more for the details.

It was such a reasonably busy week at work that I didn't get out to anything else and was considering just packing it in early on Friday, but all the caffeine finally kicked in by the time I got to the Coolidge at midnight for Wrong Cops, a fun sort-of-spinoff of Wrong that was interesting with the midnight crowd. Even the production company vanity card at the start made us laugh for how off-kilter it was.

I wound up seeing relatively little on Saturday - a midnight movie meant a 2:30am bedtime which meant no time to go see the cheap(ish) screening of The Legend of Hercules on Saturday, and then I found myself staying in until it was time to head over to Fresh Pond for Cold Comes the Night. Not a great movie - I was seeing it half out of fondness for the director's previous film, half to support unusual genre movies playing locally - but not bad. It was actually pouring rain when I got out, though, getting me soaking wet and glad I had time to dry out before heading to the Brattle for Here Comes the Devil, a borderline-great horror movie that suggests that the director of Cold Sweat may have a little more than I expected in him.

Sunday, I met up with friends at The Past, which really needs no "borderline" to qualify its greatness. After that, it was a trip to the grocery store, dinner, and some time to actually write.

Gathr Previews Presents: Summer in February

Tuesday night was among the coldest we've had in this area in a while, so let me tell you, being let into the theater a full half hour before the movie started was much appreciated.

It was an interesting movie, although as it went on, I was kind of making associations that didn't necessarily have a lot to do with the movie itself, but do sort of help show how well it does at evoking the time period. First is the one I mention in the review, the Bertie Wooster "well, when someone asks you to marry them" bit. There's a moment when a marriage proposal is made and accepted in what seems like a hasty manner, and it made me wonder just how casually or formally such things happened a hundred years ago, what with dating as we know it not nearly so common as it is now.

The other thing, though, was from the scenes where the entire community was getting together and singing or the like. But it put me in mind of how, when people talk about the way content companies freak out over digital distribution, it's a reflection of how they've tried to kill every new distribution since there has been commercial distribution of media and how even gramophone recordings were fought because they might cut into the lucrative sheet music business. It sounds goofy, but you can see, with everyone gathering around the piano, where this could really have been a thing.

Anyway, it looks like this one was a true preview, and the movie opens next weekend. It's not bad, though I don't know how much distribution it will get with the award nominees taking so much of the boutique theater space.

Summer in February

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2014 at the Regent Theatre (Gathr Previews Presents, digital)

Summer in February takes place in 1913 Cornwall, which had become an artists' colony, and in some ways that community is more interesting than any of the people in it. There's nothing wrong with the story the filmmakers are trying to tell or the characters involved, but there are interesting details to the scenes of people being a community that make the love triangle at the center of the movie seem kind of generic by comparison.

That main story has Florence Carter Wood (Emily Browning) coming to Cornwall to live with her brother Joey (Max Deacon) and study painting, though she's pretty enough that some of the artists would have her model as well. One who does is AJ Munnings (Dominic Cooper), a brilliant painter who is as confident of his abilities as he is loud in pubs. His opposite in terms of temperament is Captain Gilbert Evans (Dan Stevens), a handsome reservist who connects these artists with spaces to rent. AJ and Gilbert are friends, but someone like Florence can shake up that status quo.

Fortunately, Florence is not just there to be a thing that brings two men into conflict, but a person who, when she's at her best, can push back at AJ and likely has the potential to become a fine artist herself. She'd likely be diagnosed with something and medicated to help regulate it today, and Emily Browning does well in portraying that sort of fragility as well as the way that Florence is, as they would say then, a sheltered young woman who does not know much of the world. Browning may not quite make Florence the center of the movie, but she does let the viewer see why she can attract through her strength despite a big dollop of insecurity.

Full review at EFC.

Gathr Previews Presents: Jump

If I were really clever and writing fast enough to get the review of A Touch of Sin up while there was a little more left of it's brief run at the Brattle, it might have been a good idea to compare and contrast the two. Both movies, after all, are stories of four characters whose lives intersect with occasionally nasty outcomes. It probably wouldn't have turned out well for the decent but not exactly brilliant Jump, though, as Jia Zhang-ke's film is better in just about every fashion.

And it would have been unfair; Jump is less the single-person anthology than a single story told from multiple perspectives. In fact, I think you could probably boil Jump down to the point where it's more obviously Greta's story with the other well-developed characters moving in and out and have it work out a little better. The structure here is kind of a mess, and I think putting effect before cause and having the audience see too many perspectives hurts the movie.

But I also have to be a little honest and say that the end was a problem for me, too. As usual, that goes after the review.

Jump

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2013 at the Regent Theatre (Gathr Previews Presents, digital)

Jump spends a fair amount of time presenting itself a certain type of movie - sarcastic, amoral, built on a fractured timeline that aims to make the audience feel clever for putting its multiple points of view together. It does that reasonably well, in fact, but it may not actually be best served by playing it cool in that way, as it's at its best and most interesting when it stops fooling around and says what the characters are feeling.

It's New Year's Eve in Derry, Northern Ireland, and Greta (Nichola Burley) is getting ready to jump off a bridge, worried that she's too much her cruel father's daughter. Greta's best friend Marie (Charlene McKenna) is worried about the way she's been acting lately, but she and her other friend Dara (Valerie Kane) have their own misadventures on tap. Fortunately, Greta is interrupted by Pearse Kelly (Martin McCann), who has been looking for his missing brother and been beaten up for the trouble. It seems Sean Kelly ran afoul of local gangster Frank Feeney (Lalor Roddy), whose vault has just been robbed. He dispatches weary enforcer Ross (Ciaran McMenamin) to get the money back, along with a couple of henchman (Richard Dormer & Packy Lee) who may be more hindrance than help.

Are all these stories eventually going to intersect by the time the movie is over? Most certainly, although writer/director Kieron J. Walsh doesn't always make the most of it - at least if you define making the most of it as having disparate pieces suddenly snap together in a way that the audience doesn't see coming but which makes perfect sense. Walsh and co-writer Steve Brookes do build a little community where everything is connected, at least, with only one or two coincidences more than would be ideal, but it often seems like they want the connection but instead have occasionally split a scene in half in such a way that it's incomplete the first time the audience sees it and redundant the second.


Full review at EFC.

SPOILERS!

After turning the movie over a few times while considering and writing the review, I sort of wonder if I'm not looking at it wrong. I walked out disappointed because there are certain obvious ways to expect a movie like this to shake out - it's got a pair of good-looking leads falling in love at first sight and it's set on New Year's Eve, which is a natural signifier of new starts and happy endings in most cases. So when Walsh kills Pearse and it turns out there's no backdoor out of it... Well, what's up with that?

I still don't think it quite makes a satisfying story. The easily-discovered robbery Greta and Pearse execute and his being run over by Dara basically wind up putting Greta and Marie back where they were before the start of the movie; planning to move to Australia and able to do so in part because of the thing Greta feared from the start - they were able to just walk away from the crimes they were complicit in. And maybe that's what Walsh was going for: You can literally dress Greta up like an angel, but it won't make her one, and New Year's Eve isn't a hard line but just another point in an endless cycle. Still, she wants to be a good person and at least has a friend who is one, so maybe a new start in a new place will let it happen.

!SRELIOPS