Boston-area folks: We need to support the "Somerville Subterranean Cinema" program that Chris Hallock and the Somerville Theatre put on better. I was there the past two Saturday nights, and attendance wasn't what it should have been: Two for Proxy, four for The Machine, and the 9:30pm screenings for each canceled due to no-one showing up. And while I admit that neither of these is a movie that can be easily recommended to everyone, they both have something that should at least be interesting to audiences.
I admit, I take the low turn-out for The Machine personally; I recommended it to Chris when I saw it had distribution but no Boston booking, pushed it here as much as I could, and really wanted one of the best movies I saw last year to succeed. I'll probably try and give it another push, this time for the sci-fi marathon next February, because I think this is the kind of actually exciting genre movie that seems like it would have gotten a bit more of a chance a couple decades ago and which is accessible for a mainstream audience but sophisticated enough that the audience knows they've seen something new afterward. I wanted this to attract a crowd badly, and can only hope that the dozen or so of us that did see it will be giving it the sort of word-of-mouth it needs to get a bit more of a push going forward.
Which, I suspect, is what the filmmakers and distributors who sign on for two nights in a room that features Blu-ray projection for thirty people are hoping for. Even if all four shows sold out for $10 a ticket and the studio was getting 90% of the money, that's about a thousand bucks. Not nothing, and even $50 is probably worth the expense of mailing a disc (even using priority mail!) if it leads to a few more Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD orders. Heck, I half-suspect that some of these movies are taking meager bookings so that they can get a push onto the "watch while it's in theaters" menu on the cable box.
And that's sad. Not everything in this series will be great, or even good. But there sometimes seems to be far fewer cracks for movies not produced by the major studios to slip through: All of the multiplexes that can afford to use one screen to show something unusual just show the same movies as each other, while even midnight series are being monopolized by the same familiar hits and "cult classics" that everyone else is showing. We're actually pretty lucky in Boston that we've got SSC & All Things Horror, the @fter Midnite series at the Coolidge, and folks at the Brattle who want to put on cool late shows. But programming these things takes time, effort, and money, and there's still a lot of room for things to slip between the cracks. It's kind of shameful that Special ID didn't play Boston, for instance - it's not just a big Hong Kong action movie with the sort of action people love when they get a chance to see it, but two of the stars have local ties!
There should be room for things like Special ID, The Machine, Proxy, and the like to be discovered, but there's a hell of a gap between playing five times a day, guaranteed, at the multiplex and a couple of shows at a venue or in a series that really can't afford to get the word out beyond the audience they already have. So we've got to build the places showing smaller movies up, make them more viable. If the Somerville Subterranean Cinema series can actually draw a crowd, maybe it could occasionally get a shot at screen #4 rather than the micro-cinema, and maybe it becomes more appealing for the likes of Magnet or Well Go who, because they are trying to get their movies booked at the multiplexes, actually wind up getting no booking in Boston at all, and things that are still built for the big screen despite the rapidly changing landscape get experienced on TV or laptop screens, and that's not seeing them at their full potential.
So here it is, Boston. There are folks showing genre movies that are at least worth a look, and while they sometimes need to be sought out, supporting them with money might just give the next genre film that would look as good on the big screen as The Machine get noticed. The next show in this particular series is Desolate on June 6th & 7th, and while I haven't seen it yet, I did like director Rob Grant's previous two movies. Let's try and get this a crowd.
Proxy
* * (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2014 in the Somerville Theatre micro-cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, BD)
Give Proxy filmmaker Zack Parker this: Unlike many movies that wind up labeled "horror", his delivers something that its audience will want to put out of their heads afterward because it doesn't bear thinking about. Unfortunately, he keeps going, stretching things out long enough that the disturbing idea loses a bit of its punch, and the finale winds up being twisted in a way that is perhaps too familiar.
Things start out shockingly enough, as Esther Woodhouse (Alexia Rasmussen) - young, pregnant, and alone - is brutally attacked just outside her obstetrician's office, losing the baby and gaining an ugly scar. She's referred to a support group for parents who have lost children, where she meets Melanie Michaels (Alexa Havins), and the pair soon become friends. The thing is, neither of them is quite so alone as they have led the other to believe.
Why would one person lead another to believe she was in such a situation? The title gives a hint, although Parker and co-writer Kevin Donner never opt to bring in a mental health professional to deliver exposition on Münchhausen's-by-proxy. That's fine, helpful even; pointing out that this condition occurs enough to have a name might make the idea that people can crave the attention that comes with difficult circumstances seem less aberrant, no matter how rare it's described as being. That isn't particularly a problem here, as each thing we learn about what is going on is incrementally creepier without ever being linked to something that could qualify as an explanation, let alone a justification, and the situation is set up in such a way that it does not necessarily require constant escalation to keep things tense.
Full review at EFC
The Machine
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2014 in the Somerville Theatre micro-cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, BD)
I loved this movie when I saw it last year, enough to push to get it some screenings, and sometimes I worry that when I'm that enthusiastic, it might not survive a second encounter. Maybe the contagious excitement of seeing it at a sold-out festival screening hid its shortcomings, or perhaps I inserted what I heard during a cool Q&A into my memories of the movie proper. Or maybe it caught me personally at just the right time.
Well, I loved The Machine the second time around. It is absolutely a movie that was built almost entirely out of things I like, but it's put together with great skill and precision. I've seen a couple of sci-fi films over the past few weeks that struggled with their big ideas - the filmmakers had an image, or a concept, but felt that was enough, and that building a tight story would reign their imagination in or take the focus off the characters. As Caradog James shows here, that doesn't have to be the case. He's dedicated to pushing some strange imagery at the audience - this film is actually much weirder visually than I remember it - and pushing in a post-human direction that other filmmakers flinch at, but it's still emotional and exciting and everything that science fiction on film so often is not.
It's out on Blu-ray in about a month (and on demand now). If you like hard science fiction and don't mind a movie that uses a modest budget very well versus one that can throw a lot of money at something that is fairly conservative as science fiction goes, you really should check it out. And, if you're in Boston, kick yourself for not catching it on a good-sized screen when you had the chance.
Full review at EFC
Showing posts with label Somerville Subterranean Cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Somerville Subterranean Cinema. Show all posts
Monday, May 19, 2014
Saturday, March 08, 2014
Normal (2013)
I'll write about it a bit more when I get around to doing This Week that covers the past month, but this was the second Saturday in a row where I did more than two movies in as many municipalities, and those can be some long, sleep-til-noon-on-Sunday marathons, especially when they wind up tighter than expected. In this case, I think I figured that I had a little more time to hang styling the Coolidge and chat with Brian Tamm than was actually the case, although it's not his fault that the 66 bus likes to seemingly go backward if the MBTA tracking apps are correct, or that it delivered me to Harvard Square just in time for there to be a longer-than-usual wait for the Red Line. Which means that at about around ten, I was in the T station, hoping hard that the 8pm screening ran long or that Chris Hallock and company were doing a long intro for the 10pm show.
Ha-ha! Ten-fifteen and the Q&A for the last one was still going on! Obviously, I didn't see the intro, but I think that's director Richard Griffin on the right, wrote Lenny Schwartz in the middle, and Chris on the left. Well, him I know. Sorry about the red-eye. As I got in, Griffin was answering a question about cinematography, and then things broke up to adjourn to a nearby bar.
And, it turned out, leave me there to watch the movie by myself. I found that kind of amusing; the tickets for the 5pm and 8pm shows sold out fairly quickly, and Chris talked about adding the late show, but it appears that two shows was just about the level of demand for some pretty decent locally-produced psychological horror, and who knows how much of that was friends and family of people involved traveling up from Providence, where the movie was shoot minus some Boston exteriors.
(Don't feel too bad for Chris having to stick around and run it for just me, though; he headed upstairs and watched Citizen Kane in 35mm.)
If you go to the eFilmCritic review, you'll see that I end by comparing it, and by extension Griffin's other movies, to the cinematic equivalent of community theater, but I don't necessarily do that to dismiss them. What better metaphor is there for Griffin's Scorpio Film Releasing, which specializes in getting the same group of writers, directors, and actors together to do a few low-budget movies per year? That's what they do and good for them.
Especially since they do, in fact, seem to be getting better. Not many of these groups seem to last as long as this one, and at least based on what I've seen, Griffin is getting better: Atomic Brain Invasion was a somewhat better than usual 1950s sci-fi parody, still not good but at least better than most of that fundamentally misbegotten genre, while Murder University was the same sort of thing, except with 1980s slashers, and at least managed to have it's moments. You could at least see potential and progression there. And while i admit that I'm more likely to rate a movie which actually tries to do a higher than one that looks to spoof it, I think that Normal is just a stronger movie all around than the others.
A good part of that is the cast; I seem to recall liking Sarah Nicklin in Atomic Brain Invasion, and it looks from IMDB that this is her and husband Michael Reed's last movie in New England before decamping for the West Coast. I hope they do well there, not just because ones hours everyone succeeds in what they set out to do, but because they seem ready for the promotion to the big leagues. Leaves Griffin with a heck of a hole to fill, though.
Normal (2013)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, digital)
This is not the first time independent director Richard Griffin has tried to give his audience the creeps without having his tongue planted in his cheek - given how prolific the Rhode Island filmmaker has been since he started making movies about 15 years ago, it's no surprise that he's done a bit of everything - but it's likely his best so far. It's occasionally as shaky as one might expect from an off-the-grid production that straddles the art-house and the grindhouse, but it works out pretty well.
It starts out with Jim (Michael Reed) interrupting a rather one-sided conversation with the body in his bathtub to take a call from one of the residents of the building he and brother Tom (Nathaniel Sylva) own where Jim is the superintendent. The tenants are odd - newlyweds David (Patrick Keeffe) and Lucy (Monica Saviolakis) seem normal enough, but Kate (Elyssa Baldassari) is clearly disturbed, while both middle-aged George (David Erin Wilson) and seedy roommates April (Samantha Acampora) & June (Shannon Hartman). He only has eyes for a call girl (Sarah Nicklin) whose affections seem more sincere but who won't let him use her name when she's there in a professional capacity. Tom wants to sell and move away with his girlfriend, but Jim refuses. It probably has something to do with that corpse.
There are two types of serial-killer story that leap to mind from this situation, and while the second has probably been done enough that it's familiar enough on its own way, it is still more interesting and less purely mechanical than having Jim do nothing but murder his way through his neighbors as they complain about their apartments not receiving the maintenance they need. Griffin and writer Lenny Schwartz don't tease the audience by being needlessly cryptic for longer than they need to, but they do make good use of ambiguity and misdirection well enough that things can go in different directions without it being too obvious. The end is, perhaps, a little too weirdly metaphorical for the film's own good, but it gets there more honestly than some other movies of this type, in part because of an amusing (but still creepy) self-awareness.
Full review at EFC
Ha-ha! Ten-fifteen and the Q&A for the last one was still going on! Obviously, I didn't see the intro, but I think that's director Richard Griffin on the right, wrote Lenny Schwartz in the middle, and Chris on the left. Well, him I know. Sorry about the red-eye. As I got in, Griffin was answering a question about cinematography, and then things broke up to adjourn to a nearby bar.
And, it turned out, leave me there to watch the movie by myself. I found that kind of amusing; the tickets for the 5pm and 8pm shows sold out fairly quickly, and Chris talked about adding the late show, but it appears that two shows was just about the level of demand for some pretty decent locally-produced psychological horror, and who knows how much of that was friends and family of people involved traveling up from Providence, where the movie was shoot minus some Boston exteriors.
(Don't feel too bad for Chris having to stick around and run it for just me, though; he headed upstairs and watched Citizen Kane in 35mm.)
If you go to the eFilmCritic review, you'll see that I end by comparing it, and by extension Griffin's other movies, to the cinematic equivalent of community theater, but I don't necessarily do that to dismiss them. What better metaphor is there for Griffin's Scorpio Film Releasing, which specializes in getting the same group of writers, directors, and actors together to do a few low-budget movies per year? That's what they do and good for them.
Especially since they do, in fact, seem to be getting better. Not many of these groups seem to last as long as this one, and at least based on what I've seen, Griffin is getting better: Atomic Brain Invasion was a somewhat better than usual 1950s sci-fi parody, still not good but at least better than most of that fundamentally misbegotten genre, while Murder University was the same sort of thing, except with 1980s slashers, and at least managed to have it's moments. You could at least see potential and progression there. And while i admit that I'm more likely to rate a movie which actually tries to do a higher than one that looks to spoof it, I think that Normal is just a stronger movie all around than the others.
A good part of that is the cast; I seem to recall liking Sarah Nicklin in Atomic Brain Invasion, and it looks from IMDB that this is her and husband Michael Reed's last movie in New England before decamping for the West Coast. I hope they do well there, not just because ones hours everyone succeeds in what they set out to do, but because they seem ready for the promotion to the big leagues. Leaves Griffin with a heck of a hole to fill, though.
Normal (2013)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, digital)
This is not the first time independent director Richard Griffin has tried to give his audience the creeps without having his tongue planted in his cheek - given how prolific the Rhode Island filmmaker has been since he started making movies about 15 years ago, it's no surprise that he's done a bit of everything - but it's likely his best so far. It's occasionally as shaky as one might expect from an off-the-grid production that straddles the art-house and the grindhouse, but it works out pretty well.
It starts out with Jim (Michael Reed) interrupting a rather one-sided conversation with the body in his bathtub to take a call from one of the residents of the building he and brother Tom (Nathaniel Sylva) own where Jim is the superintendent. The tenants are odd - newlyweds David (Patrick Keeffe) and Lucy (Monica Saviolakis) seem normal enough, but Kate (Elyssa Baldassari) is clearly disturbed, while both middle-aged George (David Erin Wilson) and seedy roommates April (Samantha Acampora) & June (Shannon Hartman). He only has eyes for a call girl (Sarah Nicklin) whose affections seem more sincere but who won't let him use her name when she's there in a professional capacity. Tom wants to sell and move away with his girlfriend, but Jim refuses. It probably has something to do with that corpse.
There are two types of serial-killer story that leap to mind from this situation, and while the second has probably been done enough that it's familiar enough on its own way, it is still more interesting and less purely mechanical than having Jim do nothing but murder his way through his neighbors as they complain about their apartments not receiving the maintenance they need. Griffin and writer Lenny Schwartz don't tease the audience by being needlessly cryptic for longer than they need to, but they do make good use of ambiguity and misdirection well enough that things can go in different directions without it being too obvious. The end is, perhaps, a little too weirdly metaphorical for the film's own good, but it gets there more honestly than some other movies of this type, in part because of an amusing (but still creepy) self-awareness.
Full review at EFC
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 21 February 2014 - 27 February 2014
No lie - as stupid as the things hitting the multiplexes look, I'm kind of oddly excited for them.
- I mean, you know how Pomepeii is going to end, with Kit Harrington's enslaved gladiator racing to get out of the city before the volcano smothers everything - he'll probably have to rescue Emily Browning's lovely young noblewoman on the way - but it's got Keifer Sutherland as the presumed villain and Paul W.S. Anderson directing, and Anderson should at least make it visual striking with some decent action and well-implemented 3D. It plays in both 2D and 3D at the Capitol, Apple, Boston Common, and Fenway (3D showtimes on the RPX screen).
Meanwhile, Kevin Costner and director McG sign up for one of those Luc Besson-written/produced "basic action movie tailored to our strengths" that have worked out pretty well for the likes of Jason Statham and Liam Neeson; 3 Days to Kill has Costner playing a former spy pulled in for one last bout of mayhem in exchange to an antidote to the poison his employers (notably Amber Heard) have given him, even though he's looking after his teenage daughter at the same time. It's at Somerville, Apple, Fenway, and Boston Common.
Boston Common also has the first half of their annual Best Picture Showcase on Saturday; $30 gets you a seat for Philomena, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, and 12 Years a Slave, starting at noon; the other five play next Saturday. They've also got screenings of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon/evening, and (in an unexpected but pleasing move) will be expanding Beijing Love Story from two screenings a day to a full slate of four. - Fenway and Apple Cinemas/iMovieCafe are both keeping Gunday around on a reduced schedule (Apple also has Hasee Toh Phasee playing as well). Apple is also doing the thing where they book an interesting international genre film, in this case Snabba Cash II (okay, it's "Easy Money II: Hard to Kill" in the US, but isn't saying "Snabba Cash" fun?). It's a Swedish crime drama, the second of a fairly popular series there (the first was briefly released stateside in 2012 and is rentable on Amazon) about a business student who gets pulled into the local mafia. I suspect this entry from 2012 is being released now in order to tie in with star Joel Kinnaman currently being on another screen playing RoboCop, but, hey - Swedish action movie in local theater! I'll take it!
- The Coolidge opens up Tim's Vermeer, a documentary about an inventor from Texas who attempts to reverse-engineer the process that allowed Johannes Vermeer to paint photorealistically well before photography was invented. Should be fun; it's produced by Penn & Teller and directed by the latter half of the duo, and is playing upstairs in screen #2.
Downstairs, the @fter Midnite crew will be running John Carpenter's version of The Thing on 35mm at midnight Friday and Saturday; it's one of the best things either Carpenter or star Kurt Russell has ever done. Sunday morning is the monthly Goethe-Institut German film screening, with the Swiss consul co-presenting Lullaby Ride in which parents who take their baby Tim out for a drive get him to fall asleep must scramble when the car is stolen with Tim inside. $5 for a pretty nice-looking thriller. - Kendall Square will also be showing Tim's Vermeer, while also clearing and consolidating some screens for a number of other movies. One is The Wind Rises, master animator Hayao Miyazaki's final movie as director, in which he returns to his longtime passion for aviation to tell the story of the aeronautical engineer who designed the Zero fighter jet used during World War II. It looks as if the 11am and 5pm screenings will be dubbed into English, while the 2pm and 8pm showtimes will have the original Japanese soundtrack with subtitles.
There are also two romantic/erotic thrillers arriving there: In Secret (aka Thérèse) has Elizabeth Olsen playing a young woman in a loveless arranged marriage, the sort that may lead one to turn to crime when someone she is truly attracted to comes along. There's also a one-week booking of Stranger by the Lake, with Pierre Deladonchamps as fellow who meets two other men at a lake in rural France - one older and friendly, one sexy and dangerous, who will get him involved in a murder investigation. There's also a presentation of the recent Royal Opera House staging of La Bohème on Sunday morning. - The Somerville Theatre continues its Centennial Celebration with a Marx Brothers double feature on Friday night (Duck Soup at 8pm and A Night at the Opera at 10). It's live music for a few days after that, and then Top Haton Thursday (the program also shows Stagecoach on Wednesday, but it's not listed on the website as of right now). All anniversary screenings are in 35mm.
The Somerville Subterranean Cinema series has two programs in the Micro-Cinema this week: Black comedy Coyote plays Friday and Saturday nights and features horror stalwart Bill Oberst Jr. as an insomniac writer driven to violence, while Christmas with the Dead adapts a Joe R. Lansdale short story about a man trying to have a good Christmas despite the zombie apocalypse. It's a family affair, with Lansdale's son Keith penning the screenplay and daughter Kasey appearing in the movie and at the theater (as well as a number of other local venues as an author and musician). The theater also will be running 4:30pm screenings of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at least through Sunday and sending The Wolf of Wall Street to their sister theater, the Capitolin Arlington. - The Brattle Theatre finishes up the annualBugs Bunny Film Festival with a "Looney Tunes Revue" of 35mm cartoons playing matinees Friday to Sunday, which may overlap the past week's Bugs and Daffy programs but which contains other bits, too. Those evenings have another classic, a new digital restoration of Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai.
The weekdays following are a number of unique presentations: On Monday, the DocYard teams with The Flaherty (a New York-based film seminar) for a group of documentary shorts that will not be revealed beforehand so that they can be watched without preconception; special guests will be on hand and there will be a post-event discussion. Tuesday is the monthly "Trash Night", with The Dirt Bike Kid screening for the audience to mock. And then on Wednesday, director Doug Wolens and a number of others will be on-hand for the local premiere of his documentary The Singularity, an introduction to the idea that civilization will pass a point of no return where innovation happens faster than mere human minds can assimilate, placing the world in the hands of artificial and post-human intelligences. - The Harvard Film Archive continues Fortunes of the Western with Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (Friday 7pm) and Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon (Saturday 9pm). They also begin a Harmony & Anarchy series spotlighting the films of Harmony Korine, with Kids (Friday 9pm) and Gummo (Saturday & Sunday 7pm, the latter replacing Ken Park). Korine will come to town next weekend, while this weekend's special guest is Herbie Hancock, who will appear in person for Monday night's screening of The Spook Who Sat by the Door. He may also be around for Sunday afternoon's presentation of Antonioni's Blow Up, but it's not listed on the schedule. There's also a VES screening of La Commune on Thursday, tying in to the Carpenter Center's "Living as Form (The Nomadic Version)" exhibit.
- The Museum of Fine Arts wraps up the Films of Lars von Trier series with Antichrist on Friday and The Five Obstructions on Saturday & Sunday. A different filmmaker, Raoul Peck, will visit on Friday to host a screening of Fatal Assistance, his documentary on attempting to rebuild Haiti after it's horrible earthquake; it also plays Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It's run overlaps that of Cousin Jules, Dominique Benicheti's 1971 film about a blacksmith in the French countryside. That one plays Wednesday and Thursday and will continue popping up for another week after that. Then, on Thursday, "Mind-Bending Movies" returns with another David Lynch film; this month, audience members will have a chance to lead the post-film discussion of Blue Velvet by posting their theories on the museum's Facebook page.
- The Regent Theatre has two film events this week. The first is the weekly Gathr Preview Series film; The Forgotten Kingdom follows a man who returns from Johannesburg to his home village in Lesotho (a country completely surrounded by South Africa) and reconnects with both an old friend and the land itself. Then on Thursday, they'll have the local premiere of Lamb of God: As the Palaces Burn, which started out as a traditional rock doc about a Virginia heavy metal band but took a swerve when the lead singer was arrested for charges of manslaughter in the Czech Republic. In addition to the movie itself, there will be an exclusive pre-recorded Q&A session afterward.
- The first entry in this spring's UMass Boston Film Series was canceled due to weather (Uranium Drive-In has been rescheduled for 24 April, albeit in the afternoon); hopefully the same won't happen for Southern Comfort, a documentary about Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual who had difficulty finding treatment for his ovarian cancer because the local doctors worried what having him as a patient would mean for their reputations. As always, admission is free and director Kate Davis will be present for an introduction and post-film Q&A.
- The Bright Lights program at Emerson College's Paramount Theater has one program this week, a Thursday night screening of Fruitvale Station co-presented by EBONI (Emerson's Black Organization with Natural Interests) as part of African American Heritage Month
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Animals
I regret missing Animals at Fantasia last summer; while I did at least get to see it last night, it was one that I tried to move things around to accommodate, and new friend Gabriela said it was her favorite movie of the festival. It didn't work out, unfortunately, and the audience last night wasn't quite the packed house I'm sure I would have found in Monteral.
It's still a pretty darn good movie, even if I wouldn't have necessarily called it my favorite - The Machine filled that slot for me, but given that it's a bloody bit of hard science fiction while this is a coming-of-age story that moves between whimsical and sad with remarkable dexterity, I'm not sure that they should be directly compared.
At any rate, if you're reading this on Saturday January 25th, you've got three chances to see it this afternoon/evening, as it's playing in the micro-cinema at the Somerville Theatre as part of the Somerville Subterranean Cinema series at 5pm, 8pm, and 10pm tonight. For a small room with Blu-ray projection, it looks pretty good. If you can't make it, it is available on DVD and Amazon's streaming service, and SCT's next program is on 21/22 February, when they'll be showing the thriller Coyote.
One aside, about writing the review: I try to avoid tipping anything that I don't figure would be in the preview/synopsis/etc., which means I dance around SPOILERS! Pol kissing Ikari !SRELIOPS, but I'm not sure I should. Keeping that bit hidden doesn't necessarily feel like hiding a plot twist, but as treating that as something to keep hidden, which doesn't sit right with me and certainly isn't the impression of either my attitudes nor the movie's that I want to convey. Not sure how to get that across without spoiling a surprise, though.
Animals
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2014 in the Somerville Theatre's micro-cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, Blu-ray)
Animals is a coming-of-age story that perches right on the border between an impressive level of ambition and complexity on the one side and trying to do too much on the other. There's a whole movie just in how the teenage protagonist is stumbling around with this new attraction thing, but director Marçal Forés and his two co-writers have a lot of other things going on as well, and that's before you get to the talking teddy bear.
The bear, Deerhoof, belongs to Pol (Oriol Pla), a seemingly-average teenager in Catalonia. He lives with his older brother Llorenç (Javier Beltrán), attends an English-language high school with his best friend Laia (Roser Tapias), spending enough time together that his other friend Mark (Dimitri Leonidas) teases they're already engaged, although how each feels about that is open for debate. They spend some time watching a pair of further-outsiders: Ikari (Augustus Prew), who mostly avoids the other students, and Clara (Maria Rodríguez), who has been acting strange since nearly drowning a little while ago and soon disappears.
The film is undoubtedly Pol's story, but one of the impressive things about it is that this is in many ways more a function of Forés training the camera on him than anything else. The climax of the movie involves a number of characters who were outside Pol's circle, but despite their relatively fleeting appearances in the film up until then, they all seem real enough, not just there to accomplish one thing or fill out a scene. It's an impressive bit of work by Forés and the young cast, with Roser Tapieas and Augustus Prew especially noteworthy as the two people who spend the most time with Pol, along with Javier Beltrán as a brother clearly not sure how to act as a guardian (literally, as he has recently started as a policeman) and Martin Freeman as the kids' art history teacher.
Full review at EFC.
It's still a pretty darn good movie, even if I wouldn't have necessarily called it my favorite - The Machine filled that slot for me, but given that it's a bloody bit of hard science fiction while this is a coming-of-age story that moves between whimsical and sad with remarkable dexterity, I'm not sure that they should be directly compared.
At any rate, if you're reading this on Saturday January 25th, you've got three chances to see it this afternoon/evening, as it's playing in the micro-cinema at the Somerville Theatre as part of the Somerville Subterranean Cinema series at 5pm, 8pm, and 10pm tonight. For a small room with Blu-ray projection, it looks pretty good. If you can't make it, it is available on DVD and Amazon's streaming service, and SCT's next program is on 21/22 February, when they'll be showing the thriller Coyote.
One aside, about writing the review: I try to avoid tipping anything that I don't figure would be in the preview/synopsis/etc., which means I dance around SPOILERS! Pol kissing Ikari !SRELIOPS, but I'm not sure I should. Keeping that bit hidden doesn't necessarily feel like hiding a plot twist, but as treating that as something to keep hidden, which doesn't sit right with me and certainly isn't the impression of either my attitudes nor the movie's that I want to convey. Not sure how to get that across without spoiling a surprise, though.
Animals
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2014 in the Somerville Theatre's micro-cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, Blu-ray)
Animals is a coming-of-age story that perches right on the border between an impressive level of ambition and complexity on the one side and trying to do too much on the other. There's a whole movie just in how the teenage protagonist is stumbling around with this new attraction thing, but director Marçal Forés and his two co-writers have a lot of other things going on as well, and that's before you get to the talking teddy bear.
The bear, Deerhoof, belongs to Pol (Oriol Pla), a seemingly-average teenager in Catalonia. He lives with his older brother Llorenç (Javier Beltrán), attends an English-language high school with his best friend Laia (Roser Tapias), spending enough time together that his other friend Mark (Dimitri Leonidas) teases they're already engaged, although how each feels about that is open for debate. They spend some time watching a pair of further-outsiders: Ikari (Augustus Prew), who mostly avoids the other students, and Clara (Maria Rodríguez), who has been acting strange since nearly drowning a little while ago and soon disappears.
The film is undoubtedly Pol's story, but one of the impressive things about it is that this is in many ways more a function of Forés training the camera on him than anything else. The climax of the movie involves a number of characters who were outside Pol's circle, but despite their relatively fleeting appearances in the film up until then, they all seem real enough, not just there to accomplish one thing or fill out a scene. It's an impressive bit of work by Forés and the young cast, with Roser Tapieas and Augustus Prew especially noteworthy as the two people who spend the most time with Pol, along with Javier Beltrán as a brother clearly not sure how to act as a guardian (literally, as he has recently started as a policeman) and Martin Freeman as the kids' art history teacher.
Full review at EFC.
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