Film Rolls, Round 17: The Girl Most LIkely To… and The Mobfathers

It doesn't happen often, because I've got a bad habit of starting a movie at 10pm, but sometimes it works out that the dice choose both ends of an evening's double feature.

In this case, Mookie rolls a 4, which brings him to The Girl Most Likely To…, a TV-movie that, at 64 minutes, seems like it would be pretty short for even a 90-minute timeslot in 1973, although seeing that it was apparently broadcast on Election Night makes me wonder if the network knew it would be interrupted and wanted something that wouldn't run into the wee hours.

Rolling an 8 gets Bruce into the most recent Hong Kong section, landing on The Mobfathers, which also isn't exactly epic-length, so there was plenty of time to watch this before lights-out.

So, do good things come in small packages?

The Girl Most Likely To…

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

It's always a bit weird to see folks one first encountered as supporting character actors in their middle age as young sex symbols, as is the case with Stockard Channing here. It's especially peculiar given that her voice didn't really change that much between this first credited role and when I started seeing her in supporting roles and on television twenty-odd years later. On top of that, the Joan Rivers dialogue she's given never really sounds like it's coming from a young person, because I suspect that even when she was in her twenties, Rivers had the soul of a veteran borscht belt comic.

As a result, there's a lot about this movie that seems kind of off from 50 years down the line, even before you get to the overt sexism that drives so much of the story (it's not that this is unrealistic, but that even people making lame excuses is more interesting to watch), or the fact that folks pushing/over 30 playing college-aged characters really defied belief in 1973. The nut of it, of course, is not bad at all - Miriam Knight (Channing), a hard-working, smart, and witty but plain-looking college girl, is tormented by her roommate (Susanne Zenor) and said roommate's boyfriend (Larry Wilcox), underestimated by her professors, and taken for granted by the family friend she's expected to marry (Warren Berlinger), until a disfiguring auto accident requires reconstructed surgery, and she's reconstructed into something quite conventionally attractive, apparently so unrecognizable that she's able to get quite close to everyone who treated her badly as she seeks revenge, with the detective on her trail (Ed Asner) expressing a certain sort of admiration.

It's maybe unfair to ask this film to be more than it is, a comedy made for American network television five years before the release of Halloween and the subsequent slasher boom (heck, Bob Clark hadn't even made Black Christmas yet); it sometimes feels as though Rivers, co-writer Agnes Gallin, and workman TV director Lee Philips are trying to put a new twist on a genre that doesn't properly exist yet. Remade today, this would have a better chance to be a vicious little horror movie where the jokes served as an extra twist of the knife, although it could still wind up as the same kind of arch thing where the jokes feel casual even if they're tied up in violence. The kills themselves are often elaborate slapstick abusrdities, ridiculous ways to die which reduces the force of their irony a bit.

It is, at least, not a bad way to be introduced to Stockard Channing; she's got the right sort of youthful optimism to start, comfortable throwing off those Rivers wisecracks in a way that shows Miriam is fun and clever but knows she can't afford to show people up with it. Of course, pre-surgery Miriam is still Stockard Channing and the make-up doesn't quite make her different enough to sell her as unrecognizable, and she's not quite at the point where one buys casually homicidal as a reaction to discovering that people are just differently awful. Amusingly, there's some "she just can't write men" going on here; while Susanne Zenor's Heidi has a ring of truth in her awfulness, the guys are boringly one-dimensional, and even Ed Asner can't do much with a fundamentally ridiculous detective.

This movie is what it is and maybe all it can be given the time and millieu. It's at least just good enough to remember, while what are surely many other attempts to do something smilar haven't even made this TV-movie's small ding in pop culture.

Suen lo chor (The Mobfathers)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

What an odd mix of personalities this has - Chapman To is capable of playing a ruthless gangster (he's terrifically fierce in G Affairs), but it never seems to come naturally to him here, so this film always feels like it's going to veer off into a comedic direction, while Herman Yau's direction is pure B-movie get-a-good-enough-take-and-move-on, preventing the film from having a coherent personality. It's not quirky enough to work as a spoof of Election or the like, but it's also not the sort of movie that can stand alongside those, either.

It's a familiar story: Chuck Lam (Chapman To Man-Chat) is a triad underboss just out of prison who mostly tries to get jobs done without a lot of fuss. He's the presumed heir apparent to the ailing godfather (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang), with Wulf (Gregory Wong Chung-Yiu) and "Coke" (Tony Ho Wah-Chiu) also in the mix and old friend Luke (Philip Keung Hiu-Man) counted on for support. Of course, in a situation like this, there are lots of folks looking to take advantage of a situation in flux. Meanwhile, Chuck's son is having difficulty in elementary school and it's tough for a mobster to find time to deal with that and act like a normal person in parent-teacher meetings.



There's kind of a fun movie to be made about a guy being sort of overwhelmed by his duties as both a mobster and a father, and the English-language title kind of makes me wonder if that was originally a bigger part of the movie before Yau apparently became enamored of this as a metaphor for how so much in Hong Kong organizations is opaque right up to the top, or just found the mob storylines more interesting. The trouble with that is that To is at his best, in general and in this movie, when he's playing an everyman in an off-kilter world, and when that becomes real life-and-death stakes, it becomes precarious, and Herman Yau isn't the sort of filmmaker who threads needles. He's the sort of filmmaker that cranks things out and then moves along to the next one. And, fine - there's worse things in the world than a Hong Kong crime movie descending into violence! Unfortunately, Yau and company make the decision to go with over-the-top CGI blood as stuff goes down, and it doesn't match the grounded crime storytelling mode that the film has shifted to or the type of comedy it's used to that point, between Chuck's breaking the fourth wall or juxtaposing the gangland violence with the ordinary.

Perhaps it's a more compelling gangster story, or political metaphor, if you're actually from Hong Kong; I got to the end and couldn't help but wonder what all that was about.


A quick night which lets Bruce build a bit of a lead back up:

Mookie: 61 stars
Bruce: 62 ¾ stars

Next up: More from relatively recent Hong Kong! You can tell it's relatively recent because that lean indicates there's something missing at the end.

This Week in Tickets: 19 November 2018 - 25 November 2018

Someone dropping a whole bunch of TV that comes from one of my favorite filmmakers explains why not a whole lot of scotch tape was necessary this week:



AMC rolled out an old-school miniseries this week - three movie-length presentations on consecutive nights, the sort of thing that used to be the bedrock of network-television event programming during sweeps periods - and the thing that grabbed my attention where this new adaptation of John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl was that the whole thing would be directed by Park Chan-wook, who has made one English-language feature but who has mostly worked in his native South Korea, creating strong, lush thrillers, and whose willingness to go dark certainly seemed like a great fit to le Carré's realistic, amoral spy stories. The only issue, really, is that this is a pretty sizable project, built as six 55-minute episodes for the BBC, so my reaction went something like this:

Night One: Whoever decided to hook Park up with all those garish late-1970s color schemes was a genius.

Night Two: Look, cable stations, it's one thing to have an episode of Justified run long by five minutes, but if this is going to run 161 minutes every night, start it at 8pm rather than 9pm - some of us have to work weekdays!

Night Three (watched Sunday morning because of travel and such): Okay, this last chunk is pretty great, but how much of the set-up do we really need?

This thing drags a lot, and I kind of wonder how often Park has had to work in a format where runtime is so strictly defined before. There are thrillingly tense moments and a sort of meta-thread showing how carefully rehearsed and planned everything that the actress played by Florence Pugh is, which everybody from the cast to the editors pulls off every time. Pugh certainly has next-big-thing potential, given how she enlivened Outlaw King and how much everybody liked her in Lady Macbeth, and Michael Shannon is never not watchable, but Alexander Skarsgård is kind of dull in a pivotal role. A lot of the folks around them, be they Mossad or PLO, feel like TV supporting characters who would really get fleshed out well given their own subplots and maybe a spotlight episode, but this isn't that kind of TV series.

I wonder what Park and his editors would get this thing down to if told to make it a show to be watched in one sitting or six episodes that didn't have to be any given length. I'll bet it would become much more digestible.

Digestion brings us to the rest of the week, which involved heading north to Maine for Thanksgiving dinner(s), an even crazier process than it used to be because everybody has multiple places to go on different schedules. It's a fair chunk of time on the bus and in loud houses, but my extended family is great and contains many people who are very good at making pie, so it's pretty good. It needed to do laundry when I got back (I'd already purchased one pair of pants to put it off a couple days this week) and local theaters are getting stingier with 3D screenings, so plan A was abandoned and I caught the new Robin Hood on Friday night, and that's a frustrating movie - not nearly as bad as I'd feared or as good as one might hope, and the annoying thing is that having competently-constructed action would likely not have gotten in the way of making a modern Robin Hood for the resistance one single iota. Saturday, there was plenty of time to get to Ralph Breaks the Internet - that one didn't disappoint; it's probably smarter than Wreck-It Ralph even if it doesn't hit me straight in the nostalgia gland the way its predecessor did.

That left me with a comfortable amount of time to get to the Brattle Theatre for Seven Samurai, and even though it started early, that one will polish off an evening. It's still a total classic, a lot to watch on a regular basis but the sort of thing that makes me glad some theater in the area will play it on 35mm once a year or so. Keeps me from feeling the need to upgrade it to a Blu-ray. Sunday was also a 35mm Kurosawa at the Brattle evening, with a double bill of The Hidden Fortress and Throne of Blood.

Monday's The Grand Buddha+ has already gone up on my Letterboxd page, and it looks like there's a pretty busy weekend on tap.

Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Kurosawa in History, 35mm)

I don't know that I've got a whole lot to add to what I wrote the last time I saw this (or at least, the last time I wrote about it). It's such a relaxed film even though it never loses track of its ticking clock and the desperation of the peasants who feel the need to hire a team of samurai. I wonder if that's a matter of Kurosawa identifying with the samurai as much as (or more than) the villagers. He gives the common people the opening act, but once their are samurai, they start to drive the narrative, stern and patrician and wise. The practicalities of battle are presented as just how things are, and the stubborn common men who will see their homes destroyed sadly impractical. Even Toshiro Mifune's central rant about how both peasants and samurai are terribly selfish only gets rebuked through the warriors' actions, and his characters' trying to put on airs and climb above his station is the cause of many problems.

What makes this a rich movie is that I sort of came to the opposite conclusion last back in 2014 - that Kurosawa was sneakily undercutting the image of the noble samurai. It's kind of fascinating that my reaction to this film seems to seek an equilibrium - it will undercut whatever assumptions one comes in with, and does so in a way that seems honest rather than like the filmmakers trying to cover the angles, even if it's often theatrical rather than strictly realistic.

What I wrote back in March 2014

Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (The Hidden Fortress)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Kurosawa in History, 35mm)

This movie has a bit of an inflated reputation because of the clear line one can trace from it to Star Wars, both from those who love George Lucas and those who aren't inclined to give him much credit. In truth,it's a very enjoyable adventure story but also kind of flabby in spots, and perhaps doesn't stop to think as often as it could or have that many impressive action bits. It's good, because even lesser Kurosawa with Toshiro Mifune and Misa Uehara as a fiercely memorable princess is a cut above most films out there, but you can see it doesn't have enough to fill its running time.

That's part and parcel of its gimmick of being both a movie about two hard-luck peasants trying to get home from war with something to show for it and one about a samurai trying to get a princess to safety. It's a fun idea, and the film does a good job of representing both their perspectives, although seeing it the day after Seven Samurai, which seemed a bit more even-handed about it, although both seem kind of hard on the peasants compared to the nobility.

Full review at EFilmCritic (from 2010)

Kumonosu-jô (Throne of Blood)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Kurosawa in History, 35mm)

I kind of wonder how this plays to folks who don't know Macbeth. I suspect it's still a great, thrilling picture; I just wonder if not seeing where Kurosawa is following a familiar structure makes certain turns more exciting or more peculiar. I certainly found myself wishing he had abandoned the supernatural after the ghost's initial appearance, just relying on the wife as a persistent voice of doubt, even as I also wondered what this Kurosawa leaving a straight-up horror movie would be like, as the moments where he goes for that sort of atmosphere are fantastic.

There's still a lot to love here, though, from the usual pleasures of a brash, arrogant Toshiro Mifune to how Kurosawa skillfully blends the conventions of the stage with those of the cinema. This movie is Shakespearean not just in its premise but in how it uses servants as a chorus, for example, while also leaning into how Kurosawa's samurai stories often seem to take place in a post-apocalyptic hell. Scenes will often take place in fixed locations, having people report in rather than necessarily showing action, but the setting of the scene and the impressive cutting and cinematography makes sure it never feels static and boxed in

This movie could possibly do with sticking a little less close to its source (said the guy who loves Shakespeare), but given the master and the masterpiece involved, wishing for something even better seems terribly conceited.

This Week in Tickets: 10 September 2018 - 16 September 2018

Man, this weekend did not go as planned.



The good news - Tuesday's baseball game was a lot of fun, a nice night, the score tight until it wasn't, the first game with Sale back from injury, enough 9/11 commemoration to be respectful but far from going overboard. Didn't even stick "God Bless America" into the seventh-inning stretch, and I'm wondering if maybe we're starting to see that sort of thing start to fade away as the ramifications of its excess start to sink in

I also finished Miss Sherlock during the week, and I find myself mostly fond of it but with reservations. The cast is great, especially Yuko Takeuchi as Sherlock - she's more manic than cold, taking a genuine delight in solving weird crimes and growing attached to Wato-san in prickly, believable fashion that leaves me hopeful this won't become the Cumberbatch/Freeman Sherlock redux - but I have to admit that I'm so used to a more active Watson readily accepted as Sherlock's peer that Wato-san seemed like something of a throwback. The show's take on Moriarty seemed like a bit too much as well, but what can you do? Doyle's "Napoleon of Crime" at the center of a web is just a gangster or a garden-variety conspiracy theory these days, and while I think this show was on the right track for how to update the archetype for the Twenty-First Century with radicalization, it seemed a bit on a Rube Goldberg set-up and played into the weak-Watson issue.

Am I still hoping like heck that HBO/Hulu Asia make another series? Oh, yes.

I had big plans for the weekend, but right around 4pm on Friday, something hit me like a wall, and the next day and a half was basically my body telling me that I was going to lie down and half pay attention to the ballgame and maybe, if it was feeling generous, it would give me enough mental energy to read a comic book. Not the greatest state to be in when you've brought some work home, have errands to run, and there were something like four or five movies that looked worth seeing over the weekend. Nope, you're not going to be up for that until Sunday night, when things had progressed to "mostly feeling okay but everything tastes terrible".

That served as a good enough excuse to check out the room AMC had upgraded to "Dolby Cinema" at Assembly Row. Unlike the one at South Bay, it's not really a big room, just a bit larger than average for that multiplex, with a screen to match - but it feels tony, with no pre-movie ad package, dim LED lighting, lots of black. I'm mildly amazed that black levels are the big selling point for Dolby Cinema, even more than the Atmos sound; it just seems so esoteric, not as easy a sell as brighter colors or the rumble you feel in the seat. I suppose it goes without saying that those blacks aren't quite as black as you might find with actual film, but pretty darn decent as far as digital goes.

Fair enough spot to see something like The Predator, which doesn't quite demand overwhelming power but is still a bit of an upgrade on standard projection, especially if you're paying the same because of Stubs A-List or the like.

Much busier week planned now that I'm feeling up to writing this from the RMV lobby. Follow along on my Letterboxd, or just wait for the blog to be updated.

The Predator

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 September 2018 in AMC Assembly Row #2 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)

Predator had no business spawning a franchise at all, and yet Twentieth Century Fox keeps trying because, while there's nowhere to take it without losing the sheer 1980s muscle-headed appeal of the original film, it's just too damn merchandisable. So roughly every ten years the try again, and it's not like they don't give it their best shot, but digging deeper into the mythology behind a dumb action movie is something of a fool's errand. This attempt to do so is pretty capable, in a disposable-paperback way, but even by those standards could have been more.

It opens with one alien spaceship chasing another, the first taking damage as it escapes to Earth through hyperspace, crashing to Earth in the middle of an op where sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is in the middle of an operation south of the border. McKenna fares much better than most do when faced by one of these "Predators", but he's canny enough to know that seeing this has likely made him a target, and tries to get himself some insurance. Back home, his pre-teen son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) is being bullied for being on the spectrum, and Project Stargazer operative Traeger (Sterling K. Brown) is recruiting biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn) to investigate what McKenna has found. Oh, and speaking of McKenna, he was right to be worried about what the government would do with the only living witness to a UFO crash, as they've put him on a bus to a VA psychiatric hospital with a bunch of traumatized soldiers.

Though director Shane Black and his occasional partner-in-crime Fred Dekker are the only credited writers on this film, it's got the feel of one of those projects where a studio solicits a bunch of different pitches and then tries to Frankenstein the best parts of them into one movie. Any single one of these stories - the secret government agency, the team of traumatized veterans, the chance for some Black & Dekker holiday mayhem with a monster running around the suburbs on Halloween - could play as a new take on the Predator story, and given that the series has by circumstance never had much in the way of film-to-film continuity, there's nothing stopping the studio from just lining them up one after another, especially if they can be done on reasonable budgets. Throwing them all together like this, the plots wind up in competition to the point where the characters from the various threads are trying to kill each other for no good reason. It's not just frustrating in that none of the threads feel like they play out properly, but it takes some exceptionally dumb plot devices and Macguffins to hold them together.

Full review at EFilmCritc

This Week In Tickets: 20 December 2015 - 26 December 2015

Not many movies seen this week, because it was Christmas and my nieces require a lot of spoiling.

Like I said, pretty quick week - on Sunday I finally caught up with Mojin - The Lost Legend, which turned out to be a fun action/adventure movie, even if it was kind of funny to see how hard the filmmakers and writers worked to make sure that the supernatural elements had rational explanations. I spent the next few evenings getting Christmas shopping done, then because I screwed up actually getting on the train to Maine, I had time to check out Mr. Six when it opened on Christmas Eve.

Still, that got me to Dan's and Lara's house in time to watch "Christmas Eve on Sesame Street" with my nieces. As I get older, I find myself a bit more amazed by Sesame Street and its almost offhand diversity: A black couple are the main voices of authority and respected people on the block. The music teacher has a deaf girlfriend. There are a lot of Latino folks and that they often speak Spanish is no big deal (heck, the first song on the soundtrack to this special is "Feliz Navidad"). The main kid in the special is Asian-American. I am reasonably sure that the only time they ever mentioned that Mr. Hooper was Jewish was during the Christmas special, so that they could quietly acknowledge that not everybody celebrates the same holidays but it's no big deal because making the effort to be inclusive is so easy.

Sometimes I wonder whether Sesame Street is more responsible than we know for good attitudes being ingrained in those who grew up with it or if we've backslid terribly from a time when many people tried harder to do this kind of representation on national television. Whichever the reason, it's still a great hour, a worthy holiday tradition.

After that, I spent the next couple days hanging around with my family, giving nieces excessive amounts of presents that hopefully they'll like despite not necessarily having seen the like before (I am the uncle who spots weird games and makes sure my nieces get to see Song of the Sea). Then, it was back home, and time for another Christmas special, this year's Doctor Who: "The Husbands of River Song".

Then, on Sunday, a day well spent at the Somerville Theatre, but we're not quite back on the Monday-Sunday pages yet, so that will be material for next week.

Doctor Who: "The Husbands of River Song"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2015 in Jay's Living Room (off the DVR, HD)

I wish it were easier to get out to the theater in Revere that is showing the latest Doctor Who Christmas special on the big screen this week, not so much because it's the sort of extravaganza that demands that sort of presentation, but because the specials seem even more brutalized by commercials than the regular series. As miniature action movies that involve the Doctor and his companions reacting to a crisis rather than solving a mystery, they're always moving forward, and every ad break seems wrong.

Despite that nuisance, "The Husbands of River Song" is one of the best Christmas entries that the series has produced; one of the underrated aspects of show-runner Steven Moffat's tenure is that he digs into how Christmas is an aggregation of traditions that bring joy but can also really throw you when something is off. Here, the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) is mourning what can be seen as either a death in the family or a necessary but sad breakup (it's science fiction and thus complicated) but has little time to mope, as he's thrust into a new adventure with a different loved one (Alex Kingston) who seems to have moved on.

And it's a fun one; the Doctor hits the ground running and has to keep it up if he's to keep pace with River, who is apparently in one of her more amoral phases. It's a funny, energetic adventure, with plenty of jokes playing off River not recognizing the Doctor's latest regeneration, an angry severed head, a less-angry headless body, and the difficulties in getting a restaurant reservation on Christmas (something Brits do much more than Americans). Amid this frequently dark comedy, there's still room for a fair amount of sci-fi action, messing around with time travel, and melancholy that is explained just enough for newcomers and resonates for those who just finished watching Series 9.

It's not perfect - like Russell Davies before him, Moffat has an unfortunate habit of having characters be uncomfortably worshipful of the Doctor, and the action can often feel like lots of things happening but not to great purpose. It's easily forgiven; "Husbands" his the right emotional spots about 90% of the time, entertains enough to cover the gaps, and still feels like a good between-series check-in even coming just a couple weeks after the most recent finale.

This Week In Tickets: 25 August 2014 - 31 August 2014

Spent more time than I'd like trying to have every ticket touch the day it was used, but then you can't and there's that big space in the corner...



I wasn't going to do the Doctor Who season premiere in the theater, but then I saw it was remembered that Ben Wheatley was directing and figured, what's twelve bucks? The really crazy thing is that a lot of people seem to have done so; the 7pm show was expanded to two screens, which means about three or four hundred people decided to do the same at Boston Common, plus however many folks were at Fenway, Assembly Row, and the further suburbs. That's despite it being shown on free television a couple days earlier.

Crazy, really. I joke about how the stuff I loved as a kid is ridiculously popular now, and where were all the cute college girls in costumes paying cash money to watch this thing when I was a teenager?... But, really, it's kind of amazing.

Tuesday, I took the long train to Chestnut Hill, because if I'm going to pay 3D money for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, it may as well be at the fancy place. Just barely made it because I was hit with a couple of delays on the T, and it took until a couple minutes in to get the 3D properly turned on, but it's looked pretty good.

Then came a long weekend, and checking out four movies that hit the multiplexes but apparently had nobody reviewing them for eFilmCritic - The November Man on Thursday, As Above, So Below on Friday, Kundo: Age fo the Rampant on Saturday, and Raja Natwartal on Sunday. The big surprise among them was As Above, So Below, a pretty standard-looking found-footage film that benefits from having Perdita Weeks and just works in terms of getting the scares it wants.

That one was meant mostly to serve as a warm-up for the only midnight show I got to at the Somerville this summer, The 'Burbs, and at first it seemed like I was planning things right - have the soda at 10pm so that the caffeine is hitting the system around midnight, but it's amazing how quickly one can go from chugging along to just dragging. It lasted right into the next day, as I was feeling pretty sluggish while watching Kundo, although I arrived back from Revere just in time to catch the last screening of "Monty Python Live (Mostly)" in the Bright Screening Room at the Paramount. First time I've been there in a while, but then, they did stop having a regular film program, and I haven't yet made it to the "Bright Lights" series.

Another packed house for a thing I have liked since I was young, and I wonder if Emerson managed to get the late booking (most places, including ArtsEmerson screened this in late July/early August) for incoming students. I'm guessing that's who a lot of the folks in there were, including a couple with the weird habit of announcing everything they recognized. Did they have girlfriends who weren't fans or something? Even in that case, I'm not sure what calling out "The Parrot Sketch!" gets you.

Doctor Who: "Deep Breath"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2014 in AMC Boston Common #14 (Fathom Events, digital)

I've been looking forward to the new series of Doctor Who in large part because of Peter Capaldi and once again having the actor playing the part be discernibly older than I am the part played as an eccentric uncle rather than a potential boyfriend, or at least closer to that ideal. Given that Capaldi is a life-long fan of the show, having things move toward the original series excited me.

Well, it's not a total throwback; even though I half-suspect that the BBC suggested that the producers not worry about cutting it too much so that they could have the feature-length episode for theaters, leaving it kind of air-filled at a few moments, it's still running at a pretty frantic pace - a nice feat for an episode that, when you get right down to it, is rather dedicated to making a case that shouldn't have to be made - we've seen enough regenerations to know that the initially-prickly new guy will eventually be revealed as kind of a softie underneath, and basically the same person you've been following for the last X episodes/years/decades. It even goes so far as to basically borrow plot and villains from an earlier new-series episode. Why not just run with it?

Still, it's a fun episode. It's got a dinosaur (two, if you count Lady Vastra)! Capaldi, in the midst of talking about who he is as the new Doctor, does a very nice job of establishing the character, and while it seems like Clara is being reconfigured just as much as the Doctor (this repeated characterization as a control freak seems like a break from the caretaker of series 7+), Jenna Coleman is making it work. And while this was never going to be a full-fledged Ben Wheatley movie - he and Amy Jump didn't write it and he is making it for a much broader audience than his usual - but it's got a moment or two that I don't think a standard TV director would have gone for, with some jumps over the filler bits (I wonder what this would have looked like cut down to a more-standard 50 minutes). Having seen "Into the Dalek" since, I'm curious how others will handle the other Missy appearances; how many other directors will go for straight "I don't care if you don't get it right now" instead of "interesting, right?"

Also worth noting: The cinematic presentation was in the a roughly 2.35:1 aspect ratio, but the television presentation was HD-standard 1.78. I wonder which one Wheatley was framing for.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2014 in Showcase Cinemas SuperLux Chestnut Hill #3 (first-run, RealD)

Crazy, isn't it, that the sequel to a movie which was a huge deal ten years ago can become a "just another" movie, even though Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller have still turned out something that looks and feels like nothing else out there aside from the first and Miller's The Spirit, and those weren't in 3D. But in that time, Zack Snyder has had picked up the "make it look exactly like the comics" ball, run with it, and moved on, which means that the gimmick isn't enough - to be as well-remembered as the first movie, it's going to have to be better.

And, unfair as it is, it's not. It's got some impressive pieces: Eva Green absolutely insists on grabbing the audience's attention, just leaning into the pulpiness of the material; if this is how Miller and the pulp authors he's emulating think of women, so be it, that's what she'll deliver. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Powers Boothe are good enough in their story that it's a bit of a shame they don't get to play off each other more. Rodriguez is one of the best at using 3D and he's at least enthusiastic where the pulp action is concerned. Rosario Dawson remains fantastic, even if she's in a role that's as ridiculous as her costume.

What's missing, then? Some sort of satisfaction, I think - not one of the four stories really has the "f--- yeah!" moment that makes the suffering that comes before - or the inevitable going down swinging - worth it. There are stabs, but they're not enough. Circumstances have hurt the cast, too: Dennis Haysbert replaces Michael Clarke Duncan, Josh Brolin takes Clive Owen's role (although that's got an in-story explanation), Brittany Murphy is gone, Bruce Willis is sidelined. Jessica Alba is a better actress than she was, but too much of the last act rests on her.

I'm a bit tempted to take out the old DVD of the first movie and see if it holds up, or if all the issues from the new one are there, but it was just different and exciting in 2005. But then, what good could come out of that?

The 'Burbs

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 August 2014 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Midnight Specials, 35mm)

Like a lot of folks who really like movies, I'm always a bit puzzled why Joe Dante hasn't had more mainstream success. He's certainly made movies that people love, and his film-nut tendencies don't tend to wedge themselves in to an extent where audience feel put off when they don't get the reference, even when he is clearly making movies about movies. All his movies tend to be genuinely funny or scary as need be, and he's got a knack for making silly work that few other filmmakers do.

And that latter part may almost work against him - he can make movies that, even if they aren't targeted entirely to kids, certainly play well for them, which means that when he makes something like The 'Burbs, which is not just for adults but actually kind of hostile in tone, people don't know what to make of it. Dante and writer Dana Olsen aren't coating this particular look at suburban isolation and paranoia with any sort of fondness, and even though there are some pretty great gags in it and a mystery worth unraveling, it's not hard to see audiences coming away from it feeling like they're being accused. This is in fact the case, but not many filmmakers do it quite so flagrantly.

It's a bit of a shame that it can be so off-putting, because Tom Hanks is kind of great in it, hinting at the edge he would have in some of his later roles at a time when he hadn't really moved far outside of the audience's comedic comfort zone yet. There's a fun ensemble around him, and Dante uses what theater manager Ian Judge described as a long-standing set on the Universal lot extremely well - its half-familiarity and the way the camera flits around it help with the movie's accusatory tone, making this a little more our neighborhood.

I must admit, I do enjoy the cheerful, friendly Joe Dante (or at least the one who doesn't mess around scaring the audience) a bit more than the guy who made this movie. I'm still pretty fond of it, but I wonder if this is what pushed him to the side in Hollywood more than anything else.

Monty Python Live (Mostly)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2014 in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room (special presentation, digital)

I've got the Monty Python Instant Record Collection buried in a pile of CDs somewhere, but I always considered it a bit of an oddity; my impression of the troupe always came from the Flying Circus and Holy Grail, and I never thought of them as the group that performed Eric Idle's funny songs as opposed to the sketch-comedy troupe led by John Cleese and Graham Chapman. This live special, though, leans pretty heavily on Idle's music, with plentiful use of a chorus line to cover changes between skits. On the one hand, that means fewer moments with the surviving members of the troupe (including Carol Cleveland) actually on stage, but on the other, I feel happy for the dancers - how often do they actually get to be funny in their job?

As to the material... There's something definitely odd about watching all these routines that a couple of generations of high school/college kids memorized only to see the performers stumbling on, because they're septugenarians and their repetition of the material was for the most part done forty-plus years ago. There are uncomfortable moments when it feels like we might be seeing the beginning of the end for John Cleese, as the oldest member of the group seemed to forget his lines the most, although in that case it certainly helps to be playing against partners with the same kind of sharp comic timing and just generally be able to turn it into a self-referential bit about how the audience knows the material anyway.

And, let's face it, the stuff is still funny, even if this isn't quite the best possible version of it (live performance is nice, but being able to get it right and edit the best bits of each take together doesn't hurt). The performers have all had intriguingly different and successful careers since Python, but they still seem to have a fair amount of affection for the material and each other - Terry Gilliam especially seems absolutely delighted to be working with his old friends again, even if Cleese sort of seems to have a "not going to let people see me excited" thing going on. I do think that the moments when they go off the script we all know are the ones I enjoyed the most, whether it be Michael Palin covering for Cleese's flubs or a video bit with Professors Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking that has fun with nitpicking the science of a silly song.

When the live reunion shows were first announced, I seriously considered a London vacation to see them, although the money wasn't quite there and, besides, they were smack in the middle of the Fantasia Festival. I kind of wish I had - given that I was born in 1973, this was pretty close to a literal once-in-a-lifetime event, and being there would have been an extra jolt. In the future, I'll watch the sketches off my trusty 16-DVD set, but it was certainly neat to see this once.

This Week In Tickets: 25 November 2013 - 1 December 2013

Busy week, and I really didn't even get to everything I wanted.



For instance, I had ideas about getting to Boston Common in time to catch something in the 7pm slot before the great big Doctor Who: Day of the Doctor 50th Anniversary Special at 10pm (for which I had purchased my ticket weeks ago, lucky that they decided to put late shows on after the 7:30pm ones sold out in a matter of hours). Didn't happen; work kept me late and it would have been a tight squeeze. Still, I'm tremendously glad I went to this. Yes, it was paying $18 for something I had sitting on my DVR from two days earlier, but it looked great on the big screen even beyond the 3D actually being quite good, and it was fantastic to see it in a theater filled with fellow enthusiasts. Not necessarily a lot of other "loved it since Tom Baker & Peter Davison" fans - fezzes outnumbered scarves by a healthy margin - but, hey, it was late. Although, man, where were all the cute girls who loved Doctor Who when I was fifteen?

That was a lot of fun; Tuesday's Gathr preview of Cold Turkey really wasn't. It's the sort of drama about a dysfunctional family where one wonders if there is any affection along any axis at all, and the details are not interesting enough for good drama (or funny enough for good black comedy). There was also a little bit of bait and switch there, as some of the advertising said "from Academy Award Winner Peter Bogdanovich", but he was just there as an actor, not writing or directing.

Real-life Thanksgiving caused the rest of the relatively unusual schedule: We were told to work from home on Wednesday because of a great big incoming storm, but between it being less of a big deal than reported and the usual email to knock off a couple hours early with the holiday coming up, I was able to catch the matinees of The Blue Dahlia & The Glass Key and still have time to get to the comic shop and knock off early for the earlier-than-necessary bus to Maine. I always forget that Dad's wife Barbara's family tends to arrive and eat late, so with my brothers all scattered to have Thanksgiving with their wives' folks, I could have gotten that extra couple hours of sleep.

Friday morning was actually spent on laundry, noteworthy because the washing machine in my basement up and died a couple weeks ago, and the landlord is still sort of plotting just how to get a new one into my basement (nobody seems to know how the one that's there was installed, even though the house is too old to have been built around it). So drag clothes a mile, wash (and sit around waiting), drag them back even though they're sodden and heavy because there's nothing wrong with my dryer. Still, I was able to get to Homefront - a Jason Statham action movie solidly in the "better than it could be but still kind of just average" range - and then hit Frozen at the same theater soon after. That one was pretty great, as was the short playing before it, Get a Horse!.

Saturday was another split, with It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at the Brattle followed by Black Nativity downtown. The former is a sort of quiet classic, while the latter didn't quite do it for me, though I might have enjoyed it more without a couple of twerps making me have to really concentrate on the movie rather than just watch it.

Sunday was meant to be another two-movie day, but after Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Brattle, I went back home, had a bit of a completely-unrelated headache, and just didn't feel like going out. It got kind of rainy, too, if I remember correctly.

Worrisome: No Christmas shopping was done amid all this, and I have a ton of brothers and nieces. I tell myself that I'll do it all on vacation and then fill in blanks later, but that didn't exactly work out well in London last year.

Doctor Who: Day of the Doctor

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2013 at AMC Boston Common #16 (Fathom Events, DCP)

Given how many of us showed up for this - Boston sold out six screenings that night, and the total box office take on relatively few screens nationwide was second to only Catching Fire - I've got to think the BBC will be doing this again. Maybe not in 3D, but why not make next year's Christmas Special or the rumored Dalek two-parter directed by Kevin Wheatley a cinema event? It would have my money, especially if it's as good as this one.

Not that Day of the Doctor is necessarily perfect; as it introduces the three separate strands being followed by three incarnations of the title character (John Hurt, David Tennant, and Matt Smith), it feels like it's trying too hard to give them equal time. What's going on with Smith and Jenna Coleman's Clara is current, what's going on with Hurt and Billie Piper's not-actually-Rose is obviously important, but what's happening with Tennant and Joanna Page's Elizabeth I really seems like filler, even as it does flow into the rest of the story. It's also, inevitably, fairly heavy on the recent history of the show despite being meant to celebrate a half-century.

But when it works, it does, and it's pretty clever about it. There's plenty of fun and humor in how Tennant and Smith play off each other, and John Hurt does a great job of making "missing" version of the character still unmistakably The Doctor, even if he is different enough that we can fully understand why the ensuing "regenerations" have tried to forget ever being him (The Doctor, for the uninitiated, appears human but is actually a time-traveling alien who can, when overtaken by age or injury, regenerate his body into a new form, which also changes his personality a bit). Writer Steven Moffatt uses this as an interesting way to comment on the difference between the show's current incarnation and the original run, and then uses the climax to quite possibly roll those changes back, hinting that the next few years could be old-school.

Plus, it's a big, fun adventure. Not for newbies, perhaps, but once one knows the concept, the story unfolds in clever (and surprisingly fair) ways. It's never overly solemn but often very funny, and the BBC spent a bit of money on it, making a movie that plays much bigger than the TV show without feeling unlike it. Director Nick Hurrian and d.p. Neville Kidd also do a very nice job of shooting in 3D; it's probably one of the best-looking 3D movies to come out this year, integrating it into the story without it seeming particularly gimmicky.

And, hey, any show that gets the audience to go absolutely nuts twice (at "All Thirteen!" and "The Curator") is certainly doing something right!

"Get a Horse!"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2013 in Regal Fenway #3 (first-run, RealD DCP)

I could have sworn I'd read something about "Get a Horse" in one of the Fantagraphics collections of the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comic strips, but a quick flip through them doesn't turn anything up. Still, those collections are a big part of why I had a good time - although I suspect the likes of Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, and the like have shown up in Epic Mickey or other games, but the throwback characters making an appearance - and then jumping into the three-dimensional world as rips appear in the movie screen - was part of the fun.

Of course, the big fun is the way director Lauren MacMullen and company use the the third dimension to set up a non-stop stream of slapstick. But the three-dimensional stuff is also where the short hits a snag: The black-and-white, two-dimensional, traditionally animated footage looks so much better than the CGI animation; it feels unlimited and unbounded, while the three-dimensional versions of the characters seem to be using Nintendo-quality models. It's not quite as stiff as the digital Mickey that appeared as part of the Oscar broadcast a few years back, but still, when the screen gets completely torn away to reveal the fully three-dimensional, CGI world behind it... Well, if you read the whole thing as a sort of metaphor for the transition from traditional cel-based animation to digital, it doesn't exactly feel like progress, especially on the heels of Laika's The Boxtrolls trailer.

Frozen

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2013 in Regal Fenway #3 (first-run, RealD DCP)

It's strange - Disney has been making princess-themed stories for young girls for about seventy-five years, and this is the first one that really seems to focus on sisterhood as a theme. I don't know if my brother and sister-in-law are still trying to avoid Disney Princess stuff for their girls, but even if they are, this is one I could see them being deemed okay. Sure, it doesn't pass the "no missing parents" test (though it looked like they were on the right track early), but it hits a lot of the right notes otherwise.

First off, it's a great, fun little movie; directors Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck do a great job of introducing the audience to princesses Elsa & Anna right off, and they sell us on Anna quickly: There's tragedy and hurt in her background, but she's still incredibly optimistic. Kristen Bell does great voice-acting work there, and throughout, making Anna a scatterbrained but charmingly determined girl. She plays off the rest of the characters well, whether it be Santino Fontana as the handsome prince, Jonathan Groff as the affable ice merchant she meets searching for her sister, Idina Menzel as Elsa herself, and Josh Gad as Olaf, the snowman who accidentally came to life when Elsa froze the kingdom.

What's great, though, is how the relation between Anna and Elsa forms the core of the movie. I bet there's a draft of the screenplay where Elsa's big song, "Let It Go", is the villain number, and even in the movie as it is, it threatens to go there, because don't most villains start out confused, fearful, and just feeling better not living by the rules and restrictions others have set for her? And that would be the easy way to go, but the filmmakers have a twist or two more in store, including a subversion of the usual Disney ending to a fairy tale story that made me want to stand up and cheer for their commitment to staying on the right message; I can't imagine how women and folks trying to raise independent girls will take it.

And even if that stuff doesn't register - the movie is downright gorgeous and funny from moment one, in the same style as Tangled. The animation is as flawless as you'd expect from Disney, and I daresay they're approaching DreamWorks territory in taking the mandate to make films in 3D and using it well. Characters like Olaf who could be annoying are endearing, and while it's not quite perfectly paced, it's never far from something really funny, beautiful, or endearing happening. I'm not sure it's quite my favorite of Disney's new wave - Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph were movies I absolutely loved - but then, I'm a 40-year-old male with no kids. The audience that it's made for, my two-to-seven-year-old nieces, will eat it up, and it's quite likely that they can do so without their parents worrying about the message sent so much.

(Says, again, the 40-year-old guy with no kids, whose thoughts on what's good for young girls are, at the best, speculative.)

This Week In Tickets: 18 November 2013 - 24 November 2013

Some long days and some days when work went just the right length to screw plans up, but at least an interesting week.



Stubless: An Adventure in Space and Time at about 7-ish on Sunday the 24th. It's a TV movie, but considering there will be a ticket for another one on next week's page, it only seems fair to include it.

Kind of a quiet week. The company that owns the company that owns my employer had its"Vision Week", which brings a lot of extra people into the office, has some awards given out, some other presentations, and face-to-face time with people I normally deal with over the phone. It throws the schedule out of whack and some guys are real experts in squeezing twenty minutes of information into an hour and a half, but on the plus side, they did pay for food a few times and there is still apparently no thought of packing the operation up and moving it to Texas. I should probably be a little less paranoid about that.

On either side of the week, Bollywood! Monday night's movie was Ram-Leela, which is basically Romeo and Juliet with songs and a whole bunch of new stuff added to the last act; Saturday afternoon's was Gori Tere Pyaar Mein, a fairly standard romantic comedy that could do with being a little more of each. To a certain extent, this is a bit of a sign that there's not a huge amount of new releases and you might as well see everything if you can, but I am having some fun with these pictures.

In between, I did a double feature of The Armstrong Lie & Go for Sisters. As I said in the post, the original intent was to see the latter with a Q&A by John Sayles, but that sold out early. Both wound up being pretty good movies, though I liked Go for Sisters a little bit more.

Sunday was a triple-header: Dallas Buyers Club in the afternoon, pulling An Adventure in Space and Time off the DVR, and then The Visitor at the Brattle. I wound up liking Adventure more than Buyers Club, although the latter may be the more ambitious and dramatic. The Visitor, though... Ugh.

Dallas Buyers Club

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2013 at Landmark Kendall Square #1 (first-run, DCP)

Sometimes I wonder if every interesting true-life story really needs a movie, despite having some of the raw materials for one. Take Dallas Buyers Club: Interesting situation, a couple of roles that actors can do amazing things with, and an idea worth chewing on. The story is more a string of things that happened than something that drives from point A to point B, and sometimes that makes for a bit of distance from the audience.

Just sometimes, though, and if you take the perspective that the rest of the movie exists to give Matthew McCanaughey and Jared Leto a venue for these performances, that's fine. As two different sorts of AIDS patients in the mid-1980s - a heterosexual rodeo enthusiast and a transgendered hustler - they both undergo the requisite physical transformation but also sink into their characters in other ways. There's nothing inauthentic about Leto's Rayon at all, for example; she's got a ton of personality rather than just being a set of familiar mannerisms, and Leto sells her tendency toward self-destruction without making the character even primarily frustrating. McConaughey, meanwhile, is not quite mesmerizing but certainly has an eye on what makes Ron Woodruff fascinating: There's a fierce determination to survive to him that manifests itself in him expanding his horizons rather than narrowing them, becoming a better man but not in a santimonious way - finding ways to hold the disease back is serious work, but it's possible to have fun doing it.

I do wonder if maybe writers Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack and director Jean-Marc Vallée might have been able to make the story more compelling by digging into a possible irony of this story - that the characters' attempts to fight their disease by making an end run around the FDA is, in a way, the same sort of high-risk behavior that led to them contracting HIV in the first place, even as the two main characters' contradictory behavior toward what they put in their bodies aside from medicine after starting the buyers' club leads to the obvious results. Medicine is complicated, and both the FDA's tough standards and the scientific method serve important purposes, but this movie's tight focus on what are admittedly its best parts does occasional lead to it taking things for granted.

An Adventure in Space and Time

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Doctor Who week, HD DVR)

A sort of interesting thing about Doctor Who is that it really doesn't have a single creator. As this TV movie chronicling its birth on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary shows, Sydney Newman (Brian Cox), the head of the BBC's drama department, came up with the idea; someone else wrote the initial script; and first-time producer Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine) and director Waris Hussein (Sacha Dhawan) took it seriously enough to develop it into something that could last.

And it's a pip watching this charming cast play this creation out in a glossy version of 1963 London . It doesn't dig deep into the making-of elements, but it takes a close enough look that one can admire the improvisational nature of making television, especially in those days, especially when you compare the tight sets and even tighter compositions Hussein had to work with on those first serials compared to the open, widescreen picture Terry McDonough gets to give to Mark Gattis's script. It's pretty cool how, after making an obvious point with having Lambert watch footage of the first woman in space, there's still something very refreshing about how she argues for the overtly science-fictional aspects of "The Daleks", intuitively grasping how the things Newman dismisses as juvenile are actually the most mature and powerful parts.

But, ultimately, the focus winds up falling on David Bradley as William Hartnell, the first actor to play The Doctor. It's a part he had every reason to be skeptical about, and which right from the start was probably too much for him. But he grew to love it, to the point where he couldn't understand the younger people he worked with wanting to move on to other things, and his stern but ultimately cheerful personality formed the basis of something that would last fifty years and counting. And his story arc underscores a truth about pop culture that we don't often give much thought to: That if one wants to create something that lasts for generations, at a certain point he or she has to give it up. Maybe not in the literal way that Lambert and Hartnell hand Doctor Who off to other producers and actors, but at a certain point, the creators have to be okay with somebody else saying their lines, writing their creations, etc. It's a hard thing to accept, but who knows if this show becomes more than a curiosity if that doesn't happen?

The Visitor (Stridulum)

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2013 at the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagements, 2K DCP)

It's probably not a good sign that, roughly ten minutes into The Visitor, I noticed that director Giulio Paradisi and his co-writers apparently didn't understand the rules of basketball, as the game at which we meet much of the Earthbound cast had teams going on 8-0 scoring runs without ever seeming to force a turnover. That may be a silly, petty thing to nitpick, but I think it accidentally illuminates one of the movie's problems: The filmmakers don't seem to know how to make something thrilling, passing over the naturally exciting things and filling it in with stuff that just doesn't make any sense.

Ah, you say, but that's part of the charm - it's a bug-nuts Italian sci-fi/horror movie! And in the moments when it gets to be that, like the very first opening scenes with some cool smoke effects suggesting an utterly alien world, it's fun. But so much of it is just hanging around 1979 Atlanta, with a secret society and an extradimensional hero both trying to harness the power of a telekinetic girl (and her mother's womb), and it's surprisingly forgettable. Indeed, the most memorable bit is the finale, which seems tacked on at the last minute as every possible way of obscuring the face of the little girl seems to be used.

Admittedly, I may have drifted off for a couple minutes a few times, but something as creative and insane as Drafthouse is selling this to be should really make that impossible. But despite the trippy previews that are floating around, this is a boring, cheap movie with a few isolated good bits. I occasionally take hits on not "seeing the fun" in bad/schlocky movies, but it's not like I go in expecting not to enjoy it. But at a certain point, bad movies are just bad movies, and acting clever because you recognize The Visitor as weird doesn't actually make it a better movie.

The Fantasia Daily, 2013.19 (5 August 2013): When a Wolf Falls in Love with a Sheep, War of the Worlds: Welles & Wells, and Go Down Death

Another day, another last-minute arrival at the Imperial for my first movie. I've sort of made my peace with the idea that I spend a lot of time writing stuff to justify my press pass. I feel like I should be getting out and about more, but I have seen a lot of the tourist attractions that interest me up here and I do revisit the ones that get refreshed with something interesting.

Anyway, I saw and enjoyed When a Wolf Falls in Love with a Sheep, and then, since to the best of my knowledge there would be no English-language subtitles on Les 4 Soldats, I headed up the street to de Seve for the "War of the Worlds Welles & Wells" lecture.

That was pretty keen.



That's le Cinéclub: The Film Society' Philippe Spurrell; he generally hosts one of these every year at Fantasia, and while they're not always something I get to (sometimes it's the thing where you're out of luck if you're not bilingual), it's generally fairly interesting stuff; the C/FS has a large and interesting collection of prints to trot out. For this one, they had a version of George Pal's War of the Worlds that was cut down to about ten minutes with split-screens added. Oh, it was also 16mm and printed backwards so that it would work on the rear-projection system that was used to show it at Expo67.

They also had a print of The Night that Panicked America, a pretty good TV-movie from the mid-seventies about the 10 October 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. And, to warm up for that, we listened to some excerpts on this:



Not quite as cool as my grandfather's, which is now basically decoration in my father's house, but it did the job. At first it seemed a bit odd to bring the lights down and all, but it did help to show what a singular focus the radio was in the living rooms of the time. It was also quite impressive how well the Wells broadcast works, even 75 years later.



Last show of the day was Go Down Death. This one was my first choice because the other option was Bryan Singer who is shooting X-Men: Days of Future Past somewhere in Montreal, with the promise of two minutes of footage from that movie. Which might have been cool, but let's be honest, if that was what I wanted to see, I'd fly to San Diego for Comic Con in mid-July rather than take the bus to Montreal. Plus, the producer handing out postcards for this movie seemed nice and earnest, so why not?

Well... It's a very deliberately weird movie is arguably why not. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy bits of it, but it's one of those movies that becomes a bit of an endurance test, piling on one bit after another, and they may be building to something, or they may not, and while some of these bits are funny or clever, others seem calculated to annoy beyond their potential as entertainment. It's in black-and-white, of course, and then the last couple of scenes just go off on a completely different tangent.

It's the kind of thing where you sort of suspect the director is mainly just messing with you, but the Q&A sort of confirmed it, talking about how the last two scenes existed to ause the audience to half-forget the rest of the movie, making it more dreamlike. I don't know if that's more clever or evil, to be honest. The opening credit bit of it being based on the work of fictional poet Jonathan Mallory Sinus was apparently a bit of last-minute jokery, and he mentioned that they actually destroyed the sets before they got the final week's worth of film back from the lab, so if that had been messed up... Well, who knows what they would have done for the movie.

He also seemed pretty nervous, but it also seemed like he might have been affecting that so he could throw out answers that were just strange. I've got to admit, it's not the sort of thing I really go for - I'm very suspicious of deliberately adding randomness to something like this; it just seems cavalier.

Today's plan: Press screening for The World's End in the morning, and then Halley and Plus One in the evening. Oh, and See You Tomorrow, Everyone is highly recommended.


Nan fang xiao yang mu chang (When a Wolf Falls in Love With a Sheep

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2013 in le Cinéma Impérial (Fantasia Festival, HD)

One thing that struck me while watching this movie is that you don't see many Hollywood romantic comedies with young characters - it's always bankable stars who are by their nature at least in their thirties. The sort of just-out-of-school adults who play out When a Wolf Falls in Love with a Sheep seem to be a relative rarity.

Which is sort of a shame, because this is a charming as heck little thing that doesn't have a whole lot of anger or bitterness to it at all, and it would be fun to see more like it. One of the things I like most about it is that it doesn't feel the need to jam things into capital-r Relationship statuses; Tung and Yang can meet, do stuff, and clearly start to like each other without going into what it means for the future. Sure, they're going to end up together, but mechanically getting them to that point doesn't feel like the film's first priority.

So, it can just be enjoyable to watch. Kai Ko & Jian Man-shu both do well carrying their characters' previous relationships without making that the most important thing about these kids, and Hou Chi-jan has fun with an airy script. It's a charmer, and I appreciate it for that.

The Night that Panicked America)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2013 in Salle de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Welles & Wells, 16mm)

I don't know whether I'd call The Night That Panicked America a buried treasure, but it's an interesting reminder that the entertainment industry has produced a lot of content over the years, and some of it, while pretty good and containing some recognizable people, is just seldom going to reach the top of anyone's to-watch list. It's a nifty little movie produced for television in 1975, and benefits from its modest goals.

I think one thing that the movie does very well that often gets overlooked when talking about the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast is to give it some context, showing the world headed to war and America already on pins and needles. It transforms the story from one about gullibility to one where people were hearing a variation on what they've been expecting anyway. The various side stories are well-done enough to be little short films of their own.

Anyway, it's a shame that this doesn't seem to be on DVD or maybe even especially any of the streaming sites, where it would be a nifty thing to stumble on based on recommendations. It's a good movie that folks will seldom regret watching.

Go Down Death

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2013 in Salle de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

I'm reasonably sure writer/director Aaron Schimberg is mostly just screwing with his audience here. Go Down Death actually has some impressive moments, and a somewhat spiffy look from being shot on black-and-white film that is used well, but it's the sort of movie that has a lot of weirdness and discomfort for the sake of having weirdness and discomfort, and can as such try one's patience.

Is it enjoyable at spots? Oh, absolutely; there are bits that will make the audience laugh and some that are decently tragic. It's very deliberately peculiar, though, just as much random as quirky.

This Fall in TV 2013: Sifting through what the networks will inflict upon us this fall

It's weird - I feel like I'm watching less and less TV, but the DVR still fills up pretty darn quickly. Some of it's because a fair chunk of stuff on cable is pretty good - BBC America and FX, especially. Some of it's just because everything I watch is in HD now and takes up more space. Whatever the reason, I'm watching enough attentively to give some thought to how I want it organized. And so, even though I'm a couple years from doing this on Home Theater Forum (memo to self: modernize links on sidebar), I still like doing overviews.

As per usual, the information comes from The Futon Critic. The bolded selections are the things I plan on watching, the italicized ones I'm considering sampling, and comments follow.

SUNDAY

07:00 - ABC - American's Funniest Home Videos
07:00 - CBS - 60 Minutes
07:00 - Fox - NFL Overrun
07:00 - NBC - Football Night in America

07:30 - Fox - The OT

08:00 - ABC - Once Upon a Time
08:00 - CBS - The Amazing Race
08:00 - Fox - The Simpsons
08:00 - NBC - Sunday Night Football

08:30 - Fox - Bob's Burgers

09:00 - ABC - Revenge
09:00 - CBS - The Good Wife
09:00 - Fox - Family Guy

09:30 - Fox - American Dad

10:00 - ABC - Betrayal
10:00 - CBS - The Mentalist

* I'm kind of surprised that ABC's not putting SHIELD here, although if Once Upon a Time is doing well enough to rate a spin-off, they might as well not mess with the night. It is kind of strange to see so much stability on one night, especially one so important. Although, with it being the most-watched night of the week, maybe there's just enough audience to go around.


MONDAY

08:00 - ABC - Dancing with the Stars
08:00 - CBS - How I Met Your Mother
08:00 - CW - Hart of Dixie
08:00 - Fox - Bones
08:00 - NBC - The Voice

08:30 - CBS - We Are Men

09:00 - CBS - 2 Broke Girls
09:00 - CW - Beauty and the Beast
09:00 - Fox - Sleepy Hollow

09:30 - CBS - Mom

10:00 - ABC - Castle
10:00 - CBS - Hostages
10:00 - NBC - The Blacklist

* Man, does Sleepy Hollow look dumb. And yet, Fox is apparently giving it a big push.

* Nice cast on We Are Men (Jerry O'Connell, Kal Penn, Tony Shalhoub). A bit worrying that they're all in supporting roles.

* Hostages looks to be the first of a trend of self-contained series popping up this year, set to run 15 episodes, presumably with the idea of turning a lot of the cast over next year, 24-style.

* The Blacklist is described as an "action thriller" starring James Spader as a most-wanted criminal who turns state's evidence. The pilot is directed by Joe Carnahan, so that's got potential.


TUESDAY

08:00 - ABC - Marvel's Agents of SHIELD
08:00 - CBS - NCIS
08:00 - CW - The Originals
08:00 - Fox - Dads
08:00 - NBC - The Biggest Loser

08:30 - Fox - Brooklyn Nine-Nine

09:00 - ABC - The Goldbergs
09:00 - CBS - NCIS: Los Angeles
09:00 - CW - Supernatural
09:00 - Fox - New Girl
09:00 - NBC - The Voice results

09:30 - ABC - Trophy Wife
09:30 - Fox - The Mindy Project

10:00 - ABC - Lucky 7
10:00 - CBS - Person of Interest
10:00 - NBC - Chicago Fire

* The very idea that there's something like SHIELD out there seems crazy to me - an in-continuity tie-in to an ongoing movie series? Honestly, the fact that Marvel's cranking out two interconnected superhero movies per year is strange enough. And now this. Go figure.

* I liked Michael Shur's "Fire Joe Morgan" (under the name Ken Tremendous) blog when it was a thing, and enjoy him talking sports, but never got interested in any of his TV work. Brooklyn Nine-Nine might change that; it's got some folks I like, especially Andre Braugher. Trophy Wife has a nice cast too, with Malin Ackerman in the title role and support from Bradley Whitford and Natalie Morales, and since I miss The Middlemen and The Good Guys...

* Hands up, folks who saw Supernatural running nine years, especially considering the showrunner stepped back after they finished the first storyline after five years. ... Hands down, liars.


WEDNESDAY

08:00 - ABC - The Middle
08:00 - CBS - Survivor
08:00 - CW - Arrow
08:00 - Fox - The X Factor
08:00 - NBC - Revolution

08:30 - ABC - Back in the Game

09:00 - ABC - Modern Family
09:00 - CBS - Criminal Minds
09:00 - CW - The Tomorrow People
09:00 - NBC - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

09:30 - ABC - Super Fun Night

10:00 - ABC - Nashville
10:00 - CBS - CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
10:00 - NBC - Ironside

* I managed two episodes of Revolution before I couldn't handle the bad science.

* The Tomorrow People could be interesting, although it doesn't appear to have anything to do with the two previous shows with that name. Ironside is obviously a new version of the Raymond Burr series. I'm not a big fan of Blair Underwood, but a new mystery series interests me.


THURSDAY

08:00 - ABC - Once Upon a Time in Wonderland
08:00 - CBS - The Big Bang Theory
08:00 - CW - The Vampire Diaries
08:00 - Fox - The X Factor Results
08:00 - NBC - Parks & Recreation

08:30 - CBS - The Millers
08:30 - NBC - Welcome to the Family

09:00 - ABC - Grey's Anatomy
09:00 - CBS - The Crazy Ones
09:00 - CW - Reign
09:00 - Fox - Glee
09:00 - NBC - Sean Saves the World

08:30 - CBS - Two and a Half Men
09:30 - NBC - The Michael J. Fox Show

10:00 - ABC - Scandal
10:00 - CBS - Elementary
10:00 - NBC - Parenthood

* Hey, Elementary has been pretty good! They did a pretty nice job of establishing their version of Holmes & Watson and then bringing in stuff from the canon as the series went on. I'm pleased.

* Aw, I was kind of hoping that Super Clyde, the show with Rupert Grint as a would-be superhero and Stephen Fry as his butler/sidekick, would be paired with The Big Bang Theory. Instead, CBS and NBC split a night of sitcoms with nifty casts: The Crazy Ones has Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar; The Michael J. Fox show is self-explanatory; and The Millers has Will Arnett, Beau Bridges, and Margo Martindale. Selfishly, I kind of hope The Millers and Michael J. Fox are cancelled so that The Americans can have Martindale back and The Good Wife can reclaim Fox.


FRIDAY

08:00 - ABC - Last Man Standing
08:00 - CBS - Undercover Boss
08:00 - CW - The Carrie Diaries
08:00 - Fox - Junior Masterchef
08:00 - NBC - Dateline NBC

08:30 - ABC - The Neighbors

09:00 - ABC - Shark Tank
09:00 - CBS - Hawaii Five-0
09:00 - CW - American's Next Top Model
09:00 - Fox - Sleepy Hollow reruns
09:00 - NBC - Grimm

10:00 - ABC - 20/20
10:00 - CBS - Blue Bloods
10:00 -NBC - Dracula

* Junior Masterchef creeps me the heck out. Who the heck wants to expose kids to Gordon Ramsey?


SATURDAY

08:00 - ABC - Saturday Night College Football
08:00 - CBS - Repeats (Comedy)
08:00 - Fox - Sports Saturday
08:00 - NBC - Repeats

08:00 - CBS - Repeats (Comedy)

09:00 - CBS - Repeats (Crime)
09:00 - NBC - Repeats

10:00 - CBS - 48 Hours Mystery
10:00 - NBC - Repeats

11:00 - Fox - Animation Domination High-Def

* Animation Domination includes an Axe Cop series. In.


THE BENCH - ABC
Killer Women
Mind Games
Mixology
The Quest
Resurrection

* Steve Zahn and Christian Slater is a nice cast in Mind Games; of the rest, Resurrection looks kind of interesting, but it's an ongoing-mystery that will be stretched out forever.


THE BENCH - CBS
Friends with Better Lives
Intelligence (tentatively Monday 10pm)
Mike & Molly
Reckless

* CBS isn't cool, but you don't have to be when people just keep watching.


THE BENCH - CW
Famous in 12
Nikita
The 100
Star-Crossed

* Apparently, Nikita is coming back because the head of the CW figures it's worth giving a show that lasted a few years a short season to wrap things up as long as they're still programming Fridays. I guess that can help build some brand loyalty.

* Two youth-oriented sci-fi series in The 100 and Star-Crossed, which is interesting, as the thing they're most likely to replace is The Tomorrow People. If at first you don't succeed...


THE BENCH - FOX
Almost Human (tentatively Monday 8pm)
American Idol (tentatively Wednesday & Thursday 8pm)
Enlisted (tentatively Friday 9:30pm)
The Following (tentatively Monday 9pm)
Gang Related
Murder Police
Raising Hope (tentatively Friday 9pm)
Rake (tentatively Thursday 9pm)
Surviving Jack
24
Us & Them
Wayward Pines

* Fox has some of the moves planned as "late fall" - Almost Human bumping Bones to Friday, where it will be joined by Raising Hope and Enlisted. So, no blaming baseball when the expensive sci-fi series with a nice pedigree (the Fringe crew, director Brad Anderson) doesn't happen.

* They're also apparently considering the full-year season again (something they did a lot of in their early years) - Gang Related, Wayward Pines, and the return of 24 are all being planned to start in early May and run into the summer. Interested in all of them - 24 will apparently be real-time but skipping hours, Gang Related is directed by Allen Hughes with a neat cast, and Wayward Pines is coming from M. Night Shamalayn, who still interests me.

* Us & Them is Jason Ritter and Alexis Bledel, and this sounds like a nifty pairing.


THE BENCH - NBC
About a Boy (tentatively Tuesday 9pm)
American Dream Builders (tentatively Sunday 8pm)
Believe (tentatively Sunday 9pm)
Celebrity Apprentice (?)
Chicago PD
Crisis (tentatively Sunday 10pm)
Crossbones (tentatively Friday 10pm)
The Family Guide (tentatively Tuesday 9:30pm)
Food Fighters
Hannibal (?)
The Million Second Quiz
The Night Shift
Saturday Night Live repeats (tentatively Saturday 10pm)
The Sing-Off
Undateable

* Good lord, but is NBC a mess - they haven't decided whether to bring a couple shows back, they've got a bunch of unscripted shows coming, and almost as many interesting pilots with interesting people. Still, it looks like an almost-complete relaunch after football and the Olympics.

* Believe comes from J.J. Abrams and Alfonso Cuaron, with Cuaron actually writing and directing the pilot, so... Yeah, I'll take a look at a show from the guy behind Children of Men and Gravity. A super-powered 10-year-old girl in the lead is at least an unusual hook, too.

* Crisis is going to be self-contained, right? Anyway, it's got a very nice cast and Phillip Noyce on the pilot.

* Crossbones is John Malkovich as Blackbeard. Sounds insane, but I will take it.


So, it looks like I'll still have a fair amount of time to see movies, although there are enough interesting things coming to keep one's eye out for.