This Week In Tickets: 28 December 2009 to 3 January 2010

I looked at the way the vacation days I had to use up by the end of the year and figured I would see a ton of movies, filling up this last page of the calendar with stubs. I didn't count on two things, though:

(1) Snow. Not enough to give one that eerie "empty city" feeling - where you have to walk down the middle of the street because the sidewalks are covered but it's okay, because nobody is driving except snowplows, and the gray sky seems to suppress any light that may be coming out of windows - but enough that I really saw no need to go out in it But that's okay, because...

(2) There really wasn't much to see at all. Sure, I wanted to see It's Complicated for the excellent cast, but wasn't really enthused. Still, that put it in line ahead of the award contenders that were straddling the boutique places and multiplexes; I just couldn't muster up much, if any, enthusiasm for Nine, The Road, or The Young Victoria. Likely decent movies all, but they felt like homework. And then, on New Year's Day, nothing new opened.

Seriously? Nothing? Just a little shuffling of screens at the Kendall and maybe switching one Bollywood film out for another at Fresh Pond? Wasn't there some action movie that otherwise would have gone straight to video but could have pounced on an open week (an Echelon Conspiracy situation, so to speak)?

I half-suspect that it's a tactic to soften us up for the dreck that trickles out during January and February. "You're not only going to watch The Spy Next Door, but you'll thank us for it!"



Stubless: The films of Makoto Shinkai

The weekly calendar has, I think, swelled to something like twice its size over the past year - the plastic back cover threatens to fall off and the scanner actually starts to distort the image because the coil wasn't designed to hold something that thick together. There's 191 ticket stubs in there, along with 14 baseball tickets, 2 concert tickets, 3 festival media passes, and a couple touristy things from Montreal... and that thing isn't designed to be used as a scrapbook.

It's Complicated

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2009 at AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run)

So... Did anybody else watch this movie from Nancy Meyers about a divorced woman pulled back toward her husband, remember that she and husband Charles Sheyer were always credited as a team so the solo writing credit seems odd, then find out that they must have divorced at roughly the same time as the characters in the movie, and find that a little odd? Sure, she sticks Steve Martin's character in there so that we know from the beginning that Meryl Streep has an honest, decent alternative to Alec Baldwin, but at some point, does someone read the script or see the movie and wonder just what mom's getting at?

No? Just me? Never mind.

That aside, It's Complicated is a pretty inoffensively enjoyable movie, with plenty of funny moments, especially when Alec Baldwin is on screen as the since-remarried ex-husband who is shamelessly adept at rationalizing his actions. It's funny enough, and generally friendly, although more than a little whitebread. As much as Baldwin's character is a little ridiculous, I wish Steve Martin had something to do other than be the solid but not hugely exciting answer to him. At least let him be as funny as John Kracsinski, who walks away with just about every scene he's in.

A Single Man

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run)

Purely hypothetical question: If the English Professor Colin Firth plays in this character were heterosexual, and it was a female student of less than half his age that was following him around and maybe eventually making her way into a more intimate situation and making him feel that life was actually worth living, would the audience be quite so cool with it? Maybe; quite possibly, even, although I have my doubts. I ask because I thought of that hypothetical situation and couldn't really decide whether first-time director Tom Ford was talented enough to make the equivalent situation work with a gay pairing or whether there was a weird double standard at work.

I'm still not sure. There's no doubt that Ford does some good work here, and Firth, too, although something about their combined work leaves me rather cold. A Single Man is, within its category, just as cliched and showy as something like Avatar. It's the sort of movie where the audience notices differences in film grain and color saturation from one scene to the next, because while the filmmaker is clever, he's either not nearly as skilled at applying that as he thinks he is or it's very important that the audience know he's clever ("see? The sad, broken-down guy is all bleached out but the young guy is a golden god!"). There's lots of things in this movie that could have been extremely effective if allowed to work just below the level at which the audience consciously notices them, but Ford (as respected as he apparently is as a fashion designer) doesn't seem to have learned to moderate his artistic impulses in this medium.

Plus, I kind of hated the ending. (SPOILERS!) It's the type that wants to have it both ways - the character makes the choice to live (yay!) but actually allowing him to do so and maybe start a relationship with this beautiful boy might undercut how perfect a love he and his dead partner had (boo!). Thus, the perfectly-timed natural death, so he can end loving life and his partner (yay and yay!), which, while tragic, is still kind of a cop-out (and the seeing said loved one reaching out a hand, just as he dies? Tacky!). (/SPOILERS!)

A Single Man is a fine, very nice-looking film. Still, it wound up striking me as the type that is kind of trite, despite such a thick veneer of class and seriousness.

Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

Broken Embraces also has kind of a convenient ending, but the process that gets us there is much more assured. Pedro Almodovar, after all, is an old hand, and while he doesn't do much in his movie that is surprising or revolutionary, he handles his low-key melodrama like an old pro. The movie cuts back in forth between two time periods - the present, where a blind screenwriter takes offense at a young artist's commission, and fourteen years ago, when a secretary became her employer's mistress in order to secure health care for her father - with grace, and features fine performances front its entire cast. It noodles some, sure, but mostly at the start of the film, when it perhaps does not wish to tip its cap as to which stories will prove important.

It's quite enjoyable, and almost kind of refreshing to see a director as respected, even lionized, as Almodovar not feeling he has to prove himself or make each new film be a bold, new event. He finds ways to put bits of visual comedy into what is, by turns, a romantic and serious film. It's a solid, assured work, and you can't complain about that.

This Week In Tickets: 21 December 2009 to 27 December 2009

How can you tell that I've been going to the cinema less than usual of late? I actually had this week's page in my calendar scanned in before I realized that I had this week's tickets taped to last week's page. I guess that much white space just looked unnatural to me, and having no overlap between the days of the week is odd, too.

The blank period was good, though. I finished up the Sherlock Holmes reviews (I think I've seen my fill for a while) and went up to Maine to see my family for Christmas. It is always nice to verify that my niece remains the most adorable little girl in the world, and so smart. Shame everybody had such a nasty cold, though; by the time Christmas was over, my brother Dan sounded like a gangster who'd been smoking two packs a day for twenty years. Or something. It wasn't a healthy sound, that's for sure.



Stubless: Test Screening for the Boston Sci-fi Film Festival (Tuesday, 22 December 2009, Somerville Theater Video Room, 7:30pm)

The theme for test screenings for the BSFFF this week was "feature smackdown", and unlike previous weeks, I didn't take much in the way of notes. The idea was that we'd watch the first "reel" or so and then comment, maybe a little more if we weren't sure what sort of impression it made on us. We wound up watching the second, Lunopolis, straight through. That kind of faux documentary is tough to get a handle on as just a sample; sci-fi ones, especially, have a tendency to be pretty backloaded. This one was at least interesting enough to keep us engaged and curious for its runtime, so I think it's got a pretty good chance of making it onto the schedule.

Le combat dans l'île (Fire and Ice)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 December 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagement)

Le combat dans l'île starts off with a heck of a hook, showing us the strained marriage of Anne (Romy Schneider) and Clément Lesser (Jean-Louis Trintignant), which looks like relatively normal discontent until Anne finds the bazooka in the closet. From there, it's not long until an assassination attempt leads to and escape to the country, and whatever thrill was re-injected into their love life wanes as Clément goes on a mission (and on the run) to South America, but there is Paul (Henri Serre)...

Oddly, perhaps, the opening act turned out to be quite dull for me, though that may be a reaction to a travel-filled few days and needing a second wind. Being far from the politics of that time and place probably doesn't help; it's tough to connect with someone like Clément, who is all about a cause, when his ideology isn't particularly clear. He worked much better for me when he reappeared later in the movie; a fugitive staking his claim to his wife doesn't need a specific cause.

The romance between Paul and Anne works much better; it plays out believably, without too much of the sort of introspection that often sabotages this sort of film. There's a joy to it, both of them seeming to be appreciated for the first time in longer than they'd like to admit. I was surprised how quickly the second half of the movie flew by, as this is the sort of thing that I often find a bit of a mire.

It leads up to an action sequence with Paul and Clément dueling, and I don't know how well that works. It seems a bit strange for Anne to be relatively uninvolved in the climax, as she had been the film's center up until then. For all this film's rediscovered classic status, it struck me as a little scattered, though excellent when it hits its stride.

This Week In Tickets: 14 December 2009 to 20 December 2009

Okay, this is thin:



Stubless: Test Screening for the Boston Sci-fi Film Festival (Tuesday, 15 December 2009, Somerville Theater Video Room, 7pm)

Yes, I actually took off work to see Avatar opening day. Hey, I had vacation time I had to either use by the end of the year or lose, and what makes for a better use of it on short order? As for the rest of the white space there, there was Sherlock Holmes to watch, Christmas shopping to do, and snow to react to like a complete bunkered-down wuss.

And the second-to-last screening night for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival. My nots are rather incomplete, so we might not actually have seen much beyond "Attack of the Robots of Nebula-5" and "Enigma", which both went over pretty well. Both were pretty decent, although I didn't love "Nebula-5" quite so much as some of the other folks. Both were well-made, atbeit in different ways.

Avatar

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 December 2009 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (IMAX 3-D)

I'm kind of glad that I don't have to review this one for eFilmCritic or some other outlet, because writing the review would drive me nuts. I think it's a thoroughly successful movie, one of the most visually amazing to hit the screen in a long time. James Cameron does things in terms of world-building and large-scale action choreography that nobody other than George Lucas has even gotten close to, and unlike Lucas, he writes a perfectly fine script and works pretty well with his cast.

I worry, though, that when I say that, people will tend to overlook the comments about just how amazing this film looks or sounds, and see words like "perfectly fine" and "pretty well" (and "serviceable", which would almost certainly be used in a full write-up), andtake them as a negative. Sure, Avatar is not quite the killer app that some had hoped for, the movie that combines eye-popping visuals with crisp dialogue, award-caliber acting, and a sophisticated story to create the science fiction epic that would give the genre instant mainstream and highbrow credibility. It's a little familiar. It occasionally uses something that's a bit of a cliché. The performances are fine.

Understand - nothing in there should deter anybody from seeing this movie. It's just that, when it comes to a film routinely being described with superlatives, something less than that may sound negative. And it shouldn't. It's just that the hype, and the fact that this movie is legitimately excellent in other areas, makes it seem like less.

And make no mistake: Avatar makes sweet love to the audience's optic nerves. Darn near every frame of the film is beautiful, impeccably designed, and rendered so well that the whole "uncanny valley" issue, and that of integrating live-action with animation, is all but undetectable. Cameron can also stage a great big special-effects-filled action sequence better than just about anyone other than George Lucas, and the one that makes up the climax of the film is a doozy. It's also some of the very best use of 3-D in the current boom: There's a great sensation of depth, scale, and space, with only one or two attempts to make the audience flinch by having something fly directly at them. It's amazing, and from the first moment when I saw the exterior of a spaceship to the very end, there was very little time spent without my mouth agape.

For some that's not enough, which is fine in some ways, but you know... Just as it's okay to sacrifice spectacle for characterization. And... Hollywood is the only place in the world where making this kind of spectacle is practical. If they're the only ones who can make something that is awesome at this scale and in this way... Well, don't they practically have a responsibility to make awesome things?

This Week In Tickets: 7 December 2009 to 13 December 2009

Not a whole lot of chance to get out to the movies between cramming a new movie into the DVD player every night for the EFC Sherlock Holmes review series and waiting online for Red Sox tickets on Saturday. Then, Sunday morning, I headed out to the Red Sox Yard Sale, an incredible event where the people of New England pay the Red Sox money to rummage through piles of stuff they were just going to throw out. I saw a random woman's shoe in one of the bins. I walked away with a Fenway Park brick, a genuine cup holder ripped off the armrest of some seat (I have no idea what I will mount it on), and two framed newspaper pages.

Look at it this way, though:



... one fewer movie seen and I would have had a great theme going: Two extremely different takes on New Orleans.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 December 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run)

When I first heard that Nicolas Cage was doing a movie for director Werner Herzog, my reaction was giddiness - my two favorite crazy people working together! Would their respective forms of insanity work in harmony or at cross-purposes? And they're going to do it in post-Katrina New Orleans? On a sequel/remake to an infamous movie that makes its director absolutely livid? This would, obviously, be either awesome or a train wreck.

It is awesome.

Like many of Herzog's great films, it is about a man, none too stable to begin with, who loses his mind. Cage's Terence McDonah is a New Orleans detective who, in rescuing a drowning man during Katrina, developed chronic back pain and quickly escalated from vicodin to harder drugs to treat it. It's not long before he's hallucinating and throwing caution to the wind, and we get that from both ends: Cage's increasingly unhinged performance, and Herzog's deranged imagery.

And they go with it. I especially loved how, during the last act, there's a moment when you start thinking, okay, drug-addicted cop, already got a screw loose, we're in fantasy territory... And instead, they go with it. Terence is crazy, sure, but the world in general is apparently just as nuts.

The Princess and the Frog

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2009 in Regal Fenway #8 (first-run)

It's hard to believe it's only been five years or so since Disney's last traditionally animated feature. It seems like longer, I suspect, because I missed Brother Bear and Home on the Range, and the sci-fi adventures of Treasure Planet and Atlantis seem like different things. Still, it's great to see that specific look on-screen again, and with Musker and Clements in charge. They directed many of the best of the late-80s/90s boom period for Disney (The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules), and they've returned in good form.

Maybe not quite perfect - I love Randy Newman and he contributes a nice soundtrack, but the first half has a lot of songs, sometimes one right on top of the other. But, then, it's New Orleans, a city where we can actually believe in the crowd bursting into a song & dance number, so it's OK.

The animation is a joy to watch, though - even if Disney is now farming it out rather than doing it in-house, it's smooth, hops styles on occasion without difficulty, and does things that digital might have issues with - stretchy characters, for instance. Of course, some things that seem like that - villain Facilier's shadowy minions, for instance - must have been created entirely during the coloring stage, which is digital.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's great to see Musker and Clements back, and here's hoping that Disney puts them right back to work!

Invictus

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2009 in Regal Fenway #12 (first-run)

Perhaps the most amazing thing to happen in the past twenty years is a non-event: After apartheid, South Africa has failed to collapse into an unending mire of civil war despite the stark economic, ethnic, and cultural divisions, not to mention the bitter history. On the face of it, it should be even more of a mess than it is - and while crime is bad and there's still some ugly sentiment, they are not the mess that the former Yugoslavia is.

Clint Eastwood's Invictus doesn't really do much to demonstrate that it's due in any great measure to the South African rugby team's long-shot chase of the World Cup in 1995, when they were host nation. You could cut Matt Damon's team captain, and most of the sport-related scenes, without losing much. All of that together fails to match the first sequence when the black head of Nelson Mandela's security detail finds his request for more manpower filled with Afrikaaners who, months earlier, were probably throwing ANC members like him in jail. Following that group might have made for one hell of a movie.

Of course, to a certain extent it doesn't matter which group we follow because Morgan Freeman's Mandela is the story. Freeman's imitation is good - just short of uncanny - and as a result, it does still leave the man something of an enigma. In fact, maybe a bit more of one - though it's been easy to look at Mandela as little short of a saint, Invictus invites us to wonder how much of his actions are altruistic and how much were shrewd political calculation, made by a man with a handle on his own personal charisma. Either way, the man is impressive, a reminder that forgiveness and reconciliation can be powerful forces, even if they don't initially seem as satisfying as revenge.

This Week In Tickets: 30 November 2009 to 6 December 2009

December is looking ridiculously busy - the watch-a-thon may be over, but I'm watching a ton of Sherlock Holmes for the eFilmCritic project: At some point about a week ago, when I got to the point where I needed to watch a movie and then write it up within 36 hours for the daily Holmes review to get posted at midnight, I thought, holy crap, that's a deadline. I hate deadlines. Why would I set myself up for a whole month of them? And that's before getting into what's going on at work, the Red Sox tickets going on sale on the 12th, the party for a cousin who has moved up to Maine, and Christmas shopping...

(Although I'm actually a bit ahead of where I usually am there; I found some neat stuff at Bazaar Bizarre. I'm not usually a craft faire sort of guy, but there were a couple guys there who did their thing with welding rather than knitting. So, if anybody asks, it was a Maker faire. The Boston one is over, but folks in Cleveland and San Francisco might want to check their local events out this weekend.)

I may have to take a day off work next week for opening day of Avatar. That counts as a floating holiday for me, right?



A reminder for those who might enjoy giving for the Holidays: Final tally for the 2009 Movie Watch-a-Thon is 5 at the Brattle, 25 elsewhere, and 2 screenings elsewhere which may or may not count. Donations go to this page.

Huh, weird sequence of (non-Sherlock) movies this week, unusually tied together even though I didn't really try to do so. It starts and ends with George Clooney doing good work for critical-darling directors, and in between has two stories about Middle East war widows/returnees. The old hand and rookie delivering bad news is central to both The Messenger and Up in the Air.

And then there's Armored, because sometimes it feels really good to knock some stuff around.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #1 (first-run)

It's no secret that I've become disillusioned with Wes Anderson over the past few years. After finding Rushmore an exciting breath of fresh air, and giving a number of folks some of their best roles in The Royal Tennenbaums, there was something missing from The Life Aquatic that even some nifty visuals and Harry Selick creatures couldn't compensate for, and he followed that up with the terrible The Darjeeling Limited. There are two basic issues at work, I figure: One, a combination of success and hanging out with the Coppolas and Noah Baumbach has skewed his view of the world a bit; he's asking for sympathy for the woes of the privileged when the maker of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore might have told his later subjects to get over themselves.

Second, well, if Wes Anderson's father is still with us, could you go to Hollywood or Paris and give your son a hug? Maybe play a game of catch. He's crying for it, man!

Anderson's daddy issues are still front and center, but he, co-writer Baumbach, and animation director Mark Gustafson (who almost certainly will not get the level of credit he deserves) put together a duly whimsical adaptation of Roald Dahl's book, anchored by the note-perfect voice work of George Clooney as the title character. I'm not sure how much kids will like it - the humor is often dry and self-referential, and the Clooney fox's story is about settling down, though they may see themselves in the younger foxes. It is, overall, a fun movie, and even if one of the knocks on Anderson is that he often seems a bit too pleased with himself, he has made something to be proud of here.

The Messenger

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

The Messenger has no problem with making the audience a little uncomfortable. What might, in another movie, have been a bittersweet romance between Ben Foster's Will Montgomery (a wounded soldier serving the end of his hitch informing next of kin of death overseas) and Samantha Morton's Olivia Pitterson (a widow and mother who takes the news with surprising calm), feels an awful lot like stalking at first, and even when it starts to feel a little "right", acknowledges that it's not really healthy. Foster is exceptional, a young military man trying his best to hold in pain and confusion, just on the line between someone you root for and someone you worry about.

And then you've got Woody Harrelson, really knocking his supporting role out of the park. His Captain Stone tries to approach a job that is corrosive to the soul with precisely controlled professionalism and it leads him to reach out in ways that are both abortive and desperate. It's pretty close to perfect, a great variation on Foster's performance without duplicating or stealing the show.

Like a lot of movies more built on character and performance than story, writer/director Oren Moverman has a little trouble figuring out how to end things, but it doesn't come close to tarnishing what Foster and Harrelson do.

Brothers

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2009 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run)

Another day, another movie about a young man returning from war, with another a great pair of performances, that stumbles a bit in the end. This time, it's Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire as a pair of brothers, one a habitual screw-up just getting out of jail, the other a golden-boy soldier gone to war, presumed dead, and eventually returned.

For all the big drama and story comes in the latter half of the movie, what I loved most was the beginning: Maguire's Sam picks Gyllenhaal's Tom up from jail, and on the ride home, without any grand speeches or overtly dramatic performances, they sell us on getting brothers, how they can disagree with each other and even disapprove of their respective choices, but find that such considerations fall away almost instantly. Then there's a family dinner scene where their father (Sam Shepard) just keeps needling away at Tom, and the moment when Tom learns that Sam is dead, and...

Jake Gyllenhaal is just really amazing in this. Not to take anything away from Tobey Maguire, who gets a lot of the big melodrama, but when the story shifts in the second half, and becomes about him coming home damaged, it becomes a little more familiar. And while it is making a more concerted effort to stamp scenes into one's memory, it winds up not being nearly so memorable as when it's about Tommy stepping up in his brother's absence. It will be interesting to see who gets pushed as lead and supporting actors here, because while it's probably easier to make an argument that Brothers is about Sam, Gyllenhaal just owns the first half or so.

Also: Jim Sheridan should make scripts that feature two little girls a priority. Just as the Bolger sisters were a huge part of what made In America so good, it's tough to imagine Brothers being as grounded and real without Bailee Madison's Isabelle and Taylor Geare's Maggie.

Armored

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2009 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run)

I'm going to have to take another look at Kontroll. I saw Nimrod Antal's debut feature at the Boston Film Festival, and vaguely remember loving the style if not the story. Since then, he's returned to America and made a couple of genre movies that are far better than they had any right to be: Vacancy was a taut little slasher-thriller that was incredibly bloody effective at twisting the screws, and now Armored takes what starts out seeming like a B-movie that should go direct to video and makes it, well, a B-movie that deserves its time in theaters.

It is a rough start; it's the sort of movie where you feel kind of grateful for people wearing their names on uniforms and a multicultural cast, so you can keep a bunch of basically similar characters straight. Motivations are spelled out plainly, Milo Ventimiglia's cop gets a scene for the express purpose of establishing him early enough that he's not anonymous later on. And then, the heist goes down and things go wrong, and suddenly things get interesting.

Again, I need to re-view Kontroll to see it this is a real pattern or signature, but I think what makes Antal so interesting as a director of thrillers is that he doesn't feel compelled to top himself as the movie goes along. In fact, he seems to choose scripts where his characters wind up in boxes inside of figurative boxes (cars within the subway system in Kontroll, a motel room in Vacancy, an armored car in an abandoned industrial space in Armored). Maybe he just knows that he's good at cranking up the tension. Whatever it is, it works - Armored consistently got me to lean a little closer to the screen, eager to see just what he was going to do next.

Up in the Air

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 December 2009 in AMC Boston Common #17 (first-run)

This is getting mentioned on a lot of year-end awards lists as the best movie of the year, to which I have to say - really? Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty darn good movie, and looking over what I saw this year, I guess there aren't a whole lot of conventional movies to upset it - I loved Up, The Brothers Bloom, Sugar, Moon, and a few others more, but they're hardly typical nominees. And I won't lie; there were several points during the movie when I thought to myself that I was watching something special. In total, though, it doesn't quite merit "special". Very good, yes, but I have to hope that the top tier is a little higher.

And, one other note: It's pretty depressing. Not just the bit about it being about people losing their jobs, but look at the progression of George Clooney's character: He's happy, content, and comfortable as the film starts. He loves something about his job that many others would find incredibly stressful, he does that job better than almost anybody else, and the fact that he's not on a track to marriage, a house, and 2.4 kids doesn't upset him. So, of course, everybody treats him like a freak whose happiness can't possibly be real. Then, after dangling something that makes a conventional life seem worthwhile, he's given a crotch-kick in the sort of twist that is such a huge cliché that you think the movie can't possibly be going there, but oh yes, it does. And now he's miserable with nothing to show for it.

Maybe the end isn't quite a total sour note, but it is kind of a bummer - not just for the character, or the testimony from the laid-off workers shown in the film that seems like pandering, but because it's the sort of "serious movie" play that bugs me: It's saying something utterly conventional, but needs to prove its supposed maturity and sophistication by undercutting its message. Sure, Hollywood endings in real life are few and far between, but don't avoid it just to avoid it; do so because you've got a better ending for the story you want to tell.

These Weeks In Tickets: 2 November 2009 to 29 November 2009

Is this thing on? It has been a weird month, what with Google's automated routines apparently deciding that my blog has the characteristics of a spam blog and shutting access off. Naturally, they did that on a Friday afternoon, so my response that no, I'm a real person creating real content probably wasn't even going to get looked at until Monday.

Another weird thing happened on that Saturday, when I received the latest issue of weekly British comic 2000 AD in the mail, despite the fact that I neither ordered it nor subscribed to it. At first I thought it was a gift subscription, which brings the question of who the heck knows I like that and will pay to have it airmailed to me every week - while a lot of people know I like comics, 2000 AD is pretty esoteric in the U.S. But then none came in later weeks, so it was an apparent one-off, which just seems even more random.

And then on Monday, I had to put a picture on the intranet at work, so I stuck it on Facebook and Twitter. I now hate my camera on multiple levels - it's a heavy 2 megapixel job from 2001 with a cruddy 2x optical zoom, but it won't do me the favor of breaking so I can replace it with a clear conscience - it's just too rugged to explode when I drop it. Plus, I hate having my picture taken, and self-portraiture is even worse - I got acutely nervous taking that stupid shot.

On top of that, the flash apparently brings out the gray in my hair. Wonderful.

(Since writing that, I've purchased a phone that appears to be a better camera than that old thing, in addition to being an MP3 player and handheld internet device)

The blog being offline means it hasn't been a useful tool to raise money for and report progress on my entry in the Brattle's 2009 Movie Watch-a-Thon. More or less the entire tally is visible below, aside from an Eye-Opener entry on 1 November and a couple at the Kendall on 30 November and 1 December. So the final tally is 5 at the Brattle (which are supposed to count double), 25 elsewhere, and 2 screenings for the BSFFF selection committee (which you can choose to count or not, as they were events I was invited to). If you want to donate/retroactively sponsor - and you do, the Brattle is a cause worth supporting if you like movies, especially if you're in the Boston area - you can do so through this page.

So, a lot of movies to get through. Let's hit these guys week-by-week:



Stubless: Welcome to Academia (8 November, 11am, Brattle)

The Damned United

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2009 at Landmark Embassy #3 (first-run-ish)

One often hears talk of frequent collaborations between actors and directors, or maybe actors and producers, or writers and directors, but the frequent pairing of actor Michael Sheen and writer Peter Morgan, as near as I can tell always in fact-based dramas with Sheen playing some actual figure, is unique in cinema. Perhaps there's nothing more too it than Morgan having an interest in this type of story and Sheen being the sort of chameleonic actor who sort of resembles a lot of people, but it works. As much as I loved The Queen, I love The Damned United almost as much.

As befitting a topic that causes as much enthusiasm as English Football (soccer for us colonials), The Damned United is a far more raucous, foul-mouthed movie than The Queen and Frost/Nixon; most of its characters still have one foot solidly in the working-class lives from which they came.. And as much as I hate discussing a sports movie and saying "but it's not really about sports" - I mean, nobody feels obligated to say something like "but Bright Star isn't really about poetry" to establish the story as being worth telling - there's very little actual footie in the movie, and even someone as unfamiliar as I with the nuances of "the beautiful game" can see what the filmmakers are trying to prove there.

No, The Damned United is a nigh-brilliant example of Greek tragedy, where Brian Clough's obsession with a perceived slight by Leeds coach Don Revie (Colm Meany, who invests the role with a passive-aggressive combination of sophistication and spite) drives him to push his team and himself to incredible heights - and, just as surely, set himself up for a massive fall. It is a splendid study of the almost psychotic drive that people in highly competitive fields like sport, politics, and, yes, show business require to succeed, even though they are almost always self-destructive in the end.

And it does so without ever getting introspective and navel-gazing about it. It's an exciting, entertaining way to tell that story.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2009 at AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run)

This should have been funnier, I think. It's got a top-notch cast, including a couple in George Clooney and Kevin Spacey who truly excel at the sort of deadpan comedy that is this film's bread and butter. Jeff Bridges is a kick. Ewan McGregor isn't bad at all, but the "what's a Jedi Knight?" shtick gets old fast. It's almost as if the movie becomes constrained by its reality - it can be funny, absurd, and crazy, but not enough where the astral projecting, telepathic soldiers are ever going to be truly real to McGregor's character, or us.

Still, there are bits that are absolutely worth taking away from the movie. There's a moment I absolutely love where Clooney's character sincerely apologizes to an Iraqi man who has suffered at the hands of both Americans and his own countrymen, and it delivers a one-two punch of seeming strange followed by the realization that there is something deeply wrong with the world if that sort of humility and decency is unusual. The movie is peppered with other bits and asides that are much funnier, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy-style, but that's probably the one which will stick with me.

The Box

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2009 at AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run)

I saw this one in a surprisingly packed auditorium considering how it sort of died at the box office, and it wasn't the greatest audience. I've never liked Chris Parry's idea of using pennies to discourage talkers, but I would have been up for it if I thought my aim was good enough to put a ding in the phone of the guy a couple rows in front and a few seats to my left. Still, I can't completely complain about the audience not sitting with church-like reverence, since the girl who said, about three-quarters through the movie, that it was "fucking creepy as fuck" pretty much nailed it.

Richard Matheson's story "Button, Button" is a great little morality tale, and when he adapted it for the 1980s edition of The Twilight Zone, he reconsidered the ending so that it ended on a perfect little ironic zinger. Richard Kelley preserves the core of it, but he fills in the world around it - honestly, to excess; a perfect short story is buried under explanation and elaboration. But, for a good long chunk of the movie, that's okay, because Kelly really does have a knack for finding the most unnerving way to do it. There's barely a moment in it where you think, well, there could be a perfectly logical explanation for that. Nope, the characters are adrift in a world both out to test their virtue and make every memory of normalcy seem out of reach. Pretty much the whole movie is one long, intriguing, disturbing, tingly feeling.

Now, Kelly overreaches, just as he did in the Director's Cut of Donnie Darko and in Southland Tales, and finally pushes us just a bit too far at the very end, but if you like freaky movies, he has banked a heck of a lot of credit by then.

Welcome to Academia

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 November 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Eye-Opener)

I'll be portions of this movie are a riot if you've ever been involved in faculty politics, either as a participant or as a hapless grad student caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately, it often seems to require very specific familiarity, because as just things that are (apparently) typical of that environment, well, it's not very funny. There's two or three jokes that are returned to over and over again, and they don't really build. For instance, Callie Thorne as the man-hating womyns' studies professor is just about as crazy at the start as she's going to be, when a slow burn might have worked much better.

The big problem is that James LeGros, as the character unexpectedly promoted to Dead over others who covet the job, and is supposed to be the sane center of the film, almost never does anything. He's not more clever than expected, or humorously put upon. He's just there, when the movie needs him to either be Job or an active participant in the story. Jess Weixler fares a little better as his favorite grad student who suddenly becomes the proxy target for other jealous faculty, but just as she's established a good comedy vibe, the movie gets serious on her.



Stubless: Slimed (11 November, 9-ish, Somerville Video Room), The New Year Parade (15 November, 11am, Brattle)

Slimed

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 November 2009 in the Somerville Theater Video Room (SF/35 selection group screenings)

I'm not sure how much it's appropriate to talk about these films, but since I'm pretty sure that this one won't get chosen for the festival, I feel pretty good about giving it a thumbs-down. Admittedly, I'm the guy in the room who has just about lost all tolerance for deliberate camp unless it's done very well, but even the folks who liked that seemed to hate this one. It's stupid and lazy, and seems to think it's a virtue.

What's almost frustrating about it is that somewhere about halfway through, they seem to discover comic timing, and the occasional bit starts working. Hopefully this group's second movie will reflect that experience, but there's no need to subject people to what they went through to gain it.

Tian bian yi duo yun (The Wayward Cloud)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Tsai Ming-liang: Then and Now)

I formulated a theory about Tsai as I watched this movie: All the discussion of him as a highly-intellectual auteur, and his presentation as such, is a smokescreen. He's just a guy trying to make silent/burlesque-style comedy, and has an extremely weird sense of humor. That plays even less well commercially than art-house films, so he disguises his goofy productions as art pieces.

I'm mostly kidding about that but there's a nugget of truth to it, too: The Wayward Cloud is in fact a very funny movie, and while I await a future Criterion Blu-ray where I can go over it and extract nuance, I do think that the best way to experience it the first time is to just sit down and enjoy it as a comedy, because it really is extremely funny, rather than worry about parsing it for intent or meaning. That can come later, and maybe it will make the movie even better.

That said, I still think the "comedy made by a guy with a weird sense of humor" explains the last act best. Yes, there may be some meaning to what's going on, but I think it makes a lot more sense if Tsai is just kind of out there, giggling over something terribly inappropriate.

An Education

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (first-run)

I've long advocated that the Academy establish a Saul Bass award for outstanding opening credits, and An Education, with its upbeat music straight out of Charlie Brown specials and doodling over a peppily-edited montage that establishes just the barest hint of discontent, has one of the year's best. The movie that follows does a pretty good job of living up to it. Every single step of the story is easily predicted from the beginning, of course, but the cast is fantastic to a one. Star Carey Mulligan is just as good as promised, and Olivia Williams is particularly fine in her small role. It's a Sunday drive of a movie, familiar but still an enjoyable path to go down.

One odd thing that stuck out was the numerous references to the casual anti-semitism of the time. I'm sure that they're an accurate reflection, and when it first shows up, it reads as Alfred Molina's Jack trying to show that he's at least striving for his family to become more sophisticated (in that he says something "common" and then stumbles backing away from it), but when it reappears coming from the mouth of Emma Thompson's headmistress, well, then it's a thing.

Black Dynamite

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (midnight)

Huh, Michael Jai White is funny. Hilarious, even. Who knew?

The sort of parody that Black Dynamite engages in - replicating a genre that is less than stellar flaws and all (especially the flaws!) - is one I usually have pretty harsh words for. It's generally either the product of laziness (like Slimed and half the shorts we've screened for the BSFFF) or just seems disrespectful. The people who made those old movies that the parody's filmmakers often claim inspired them weren't trying to make something unintentionally hilarious, and if you're trying to honor their work, you really should do it by making the best movie you can. I'm talking to you, Larry Blamire.

Black Dynamite works because the filmmakers, as much as they're doing a warts-and-all recreation of seventies blaxploitation, don't ever use that as an excuse to slack off. When the characters talk, it's genuinely funny, and instead of trying to be bad actors, they're selling their lines with perfect comic timing. And for as ridiculously over-the-top as many of the action scenes are, they're actually shot better than the fight scenes in a lot of conventional action movies; White is a good enough screen fighter that he doesn't want to look bad.

Sure, maybe the last couple of segments are a little much, but I get the impression that the filmmakers knew they might never get another chance to make a movie like this, and made sure that they could cram every idea they had in there. And it's better for a movie like this to be overstuffed than have missed opportunities.



Stubless: The Foundling (18 November, Somerville Video Room, 7.30pm), an Eye-Opener they'd prefer I didn't mention by name or discuss since it's still a rough cut but which I didn't like all that much (22 November, Brattle Theatre, 11am)

The Foundling

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 November 2009 in the Somerville Theater Video Room (SF/35 selection group screenings)

So, speaking of stuff that I should probably keep under my hat, I'm kind of worried about the line-up for the festival part of February's Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. I'm tending to be the wet blanket in the room because I don't like camp that much, but that's not the problem with The Foundling. It's serious but not very good, really in any facet, but it's one Izzy seemed to feel was borderline. Some others praised the acting, which I just can't see. It's one of those movies that folks shy away from saying sucked because the intentions are good, it's unusual to see either a science fiction film or a western centered around Asian-American women, and just looking at it, you can see that the filmmaker did the very best she could with limited resources.

Still... You're asking people to pay the same amount for this that they would for a "regular" movie. And while a regular festival audience may find learning about new filmmakers enough, I don't know that this sort of film festival is the sort where good intentions and perhaps being a filmmaker to watch are good enough for the audience. I think each entry really needs to do something well, and The Foundling doesn't have that.

The Boat That Rocked (Pirate Radio cut)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 November 2009 in Regal Fenway #5 (first-run)

I probably should have known to be a little wary when the preview for this movie, aside from changing its name from the nifty-sounding "The Boat That Rocked" to the generic "Pirate Radio", spent a good chunk of time announcing that it had music from a bunch of great classic rock groups on the soundtrack. That's nice and all, but the target audience has most of that stuff on CD, and the time period rules out much in the way of new stuff (if groups being broken up and artists being dead didn't do an even more thorough job). So, Universal was basically selling it on what a great job the people who did the music clearances did. And while I'm sure they worked hard, if that's what you're using to push a movie with this cast, it sort of suggests that the movie isn't nearly as funny or clever as a movie with this cast and pedigree should be.

And, sadly, it's not. It's never bad, especially when it pulls out weapons like Billy Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Emma Thompson, but the truly great moments have a little too much space between them, and director Richard Curtis never quite manages to communicate the excitement of the era and how playing rock & roll like this was such an act of rebellion. The heck of it is, with modern American radio becoming as soullessly corporate as the day's BBC was stodgy, this movie could have really said something to people, but doesn't quite get there. Not that I expect Brit Curtis to think in those terms, but if the energy had been there, it would have been a nice side-effect.

The movie was recut from the original UK version for its US release, since the lengths was apparently a factor in its disappointing performance across the pond (which, I guess, makes the name change a little more palatable). One thing I think might have gotten garbled in the cut is how Tom Sturridge's Carl, the teenager sent to apprentice on the boat, at one point suspects Nighy's character is his unknown father, not far from when he is being set up with said character's niece. Maybe this was re-ordered for the US release, or something was cut, but it seems like there should have been alarm bells going off for someone.

The Parallax View

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Gordon Willis: The Man Who Shot the Godfather)

Pretty darn decent as paranoid 1970s thrillers go. The action set-piece that plays out in the beginning is a bit of a classic, although jarring to modern sensibilities: It plays out with no music, and is actually over pretty quickly, although not in a "came out of nowhere" way. It's just understated, acknowledging that this sort of chase wouldn't necessarily last very long.

The rest isn't quite up to that level; Warren Beatty is decent but not great, although Hume Cronyn is a treat as his crusty newspaper editor. It does serve as an interesting time capsule about paranoia and attitudes then and now. People still seemed to really believe in the press as an important check on government and industry ambition. Somehow the secret organization at the center seems both tame and extremely unlikely. And, get this, a man could just walk onto the runway, get on a plane, and then buy a ticket in the air, like he was on the commuter rail.

Not bad, and as befits a film presented in a series about the cinematographer, it certainly looks nice.



Bronson

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 November 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

Let's talk promotion and trailers again. I saw Bronson listed in the IFFB catalog and the picture used was a reddish image of Tom Hardy, stripped to the waist and looking tough. I figured, okay, I'll give that a pass. Then I see the crazy, colorful preview and think, huh, that might be worth a look.

In the end, Bronson winds up a so-so story told rather well. It's eye-popping to look at, and having the title character narrate as a stage show proves compelling and surprising far more often than it seems gimmicky. It's still very simple - young man gets sent to jail, discovers he likes to fight and is good at it, and is so committed to it that the sentence of seven years (and likely out in four) winds up becoming over thirty years spent in solitary confinement. But it's entertaining to watch, even if that's not the sort of story one usually goes in for.

Precious (based upon the novel Push by Sapphire)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2009 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run)

At some point while watching Precious, I remarked to myself that watchiing the movie was remarkably like being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer. That's not meant as a criticism; the life of Clarice "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is remarkably like being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer, and she certainly starts the movie ignorant enough that her way of communicating her life would like be akin to... Well, you get the idea. So, to a certain extent, every ham-fisted symbol or device is evidence that director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher are doing a good job of capturing Precious's perspective. Still, there are times when it doesn't quite feel like cleverness as just fumbling.

Still, the cast is top-notch. Gabourey Sidibe is excellent as Precious, as is Mo'Nique as her monstrous mother. Paula Patton and Mariah Carey provide good support, as do the group of actors playing Precious's friends. They're all quite natural, and no matter how awkward the storytelling sometimes may be, the acting is absolutely worth seeing the film for.

Mr. Skeffington

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2009 in the Brattle Theatre (Epstein Brothers)

The Epstein Brothers' most famous screenplay is, of course, Casablanca, but there's an argument to be made that the movie is fantastic in spite of the script, rather than because of it. After all, its events are absurd, but the acting and snappy dialog make up for it. Mr. Skeffington isn't quite so peppy, covering thirty years in its two and a half hours, and the star-crossed romance between Bette Davis's Fanny Trellis and Claude Rains's Job Skeffington is far from being Rick & Ilsa.

Still, it's not bad. Claude Rains, Walter Abel, and Marjorie Riordan are all charming in their parts, and there's a nice scope to it. Bette Davis, on the other hand... Well, Fanny soon becomes a singularly unpleasant character, and she gets saddled with some astonishingly horrific prosthetic makeup.

Red Cliff (edited from Chi bi and Chi bi xia: Jue zhan tian xia)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

Surprisingly, considering that the American release of Red Cliff has been cut just about exactly in half from what it was in China (where it was released as two movies totaling five hours), it's not simply one action scene after another. That's not to say it's not action-packed - it is, with Woo staging a few battle scenes that are nothing short of breathless - but not at the expense of the story.

The main attraction, of course, is the action, and we know what we're getting into from the start, when a loyal general takes a baby prince from its dying mother, puts him in a sling, and starts hacking up members of Prime Minister Cao Cao's army; from the moment we see the sling, we know there's badassery ahead, and we'll have single men taking on armies, literally controlling the battlefield, and an entire armada set on fire. Woo works his repertoire into this wuxia film, right down to the doves.

I'm hoping that when Magnolia releases this on home video, the entire two-part film will be on the Blu-ray, because although Red Cliff is suitably epic as is, there are points that could definitely use some fleshing out; in particular, Takeshi Kaneshiro's master strategist tends to seem to be ahead of Zhang Feng-yi's Cao Cao too much of the time; hopefully the entire story contains more back-and-forth, and perhaps a bit more of a story arc for some of the other characters.

Ninja Assassin

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2009 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run)

It's good to see that fake fake blood technology has improved since the Zatoichi remake, because the folks in Ninja Assassin do plenty of slicing and dicing. There's plenty of real fake blood, too, and even the some of the CGI weapons look pretty good. It's not the same sort of awe-inspiring action seen in Red Cliff, but there is something nice about how director James McTeague and company aren't messing around - there's been little if any thought given to how this could possibly secure a PG-13. Ninja movies should be this bloody and violent.

And it's good that it has that going for it, because even if it's not quite rock-stupid, it is the sort of action movie where every moment where fake blood of one sort or another isn't spurting is pretty much filler to lead us to the next. The characters are thoroughly generic, and there isn't even an obvious twist toward the end. The ninjas seem to have some mild supernatural abilities when McTeague and company think it would look cool - although I argue that ninjas actually being stealthy rather than seeming to impossibly step out of shadows with a shimmer would actually be cooler.

Ninja Assassin also seems to suggest a corollary to the multiple-ninja rule - that is, although one ninja is an unstoppable, undetectable killing machine, an army of ninjas is basically cannon fodder. It's as though a given geographical area has a limited pool of awesomeness to be drawn upon, so when you have many ninjas, they only get a little awesome each. Ninja Assassin posits a much stronger awesome field than most movies, as even groups of ninjas prove to be pretty fierce, but it also suggests that the field is polarized, with positive and negative awesome. Rain's title character thus has an advantage because he's the only one using the positive awesome field, while all the other ninjas are splitting the negative.

This Week In Tickets: 26 October 2009 to 1 November 2009

If not for the World Series, I'd probably be getting my DVR cleaned up and be making a dent in the metaphorical pile of unwatched screeners/DVDs/BDs hanging around my apartment. Actually, the pile's not metaphorical any more; there's a couple actual piles of things I mean to watch as soon as possible on my coffee table. And it probably wouldn't be a big dent - more of a ding. But I expect to start making it toward the end of the week.

Of course, maybe then there will be more good movies coming out. Right now, I'm really not excited about a whole lot of what's out there, as the relative thin-ness of the last couple weeks shows:



Stubless: American Casino (1 November, 11am, Brattle).

I can't really recommend American Casino when it opens at the Brattle this Wednesday, but it's far from the worst thing coming out this week: Apparently, after threatening to do so for about a year and a half, Magnolia is actually going to put Severed Ways out in a local theater. I saw it at the IFFB last year, and, well, really despised it. I suppose it's inspiring, in a way - if that piece of crap (literally - you get to watch the writer/director/star take a dump in front of you) can get theatrical distribution, there's hope for everyone else with an HD camcorder and a vague idea.

The Spanish Prisoner

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Noir)

I first saw The Spanish Prisoner at the Keystone Theater (which apparently doesn't even seem to have an entry in Cinema Treasures) in Portland, ME, and my older and wiser self has no trouble drawing a parallel between the two: Despite both having what seem to be all the pieces for success, they don't quite work out.

This is one of David Mamet's puzzle movies, and while there's plenty of genuine delight to that, there are also times when the plot seems to require that the movie take place in a parallel universe, where a certain type of clipped speech, odd behavior, and willful obliviousness to what's going on around them make a certain kind of con game more possible. The con certainly seems to have some weak points where it could have completely collapsed.

The cast makes it work very well, though. It is a lot of fun to see Steve Martin play against type as the smooth Jimmy Dell, without irony or much in the way of comedy until his last scene. The stiffness of Campbell Scott works for this character, especially when he's got the too-sweet Rebecca Pidgeon and grumbling Ricky Jay to play off. And I do sort of love how, after playing things very straight and precise from the beginning, Mamet allows things to become whimsical in the last few scenes.

Spartan

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Noir)

I reviewed this back when it originally came out (it's somewhat gratifying to see that while I occasionally cringe at how predictable my structure has become, the actual writing has improved). The second time through, I found I liked it even more. It's a genuinely engrossing thriller, but the second time through, I was more able to appreciate the acting. Val Kilmer just about fell off the map after this (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the only really noteworthy work he's done since), which is too bad, because this is a nifty performance, a guy who knows how to be a worker bee having to strike out on his own. On the other hand, Kristen Bell would get noticed soon after, being cast in Veronica Mars, and this is an early indication of how great she could be. She may be being wasted in the comedies she's doing now.

I'm kind of surprised this didn't hit the HD formats. I really wish it would.

Movie Movie

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Debonair: Stanley Donen on Film)

It's a rare, rare thing for this sort of homage/pastiche/parody to work nearly as well as it does. There's a number of reasons for it - Stanley Donen had actually worked in musicals in a career that already spanned 30 years at the time the film was shot, for instance, so he has the comic rhythms down pat, and he doesn't try to modernize them even as he tweaks them.

What's most interesting, perhaps, is the different reaction I had toward both mini-films, even though Donen and writers Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller seem to be going for the same deadpan parody in both. The first half, "Dynamite Hands", hit me as a funnier-than-usual idiot movie, pure parody material, while the second half, "Baxter's Beauties of 1933", actually kind of works if you take it seriously. And that's coming from someone who doesn't really like musicals as a rule.

Where the Wild Things Are

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2009 at Jordan's IMAX Reading (first-run)

When I saw the first stills from Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, what, two years ago, my first reaction was that that was exactly what a filmed version of Where the Wild Things Are should look like. My second was that that there was no way that book could be made into a feature length movie. It's ten sentences long. To my surprise, the first thought was less true than I expected, the latter maybe a little more so.

I remember the Maurice Sendak book as brighter; even when it was night, everything was sharp. There seems to be a lot more gray and brown in the movie, with Jonze, co-writer Dave Eggers, and company creating a world that seems much more lived-in than the pure fantasy of the book. But that is, perhaps, as it should be - one of the great things about adapting a short work is that you can build it up, elaborate on ideas that interest you without it being at the expense of some other part of the story. It's more creative, and more satisfying, to do that than to cut down and change.

It also makes the result unarguably a Jonze film, and I like that. The way he and cinematographer Lance Acord shoot the opening scenes has me intrigued from the start; it's clearly the work of someone looking to make something more than disposable entertainment for kids, but it's also neither edgy nor overtly nostalgic. He's not talking down to the young folks in the audience, either - there's no obvious sting on the soundtrack when Max finds an ominous set of bones on the Wild Things' island, for instance. The flip side is that the movie does go on a bit too long, dragging at some points in the middle, and the soundtrack is a little too indie at times; for a movie in large part about rage, the music is sometimes too happy.

American Casino

* * (out of four)
Seen 1 November 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

American Casino frustrates the heck out of me. The title mostly refers to to the first half of the movie, which purports to explain how the current financial crisis is the result of parts of the economy being treated as a game of chance, and it's almost completely unwatchable. If the idea is to show how it's all so confusing that even career economists can't understand it, mission accomplished, I guess, but, you know, it's no big accomplishment to demonstrate that something people already don't understand is confusing. It doesn't feel like a successful operation, though, more like sloppy filmmaking.

The second half, where the film zooms in on how it affects people on the ground, especially among Baltimore's African-American community, is much more successful, in large part because it manages a nifty trick: It introduces people to us with the implication that they are maybe not experts, but community support, and once the audience accepts that they are intelligent, capable people, reveals that they are in danger of losing their houses because they are victims. It's as manipulative a technique as any filmmaker uses, but surprising and effective. And if you can't muster up sympathy for your fellow human being, there's an intriguing bit on the environmental toll that this is taking.

So, filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn manage to do a few things right. Maybe things would have worked out better if they had narrowed their focus, because for all that individual segments are done well, the transitions between them are frequently poor, and the film as a whole feels confused, like the filmmakers knew what they wanted to talk about, but didn't know what they wanted to say.

This Week In Tickets: 19 October 2009 to 25 October 2009

Not a big week here, although I don't particularly feel like I'm missing a lot. Of course, some of it just doesn't show up here:



Stubless: Wednesday's screening of nine sci-fi shorts that are candidates to appear in February's expanded Boston Science Fiction Film Festival; a Fantastic Fest screener for A Town Called Panic on Friday; showing off my home theater for Mom & Bill with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls on Saturday; and the Brattle's Sunday Eye-Opener of The Good Soldier.

I vacillate between very excited and very worried about the 7-9 days of festival screenings that are being attached to the venerable sci-fi marathon. On the one hand, I want it to succeed badly, and I think it might be in a better position to do so than the Brattle's late and lamented (by me, at least) Boston Fantastic Film Festival. It's attached to an event with an existing following, and should cross-promote easily with Arisia and Boskone. On the other hand... Well, the premieres at SF/x have been terrible for the ten or so years I've been going. Even if they're only programming one a night, how far down the well of direct to video crud are they going to have to go? Especially if they're going to be reliant on submissions, because the guys doing awesome stuff in Japan aren't looking for small festivals.

I'm not sure how much it's appropriate for me to say about the nine films I saw; so I'll just talk up the good stuff. The highlights were "Lifeline", an animated short that struck me as the offspring between 2001 and Bill Plympton, and "Under God", a somewhat heavy-handed but extremely well-produced tale of President Eisenhower seeing UNIVAC for the first time.

Astro Boy

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2009 at AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run)

Astro Boy isn't a bad idea, either from a storytelling or pragmatic sense. Mighty Atom (as the character is known in Japan) is much beloved by audiences on multiple continents, but doesn't really have a fleshed-out origin story, so there's the opportunity to go Batman Begins/Casino Royale/Star Trek on it, and new animation studio Imagi stands a good chance of making a profit rather than having their first ambitious project put them in the red.

In a lot of ways, they do right by Tezuka's best-known creation. The animation is gorgeous and filled with playful designs, evoking Tezuka's cartoony style while still being solid and three-dimensional. The moments when Atom realizes he can fly are just absolutely perfect, and the filmmakers don't shy away from just how painful a lot of the story that introduces Atom is: He would later become an upbeat character, but there's a tragic core to him. Director David Bowers and his co-writer Timothy Harris do a good job of balancing that with goofy stuff.

And yet, so much of the movie just falls flat. There's messages of non-violence and environmentalism in there, and the opening sequence has a satirical sting, but mostly just vague nods in the direction. And as much fun as the big robot fighting sequence in the middle is, it's not clear why it's okay for Atom to blow up a bunch of other robots.

The Good Soldier

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

Huh, has it been three and a half years since seeing Sir! No Sir! at the Eye-Opener? It honestly seems like it was more recent. The Good Soldier has the same basic message - soldiers turning toward peace activism after seeing the horrors of war first-hand, although The Good Soldier widens its focus from Vietnam to sixty years of armed conflict, and is more interested in ideals than events.

And, good for it. It's good information, and filmmakers Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys do a nice job of not making the film into a polemic. Indeed, this is one of the first movies of the sort, clearly made partially in response to the Iraq war, that that I think could be shown to people with varying opinions on the war and have them maybe find some common ground. It's not perfect, but that's remarkable in and of itself.

A Serious Man

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (first-run)

The Coens' latest is one of their most peculiar - it starts with a fable set far in the past, then jumps to the 1960s for a story that frustratingly refuses to provide any sort of release. As quirky as their other movies have been, they went somewhere; this one just seems to stop.

But that's the point, isn't it? At no point is any given person's story over, and it can't be fully understood. A marvelous recurring theme of the movie is uncertainty: The opening segment with us not knowing whether or not Fyvush Finkel's character is a dybbuk or not; Michael Stuhlbarg's physics professor character lectures on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Schroedinger's Cat, and is himself deviled by a paradoxical threat made by a student's father, who encourages him to embrace the mystery about it rather than think too hard. He's caught flat-footed by his wife's desire for a divorce, has nightmares about possible outcomes, and becomes frantic about not being able to get a simple answer.

Stuhlbarg is great in this role, a reasonable man buffeted by forces outside his control. It's a performance that will probably be undersold come awards time because it's very funny, but it's also amazing in how Stuhlbarg and the Coens make an everyman into something that seems like a wholly original creation.

This Week In Tickets: 12 October 2009 to 18 October 2009

Yes, I've been using computers since I started playing with the school's TRS-80 Model 1 in the second grade, and I work in the field, but I've been slow about following certain online trends. So, I've spent the past couple of weeks catching up, a little: Here's me on Twitter and me on Facebook.

Here's me at the movies:



I can't claim I'll friend everybody on the latter or reciprocate with everybody who follows me on the former; past a certain point, all it does is make it harder to follow the people I do want to keep track of because they're swamped in a sea of folks you sort of knew back in high school.

And all they'd get is me complaining about baseball officiating and telling stories about how I scored a mini-jackpot on Saturday - my ticket to Paranormal Activity not only pushed me over the Regal points threshold for a free movie ticket, but also happened to be in one of the big rooms without my even checking.

(And, yes, sometimes when I go to the Fenway theater and I'm not sure exactly which movie I'm going to see or if it's playing on more than one screen, I'll check and see which ones are running on screens 12 and 13. Hey, they all cost the same, so you might as well get the most bang for your buck!)

The Boys are Back

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)

The basic idea behind The Boys Are Back is kind of a chestnut: Newly widowed father has to take care of his two sons, only, get this, in many ways he's still more a boy than a man himself. It's not bad at that, although it doesn't exactly break a whole lot of new ground. Clive Owen continues to make a good case that he is, in fact, an actor, rather than a guy who has benefited from choosing roles that fit his on-screen persona well. Nicholas McAnulty and George MacKay are good as the sons, and Emma Booth is good as the woman who enters his life.

Like Up, though, The Boys Are Back distinguishes itself in its tragic set-up. Director Scott Hicks and screenwriter Allan Cubitt take just ten or fifteen minutes to discover wife Katy's cancer and have it run its course, but it's gut-wrenching, managing to communicate both how quick it can happen and how painful and drawn-out the process can feel. Then there's the way younger son Artie reacts to it, which made me feel a sort of weird frustration that he didn't seem to understand just what the situation was. And how sons Harry and Artie, who have been raised on different sides of the world, aren't sure how to react to having a brother in their lives.

So, nice, and refreshingly aware of how complex family relations in the twenty-first century can be.

Paranormal Activity

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 October 2009 at Regal Fenway #12 (first-run)

Paranormal Activity is without question working from the Blair Witch Project playbook, but does so with great effectiveness. Like that predecessor, it's built on not showing the audience too much, knowing that no matter how creative visual effects guys get, they'll never be able to create a single image that scares everybody. Let us imagine our worst nightmare, though...

The flip side, though, is that what makes this movie work is how much it shows. Writer/director Oren Peli lets us get familiar with the house where everything takes place and holds the camera steady - in fact, the characters trying to capture their haunting even have the courtesy of mounting it on a tripod. Some very well-timed and seamless practical effects show us that something is going on, but are likely simple enough that the audience doesn't disengage and wonder how the filmmakers did it.

And, the two characters we spend the most time with are able to keep from wearing out their welcome. They like each other but can still be irritated by each other's foibles. Micah Sloat in particular manages a nice balance: His enthusiasm about investigating this mystery is thoroughly understandable - how many of us wouldn't be excited about something so out of the ordinary in our lives - even as we realize it is really dumb for a character in a horror movie.

Zombieland

* * (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2009 at AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run)

Even if Zombieland were executed really well, it would probably rub me the wrong way, at least a little: I kind of like my horror movies to be scary, and this one isn't, not even a little. Sure, it's not actually a horror story, rather a coming of age comedy that uses a zombie apocalypse as a metaphor (don't go through life as a zombie!), but it's not a very good one. Jesse Eisenberg's character is annoying even without the constant narration, and neither Woody Harrelson nor Emma Stone is much more interesting. Abigail Breslin, at least, is a unique entry, the 12-year-old scam artist who bounces off both Stone and Harrelson quite well.

Unfortunately, the movie just isn't very funny. It's the sort of thing marketed to movie fans that relies heavily on familiarity with in-jokes about how to survive zombie movies or the like, and I get them, but that's not actually funny. The most egregious is when a certain actor whom I absolutely love shows up playing himself midway through, and the movie just thinks having him there will lead to spontaneous laughter, but even he is just not that funny on his own. Thus, Zombieland makes one appreciate the occasionally clever writing in Space Jam, which did the same thing, only much better.

The killer is, the movie undermines even that by having Breslin look blankly at the characters having their little in-jokes and actually say "I don't know what you are talking about" - the movie actually acknowledges that this stuff isn't funny on its own!

New York, I Love You

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run)

Paris, Je T'Aime had 18 segments directed by an amazing selection of directors from around the world, with a similarly high-profile cast. New York, I Love You has ten, and one of the directors is Brett Ratner.

I kid; Ratner's is actually one of the more entertaining, telling a tight little story with a fun appearance by James Caan. It's far from perfect, but it does have a beginning, middle, and end, with a bit of a twist, and memorable performances from Caan, Anton Yelchin, and Olivia Thirlby. The same can't really be said for any of the other shorts, though: Yes, some of the directors are folks whose name gets me interested - Allen Hughes, Mira Nair, Shekhar Kapur (pinch-hitting for the late Anthony Minghella), maybe Yvan Attal, and the cast is full of stars. Only Ratner, Josha Marston, and Hughes really seem to do what they set out to, though; the rest just seem somewhat inert. And Marston has Cloris Leachman and Eli Wallach, which means he starts out way ahead of everyone else.

Adding insult to injury, IMDB's trivia page for the movie says that two segments were cut entirely - one directed by Scarlett Johansson and starring Kevin Bacon, another directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev and starring Carla Gugino. Those had better show up on the Blu-ray.