That Week In Tickets: 26 December 2011 to 1 January 2012

Man, if I would have finished this on the bus ride home yesterday, I could have actually said I was caught up with TWIT. Instead, I went and saw not one, but two movies at Kendall Square last night.

Still, the plan is going to be to keep up with this in 2012, even if it means some late Sunday nights. For now, I'm closing out 2011 with this busy page:



It's kind of amusing to see Monkey Business just a couple days away from My Week with Marilyn; though the former was part of the Brattle's Ginger Rogers tribute series, it's got a great big picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cover if you buy it on DVD. She's really only got a supporting role in it, and that's kind of being generous with her contribution. Still, it wouldn't be much of a surprise that studios would later build movies around her being sexy the way they previously did around Fred & Ginger being able to dance; she seemed to hit an intersection of child-like innocence and fully-realized sexuality without making it sound creepy.

Michelle Williams does a pretty good job of capturing that in My Week with Marilyn, deliberately making it difficult to see where Norma Jean Baker ends and Marilyn Monroe begins, even while insisting they aren't exactly the same. Of course, I suspect that's a result of the source material, where even though Colin Clark may have felt like he was getting close to the woman, he was still only really meeting the movie star.

The Darkest Hour

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2011 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, digital 3D)

There's a lot of product placement in The Darkest Hour, and I wonder if the filmmakers ever found themselves trying to rationalize all those shots of signage for McDonald's and Starbucks Coffee with Cyrillic lettering. See, they might say, we're doing a movie about an alien invasion, and by showing all of these American things, we're making a statement about how Moscow has, in a way, already been invaded...

It's the sort of thing you almost have to say; otherwise you're looking at a movie that feels like a string of compromises and wondering what you gained by them. It's set in Moscow, but follows a group of Americans almost exclusively for the first half, and never really has them come across cultural or language barriers when more actual Russians show up. It's shot in 3D, but what good is that when the villains are mostly invisible? It needs to end, but wants to leave the possibility of sequels open.

And, on top of that, it's just not very good. There are certainly signs that director Chris Gorak could stage a pretty good action scene given some inspiration, and while the CGI for the aliens could use a little more money thrown at it, the vision of a suddenly devastated Moscow (which appears to be a truly beautiful city) is quite impressive. The movie just can't escape how utterly generic it is, though - it is full of interchangeable characters, the aliens are a bland cross of between familiar grays and Dan Dare's Mekon, and it doesn't add even one original concept to the annals of post-apocalyptic adventure.

I don't think that The Darkest Hour was ever going to be a great movie, but even as sci-fi/horror "product" it fails to stand out from the crowd for much more than a couple of cool shots. Some of the people involved will undoubtedly do good work someday, but this tops out at "kind of slick for a low budget" (if it had a low budget).

Those Weeks In Tickets: 12 December 2011 to 25 December 2011

A busy couple of weeks, getting ready for Christmas. Not that I put up lights or anything, but the niece population has doubled, and while they don't necessarily have a lot in common, it turns out that they all like presents.

Also, cold makes it hard to get up in the morning.

Table of contents:
12 December 2011 - 18 December 2011
19 December 2011 - 25 December 2011



Stubless: Saint, seen 18 December in the living room

Shame and Long Day's Journey Into Night are, quite frankly, terrible movies to see during the season when you get together with your families to exchange gifts and cheer. Terrible.

Shame

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 December 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #1 (first-run)

Shame is an example of how a film can seemingly do everything right and yet fail to be compelling. Maybe that's because it is so careful about every detail; writer/director Steve McQueen is as precise in his filmmaking as lead character Brandon Sullivan is in arranging his solitary life to facilitate his urges, and it's easy to admire the craft without ever feeling anything strongly about it.

That may not even be a particular failing of the movie; if the idea is to make the audience understand the feeling of how something that normally brings joy (in this case, sex) can become an obligation which only provides a shadow of its former release, McQueen and star Michael Fassbender have done a good job. Fassbender hits every note flawlessly, and does manage to give Brandon a personality instead of just making him an exemplar of addictive behavior. The personality is that of a jerk, but a believable one; his scenes with Carey Mulligan and Nicole Beharie (great as, respectively, Brandon's sister and co-worker/potential next lover) make him at least an interesting mess.

And yet, like a blockbuster movie with little story to frame its big special effects scenes, Shame allows its fine acting to exist in something of a vacuum. It's not quite such a grievous sin - McQueen services those centerpiece performances in every scene, rather than making the audience wait like a bad action movie does, but there's still the frequent feeling that the movie has made its point and can move on to the part where something happens now. And when you get right down to it, the ending is just as desperate a grab for sentiment that it hasn't quite earned as you'll see in any more mainstream movie.

That doesn't make Shame a bad movie; in fact, there's really not a thing wrong with it. There's just also not much compelling about it; it executes well, but makes one wonder if what it's executing is worthwhile.



The theme for this week was "going to the IMAX theater when I really should have been finishing up my Christmas stuff". I actually took Monday off for it, what with having vacation time that wouldn't roll over and the trip out to Reading being something that eats a good chunk of the day. Well worth it, though - not only did this get me the Dark Night Rises prologue, but even though IMAX's digital sharpening work is pretty good, the parts of Mission: Impossible that were genuinely shot in genuine IMAX is pretty gorgeous on the giant screen.

It's kind of a shame that Mission: Impossible and Tintin came out so close together, as it relegated the latter to just a couple matinee showings a day on the Imax-branded screen at Boston Common. It's also a beautiful film, but M:I was a beast that would not be denied - perhaps ironic, as I'm pretty sure M;I's "five days early in IMAX" opening was to originally meant to give it a little more time on the digital screens before Tintin took over, but instead Tintin got bulldozed.

Interesting coincidence of the two coming out back-to-back like that, though, is that it has two very good directors trading roles: Brad Bird is directing the live-action film, while Steven Spielberg is directing the animated feature. As fun a novelty as it is, I hope this reversal doesn't persist too much: Bird has directed some fantastic animated films, and while I get that directing animation in the CGI age is often managing an office full of people working at computer terminals (and who gets into show business to do that) while this let him fly around the world and blow stuff up, there aren't a lot of people who can do what he does. Spielberg got to be halfway there by doing motion capture, but so much of Spielberg's best work has been instinctive; I don't know if the meticulous nature of animation would suit him long-term.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 December 2011 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, genuine IMAX)

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is a heck of a ride, filled with one incredible set piece after another, and as a bonus many of the big scenees are filmed in eye-popping genuine IMAX. It's got a few moments when its execution doesn't quite match its ambition, but what works is pretty terrific.

What's missing, in this case, is a villain. Oh, Michael Nyqvist is there, but considering his grandiose plan, he needs to be bigger. His Kurt Hendricks is never established as a strong personality when he needs to be sneering and really just bug-nuts. Instead, he doesn't make the same impression that Lea Seydoux does as the mercenary who he hires. Sure, part of that's Ms. Seydoux being a knockout, but as Sabine Moreau, she's got an oddball hook (gets paid in diamonds), an early set piece showing her as a threat, and a big fight scene with her opposite number. That's how you establish a villain, not by telling us how smart/dangerous he is.

(Aside: In four movies, how come none of the people involved have decided to send Ethan Hunt and company up against an evil IMF? Granted, the team angle has only really been a big factor in the Bad Robot entries, but this seems like a natural thing!)

Fortunately, the good guys are enjoyable enough to watch without perfectly matched adversaries. Everyone knows their roles - being more experienced doesn't make Tom Cruise much less cocky and Simon Pegg is still the eager nerd next door as the returnees, while Paula Patton and Jeremy Renner both do well as very capable people with nagging doubts. They all handle the physical aspects of the job quite well, and there's a fun back-and-forth that develops between Pegg's Benji Dunn and Renner's William Brandt.

But, let's face it, we're here for the action, and it turns out that Brad Bird blows stuff up real good. I'm actually kind of curious to see how this plays on a 2.35:1-proportioned screen, because Bird frames a fair amount of the action vertically, using the 1.44:1 aspect ratio of the IMAX screen to indicate either great height or action happening on multiple levels. His animation background serves him very well, not just because he's a natural where CGI is concerned, but because he's used to paying attention to every quadrant of every frame.

The Adventures of Tintin

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 December 2011 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded digital 3D)

When I was a kid, the Tintin albums were the only comic book-type things in Cumberland, Maine's Prince Memorial Library, and I read them all (heck, they may even have had a copy of Tintin in the Congo). They're great all-ages adventure stories, and it's no wonder that Steven Spielberg has been trying to make this movie for roughly thirty years (or that original comic creator Hergé considered him the perfect man for the job before his death).

They probably couldn't have seen this Tintin movie back then, a three-dimensional, motion-captured piece of animation that captures the way Eurocomics like Tintin are full of incredible detail while being whimsical and cartoony. It's a funny thing - even as motion-capture animation is being phased out and 3D is being scaled back, Spielberg and a few others are doing a great job of showing that the technology itself isn't to blame, but just needs people figuring out how to use it.

And he uses it pretty darn well. There are many flat-out amazing big action scenes in this movie, but three stand out: A battle with pirates that takes on some bizarre angles, a cut-free chase through a Morocco-inspired city, and a swordfight with... No, that would be telling. All three, though, are further evidence that nobody does big action better than Steven Spielberg; that chase, while it only lasts three or four minutes, has a ton of moving pieces to keep track of, and it winds up being not just exciting but so clear that most people will never realize what a frustrating thing it could have been.

The movie is a lot of fun when things aren't being thrown around and shot up as well; Spielberg, the screenwriters, and the cast find an excellent balance of light-hearted whimsy and genuine thrills; while the actual jokes may not always come off, there's a comfortable familiarity to the characters, even the ones just meeting for the first time.

It's a shame Mission: Impossible has gulped up all the IMAX screens during its run; this is a big adventure that deserves the biggest screens, and a fine addition to the exceptional run of kid-friendly movies to come out this fall.

This Week Month "Has It Really Been That Long?" In Tickets: 24 October 2011 to 11 December 2011

A week or two seeing a lot of movies here, a foreign-language class there, and suddenly I find myself ridiculously far behind on the blog. Let's see how quickly it's possible to catch up!

Table of contents:
24 October 2011 - 30 October 2011
31 October 2011 - 6 November 2011
7 November 2011 - 13 November 2011
14 November 2011 - 20 November 2011
21 November 2011 - 27 November 2011
28 November 2011 - 4 December 2011
5 December 2011 - 11 December 2011



I was hoping to do a bunch of reviews on the Brattle's "Silent Screams" series, but not only did other things fill my time afterward, but I felt unusually knocked out that weekend, really dragging during a few movies . I wound up spending a lot of time at the Brattle that week, between CineCaché and the double feature and the silents, to the extent where the soda they serve there is actually starting to grow on me.

Of course, sometimes falling behind isn't really heartbreaking.

Unhappy Birthday

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché)

Giving negative reviews to independent movies sucks, especially when the director notices you mentioning their movie on Twitter and asks you directly what you thought. That happened here, and there's really not a whole lot good to say about Unhappy Birthday. It's got an impressive opening sequence, a clever setting, and filmmakers who certainly seem to want to use the form to say something clever, but just don't have anything close to the skill to put it together.

The opening is connected to the setting; the town of Amen is perched on the end of a piece of coastal land so flat that it only acts as a peninsula at low tide' the rest of the time it is an island. Rick (David Paisley), his friend Sadie (Christina De Vallee), and his boyfriend Jonny (Jonathan Keane) are going there to give Sadie a very special birthday surprise - a reunion with her long-lost sister Corinne (Jill Riddiford). Actually, given that Sadie was a foundling, she's probably the long-lost one. Naturally, of course, the island turns out to be sinister.

I got to the theater just a bit after the start time, but didn't miss any of the movie because there were a couple of folks from the Boston LGBT Film Festival up front doing the intro, talking about "queer cinema" and "queer horror", which was nice in that it gave me a chance to get my coat off and sit down without messing with anybody watching the movie, and I get that the movie was made with a certain point of view, but it made me a bit worried, because they didn't really seem to be saying anything - there were words about how some movies scanned as straight or queer, but they weren't actually talking about whether or not the movie was scary.

And ultimately, that's what really sinks Unhappy Birthday - filmmakers Mark Harriott and Mike Matthews just don't tell a good scary story. It doesn't help at all that the movie is a mess on a technical level, with terrible sound mixing and photography that looked cheap and low-rez even from the back row. Yeah, it's independent, but there are a lot of good, cheap, consumer tools these days. That could be forgiven if the movie was well-told, but that was painfully amateurish, too. The filmmakers seem to be trying to replicate things that they have seen work in better horror movies without understanding what makes them effective or integrating them into the story (voyeuristic shots work much better with a voyeur, handheld cameras aren't automatically scary, etc.), creating a patchwork feeling that just never comes together. Characters change behavior drastically between scenes without explanation. Things get campy without the movie either fully committing to it or using it to make the horror aspects more shocking. And while individual scenes make sense, the totality doesn't. I'm cool with gay main characters and having sexuality be a big part of the story, but just because these things are relatively rare in the genre doesn't mean they're free passes.

There's actually some good work on the cast's part - Paisely, Keane, and De Vallee could make these characters the center of a genuinely good movie - but they're too thin as written and given too many dumb things to do. I'd certainly like to enjoy this movie, and maybe it works for those who think the "queer" part of "queer horror" is more important than the "horror" part (though I wouldn't presume to say), but it's just not scary, and not clever or even funny enough to make up for that.

The Trip

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Recent Raves)

If you clicked the ticket looking for The Guard, head over here; I don't usually split a double feature, but this didn't fit in the "no reviews on EFC" theme of that post and I didn't really have a lot to say about it even right after I saw it (and I may have dozed off at some point, too).

It's an entertaining enough movie, at least, with UK personality Steve Coogan inviting his friend and frequent collaborator Rob Brydon along with him on a restaurant tour he'd originally planned to do with his much younger girlfriend (Brydon is a cheerfully domestic family man to Coogan's fame-loving sophisticate, at least in this fictionalized version of the pair). Conversation and mishaps ensue, with Coogan pondering whether he wants to move to Hollywood to star in a new CSI-type program. The famous dueling Michael Caines and the like are just as funny as billed, and the pair do have fine chemistry.

Interesting thing about the series - there was no writer listed on the print or IMDB, and checking the latter doesn't yield any writers' credits on the TV series that it was edited together from. A great deal of it is likely real and improvised, but there are some parts that are obviously scripted; I imagine those come from Coogan and Brydon as well. It's an odd set-up all around, really, and compacting the series to about half its length while keeping all the stops does lead to the film falling into a bit of a rut toward the end. The Trip is a well-improvised portrait of two middle-aged men with opposite perspectives, but it wasn't originally built as a movie, and sometimes that shows.

Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Silent Screams)

I am pretty sure that even with a more appropriate soundtrack, The Golem would have its problems. When shown at the Brattle with a pre-recorded soundtrack by Frank Black (aka "Black Francis"), though, it was an object lesson in how precisely these things must be matched: The mood of the music seldom matched the picture, and brought something previously unseen out even less often, and that tended to highlight the flaws that were already present.

Because, let's face it, there's a big one here, which is that the plot is spurred into action by the emperor declaring that the Jews must be moved from the ghetto on account of their use of black magic, and Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinruck) deciding to fight this edict by... well, summoning a demon so that he might learn the magic words necessary in order to animate the soulless brute of the title. That is kind of ceding the high ground, there. Naturally, the golem (co-writer/director Paul Wegener) eventually goes out of control, endangering the whole community, most notably the Rabbi's daughter Miriam (Lyda Salmonova), who will likely need rescuing by her new secret Christian knight boyfriend Florian (Lothar Muthel).

The Golem is by no means whatsoever a bad movie; indeed, directors Carl Boese and Wegener put together a story that is often pretty thrilling, and looks very nice indeed for being made in 1920. It's got an appealing cast, too, particularly Wegener. His role, more that in many silents, involves a great deal of mime; even in motion, he looks like hard clay, and he's entirely convincing when going from impassivity to an almost-feral state. This movie was said to be a large influence on the James Whale Frankenstein, and that's in large part because Wegener and company give us a monster who, though in some ways a man, is in other ways decidedly less.

Still, it's hard to get over just how much of a mess parts are, especially the finale that sort of invites the jaw to drop - that's how you finish this? Ah, well - the movies still had some growing up to do when The Golem was made, and it manages to be a good yarn even if it has troubles as a story.

The Ides of March

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run)

Going into this, I had completely forgotten that George Clooney directed and co-wrote the movie as well as co-starring and producing. That's almost not fair; sure, it's not surprising that he might wind up following the same career path as Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford, but I don't recall either of them being much in the way of writers. It's almost unseemly for one guy to be publicly good at so many things.

But, let's back the praise up a little. The Ides of March isn't exactly a masterpiece, just an above-average movie, which is certainly nothing to sneer at. It's based on Beau Willimon's play "Farragut North" (changing the title from a bit of political nerdery to a Shakespeare reference makes it a little more inviting, I guess), and features Ryan Gosling as one of the chief lieutenants in the Presidential campaign of Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), with Philip Seymour Hoffman as the campaign manager, Paul Giamatti as the main primary opponent's campaign manager, and Evan Rachel Wood as a lovely young intern. Gosling's Stephen Meyers knows that he's in a ruthless business, but Morris has him just starry-eyed enough that he's still caught unexpected when little things become power struggles.

It's probably an artifact of having two movies where a certain limited affect is called for come out in such rapid succession, but Ryan Gosling is sort of a paradox as a lead actor: He always gives a good performance, but even when his characters get angry, there's something very distant and vague about him. Now, maybe I'm wrong about this - I've seen a few Facebook updates from younger cousins that certainly seem to indicate that girls go for him, and maybe his blankness is part of the appeal, a medium to project fantasies on. Compare him to his co-stars - Clooney, especially, is engaging and charismatic even though he's mean to be just as much of a cipher. Hoffman, Giamatti, Wood, Marisa Tomei, Jeffrey Wright, they all have something too.

Of course, having no easy hook into Gosling's character means that there are a great many directions the movie can go at any time, although there is something oddly muted about the whole thing - it's never quite as intense as it perhaps should be. A good story well-told, at the very least.

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

N/A (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Silent Screams)

So, the night before this screening, I went to see RA. One at Fresh Pond. It got out at around 12:30am, after the T had stopped running, so it was a half-hour or so walk back home in the snow (yeah, early snowstorm this year). It's almost impossible for me to fall asleep after that without reading for a bit, so I was pretty fuzzy the next morning, and I nodded off at some point during this, and I apparently completely missed the big twist that makes the movie famous.

I'll certainly re-watch it another time, because I love silents. They take a certain amount of concentration, though, which I just didn't have to give that day.

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Silent Screams)

I've mentioned that this is my favorite vampire movie ever before, right? Yes, I have.

My opinion is more or less unchanged, although on the fourth or fifth viewing it does start to seem a little less perfect and a little more rickety. I hadn't seen a lot of silent movies when I first saw this one, so I was a bit bowled over by what a new experience this type of storytelling was. Still, I think it makes all the right decisions in adapting Dracula that other movies avoid in the name of humanizing the inhuman title character.

Midnight in Paris

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, amazingly)

I'm not quite the last person to see Midnight in Paris theatrically, but I certainly waited long enough: The movie was in its twentieth week or so at the Kendall, with a mere eleven days left to go there before heading over to Arlington for its second run. Forget being Woody Allen's biggest hit in a long time, that sort of longevity is almost unheard of anywhere.

Perhaps surprisingly, it's mostly deserved. Though there's still a bit of bitter old man to Midnight - the inevitable Allen-surrogate, Owen Wilson's Gil, can't mention his work in Hollywood without also mentioning that what comes out of there is crap - it's well ameliorated by the themes of the rest of the movie: The desire to live in the past, Gil learns, is seductive but there's no growth to come from it. It's not so much the present that's flawed but how one lives there.

Allen isn't close to subtle in getting this message across, but there's a sense of whimsy here that has seldom been present in his recent works, including the comedies. Part of it's the fantasy conceit of having Gil regularly catch a cab to the 1920s - even if Allen has something sincere and emotional to say, he's got to have a light touch or fall down the hole of making what the sci-fi/fantasy fans call "the mythology" make some sort of sense, and he's too smart to do that - but part of it seems to be just not being afraid to have some fun. There's a gag toward the end ("what happened to the detective") that shocked and delighted me because it was quick, funny, and kind of anarchic. It's the sort of thing that recent, serious-even-during-the-comedies Woody Allen just doesn't do.

I really hope he decides to do it more; I miss that Woody Allen, even if that's the sort of thing he tended to do before I was watching his movies.



I started taking a Saturday-morning Japanese class at the Boston Language Institute this weekend, with the stated goal of being able to enjoy Toshiro Mifume performances in their entirety. Thus far, it has had the principle effects of (1) making me tremendously glad that English has an alphabet rather than two syllabaries and a gigantic collection of pictographs; (2) demonstrating that my study habits and general work ethic have sadly not improved noticeably since college; and (3) rearranging my Saturday moviegoing habits, as the cheap "AM Cinema" shows are out and I'm just a block away from Fenway when class lets out at 12:30pm. Also, lolling around the house all weekend has suddenly stopped being an option.

Gulliver's Travels (1939)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2011 in the Paramount Theatre Bright Screening Room (ArtsEmerson family shows)

Worth mentioning: The program started off with a pair of Fleischer brothers shorts, both fascinating/delightful in their own way: "Cobweb Hotel" (1936) is one I'm sure I've seen before, pretty typical of the period - rounded character designs and a musical framework that not only has the short structured around a song but has all the characters swaying to the beat. Still funny and kind of macabre, though, full of whimsy. The other was one of their Superman cartoons, "Billion Dollar Limited" (1942), in which Lois Lane is covering a shipment of gold that gets hijacked by some fast-driving gangsters, leading Superman to come to the rescue. It's an almost completely different style from "Cobweb Hotel", with realistic figures and less idiosyncratic voice work, along with serious thrills. I love their Lois, by the way, who gets in a fight with gangsters and winds up picking up their Tommy gun and opening fire.

It's worth mentioning these shorts because Gulliver's Travels falls in between them not just chronologically but stylistically; cartooning collides with realism, and the result is sometimes both interesting and a bit pretentious because of it. The Fleischers (as many adaptations do) focus on the Lilliput section of Jonathan Swift's book, and their depictions of the characters are interesting: The Lilliputians (as well as their rivals) are depicted as rounded cartoons drawn freehand, while Gulliver is rotoscoped. It's a bit of symbolism I'm not totally comfortable with - it depicts the Lilliputians as sub-human while Gulliver comes off too perfect, and too idealized. It seems like Gulliver should be seeing them reflecting human foibles, as opposed to coming across like a benevolent god amused by the antics of children.

Of course, it's been a while since I've read the source material in any form (I remember it mainly from what was certainly a simplified version read in elementary school), so director Dave Fleischer, producer Max Fleischer, and the five credited screenwriters may be closer to the mark than I think. It's not a bad movie - the cartooning is decent and the songs passable - but not quite up to the brothers' short work, either.

In Time

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2011 in Regal Fenway #9 (first-run)

Part of what makes In Time so disappointing is that it seems to have arrived at exactly the right moment; on the face, it seems to be a fine allegory for the 1% manipulating the system so that they can thrive at the cost of the 99%'s very lives. It's got an author in Andrew Niccol who has proven himself quite skilled at telling stories in this sort of world, so long as you don't look too hard at the underpinnings (I buy that Gattaca could evolve, and to a lesser extent that The Truman Show could happen, though In Time seems like it would have to take place much further into the future than the tech on display implies - heck, it sometimes feels like a script from 1987 which doesn't take cell phones into consideration).

And yet, while it shares a whole bunch of Gattaca's DNA (it even illustrates its central point by having characters swim in the ocean!), it's also missing much of that movie's heart. The main characters are portrayed by an appealing young pair - I like Amanda Seyfriend and Justin Timberlake a lot, although both seem to be more suited for comedy - but they seldom seem to be much more than ciphers. I don't quite buy them as being more than class envy and liberal guilt, and that the movie doesn't have much more to say about societal inequity other than offering violence and theft as a solution makes things ring hollow. This could work if Niccol weren't so intent on the characters being considered heroic or pleasant, but he doesn't seem willing to go that dark.

Somewhere in the concept for In Time, there's a bit of sharp, uncompromising satire waiting to come out: At its core, it's about the deepening inequities in modern America, and how nobody questions the system because they believe that they can eventually work their way to the top even if the system is stacked against them. Niccol just doesn't go for the throat, though, and he's not good enough with the big sci-fi action to deliver great sizzle when the steak is absent.

Moneyball

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2011 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run)

Speaking of inequities between the rich and the poor, it says something that the happy ending to this movie about Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) trying to figure out how to make his team win with limited resources is that the much wealthier Boston Red Sox win the World Series. This Boston-based blogger is obviously completely okay with that, but I wonder what folks from Oakland think of that as the ending.

It's at least an entertaining, genial couple of hours, with the central message - that when you've got fewer resources to play with, you've got to figure out what your competitors are under-valuing and buy low - coming through strong. Pitt and Jonah Hill are an entertaining odd couple, and the script by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zallian does a nice job of fleshing the business-centric plot out on a personal level.



Busy, busy week, with two previews, two from the Boston Asian American Film Festival, a double feature at the Paramount, and then the two I'm just going to capsulize here because they're starting to fall out the back of my brain:

Puss in Boots

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2011 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, digital IMAX 3D)

In theory, Puss in Boots should be the best spin-off movie imaginable: It's got a character who regularly stole scenes from the main characters of the movies he was in but was still a relatively blank slate, played by a star who can carry his own movie. By the end of the Shrek movies' run, who didn't enjoy Antonio Banderas's swashbuckling kitty more than Mike Myers's Ogre with a heart of gold? DreamWorks also wasn't shuttling the production off to some B-team, so this had a chance to be pretty good.

And the movie is handled ably enough - probably better than the last couple Shrek sequels - but Puss doesn't quite make the transition to leading character that well. "He's distracted by reflected dot of light, just like a real cat!" gags are no longer throwaways, but undercut the main character. The fairy tale supporting characters feel like they were designed to fit into Shrek's milieu, not Puss's. The movie never really feels like it's about Puss more than it is, say, Humpty Dumpty.

It's not bad, but in a year that is giving us some exceptional kid's/animated movies, the bar is a lot higher than "better than Shrek the Third"

Giù la testa (Duck, You Sucker!)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2011 at the Harvard Film Archive (Sergio Leone)

I've not seen enough Sergio Leone, and the retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive sadly did not do enough to remedy that. Well, that's obviously placing the blame in the wrong place; me not heading to the HFA at every opportunity is to blame. A shame, especially since screenings there often come with informative mini-lectures; this one in particular had a lot of interesting detail, such as how Leone was not planning to do any more westerns, creating this one for a protege, but studio and stars continued to demand more personal involvement until he was directing the thing.

Leone's cynicism is much more prevalent - even more than in the "Man with No Name" trilogy, the action in Duck, You Sucker! takes place in a grimy world where nobody has enough money aside from the arrogant upper-class jerks Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) and his family rob. Though flashbacks show Irishman John Mallory (James Coburn) as having once been a gentleman, he's fully assimilated into this world, although he has retained both a sort of idealism and a certain amount of disdain for the lower-class likes of Juan.

Of course, they eventually develop something resembling affection, even if they do continue to rub each other the wrong way more often than not. Leone comes up with a number of nifty missions for them, always with a dollop of tragedy and black humor to finish it off. It's not his greatest spaghetti western, but a good one, fueled by strong feelings and occasionally as incisive as it is action-filled.



Another great preview, a lot of work, and then sticking around the Kenmore area after class on Saturday. I wasn't going there an awful lot before, but my Saturday morning language class has me in the area, so it's easier than taking the Red Line to the usual spots.

The restrictions on the free ticket you get at one of their loyalty program's checkpoints are nuts, though - no 3D, RPX, or anything still in "special engagement" territory (or roughly the first week and a half of its run). When I got one for seeing Immortals, I basically figured that Tower Heist couldn't be that bad, and, hey, who knew if there'd be something else I wanted to see with those restrictions before the coupon expired.

Immortals

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 November 2011 in Regal Fenway #10 (first-run, digital 3D)

I haven't seen either version of Clash of the Titans, and the last movie I saw before Immortals was The Artist, so maybe that's why the comparison that leaped to my head when I saw Immortals was not the movie with basically the same plot, but various German Impressionist silent fantasies like Fritz Lang's Die Niebelung. I don't know if that's a huge reach, considering that director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar's previous film was the silent-era/referencing The Fall; the point is that the ornamental costumes, the geometrical set design that seemed rather like something from the stage, and declamatory dialog felt like something out of that era.

And I kind of dig the movie for going that route. A lot of digital-backlot stuff is going to have that look anyway, and Tarsem made it work for him. He also merrily gives the audience what it wants on a very basic level: Everyone's armor has a form-fitting breastplate whether male or female, the fighting is creative (gods move at super-speed, but once a limb gets hacked off or blood spurts, it obeys normal laws of physics) and gory (lots of limbs get hacked off or mashed), and he understands and embraces the nutso aspect of adapting mythology for a modern audience. Gods arriving on Earth like they've been beamed down from the Enterprise? Why the hell not?

The trouble is, there's a lot of material between the crazy fighting scenes and the awe-inspiring images, and they are often dull at best, outright stupid at worst. The trouble with having gods in a story is that you have to come up with really arbitrary reasons for them not to interfere, which are just as arbitrarily discarded as soon as the writers hit a wall. Writers Charley & Vlas Parlapanides never really have a character do something for interesting reasons, and the cast doesn't invest them with enough for us to get involved beyond the cool imagery that Tarsem throws at us.

There's a lot of eye candy, don't get me wrong. It just has to do a lot of work to counteract the dumb around it, and considering that these are stories that have endured for millennia and were foundational to great civilizations, looking awesome should just be a bonus.

Tower Heist

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 November 2011 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, digital?)

I didn't really get the hate that the movie-lover circle has for Brett Ratner (and to a certain extent I still don't; being a crude jackass doesn't have much bearing on the quality of his movies and I don't recall reading much about that facet of his personality before). He's by no means an excellent filmmaker, but he's a capable-enough one who seems to be akin to the manager of a similarly-budgeted baseball team: His strategy isn't great but he manages personalities well and lets the stars do good work.

The trouble with a director like that, though, is that he's not going to help a film with real problems. Tower Heist has a nice cast, mostly in good roles for them, and they execute their bits pretty well. It's got a couple nice set pieces, especially once the big heist begins, and while Ratner doesn't turn in the most jaw-dropping action scenes of the year, he doesn't screw things up, and there's something to be said for that; it's a lot better than most directors do. This is at times a very fun, very capable movie.

What Ratner can't do, though, is take the flaws and do the things to make them work. He can't see that Eddie Murphy's character is usually on the wrong side of the line between "jackass" and "charming rogue". He and the four writers also make a few miscalculations where the caper material is concerned, not always adept at balancing the joys of a good plan executed well with those of a crew thinking on its feet.

None of these missteps exactly make Tower Heist into a bad film, even in aggregate. They're each opportunities to make it better than the raw materials, and that's something Ratner just can't do.



The rare skipped CineCaché screening this week, as I had seen Green at IFFBoston, director Sophia Takal was a last-minute cancellation, and I recall being dead tired when I got off the subway. It's a shame, as I really would have liked to have seen how a few months and a different context changed the Q&A. Back in April, Takal had done the Q&A with co-stars Kate Lyn Sheil and Lawrence Michael Levine, and as much as she struck me as quite nice, friendly, and instinctive, she was very deferential, giving a lot of credit to her boyfriend Lawrence and often passing him the microphone. I wondered if, on stage by herself, we might have heard much more about what she thinks.

Also, I'm not saying that I worked from home on Wednesday with the specific thought of getting to The Muppets on opening night, but I also didn't feel disappointed upon missing the bus.

The Maltese Falcon

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Giving Thanks for Bogie)

I've written this one up before, five and a half years ago, for a similarly titled series at the Brattle, and my opinion of it hasn't changed much. It's pretty brilliant, a great combination between pulp and noir, and Bogie's late speech about how it's useful to seem corrupt, but he just might be more honest than he appears is one of the great bits of tough-guy dialogue that goes against type.

I may have read the original novel at some point - I remember checking a volume with both The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man out of the library sometime in high school - but I read a bunch of Dashiell Hammett's short stories just before this, including all of the other Sam Spade stories, and it's always fun to compare the way a character appears on page and on screen. In a lot of ways, Spade isn't that much different from "The Continental Op", Hammett's earlier protagonist (of Red Harvest and a great many short stories) on the page, especially when read far from the time the movie was created. In the books, Spade could almost be Philip Marlowe to a modern reader, but Bogart makes him a shark.

Previous review at eFilmCritic.

The Big Sleep

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Giving Thanks for Bogie)

As I mentioned last year, I love Philip Marlowe. I actually have a bunch of Raymond Chandler on my shelf now, and having worked by way through the books which have not been adapted into films, I will soon be reading the ones which I have seen on the big screen.

This is relevant because, after coming home from this double feature, I immediately opened my copy of The Big Sleep and flipped to the beginning to see just how much of it came directly from Chandler and how much came from the screenwriters (William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman). It turns out that the scene of Marlowe entering the Sternwood mansion and speaking to the general is very close to verbatim, which doesn't surprise me: You don't mess with Chandler's dialogue. You just don't. I suspect that the process of adapting one of his books is seeing how much dialogue you can fit in, crying over having to cut the narration, and trying to streamline the plot in a way that you get to keep the best lines without becoming as confusing as this one can be.

Of course, I must confess, I wasn't really confused the first time I saw this movie. It wasn't until hearing about how the filmmakers would actually call Chandler to find out what happened that I started to notice how strung together the plot is. I'm looking forward to reading the book, both to see whether it's a mess from the source material and how much of Martha Vickers's character was cut, supposedly to appease Lauren Bacall and otherwise focus the movie on the suddenly-popular pairing of her and Bogart. There's the remnants of a great, potentially iconic performance in the movie, and though it appears to be mostly lost, I can at least read the lines with Vickers in my head, wondering what her career (and too-short life) would have been like had this not been cut.

Previous review at eFilmCritic.



See those tickets in the lower left hand corner and the lower right hand corner? Those are the extremely rare repeat viewings of movies recently seen. The one on the right is The Artist, and I already had the ticket from having pre-paid for the Talk Cinema series; I'll probably buy another ticket to see it again at some point in January. Probably at the Coolidge again, because seeing it digitally at Boston Common would just be wrong.

As for Hugo... Yeah, I liked that a lot, and wanted to see it again while it was still playing in 3D on the very nice RPX screen (which, do to a quirk of pricing, isn't that much more expensive than a regular 3D screen). And, honestly, I'm tempted to do it again; it's one of the relatively few live-action 3D movies that uses the medium well, and I notice that in some cases, it appears to be playing in 2D even at venues that have 3D screens to spare. It's a bit of an ironic shame that theaters seem to be cutting down on 3D showings just as filmmakers and studios are finally figuring out how to use it.



Stubless: Victim, in the living room on 10 December.

Man, I just didn't get to the movies much at all this week. I wonder if it was busy at work.

... So, that leaves me just a month behind, and a binge over the last week or two means getting caught up is going to be tricky. One of my resolutions for the new year is to make this actually timely and weekly, which I will certainly attempt to do.

At least, starting with the first full week of the new year (2 January - 8 January). In the meantime, there's a lot of writing to do.

This Week In Tickets: 17 October 2011 to 23 October 2011

10am movies, a really World Series that is pretty exciting despite the lack of Red Sox involvement, and a desire to grill one last time before winter shut that down for good account for a reasonably slow week for me at the cinemas:



Plus, I picked up a new laptop on Saturday so as not to use my work machine for everything and got to playing with it. Technically, anything I create on that machine belongs to my employer, and while I have no idea what the special products division of a pharmeceuticals distributor would want with my blog and eFilmCritic reviews, it's good to stay on the right side of the contract.

The Three Musketeers (2011)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run; RealD 3D)

On the whole, Paul W.S. Anderson's new version of The Three Musketeers is just not good. That's not really surprising; Anderson doesn't have a great reputation and he's working from a script that is, to be frank, pretty awful. It's outright "why did a buy a ticket for this" groan-worthy at times. And then the movie will hit something that Anderson is good at, and that almost makes it worse, because it means that this bad movie wasn't a bad idea, but just got screwed up.

What's bad? Oh, lots of stuff. Every place where writers Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies could have written some clever bit of dialogue, they basically do the opposite. It's not just that nearly everything every character says is bland, but it's as if every single bit is calculated to make the characters seem like jerks, and only Ray Stevenson's Porthos and Milla Jovovich's Milady de Winter can make that work for them. Honestly, even though D'artagnan is supposed to be the viewpoint character we like, he's such a smug little bastard that the natural desire of the audience throughout the movie is to punch him in the face (and man, is Logan Lerman terrible). The plot is a goofy mess, frequently advanced in dumb, dumb ways.

And then Anderson and company will throw anachronistic airships at us.

Sure, one can complain about how the filmmakers are taking ridiculous liberties with the source material, but it's sort of akin to complaining that Robin Hood movies don't follow Ivanhoe or that superhero flicks generally don't follow any specific comic book storyline. The crazy clockwork technology and environments are fun enough on their own for it to be forgiveable, and the fun that the filmmakers and actors are having is palpable. If Anderson has one saving grace, it's that he knows when to say "screw realism" and go for larger-than-life fun.

If he's got two, it's that he knows how to use 3D fairly well. He was a kid let loose in a candy store with Resident Evil: Afterlife, spending what seemed like half the running time throwing poorly-rendered stuff at the audience in slow motion; this one looks a little nicer and uses the third dimension more for depth and scale than jumps. The Three Musketeers is a spiffy-looking movie, and while the 3D isn't necessary, it looks good and has a fun sense of awe and grandeur.

And, finally, I really like the way Anderson ends his movies, including this one, with ridiculous cliffhangers. He doesn't do it in a cocky or presumptuous way; he gives a satisfying climax and then basically says that these characters have more and bigger adventures ahead of them.

This Week In Tickets: 10 October 2011 to 16 October 2011

A busy moviegoing week:



Did I deliberately miss the bus last Thursday because it's much easier to make it downtown for screenings of Margaret and Love Crime (on their last day in town) when working from home in Cambridge than it is from the office in Burlington? No. But seeing as Thursday has been the usual day on which folks at my company are encouraged to telecommute, it's not a bad idea.

Margaret

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run)

The easy comment to make about Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is that it drags terribly at 149 minutes, so it's kind of amazing that the thing that kept it from release for over five years was the director's inability or unwillingness to budge from the three-hour cut to get it down to the two-and-a-half that the studio demanded. The last thing this movie needs, perhaps, is to be longer. Of course, one must then think of all the directors' cuts where some extra length has helped. After all, "boring" isn't just a matter of something taking a long time; it's taking a long time without seeming to accomplish anything.

So maybe this movie actually would play better with Lonergan's cut... but I kind of doubt it. Margaret doesn't feel like a group of interconnected stories that each needed to be given room to breathe; it feels like Lonergan started from one reasonably simple, interesting story (Anna Paquin as a teenage girl who struggles with the repercussions of a traumatic experience) and got distracted, following every subplot he could think of. These side-trips don't enhance or reinforce the central story, though, at least as the movie is constructed - it just dilutes it.

And that is really too bad, because Anna Paquin is kind of great in this. Her character can be pretty darn difficult to like at times, but it's a believable sort of teenage snottiness. Two and a half hours is a lot of time to spend with this character, though, and none of the others make for an especially interesting contrast, though they're all played well.

So, a disappointment. Hopefully Lonergan at least has this out of his system now, and can move on to hopefully make another movie as good as You Can Count on Me

Crime d'Amour (Love Crime)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)

I think I read something about how the filmmakers opted to make Ludivine Sagnier sort of frumpy in this movie, as opposed to the usual sex-kitten image. This means messy hair, glasses, and a pimple on her forehead. Oh, and she's only ever naked from behind.

I kid. This is actually a deliciously fun little movie in which Sagnier plays Isabel, a loyal and admiring junior executive who routinely has her work appropriated by boss Kristin Scott Thomas. When each makes an attempt to move up in the company - and a man comes between them - Thomas's Christine opts to humiliate Isabelle. What she doesn't realize is that even though Isabelle seems meek, she has the potential to be just as ruthless as Christine, and is probably smarter.

There's a couple of things I really like about this movie. It's structured like the best kind of magic trick, with practically every bit of deception done in plain sight, with it up to the audience to figure out just where filmmaker Alain Corneau (with co-writer Nathalie Carter) is going with everything. We're given an unusual rooting interest, and the movie at times seems to stake out an interesting moral position - that it's not necessarily ruthlessness and ambition that are most evil, but arrogance. as SPOILER: the lynchpin to Isabelle's plan is that she's willing to act without ego, something that Christine just couldn't do. :RELIOPS

50/50

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2011 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run)

There are many, many things about 50/50 that are kind of terrific, but something I always appreciate is when a movie or TV show finds good use for Matt Frewer. He and Philip Baker Hall have small parts as fellow cancer patients that share chemo times with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character. It's a little thing to notice, but it's the sign of of a movie that that sweats the details.

You'd expect those details to be sweated, as it's based on writer/producer Will Reiser's actual life, and funny, because his buddy when going through this was Seth Rogen, who co-stars as, well, basically Seth Rogen. Someday Rogen is going to win an Oscar for playing a sad or tragic variation on his jovial stoner persona, despite it being arguable that his ability to get the audience attached to these guys who make the audience laugh is the greater achievement. Here, he's really giving a great supporting performance, funny as usual but also displaying strength in just how he doesn't change as a friend.

Everyone's pretty good, especially Gordon-Levitt, who does a good job playing Adam as just a little tightly wound, which makes him at least a little funny even when the jokes come from how the people around him are reacting. Mostly, though, he's likable and able to let us see how afraid he is without it being overwhelming for the audience.

This Week In Tickets: 3 October 2011 to 9 October 2011

Since this was a relatively quiet week in which I wrote up a blog post for everything I saw, this is more or less a collection of pointers and excuses for there not being more:



No ticket: Ocean Heaven (screener DVD in my living room on 7 October, about 7pm-ish)

Quiet week at the movies for a couple of reasons: First, Sunday was Dagny's Birthday (Observed), in which the Seaver clan heads to Maine and celebrates my niece stealing my birthday from me. It's cool; she's an energetic five-year-old and because of her, my age has frozen at the 32 years old I was when she was born (that's how it works, right?). Second, some jerk hacked my debit card number, and while my bank was quick to catch it, getting a new card sent took "3-5 business days", which meant doing what I could to stretch what cash was in my pocket out that length of time. It's the second time it's happened this year; clearly it's time to beef some security up.

So, you see what makes the cut when such things must be managed - Detective Dee, because I was meeting people and I loved it back at Fantasia; a classic Chaplin film I have (embarrassingly) never seen, and the new Jackie Chan movie, which I nearly passed over due to bad reviews (which, sadly, I had to add to), but which I wound up seeing out of curiosity and wanting to support this sort of [close to] day-and-date release. Naturally, it winds up being the most expensive ticket because I had to fit it around trips to the toy store and Maine, and the evening show was the only one that fit.

It's also another one of those really annoyingly nationalistic movies coming out of China (although I wonder how other countries see Hollywood films). This has become such a trend that there have actually been stories about Chinese studios preparing "international versions" which cut out some of the flag-waving. It's a bit odd that those are the ones getting quick American releases; even if marketed to the expatriate community, I wonder how much of that community is here because they want to be away from such things versus missing home.

Di Renjie (Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 October 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)

Picking up on that "nationalist Chinese film" angle, I think Detective Dee either does pretty well in that regard or is depressingly accepting of totalitarianism. It never does the rah-rah stuff, but much like in Hero, where the rebellious character winds up accepting the need for an autocrat, there may be a hidden pro-state agenda here, at least if you're determined to find one: The title character was jailed for opposing the Empress-to-be, but acknowledges that the empire is better off under her stewardship upon his release to work for her. In the end, SPOILERS! Dee uncovers a plot by the Empress to eliminate dissidents, but decides that stopping this is less important than foiling her assassination, which would kill innocent people and could plunge the nation into chaos. Tsui Hark and company maybe aren't completely cool with this sort of thing, as they finish with Dee a fugitive who must literally do good in the shadows because of what he knows !SRELIOPS. On balance, it's better than I thought when I started this paragraph (this is basically how 24 ended), but it's hard not to think of these things when watching a Chinese movie these days, even one like Detective Dee which is more Hong Kong than Beijing.

Still, I wasn't thinking about it during the film that much, because Tsui Hark and the other filmmakers really are completely nuts. To give you an idea of how crazy and over-the-top this movie can be, the seventh-century kung fu robot marionettes showing up took me by surprise on this second viewing because there was so much other insanity to be found. The filmmakers really didn't do anything halfway, and good for them - if you're making a movie where it makes sense to have a character doing martial arts on talking deer, you are arguably failing your audience if this never happens.

So I'm glad I got a second chance to see it in theaters before its last day (if you're reading this in the Boston area before 7:45 on 13 October 2011, run to Cambridge! you can still catch it!); it's a ton of fun, and I like giving movies I saw on a press pass at festivals a bit of my money, voting with my pen AND my wallet, even if theater 4 in Kendall isn't quite the floor-to-ceiling screen of Theatre Hall in Concordia.

(For more on this movie, my festival report is here; the eFilmCritic review is there.)

(Yes, I realize now that I did actually pay to see this one at Fantasia because I didn't have time to pick up my press pass until Friday. The principle still holds!)

This Week In Tickets: 26 September 2011 to 2 October 2011

Ah, a busy weekend of seeing movies. The week was mostly consumed with watching the end of the Red Sox' kind-of-amazing collapse. Exhausting sports fandom, but I recovered enough to treat myself a little on my birthday weekend:



Let me tell you, I did not eat well those days - lots from the concession stand, and the snacks for the 2pm show on Sunday were too filling for me to have much room for anything other than a cupcake between movies (hey, birthday!). I did use the time between shows to head down to the Newbury Comics in Quincy Market and finally pick up a copy of Batman: Gates of Gotham #3 and Ultimate Comics X-Men #1 I'd been looking for. Good thing I read them while eating my snacks, because I forgot them in the theater. --sigh-- Second time I'd done so that day, although I remembered the paperback in Theater #15 relatively quickly, as opposed to the comics in screen #2.

Overall, pretty decent week(end) of movies, though.

Warrior

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)

I heard a lot of good things about this one, and most of them were pretty accurate: There's a trio of impressive performances at the center, especially Nick Nolte as the recovering-alcoholic father of the two fighters who wind up vying for a five million dollar prize in a mixed martial arts tournament. The whole family is believably torn apart, and all three lead actors - Nolte, Tom Hardy (as the drifting ex-marine), and Joel Edgerton (as the high-school teacher and family man) all create believable characters, and co-writer/director Gavin O'Connor does a very nice job of not playing favorites as the story goes on. It's emotional, but enjoyably low-key.

This does become a bit of a problem once the movie actually gets to the tournament, though; we're inevitably heading toward a showdown between brothers, and it's honestly never as intriguing a proposition as it should be. O'Connor and company set the brothers' styles up as opposites - Hardy's Tommy is the brute-force, one-punch-knockout type, while Edgertron's Brendon uses leverage and submission holds as befits an aging physics teacher - and the plot doesn't paint either as a monster, which seems like it would make for a tense last act. But O'Connor is not great at using action as storytelling; the final fight should be the brothers' conflict in microcosm, but that never really happens, so when one brother finally wins, it's just the end of a fight, as opposed to the story's climax - a bit of a fizzle.

Warrior is pretty good, but I must say, Brawler, which played Fantasia this summer, is better, even if a bit more familiar.

Bad Teacher

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #3 (midnight movies)

Weird release schedule on this - it had its usual run starting in late June, and then reappeared in September, mostly playing weekend midnights, either as a back-to-school thing or just as promotion for its video release. For this last weekend of midnights, Sony was giving tickets away, apparently with the thought that folks who saw it would like it enough to buy the Blu-ray a few days later.

Well, at the very least, it's worth a fair amount more than the nothing I paid to see it. As I expected from the trailers, how funny it is tends to be directly proportional to how awful the characters are. Well, within reason; Jason Segel's character is more snarky than outright mean, sort of establishing a middle ground between the self-centered witch Cameron Diaz plays, Lucy Punch's sanctimonious snot, and the clueless trust fund sub of Justin Timberlake. It's a great deal of fun to let one's meaner side out, and the movie seldom deviates from that.

Now, director Jake Kasdan and company seldom really manage the huge laughs, but it manages a pretty steady stream of medium-sized ones. Can't complain much about that.

Star Trek

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #2 (digital IMAX return engagement)

Hey, if IMAX and AMC want to have this playing in faux-IMAX on my birthday for only $7, I'm there.

After seeing it in theaters four times over the past couple of years - original love here - I still love it. It's a reboot that feels modern while respecting the original, and also does a very impressive job of letting the audience see right away that this is not their father's Star Trek. I kind of love the little dialogue the filmmakers have with fans in the middle, from Chekov's comments that Vulcan likely has only minutes to the explanation that this doesn't invalidate the Trek we love.

This Week In Tickets: 19 September 2011 to 25 September 2011

I swear, this is not an "I want to get TWIT done quickly" reaction to falling so far behind before:



The company that I work for has been in the process of being acquired for the last what-seems-like-an-insanely-long-time, and last week there were folks from the new home office in Texas in town to get to know us. Which is nice, I guess, although I must admit to not really caring about the structure of the company beyond my manager in one direction, the other folks in my department in another, and the unit we pull data for in a third. So, yeah, this means extra meetings and a Wednesday-night "get-together" which was a cocktail hour and two-plus hours of eating food fancier than I usually go for. Sure, our table won the trivia contest, but... Well, some situations are more or less guaranteed to bring out the worst in me. Enforced socializing is one of them.

So, that means that there was no getting out early to get to potentially interesting stuff. It's kind of a shame, because there were actually a couple of movies I would have enjoyed seeing at the Boston Film Festival on Wednesday - pretty much the only day when the announced schedule had stuff that interested me. I would have been down for the last-minute closing night feature of Bunraku, but getting to a 6:45pm show in downtown Boston would have been tough enough if I'd caught the 5:08 bus out of Burlington, but of course a new problem reared its ugly head at 3pm and kept me late.

So no BFF for me, and I was surprisingly OK with that. My disgust from last year didn't really carry over; I just didn't have much interest in the schedule or feel much obligation to support the event even in a lean year. At least, I assume it was lean - I'd be interested to hear what it was like from anybody who was there. The line-up looked much less impressive than even last year, the website didn't talk up the parties and passes that usually seem to be the focus of the event, and the venue hadn't shown a movie since Jig played there for a week back in mid-June. That certainly seems like a recipe for a quiet festival.

Interestingly, I was having lunch with the Chlotrudis folks on Saturday, and apparently the idea of the smaller festivals pooling their resources to put together a major festival to rival Toronto and SXSW is kicking around. If this were to happen, I suspect that they'd want the Boston Film Festival name, but I suspect that getting hold of that would be difficult unless the event was in financial trouble. I wonder what the name would be worth in this scenario.

Anyway, after that lunch, I went back home and spent the rest of the weekend watching baseball, even though it was sort of torture. But, hey, there might not be much baseball left. So the only movie I wound up seeing this week was the midnight show at the Coolidge on Friday night (and I was probably pretty dumb to walk there in the rain). It had me kind of wiped out for the rest of the week, but at least it was a good one:

Balada triste de trompeta (Balada triste de trompeta)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2011 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (@fter Midnight Fresh Cuts)

Alex de la Iglesia's new movie certainly qualifies as a circus - it's filled with bright colors and daring displays that look joyful while also tempting the audience with sex and violence. This makes perfect sense; De la Iglesia's best work has always come in the form of polished chaos, so these particular big tops are a fine place for him to do his thing.

The first circus we encounter is in 1937, where a Happy Clown (Santiago Segura) is entertaining children as the occasional gunshot from the Spanish Civil War is heard in the background. The performance is interrupted as the Nationalist forces show up to draft every able-bodied man into the army, including the clown, who is thrown into battle while still wearing his costume. In the aftermath, he tells his son Javier that even though clowning is in his blood, he will likely never be able to play the happy clown; he's seen too much to be anything but the sad one. And, indeed, when we meet Javier (Carlos Areces) again in 1973, that's the job he's taken with a struggling circus, being the butt of the smiling clown's jokes. Of course, behind the scenes, happy clown Sergio (Antonio de la Torre) is an angry drunk, and Javier being attracted to his girl Natalia (Carolina Bang) doesn't help matters.

In other hands, The Last Circus might be a simple tragic love story, maybe avant-garde (the likes of Fellini certainly liked their circuses back in the day). But this is an Alex de la Iglesia movie through and through - his first without his usual co-writer, Jorge Guerricaechevarría - and it is just packed with his signature slick camerawork, bizarre characters, and pitch-black comedy. It's the sort of movie that scores big laughs throughout, although one may be reluctant to relate just exactly which gags got them; a lot of bits just don't work out of context. De la Iglesia's movies have always had a bit of an edge to them, but this one seems to have the cynicism much closer to its heart; there's a meanness to it that parallels the way circus audiences laugh at the Happy Clown tormenting the Sad Clown.

Full review at EFC.