This Week in Tickets: 15 January 2024 - 21 January 2024 (Bonus Weekend Day!)

I always feel unsure as to whether or not I'm going to get Martin Luther King Day off. I don't think my employers try to minimize it, but since people don't travel for it, they don't let us go 2 hours early the day before the long weekend, it's not really something where you will end a meeting by saying "have a happy MLK Day", and I don't know that any traditions have developed around it (or at least, not ones that make sense for middle-class white folks like me). So I spend that Friday poking around the company intranet, seeing if there's some sort of announcement, aware that I could wind up working for half the day before realizing there weren't meetings rather than, say, taking in a couple of matinees.

(Oops, small scrapbooking error there!)

Anyway, I took that day off and did a sort of unintentional "fighting internet crime" double feature split across two AMC theaters - I Did It My Way at Causeway Street, because that's where it was playing, and The Beekeeper at Assembly Row because that was the next time it was playing in Imax and AMC doesn't advertise any one screen at Causeway street as being fancier than another. Screen #15 was the deluxe "WideScreen" back when it was an ArcLight, but doesn't get tagged as anything in particular now. And, yes, it's still screen #15 even though it's a 13-screen theater and I only count 11 in use looking at the site. I suspect the old screens #13 & #14 will eventually be opened as an Imax/Dolby/etc.room, but for now the numbering is screwy.

Tuesday night I rewatched EXIT ahead of writing up a Film Rolls post. Sometimes I'll do this because it's been months and I remember nothing about a movie; this time I remembered it as a ton of fun.

Wednesday night, the place in the Seaport was showing Blood Tea and Red String, which has been playing a lot of Alamo Drafthouse locations in recent weeks, which I'm hoping is a prelude to a Blu-ray release and maybe even Christiane Cegavske's new film Seed in the Sand being ready to hit the genre festival circuit in a couple months.

Friday night, headed to the Brattle for the only night The Unknown Country, which I really liked. I was intending to head back their the next night for Bottoms, but, well, sometimes you make decisions on what to watch based on not wanting to hang around Harvard Square in the cold for two hours when you finish shopping at 7:15pm (some folks can milk a meal for a couple hours; I feel weird about it when I'm on my own). So it was downtown to catch Time Still Turns the Pages, one of the few recent Chinese movies to open at Boston Common, right outside Chinatown, since the Causeway Street location re-opened.

Kind of a good crowd, to, especially considering how Mainland movies usually do much better here than ones from Hong Kong. I've got a bit of a theory on that - it's not so much the location so much that Mainland movies have tended to skew younger until recently, while a lot of HK stuff that gets distributed here still kind of leans on folks who were popular in the 1990s, but when you get something like this with a new voice coming out of the area, it lands pretty well. Might be worth watching to see how the next few ones do.

Sunday, it was back to Boston Common for The End We Start From, although its weird 5:05pm start time meant it didn't really play well with seeing another movie that day. I'm always kind of impressed by how multiplexes schedule things so people aren't likely to see two movies in a row, in a "that's kind of difficult with 19 screens" way more than a "good job!" way, likely because folks like me are probably only visiting the concession stand once even on a three-movie day, but it's kind of a bummer when the movie winds up a dud.

We'll see what Oscar announcements do to this and my Letterboxd account as they come out! Meanwhile, I'll be refreshing Fandango repeatedly to see where Alienoid 2 opens.

(Also, you may note that I've started putting some "available on Amazon text bits"; which are probably more useful on Film Rolls than this, but, hey, click through if the movie interests you, even if there's no longer images to break up the wall-o-text!)


The Beekeeper

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 January 2024 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax Laser)

When this type of movie has one person who has done bigger and better things, say Jeremy Irons as a villain, it probably goes straight to VOD. Two (add David Ayer as director), it's a streaming premiere and maybe sneaks into theaters for a weekend. Script by Kurt Wimmer and Minnie Driver shows up, and maybe it's more interesting than it looks.

Not that much more interesting, sure, but it's a little better than it could be. Jason Statham (who, to my surprise, has never really had his releases dip down to VOD level for two movies in a row) bluntly telling a woman whose mother just committed suicide about how awful preying on the elderly is because nobody cares comes off as someone bad at human interaction rather than bad writing; and indeed highlights why Statham movies can be unusually fun: He's able to play "Adam Clay" as kind of a weirdo here without really making weirdo his thing. Everyone else is on the same page; it's not really an "action comedy", but you couldn't really drop the FBI agents played by Emmy Raver-Lampman and Bobby Naderi into a standard flick that's played earnest .

It lets the whole movie be a bit off-kilter without the audience realizing it's cock-eyed until they're into it. The bee metaphors are made very literal, and there's enough action-movie skill bouncing around the set that you can roll with a ridiculous level of escalation. Kind of a shame that the tagline on the trailer (funnier in its red-band alliterative form) didn't make it into the movie, though.

And so, this becomes a fun January diversion as a ridiculously overcapable avenger rips his way through easily disliked goons, impressively shooting around honest law enforcement types to take out the private security bastards, while supporting characters banter enough to support the silliness without making it a comedy. Statham hits a good spot between stoical and a guy with a weird sense of humor. The Boston-set pieces are likably authentic. It's the sort of movie monthly pass programs are made for, but also the sort where I wouldn't necessarily mind seeing them do two or three more, even if I'm not sure they could capture the same sort-of-off vibe again now that folks know it's coming.


Blood Tea and Red String

* * * (out of four) Seen 17 January 2024 in Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #5 (first-run, DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime

I don't know that anything in this movie means much of anything - there's a fable about greed eventually destroying what gave the puppet the illusion of life (which perhaps plays a bit meta in a stop-motion film), but that's broad strokes as opposed to particularly direct symbolism - but there's a slow-motion life to it. Everything moves just enough to seem animated but not quite enough to be magical or make one wonder how Christiane Cegavski did that; the storyteller is very much present. And yet, something about the deliberate pace emphasizes that there is, in fact, some kind of logic to all the surreal and grotesque imagery and action, even if it's just beyond one's grasp, while the storytelling, with its creation, death, and abstraction, feels mythic. We understand why all this is happening even if the film has no words to explain anything.

Archived eFilmCritic review from 2006


The Unknown Country

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 January 2024 in the Brattle Theatre ((Some of) The Best of 2023, DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon

Despite its title, The Unknown Country doesn't lean too hard into the idea of Lily Gladstone's Tana traveling straight down the center of the United States even though that can't exactly be unseen once you make the connection. It tells the stories of people in that oft-overlooked middle in little bits, letting them be small but varied, using a lot of folks who are presumably non-actors. It's not necessarily a unique approach - it happens often enough that I suspect filmmakers don't trust themselves to avoid being inauthentic or looking down on folks - but it mostly works The film will often spend a minute or so letting them narrate and showing their home life as Tana starts moving to the next stop.

An interesting thing that does is that it allows writer/director Morrisa Maltz to fade in on Tana's story rather than presenting the first couple of these things as detours. It's easy to take the first time we see Tana as her fleeing something as opposed to just getting an early start in a place/season where the sun takes a while to rise (though there's maybe something metaphorically accurate to the first impression), but it also sort of prepares the viewer for how where she goes is surprisingly upbeat but has some underlying tension. Lily Gladstone does some really nice work there, looking frazzled and worn down but able to bounce back a bit, revealing Tana in pieces but not as revelations; more as realizing you don't really know a person from first impressions.

I'm impressed by how the filmmakers avoid romanticizing the environment she travels through. There are wide shots of the land's beauty, but on the road, it's dark and empty, a Native woman has to be on her guard, and the air is filled with AM radio which amplifies the reasons why but is often unintelligible and fragmentary. Some family is a warm embrace, but even that's divided with grudges lurking just out of reach. Tana loves them, but you get why she and her grandmother before her find some relief when they get far away.

Throughout, there's great moments . A woman who has probably been waiting tables at the same dinner for 50 years tells customers passing through not to forget her, and it's a little sad but not as much as it could be. At the end, Tana recreates a picture of her grandmother that she's carried throughout the film, and a wide drone shot tells you that her life was bigger than that image could show, and maybe Tana's can be, too.


Ninsiu Yatgei (Time Still Turns the Pages)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)

Time Still Turns the Pages appears to have taken the old-fashioned art-house route to American theaters rather than arriving just a week or two later the way Chinese genre films often do (though that's still pretty quick compared to how long foreign dramas have historically taken), and I kind of wonder if that's why it played both Causeway Street, which is now tending to get the Chinese-language movies, and Boston Common, which is getting more art-house releases these days Indeed, it probably belongs more with the group of young filmmakers emerging in Hong Kong over the past ten years trying to make stories which aren't necessarily subversive but which are local and feel like they come from the artists' recent experiences, rather than looking to play on the mainland but placing anything dramatic in the past.

It does start some twenty-odd years ago, though with a fake-out where ten-year-old Eli Cheng (Sean Wong Tsz-Lok) initially seems to be jumping off a building, though there is plenty more roof on the other side of the half wall he leaps from, where he yells he will get accepted into Hong Kong University and become a great teacher. Not that he doesn't have motivation; father Chi-Hung (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) is abusive toward both wife Heidi (Rosa Maria Velasco) and Eli, angry he's not the prodigy his 8-year-old brother Alan (Curtis Ho Pak-Kim) is. In the present, Mr. Cheng (Lo Chin-Yip) is maybe not a great teacher, and his personal life is a mess - he still hasn't removed his wedding ring since the divorce - but he bends over backwards to help his students. When a janitor finds a note that looks like someone contemplating suicide, it shakes him to the core, and while the obvious writer is bullied student Vincent (Henick Chou), he asks another trusted student, Betheny, to see if she sees signs of this in any of her classmates.

For a while, it looks like Cheuk is going to be running these two stories in parallel with roughly equal weight, but that's not the actual play. Instead, what this movie does is to set up what seems like a mystery plot, more or less sideline it in order to concentrate on the backstory that one assumed was only going to be half the movie, but still have a surprise or two that one might not have expected. It's a smart way to use a hook but not necessarily be in service to it. It is, probably, more satisfying this way; the film is about Cheung not being free of his past more than cycles of abuse, and spending relatively little time on the student's issues implies a lot is happening off-screen, rather than just using them to motivate Cheung.

The movie itself is very earnest, perhaps more straightforward than someone looking for a certain type of drama may want, like director Cheuk saved all his nuance for a bit of misdirection and a couple interesting storytelling bits, but there isn't a lot of moral gray area on this sort of story, and the attempt to find some doors is victims a disservice. Abuse is abuse. Still, the telling of the story is often interesting; there's a nifty scene early on where Cheung imagines the note in each of his students' voices, and presents various pieces of the story in a way that makes one wonder how they can fit together until they do.

The cast is good, too. Lo Chin-Yip gives Cheuk a take on Cheung that suggests someone damaged enough to potentially fall apart without ever quite getting to the level of "should he be teaching", and Ronald Cheng is pretty terrific in essaying a very specific sort of monster, the sort that puffs himself up and lashes out at anyone who might undermine that supposed sophistication, maybe not even able to escape it at the end. A whole lot of the film rests on the tiny shoulders of Sean Wong, who gives the performance of a great kid who will keep trying even as it's breaking him despite his being just perceptive enough to see what's happening. The way Curtis Ho mirrors that as Alan is good, too, his head in his own thing, but feeling like Eli's brother.

I don't know that Time Still Turns the Pages is a life-changing movie, or one that gives us a look at the new wave of Hong Kong film, but it's a solid little indie drama with good performances from kids, and those are nice to see from anywhere.


The End We Start From

* * (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)

Find something you love as much as the people making this movie love putting Jodie Comer's character in a difficult situation and then cutting to her not being in it. I know the arc of her growing from this pretty but kind of vacant-looking piece of fluff to determined mama bear wouldn't work as well if we saw her getting from a flooded house to a hospital in the first ten minutes, but instead it sets up a different pattern that no amount of with/without-makeup match shots in and out of flashbacks can make up for.

It doesn't feel like a particularly deliberate choice to emphasize what fits the film's thesis, though; mostly, it just seems like the filmmakers had a lot of ideas for scenes where the actors can do character stuff, maybe the ones that most stuck with them from Megan Hunter's novel, but there is neither interest nor resources to do the more active material that must come between those pieces. Comer, Katherine Waterston, and a few others are good in their scenes, but you can feel the void where the bits where we usually learn something about characters by what they do and how they do it are. Consider the whole thing with the "folks in the communes just want to pretend things are normal" thread: It's outright spoken before we ever get near them, and then once they do, there's no time where we see how those setting work and how Comer's character doesn't fit in because she's so worried about her husband; she's just "this is not for me" as soon as they arrive and it's time to go back to the mainland.

So much of it doesn't make any sense because it mostly works as an actors' showcase but there's not a lot of awareness or attention to what creates the situations these characters are in. It's a movie about internal climate refugees that has nothing to say about the climate crisis, even off-handedly. It's full of decisions that are immediately reversed because it needs to get to the next sequence and there's no clear path between them. The End We Start From is not quite so aggressively stupid as Leave the World Behind, but it feels emptier, a major catastrophe where people die played as a massive inconvenience.

Also, this is yet another movie where everything goes to hell and people have cars and boats with fuel in them six months later but nobody has found and made use of a bicycle as they walk across the country.

This That Week In Tickets: 29 December 2014 - 3 January 2015

Wait a minute, that's only six days! What the heck is going on here?

Oh, the calendars I've been using as scrapbooks for the past five years have gone from running Monday-to-Sunday on a page to running Sunday-to-Saturday. Why would they do that? Don't they realize that people count on calendars for predictability and structure?!?!

(Deep breath)

I can make this work. Sure, now some things that run weekends like the Boston Underground Film Festival will have the end clipped off, but it will give me a little more space for both weekend days, and maybe having lazy Sunday afternoons to work on these posts will make them more timely. It'll mess with the opening-weekend narrative, but you can worry about that if these seem strange one they're back on some sort of schedule...

ANYWAY, that leaves a not-really-blank spot at the top of the page to represent what was actually a fairly busy day (check out the 22-28 December 2014 post for that) before my last movie of 2014, which happened to be the only thing i caught from the Brattle's Bill Murray program, The Razor's Edge. It was not the best film playing in the series, although it is kind of interesting in that it is the sort of movie made by someone desperate to be taken seriously but who is also terribly worried that people won't like that. Murray would have to practically disappear, age, and reinvent himself before figuring out how to make his comedic gifts and dramatic ambitions work together.

Most of the week, then, would be quiet; I don't do much for New Year's because it's cold, I've seen the Christmas releases that I am actively interested in by then, and there was stuff to catch up on at the office after being on vacation a week. I did finally do some DVR cleaning and watch that Blu-ray set of True Detective, though, and that is some awfully fine television. I'm not sure whether I would have rather seen it during its original run and been part of the conversation or not; as much as it's cool to get swept up, internet TV talk disdains the procedural in favor of the built-out world and the tightening twist, and this show ultimately being a serialized cop show with more detailed character work than usual seemed to upset folks. Pity, because it reminded me of the original Prime Suspect in how it used an intriguing crime story as a way to just watch Matthew McConnaughey and Woody Harrelson (and to a lesser extent Michelle Monaghan) act the hell out of their roles.

That finished up, I was back to the Brattle on Friday night for Hayao Miyazaki documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which didn't cover nearly as much ground as I had hoped. I was also weirdly worn out afterward, so I didn't stick around for Why Don't You Play in Hell?, which would have made an excellent second movie of 2015.

It did lead to sleeping in, though, and that meant I was in good shape for Saturday: Catching The Interview now that the Somerville Theatre had room for it after committing to other things before, and then walking through some pretty miserable slush to catch A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night at the Coolidge's midnight show. Wasn't going to chance the GoldScreen being sold out, even if I did more or less kill a pair of shoes in the process.

Then on Sunday-- Oh, right. New calendar. Next week, then, and it's a good thing I don't really flip out over changes to my routine that much.


The Razor's Edge (1984)

* * (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Bill Murray: More than Just a Nut, 35mm)

The 1984 version of The Razor's Edge had a well-worn behind-the-scenes narrative attached to it almost as soon as it was announced - the comedian who wanted to be taken seriously, proved unsuited to it, and failed spectacularly. He goes back to making people laugh, but has he learned that this is even more important than making them cry, or has he been crushed by the realization that he will always be second class? In real life, Bill Murray hones his craft for the next fifteen years and ages into the kind of guy melancholy suits, but that doesn't mean that the first part of the story didn't happen.

For his dramatic debut, Murray and his collaborators adapt a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, with Murray playing Larry Darrell, a laid-back college baseball star who, along with classmate Gray Maturin (James Keach), volunteer to drive an ambulance on the front lines before the United States has officially entered World War I. He leaves behind sweetheart Isabel Bradley (Catherine Hicks) and married friends Bob (Joris Stuyck) & Sophie MacDonald (Theresa Russell). He comes back confused and dissatisfied with the gilded life awaiting him back in America, deciding to spend a year on Paris - and not the classy enclave Isabel's uncle Elliott Templeton (Denholm Elliott) picks out for him.

It stretches out to more than a year, of course, and is quest to find some understanding of the world takes him to many places other than Parisian grottos. In the meantime, life back "home" goes on without him, until the group inevitably reunites over a decade later. Indeed, it seems like everything that can happen does - every period-appropriate tragedy, every bit of soapy melodrama, every way a person can contemplate Just What All This Means. There is nothing that seems out of place, but also nothing that seems like it comes from the characters, rather than happening to them, the most serious moments picked from their lives and lined up by screenwriters who figure the way to maximize drama is to maximize the obviously important scenes.

Full review at EFC.

The Interview

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)

The irony to The Interview having its theatrical release severely curtailed in the wake of a computer security breach at Sony Pictures that may or not have been initiated by North Korean hackers in response to this movie is not that the comical villains of the movie wound up being more powerful than its makers. No, the irony is that this film is, at its heart, about how when the media stands up and gives a damn, rather than compromising on the name of access or other sorts of timidity, it can be a tremendous force for positive change... And the movie will not be much seen because the theater chains were awfully timid.

And all of that aside, it means that people missed a very funny movie. The two opening bits are both kind of brilliant in different ways - the cute little North Korean girl singing a patriotic song that takes a harsh turn is a great comic bit made even better for actually being much closer to reality than many might expect, while the televized interview with Eminem that introduces the audience to talk show host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen) is both a clever pop-culture gag and a foreshadowing of what will happen at the climax. Throughout, there is a steady stream of jokes, often crude and broad, but still funny.

That's in large part because Franco and Rogen know exactly what they are doing. Both, I think, are guys who are not appreciated as much as they should be because people conflate their often not-so-bright characters with their easygoing personalities (something they have played into at times), but they're both ambitious and smart. Stuff that looks offhand is actually well-planned, and absurd doesn't equal dumb. They're great performers given fun support by Randall Park as Kim Jong-un, Diana Bang as the liaison officer Aaron falls for, and Lizzy Caplan as the CIA agent who tasks the journalists to kill Kim.

By the time things start going every which way in the last act, it's clear that the writing/producing/directing team of Rogen and Seth Goldberg can get a little sloppy, but they've still made a movie funny enough to deserve some of the extra attention it wound up getting, even if it's ultimately not much more than a brief, if topical, comedy.

This That Week In Tickets: 22 December 2014 - 28 December 2014

My cunning plan for using vacation time this year: Take the week of Christmas off and see if I'd be better off shopping during the hours when other folks are working than on the weekend or in the evening. It's not a bad plan, although it works best if you have a high-end chocolate shop to finish things off with.

Also helpful: A nut shop, toy stores, and a puzzle & game store. Believe it or not, I didn't hit the Red Sox team store.

After the first day of Christmas shopping, I went to the Brattle for their "Alt-Xmas" screening of Batman Returns, and that was an interesting experience; I didn't remember just how weird it was. After finishing the shopping on Tuesday, I decided to go with the Shane Black Violent Christmas Marathon while wrapping presents, getting through Iron Man Three and The Long Kiss Goodnight before finishing at 2am. I had The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ready to go, but didn't need them... Well, not then.

Wednesday afternoon - Christmas Eve - started off with Chinese import Love on the Cloud, which is an enjoyable romantic comedy, although it is a little too frantic for its own good. After that, a quick trip to the comic shop, put everything in the bag, set off for the train station...

And watch one of the three paper bags I had stuffed full of gifts fall apart because it was raining pretty hard and they were apparently highly compostable. Gather them up, get to Central Square, realize there will be no catching the Downeaster, so take the Red Line to South Station... and have the second bag split in half as I'm standing up. Happily, the other folks on the train both held the door and got me some canvas & plastic bags, but, man, was I ground down by the time I got to the bus. I wound up spending the night re-wrapping almost everything at my mother's house, wishing other people would come to me for the holidays just once (well, twice - it did happen once, seven years ago).

But, the brothers with the adorable nieces make the rules. We made a circuit Christmas morning - first to see Travis, Jen, and their awesome twin girls, who have apparently been watching Brave a lot lately and thus wanted bows and arrows like Merida. That should be fun! Then to my grandparents, then to Dan & Lara and their girls, who have gotten old enough to really like games, really starting to care about the outcomes. I wound up staying over there, helping put stuff together, reading to them, and finding that these girls can do one thing for a good long time if they are into it.

Friday, I headed back to Boston, and having nothing in the fridge, figured I had to go out to the fancy theater where they serve dinner in order to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in HFR 3D. Couldn't find a seat I liked in the really fancy section (so no steak), but they served a pertty passable burger up front. The movie... Well, at least now Peter Jackson can maybe go back to making stuff that's actually interesting.

Saturday's film was chosen on the basis of "The Gambler hasn't been reviewed on EFC, so I'll take it", and it was pretty good, some of the best work Mark Wahlberg has done, although it seems to work very hard to be clever.

Sunday was a much busier day - I used one of the gift cards I got for Christmas to see Exodus: Gods and Kings in 3D. It doesn't quite manage to transcend its weak source material the same way Noah does, but there's no doubt that Ridley Scott is a guy who knows how to use that third dimension (Prometheus was similarly gorgeous but dumb).

After that I went to the Art of the Brick exhibition at Faneuil Hall, which was pretty neat. The early sections, where Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya was reproducing & reinterpreting famous works, were okay, but the more he starts creating on his own, the niftier it got. And there was a dinosaur!

Last stop of the day (and vacation) was down the Green Line to the Coolidge, where I hoped to see Citizenfour but couldn't get there in time to buy a ticket for the 14-screen room it was playing in, so went for The Imitation Game instead. That was pretty good, although I suspect that the fact that we're getting major prestige biographical pictures about the likes of Alan Turing is a little more impressive than the actual movie itself.

It was back to work the next day, but sill a very productive week of family-seeing, niece-spoiling, and movie-watching.

Batman Returns

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 December 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Alt X-Mas, 35mm)

A few minutes into the Brattle's Christmas presentation of Batman Returns, I was willing to trade all three of Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batmovies for one more by Tim Burton with Michael Keaton, back when they were at their peaks. That's impossible, obviously, and I had talked myself down to maybe something like two for one by the climax, but was delighted to find that it was both weirder and more fun than I'd remembered it being.

I think it's a fairly reasonable reaction to have as the film starts and the audience gets reacquainted with Burton's Gotham City, an expanse of towering, interconnected skyscrapers with similarly-scaled status that looks like somebody built Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the 1920s and it's been decaying ever since. There's an opening that establishes Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot as an impossibly bad seed, though his parents' secretive attempt to dispatch him is similarly awful. Then it's the present day and garishly costumed villains are unveiling magnate Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) at the behest of the adult Cobblepot (Danny DeVito) while Batman (Michael Keaton) is busy with goons.

This vision of Gotham is probably the best ever put on film, and not just because it is full of references to silent movies I love (and remember, this was before Metropolis had the two restorations that returned it to its deserved prominence). Burton and his team create a city that is larger-than-life and run-down at the same time, but in a balanced way. As clearly as one can see that this is not a great place to live, even from aerial shots, it's not quite a post-apocalyptic hell, either. Better than any other adaptation - or indeed most runs on the comics - the filmmakers create a city that people would believably stay in, even as it drives them insane.

That's the other thing that works impressively well - Batman's villains get locked up in an asylum rather than a prison, and both DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer (in the role of Catwoman/Selina Kyle) are fantastic at being quite mad. It's different flavors - the Penguin is a murderous sociopath even if his rage is understandable, while Catwoman, afraid of nothing having survived a fall that should have killed her, is slowly losing her mooring to humanity (Pfeiffer is great - she makes a funny self-referential line into something also quite heartfelt). A lot of Batman's instability happens via production design - look at how empty Wayne Manor and the Batcave feel - though Michael Keaton complements Pfeiffer well as a troubled man also trying to be sane but not quite sure he knows how.

In some ways, that exposed the main issue not just with Batman Returns, but with most of the superhero movies of its era: There is a Bruce Wayne-shaped hole in the middle. The popular wisdom was that they were only as good as their villains, and while Marvel has made a mint in recent years focusing more on the heroes than their adversaries (quick, name an Iron Man villain!), Burton and his screenwriters focus so strongly on the villains that sometimes Batman can be shoved to the side of his own movie, leaving Michael Keaton with very little to do and less resolution at the end.

So he mostly stands around, posing in fight scenes that are relatively stiff, but still fairly lively. As things escalate, Burton and company make the action simultaneously bigger and weirder, and while things frequently threaten to careen completely out of control, there's always a sense of grand tragedy to go along with the absurdity of the situation. It's strange and sort of grotesque, but there's nothing that doesn't actually fit, especially in this insane setting.

And that's why, despite Christopher Nolan's "Dark Night" trilogy being more thought out and grounded, I can't help but think that this movie is the one that represents Batman best on-screen. It reflects the heightened reality comics can do almost as easily as realism, and I would love to see Gotham City's madness approached this way again.

Full review at EFC.

Iron Man Three

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)

Believe it or not, revisiting a film on video a mere year and a half after I've seen it on the big screen - and thus having the Blu-ray only sit on the shelf for about a year - is actually fairly quick for me. It's not quite enough time to be surprised because I don't remember the details any more, although there's still room to remember great bits and discover new details I didn't catch the first time through.

The good news: Iron Man Three holds up. It's a great big fun adventure movie that does an impressive job of navigating how these films will work in a post-Avengers world, gives the supporting cast plenty to do, and has some great big action scenes. It's also very much a Shane Black movie, and I really hope that all the big franchises - Marvel, DC, Star Wars - will continue doing this well in allowing guys with distinctive voices to use them even while being part of something bigger.

Anyway - my opinion hasn't changed much since I originally saw it; it's still highly recommended.

"Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)

Since I had the Iron Man Three BD already in and the TV series was going to be starting up in a couple of weeks, I figured I may as well give this a spin.

Who knows whether it was serving as a preliminary pilot for the series at the time or if it became one afterward, but it is certainly a fun fifteen-minute adventure story, setting up a situation, introducing a cast, and playing out a bit of action at a quick, exciting pace. It's great to see a supporting character who was able to grab a spotlight on her own get a check-in, especially since Hayley Atwell was set up to be left behind by the rest of the Marvel franchise. It's quite easy to see from how much of a kick this turned out to be why everyone involved would decide they wanted more.

The Long Kiss Goodnight

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)

I don't know if I'd seen this one since it's original theatrical presentation (and, man, that means I may have paid for VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray copies of it; enjoy your residuals, folks), and that's not surprising; I like everyone involved but somehow never considered it a great movie.

Since then, I've come to know and love the pulp that serves as inspiration to writer Shane Black a bit more; it's a different movie once you've learned about Hammett and Chandler, even though it's no pastiche. Still, it's got the sort of borderline incomprehensible and silly plot that sort of private-eye story often featured because the writer was really more interested in everything around it. That "everything around it" is good stuff - Geena Davis as an amnesiac suburban mom discovering what kind of background she had (and then reconciling the two once her old persona returns to the fore), Sam Jackson as a low-rent private eye, and Brian Cox as a cynical old bastard who still might be the most honest man in an intelligence community crawling with self-serving sharks.

It may actually be Davis's best role (says the guy who hasn't actually seen Thelma & Louise); she splits her time as "Samantha" and "Charly" almost evenly, giving both aspects distinct characterizations and then doing a fine job pulling them together. Then-husband Renny Harlin handles the action well, and his tendency toward kind of overdoing the violence actually matches up well with Black's pulpy tendencies: It makes for a movie that's big, kind of ridiculous, and kind of crude, but which has an eye on what it's going for and never loses sight of it even while the audience is enjoying the explosions.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2014 in Showcase Cinemas SuperLux Chestnut Hill #3 (first-run, RealD HFR DCP)

Well, that's over with.

That something akin to relief is the dominant emotion at the end of a series made by a filmmaker I'm still fairly fond of is unfortunate, and I hope someday that the machinations of how Jackson wound up directing this Hobbit trilogy rather than just serving as a producer, and how it wound up split into three parts (it was just going to be two when filming started, if I recall correctly), and how something fans thought would be a great addition became a bloated obligation... Well, I hope a great book comes out of it. It wound up being just decent movies.

Why is that? Personally, I think it was having too close an eye on The Lord of the Rings. The original The Hobbit was a fantasy made with kids in mind, and whenever Jackson is building a kids' movie, these things are an awful lot of fun. There's a great deal of pure silliness in the destruction/escape from Lake Town, for instance, and the moment when Martin Freeman's Bilbo steps up and says he is the one who has been hiding the stone that Thorin (Richard Armitage) has become obsessed with, because he just wants everybody to get along, is played with a beautiful earnestness. There's joy to it, even if tragedy comes later.

But whenever the film starts looking toward setting up The Fellowship of the Ring, it feels like a distraction. This is material that is not going to pay off by the end of this movie/trilogy, but there's nothing in the details that gives us a new perspective on what we saw ten-plus years ago. It's just seeing it played out, and it messes with the tone of this one, padding it needlessly.

So we forget that there is some great action in here, a really good performance by Martin Freeman, a genuine moment of delight when Billy Connolly shows up as a dwarf prince - even if it does lead to the question of why the heck he hasn't been in all three movies - and a goofy Stephen Fry. The 48fps photography looks a bit odd at ground-level, with the sets probably needing a lot more detail to give the eye enough to look at with all that clarity, although when the action and 3D-centric scenes kick in, it looks beautiful.

So, we're done. Maybe now Peter Jackson can get to do his Tintin movie, or even better, his first movie that really comes from his own head in almost twenty years.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #12 (first-run, RealD DCP)

I joked above about Exodus having to deal with weak source material - say what you will about the Bible/Torah/Koran, but folks have been finding some worth in it for thousands of years - but I do think it's kind of unavoidable when tackling the Old Testament to have trouble dealing with how bloodthirsty its God is. Within the movie, Moses talks about how the Israelites "wrestling" with their deity isn't the same as opposing it, and I think that director Ridley Scott and his writers do want to do some of that wrestling, but don't quite have the nerve. This film is not Noah, where Darren Aronofsky was unafraid to draw parallels with the modern world, let the audience ponder what both what that kind of blind obedience to a vengeful God makes you as a man and the horrors that can come through interpretation.

Instead, there's an empty irony in how Christian Bale's Moses starts out disdaining prophecy but becomes the subject of one. There's a subtext about how God's terror attacks upon Egyptian civilians is what is ultimately effective, compared to Moses's more traditionally honorable campaign, but it plays as just a rendering of Judeo-Christian mythology, not an examination of its message. As a result, a fairly talented cast has nowhere to go but into melodrama.

That said: Wow, can Ridley Scott make a beautiful movie. Just like with Prometheus, which was similarly dumb but pretty, he uses 3D to excellent effect, building a wonderfully realized ancient Egypt, creating a sense of space during action scenes, and otherwise rendering quite frankly amazing spectacle. It's almost a pity that he didn't use it to do something not attached to a myth that is rather problematic in modern times, because while an Egyptian melodrama not connected to the Old Testament might not have sold as many tickets (and might have caught even more deserved flack for its very pale cast), it could have been a story that wasn't so boxed in.

The Imitation Game

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, RealD DCP)

The Imitation Game caught some flack for how it doesn't follow Alan Turing's life all the way to the exceedingly bitter end, although I think that's somewhat undeserved; by the time it finishes, there can be zero doubt as to how the homophobic laws of the time devastated him. Despite not rubbing the audience's nose in the last days of Turing's life in the most complete way possible, it gets its point across.

Up until then, it's quite the intriguing film, as it manages to be a great many things to a great many people: A historical thriller, a drama about what it means to be discriminated against, whether as a gay man or a scientifically-inclined woman in a society that does not have a place for you, a character piece. Because history is messy and screenwriter Graham Moore didn't feel the need to streamline it into something more comfortable, The Imitation Game sometimes feels like it is trying to do too much: The moral choices to be made after Enigma is cracked are a whole movie on their own, as is the story of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), a brilliant mathematician in her own right who becomes Alan's beard and closest friend.

Knightley is great, although I'm still not quite sure what to make of Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. Early on, there seems to be a reason for his broadness, like he's trying to play up his arrogance as a smokescreen to hide his homosexuality, but eventually the realization hits that he is that guy, and it becomes a little harder to be sure what to make of him in that case. It's a flashy role, one which for better or worse plays into the popular perception of Cumberbatch's on-screen persona, and by the time the film ends, I'm not quite sure whether that helps or hurts, or whether it's a fair criticism or not.

One thing I did like, that I'm not sure the folks who haven't done a lot of science, math, or computer work may not appreciate, is how much of the film is about understanding Turing's mindset in building "Christopher": Our normal approach to a problem is to try and solve it ourselves, whereas Turing proposes finding a way to automate the process, to understand the problem and take the mechanical parts out of human hands and leave them to a machine that can do them quickly and by rote without getting bored or distracted and thus making mistakes. As someone who has done a lot of that as part of my work, it's nice to see that communicated so strongly.

This That Week In Tickets: 15 December 2014 - 21 December 2014

Another slow week, and this time work did have a little something to do with it. That and it being cold and rainy enough that if I couldn't walk out of the subway and almost directly into the theater, I needed to be convinced.


The first few days of the week were chock full of "agile training" at the office, with the idea being to change processes so that everything is done in two-week chunks, testing happens as you go, and the discovery that what you were told to build and what you were supposed to build are different things happens much earlier. It seems like half good ideas and half a consulting company trying to sell us stuff, but we'll see. In the early days, I'm amusing myself by seeing how long it takes for the folks on the team to realize that I will not say "SME" (pronounced "smee") out loud like it's a non-ridiculous made-up word, but will just abbreviate "subject matter experts" as "experts" and be understood by those who haven't taken the training.

Fortunately, I was able to escape the early enough on Monday evening to catch my last show of the Harvard Film Archive's Jacques Demy series, Lady Oscar, which is no classic but is at least a fascinating oddity - a French guy directing an English-speaking cast in an adaptation of a Japanese comic set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Yes, this one grabbed my attention as soon as I saw it on the schedule.

Thursday, with training safely over, I decided that I would, in fact, see Chinese romance Back in Time. It was another mixed bag - some entertaining moments and characters stuck in a story that finds a new way to be off the mark every twenty minutes or so. It's the type of thing where every potential tangent or alternate direction makes you wonder why you're not watching that story play out.

There weren't many new releases I had interest in over the weekend, other than Wild opening at the Somerville after having already been at lesser theaters, so I did that Sunday afternoon, after a little Christmas shopping. Enjoyable, pretty good little movie.

And after that, the crazy Christmas week - both for movies seen and running around.

Wild

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2014 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)

Wild is less a simple story told well than a fine job of giving shape to the anecdotes that form a life if not necessarily a tidy narrative. In a way, the teasers' voice-over saying that Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) wouldn't change a thing she's done because it has led her to where she is lays the necessity of building the movie that way out, right down to being said on-screen at an almost random point. There is cause and effect, and what you do does reverberate later on, but it's seldom tidy. Finishing her hike up the Pacific Crest Trail is a big deal, but doesn't get swelling music and doesn't conclusively close the door on the rest of her life; it just makes a chapter divider.

In getting there, writer Nick Hornby (adapting the real-life Strayed's memoir) and director/co-editor Jean-Marc Vallée do a nice job of jumping around. A movie about walking a thousand miles intercut with the downward spiral leading to it has the potential to be filled with excess bulk - and if it isn't it can feel like they are deliberately overlooking just how much effort something takes. Vallée and company do a good job of highlighting the Good Parts, cutting back and forth between Cheryl on her hike and appropriate flashbacks, but making some jumps so abrupt that there does seem to be some time spent elsewhere. It's a small thing, but progress captions are used well, both to show how difficult it is for Cheryl at first and to feel a rhythm later.

Mostly, though, this is woman-against-wilderness, and both play their part. Witherspoon doesn't always disappear into the role - she has movie-star charisma here even when she's trying not to - but she always feels genuine when discovering new things, and she does that enough to be a big positive. And, yes, a lot of time is spent gaping at the trail, but it's worth it, with Vallée and cinematographer Yves Bélanger always finding the right scale to make the world in comparison to Cheryl.

That's pretty good, especially with nothing to mitigate it if some of the big pieces go wrong. That doesn't happen, though, making Wild a drama worth the big screen even if it seems like a small story.

This That Week In Tickets: 8 December 2014 - 14 December 2014

First of two weeks full of stuff at work that kept me busy until the weekend.

Well, okay, I'll be honest, work didn't keep me terribly late that week other than one day, despite it being "spirit week". That's when the multibillion dollar company I work for has special events to make sure we know how lucky we are to work for them, which isn't really the implied threat it sounds like. It was pretty low-key this year - nobody from the home office (or one of the home offices; each layer above us has a different one) doing pep talks and the like. There was a superhero theme to the week, though, and yeah, I crushed the trivia contest. Don't know how I'll defend that championship next year unless the theme involves us being somehow similar to the films of Pang Ho-cheung or something.

No, it was more a case of having seen The Pyramid and Miss Julie the weekend before, and there not being many new movies, so I bided my time until a crowded weekend. I don't recall if Zero Motivation was my first choice that night, but it was a good one; it's a quality female-driven Israeli army comedy, and you don't see those every day.

The rest of the weekend actually became something of a tight squeeze. I loved Chris Rock's Top Five even more than I expected, in part because it really didn't sink in that Rosario Dawson was co-starring until after I started seeing listings instead of ads, and I was glad to see the two together. It didn't leave me a whole lot of time afterwards to get up the Red Line for the Brattle's preview of Inherent Vice, but I made it, just in case that was the only way the film was playing in 35mm in the area. Fortunately not, but I was certainly glad to see it early.

Locking Saturday night down with Vice meant that I would have to go for the encore presentation of the Etheria Film Night, which was actually Sunday afternoon. And a full Sunday afternoon it was, containing a couple hours of shorts, some more trivia (it's not often you win a DVD authographed by the director's dog), and then a feature on top of that. Fortunately, it was only a couple stops down the Red Line to catch The Young Girls of Rochefort as part of the Harvard Film Archive's Jacques Demy series, which I pretty much adored.

So, not the busiest week of movies, but the quality was high all around. Can't complain much about that!

This That Week In Tickets: 1 December 2014 - 7 December 2014

I don't know how much this applies as a general statement, but I find that the weeks when a lot of people are making their "once every few months" trips to the theaters, I'm going less frequently.

See, while studios are mostly giving each others' big releases (Hunger Games 3, Penguins of Madagascar, and a fair amount of Interstellar & Big Hero 6 in this case) a whole ton of screens, the likes of me have seen those, so we're either staying home or catching the stuff on its last legs that we meant to see earlier or the semi-doomed things getting half-hearted releases out of contractual obligation. I saw two in each category.

The first of stragglers was Tommy Lee Jones's The Homesman on Monday night, which might have been splitting a theater in last week. It's not hard to see why it didn't hang around for that long; it's a bleak vision - sometimes gratuitously so - that makes few concessions to what we to think we think today. There may have been walk-outs on that count.

Things didn't really like up again until Friday, when I caught The Pyramid, a limited-release horror movie that's on shaky ground from the moment it reveals that it's tomb is a tetrahedron, but I found myself enjoying it maybe a little more than it deserves because there aren't enough movies about foolhardy archaeologists evading ancient deathtraps and it does get good and nuts toward the end.

Saturday's small-release special was Miss Julie, an adaptation of the Ibsen play directed by Liv Ullmann and starring Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Emily Mortimer. As you might expect with that group, it's impressively mounted although it doors begin to wear on a viewer by the end.

Finally, on Sunday, I found some time to take William Goss's advice and catch Beyond the Lights. I'd say something similar about romantic comedies a few weeks later, but it's the sort of modest story executed well that seems like it should be Hollywood's backbone, but these days reaches multiplexes infrequently enough to deserve more notice than I'm giving it.

The Homesman

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, DCP)

I can't recall Tommy Lee Jones ever working with Werner Herzog at any point, and that's probably for the best. The Homesman suggest they may be too much on the same page about how the untamed wilderness not only wants to kill any person who ventures into its domain, but it will first drive him or her mad. We are probably better off not having witnessed that combined bleak outlook.

And while Jones's adaptation of Gledon Swarthout's novel sometimes pushes said bleakness not just past the point of comfort but into territory that might make a viewer give up early (more dead babies than you need to see). It's worth sticking around, though, because Jones evokes the idea of a West that just pulverizes minds in a way that is pure horror: Men become cruel, to the point where the women they are with just shut down, and even strong, capable women like Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) have their sense of worth chipped away to an extent that is tragic. Jones's title character may be the most rational in his amorality, but he's hollow for it.

It's a fine, fragile performance on Jones's part, a notable contrast to his many more bombastic parts - or the sleepwalking turn in The Family which I suspect was done as barter for this movie (Luc Besson's Europacorp produced it). Hilary Swank is exceptional as Cuddy, giving a performance that evokes solid decency but also highlights the cracks that have been forming in part as a result of that. It's essential in making the film's last act completely believable even while it feels like a betrayal. The turns from Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter as the women who lost their minds are terribly effective, and there's a string of memorable appearances in smaller parts: John Lithgow, William Ficthner, James Spader, Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld.

I probably won't watch this one again - it is just too cruel at points to subject oneself to multiple times - but it's certainly worth one watch.

Beyond the Lights

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2014 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)

Does anybody else see Gugu Mbatha-Raw playing fairly young and inexperienced characters in movies like this and Belle and find it kind of weird because she played a semi-retired, veteran spy on Undercovers, or am I the only one who watched/liked that show?

I jest, a bit, although it does make me wonder if the movie plays better to those for whom Mbatha-Raw is a fresh face rather than someone who has already paid some dues. That's an issue I brought in, and though it's not quite the biggest one - the film seems to require her character Noni to simultaneously be a big star and about to have her debut album drop, although I suppose that sort of thing is possible in today's pop music industry and celebrity culture. - but that it's what stuck out to me, then the movie is in pretty good shape otherwise.

And, truth be told, it is in pretty good shape. There are a lot of places where it could go wrong - everything could seem to move too fast, it could get snotty or cavalier in how it approaches the sexualization of girls like Noni in the hip-hop/R&B world, it could make the parents of both Noni and Kaz (Nate Parker), the cop who pulls her off a ledge and gets attached, into too-simplistic caricatures. Instead, though, writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood manages to keep things moving smoothly; if she's not quite finding a fresh angle to her story of a young entertainer finding love and stability with a man from outside that world, she's smoothing the edges off the harsh turns, giving the actors good lines to speak, and lining up a bunch of interesting details.

She's also got a fine cast who can get what's going on with these character across well enough that she doesn't have to spell it out. Mbatha-Raw is front and center, and I love how she's able to play Noni's rock-star confidence in the opening parts of the film as not just a front - that for all the doubt and turmoil which Mbatha-Raw gets to bring to the forefront in due time, the brass is part of her as well. Nate Parker does a lot of little things right in what could be a bland, ideal-man role, especially when it comes down to looking like he's trying to be cool in a situation that could bring out (pleasant) agitation. They play off each other well, along with parents who manage to make good parallels without being terribly similar: Minnie Driver is a familiar nightmare of a stage mother, and she bites right into the part, but she's also always ready when we need a glimpse of better qualities; Danny Glover, on the other hand, has his characer project ambition onto his son in a way that seems to reflect pride as much as opportunism.

It's straightforward material, and doesn't always excel within its genre - the movie gets stretched until it reaches the end Prince-Bythewood wants - but it's an entertaining romance that goes down well. Like I said up top, we should be seeing movies like this all the time - it's funny, romantic, and dramatic in the proper turns, and should appeal to a wide audience - but we don't, and it's a shame that there doesn't seem to be much room for good love stories well told in the cinema today.

This That Week In Tickets: 24 November 2014 - 30 November 2014

After Christmas, just getting to writing up the week of Thanksgiving. I think catching up will pick up speed from here, though.

Things started off heavy, with John Stewart's Rosewater, the sort of film whose intentions are the best and whose every moment is sincere but the final effect isn't quite what you'd hope for.

I think it was a crappy week, weather-wise - or more, it was expected to be one - because the time on the ticket for Women Who Flirt indicates I was working from home and thus able to get to an early show, because suddenly Chinese movies sell out and I wanted to get my write-up on the new Pang Ho-cheung movie in early. Fortunately, it was a fun one, a romantic comedy that occasionally strays toward the genre's worst instincts but winds up clever and offbeat enough to work.

Thursday was Thanksgiving, which meant a trip up to Maine and shuttling between a couple of places for dinner - starting at Gramma & Grampas, because not only was the power out at my mother's house, but a nearby transformer was still burning (Yarmouth, Maine got hit a bit harder than Cambridge, Massachusetts). After dinner there, we headed to my brother Dan's place, and I wound up hanging around to play with my nieces and even staying over. The girls wanted me to watch Elf, and as a semi-professional movie-watcher who had never seen it, I could not say no.

I got back, lazed around for a while, trying to drill down through unread graphic novels and such, and then headed over to the Harvard Film Archive for Lola on Saturday, not quite falling in love with Jacques Demy's first feature, but finding that I liked his work quite a bit.

On Sunday, I went for an early double feature: The 10am screening of Penguins of Madagascar was a fairly entertaining movie, but dead - not only was I the only person in the theater, they didn't even bother opening up the downstairs concession stand for it. Shame, it was fun, and comedies and kids' movies are usually better with a bit of a crowd. After that, it was down the C line for Foxcatcher at the Coolidge. Definitely a weird one, with Steve Carell working so hard to avoid his usual persona that he becomes almost alien. In a way, I think that's the point - the super-rich really aren't like you and me - and I hope that didn't make it too weird for people to get into, as it's really a good little movie.

Elf

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2014 in Dan's Living Room (hanging around, DVD)

Elf is apparently considered, by many, to be a holiday classic already - folks in the UK freaked when the station that usually airs the movie over the holidays didn't have it on the schedule - although in some ways that seems a little generous. Then again, I occasionally see the Elf on the Shelf referred to as a holiday tradition (mostly in its own advertising, admittedly), so why not? With as hectic as the holiday season can get and how heavy-handed holiday stories can be, this movie's gentle goofiness is kind of nice.

It works, I think, a little better than some of Will Ferrell's other movies where he's playing this sort of off-center character, in part because he actually has a place to fit in, rather than just being some nonsensical weirdo. He's broad and absurd and silly, but he comes from somewhere good, and that makes him much easier to swallow, especially as that silly world of his has a lot of charm in its Christmas-y details, most hitting just the right note with audiences of all ages without becoming cloyingly nostalgic.

I do have to admit, though, that I'd probably like it a little more if some of its jokes and supporting characters were a bit bigger. Sure, I remember being kind of excited about Zooey Deschanel when the movie came out, but this was right about when she went from an intriguing actress to a mannered persona, and there's just very little to her character aside looking nice in a costume to make her an interesting female lead. James Caan, Ed Asner, and Bob Newhart all feel like they should have great moments that they really never get. Daniel Tay - as Buddy's half-brother - actually proves to be Ferrell's best foil, with Peter Dinklage the one who gets to be explosively funny.

But, good cheer counts for a lot in a Christmas movie, and this turns out to be where Jon Favreau first demonstrates and ability to really merge the fantastical and mundane better than most, and that's an impressive discovery on its own.

This That Week In Tickets: 17 November 2014 - 23 November 2014

The goal for next year: Use a lot more vacation while it is warm out so that I'm not scrambling to use it at the end of the year and kind of enjoying my vacation less because it's so cold.

This year, I was trying to save a bit of money and opted to spend a few days in New York, a pretty easy bus ride from Boston. I didn't go terribly nuts with photos, since a touchscreen phone means taking your hands out of your gloves and my point-and-shoot only wants to work for a month or so at a time, and I got my month this summer.

It was a fun trip, though there are some things I'd do differently. For instance, I would find a way to ditch my backpack before going into the American Museum of Natural History because I have time to kill before I can check into my room (itself a tiny space in a Bronx building whose "front desk" is located in the basement). The museum is fantastic, although given how much certain rooms puff up Teddy Roosevelt, it's easy to joke about how TR killed all the dinosaurs himself ("then why aren't they stuffed like the other animals?" / "Because dinosaur meat was delicious!"), and now I kind of want to find an artist and start a Kickstarter for a comic about Roosevelt on the island from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

Still, dinosaurs! I hope that I am never too old to grin like a nine-year-old when I visit a museum that has dinosaur skeletons, meteorites, space stuff, etc. I'm not necessarily sure about the taxidermy; I kind of get that this was the best way for people to get a sense of animals from far away a hundred years ago, but it comes off as more than a bit weird today. Highly recommended, although I must admit that the ticket above isn't mine, but one I picked up off the floor when I found I had lost my own. Sadly, that meant I didn't get to see the pterosaur exhibit I paid for.

Tuesday's outing was to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I wouldn't mind coming back sometime when it's warm and I can reserve tickets to the crown (apparently, that's got to be booked months in advance, rather than day-of). That ferry was cold, as was the walk around the island itself.

Funny thing about the statue: You stand outside it, and it's big and impressive, but in today's world of skyscrapers and other massive engineering achievements, it's not really amazing until you get into the museum part of it and see what sort of crazy effort went into funding, designing, building, and transporting the thing, and then the 1980s restoration work. That, at least for me, is when the achievement suddenly becomes amazing.

The next stop on the ferry was Ellis Island, which was a bit of a disappointment - there is a large complex there but the Immigration Museum is confined to one building, and its openness, while pleasing, sort of works against giving one an understanding of what arriving there was like, with the crush of people all speaking different languages, being quarantined, etc. The mix of exhibits and recreations doesn't feel quite right, and that so many things were damaged or removed during Hurricane Sandy and still have not been restored means that there are big, empty spaces.

I joke about how you know it's a gift from France and Paris because it's a public monument that involves climbing a bunch of stairs, even without going to the crown, but I think the funniest/saddest thing is that, in order to see Lady Liberty, you have to go through airport-style security twice: Once at the ferry, and once at the entrance to the pedestal. The irony is sour in itself, but I sort of wonder what sort of weapon they think I've picked up on the boat. Post-9/11 paranoia is a sad, crazy thing, so it's kind of good to see that the memorial - a simple black-colored hole that represents a void left over after the attacks - is not overstated. Granted, I didn't get into the museum (too late in the day), but at least the building isn't horrifically ostentatious.

Speaking of stupidly increased security, they don't have lockers at the bus station(s) any more, which means I had to track down a place that wanted $25 to hold my backpack for the day after I checked out of my room on Wednesday. For comparison, a days rental of a locker costs a twonie in Montreal's bus station.

But, hey, it was arguably worth it to not have to carry the extra weight around while exploring The Metropolitan Museum of Art - especially after having chosen the wrong subway station to get off and having to walk roughly a third the length of Central Park to get there. It's a good way to spend the afternoon, though, even if you're like me and not much of a fine-arts type. There's a reconstructed Egyptian tomb and temple, a very nifty exhibit of musical instruments from around the world and history, armor and weapons... You can wear yourself out there.

I kind of did, but I still had some time to kill before my overnight bus home, so I poked around in Forbidden Planet (I didn't realize that the venerable UK comic shop had a New York location) and the Strand bookstore, buying a copy of Jo Nesbo's The Bat both because I have meant to read his Harry Hole novels ever since liking the non-Harry movies made from his books and because that bookstore was a good place to hide from the cold for long enough, at least, to get hungry for some authentic New York pizza and then catch one last movie before heading to the Port Authority and sit in semi-sketchy surroundings waiting for the bus to Boston.

And, oh yeah, the movies. I went to one each night, figuring they wouldn't play Boston in two cases and not in a certain format in another. I wound up catching Goodbye to Language, Interstellar, and Mea Culpa respectively at the IFC Center (in Dolby 3D), Ziegfield (in 70mm), and AMC Empire 25 (plain ol' DCP). Even the one I didn't really like was a neat experience, so that was a win. I will mention that it was kind of difficult to get MoviePass to work right, and it's almost funny - a few months ago, one of my annoyances with the program was that the phone app would forget my location what seemed like daily, adding an extra step to finding the theaters I wanted to use. Now, it's pretty locked into Cambridge, and getting it to work on those NYC theaters meant standing right outside, telling it to use the current location, and then quickly making selections before it reverted back to my home base. Fortunately, it worked eventually, which is good because as you can see, those are some expensive tickets.

I got home safely, crashed for much of Thursday, and then used having Friday off to see The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 on opening day before the truly crazy crowds got there. On Saturday, I took the bus out to West Newton to see The Two Faces of January, which I had missed during its closer runs (although I kind of like heading to West Newton anyway). Pretty good, both of them.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 November 2014 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)

A couple years ago, I spent a lot of words talking about how The Hunger Games was not a patch on Battle Royale, and I stand by that statement - the first movie in this series really isn't very good and would be a complete disaster without Jennifer Lawrence. Something happened as the series strayed from those roots, though - it got interesting.

And as it keeps straying, it keeps getting more interesting. The second movie's exploration of how the next generation has an almost instinctive, twenty-first century knowledge of how to use the media is expanded on here, but it becomes much darker and cynical, as the revolutionaries are massaging their message nearly as much as the corrupt government, making Katniss as much a manufactured symbol as a genuine hero. It actually plays into one of my complaints from the previous films - that Katniss seldom actually does anything, because the idea here is that she doesn't need to - the media machine will make her into whatever they need.

And so, a great deal of what's interesting in this one is watching Julianne Moore as the "President" of underground District 13 who spars with a spin doctor played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. The former is kind of a monster, and so is the latter, and that always takes us by surprise, at least a little bit - the revelation at the end of Catching Fire that he was a traitor to the Capital has the audience inclined to see him as idealistic, and his somewhat ruthless pragmatism is a little shocking. It's different from that of Woody Harrelson's Haymitch, unhappily sober, cutting through the crap, but still knowing Katniss's point of view. The switch in settings also (finally) gives Elizabeth Banks something interesting to do as Effie Trinket, as her absurdity is made even more obvious but also shows hints of an interesting person underneath.

Lawrence is still pretty great, although I suspect that the crassness of splitting this final book in the series in half has deprived her of having much action in this part beyond righteous anger. There's some goofy science fiction toward the end that also may get explored in next year's second half, but overall, this movie impresses a heck of a lot more than it was reasonable to expect back in March of 2012, and I wouldn't be surprised if the series as a whole winds up with a respectable showing in the top X sci-fi movie series among people who make lists in coming years.

The Two Faces of January

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2014 in Weston Newton Cinema #4 (second-run, DCP)

It sometimes seems as though Patricia Highsmith's novels have been constant fodder for classy thrillers, but believe it or not, there weren't very many English-language film adaptations of her work between Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley almost fifty years later at all. And yet, Hossein Amini's adaptation of The Two Faces of January is recognizable almost immediately - the murky morality, the people detached from ordinary life, the class tensions just under the surface. Of course, there have been other adaptations from around the globe, because Highsmith is just that important a figure in suspense.

And this latest movie based on her work is a nifty one. It gives us Viggo Mortensen Kirsten Dunst as an American couple in post-WWII Greece and Oscar Isaac as the American expatriate who becomes their guide and accomplice when the situation they are in deteriorates - and naturally finds himself attracted to Dunst's Colette. It's a situation that gets more tense by degrees after the first murder; Amini pumps things up slowly enough that the straw that broke the camel's back comes quietly. Part of it is the way we get immersed in the environment; part is just how well-directed it is, even with an ending that perhaps disappoints those who have become invested in one aspect of the story.

A lot comes from the impressive cast. Isaac finds the spot where conniving inersects with over-his-head, making Rydal one of the more interesting gray characters I've seen recently. Viggo Mortensen plays more solidly creepy, but not necessarily villainous. They contrast nicely. And as usual, I'm not sure why Kirsten Dunst isn't a big star; her role is more a fulcrum for others to play off, but she gets us caught in the middle as thoroughly as her character is..

The Two Faces of January isn't my favorite Highsmith movie, and has some flaws. But it's a cool little thriller of a type that doesn't show up nearly as often as it should.