This Week in Tickets: 31 December 2018 - 6 January 2019

New year, new calendar! Take a look:



It looks a little different because not only do I have to shrink it down more, but I accidentally bought one that's actually too large for a two-page spread to fit on my scanner, so I'm kind of cut-and-pasting the two pages together, which means you should prepare for a lot of funny-looking spiral bindings in the coming months. I do worry a bit that this now shrinks things down to a level that's tough to read, but I'm not sure. Let me know in the comments (or on social media, or whatever) if that's the case.

(And maybe follow one of the merch links, too - I've apparently been pennies away from a $5 gift card for a long time!)

Anyway, New Year's Eve was another day when I didn't do much of anything other than try to finally unpack a lot of the tubs in the back room and organize after the previous Saturday's Great Collapse of Shelves not Actually Strong Enough to Hold Books. Unfortunately, my method of doing so involves making a bigger mess as the first step, and I'm stuck midway through that now. By the time I was done with that, there were no movies playing because apparently nobody wants to have anything else going within a couple hours of midnight, and I just hit the hay.

That got me up early enough to do relatively early shows for New Year's, though, starting the year off right with If Beale Street Could Talk at the Coolidge, which, yeah, is as good as its trailers have made it look. After that, it was inbound on the Green Line for a second go with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and that, too, is every bit as great as people have been saying, holding up pretty darn well on a second viewing. I'm really hoping Sony does a combined 3D/4K release for this one, because it's gorgeous all around.

On the 2nd, the Brattle started a series with three movies arranged in two double features of Ida Lupino's films as director on consecutive nights, so I went with the late show of Not Wanted on Wednesday (after the weekly trip to the Million Year Picnic) and then did the pair of The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist on Thursday. It's a kind of fascinating trio, especially when you consider that Lupino was one of the few women directing mainstream movies at that time (if not the only one), and you can't help but wonder how it impacted each of them in different ways, just in terms of being different from how the men around her did them.

Friday was the first night for Mojin: The Worm Valley, which is on the low side of average and probably not helped much by my mentally comparing everyone in the cast to their predecessor (Gu Xuan, for instance, is actually pretty good, but she's also clearly "off-brand Shu Qi", and that thought just drives me to the internet to try and find out when Shanghai Fortress comes out). I'd actually meant to watch Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe earlier in the week, but wound up (mostly) watching it afterwards Twice, actually - once in 3D right after I got home, and then again in 2D the next afternoon to get what I missed nodding off.

Then on Sunday, I arranged things based on something showing once that day - not Escape Room, which was a new release and playing all day (and turned out to be decent enough, especially by eary-January-dumping standards), but Dark Money, which was one of fifteen documentaries sharing one screen downtown and as such played once over the weekend. I'd meant to catch it earlier, and it turned out to be all right.

Not a bad way to start 2019, all told More to come, with the well-thought out editions of my thoughts here and what I can get down on the train home on the Letterboxd page.

Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2019 in AMC Boston Common #?? (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

The sort of quick, potentially-expensive revisit you can do when you've got A-List and don't have to ration 3D tickets, done in part because while I certainly liked Spider-Verse a lot the first time, I was kind of taken aback by just how much the public at large seemed to go for this one - both online and hearing folks who usually haunt the art-houses and rep screens saying that they'd seen in six times already. That's a lot of love.

It's certainly deserved, and I think coming at it as just a movie rather than an assembly of comics I quite like helped it. It's just spectacularly well put-together, and I think the key is that it arguably gets Miles Morales better than the comics have, for the most part. Miles is an Afro-Latino teenager who has been written by basically one middle-aged white guy since he was introduced (at least until a few months ago), and I think having people closer to him voicing and directing et al has really sharpened his characterization. It feels like a movie made more by people who know its characters than by those intrigued by what they represent.

And, of course, it's still tremendously funny, gorgeous to look at, and full of action that feels like it's truly got all the possibilities of a comic book for a first time. Absolutely everything in this movie is working together, and it's no wonder people find it brilliant

What I said a couple weeks ago

Not Wanted

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Refreshed, Renewed, Restored; DCP)

This is basic B-movie melodrama, fit for the back end of a double feature that most people wouldn't have stayed for when it came out. I don't know whether Emerald Productions and Film Classics were technically Poverty Row studios, but this was no prestige picture with top-of-the-line talent. The acting is rough and the scripting at times rougher.

Ida Lupino co-wrote and produced the fim, eventually taking over as director when Elmer Clifton had a heart attack, and I'm curious how much that changed the movie. It's tremendously sympathetic to its main character (a 19-year-old girl who runs off to follow a man and winds up pregnant and alone), never taking the position that her strict parents knew best or treating her as ruined, and the last act is all about women helping women. It's a cautionary tale, but seldom a scolding one, and while men certainly can make that sort of picture, they're examining every aspect of Sally's situation from the outside.

It's still kind of a mess, but every once in a while you can see past its clumsiness to find a little style. There are moments that feel horrific and others that feel surreal, and though lead actress Sally Forrest is not great with dialogue, she is pretty good when she's not reciting banal lines; she's expressive in a lot of other ways.

It's not great, and maybe it winds up forgotten without Ida Lupino's involvement. It's better than just a curiosity, at least.

The Hitch-Hiker

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Refreshed, Renewed, Restored; DCP)

Famously the only classic noir directed by a woman, The Hitch-Hiker is nevertheless a testosterone-laden affair, just over an hour of a driver with the urge to fight back against the killer of the title being held in check by his smarter friend, who figures they should bide their time. The killer himself is even more pure id, nothing but the urge to take what he wants and kill anyone in his way. They're three different sorts of masculinity. William Talman makes a fine psycho, and Edmond O'Brien plays a frustrated version of the same impulses, with Frank Lovejoy trying to be less controlled by them.

Or maybe it's not really that deep, but it's a crisp thriller, surely tightening its screws without needing to complicate things. Its cutaways to show the pursuit are quick and perfunctory, never leaving the action behind for more than a minute or two, although they often tend to highlight just how basic the story is. Still, it's not stretched out, and at seventy-odd minutes, things don't need to get that complicated.

The Bigamist

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Refreshed, Renewed, Restored; DCP)

This is one of those movies that's something like 75% flashback and lots something from that, becoming all recitation of facts and not particularly dramatic. It's capable and does all right with that, but Ida Lupino doesn't really manage to turn its sympathetic take on the situation into something tragic or even a fascinating sort of irony, despite how hard the writers lean on that word in the last few scenes.

It is, like Not Wanted, impressively sympathetic to its characters, which in some ways contributes to how it can feel rather uneventful - everybody involved is basically decent, and they're isolated enough to never come into direct conflict. That's a big part of why not a lot seems to happen, perhaps. Shame, because the cast is nice; director Ida Lupino does nice as the girl who could be the femme fatale but isn't, and Joan Fontaine is terrific as the first wife. Edmond O'Brien is kind of bland, but earnest enough when need be, and Edmund Gwenn is an entertaining foil as the adoption agency official. Weird that someone name-checks the actor at a couple of points.

Those Weeks in Tickets: 17 December 2018 - 30 December 2018

Christmas smack in the middle of this period, so really no time to do a TWIT for the first week on its own.





Another day off on Monday the 17th, and I pre-purchased tickets for They Shall Not Grow Old in 3D that afternoon so that I could make it to one of a couple 7pm options. That almost didn't work out, since the show started half an hour late and had hiccups enough to necessitate stopping for a moment to pick up a compensation ticket. From there, I caught the Red Line to Harvard Square to see Bombshell at the Brattle with Karina Longworth doing an introduction and slideshow from her book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood. Made it just in time, fortunately, and it's still a very funny movie.

Back to work the next day, and I opted to watch something at home that evening, pulling Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins off the pile of Twilight Time discs. You can see why it's sort of the forgotten weird genre movie of the 1980s - it's just not weird enough to compete with the other crazy things.

The weekend got a bit shuffled from my original plans since both Thursday and Friday were late days at work. That led me to the Coolidge for Mary Queen of Scots on Friday night,and that is pretty darn good. After that, I got home and decided to take another off the Twilight Time pile - Devil in a Blue Dress - to watch while wrapping stuff to send to my brother in Chicago. That we didn't get a series of Easy Rawlins films is a real failure on Hollywood's part.

Saturday was a day poking around craft fairs and the like before arriving at Boston Common for the week's Chinese release, Airpocalypse, which isn't great; I assume the more impressive stuff is being held until after all the logjam in America clears up. Part of that logjam is Bumblebee, a surprisingly decent Transformers prequel/reboot.

Sunday was a lot of Christmas shopping until around 6pm, when I was just done and decided to go for Aquaman, which is pretty decent for a DC movie. Left me shopping and wrapping quite a bit on Christmas Eve before getting on a train for Portland and then out to the 'burbs to see parents, brothers, and nieces. It's a challenge to shop for them on the one hand, but on the other they enjoy building, reading, and solving puzzles, so when I do find something, it's fun.

Back home, I did work a couple days and then hit Kill Mobile on Friday night, and it was kind of not surprisingly not as good as the previous remake of the same source material seen just a month earlier. That gave me just enough time to get back to Cambridge for "Un Chien Andalou" and Army of Darkness at the Brattle. That was part of the "Keaton-esque" series,which led me back there the next day for a couple Jackie Chan pics, Rumble in the Bronx & Project A II.

Then it was almost the end of the year, and since Regal expires points, I went there to see Welcome to Marwen, which is not very good but is the most interesting thing one of my favorite filmmakers has done in years.

This more or less closes the book on 2018, as I'll probably go to the new calendar for 2019. Rough drafts will continue to be on the Letterboxd page.

Bombshell

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (special presentation, 35mm)

My first few Jean Harlow movies had her really rubbing me the wrong way, but I've found myself enjoying the heck out of her in every visit to this often frantic Hollywood farce. It's a fast-paced, funny movie that makes Harlow's Lola Burns as silly and flighty as any of the rest of the characters, but also genuine and easy to like. There's something especially delightful about how Lola seems to subconsciously adopt different accents and characters as the situation develops or an idea enters her head, like being an actress is who she is well beyond her job, though she never sounds like a phony of any sort.

It's an interesting artifact as well as a delightful comedy, working as a sort of record of when movie stars were a strange combination of intensely-followed celebrities and clock-punching employees, with very little leverage in their negotiations. It's almost inconceivable in these days of stars being free agents, and I suspect you couldn't really remake Bombshell for the modern day without a fair amount of reconfiguration.

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins

* * (out of four)
Seen 18 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Blu-ray)

If this thing had even the barest whiff of an actual story, then maybe the adventure might have actually continued, and maybe have become a head-scratching franchise rather than just a misguided-seeming attempt at one. It feels like it should have a cult following, but coming out as it did right between Buckaroo Banzai and Big Trouble in Little China, it just never seemed strange enough to capture the imagination, nor slick enough to be the James Bond competitor it most obviously is trying to be.

There's potential here - scrappy Fred Ward, Joel Grey giving a performance that would be a lot more fun if it weren't yellowface (and how the heck was that every acceptable?), a bombastic score by Craig Safan, and that terrific Statue of Liberty sequence, one of a few times when the action seems big enough that the film seems to be embracing its absurdity rather than trying to play it straight-faced. It's not hard to see what the filmmakers are going for.

But, boy, is the plot utterly forgettable (something about a weapons manufacturer manufacturing weapons), and while the bits with Remo and Chiun are clearly where the film is at its best, it makes the movie something like 80% getting ready and 20% doing the thing. Secret agency CURE feels less mysterious than unimportant, and the great action bits feel like they're just dropped in randomly, not really accomplishing anything.

I don't know if Remo Williams is actually obscure, but it seems like it must have flopped. I remember seeing newspaper ads for it as a kid but never having it cross my path until now, and, honestly, that seems about the path it should have taken. There's just not enough there to make the effort to actually see it.

Devil in a Blue Dress

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Blu-ray)

Between this and Inside Man, it really feels like we should have had a great Denzel Washington crime franchise well before the (questionably great) Equalizer movies. It's a crying shame, because characters like Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins fit him like a glove: Smart, sardonic, charming but also kind of devious. This one feels like The Big Sleep except that the powerful have no way to dip into the African-American community and thus need to hire an amateur like Easy, who himself pulls in his friend Mouse, which at the time introduced audiences to Don Cheadle, who gives this guy enough charm that you forget he's pretty much a thug.

It makes for pretty good noir, the sort of twisty mystery where the filmmakers (and original author Walter Mosley) sacrifice obviously clever construction for a feeling of even someone like Easy having illusions broken and the feeling of being sucked into a morass with no bottom to be found. It's crisp, looks and sounds good with its period detail, and raises an eyebrow or two as the plot twists into another direction. It's the promise of more of these movies with Washington and Cheadle that had me grinning when I first saw this twenty-odd years ago, though, enough that I kind of hope Mosley has been writing more Easy Rawlins novels in the meantime, and there's a producer who might want to give us a movie where they're older, wiser, and still getting into trouble..

Aquaman

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2018 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)

Write for DC Comics long enough, and you'll eventually be given the job of trying to prove that Aquaman is cool at some point; the most successful attempts have generally done so by taking him and his whole milieu not as a superhero comic, but high fantasy. That's what James Wan and company are going for here, with the extra challenge being that their main character was basically the comic relief in Justice League.

It works more often than it should. Jason Momoa's Arthur is the sort of lunkhead that makes you wonder why he's not the sidekick to Amber Heard's Mera rather than vice versa, but he's likable enough to make it work, and he and Heard make a good team. It amuses me that ultimately, the answer to the question of what he can do that she can't is the thing usually derided as what makes Aquaman lame. The pair are at their best when in Indiana Jones territory, swashbuckling through a pulpy quest rather than getting too deep into politics or trying to be superheroes. Truth be told, you could excise the most traditional supervillain (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's Black Manta) and same him for another movie without a whole lot of trouble, and though Patrick Wilson, Dolph Lundgren, and Willem Dafoe are capable enough, the palace intrigue is mostly good for getting Arthur & Mera to hit the road.

Wan never runs out of entertaining things to throw at the screen, with fighting crab people, a trench in the ocean filled with savage mutants, and Arthur & Mera having to find an ancient tape deck because no current technology can play the old format that have. The film can get downright loopy when filled with IMAX 3D effects, although there's also the likes of Nicole Kidman fully committing herself to the silliest thing she's been a part of in her entire career. If it ever really slowed down, it would probably crash hard, but it doesn't, and while you won't mistake it for even a lesser Marvel movie (well, maybe it's on a par with Thor 2), it's enjoyable-enough entertainment, especially when projected big and in 3D.

"Un Chien Andalou

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, 16mm?)

I know this is beloved and probably important for how it brought surrealism to the screen in the person of Salvador Dali, and, man, I tried to get something out of it, but it just never makes the leap from being grotesque and archly unstuck in time to actually doing something interesting with that, story-wise, but try as I might, my brain refused to spark to this. It's striking to look at, and probably disassembles well enough into good parts, but feels like a building block, with a couple artistes pushing some boundaries so that they've got more room to play in later.

Army of Darkness

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, 35mm)

There was a time when I watched this every couple weeks, back in college and just after, a young dork obsessed with its slapstick absurdity and buffoonish lead performance by Bruce Campbell despite not really having seen the things that it was mashing up. I mostly wait for it to show up on 35mm now, but still genuinely love it today, now that I can see the audacity of taking a horror series and not just turning it comedic but mashing it up with Ray Harryhausen fantasy. It's clearly everything that director Sam Raimi loves, and the movie world could certainly do with him just throwing everything in the blender again.

Given how many people I know had this movie memorized at the time, I'd like to give the audience at the Brattle credit for not making it an annoying quote-along. I've generally been lucky in avoiding those aside from the sci-fi marathon, and I think most theaters do a good job of containing that to specific shows, but the threat is always there, lurking, waiting to ruin everybody else's good time.

Full review at EFC from a while ago

Hung fan kui (Rumble in the Bronx)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, English-dubbed 35mm)

Not technically my first experience with Jackie Chan (I saw one of the Cannonball Run movies at the drive-in as a kid but mainly remembered Jamie Farr from M*A*S*H in it), but as with a lot of folks, this was the first time I saw just how nutty and amazing Hong Kong action could be. I don't know that I recognized it as something fundamentally different than American action movies at the time, but I'm pretty sure that when Hong Kong movies and stars started making their way to American screens after that, I tended to be pretty excited.

Does it hold up? More or less. It's just as cringeworthy and basic writing-wise and in terms of performance as I remembered, and I've got the experience to know that it's not just the dubbing any more. The most remarkable thing about the script, in some ways, is how what could be some really ugly, insensitive material comes back around - the Afro-Chinese wedding becomes really sweet and if Stanley Tong formed his idea of the Bronx more from other movies than experience, at least one of them was The Warriors. The fights and everything else not necessarily top-tier Jackie, but I'd never seen anything like it before, and I'm still kind of astounded by the things he pulls off in even some of his lesser movies. He takes more of a beating than usual here, enough to cut into the acrobatics and slapstick, but the action is solid all around.

And though the finale clearly shows signs of being reconfigured because of Chan's injury, it's also a little bit of everything and escalates impressively. Plus, I do kind of love the cops and every spring character getting together to run "White Tiger" down with the hovercraft for the basic reason of "screw that guy". It is not a thing people would ever do, but I suppose that's part of what made this a great introduction to Jackie Chan: It leaves no doubt that the action and mayhem is the point, and don't worry too much about anything else.

'A' gai wak 2 (Project A II)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, 35mm)

I could not begin to tell you who all the factions are in this movie, and that's got nothing to do with the fact that it's a sequel. Heck, you could argue that the material that is the most obviously held over from the first Project A is the easiest to process, while some of the subplots about rebellion, revolution, and royalty make a n interesting contrast with how that sort of material is handled today When this film was made in 1987 without much expectation of being seen outside Hong Kong and Taiwan, they just assumed the audience knew all this stuff; now that they seek an international audience and it doesn't hurt to frame it in the most patriotic way possible to play China, there's more explanation. Plus, the last act has Jackie and his character Dragon Ma bending over backwards to be apolitical, where he'd now probably wave a flag a bit.

On the other hand, even if I don't understand who all the various groups in opposition to each other are, it makes for a delightful bit of farce when they are all in the same apartment and hiding from each other. Chan and company follow that up with some top-quality slapstick, even before the great big action finale which absolutely earns a spot in this "Keaton-esque" lineup (and not just for the obvious Steamboat Bill, Jr. reference). That's enough for a fun Jackie Chan movie.

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

A three-day workweek here, but you'd never tell. This is why I take full weeks and run off to some other continent; knowing you won't be back to a city for years if ever is good motivation for not just being a bump on a log.



Seriously, what the heck did I do on Monday? I have no idea! I had it off, but the apartment isn't cleaner, there's no ticket, no entry on Letterboxd, no noticeable dent made in the to-read piles. Maybe I cleaned out the DVR some? I guess. I didn't dig into the pile of Blu-rays for The Sleep Curse until the day after I'd gone back to work.

I had ambitions for the weekend, though, getting things started with Mortal Engines in IMAX 3D on Thursday night. It's the sort of thing that you kind of credit to the special effects crew as much as the filmmakers, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the thing I'd wanted to see in that format but missed because work kept me wound up with weird showtimes, so I had to "settle for" Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in RealD. But, since that one is legitimately great, I don't exactly mind.

Saturday wound up being another bump-on-a-log day, although I made some progress on the Twilight Time pile with The Hot Rock, which is, in fact, as good as promised by all the people who brought it up after William Goldman's death.

Sunday wound up being busy with me hitting a bunch of craft-fair type things and really only winding up with some mildly amusing gifts for my brother and his wife in Chicago, and while I'd planned certain things for after, my legs were tired and then it started to rain. We're kind of at the point where "I don't want to stand around outside the theater" starts driving decisions, so I went for a double feature at home of The Flying Machine, a genuine 3D oddity, and Allied, the latter in the hopes of catching up with Robert Zemeckis before his new one this weekend in order to feel better about that. Not the greatest results there, I fear.

Still, you'll probably see Welcome to Marwen on my Letterboxd page at some point over the next week anyway - I can be pretty loyal to people who have made one good movie, after all, and Zemeckis has done far more than that.

Shi Mian (The Sleep Curse)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

There's something weirdly admirable in this gross little horror movie coming out one month after big action movie Shock Wave and one before romance 77 Heartbreaks, with Hong Kong workhorse Herman Yau directing (and Erica Li Man writing) all of them. Add that to the sheer scale of star Anthony Wong's credits, and that is some crazy studio system guys making movies like it's a clock-punching job in a way that you don't often see anywhere else.

That may not be the best way to make every movie worthwhile, obviously, and this one shambles forward in kind of dull fashion. Wong plays a dual role - a sleep researcher in 1990 and his grandfather during World War II - but there's seldom the sense that the two are connected, and when insomnia turns to mania for both, it doesn't really feel like either has cracked, just that the story's reached a place where there's violence. In the later time period, the story struggles to connect Wong's and Jojo Goh's characters, which is shame they've got some chemistry and having them clearly know and care about and defy their ancestors' connection would make it more dramatic.

The filmmakers know what some folks come to a Category III horror movie for, though, and don't mess around in the last act, which is bloody and ruthless and gets the job done if you've come for blood, guts, and revenge. It's more than you might expect to see on-screen in a movie from people who don't necessarily need to go to the grindhouse, although it's not quite fun. It's random and awful enough to not really be great storytelling, but that does make it genuinely horrific rather than something to make gorehounds smile, and if you value the latter more than the former in this sort of movie, you won't come away disappointed.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2018 in AMC Assembly Row #4 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

It seems like only a few months ago that people were roundly mocking Sony/Columbia continuing the try and make Spider-Man-related movies despite Marvel having pulled the main character into the Avengers franchise, where conventional wisdom said he belonged. Then Venom came out and was a surprising hit, and then Into the Spider-Verse, which seemed like it would be an interesting but niche production due to it being animated and full of relatively obscure pieces of Spidey lore, instead turns out to be a fantastic Christmas present for audiences who might not have thought 2018's sixth movie with a Marvel logo could offer something new.

But it turns out terrific, in large part because they knowingly embrace what wound up being the theme of Brian Michael Bendis's and Dan Slott's recent long runs on the Spider-Man comics: That Spidey is for and about everyone, and all the repetitions and variations on the classic origin reinforce this while also playing like great recurring jokes also filled with nifty Easter Eggs for comic book fans. The whole movie is like that, simultaneously exciting, sincere, and funny, making a virtue of familiarity but also of coming at super-hero action and angst from what seems like new directions.

Plus, it's incredibly gorgeous, a 3D animated movie that looks like almost nothing else that came before it even before branching out into a new animation style every time a new Spider-person and universe is introduced. It's got the realistic movement of motion capture without the stiffness, and the whole thing becomes lighter-than-air in a way that lets the larger-than-life action of the last act be impossible but also perfect. It embraces comic book visuals not out of camp but out of love, a knowledge that these characters and that medium were made for each other, and that live-action versions often have to take the long way around to get to what comics do naturally.

Plus, some of the voices are terrific. Nicolas Cage is perfect as Spider-Man Noir, enough to make me want more despite knowing the movie only needed this much ("I like egg creams..."), Lily Tomlin is the Alfred-esque Aunt May I never knew we needed ("oh, great, it's Liv"), and Shameik Moore is especially great as Miles, giving him a kid's confidence and shame even when the animators are emphasizing the other half of the character.

The movie does darn near everything right, maybe getting a small ding for being perhaps just a bit too long (or maybe that was just the soda I had earlier). Still, I hope Sony is diving into a sequel right away, because there are a lot of other Spider-guys I want to see mix it up with Miles, Gwen, the Peters, and company.

The Hot Rock

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Blu-ray)

Maybe it's not quite a fortuitous coincidence that this was mentioned in many places as a highlight of screenwriter William Goldman's career at roughly the same time that Twilight Time was having a sale that included it, but sometimes it takes two prompts rather than just one to actually get you to go for something specific. There's just too many movies out there!

You can see where this gets its good reputation early; Goldman is adapting Donald Westlake, and the banter is as good as you'd expect from that combination. They give director Peter Yates a heist story that is seemingly small to start with but is able to just keep going, getting kind of out of hand and destructive without ever making a quantum leap to the scale where it's too big an action/adventure. The actual final go at it seems like a bit of a cheat - if they can do that, it seems like they should have had an easier time before - but also kind of nervy in the execution, a fun choice to go small after the rest of the movie had more explosions than one might have expected..

There's also a really fun cast, starting off with Robert Redford and George Segal as friends, brothers-in-law, and reluctant partners; they have neat chemistry as a pair who like each other despite sometimes finding the other irritating (side note: I'm kind of surprised Topo Swope would wind up finding more luck as an agent than actress; she's cute and appealing as the "Sis" connecting those two). It keeps going, though - Paul Sand and Ron Leibman are just what this heist needs as the rest of the gang, minor but still important and entertaining, with Zero Mostel a good late addition. Still, it's Moses Gunn as the diplomat alternately frustrated and kind of tickled to be dealing with these lowlifes that walks off with every scene he's in - which is a pretty good result, if you think of it, considering that it's a movie full of thieves.

The Flying Machine

* * ¼ (out of four) as a whole
* * * ¼ (out of four) for "The Magic Piano"
Seen 16 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, 3D Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I am not sure that I have ever seen an actor more apparently confused by their own presence in a movie than Heather Graham in The Flying Machine, but I can't exactly blame her; it is basically 47 minutes wrapped around a truly fantastic 30-minute short film, not quite the bare minimum necessary to get "The Magic Piano" booked in theaters capable of showing it in 3D, but certainly not far from it, and her parts are basically the padding. I kind of admire the ingenuity there, and there's some effort to make the framing bit look nifty, but I did wish they'd made a story worth watching out of that.

"The Magic Piano", you see, is pretty great - fantastic stop motion animation with Lang Lang playing the works of Chopin as the score, shot and rendered in 3D in a way that pops especially well after the feature's opening shots are a bit underwhelming, cinematographically-speaking. It's a sweet, charming little story, too, effortlessly following Chopin's life but also working as the tale of a girl who misses her father who has had to go work abroad. I genuinely envied the audience of the feature that got to see it on its own, with Lang playing live. It's a fine piece that maybe wouldn't have been award-worthy, but would have impressed on the festival circuit, and I can't fault the producers for trying to figure out a way to get it in front of audiences.

It's a shame that the movie they built around it is dull, retracing the short's steps, building a very familiar story around a workaholic mother barely paying attention to her kids as she tirelessly works to provide for them (but has more in common with her daughter than the younger girl might realize). Even for something meant to be daydream-like, what's going on doesn't make sense from one scene to the next, is educational in the most blandly fact-reciting way, and has visual effects that, while rendered nicely in 3D and drawing upon John Constable paintings as backgrounds, can't help but compare poorly to what was in "The Magic Piano" (although an animated sequence by Loving Vincent's Dorota Kobiela is charming in its own way). Graham kind of manages to claw her way to something okay when the producers give her something worth doing, but can't elevate weaker material - kind of her whole career, I guess - while Lang Lang seems like he'd come off as kind of impish and eccentric even without Benedict Wong dubbing his voice.

It's a wrapper that brings the average score of the movie down, and from what I can tell, this never played theaters in the US anyway. But the good news is that the Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray looks pretty good, and I'm under no obligation to watch the rest of the feature should I want to see/show "The Flying Piano" again.

Allied

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Allied is beautifully mounted but ultimately kind of boring. The film takes an hour to get to the main story, but in that first half, the filmmakers don't do enough to establish this as a great romance or a thriller that could have multiple layers to it. It leaves the rest feeling like Brat Pitt's character is running around out of some obligation to the script, not because he has to figure it out what is going on or go mad and to hell with the folks who might get hurt in between.

We know how this will play out, of course - it's too slick and prestigious a thriller for an adult audience to go any other way but the one which will have Brad Pitt slowly tying himself in knots and Marion Cotillard having a great Acting moment or two after being just kind of there for the past forty-five minutes. It's the curse of the hard split between mainstream entertainment and award-quality pictures that exists today; the latter has become as predictable and rote as genre films are expected to be, even though their audience can presumably see the patterns just as well or better.

It's glossy as heck - the big action scene that caps the first half is terrific, and the air raid during a party is an incredible demonstration of how life in wartime goes on and is incredibly warped. There really aren't many people out there better at getting something from his head to the screen than Robert Zemeckis; he just didn't have much interesting to show this time around.

This Week in Tickets: 3 December 2018 - 9 December 2018

I had use-it-or-lose it vacation time, so I took Friday off, but you'd never be able to tell.



The Brattle and Harvard archaeology departments don't necessarily show Raiders of the Lost Ark absolutely every fall, but it can seem like they do, and why not? I'm actually kind of mildly surprised it was just the one show; it was a packed house and I know people got turned away on Friday because Fandango had it listed then for some unknown reason. Anyway, they show it often enough that I'm not quite sure why I have it on disc, aside from it being in a box set.

I came down with something right around then, so I didn't really feel up to getting out to Kendall for the last local screenings of A Private War (that I know of; I'm kind of hoping it may pop up in Lexington or as part of next year's Bright Lights or something). Had me not really wanting to leave the house beyond doing laundry on Friday, so I drilled down the DVR a while before starting to work on the latest batch of Blu-rays, this one from Twilight Time, starting in on the pile with Don't Bother to Knock, a weird Marilyn Monroe thriller from before when she really became Marilyn Monroe, if you get my meaning.

Same kind of went for the next day, though I opted for the 3D disc in the package, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, which being just 5 years old is an odd choice for that distributor, but hey, it's only 2D and apparently dubbed on Amazon Prime Video. Not great. I went with my other unwatched Twilight Time 3D disc, Gun Fury after that. A better movie, although the dialogue being in English made the fact that 3D Blu-rays are especially prone to getting the audio sync messed up particularly annoying; I kept trying to adjust but never quite getting it. I'm wondering if maybe having one wire going to the TV and one to the receiver is the issue, and maybe a new receiver would do it. Don't really feel the need to upgrade, though.

Sunday, I got out, trying to do some Christmas shopping, and, folks, the holiday craft fair scene seems really slow this year. Also, I'm beginning to suspect that one of the holes in my comic collection (Spider-Gwen #34) never actually came out. Got me to the Coolidge in plenty of time for The Favourite, which I'd hoped would be more fun than it turned out to be. Left me kind of disappointed, enough that instead of going straight home, I stopped at Boston Common for Anna and the Apocalypse, which I think I might have liked even more than when I saw it at Fantasia - or at least, it didn't suffer for being seen with a different, smaller audience.

Anyway, follow the Letterboxd page if you want; that's where most of this page's entries came from..

Raiders of the Lost Ark

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (special presentation, 35mm)

Usually I don't have a lot new to say about this movie, but I'll confess something that makes me feel pretty stupid: I hadn't realized that Belloq was taking the position of the rabbi in the climactic sequence, which is kind of ridiculous on my part, but now I'm wondering just exactly which shade of twisted Spielberg/Lucas/Kasdan were going for: Is Belloq Jewish and so obsessed he's willing to work with Nazis or just so megalomaniacal and certain of how he deserves the contents of the Ark? Either way, even better villain that I thought, and I've thought he was a great villain for a long time.

Nice print, at least, although it kind of looks like it's from a restoration that's been inside of a computer.

Full review at EFC from 2013

Don't Bother to Knock

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Blu-ray)

I'm not sure whether Don't Bother to Knock uses Marilyn Monroe's breathy, seductive innocence poorly or if it's just odd to see her in something like a dramatic role, but it's kind of rough going at times; she was a better actress than she appeared but even someone genuinely great might have trouble navigating the space between lurid and sympathetic that this reluctant babysitter requires. She's okay and maybe a bit better, but caught in the middle of a movie that requires something genuinely great or something totally deranged. The latter would be a terrible movie, but a more memorable one.

This actual movie is kind of a well-cast B-movie; besides Monroe, it's got Richard Widmark, Anne Bancroft, and Elisha Cook Jr., all turning in solid-enough performances (although Bancroft's singing being dubbed drove me nuts as my BD player can have lip-sync issues at the best of times), at the very least good enough to provoke reactions. Though broad and simple, Cook's well-meaning obliviousness to his niece's issues, Widmark's growing conscience, and Bancroft's genuine reactions to the man he is at the start and end of the movie all click. Smaller parts are iffier, but mostly need to be functional anyway.

It's the plot that lets things down a bit; it plays like someone intended to make a pulpy thriller about a crazy woman and then found themselves sympathetic to what Monroe's Nell had gone through. It makes the whole thing feel muted but not exactly serious, trapping the film somewhere between thriller and drama.

Kyaputen Hârokku (Space Pirate Captain Harlock)

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, 3D Blu-ray)

So this is what it looks like when manga adaptations go full CGI - a world filled with characters that don't have the expressiveness either freehand drawing or live action can bring except in the most deliberate, mannered way, and the original manga-ka's style gets lost in a mess of photorealism and rigid scaling, everything just a little bit off from pacing to design. It's a high price to pay for some admittedly spiffy 3D space battles and action.

Maybe if I were a fan of some previous version, this would work better; it's the sort of adaptation that throws a whole lot of exposition at the audience and has room for multiple Biggest Weapons Ever that the manga would have spent months building to. Still, it also spends a lot of time telling the audience that Captain Harlock is amazing but spending a lot more time with other characters until the end, when it finally gives Harlock some backstory. The movie never really develops a rhythm, getting bigger and bigger until the sheer size is meaningless, scaling up another piece of melodrama to match but making it look foolish as a result.

The movie admittedly often looks great - the skull-festooned everything may be more kewl than cool, but there's something about the way Harlock's ship Arcadia just bashes its way through things that almost gives it some personality. The action is creatively conceived and lovingly rendered in 3D, although the relative realism of the rendering makes the violence a bit harder to swallow. It's the sort of space opera that can feel pretty nihilistic as the sheer scale of the carnage sinks in, and the lack of a hero who actually abhors the violence itself doesn't give the audience an outlet.

I still kind of wish I'd had a chance to see this in 3D on a big screen; I bet it looked amazing. It still wouldn't have been an actual good movie, but a Fantasia or other otaku crowd getting into it sure would have made the experience more fun than watching it at home.

Gun Fury

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, 3D Blu-ray)

3D westerns from the 1950s are a ton of fun to watch; there's a ViewMaster-like look to the lay of the land with bits of scrub popping out randomly, and foregrounded bits that seem like they must have been composited in, except it's 1953 and doing that in 3D would have been a nightmare, so, yeah, they just shot to have extreme foregrounding happen. Directors have fun breaking the pane of the screen with guns, throwing things at the camera, or placing the audience right behind a team of horses going over uneven ground. It's simultaneously very traditional and very showy.

The glee in shooting a movie like this is most of what makes Gun Fury kind of nifty now that it's old enough to collect social security checks; it's otherwise kind of a basic revenge story about a bland rancher (Rock Hudson) trying to rescue his pleasant-enough fiancee (Donna Reed) from an "unreconstructed Confederate" bandit (Phil Carey). The film refers to the Civil War in various platitudes that tend toward the noble lost cause, which is too bad - both in and of itself and because there's something in the hollow gentility that Carey gives his villain that seems like it could get more interesting as their paths cross with Mexicans and Indians (including Thurman Lee Haas aka Pat Hogan, who is uncredited despite having a pretty important role). America wasn't really confronting that part of its history in popcorn films at the time, so what could have made Slayton one of the great villains just makes him generic.

The script tends to unravel as the film goes along; the writers have a knack for finding interesting situations but not milking them before getting to the next bit of action or obvious hammering on the theme. It is kind of fun to see Lee Marvin show up in a minor role - he's not a star yet, but you can sort of see the fully-formed persona even in a bit role that will let him become one.

The Favourite

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2018 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

I'm not sure whether this is better than expected because I generally wind up disliking Yorgos Lanthimos on balance or worse than expected because the trailers were entertaining and they suggested a more entertaining movie. It looks like the guys editing the previews condensed all of the enjoyable black comedy into three minutes and the rest was less fun.

And, sure, maybe "fun" is the wrong thing to expect from a Lanthimos movie about these particular figures, but someone is amplifying the absurdity, but it often seems like Lanthimos and writers Deborah Davis & Tony McNamara are less trying for laughs than smirks, and that leaves everything too abstract. There's a good story in here about Emma Stone's Abigail shedding a skin of innocence and kindness (whether real or performed) to get to where she feels safe and powerful, and one about a queen who is probably a good person beneath the royal isolation, privilege, and ill health (I don't remember if the British royal family was inbred to Hapsburgian levels at this period, but the aristocracy is often shown as freaky-enough-looking to suggest it), and maybe even one for Rachel Weisz's Sarah, but she's the key to what makes this movie kind of pointlessly cruel: Nobody believes in anything for any particular reason beyond power, and while there's intrigue in watching these women maneuver and some illicit delight in bad behavior where one might expect propriety, it's eventually hollow.

The Favourite winds up feeling like someone went in mistaking cruelty for depth, sarcasm for subversion, and fisheye lenses for being visually interesting. It's the sort of movie that feels clever because we often confuse being cynical for being perceptive (as can all too often be the case), but is blandly assuming the worst and showing it with flagrant detachment a useful way to talk about things? I'm not sure what point it makes other than that the person doing so considers themselves above something.

(As a personally annoying aside, consider the end credits. Yes, they look very much like how something would have been printed in the seventeenth century, but they're hard to read, a case of filmmakers prioritizing showing off over actual communication. I was kind of afraid I wouldn't see whether the harpsicord version of "Skyline Pigeon" was Elton John or a cover amid the excessive style, and what's the point of that?)

Anna and the Apocalypse

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2018 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

After The Favourite, which was less engaging than it seemed like it should be, I felt like this would make a good chaser, because it seems to be the opposite: Something that could have been cynical and self-aware in an obnoxious way but which instead manages to be sincere and earnestly entertaining. I think I may have liked it a bit better the second time around, outside the festival environment. It's an odd thing - sometimes seeing something like this with a bunch of other genre fans and a young, self-deprecating director geeking out while he does the Q&A can make you think of it as a small film that gets a lot out of a little, but seeing it in your local multiplex with a more conventional crowd can highlight that, hey, this is also pretty slick and professionally done.

It's a genuinely good movie, and I kind of hope it finds an audience. It probably got all the release it could expect, but I think folks would go for it if it was a bit higher profile.

Full review at EFC from Fantasia

This Week in Tickets: 26 November 2018 - 2 December 2018

The theme for this week: Use the chance to see something in theaters wisely.



What that means is that when The Great Buddha+ shows up on the Harvard Film Archive's schedule after you've been seeing the distributor tweet it up for a year (though somehow never registering that it's on Amazon to rent), you go for it. Maybe you don't love it, but it's still big-screen worthy.

Similarly, when you see that the new animated film by Mamoru Hosoda is only scheduled for a day here and there, you book tickets for Mirai a week in advance and then tell other people reading your blog about it. Hosoda is a pretty reliable guy, and he's made another pretty darn good animated film about youth and family, and I'm a bit surprised the distributors aren't giving him a bigger push beyond anime fans here. Much like Mary and the Witch's Flower at the start of the year, this feels like something that could have done okay alternating dubbed and subtitled shows at Kendall Square (as some GKids productions have), or even cracked the regular lineup at Boston Common (as happened with The Boy and the Beast, Your Name, and A Silent Voice.

That was Thursday; Friday was the first night of Prospect at the Brattle. That sci-fi western turned out a whole lot better than I'd expected, although it turned out my expectations were low, as I'd seen and like the original short film version four years ago but not connected it with the new trailer.

Saturday I got up relatively early for 2.0, anticipating a big crowd for the Enthiran sequel, and wanting to see it in Tamil, the language it was filmed in, and 3D, which I just like though it turns out that it was captured that way. It wasn't the complete "what the heck is going on up on screen and why is the audience going so nuts for it?" experience of the first, but, honestly, what can compare to going to Enthiran and not knowing that Rajinikanth is a whole thing? Sadly, there wasn't quite the same dedicated fanbase for Me Dong-seok aka Don Lee when I saw Unstoppable that evening, with just a handful of us in the theater. Too bad, because it's a good, if modest, dumb action movie.

There were plans for Sunday, but it rained, and after coming back from the grocery store, I wasn't really in a mood to turn around and go back out. So I decided to shrink the pile from my last delivery of movies a bit and watch the UltraHD Blu-ray of Helios. Not a particularly great thriller, but serviceable, and the 4K transfer looked fantastic, like "why isn't everything released on this because now regular HD is ruined for the next few days" great. I don't actually use the 4K abilities of the player and TV that often, since I mostly watch new stuff and most of the high-res discs I get are stuff I've seen in the theater. I do kind of wonder why more people aren't releasing these - Hong Kong seems to lag a couple months behind the Blu-ray release (frustrating!), and the guys who make specialty discs are relatively slow to embrace it, aside from Lionsgate figuring that there might be another fifty bucks to squeeze out of those of us who keep buying the Evil Dead movies. Still, after having seen some of the limits of 2K projection with Mirai a few days before, it was cool to see just how good something can look.

Not sure what will go my Letterboxd page today, but keep watching it for blog previews.

Helios

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Hong Kong 4K Blu-ray)

Helios is a slick, well-staged thriller that ultimately winds up being completely inconsequential. Sure, some characters don't make it to the end and Hong Kong doesn't get obliterated, but there are at best momentary thrills. It shows us a shadowy world of arms dealers and capable agents, but there's no larger tension, just people playing a fast-paced game of chess, and where you can pick the double agent out not because he actually makes sense but because (he does not!) but because he keeps showing up despite having nothing to do.

Maybe it plays differently in Hong Kong, where this sort of nuclear thriller can be especially high-stakes because something as powerful and portable as the DC-8 that serves as the film's Macguffin could basically erase what they consider to be their entire country on the one hand while on the other they are feeling the pinch as China uses them for their own purposes. It's interesting and maybe telling that much of the movie and especially the finale seems to show the HK-based police seeing their South Korean counterparts as friends and allies but look at the representative from Beijing with suspicion (kudos to Wang Xueqi, who makes Song An professional, sincere, and just a smidge arrogant in how he's always considering the bigger picture).

Still, for all that this movie is a bunch of very serious people in suits (and slightly more colorful villains) striding purposefully, it can work pretty well in the moment. It is that sort of urgent, cut to feel like it's laser-focused with no wasted moments and shot with a steely color palette, making fine use of drone cams to get into the canyons of Hong Kong's streets, giving a great view of the action. And, as in the filmmakers' Cold War movies, the action is top notch, with a fight scene between Nick Cheung Ka-fai and Janice Man Wing-san a particularly terrific example (also, the ladies don't ever fight each other).

I've read somewhere that there's a sequel in development, and maybe that will give it more resolution - although given that the filmmakers have done Cold War 2 and are supposedly working on Cold War 3 before Helios 2, I wonder if that's a little white lie they told their Chinese investors to be able to leave things more open-ended than usual. Without something like that, it's kind of like the recent Jack Ryan series - well-made, never actually boring, but also not leaving you with hair standing on end when it's done.

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai)

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

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

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

What I wrote back in March 2014

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFilmCritic (from 2010)

Kumonosu-jô (Throne of Blood)

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

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

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

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

This Week in Tickets: 12 November 2018 - 18 November 2018

Some good stuff this week, but the one that made my phone blow up was the one I reviewed at Fantasia. Aidan Turner has some fans who will retweet the heck out of people who tweet that review you wrote.



I started the week off with Intimate Strangers, which had me mildly curious and wasn't scheduled to play any more evening shows after that, because the Korean dark comedy is the thing that goes when a theater needs extra screens for previews and special presentations and the like. It's pretty good, although I am absolutely considering the "remake review" when the Mexican version comes out in January.

The next day was my first Bollywood movie a while, Thugs of Hindostan, which is not great, but it's got the basic swashbuckling stuff down. Barely got there in time, though, because the show started at 6:30pm rather than the 6:45pm I expected. Good news when settling in for a three-hour movie. I am starting to wonder why the Fresh Pond plaza guys don't put a real set of steps on the landscaping that even Google maps tells you to cut across, though - someone will eventually get hurt.

Worked a bit late on Wednesday so I could cut out early on Thursday and catch the last screening of The Old Man and the Gun at the Capitol, with just one late show left at the Kendall that night. Really waited until the last minute on that one, which is a shame. It did make for a pretty perfect double feature with The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, which I was presented by Imagine Magazine, and they had some seats roped off, enough to send me to the balcony. Still a better view than I had in Montreal, though.

The most convenient thing on Friday evening was A Cool Fish, which has a few really nifty pieces that could fit together much better. Saturday's movie would be Burning, which is terrific, although I was taken a bit aback that MoviePass didn't work at Kendall Square that day. If it's no longer working at Landmark, I'm not sure I see the point of it anymore. It being a long movie, it didn't sync up with much else, so I made another dent in my last shipment of discs from Hong Kong with City on Fire. Grindhouse as heck.

I probably should have done laundry on Sunday morning, but instead headed out for Widows and then, for the second Sunday in a row, to Waltham for a Netflix movie, because that's good enough to say you're playing the Boston market. Sad, really, just a half-dozen or so of us in the theater, laughing like crazy at The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It's too good for Netflix to make it hard to see with an audience, honestly.

What'll be on my Letterboxd page this week? Who knows, considering there's family to visit for Thanksgiving and Park Chan-wook directing a three-night miniseries.

The Old Man & the Gun

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 November 2018 in Capitol Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)

Robert Redford has backtracked a bit on this being his last film, and it's natural to be of two minds on that: No film is going to put a better cap on his career even as it says to live your life doing what you know and love.

Redford is a delight, of course, the head of a cast of folks from Casey Affleck to Sissy Spacek all slotted into parts where they can do what they do best. There's a sort of joy to Redford's lifelong bank robber Forrest Tucker, who's got one toe over the line where devil-may-care maybe becomes a little dangerous that blends well with Spacek's basic good cheer and offsets Affleck's hangdog uncertainty just enough to bring them all into sharp focus. They get to stretch a bit as the film nears its end, just enough to stay true to their characters' selves while still showing what this pursuit has given them.

Filmmaker David Lowery tells the story in simple, relaxed fashion; it's never rushed but a lot happens in 93 minutes, while also leaving plenty of room for when little is happening and you can just watch these people. It's beautiful to look at, expertly recalling the films of Redford's prime without feeling like a pastiche and getting maximum mileage out of the cast's often craggy faces. Lowery also captures a lot of important details that ring true, like the way folks look askance at the white detective's black wife and kids (and how that family obviously adores each other), or how, even as people are charmed by this elderly stickup artist and put the best face on it afterward, they're clearly scared in the moment. Those moments tip the film just far enough from nostalgia when it counts that Lowery can indulge a bit later.

Above all else, this is a movie that puts a smile on one's face. It's small, it maybe won't receive awards because it doesn't necessarily challenge its cast, it maybe false-ends once or twice too often. But it's a delight, and if it's the last we see of Robert Redford, he left the stage reminding us why we like Robert Redford.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 November 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Imagine Presents, DCP)

On a second viewing, I find myself a little more impressed by the sheer audacious oddness of this movie's makers in taking a pulpy premise and spending a lot of time pulling back and not necessarily using the crazy bits to stint on how people react to them. The film maybe doesn't have quite so much of the high adventure as I remember - the first time through, I got caught up in them, with the second time finding me examining details a bit more - but it holds up.

Mostly, though, I love Sam Elliott playing this thing straight as an arrow, even when in the moment when the movie gets a big laugh from him not believing that the government wants him to kill Bigfoot and the Canadian envoy isn't quite processing his WWII adventures. It's a wink that feels genuine even without the audience watching.

Full review at EFilmCritic (from Fantasia)

Lung foo fung wan (City on Fire)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 November 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

It's been a while since I last watched City on Fire, if indeed it's one of the movies I watched when Hong Kong cinema was in vogue and repertory series were appearing on a regular basis, and it's easy to forget sometimes just what a shoestring these movies were made on back in the eighties, cranked out quickly and not really expected to last. It is one of many undercover cop films that came out around that time, and looks a bit rough when you consider what John Woo, Andrew Lau, and Johnnie To would do later, after having had what Ringo Lam does here as a model.

Even if he's building a prototype, though, Lam's still building something remarkably efficient and comfortable, showing what a difficult job the police have in getting cooperation from the public to make a dent in crime and making it feel like an ongoing issue without the detectives explaining it to some rookie and otherwise trusting the audience to know this song's rhythm and recognize when it's done well. Chow Yun-fat is maybe not best served when his character being kind of a lousy boyfriend/fiance is used for comic relief, but he's quietly terrific as he makes his guilt over that part of the character, highlighting how much his loyalty can serve as an anchor in the job he is unfortunately good at.

Of course, what arguably really sets this apart is that Ringo Lam is really good at violence: As much as the opening murder of an undercover detective is effectively nasty, it's a heist that goes from professional to excessive that really opens one's eyes. It's big and bloody and stops being entertaining just long enough to highlight its cruelty. Lam never really lets his audience purely enjoy the action as a welcome release - it's thrilling but has ugly consequences, right down to the orgiastic hail of bullets that finishes things off reminding the audience that excessive force in the hands of people who aren't professional has consequences just as destructive as the criminals. The bit after that is insanely 1980s and goofy, from the saxophone solo with the unambiguous lyrics to the contrast between goofy cheer and grim death, but it works, and makes it clear that Lam does, in fact, have a bit of a point to make behind the cops-and-robbers stuff.

Widows

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 November 2018 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)

I'm not sure how much of what makes Widows great (and, admittedly, is the source of the odd weakness) comes from it having been adapted from a TV show, but that DNA seems important. The movie is full of interesting tangents while never feeling like it's got a wasted moment, as if writer/director Steve McQueen wouldn't allow himself to actually dispense with any subplot in the name of simplifying the story but instead boiled them down to just what the movie needed to not have anything left out.

So maybe you could have a little more of Viola Davis actually acting as a mastermind, but the audience instead gets to get a sense of her from how she treats people and how she professes unawareness of her late husband's business; it's the kind of great performance that doesn't have an obvious clip to pull out for an awards show. She's matched and complemented by Elizabeth Debicki, who never quite loses her willowy uncertainty but gains an impressive confidence anyway. And maybe you can excise Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell as the last couple generations of a political dynasty, but why would you do without Duvall in any situation, even if Farrell's smarmy, Mitt Romney-looking son was not most likely the best thing he's ever done with an American accent. Or Daniel Kaluuya as a stone-cold monster that makes Brian Tyree Henry look almost likable as his corrupt, opportunistic brother?

Everyone involved is good enough and has enough going on that it's impressive just how much this movie sings even with relatively little actual heist action, although the finale is, in fact, pretty terrific. McQueen has given the audience just enough prep to follow along but also keeps it from being particularly mechanical, both because he wants it to be about the ladies running the job and because by that point we don't really love the idea of success meaning that they successfully followed a plan that a man drew up. The movie pivots, smartly and fairly, from its ensemble to give Davis the climax, and it earns the heck out of the applause that the audience gives it.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 November 2018 in Landmark Embassy#3 (first-run, DCP)

It ticks me off that I'm not going to be able to add this to my Coen Brothers collection, and that it may not be easy to book for repertory theaters in the future, but Netflix did pay for this, and that does count for something.

The movie starts with one of the funniest things I've seen in a while - Tim Blake Nelson as a singing cowboy gunslinger who hates his violent reputation but doesn't exactly shrink away from finding situations where he can draw down on someone, and it is fantastic black comedy with a moment which rivals the not-an-inhaler bit from Intolerable Cruelty in terms of violent, hilariously terrible slapstick. The next segment is a similar sort of black comedy, but soon the film moves to darker, subtler sorts of humor. Even in the most serious, dark segments of this anthology picture, there's a sense of absurdity that this beautiful country is filled with such violence.

The Coens take to the omnibus format well, telling nifty little stories which have some depth but also great punchlines. Half of the six are excellent, but the other half are very good indeed, and that's a heck of a track record.