This Week In Tickets: 25 October 2010 to 31 October 2010

A little slow this week - the World Series started Wednesday, and though it was a pretty short one, it occupied a few evenings. And while I'm not sure that Fox pushed the schedule around so that it wouldn't interfere with Glee (how is it fair or right that I don't get to see Fringe for a couple of weeks, but that thing continues uninterrupted?), it certainly seems that way. Still, good series, and my friend who roots for the Giants is probably still on cloud nine.



Stubless: Trick 'r Treat (31 October 2010, about 6:30pm)

Nothing really big-time this week - one movie I didn't really feel like talking about, one I wanted to talk about a lot, and one I went to in part because I figured few in the mainstream American blogosphere would be covering it (laugh all you want, but Endhiran drove people to this blog like crazy, relatively speaking). It's starting to get to be time to really pay attention to the multiplexes again - I really should get around to The Social Network and Hereafter while they're still playing theaters and the crush of other stuff isn't too heavy.

The one I felt talking about, Never Let Me Go, is in part because of something that gets under my skin more than it should: Nearly every write-up or review I've seen has said, more or less, to not worry about the science-fictional aspects of it, or used a euphemism like "speculative fiction", or, the one that really gets my goat, used some variation of "it transcends/is more than science fiction."

Look, I'll be the first to admit that there's a reason Sturgeon's Law was first applied to science fiction: 90% of it is crud. But, some of the other ten percent is like Never Let Me Go, fantastic. And for good science fiction to be taken seriously, it needs to stake a claim to things like this. Sure, the movie's trailer may have tried to downplay the science fictional aspects, but it was still pretty obviously a movie about clone kids created as raw materials for organ transplants (an art-house version of The Island, if you want to be sarcastic about it). Sci-fi fans should step forward and own that.

Or maybe it wasn't so obvious - before the screening, one of the trailers was for Monsters, an independent film which wears its genre trappings on its sleeve. It got a couple snickers from the audience, although it may just have been at the incongruity of one of the quotes being Ain't It Cool with "The greatest giant monster movie in years", or something like that. Still, I hear that, and I do have to wonder whether that person knows that they were settling in for science fiction themselves.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)

It's no fun reviewing Woody Allen movies any more, even on the odd occasion when it's actually rewarding to watch them. About ten years ago, with Small Time Crooks, I found myself disliking the quite pessimistic take he seemed to have on life; the end result of the movie seemed to be the universe smacking characters down for any sort of ambition. Not just the characters plotting a robbery, but any attempt to rise above one's station would be punished. And every film of his to come out in the past decade seems to conform to this, though I haven't seen Scoop or Whatever Works. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is not the film which breaks the streak.

It is, however, unusually frustrating, in that it's pretty darn inert. There's not really a story for the quality ensemble to act out, just parallel situations of temptation that ultimately leads to destruction. Random, chaotic destruction, rather than smiting directly connected to ambition, but make no mistake - happiness will only come as the result of self-delusion.

Still, there are worthwhile moments. The awkward last scene between Naomi Watts and Antonio Banderas, for instance, as she tries to act on her attraction when they both know it's too late, even though she knows it's the first moment when she feels she can, while he just won't rise to it. That's a brief moment of quiet, almost beautiful tragedy, one of the few that stands out among the uninteresting selfishness and delusion that the movie otherwise settles for.

Never Let Me Go

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)

Never Let Me Go is the sort of science fiction that tends to hide its genre or go by another name - "speculative fiction" or "slipstream" - because it wants to associate itself with a different audience. Science fiction is considered to be stories about gadgets and things, while this work is about people, and relationships, and ideas. It's a false distinction, but even if one buys into it, all of the best science fiction has been about ideas, and this one is about people treated as things.

In its world, organ transplants became much safer much earlier, and cloning was apparently mastered not long after Crick and Watson discovered the double helix. Thus, by the late 1970s, Britain's National Donor Program has facilities of various types scattered around the country. Hailsham looks like a boarding school, but its charges have no parents to go home to. Three children on the cusp of adolescence are brought into focus: Tommy (Charlie Rove), a volatile but sensitive boy; Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small), a curious young girl who finds herself attracted to him; and Ruth (Elle Purnell), her best friend. It's Tommy and Ruth who eventually pair off, though, and as they grow up and are moved to "The Cottages" to await their first "treatments", Kathy (now played by Carey Mulligan) opts to train as a "Carer". The three go their separate ways, until Kathy meets Ruth (Keira Knightley), who suggests they reunite with Tommy (Andrew Garfield) while they can.

Director Mark Romanek, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and screenwriter Alex Garland set the story in an alternate history rather than the future, and the speculative elements are all the chillier for it. A potential future, after all, is something that we can avoid; this world is so familiar that it feels like the way that the twentieth century would have inevitably run with those key differences in medical science. The world-building is deceptively meticulous - we hear little technical jargon and few details that the audience could trip on, but the details of the clones' lives at Hailsham and after always ring true. They cheat a little, perhaps, by having characters take note of their unusual psychology, but they also sneak things in that show that the world isn't standing still, and as horrible as the idea of Hailsham is, the setting implies things that are even worse.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Trick 'r Treat

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Halloween! blu-ray)

How, I wonder, does Trick 'r Treat not get actual theatrical distribution? It's got a couple of of notable production companies behind it (Legendary Pictures and Bryan Singer's Bad Hat Harry). It's got some reasonably recognizable faces for the trailer. The effects are slick. It markets itself as a Halloween movie, a more fun alternative to the annual Saw release. Is there really no room for a horror-comedy more interested in freak-outs than gross-outs?

That's not to say the movie is perfect, although of the four or five interconnected stories, only one - a serial killer with a really annoying kid - falls flat, and that one at least gives Dylan Baker a good, nasty-funny role. Similarly, there's a fairly notable lapse in logic to the young t(w)eens collecting pumpkins and going to a haunted quarry, but the atmosphere is more than good enough to cover it. And there's nothing wrong with Brian Cox under siege from a demonic trick-or-treater and Anna Paquin as a college girl put upon by her more experienced sister and friends.

For any faults it has, though, it's a fun ride. Writer/director Michael Dougherty is good at tingling the spine; the expectation of what may happen next is built up very well. He's also good at having the humor come from the characters as opposed to making fun of the genre. He takes his scares seriously, but populates the stories with funny people.

This Week In Tickets: 4 October 2010 to 10 October 2010

A busy week (especially when you consider that Sunday was blocked out for my niece's birthday cook-out), including some rare full-priced tickets!



Stubless: The first three Resident Evil movies on Blu-ray.

Sometimes a marathon day seems like a good idea. Knowing that dong any movies Sunday would be out of the question, almost everything on Saturday got locked in in one way or another: I knew that Waking Sleeping Beauty was only scheduled for one week and only matinees and figured Endhiran wouldn't last forever. I'd picked up the first Resident Evil Blu-ray a month or so earlier, figuring I could watch it before the new one came out, but time filled up. Then, while RE: Afterlife had a good first couple of weeks, it didn't last long once it wasn't on the IMAX and digital 3-D screens so much, and Saturday night's screening was likely to be the last. Well, I picked up the other two movies at Best Buy last weekend when they were $10/pop on Blu-ray (along with a few other horror movies I really should get around to watching around Halloween), there looked to be just enough time after getting back from Fresh Pond to get all three in before walking to the T and heading to Park Street.

If you're going to do this, though, it's wise to consider the next day a bit. The last movie was at 12:30am, so it got out around 2, which is after the subway stops running. So it was nearly 3am before I collapsed in my bed, and my brother Matt was going to come by to pick me up at around 9:30am. Figure time for a shower and wrapping my niece's presents... Well, it makes for a short night. Amazingly, Sunday was no problem, but I've been dragging ever since - apparently hanging around with one's family, including and especially a four-year-old birthday girl, keeps you more active and alert than sitting at a desk and staring at SQL code.

And, yes, it makes sense to do it with a better set of movies than the Resident Evil cycle, but to be honest they're not that bad and at least have the virtue of being short.

Let Me In

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2010 at Regal Fenway #5 (first-run)

Let Me In is a good movie, a very good movie even. As much as I wish that there wasn't a rationale for movies like this to be produced, the fact is, a number of people won't go to or rent movies with subtitles, mainstream theaters won't book them, and a fair number of folks who bristle at subtitles don't like dubbed movies either. That being the case, I can't fault Hammer for producing an English-language version - it's a good story that deserves and audience.

And writer/director Matt Reeves does a good job. This movie is good for all the reasons that the original Swedish Let the Right One In is (for why I loved that movie, see the original review), and while I think that a few key scenes aren't done quite as well, it may partly be a matter of which I saw first. Sure, I suspect that you could use math to prove objectively that the final swimming pool scene took a hit between the films, but I'm also reminded of watching The Departed and hearing the theater around me jump at bits that I was anticipating and didn't think were quite up to the level of their equivalents in Infernal Affairs. This version also has the benefit of a nice Michael Giacchino score which manages to be moody and goose the scares nicely.

(From here on in, I'll be comparing the two directly, so SPOILERS for both films)

There are a couple of interesting and crucial differences between the pair that at least make them interesting in terms of comparison. As expected, Reeves doesn't confront the "I'm not a boy" thing nearly as directly as Tomas Alfredson did, in that there's no blink-and-miss-it shot of Abby's castration scars, and Abby is a much less androgynous name than I suspect Eli is in Sweden. But I don't think he avoids it entirely; anyone watching the movie with knowledge of this will likely note just how androgynous Abby is in her early scenes; Chloe Moretz's Abby actually comes off as more masculine than Kodi Smit-McPhee's Owen. Indeed, she starts to appear much more girlish after she first feeds, which she does in response to her caretaker not procuring sufficient blood for her.

That's the other real notable difference here - where Let the Right One In suggested the idea that Oskar would become the sort of caretaker for Eli that Hakan was, the relationship between the two was left rather undefined (unlike the book); in this one, Abby seems to be actively seeking a new protector after seeing her unnamed "father" fail to bring her blood and openly say that he may not have it in him any more. That's when she starts to go to work on the isolated boy next door, giving him the little pushes to make him feel he owes her but also that she is, in many ways, weak and in need of safeguarding. It's little differences that I may have wrong - I don't recall Abby shivering, suddenly remembering what it's like to be human, upon meeting Owen the way Eli did with Oskar; similarly, I don't remember "I'm not a boy" being followed by "what are you?"/"I'm nothing" in Alfredson's film, a potentially revealing and manipulative exchange.

I don't think "Abby is training a new keeper" is the only way to look at Let Me In, but it's an interesting one, and the strength of the theme makes what is superficially a very direct translation actually an interesting variation.

(No more spoilers)

Even taking comparisons to Let the Right One In away, the new movie still has a few issues - some overly on-the-nose 1980s references, occasional stumbles, and some less-than-ideal CGI. Still, if I'd never seen the prior film, I think I would find Let Me In a darn good horror movie, without reservations. It's a worthy remake even with them, well worth giving a chance even if the idea of remaking the original initially seems absurd.

Waking Sleeping Beauty

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)

Watching this movie's opening scenes, with a bunch of animators screwing around, working more or less unsupervised in Disney's old Ink & Paint building, brought together for being college classmates and taking breaks to do skits and home movies, reminds me of my youth. Not because of how I loved Disney movies, or because I was that sort of creative person. No, this image of Walt Disney Studios circa 1984 reminds me of what working for the dot-coms during the internet bubble could be like, and, well, let's just say that I know how that story ends.

Waking Sleeping Beauty doesn't follow this story all the way to its conclusion, though - it mostly chronicles the years between 1984 and 1994, when Disney feature animation rose from the low of The Black Cauldron to the high of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and how behind-the-scenes changes in corporate leadership saved the division, shook it up, and built it into the Disney of the 1990s. We're (re-)introduced to all the important figures of the time - executives Roy Disney, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Frank Wells; creative people like Ron Clements, John Musker, Howard Ashman, and many more, including camoes by the likes of Tim Burton, John Lasseeter, and Don Bluth. They tell the story of what working at Disney was like at the time, in their own words and with their own pictures (both caricatures and home movies).

It's a telling demonstration of just how dependent on editing all films, but especially documentaries, can be. Director Don Hahn pieces his movie together from behind-the-scenes footage and other odds and ends, and he does a decent job of matching his narration and interview recordings to it, although he quite often seems guided by what he has, often indulging his own nostalgia for the time. As a result, the movie is sometimes awkwardly constructed - with over a decade having past since the film's endpoint, much rancor has disappeared; even Eisner and Katzenberg seem to talk about their past dealings with regret more than anger. So in chronically the rise and imminent fall of the group, Hahn seems to have trouble both in saying that Feature Animation needed a shake-up and in presenting the acrimony behind the scenes.

Of course, presenting the chronology of this story presents some unique challenges - it makes sense to present the film in chapters, and the pictures themselves make for reasonable divisions, but production on them overlapped, resulting in a fair amount of back and forth that makes the chronology feel a bit wobblier than it actually is. On the other hand, he and his editors do, ultimately, do an impressive job in framing the film: As the movie wraps back around to the start, footage that initially seemed endearingly awkward is re-presented as contentious, strained politeness.

Waking Sleeping Beauty isn't the definitive telling of this story; Hahn is too close to the material and subjects. It's a good starting point, and offers a tantalizing glimpse at how the suits and creative types need each other, even if they sometimes have a hard time admitting it.

Also at EFC

Resident Evil

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Blu-ray)

There have now been four Resident Evil movies, which is kind of surprising in some ways. The first is kind of mediocre, the man behind them (Paul W.S. Anderson) has what you might call a negative fanbase, and the fans of the original property kind of hate them for how this first one seems only vaguely connected to Capcom's Biohazard games, and the franchise's central character is created for the movies. But they keep on coming.

How did this one kick off a franchise? Well, most obviously, there's having Milla Jovovich. She's easy on the eyes, good at the physical parts of an action-movie role, and just good enough as an actor that we believe in the character without ever giving the impression that she's slumming. Anderson also makes the interesting decision to pair her with other strong women - here, Michelle Rodriguez (admittedly, not really doing her best work) - reinforcing that the heroines are defined not by the men they're with, but the ass they kick. I imagine that's got a genuine appeal to both women and guys who dig strong women.

And while Anderson the director isn't any great shakes - although he does okay with the action scenes - and the editing is pretty bad, Anderson the writer shows himself pretty adept at writing around budget limitations and capturing the structure of a videogame (thrown right into action not knowing much, story information gradually revealed, constant stream of minor monsters building up to boss battles) while also making it feel like a movie. Resident Evil may not be 100% faithful to the game, but I suspect that it does a good job of stimulating the brain in similar ways.

Resident Evil: Apocalypyse

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Blu-ray)

Apocalypse isn't a lot better than its predecessor, but it's slicker. Moving to the surface rather than a bunch of underground makes for bigger and brighter action scenes, and at least on the Blu-ray, there's less of a cheapness to the cinematography (I don't mind grain, but Resident Evil looked a bit off, though that may be about how compression doesn't work quite so well with dark scenes that well-lit ones). While the movie still has a few issues with how it's pieced together - if I in the audience notice that star Milla Jovovich doesn't seem to be in it much, then something should perhaps be tweaked - it flows from scene to scene fairly well, better than the first.

The story is thin, and often somewhat random - lots of people meet up at opportune times, and a lot of what the characters need to do is fed to them from outside - but it's a solid zombie action movie with some fun boss battles.

Resident Evil: Extinction

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Blu-ray)

This is where the series started actually growing on me, because it seems to be around this point that Anderson and company decided that they could start going nuts with the series. It still recognizes its video game roots - its opening is almost a grim parody of how most people play games (play five minutes, die, restart, get a little farther, die...), as is the powering up. The movie gets full-on post-apocalyptic, though, and becomes a cool hybrid between a traditional zombie movie and a gonzo sci-fi one.

There's a really cool "anything goes" vibe, the action is pretty good - even if there's now more superpowers involved - and the filmmakers aren't afraid to off returning characters. The switch from an urban setting to a wasteland is probably in part to stretch the budget a bit, but it does work in a "we don't care if we have to fix this later" manner.

And so, when the movie ends on a nutty, potentially game-changing note, I was pretty pleased and ready to head downtown for the next part. The series has embraced its ridiculous cliffhangers and actually gotten better as it went on.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, Real D digital 3-D)

The reason for that marathon, aside from perhaps wanting to show that yes, I will eventually watch all those movies I buy, was because Afterlife was down to one midnight show a day at the Boston Common theater, meaning that after Saturday it would be gone. It looked like it would be a bit of fun; though Anderson was returning to the director's chair, he was shooting in 3-D, which can be a lot of fun when used well.

And while Anderson indulges in a lot of throwing things at the audience and slow-motion, he and cinematographer Glen MacPherson (who also shot The Final Destination in 3-D) do make good use of it; there is a sense of space and size even when things aren't flying around in mid-air. The stuff they're shooting is fun, too - a clone army, a field of abandoned aircraft, a prison within a prison, a gigantic monster with a massive meat tenderizer who elbows his way through a zombie horde. Of course, so much of it is made with 3-D in mind that I wonder if it's a compromised experience in other media.

By now, the story is a bit repetitive - another ragtag group of zombie-apocalypse survivors, the Umbrella Corporation continuing to do nasty experiments despite the world falling down around it - but it sort of works; it's a good combination between feeling like the story is progressing and giving the audience what they liked about previous films. Although, and maybe this is just me, I'm not sure we need to see zombie dogs every film. Are they this ubiquitous in the games, as well? Why should they be a thing that shows up in every installment, when the streak of Ms. Jovovich getting naked ends with three?

The movie ends on another over-the-top cliffhanger, and I found myself hoping for a fifth movie sooner rather than later. The series may have humble origins, but it has done a remarkable job of getting better, not growing into something unwieldy, and figuring out how to leave the audience both satisfied and wanting more.

This Week In Tickets: 1 March 2010 to 7 March 2010

A whole lot of delay on this post for not a whole lot of content. A nasty cold hit me Sunday afternoon and lasted most of the week, making the Barking Dogs review harder to get done than it had any right to be, and then both times I tried to scan the page in before catching the bus in the morning, it would disappear in a computer crash sometime during the day.

Not a bunch to write about what's coming out this weekend, either:

* The Brattle opens what promises to be a good-looking new print of The Red Shoes for a week.

* John Ford at the Harvard Film Archive. From the look of the calendar, including how the winter-months series is described as "part 1", it looks like John Ford will be the theme for the archive at least through the end of the academic year.

* The tail ends of the "New Films from Spain" and "New Films from Quebec" series at the MFA

* Stuart Street reopens The Hurt Locker to capitalize on its Oscar wins, which is great - it's a terrific movie. It's enough to make one stop wondering, at least for a week or so, if "$10 second-run boutique house" is really a viable business model.

* A little film by Oscar Winner Kathryn Bigelow's ex, Terminator 2, plays midnights at the Coolidge as part of "March Metal Men". Next week is Robocop and I think it would be kind of funny if they finished up with Anvil!. Also continuing are Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer.

(I am conflicted as heck on The Ghost Writer. Trailers look good, excellent cast... But I do not want any of my money going to Roman Polanski.)



Stubless: Triangle, 5 March 2010; "A Matter of Loaf and Death", 7 March 2010.

Thin week. You know how sometimes at work, something huge comes up, and it's all hands on deck to make sure that gets done? That was the week before last. Last week was the week where I worked late to make up the time lost on the other thing.

"Wallace & Gromit in: A Matter of Loaf and Death"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Blu-ray)

I may talk a little bit more about this when I get to the Oscar Shorts programs next week, but it is a darn good year for animation when you can legitimately argue that a new Wallace & Gromit short is the weakest nominee in its category. That's not anything against "Loaf and Death" - it's a quality half-hour of "Wallace & Gromit", though it suffers a bit of wear (as often seems to be the case, Wallace has gotten dumber and lazier over the course of the series), but it still brings a great deal of the funny: Slapstick, awful bread-related puns, and well-utilized movie references (Aliens in a kids' cartoon!). There's just enough suspense to keep adults involved and kids on the edge of their seat, and the quality of the animation is top-notch.

Triangle

To mix things up a bit, my thoughts that don't quite fit in the eFilmCritic review. Not just because it's nice to do things a little differently every once in a while, or because it's rather apropos for this particular movie, but because a lot of what I want to say is a spoiler (more specifically, a spoiler-filled rant). If you haven't seen it, turn away after the "Also at eFilmCritic" part.

(Okay, one comment - my brother, father, et al, just got back from a Caribean cruise. This might have been a fun one to show them before they left)

Triangle

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Blu-ray)

This review will, at times, be vague, convoluted, and maybe even self-contradictory, but hopefully also intriguing. The primary reason for this is that I like to avoid giving too much away and Triangle goes for its big, not-mentioned-on-the-package surprise fairly early. Which, as clever folks have likely already deduced, is a secondary reason to write it that way - that combination of confusion and intrigue rather matches the experience of watching Triangle, so even if I don't tell you what it's about, I can maybe give you an idea of how it feels.

As the single mother of an autistic child (Joshua McIvor), every morning can be a struggle for Jess (Melissa George), even a Saturday when she's been invited to go sailing with Greg (Michael Dorman), a regular customer at the restaurant where she works as a waitress. It's not quite a romantic getaway, as four others are coming with: Victor (Liam Hemsworth), the nineteen-year-old kid Greg took in; Downey (Henry Nixon) and his wife Sally (Rachael Carpani), old friends of Greg; and Heather (Emma Lung), a friend Sally is trying to set Greg up with. Jess is worn out from dealing with her son, but things will soon get much worse - after a few ill omens, a storm capsizes Greg's boat, but their course intersects with Aeolus, a cruise ship from the 1930s that is curiously empty...

And we'll stop there, because what happens afterward deserves to be discovered as you watch the film. What I will say is that writer/director Christopher Smith is still making horror movies, but he isn't repeating himself; where Creep was an intense running of a gauntlet and Severance featured over-the-top gore and black comedy, Triangle aims to be a mindbender, tossing the audience clues as to what is going on between its thrills and kills, and then, once the trick has been revealed, daring the audience to keep track of all the pieces and spot any flaws in the construction. And, the majority of the time, it works; there's a thrill of recognition whenever Smith does something that explains an earlier scene. Sometimes he leans a bit hard on that explanation, making sure that everybody gets what happened, but other times he will throw things in that are almost but not quite red herrings - they're connected, but outside the immediate narrative.

Which may be a problem, depending on what kind of story you look at Triangle as being. Mindbender stories are at their best when they are meticulous, when you can take every action and every character, put them on a chart, and come up with a complex but tight pattern. Still, this is also a ghost ship/Bermuda Triangle movie, and that's a variety of horror that often works best when left unexplained - or at least, when the explanations are relatively vague and more about emotion than paranormal phenomena. So while certain logical inconsistencies drive me absolutely bonkers - Smith doesn't even try to explain some things beyond "it was set up that way earlier" - there is something perfectly right (and sadly wrong) about the way things feel at the end, and the dangling bits of the script only make it more so.

A lot of that rests on the shoulders of Melissa George. It's not spoiling any huge surprise to say she's the main character, the one we spend the most time following and the one where we have the most built-in interest in seeing her get off the ship. It's an odd performance, in some ways: In the early scenes, it can be extremely hard to connect with her; there's a dull unresponsiveness to Jess that is rather off-putting. Once the characters get on board the ship, though, Jess becomes a more active character, and George handles everything Smith throws at her. And that's a lot; she's in nearly every scene, with the story sending her from one emotional extreme to another. She handles most of it with aplomb, even doing a pretty good job of selling us some of the more nonsensical parts of the story. She handles herself well in the action scenes, too; she's necessarily doubled at some points, but very capable when nothing but a steady, medium shot will do.

That's not to give the rest of the cast short shrift, but it's pretty clear that this is George's movie from the start, and none of the rest are going to be given much chance to upstage her. One thing that is refreshing is that the cast are adults; only Liam Hemsworth's Victor really falls in the "barely old enough to drink" demographic. He is one of the ones I might have liked to see a bit more of; Hemsworth gives him a nice self-confident vibe.

Like the story, the production of the movie is kind of a mixed bag. As in his previous films, Smith displays a strong grasp of tone and pacing. He never goes for the inappropriate laugh that tempts other horror filmmakers, for instance. And he keeps the story moving at the right speed, supplying jolts of action when needed but giving the audience just enough time to mull over what's going on. The set of the Aeolus is impressively detailed - there's not a bit that doesn't feel realistic, even if he does manipulate it in a way to make certain scenes surreal. On the other hand, water still seems to be tough on CGI artists with a limited budget; some waves look really good, others not so much. Some splashes are just cringe-worthy.

I applaud Smith for his ambition with Triangle; he challenges himself and the audience with his story, and as much as it makes writing this review harder, I love that he kicks the audience's collective legs out from under them early rather than later (not a lot of filmmakers give themselves that sort of time to play with their cool idea). Writing this review, I see how some of the pieces fit together better than they seemed to at the time, and I'm all for movies making you think, but this one is as likely to lead to frustration as satisfaction afterward.

Also at eFilmCritic

Okay... Anyone reading on from here clearly doesn't care about having the movie spoiled for them, either because you've either already seen it or because you like those trailers that tell you the whole story or because you just don't care.

Anyway, the words I was desperately working to avoid above were "time travel"; Jess periodically seems to slip backward in time, so that she's already on board Aeolus when the wreck of the sailboat arrives, and she deduces that the cycle starts over whenever she kills the rest. That's kind of a leap; what sane person jumps to that conclusion (it may just be a fixed amount of time, for all she knows)? Of course, Jess isn't necessarily a reasonable person, as we see in the final reel.

(My friend Amanda recently mentioned that she likes time travel, though not science fiction in general; so do I recommend this movie to her, since telling her she'd like it ruins the surprise?)

The action on the boat is often curious as well. One thing I really kind of liked was the implication that we're only seeing the first (?) complete loop for Jess, but that others are happening later/earlier/simultaneously: The bloody-headed Jess, for instance, enters and exists without much explanation at all, and then there is the hole full of heart pendants and the deck full of Sally corpses. The latter raises a lot of questions about the mechanism, though; the implication, otherwise, is that everybody other than Jess is only going through this once, encountering multiple Jesses, or at least, Jess at multiple points upon her personal timeline. Otherwise, why doesn't the ship get even more crowded every time a new group boards?

Also, Smith hits us with two huge paradoxes: First, the keychain - when Jess finds it, why doesn't she have two afterward? Maybe she does, but if that's the case, shouldn't the characters notice that she has two and be freaked out? Or maybe she didn't have it before then, in which case, where did it come from? Given the car crash, it makes sense that she wouldn't have them to begin with, but if that's the case, then they more or less appear out of thin air - Jess has no keys, finds them, loops back, and then drops them for her earlier (?) self to find.

And then there's Jess herself. If survivor-Jess who kills rotten-mother-Jess at the end is also the same Jess who gets on the boat at the start... Where did she come from? The most reasonable explanation seems to be that she's a ghost, and even though ghosts (as opposed to ghost ships) aren't ever explicitly discussed, I like that as an explanation in some ways. It becomes a cool twist on the ghost caught in a loop, forever seeking revenge or redemption. The bloody-headed Jess then becomes a Jess from further down the timeline, implying that this is going to go on indefinitely - that ghosts, like people, can't break out of their patterns.

Which isn't a bad deal for a ghost story. The trouble is, I wasn't thinking ghosts until a full night of sleep and another movie later. But I may be overthinking things, or I may have missed something really obvious. What say you?

This Week In Tickets: 18 January 2010 to 24 January 2010

This weekend is as pure an example of laziness as you will find. No movies interested me enough to actually get out of the house, but while there, did I do any of the cleaning and stuff that needed to get done? No. Apparently, I need the imminent threat of visitors for that to happen.

I didn't stay in the house for the entirety of the weekend, though...



Stubless: Trucker (21 January 2010) and As You Like It (22 January 2010) on DVD.

... My friend Justin plays bass in Girls Guns And Glory, so I went to the Paradise to see them. Nice band; they're going to be at South by Southwest this March. I think they were booked just after I decided that I couldn't go to the film festival because of all the travel to various weddings I have planned this year (ironically, including his). But, anyone who is going there should check them out, especially if you like roots.

No other reviews this week. I was going to try and plow through some screeners, but even the ones that were likely NTSC wouldn't play on my HD-DVD or Blu-ray players, and the SlingCatcher which puts stuff from the computer out to the TV was balky. Actually, more likely the video drivers on the computer, but I wasn't feeling like screwing with them at the time. Hopefully, I'll get to some of them this week, although the Asylum Sherlock Holmes is on the docket as well.

As You Like It

Oh, my. This has been sitting on my coffee table for a bit more than two years, most likely. I have loved Branagh's other Shakespeare adaptations - one of my fondest memories of high school was going out to see Much Ado About Nothing with a bunch of friends who were taking the same Shakespeare class, I took the bus to Boston to see Hamlet while going to college in Worcester because the Landmark Theater brought in 70mm projection especially for it, and I remember dragging my brother Matt to Love's Labour's Lost because, darn it, he had to see how gorgeous it was, with Branagh making sure to do things like match the colors of the ladies' dresses and drinks. The soundtrack to that one was in heavy rotation for a while, too, goofy showtunes and all (though I absolutely loved how "You Can't Take That Away From Me" was used in it). I defend Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. If Dead Again were to come out on Blu-ray, I am pretty sure that I would not remember actually purchasing it, because it would be done entirely by my involuntary nervous system.

So, yes, I am a fan. Fan enough to pre-order As You Like It, and then keep it near the TV rather than the shelf of movies in the back room because watching it is a priority, but with the sort of addiction to buying movies much faster than I can actually watch them that keeps me from actually sticking it into a player for over two years. I'm a bit ashamed of that.

Now... Does anybody know where I can find the Japanese HD-DVD of The Magic Flute for a reasonable price? Because that looks like the only version available that I can watch without a region-free player, and the fact that something by Branagh (and Stephen Fry!) has not gotten American distribution in the three-plus years since it started trickling out in other markets is tremendously disappointing.

Next up, as I try to plow through my unwatched DVDs: The fifteen or so unwatched festival screeners I've amassed over the last couple of years. And that's just DVD; there's some VHS ones that I'd have to hook something up for.

As You Like It

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2010 in Jay's Living Room (upconverted DVD)

Thus far, the twenty-first century has not been kind to the films Kenneth Branagh directed. If you blinked, you missed his remake of Sleuth; if you're in North America, you haven't even had a chance to see his 2006 production of The Magic Flute (which, as far as I can tell, has yet to play theaters, television, or home video here). As You Like It fell somewhere between them, premiering on pay cable a month before being released on DVD. I suspect this explains why Marvel has tapped him for their Thor movie - he can use the boost in visibility as much as they can use somebody who can breathe life into things that the general public might assume to be stuffy and boring. Such as, say, Shakespeare, for the fifth time as director.

One of the ways he does this is by taking them out of their Elizabethan setting and placing them in new contexts to show the universality of the ideas behind them. With As You Like It, he moves the action to nineteenth-century Japan, where English traders had set up enclaves in port cities. As the film opens, a well-liked Duke (Brian Blessed) is removed from power by a group of ninjas and ronin in the service of his evil brother Frederick (also Blessed). The Duke and much of his court is sent into exile in the forest of Arden, but his daughter Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard) is kept as a companion to her cousin Celia (Romola Garai). This sort of jealousy among brothers appears to be common, as Frederick's ally Oliver De Boys (Adrian Lester) plots to kill his youngest brother Orlando (David Oyelowo). Orlando captures the affection of Rosalind, which enrages Frederick, who banishes her. Celia refuses to abandon her best friend, and they bring court jester Touchstone (Alfred Molina) along with them into exile.

There is more, of course - Shakespeare filled his plays with characters and subplots! So we have a pair of country lovers (Alex Wyndham and Jade Jefferies); the lusty Audrey (Janet McTeer), who hooks up with Touchstone; and the melancholy Jacques (Kevin Kline). Rosalind disguises herself as a boy, as a clown would be small discouragement to any bandits who might attack two women on their own, and teases the lovesick Orlando, who also finds himself in the woods. And if the material that Shakespeare came up with wasn't enough, Branagh fleshes the story out a bit with scenes of his own invention, depicting things which previously occurred off-stage. That's how you get ninjas in Shakespeare.

You can spot those scenes because they have no dialogue - adding one's own words to Shakespeare is just not done, after all. Though he doesn't do that, he is, as usual, well aware that he is adapting the Bard's work to film, rather than simply recording a play. Lines that simply describe what the audience can see are cut, scenes are re-arranged, action is shown rather than related, and the camera follows people around. Characters speak in verse, of course, but it comes across as conversational as well as larger-than-life. And while the story is far from completely modernized, the script manages to excise some of the aspects of the last act that are downright silly and weird without losing sight of the fact that the story is intended to be funny. The whole plot about Rosalind disguising herself as the boy "Ganymede" could fall into that category, but the film manages to acknowledge that without falling into self-parody.

That's in large part due to Romola Garai. Celia is the supporting female role, but this version of the story gives Garai a lot of chances to be more than just the friend Rosalind confesses her feelings to; she's given enough slapstick and double-takes to be near the top of the list of funny people in the cast. Alfred Molina isn't far behind; he delivers Touchstone's lines with the timing of a veteran stand-up, especially when he's allowed to just take control of a scene (or has McTeer's assistance in taking things over the top). Bryce Dallas Howard doesn't get quite so many jokes as them, but she shows a tremendous mischievous charm when in disguise as Ganymede that puts a smile on one's face even though she's not going for laughs as directly as the others.

The actors in more serious roles do well, too. Brian Blessed has shown up in a number of Branagh's films, and he's well-used here; his dual role gives him a chance to use that booming voice to both make the exiled Duke jolly and gregarious and cast Frederick as a frightening maniac. David Oyelowo brings plenty of sex appeal to the part of Orlando (he makes a sumo loincloth work for him early on), and manages to be head over heels for Rosalind without chipping away at his cool too much. And while I suspect that the part of Jacques has been pared down in the adaptation (though it's been some time since I've read the play or seen a different version), Kevin Kline makes up for any lost lines with his body language and general performance, and makes the famous "all the world's a stage" speech sing.

Does Branagh's grasp of what makes a good movie as opposed to a good play, visual flair, and quality multi-ethnic cast yield a version of As You Like It that could appeal to a general audience? Maybe. Truth be told, the cross-dressing plots in many of the comedies become harder sales with every year that passes from the time when only men and boys performed on stage, and the incredulous looks Garai as Celia gives Orlando, Rosalind, and the audience only gets us most of the way to really buying into it. And as nifty as the Japanese setting frequently looks, it often feels like a gimmick that won't bring in as many newcomers as it will alienate purists.

Their loss, if so. Branagh has filmed five of Shakespeare's plays, and all five times he has produced something that is no less an entertaining movie for being an adaptation of four hundred year-old works. As You Like It is no exception.

Also at EFC

5 Centimeters per Second and the other films of Makoto Shinkai

As I mentioned a few days ago, I fully intend to start going through my backlog of unwatched movies, and the first one on the docket was 5 Centimeters per Second, which I found myself liking quite a bit, and more as I wrote up the review. Enough, in fact, that I was inspired to get out my other Shinkai discs and see how much I still loved them.

"Voices of a Distant Star", as I expected, is still kind of amazing. It is sort of amazing to see how Shinkai's rendering has gotten better, as he's gotten more resources and moved past "one guy on his Mac" status, but I remain a little bit in awe at the level of accomplishment for such humble beginnings, and I still love the hard sci-fi idea underneath it.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days, however, seemed to really grow in retrospect. I was surprised at how much better the animation was than "Voices", even though the upgrade wasn't that big, and on the second time through, I was able to see the story more clearly as I wasn't trying to process the alternate history so much. It's an ambitious work, and I do think I'd like the science fiction harder and more directly integrated into the story as it was with "Voices" - there's a lot of hand-waving and going with gut instincts, especially toward the end - but a pretty good one. One thing surprised me while looking at the extras on the disc was that there were some scenes animated that really looked like they could have added to the movie; I wonder if they were just done for the trailer. It kind of confuses me when I see extra scenes for an animated production; I always figured that most of the editing was done before filming, in the storyboard and animatic stages.

From just these three, it's pretty clear to see themes emerging in Shinkai's work: Friendships and romances dating back to junior high; distance and separation; communication; science. That's not a complaint; I like the naturalism in Miyazaki's work, for instance, and it does not seem to be leading to Shinkai telling the same story every time out. He does still seem to have trouble with endings; Place is the only one that really seems to come to a definitive conclusion, and all three of his films seem to jump a little toward the end, skipping over something that could be really useful.

Of course, the trouble right now is that all three of his films were distributed by AD Vision, which is more or less kaput. I won't miss them much (but let's not discuss the misquote on the cover of Synesthesia again...), but it means that digging up copies of these spiffy animated movies means renting and hoping for the best, at least until some other company picks up distribution and/or releases them again. Shinkai is working on a new film, so here's hoping it proves a good reason to re-release the whole collection.

In the meantime, 5 Centimeters per Second gives me a ready-made response as to why I buy movies when I might not watch them right away. Only available for four months!

Next up: Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of As You Like It.

Byôsoku 5 senchimêtoru (5 Centimeters per Second)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2010 in Jay's Living Room (upconverted DVD)

I wish I'd watched and written about this movie when I actually purchased the DVD almost two years ago since, this is a great little movie that was only available on North American DVD for a lousy four months. My recommendation probably wouldn't have done much to keep it in print - I've got no delusions about my reviews having any great influence - but at least it would have been a lot easier for those who read this to act on it.

5 Centimeters per Second is the second feature-length film by Makoto Shinkai, though just barely, with a length of just over an hour. It's actually something of an anthology piece told as three connected shorter stories. In the first, "Cherry Blossoms", thirteen-year-old Takaki Tono (voice of Kenji Mizhuhashi), upon learning that his parents are moving again, makes a train trip to visit best friend Akari Shinohara (voice of Yoshimi Kondou), who herself moved away from Tokyo a year ago. The second, "Cosmonaut", is told from the perspective of Kanai Sumita (voice of Satomi Hanamura), a girl on the island of Tanegashima who has a crush on high-school senior Takaki. Then, in the final segment ("5 Centimeters per Second"), we catch up with Takaki and Akari as adults in their late twenties, with Akari engaged and Takaki finding no joy in either his work or three-year relationship.

Despite the title of the second segment and the occasional use of space-related images, this is a down-to-earth story, eschewing the science-fictional premises of Shinkai's previous films. It still covers much of the same emotional territory, though - especially early on in "Cherry Blossoms", where we only glimpse Akari through the letters she writes, it's hard not to think of Shinkai's short-film masterpiece "Voices of a Distant Star" - with a focus on trying to connect across distance, whether it be physical or emotional. Here, he uses it to tell stories of first love, and how they can be joyous and tragic, and how it can eithr strengthen a person or become an unapproachable ideal as he or she grows older.

The stories are rooted in things that are familiar, even mundane. Shinkai and his team did extensive location scouting for photo reference, so when his characters visit a place, the location is authentic down to small details. The opening story about Takaki traveling by train from Tokyo to Akari's home in Tochigi, only to have a snowstorm cause delays that he had not figured into his itinerary, is especially pitch-perfect; it captures the combination of frustration and absurdity in the situation exactly. "Cosmonaut" is a beautiful evocation of how overwhelming the emotions of adolescence can be, both in terms of attraction and having to make decisions about the direction of one's life. The last segment is a little weaker, story-wise, featuring a number of loose threads that don't seem to come together.

At least, not in a strict narrative sense. Indeed, for the finale, Shinkai creates a music video that is almost a tone poem. It uses a sentimental song from the 1990s as the background, cutting from scene to scene at a brisk pace, with what we see combining bits from the present day, clips from the previous segments, and new shots of both. It is almost impossible to process these scenes individually - they come and go too quickly - but Shinkai does the kind of editing that most quick-cutters can only dream of managing, so that the emotions of the film can roll over the audience like waves. The musical montage is often a trite, overused device, but Shinkai turns it into something exceptional with precise attention to every second.

That shouldn't be much of a surprise - that is what Makoto Shinkai does. As with all of his films, 5 Centimeters per Second is made by a relatively small team (especially in comparison to major-studio releases) with Shinkai wearing multiple hats (IMDB has him working ten jobs). He is thus able to exercise tight control, and he uses it to create a picture that is often understated in both visual design and score, but also to do awe-inspiring things when the movie calls for them. The closing montage is just one of the most obvious examples; there are many other moments in this film that are simply sublime, such as when he opts to reduce the detail in the animation to suggest silhouettes but retain color and light, the dazzling starscapes in Takaki's and Kanae's night sky, or the beautiful, inspiring, and revelatory scene of a rocket launch.

Though not full of science fiction scenarios in the way his previous films were, there's little doubt that 5 Centimeters per Second is fantastic. I eagerly await Shinkai's next work, and I certainly won't delay seeing it.

Also at HBS

New Year's Resolution

One just came to me as I wondered what to do tonight and saw the tons of movies arrayed around me. It is in two parts:

(1) When I buy something meant to entertain me, I will allow it to do so promptly. Especially movies. When I buy a DVD/BD of a film/TV show/whatever that I haven't seen before, it goes into the player within a week.

(2) Go through all the stuff I've bought but not enjoyed over the past ten years or so and watch them. We'll start with the living room - DVDs I stuck on the coffee table because I was excited for them, festival screeners, Wholphins, Blu-rays and HD-DVDs (oh, gads, the HD-DVDs I bought because they were like $3) - before hitting the shelves out back.

It starts tonight with 5 Centimeters Per Second, which had me so stoked as a new Makoto Shinkai movie. We'll see how long the plan lasts once a week comes where new movies actually get released.