Monday Double Feature: The League and Lost in the Stars

An odd case where I worked backward in building a double feature because, initially, Lost in the Stars was only playing shows 9:30pm and later with the last show on Monday as Mission: Impossible grabs all the screens on Tuesday, and as you might expect considering that this is apparently the biggest movie of the summer in China, the folks next door in Chinatown bought up tickets even before i knew it was playing, so that last show on Monday was my best shot at a decent seat.

After I did that, AMC put on more shows (and it's playing for a second week), but I wound up sticking with my reservation, although that meant finding something earlier because it can be a pain to pull myself out of the apartment at 9pm. Factor in AMC's 20 minutes of trailers and how a lot of movies are well over two hours these days, and it can be tough to make a twin bill work.

Maybe not surprisingly, it was looking like I was going to be on my own for The League, in part because of its weird booking strategy: Magnolia Pictures apparently booked with AMC directly for three weekdays, which is a Fathom-like booking but doesn't get it into the Fathom block of previews, and I don't think I saw a trailer before any films. The most advertising I saw online was tweets about it playing AMCs in Chicago. Some other folks did show up, all of us, I think, at least middle aged, and I don't know that I saw any folks of color either, though I wasn't looking behind me from my third-row seat.

On the other hand, Lost in the Stars was fairly busy, already pretty packed when I arrived and then filling up behind me.

And, after that, a good twenty-minute wait for the Green Line Extension heading home, arriving there at 1am with a 9am conference call scheduled the next day, which is a big part of why I don't do a lot of double features that aren't built as such. Who goes to those 10:45pm shows at an AMC with how early the T stops running?


The League '23

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #5 (special engagement, DCP)

As documentaries that probably don't tell their intended audience a whole lot that they weren't already aware of, The League at least had the benefit of being about something fun and only having to compact thirty or so years into a feature length presentation. It is, as I tend to say about a lot of these docs, Negro Leagues 101, but as someone who could use that, I certainly found my curiosity piqued.

Those 30 years are roughly the length of time between World War I and Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Director Sam Pollard doesn't exactly present it as the story of Black businessmen who owned the teams and shaped the leagues, from "Rube" Foster, whose Chicago Giants were the lynchpin of the original Black National League, to rival owners in Pittsburgh, to Effa Manley in New Jersey, who saw clearly that the white leagues signing their players without compensation would lead to the Negro Leagues' collapse. There's plenty of time spent on the famous players - one will hear the stories of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson - but as the story of the leagues, the film focuses on the people who made things happen, directly.

The timing of it was lucky for me, arriving during the MLB All-Star break when there's relatively little actual baseball, leaving the major papers ceasing their daily sports coverage as one of the bigger stories in sports, because a major theme is that sports are important to a community, in both tangible and emotional ways. There's sentimentality here, but also nuts and bolts of how sports teams can be a central part of a community, even when they are not one of the most visible, accessible pictures of Black excellence. The filmmakers are good at recognizing how they're intertwined without diminishing either.

It's well put together, too, making good use of the names the audience is likely to know but also giving plenty of time to those they might not, and doing a fair job of mixing recreation, animation, and plenty of archival material together so that it's seldom overdone, or static (there's a danger of feeling like you're rehashing Ken Burns in substance and style here that is mostly avoided) Maybe a little too smooth at times; the transition from grainy home movies to something sharper can supply a bit of excitement at the filmmakers perhaps finding some great archival material that is probably actually a recreation, with the same happening on voice-overs one may presume are from audio interviews but are actually actors narrating, especially when there are on-screen titles for the speaker. It's not exactly fraudulent, but it does raise the question of whether one is seeing the thing raw or someone's interpretation. That comes right down to one of the central threads; the film is largely based upon the writings of former umpire Bob Motley, but it's not clear when one is hearing his voice, or if one ever is.

A bit of a shame, that, as there's something especially apt about having one of the League's umpires being a primary point of view - an ump is by nature both an insider and expected to call a fair game, compared to players or executives who may have agendas. It's the same story, in many ways, but told well and down the middle.


Xiao shi de ta (Lost in the Stars)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)

Chen Sicheng of Detective Chinatown fame knows his mysteries, so it's not exactly surprising that he would be part of adapting a 50-year-old French stage thriller into a modern Chinese movie, though others direct and contribute to the script. His name being attached to the story's solid hook certainly got my attention, and it has been a massive summer hit in China; if you're looking for a nifty little thriller as a massive blockbuster, you could do a lot worse while it's playing North America for a couple weeks.

The film opens with He Fei (Zhu Yilong) bursting into a police station on Bankal Island (a resort implied but never stated to be in Thailand), in a panic because his wife Li Muzi (Kay Huang Ziqi) has been missing for 15 days, but with no evidence of foul play, the police can't help him, though an ethnically Chinese officer, Zheng Cheng (Du Jiang), offers to help. But when He Fei wakes up the next morning, there's a woman in his bed (Janice Man Wing-San) who claims to be Li Muzi, and she's got the passport, photos, etc. to support the assertion. With just days before his visa expires, He Fei hires lawyer Chen Mai (Ni Ni) to help him get to the bottom of this.

Based on a play by Robert Thomas, "Trap for a Lonely Man", that has been adapted for television and film at least ten times in nearly as many languages, and I'm tempted to dig up one of the English-language versions to see if it was a more leisurely, chatty thing than this occasionally frantic production with room for a chase or two, although one way to make it work as a movie is to have He Fei and Chen Man literally running down every bit of evidence. I'm not sure that the film ever entirely recovers from introducing itself with a great premise for a psychological thriller and then bounding ahead at full speed rather than giving the ambiguities time to fester in the audience's collective mind, though; it's the sort of mystery where mentioning a potential twist seems to eliminate it as a possibility, and folks in the audience are probably already wondering whether this is more like Gaslight, The Game, or something else well before the filmmakers are ready to spring a surprise.

I suspect that, even as the Chinese filmmakers modernized and made the story their own, the core of it is something that could easily attract actors, with Zhu Yilong and Ni Ni having a pair of fun opposites to play, especially since Zhu has a chance to play the gaslit husband as an everyman rightfully panicked by all these things happening to him that make no sense, with Ni countering as the cool lawyer who is believably good at everything the story needs her to do, trusting that this sort of chemistry doesn't require a sexual or romantic component. Still, Janice Man's "impostor" probably channels the film's exact gonzo energy best; whether she's the con artist He Fei thinks she is or is having her actions twisted by his delusions, she unbalances every scene she's in, in precisely the right way (right down to how just a little sexiness can feel quite dangerous to someone concerned with reasoning out a puzzle).

Chen, co-writers Gu Shuyi & Yin Yixiong, and directors Cui Rui & Liu Xiang could maybe stand to find more ways to use Ni Ni, both to add a little tension to having to operate in plain sight and to make a movie that doesn't really spend much time questioning He Fei's point of view a bit more ambiguous. Still, you can see why this has been a massive hit in China, and thus one of the biggest movies of the summer worldwide. It's slick and fast-paced, and if the finale may seem like a lot to swallow, making one believe that this is possible is only half of what a thriller has to do along with making it click emotionally, and the pieces fall into place nicely, right down to a scene that has me think that made me smile at how properly cowardly it was. It's also beautiful in spots, with Cui, Liu, and company teasing the audience with mirrors and lighthouses, and eventually coming up with a nifty demonstration of how how to take transformative inspiration from something like "Starry Night", compared to the "immersive Van Gogh" exhibits.

I'm tempted to give it a second look sometime when I know to expect magic rather than moody, on top of seeing how else it has been adapted. It's a mystery just good enough to be worth seeing how many clues were planted that one missed without becoming too ponderous.

Two from Laurence Lau: City Without Baseball and Dealer/Healer

This is not, perhaps, the most clever double feature I've come up with as I pulled stuff down off the shelf, but it's one that felt that way at the time, as I noted that two of the movies I'd ordered from Hong Kong as relative cheapies to bulk up an order had Laurence Lau listed as director, so why not pair them? I'd purchased them both out of curiosity - City Without Baseball intrigued me as a fan of the sport while Dealer/Healer was one I recalled seeing in a festival lineup on top of starring Lau Ching-Wan - so why not.

Well, it turns out that Lau is not exactly the director you make a themed night of (and if I wanted to, I have three other discs with things he directed on it, one of which is a horror anthology and two of which are direct-to-video sequels to a Johnnie To film). He's a journeyman, a guy who's done some programmers and, for City Without Baseball, appears to have been brought in to be a steady hand for a movie with a first-time filmmaker and a mostly-amateur cast who all probably needed to be shown the ropes. That's not to say that the films have nothing in common - they're both based on real-life figures and examine unseen bits of Hong Kong - but it's not exactly an auteur double feature.

On the other hand, having done this double feature Tuesday, I can say I slipped City Without Baseball in under the wire before baseball got restarted, which is maybe worth 1 clever point on a 100-point scale.

Mou ye chi sing (City Without Baseball)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

There's a part of me that wishes the posters, packaging, and other art for City Without Baseball played up the sports angle, entirely so that some of the people who watch it on that basis get a genuine shock over just how much it is something else, even if it's not necessarily quite so queer as it appears from the other angle. It's a genuinely odd film in a number of ways and one which often highlights its own eccentricity so that it can have an easier time noodling around the edges of various stories.

Hong Kong is not, as the title may imply, entirely lacking in baseball, but there's no professional league, and the national team, such as it is, is a group of amateurs, led by starting pitcher Chung (Leung Yu-Chung), catcher Jason (Jason Tsang Kin-Chung), and captain Jose (Jose Au Wing-Leung); 19-year-old Ron (Ron Heung Tze-Chun) has just recently joined. The team has recently hired Taiwanese coach John Tai (John Tai Yu-Ching) to help them prepare for the Asian Baseball Cup. Tai is lucky enough to meet a nice girl (Yan Wei-Suo) at a seaside bar, and while Ron has recently broken up with his girlfriend, he's met someone new in Meizi (Lin Yuan). Like a lot of girls, she soon develops a crush on Chung, although he's drawn to a suicidal girl (Monie Tung Man-Lee) whose phone he discovers when he nearly hits her while driving drunk.

The film opens with "they are not actors... they are ballplayers" with the usual disclaimer at the end of the credits is reconfigured to say that the characters in the film "are not necessarily fictional", and while one would not mistake City Without Baseball for a documentary, writer/producer/co-director "Scud" Cheng Wan-Cheung does have the 2004 Hong Kong baseball team playing themselves in a film based on stories they told him. There's a certain shagginess to the film that might not work if Scud and co-director Lawrence Lau Kwok-Cheong weren't so brashly up-front about the way the film was made - the footage from the ABC is clearly a repurposed sportscast and the scenes around it are a mess, continuity-wise, and there's an early joke about someone making a movie about the team that winks at the audience so hard it might cause actual eye damage. The subplots are cliched as heck and mashed together in fairly haphazard manner.

And yet, the very simplicity and messiness of it may explain why so much of it rings true; it plays like a collection of jumbled remembrances that are not shaped too perfectly around any specific theme. The cast of (mostly) non-actors similarly seldom seem to be trying to steer a scene but just doing a fairly good job of getting across genuine personalities, if not overly-complex ones, rather than forcing out lines or looking like they're the only dozen people in the city who can fake baseball convincingly. It's especially useful as Ron has his story move toward the film's center; a student and would-be musician on top of being a ballplayer, and the film often reflects his combination of big dreams (that likely outstrip his talent) and slightly-panicked uncertainty over everything. Knowing how the film was made means that the real-life Ron Heung is laying all that out there in the same way the fictionalized version is - as is Leung Yu-Chung, to a lesser extent - and between their openness and natural charisma, it's not hard to feel that connection.

It's one that is inevitably of its time and place, as well, with Scud and Lau often noting that the musical acts on the soundtrack, folks like Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, had recently passed on, while the songs Ron writes are in English and his roommate is on the ethnically ambiguous side. It's a set of circumstances and signals that notes how the old Hong Kong is disappearing and that moving forward that the things these kids have been devoted to are not necessarily going to be useful, or that they are chasing something that is ultimately small potatoes. By the same token, though, there's something beautiful in the very smallness of their ambitions once one reaches the tournament; Scud and Lau don't do much to sell the audience on the game, or present the footage in a way that tells a story even for fans. It is all about the delight Chung, ron, Jose, and the rest take in playing even though there are no fans in the stands.

In the years following City Without Baseball, Scud would go on to write and direct a number of films that were more overtly LGBT-themed, almost as if in making this broadly-themed film would have him discover where his storytelling passions lie, even if they're of niche appeal. For a film so invested in its meta-appeal, what could be a better result?

Duk gai (Dealer/Healer)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

There's a compelling, worthy story lurking somewhere inside Dealer/Healer, albeit the sort of generically inspiring one that can often have a film derisively tagged as "awards bait". You can still get something out of that sort of movie; an earnest passion if nothing else, even if it's miscalculated and the result of filmmakers wanting to be seen as more than they have been. This just feels like the work of journeymen whose skills aren't a match for the material - functional, but little more.

It's the story of Chen "Cheater" Hua, who started out as a teen hoodlum in the Tsz Wan Shan Estates back in 1964 before rising to middle-management in the gang that controlled the drugs in the Kowloon Walled City's "Canteen". During that time, he's developed a nasty drug habit of his own, eventually pushing girlfriend Carol to work as a taxi dancer to support them. He winds up in jail, naturally, and gets clean, working tirelessly for drug rehabilitation when he gets out, awarded recognition as an "outstanding young person" and speaking out about his mission throughout Asia, though he's never able to do all he wants or get back all he's lost.

The filmmakers hang a bit of a lantern on his award early on - the film takes place in three separate time periods from 1964 to 1987, which means Hua is forty-ish when awarded, and Lau Ching-Wan never looks "young" when playing him in 1974 or 1987 (both he and co-star Louis Koo Tin-Lok are well-preserved, which isn't quite the same as youthful). It's the sort of gesture that can't help but highlight the artifice in how the film is put together, as the filmmakers often shoot the movie like a sleek period traid thriller, with set and costume design that seems more intent on evoking nostalgia rather than creating a world that feels coherent, and it's sometimes almost comical, like when a door in the small but homey apartment Cheater and Carol share opens into a bathroom that looks like it belongs in a shooting gallery, two familiar movie sets awkwardly fused together.

That's potentially fine - nothing wrong with using heightened or familiar imagery as a shortcut, especially since director Laurence Lau Kwok-Cheong and his team do it consistently - but somewhere between the screenplay by Chan Man-Keung and Sana Lam Wai-Kuk and the end product, there's never any serious attempt to get into Cheater's head or that of anyone else in his orbit. The narration tosses out facts and describes other characters as close friends or inspirations, but aside from a brief moment of Hua in withdrawal, Lau seldom shows Hua as being particularly pushed in one direction or another by things or otherwise affected. Things happen, and Hua does what a hoodlum, junkie, or humble-and-reformed man would do in reaction. It's a sort of bland earnestness - addiction is bad and helping others is good - that could use a little more of Hua being caught in between.

There's a bit about Hua meeting up with Carol again in 1987 that's not exactly framed like he might be able to win her back but still gives the impression that her potentially forgiving him is more important than the ways he hurt her in the first place, which feels kind of misguided. There are slick and clever moments that work on their own but sometimes make one wonder whether this sort of movie should be slick and clever, like when a confrontation suddenly turns into a nicely staged action scene (action director Paco Yick Tin-Hung has been one of Johnnie To's go-tos for such material recently, and attacks those sequences with gusto). There's a couple nifty bits of effects work that shows Kowloon Walled City closing in and opening up at either end of the film, and one can admire its clear meaning even if wondering if it's right for this particular movie.

A lot of Dealer/Healer is like that, a movie made by people who are by and large very good at what they do but none of whom really do this. It never exactly feels misguided or like the filmmakers are out of their depth, but just like a bad match between subject and personnel.

This Week in Tickets: 16 September 2019 - 22 September 2019

Unless I have a weird impulse to get to the ballpark one last time, this is my last trip to Fenway of the year, and at least it's memorable.



Tough to end on a more memorable game than this one, though - picked up a bobblehead, saw the grandson of Carl Yastrzemski make his Fenway Park debut with the Giants, and had the game go on forever. I am reasonably sure that the first game I saw at Fenway as a kid may not have been the actual "Yaz Day" retirement game but was right around there, so it was kind of neat, even if I joked that this was really exciting for old people.

I won't miss expanded September rosters when they're gone next year, though - you're supposed to get weird baseball when a game goes past midnight - people playing out of position, infielders pitching, the reluctant walk out to the bullpen of the next night's starting pitcher. But with all those extra players, relievers in particular, it was not just more baseball, but managers playing matchups in the 13th! There's a point where you think, hey, those two minutes pitching changes add to the game could be the difference between taking the T home and calling a cab! And then it's not, because the game goes on, and eventually reaches the point where you hope it goes on forever so that it gets really weird. It doesn't, though, ending at around 1am, with the Red Sox losing, because it's been that sort of year.

Then I take a Lyft home, looking at my phone all the way back, until I get home and immediately realize it's not in my pocket. I send a message to the company, saying I'll stay up until 3am, if they get the message to the driver quickly. It's not quite quick enough, and as you might imagine, the guy who's dropping you off at 2am is not answering the phone when I get to work. I get the thing back that evening, and a $15 lost-item charge is better than buying a new smartphone, but I'm kind of zonked for the rest of the week and have learned a valuable lesson about that thing going in a pocket with a zipper.

Anyway…

Saturday, I hit the Coolidge for Live from the 36th Chamber, in which Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA and his compatriots gave The 36th Chamber of Shaolin a new, hip-hop soundtrack before the audience's eyes:



That bit before introducing the film is the only time RZA used the piano. Some folks at the Coolidge moved it onto the stage for that minute. It was a bunch of fun, and 36th Chamber is a good movie to do this with - it's a classic that's not so perfect that you can't fiddle with it.

The plan after that was to hit the Fluff Festival, but I was an idiot and got off the Green Line at Hynes rather than Copley, and unfortunately the train to Lechmere, from whence I would catch a bus to Union Square, comes from Heath Street, and I didn't figure it out until too late (trust me, if you're from Boston, you're nodding along and shaking your head at that mistake). It really didn't leave me much time to actually be there, so I went straight to Assembly to see Ad Astra on the Imax-branded screen. It was pretty darn great, and recommended to be seen huge so you can sort of fall into it rather than dissect the rest.

AMC put the "AMC Artisan Films" label on it, which is a stretch, but defensible because it is an odd sort of science fiction film. They're doing the same for Midway, and I gotta ask - if a gigantic World War II movie packed with visual effects directed by Roland Emmerich and released by Lionsgate counts as "Artisan", what doesn't?

Sunday started with more live accompaniment, with the Somerville welcoming Jeff Rapsis to accompany Girl Shy. Unfortunately, the 35mm print didn't arrive and they didn't really have a great DVD player/projector combination, but it's still a very fun movie, especially once you get to the end and the chase really makes Jeff work. Then there was time for a bit of a rest before heading to Fenway and the only screening of Villains I could easily make. Kind of not great, but maybe a few tickets sold means Fenway books a few other indie genre films as the landscape changes over the next few months.

I'd better see enough to update my Letterboxd page over the next few days, as there's a business trip coming up and the new headquarters/hotel is not near a mall and there's team-building crud planned for every night.

Shao Lin san shi liu fang (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP with live accompaniment)

This was a special screening with RZA and accomplices doing a live score, and while the soundtrack was kind of weird at spots - removing the soundtrack took the foley out in a few places, the dubbing didn't always match the subtitles, and the mix was a bit odd - it was a lot of fun. I don't really love this particular movie; it's three things stuck together with the middle one involving a lot of people being dinks, and time doesn't seem to flow the same way inside and outside the temple. Watching how the new music interacts with the action certainly keeps things more fun in the somewhat extended middle. It's fun on its own, if not quite the big deal it seemed like it would be - the hip-hop is great for when things are about to get violent and making some of the montages a bit less goofy, but doesn't quite transform the film otherwise.

What I thought back in '12

Girl Shy

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, digital with live accompaniment)

Not quite the ur-romantic comedy because, despite how much you can flirt with just looks and slapstick reactions, it often feels a little more like someone steamrolling someone else since you can't have the sort of back-and-forth that actual dialogue allows in a silent without the intertitles slowing it to a crawl. It seems even more the case now that I watch it fourteen years after the first time, with Harold seeming like a maniac in this finale that would not only be ruined by cell phones, but might have trouble with regular ones.

Still, you kind of have to love the almost insane simplicity of this movie, which kills a bit of time to make Harold into a highly unlikely romantic hero and then sets up the meet-cute, separation, obstacle, and frantic reunion with almost no pause in between, with that last bit pushed to quite frankly absurd lengths. It demonstrates, a bit, why Lloyd is probably third among the silent comedy greats - he often builds his finales as piling on more to the point where they get exhausting, while Chaplin would have the great emotional moment and Keaton the one shot that just drops one's jaw

It's one of Lloyd's best-loved films, although I must admit to having a bit more of a fondness for the truly weird ones. Still pretty good stuff.

Full review (from 2005) on eFilmCritic

This Week in Tickets: 2 September 2019 - 8 September 2019

You may see a lot of empty white space on these pages; I see the weekend that I finally reached the bottom of the stack of comics that's been growing since I went to London for vacation.



(And, good gravy, is DC a disaster right now. It seems like they always are, but "Year of the Villain" is currently in the "re-reading the same beats in every series" stage, seemingly every idea Brian Bendis has for Superman is wrong-headed, the whole thing with Bane and Flashpoint Batman in Batman is awful. Who looked at these pitches and said "this will be fun and worth $4/issue"?)

It was, at least, a good week for baseball, or at least the two games I had tickets to. Wednesday was the result of me ordering in a kind of dumb manner - I didn't reallize that the ticket I got in a four-pack was also the Peanuts bobblehead game, so I bought a separate ticket for that, and then couldn't unload my original. A bummer, but I had a really nice seat for a game in which Mookie Betts hit the first two pitches he saw over the Monster (which also got me to the line-free King's Hawaiian barbecue concession stand during the game and out at the end with little fuss). Friday had me nervous - bullpen game against the seemingly-unstoppable-no-matter-who-gets-hurt Yankees - but they wound up winning 6-1.

But I digress from the entry on my movie blog that lists the movies I've seen in a given week. Those were seen on Sunday's excursion to Brookline, where I spent most of the day at the Coolidge. It started with Balloon, a German film that played Canadian theaters while I was in Montreal for Fantasia but which I didn't have time for. I'd sort of pegged it as a family movie at the time - it was rated G in Quebec - but it's not exactly that. There was apparently an earlier version (Night Crossing) made by Disney, but it wasn't well-remembered, and the makers of this one had to spend years negotiating with that company to get the rights to the story back (I'm guessing what the prominent thanks to Roland Emmerich in the credits refer to). After that, there was still a lot of convincing necessary, especially since the director was from Bavaria rather than the former East German and more known for comedy than thrillers. The film doesn't quite get to how, after reunification, some of the escapees were able to get their old house back and move back in, but that's neat.

(Aside: Thomas Krestschmann has played so many Nazis in international films despite being a tremendously charismatic guy that it's almost funny that he goes home and gets cast as Stasi.)

It wasn't a long wait after that for Official Secrets, which is pretty decent but not something I particularly regret missing at IFFBoston, even if there were some guests. It feels a bit like the filmmakers finding a story that makes a number of important points and seems dramatic enough but which only makes for a pretty-good movie rather than the great one you figure they'd gone for.

Hopefully a busier week for here and my Letterboxd page coming up, if only because there's a werid no-baseball Friday.

Ballon (Balloon)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Geothe-Institut German Film, DCP)

When I first saw the description of Balloon, I pegged it as a light family adventure, likely because the idea of fleeing a repressive society in a homemade hot-air balloon sounds fanciful, and the film didn't have enough red-flag content for the local ratings board to give it anything but the least restrictive rating. Of course, evading the Stasi while attempting to escape East Germany was no small matter, and that makes this movie a serious, no-nonsense thriller even if it doesn't have any harsh language or graphic violence. It's something of a throwback in that way, but that works for it.

It opens in 1979 on the day of the "Youth Dedication Ceremony" in the city of Possneck. Frank Strelzyk (Jonas Holdenrieder) is one of the graduating eighth-graders being honored as father Peter (Friedrich Mücke) mocks the presiding official to wife Doris (Karoline Schuch), despite the fact that they'll be giving neighbors Erik & Beate Baumann (Ronald Kukulies & Elisabeth Wasserscheid) a ride home, and Erik is a sort of mid-level bureaucrat with the Stasi. They don't intend to face the consequences, though, as the Strelzyks and their friends Günter & Petra Wetzel (David Kross & Alicia von Rittberg) have been working years on a hot-air balloon that will take them south, over the border to Bavaria, and the wind is right, even if the Wetzels have cold feet. The Strelzyks almost make it, but "almost" is a dangerous situation - it leaves enough clues behind for Lt. Col Seidel (Thomas Kretschmann) to pick up the scent, meaning they have to try again, except with weeks rather than months and the Stasi looking for them specifically.

Director and co-writer Michael Bully Herbig gets to that point, where the real meat of the film begins, fairly quickly, dispensing with a lot of what might be treated as important establishment of motivation. You don't really need to be told why anybody might want to flee East Germany, let alone why it's important for this specific group, so Herbig throws that in as details at the point where characters might actually mention it. Similarly, since this story involves the families doing a lot of things twice, it makes a lot of sense to just skip over the first time as much as possible rather than later feel like the filmmakers are spinning wheels or diminishing something's importance by doing a montage or not showing it later. It's a smart approach to this specific story and also just good storytelling in general - there's never a sense of anything important being left out or a filmmaker obviously trying to shape a story.

Full review at eFIlmCritic

Official Secrets

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)

Gavin Hood hasn't dedicated his entire directorial career to making films about the crimes and compromises behind the twenty-first century's Middle Eastern wars, but at three and counting, he's probably done more dramatic features on the subject than all but a few. If they ever become history people look back on rather than things that are still going on, those films will at the very least be an interesting set of commentary on the times as a group, even if some (like Official Secrets) are better as commentary than thrilling narrative.

The Official Secrets Act is the United Kingdom's primary law meant to protect national security, and in February 2004, Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) went on trial for the events of nearly a year earlier, when as a translator of signals intelligence, she was forwarded a memo asking that any information that could be used to leverage United Nations delegates into supporting action in Iraq on rather flimsy pretexts. She gave a copy to a friend in the anti-war movement, via whom it eventually made its way to reporter Martin Bright (Matt Smith) of the Observer, a paper that had until that point been editorializing in favor of the war. Bright, Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode), and Washington correspondent Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans) must be careful running the information down - it's hard to prove the sender even exists - and when the story breaks and Katharine is discovered, her Kurdish husband Yasar (Adam Bakri) becomes a target and lawyer Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes) is hamstrung in what he can do to defend her.

There are times when Official Secrets seems almost too reserved and British for its own good, avoiding direct confrontation, short-circuiting a suspenseful stretch by having Katharine spontaneously confess, and making a lot of effort to repeat the details of what seems a convoluted legal strategy. But that's sort of the point; the film is about how institutions can smother people attempting to do right and how those in power arrange those institutions to make it more difficult. One of the most telling lines is almost tossed off, referencing how the law Katharine Gun has run afoul of was specifically amended when someone had successfully opposed corruption before. It's about crimes whose effects are devastating but diffuse, almost impossible to witness and report by design.

Full review at eFIlmCritic

This Week in Tickets: 12 August 2019 - 18 August 2019

The next time someone talks about superhero movie fatigue, remind them that the Brattle was able to program a whole series of films noirs celebrating their 75th anniversary this summer, and I don't know how many people were talking about "murder drama fatigue" in 1944.



Granted, there was a war on and people didn't recognize "film noir" as a genre yet, so there were probably other things to talk about. Still, it's been making for a fun way to revisit some nifty movies, with Tuesday's pair being Robert Siodmak's nifty Phantom Lady and Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear. Both of them, in addition to being solid little mysteries, are compact 90-minute movies.

The weekend started with Friday's Red Sox game, which was, thankfully, the sort of game you should be expecting them to have against the Orioles - the Red Sox score a lot of, the Orioles don't, and the whole thing never gets bogged down but still lasts long enough that you don't feel ripped off. This has not happened often enough this year.

Saturday was a cross-river double feature of Line Walker 2: Invisible Spy & The Nightingale. I liked the former a bit and the latter a lot, enough that I'm kind of surprised that it's really passed through the Boston area quickly, going from two screens to one small one and then gone at the Kendall and starting in the screening room and quickly reduced to sharing the Goldscreen at the Coolidge. It feels like it should be a hit, but isn't. I wonder if everybody (including myself) talking about how it's so violent and intense scared people off.

Sunday was another day split between two theaters, with a "Silents, Please" screening of The Woman Disputed at the Somerville and then Olivia at the Brattle. Both were interesting but not really my thing. Combine all that with the noir playing the next Monday night, though, and that's seven Academy-ratio movies in seven days, which is especially funny since the TV I've been watching is 2.35:1.

Falling behind on my Letterboxd page. Sorry about that.

Phantom Lady

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Noirversary, 35mm)

I find that Phantom Lady makes a terrific second impression, in that while it seems kind of all over the place and silly the first time around, it's very easy to discount those weird bits or find them charming later, and every viewing after that will have a viewer anticipating the good moments and letting the rest pass by.

The bulk of those good moments come from Elsa Raines as one of film's pluckiest amateur sleuths, a secretary obviously in love with the boss who has been framed for murder but not mooning over him, and able to both amusingly and believably capture how this is a thrill for her but also terrifying when she knows that she's in the middle of danger. She's a fun alternative to the usual clipped professionals or dour pessimists that lead this sort of thriller, with Franchot Tone gleefully diving into the sort of insane villain that has (happily) been kind of discredited by now.

It rolls, though. A lot of mysteries just seem artificial the second time through, badly-paced when you know what's going to happen, but this one is just more comfortable. It's the sort of thing where I'm torn between buying a disc or hoping it comes around on 35mm on a regular basis.

eFilmCritic review from 2015

Ministry of Fear

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Noirversary, 35mm)

One of the fun things about how I've been keeping this blog is that, even if I haven't actually found time to write up Ministry of Fear before, I can search the "Next Week in Tickets" entries and see that this shows up in Boston fairly often - indeed, this screening was behind schedule, as I have records of it playing 2012 (twice), 2014, and 2016. There are a lot of reasons to revisit it, and maybe the print is more available than some other things.

It plays as an odd little mystery that's got a bit of everything, from the Blitz to supernatural quackery to a dark secret that's not quite so dark as all that. I'm curious how some of it played when it showed up back in 1944; I tend to associate the bit with the medium with earlier periods of history, and the awkward bits of spycraft toward the start seem maybe a bit more surreal than they should - would someone who hasn't been in a mental hospital for a couple of years accept any of it? It's especially strange because the more realistic outlandishness of the air raids and hiding him away as a fugitive aren't quite the right contrast.

You've still got Fritz Lang behind the camera, though, and even if the script is said to lose a lot of the feel of Graham Greene's novel, you can't easily squander that amount of sheer talent. Lang has always done spy stuff well, and captures the sinister nature of what it's like to find oneself in the middle of this very well. I'm kind of curious about the odd lack of xenophobia shown in the movie - I don't know Lang's personal experience as a refugee at the time, but it's kind of curious that nobody seems to suspect the siblings with Austrian accents as being anything but what they say.

The Woman Disputed

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 August 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

Thinking back on The Woman Disputed the better part of a week later, what it's trying to do is a little clearer - keep putting Norma Talmadge's Mary Ann Wagner into situations where people are able to think the best or the worst of her, such that even the man who loves her and stood up for her before is reluctant to believe her - and it's not entirely the film's fault that, 91 years on, its often less-than-feminist attitudes are just as eyebrow-raising as the decision to frame the Austrians as victims of Russian invaders in World War I (to be fair, WWI was a mess).

Even taking the whole product-of-its-time thing into account, though, the pacing is weird. It takes a while to get started, spins its wheels for a while, and then pushes the thing that feels like it should be the main engine of the film - will Mary Ann betray her fiancé to protect refugees and maybe help a spy get vital information out of the city? - is pushed toward the end with almost no time to deal with the fallout. It really exacerbates how even the people who say they love Mary Ann treat her terribly, and the end where Paul basically needs a man to publicly tell him that Mary Ann is a hero seems kind of egregious even for 1928.

The good news is that it's pretty easy to project Talmadge as recognizing that this is garbage along with the shame meant to be closer to the fore; she's got a scrappy charm that offsets the melodramatic woe nicely.

Olivia

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 August 2019 at the Brattle Theatre (special engagement, DCP)

The kind of distracting thing about Olivia is that star Marie-Claire Olivia looks right on the border of "too old to play a teenager", although given that it's a mid-century French film, it might just be filmmakers fetishizing and sexualizing innocence. That it's the rare film from that time and place directed by a woman doesn't really change that much, because it's queer as heck.

Indeed, Olivia (character and namesake actress) seems kind of peripheral to the really interesting story of two older women who are clearly each other's true loves but who had a rift develop sometime in the past that they've never been able to close. Mademoiselle Julie probably did, once upon a time, look at the young women in her charge a little too closely, especially the ones like Olivia who clearly like girls; another member of the staff has used this as a wedge to ingratiate herself with Mademoiselle Cara. It's the slow-motion fallout of an inciting event that itself doesn't matter. The students' devotion to one or the other of the pair feels like it could be a good way to represent this schism, but director Jacqueline Audry and the writers (adaptation of Colette Audry, dialogue by Pierre Laroche) don't make much of it.

It's still charming and often upbeat, enough to understand why the narration is sentimental despite a rather melancholy end. And given how unique a film it is for its time and place, a little imperfection or not connecting to people like me who are not its main audience is not something to worry about too much.

This Week in Tickets: 5 August 2019 - 11 August 2019

Back from Montreal, and London not long before that, and Hong Kong a little while earlier, and I'll often say the MBTA isn't that bad, but, yikes, while those places aren't perfect, there's a certain basic level of reliability to their public transportation that I kind of miss



Anyway, I'm leaving a gap here for Fantasia, and after getting my rest after the trip back, it was back to work and back to the movies on Monday, when I opted to catch Crawl because I'd heard good things online - which were pretty deserved; it knows what it's doing and does it well. And then, when I get home, there's a package with a new camera waiting, which is an ironic thing to get the day after arriving home from vacation.

The next night, I had a ticket to the Red Sox, and my encounters with the T went "the 350 bus is 20 minutes late", "the 350 bus breaks down and we wait by the side of the road for 20 minutes", "ten minute wait for the Red Line at Alewife", "two Green Line trains leave as I arrive at Park Street", and somehow I managed to avoid any more delays on the way to Kenmore (where it fortunately takes just a minute or two to buy some 35mm film for the camera). Once there, the game is not good; the Red Sox lose to the Royals 6-2, and I missed the first couple innings. What the heck happened to this team after last year, right?

Wednesday was for picking up a month's worth of comics (what the hell is DC doing these days? Who actually enjoys this "Year of the Villain" garbage enough for it to be in every damn book?), Thursday had me leaving work at a weird time, and then Friday's ride home just kind of wore me out and threw me off: I got to Alewife, and then actually got stuck in the tunnel between Alewife and Davis, eventually going back and moving to another train. I've gotta say, I kind of figured being on the train that held the whole Red Line up would be more exciting.

I briefly toyed with the idea of heading out to the Liberty Tree Mall to catch Nekrotronic, but guess I'll just settle for VOD after it took a few minutes longer than I'd allotted to get a haircut and I got cold feet at the times listed for transfers on Google, which could leave me all the way out in Salem and having to turn back. Instead, I caught Chinese firefighting adventure The Bravest early and then headed home, watched some baseball, and then caught Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 35mm at the Somerville, a reminder that film looks great and giving it up for the same of easier workflow was a mistake.

Sunday was laundry day, capped with Fast & Furious Presents Hobbs & Show on Assembly Row's Imax-branded screen. Not bad, but a little try-hard, and it's kind of crazy how weirdly big the spin-off from what started as a pretty modest series (and isn't nearly this grandiose) wound up being.

Sadly, my my Letterboxd page has fallen behind because I couldn't keep up in Montreal, but I'll do my best to keep it current while backfilling the festival stuff.

Crawl

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2019 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, DCP)

This movie does what it's supposed to do with no fuss and does it less than 90 minutes, which is something more horror movies should aspire to. It is a killer-animal movie that knows its job and spends just enough time building everything up to make everything that plays out extremely satisfying. It is the sort of thing you go into knowing it's a large alligator movie, where you spend the first act scoping out the terrain of the house and thinking about just what sort of trouble a corner will be when the reptiles finally appear, and still go "holy shit, gator!" when one shows up.

Around there, it's smart about knowing just how cranked up to be. Kaya Scodelario's Haley and Barry Pepper's father aren't stoic - they react to huge alligators in their basement during a Category Five hurricane with a believable amount of alarm - but they feel like people who can survive and won't exhaust the audience in doing so. The filmmakers are also pretty slick at getting the most of their effects - the CGI gators mesh very well with the practical ones (he says, assuming there are practical gators), and there's just enough gore the get the audience to react without getting to the point where it's taken for granted. They do a nice job of getting the light and sky to feel right, too.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 August 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

Quentin Tarantino has always been more than a bit heavy-handed, but something about this movie makes me wonder if, for all the ways in which he is a terrible human being, Harvey Weinstein had a knack for reeling him in just enough. There are a lot of scenes that run just a bit too long here, and cameos that feel just a little too cute in part because people watching the movie know who his rep stable is. Maybe he could use a producer who knows how to say "this is great, but..."

Of course, the movie is great in a lot of ways - Tarantino's pure love of Hollywood and the movies comes through in how Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate seems to be radiating pure joy most of the time on-screen, even as a bit about not being recognized at the box office of a theater showing a movie she's in hints at how fleeting fame can be, for instance. He gives the audience a couple of men who have made complete messes of their lives and lets the audience wonder just how worthy of second chances they are even while acknowledging that they can't just stop living and working. I don't know that Leonardo DiCaprio is quite playing against type here, but he vanishes inside the tough-guy actor who is in truth a mess of insecurities in a way that he has seldom done before. It's a performance that's almost too funny and bombastic to feel good, but it nevertheless plays as authentic.

And it's gorgeous, between how Tarantino clearly shoots this to be seen on film first and foremost, framing shots wide enough that even 2K high definition is going to lose significant detail and making great use of twilight, and how the crew puts 1969 Los Angeles together, both via visual effects and in terms of design, with the occasional wink toward how filmmakers make the past feel contemporary without being anachronistic. It's fun to see Zoe Bell graduate to full stunt coordinator here; this isn't an action movie, but her and Quentin being on the same wavelength helps out a lot when the time for action comes. There's a great sequence in the middle that does a fantastic job of making the Manson Family the stuff of horror movies but also showing how people can dismiss it and the like until it's too late.

I'll still probably be happy to catch it again on 35mm while my local place is still running it that way, even if it's not quite up there with my favorite Tarantino flicks.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2019 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax digital)

There are credits for 3D conversion on this movie, nestled among an honestly absurd number of mid/post-credit scenes, but we don't get 3D in America, which is kind of a shame: This big dumb movie that just doesn't know when to scale back and never has any heft despite always cranking up the scale could not only use a bit of fake 3D, it probably deserves it.

(Yes, I checked the Hong Kong movie times app that is still on my phone to see if they got it in 3D - they did - and did you know there is a sequel to Minuscule and a new movie starring Simon Yam and Weathering with You playing there?)

Anyway, for as much fun as the Dwayne Johnson/Jason Statham team-ups were in the previous F&F movies, a whole movie is a lot of two puffed-up headcases bickering, especially since the intended counterweight is Vanessa Kirby just wanting no part of their stupidity. They're all trying too hard to be cool but never get tested in a way that makes them overcome it. Meanwhile, Idris Elba is given a potentially great true believer of an antagonist but the script makes him muscle rather than mastermind - apparently they're saving the alpha villain for a sequel - and the two cameos that could have actually served as fun complements to the very serious stars are trying too hard to be scene-stealers.

David Leitch is still pretty good at action even when he doesn't have people as happy to get down and dirty as Keanu Reeves or Charlize Theron (that Statham is less tied up in being an unstoppable force than Johnson tends to make him more fun to watch), but he's got a solid sense of how things move and tug at each other, from Elba's motorcycle that seems like an extension of the cyborg assassin and seemingly wants to be with him to the finale which, while shown plenty in the trailer, is still a genuinely terrific set-piece, even if it seems as deliberate in the world of the film as it does as part of a film.

It's fun, even if its old-school James Bond villains seem as far removed from the later Fast & Furious movies as they themselves are from the first movie's plot that involved stealing a few VCRs. It's a big, dumb movie, but probably wouldn't have worked smaller and smarter.

This Week in Tickets: 17 June 2019 - 7 July 2019

So, about a year ago, Major League Baseball announced the Red Sox and Yankees would play a series in London, I registered to buy tickets as a season ticket-holder, got a chance to buy them in December, and then set my vacation time up. I didn't exactly go to London to see baseball, but it made for a good excuse.







I wouldn't leave until Friday, and meant to catch a bunch of movies beforehand, but there was work to do to get ahead and preparations to make, so the only film I got to see was Late Night, which has Emma Thompson and is thus better than a lot of movies.

After that, I had a Red Sox ticket for Friday night, but booked by flight for 10pm, so that went to StubHub and I got on a plane. The sleeping aid don't work quite so well as I might have hoped, so I was kind of dragging through most of Saturday, but I was still alert enough to climb 300-odd stairs to snap pictures like this:



That's a view from the top of The Monument, not far from my hotel, something I stumbled upon when I visited back in 2012, and breezy enough that I'm glad I didn't climb it in December. I followed it up by my first dinner of fish and chips at a pub, which is honestly something I wish I could do more often at home, but there's actually not as many good chippies in the Boston area as you'd think.



Didn't have me straying far, revisiting the Tower of London, which is a really delightful place to walk around, a blast for being full of a thousand years of history but also right in the middle of the city, with skyscrapers and bridges and the like all around.



Monday was the all-but-inevitable trip to 221B Baker Street, because I am who I am and cannot resist. It's kind of a silly thing to do - fifteen pounds for something like twenty minutes - but fun and more than any other tourist thing in London, you're in there with people who love the same thing you do rather than people who think it's a classy, "good-for-you" thing, and they're from America, Britain, Korea, Russia, all over the place. Folks love Sherlock Holmes.



On Tuesday, I actually got on a tour bus and headed out to Stonehenge, going for the tour that was led by an archaeologist, who promised to kick anyone mentioning aliens off the bus, pointed out that this place had nothing to do with the Druids (despite neo-druidic types making stone circles part of their thing), and was basically very informative and on top of the latest research, which seems to be rapidly changing the impression of what early Britain was like.

I'd initially been somewhat disappointed that I was unable to book a tour that allowed us inside the stone circle, but you actually get much closer than I'd thought. Maybe next time I'll just be generally more prepared.



Part of the tour was Bath, and while the Roman Baths themselves are kind of an approximation above ground level, it's a nifty little city that does a nice job of blending the modern with its mostly-Georgian design.



Wednesday was the day that I'd carved out to see some theater, attending The Merry Wives of Windsor at Shakespeare's Globe, which is if nothing else a unique experience - a reminder of how plays were staged in Shakespeare's day, before artificial lighting and completely enclosed spaces. I did the tour the last time I was in London, but couldn't see a play because it was cold out.

Merry Wives is a great example of how these plays come alive when performed but can be hard to love when read - this particular staging was filled with slapstick, big performances that put emotion into words that otherwise might just sit on the page, etc. The staging seemed to transplant the story to 1920s Louisiana, which just gave it more personality.



I didn't actually take many pictures at the Edvard Munch exhibit at the British Museum on Thursday, but enjoy it, as well as the manga exhibition (where I saw this 1880 theater curtain) and everything else. The manga exhibit amused me in part because the nearby Cartoon Museum was closed and it kind of seemed like this one was picking up the slack. Great stuff in there, including some Osamu Tezuka original art, along with more modern stuff, though it excluded some of my favorites (although that would be rectified later).

The British Museum is one of those monster places that eats a whole day even if you've been there before and figure you can just hit the highlights because there is so dang much that it can come across as warehousing rather than exhibiting at times. It would likely be that way even if you sent everything back that had arrived in ways that would currently be frowned upon where it belonged, and my legs were kind of worn out by the end.



Friday was spent in Greenwich, seeing the Cutty Sark, Maritime Museum, and Observatory, with the Maritime Museum having an exhibit on recent astrophotography, and, yes, I am a complete sucker for a spot that combines boats and space and a nice park where a person could just sit down and read for a while. This part of London is a bunch of my favorite things and that the easiest way to get there was on a river line was pretty great too. That made me wonder why Boston doesn't have one, to be honest - for all that it was more expensive and a bit slower than taking the subway, there have certainly been days lately when I would absolutely choose it over the Red Line.



Saturday… Well, let me tell you a bit about how I vacation. I don't really like package tours and buses and cruises all that much, preferring to get a transit card and a guidebook, leaving room for what I find out about on the ground. I joked with a friend that riding the subway is an essential part of traveling, not just because it gives you a feel for the city but because that's where you see ads for museums, plays, and other things that are just too ephemeral to get written up where a tourist knows to look. It's how I found out about the Da Vinci exhibition at Buckingham Palace, and then saw that there was a Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Design Museum. Sadly, that required timed tickets that I was too late to find, but getting off the tube there also showed me that Japan House had an exhibit of the works of manga-ka Naoki Urasawa, one of my favorites who had been absent from the one at the British Museum. Total chance discovery but a very happy one.

After that, I had a little more time to kill than expected before the baseball, so I went to Kensington Palace, which is an awfully pretty building and has neat gardens, including this winding hedge "maze" that gets you to the tea-house that was a bit too classy for my t-shirt-and-cargo-shorts clad self. As much as I'm glad we tossed out the British royalty in America, visiting European capitals always reminds me that it's nice to have had a royal family, even if they seem like an anachronistic waste in the present.



And then, finally, it was time for the baseball that had served as my impetus to come. The games were unfortunate thrasings by the Yankees - a 17-13 loss on Saturday and a 12-8 game which strangely never felt as winnable on Sunday - but it was a lot of fun. They were crazy, anything-can-happen games, the European fans were into it, there were a bunch of food trucks to supplant the regular stadium fare around the concourse, and the folks who traveled like me clearly had a blast. I probably won't go back for Cubs-Cards next year, but it's tempting.

I just wish someone had told me that the 80m-high sculpture next to the stadium had an observation deck that you could descend from via lift, steps, or slide. I would definitely have bought the necessary timed tickets ahead of time, but, alas, that is something else to write down for the next trip, whenever that may be.

After that, it was back home, which took most of Monday, but I got to ease back into work, what with being let out early on Wednesday for a holiday on Thursday. I took advantage of that, catching an earlier-than-usual show of Midsommar on Wednesday. I liked it more than the director's previous film but it's still kind of a lot, especially when it's time to go full-on nuts.

I headed out early on Thursday because that was the only time to easily catch the reissue of Do the Right Thing, especially since I wanted to catch the 35mm print that the Coolidge got their hands on. It's a pretty terrific movie that I probably should have seen much earlier, but when I was young, I kind of suffered under the delusion that Spike Lee's movies weren't really for me, kind of reinforced by how, when I worked in a Worcester theater while in college, the extra security and Wednesday openings tended to reinforce the idea that films by/for/about African Americans were a niche thing to be accomodated rather than great on their own. I've got a fair amount of catching up to do.

Preferred format considerations played into me heading to Boston Common after to see Spider-Man: Far From Home in Imax 3D during the one time a day it played in that format. I don't think I'm getting Marvel fatigue yet - I enjoyed it a lot - but, boy, am I coming to take the fact that there will be well-cast, slickly-made, and generally pretty enjoyable takes on these characters every few months for granted.

With a bit of a time crunch to see things, I did a Kendall Square double-feature of The Spy Behind Home Plate and The Third Wife on Friday. I liked the second more than the first, but both are well worth seeing.

Saturday was spent up in Maine, where the whole family was together to meet my brother's future in-laws. I had the option to stay over, but didn't, though saying "I need Sunday free to go to the laundromat so that I can wear the clothes from the vacation I just returned from on the one I'm about to take" makes me sound like a couple types of jerk. On the other hand, if I'd stayed over, I probably would have wound up getting a ride back to Boston with my other brother, who got stuck in nasty traffic, missed his 7pm flight back to Chicago, and couldn't actually make it home until a 5:50am flight on Tuesday. I, meanwhile, got my laundry done, watched some baseball on TV, and then hit a 3D screening of Toy Story 4. That may be technically one film too many in the series, it still works awfully well.

And now, I'm on another bus, for the yearly three-week stat at summer movie camp that is the Fantasia Festival. I'll be doing my best to post daily updates, and to get the reaction to one movie onto my Letterboxd page while waiting in line for the next

Midsommar

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2019 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)

Like Ari Aster's previous film Hereditary, Midsommar is perhaps best appreciated in pieces: It is impeccably designed and photographed, the performance by Florence Pugh is as terrific (as we should more or less expect by now), and the basic engine driving it - a woman who has lost everything so desperate to belong that she soon accepts a community that offers it even though the warning signs should be impossible to ignore - is kind of great. Add a strong supporting cast and a pitch-black sense of humor and you should have something really special.

There's something a little too certain about it, though. It starts with the showy placement of mirrors in a bunch of early scenes, where the isolation of having people not seeming to look at each other as they talk or being positioned in a sort of cut-out is undercut by knowing cameras were digitally erased, or other trick shots, and goes on with a cult that has supposedly been going on for decades but always seems like weird bits stuck together rather than something which grew organically, though I suppose cults are generally weird bits put together in real life. The low-key distortion as folks get high on mushrooms in various ways calls distracting attention to itself, and character exits feel less unnerving and dangerous than like Aster couldn't be bothered with them any more, something of a side effect to how everything but the main story is meant to be sort of deliberately trivial in comparison to what Pugh's character. Plus, the thing is 145 minutes long, which is insanely indulgent, feeling like one of those indies where every painstaking thing the crew created gets left in no matter how pacing and storytelling suffers.

Midsommar is better than Hereditary - it doesn't squander a good human story for supernatural idiocy the way that one did - but all its good minutes don't add up the way they should.

Do the Right Thing

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (reissue, 35mm)

This was My first time seeing this, and I'd always been under the impression that the explosion came earlier, with a bigger chunk of the movie the resulting chaos, but that it doesn't is a sign of what makes Spike Lee brilliant. By the time the trash can goes through the window, he's managed to spend the previous two hours getting the audience to feel the heat and tension in an air-conditioned theater without resorting to people being overtly sweaty or some sort of visual distortion. He isn't subtle about highlighting all the ways people mistrust or push at each other, but it doesn't seem like an obvious powder keg in any one scene. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect is powerful, setting things up so that when it does blow up, one nods along, not approving but certainly having some idea of just how it gets to this point.

It's an impressively empathic bit of filmmaking in how it gets someone (like me) whose background is pretty far from the very specific environment that Lee channels to feel like I'm right there with his characters. Do the Right Thing is tricky but impressive as heck - as cacophonous as anything Lee would make later, but also a less-confrontational indie that can make the different seem familiar and the familiar seem new. I'm glad this got a chance to play theaters again to remind us that Lee has been one of the great directors right from the start.

Spider-Man: Far from Home

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2019 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax 3D)

As much as the casting on this newest run of Spider-Movies has been top-notch and they look great, they do kind of demonstrate the downside of a shared universe, in that Spidey never feels like quite the big deal he was in the Raimi movies. You look at those, and even the "Amazing" flicks, and you see a guy figuring things out, wisecracking as a way of finally responding to those who have kept him down, and measuring himself against his own high expectations, as opposed to trying to be the next Iron Man. It's sometimes a small difference in terms of what actually happens, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man is never just a kid from Queens up against problems bigger than he thought he would ever face, but someone who has people ready to catch him when he falls.

This time around, he's up against Mysterio - who, like the Vulture before him, has been given an origin that relates to Tony Stark - and it's a weird script; I suspect that even the people who don't know him from the comics are going to be expecting a heel turn from the start. Fortunately, when that comes, it unleashes Jake Gyllenhaal to do the sort of mania he does best, and gives the filmmakers a chance to do some Ditko-style mania that is eye-popping even if it doesn't necessarily make complete sense given how his equipment is shown to work. Tom Holland is still a delightfully earnest Peter Parker, and even if I occasionally find myself shrugging off a lot of the high-school comedy material (it is just not a thing that gets me going), I loved the kids acting it out. I like that the "button" at the end was not just a vague tease this time, but a huge cliffhanger that hit with an extra wallop because it seemed like the unexpected cameo was going to be the payoff.

When it really gets going - which is often! - Far From Home is energetic and a lot of fun, and I suspect that it came out a little further from Endgame or Enter the Spider-Verse, both of which pushed the boundaries of what a superhero movie could be and had great Spidey material, I'd react with much less reservation. Marvel's just set the bar so high.

Toy Story 4

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2019 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

I have to admit, I had this kind of dismissed ahead of time, because the series seemed pretty conclusively done after #3, despite the enjoyable specials done for TV. Well, now it's even more done, if not nearly so nearly, but there are some great parts to be found in this probable for-real finale.

I don't want to say too much, just because noting how it's not quite so well-constructed as its predecessors might take away from noting all the clever things it does have to say about subjects stretching from parenthood to retirement - and how it's more than a bit impressive that Pixar has made the toys go from feeling like kids to feeling like parents, and there's so much of that here in so many different forms, and not just Woody being challenged by "newborn" Forky. Gabby Gabby is arguably the series's most fascinating antagonist, motivated out of a complex sort of envy in how she wants to raise a child but never had the chance, trying to remedy that "medically" and going through a nerve-wracking (and often heartbreaking) adoption process to do so. I was surprised how invested I found myself in Woody and Bo Peep by the end, too; she had always seemed like the part of the movies that didn't really fit, the sort of girlfriend character jammed in so that the movie wouldn't be all boys, and I wonder if the filmmakers realized that, and made her story about making herself become more here as a bit of a comment on that. The themes of moving on are kind of interesting, too, considering that several of the people who had been with Pixar since early on left (voluntarily or not) during its production.

It's got some problems that the unambiguously brilliant forebears don't, though. There's not enough Mister Pricklepants, obviously - aside from "Timothy Dalton makes everything better", one can't help but notice that the toys that Bonnie brings on the road trip are mostly Andy's rather than her own, mostly because those are the ones the audience knows. There's something kind of off about how much the toys are able to affect the human world, too; it feels like it should be harder. And while I love Randy Newman - "You've Got a Friend in Me" has re-lodged itself in my head since seeing this one - the new song he contributes here seems awfully literal, even by the standards of the series.

The movie is impressive in a lot of ways - it's clever, gorgeous (check it out in 3D if you can), and big-hearted. It's also a fourth entry in a series, where the world starts to feel stretched and the filmmakers can't quite simultaneously push into new territory and deliver what the audience loves about the series with quite the same apparent ease at this point. Hopefully Disney and Pixar will heed their own message and find new horizons.