This Week In Tickets: 26 August 2013 - 1 September 2013

You know, I don't know that this week was actually that much busier than a typical week, it's just that all the places I went had great big tickets:



Stubless: I started going through the online screeners for the films I couldn't get to at Fantasia: Tiger Mask on Tuesday the 27th, After School Midnighters on Saturday the 31st, and Les 4 Soldats & The Battery on Sunday the 1st.

Okay, fit those in, and it actually was a busy week. I'm trying to cram those in late not just because I tend to procrastinate, but so that they're not terribly far from the front of my mind when I have finished with writing up the stuff I saw in person. I'm also planning to do the same with the Hitchcock stuff, but who knows? That slowed down a little this week, with just two screenings for me: "Aventure Malgache" & Lifeboat on Monday, and Murder on Sunday.

Also coming in a pair: Red Sox games. I had really good seats for the one on Thursday night - not only were they in the loge box along the first-base line, but they were right at the top of a walkway, so I had something resembling leg room. The Red Sox lost, in large part because it seemed like John Lester would not throw strikes and Johnny Gomes could not play left field, but Shane Victorino clobbered an impressive homer. Sunday, I was in the bleachers with my brother Matt and his wife Morgan, and it kind of rained on and off, but this game they won. It was a long, kind of grinding game, and kind of the start of September baseball - you know, when there are too many call-ups and so there's a lot of pinch-hitting and relief appearances. As inefficient as Doubront was, usually Farrell would leave him in for a chance at the win. It was kind of a weird feeling - for as close as the score was, it never seemed like the White Sox were actually going to take the lead, even before Koji time.

The Gathr screening this week was Breath of the Gods, which isn't bad at all, although it's the kind of thing that doesn't leave a terribly strong impression. That can't be said for the other films I saw in theaters - The Last Dragon is thoroughly bonkers, but in a cheerful sort of way; I already knew I loved Starry Starry Night, but it was very nice to share it with some friends and see that, yeah, it holds up like crazy; Getaway was a harsh lesson in not going to see a movie just because of its start time; and Phantasm was at least as genuinely weird, although I don't know if you're going to get anything else with Don Coscarelli.

And, right in the middle of the week, I went to my second concert of the summer at the Bank of America Pavilion, this one for Huey Lewis & the News. I saw them there before, I think on the tour for Four Chords & Several Years Ago, when I think it was still called Harborlights, and I realize that marks me as old in two different ways - though, to be fair, Huey mentioned having played Great Woods, so we're all likely to revert back to pre-naming-rights-sale titles when there is one.

Fun concert. The opening band was The Stompers, a Boston band that got their start at the same time as the main act but never really took off; it's a reminder that this sort of success can be random. I see now that their last song was "Never Tell an Angel", which in retrospect makes a lot more sense than "Never Tell a Ninja". Then Huey came on and played the entire Sports album, which still holds together very well, and it's neat to see an album played in concert like that; good albums are built with the flow from one song to another in mind, and the "grab the hits" format of the typical concert loses that. Plus, there was a lot of other fun stuff - "Some Kind of Wonderful" running right into "But It's Alright", bringing the drummer's daughter up on stage to sing Gwynneth Paltrow's part in "Cruisin'", and making "Plan B" a way to show off the horn section, including special guest Grace Kelly on alto sax. Obviously, a different one.

I recommend the show a lot; the thing about this band is that, while they never particularly influenced rock & roll, they made a lot of solid songs, and the vibe is upbeat. You can understand the lyrics, and the style is encompassing enough that playing oldies doesn't seem out of place. They're arguably the world's greatest and most successful bar band, and they make it a positive.

"Aventure Malgache"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

"Aventure Malgache" is an oddity from Hitchcock; a half-hour-long propaganda film that he returned to England to shoot in French during the war. It was meant to be used as a propaganda film, but apparently portrayed the Resistance as being too human and imperfect to be distributed at the time, and as such wound up languishing in obscurity.

Looking at it now, I'm not sure that those complaints are particularly valid, though I'm not living in that particular sort of wartime environment; maybe the ambivalence the French in Madagascar are shown as feeling at the start just wouldn't fly. It is, more disappointingly, rather dull; much of the action takes place off-screen and there are frequent returns to the framing device of exiled Frenchman in a theater troupe. This sort of film seems like an excellent chance to amp the melodrama up, or engage in some barbed black comedy. Instead, we merely get a few lines disparaging Vichy water, and the admittedly amusing way a collaborator tries to hide the evidence of working for the Germans.

Lifeboat

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

I'm not sure I quite love Lifeboat as much as when I first saw it, but I may appreciate it more. It's really quite a remarkable film for its time, daring to wonder about wartime morality and its costs when many other films might be satisfied with either demonizing the Germans or having ethical behavior be unrealistically rewarding. It's also got an impressively full role for Canada Lee, a relatively rare thing for African-American actors at the time.

It also holds up very well for a movie that is often in the Ten Little Indians mold, remaining quite compelling even when one knows just what is going to happen next. It gets into impressively dark territory, enough so for the last act especially to contain multiple kinds of horror beyond mere surprise.

EFC review from 2006

Tiger Mask (Taiga Masuku)

* * (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

Tiger Mask is disappointing in a way that resembles lack of ambition, but may very well just be low budget problems. After all, during the first act, my jaw was regularly dropping about how genuinely nuts it seemed to be; it's not very long at all before you've got a whole passel of orphan boys being trained by whip-wielding women in tight leather dresses, all aiming to be the one that gets to wear the skill-enhancing Tiger Masks made by Mister X. And while the idea of funding a criminal network by having these guys participate in underground pro-wrestling deathmatches is goofy, it can certainly work in this story's world.

Unfortunately, at that point, the filmmakers seem to reach the end of their madness and resources. The action may be well-staged, but the matches look small. There's a neat idea that the environment in which they were raised has left hero Naoto Date very much unprepared for things like bars and girls and the like, but they don't do much, and the shadowy organization behind Mister X remains too shadowy, despite seeming awfully central to the plot.

There's a post-credits tease promising more in a sequel, but it's the sort of "more" that really should have been in this movie in the first place.

The Last Dragon

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (@fter Midnite, DCP)

The Last Ddragon is as goofily 1980s as something can manage to be, and early on I realized just what that meant when all the broad parody it was doing fit in pretty seamlessly with an El Debarge music video, and I couldn't help but feel some kind of amazement that Debarge was a thing back then. It's kind of scary to look at things from your youth and not have any idea where reality stops and mocking begins.

One thing which I hope is real - although it falling out of favor since then makes me sad - is just how gleefully cultures were shown as cross-pollinating. "Bruce" Leroy Green (Taimak) loves kung fu and acts a bit like a stereotyped Asian, but nobody really cares, and he doesn't have to embrace his blackness to succeed. The same sort of goes for Sho Nuff (Julius Carry), plus there are Asian folks acting like the popular perception of African Americans; Green owning a pizza place even though folks say a black guy doing so is strange; and the youngest Green child has a bunch of names from different cultures, as if they're not going to make her be one thing or the other yet. Heck, the villain (Chris Murney) is the guy who is ashamed of where he comes from and disdainful of what he does, and that's just the worst thing he can be.

The movie's a lot of fun that way in general, and while it doesn't necessarily have great kung fu, it's lively and over-the-top enough to maintain smiles and laughter all the way through. I'm not particularly surprised that this was the role that most people remembered Julius Carry from after his death - I may prefer "Lord Bowler, MANHUNTER", but Sho Nuff reaches out and grabs one's attention, doesn't he?

After School Midnighters (Hokago Middonaitazu)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

This was scheduled as Saturday Morning cartoons at Fantasia, and I found myself holding out on the screener until I could watch it as such at home. I'm quite glad I did - just like it's more fun to watch horror movies when it's dark outside, kids' cartoons are more fun when you're alert and maybe feeling a bit of a sugar rush from breakfast. You just feel like you're doing it right.

And this one, for all it clothes itself in spookiness, a self-contained loop of a time-travel subplot, and some weirdly adult references (although if Animaniacs could have a regular bit based on GoodFellas twenty years ago, why shouldn't a Japanese CGI cartoon give gun-toting bunnies names from The Godfather?), After School Midnighters really is for kids, leaping past explanations or much in the way of logic the same way a kid's brain does, propelling things forward with raw energy, cuteness, and just plain being silly. It goes for the gross-out humor at times, and I can't imagine what an American distributor would do with it as a result - but never as anything truly malicious or humiliating.

I kind of wish I'd had a chance to see it on the big screen (got stuck with Zero Charisma instead, and, ugh), if only because the HDMI output from my computer to my TV runs kind of dark, and I'd have liked to see how poppy the colors were. It's got a video-game level of detail, but the style mostly works for it; everything on-screen is kind of smooth and rubbery, lending itself to slapstick and exaggeration. It's all over the place, at least for an adult watching it by himself, but it's at least never boring.

Xing Kong (Starry Starry Night)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in the Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (Boston Children's Film Fetival, 35mm)

I spent a bit of effort pushing how great this movie was for its two shows at the MFA, and while I did get three people in, I still feel kind of bad that it was a pretty empty auditorium, with no kids present for something that's part of a Children's Film Festival. Sure, they may have come the night before, or when many of these same movies played back in April, but I must admit to being rather puzzled by how this movie really just hasn't gained any traction in the US at all. It had a tiny China Lion release last year and doesn't seem to have been picked up on video at all. Shame, because it's great and not so specifically Taiwanese that an American audience would be thrown by it - heck, most of the references are Western.

One thing that really impressed me the second time through was just how much Tom Lin's flights of fancy really worked, even when they're not surprising or just being admired for their beauty and ingenuity. They're the sort of artifice that can be distancing - it's not for nothing that I occasionally describe this movie as what Moonrise Kingdom would be with real kids instead of Wes Anderson quirkbots - but they do actually heighten the emotion here.

I also like how much effort there is to not make the mother of the collapsing family a monster. It's easy to see her as horrible - she's so deeply unhappy that she doesn't just want to leave her husband, but her country - but she does come off as more hurt than selfish, and I think it's clever that the beret Xiao Mei wears at the end is the one she got from her mother and mostly ignored toward the beginning. It's a detail I missed the first time, but it's impressively gentle and real.

Original 2012 review on EFC

Getaway

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

As I mentioned earlier, Getaway is an excellent argument for not seeing movies just because of when they start. For whatever reason, it was the only movie I hadn't seen in the 5:00-6:30pm window on Saturday (and even that qualifier may not have been necessary), so out came the MoviePass card, because why not?

Well, "because it stinks" is why not. As much as I'm going to have some affection for any movie that commits to smashing up real cars, this one didn't have a whole lot to offer beyond that, and it had the sort of hacky editing and staging of the car chases that felt like the filmmakers were just trying to set a record as opposed to creating excellent chases. It seems like a huge mistake to not put anyone of any interest or consequence in any of the other cars, and a script can only point out that a plan is stupid so many times before it stops being likably self-deprecating.

On the plus side, it does have Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez, who aren't doing great work, but are better than the movie deserves. They try for chemistry despite it being tough to get blood from a stone. You can see the benefit of experience as Hawke does a slightly better job of building a character out of nothing than Gomez does from her nameless, whatever-the-script-needs-her-to-be-right-then construct. Jon Voight, on the other hand, is just picking up a paycheck, with the director trying hard to use style to create menace despite the fact that they've got a perfectly capable actor there to do it.

Phantasm

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Cinema Slumber Party, 35mm)

Sometime I'm going to have to go through Don Coscarelli's output, especially the "Phantasm" series, to see if he's really displayed a specific interest in certain subjects, or if I'm finding patterns where there aren't any. For instance, in the first film I saw from him, Bubba Ho-Tep, he's got an Egyptian mummy sucking souls out of the anuses of the elderly - including a long-forgotten Elvis and JFK - and it's not hard to see that as a commentary on the indignity of death, impending and otherwise. I didn't make the entire connection when watching Phantasm II a few months back, because I was mostly trying to process all the strangeness on display, especially considering that it did relatively little to catch the folks who hadn't seen the first up, but there's something similar going on in his most famous series.

Here, the focus is less on impending death than the recent variety, but it's set around a mortuary and graveyard that is a passageway to another world. If he's not referencing some form of mythology, he's doing something wrong. Granted, that he's creating his own mythology is undeniable, and he just goes for flat-out weird on occasion. What is with the fortune teller Mike visits, for instance? In a lot of movies, he'd be trying to spend time with the cute granddaughter, but they play that as the pair being straight psychics, and then the granddaughter is pretty much just removed from the movie, and the fact that this town has something supernatural going on is more or less forgotten.

It's still plenty enjoyable, though - Coscarelli has a knack for the strange, and when he decides he wants to scare, he knows how to get the job done. The cast may not exactly be great, but they're pretty good matches for these characters, and that gets the movie most of the way there. I do tend to think that the second film is an improvement on this, although I suspect I'll need to see the whole series to really get an idea of the scope of the world being created.

Les 4 Soldats (The Four Soldiers)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I definitely wish I could have seen this one in Montreal, although it seemed as though there weren't going to be any English-language subtitles. I really should brush up on my French, so that maybe I can enjoy movies like that and the Q&A afterward.

I gather writer/director Robert Morin is kind of a big deal in French-Canadian film, which doesn't surprise me from watching Les 4 Soldats; it's a very confident, assured independent film, impressive for how it can take relatively minimal activity and still make something very dramatic. He establishes a civil war of sorts at the beginning but mainly uses it to isolate his characters, shrinking their world physically, emotionally, and in terms of direction.

He does a number of interesting things with his narrator, too - occasionally Dominique will start talking mid-scene for only the audience to hear, though other moments will be standard voice-over. There's something more intimate about the former, naturally - those are her feelings as opposed to just information being delivered. I also wondered if the other characters were meant to think she was a boy - the pronouns occasionally worked that way, and she never does undress at the pond. At any rate, Camille Mongeau gives an impressive performance as Dominique, and the rest of the actors playing the core group are just as good, even though some don't have particularly showy parts.

The Battery

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I've heard a lot of praise for this one, and in some ways I find it somewhat puzzling. I suppose you could say that it does what it's looking to do fairly well, exploring the bond and antagonism that form between two survivors of the zombie apocalypse thrown together by chance. The question, then, is whether this is a story worth telling.

Maybe if World War Z had been adapted as an anthology, this would have made a nice hour-long entry, but as it is, it feels a little padded, especially when minor league ballplayers Ben & Mickey find themselves at the edges of bigger stories that might have made for the plot of a fine story-based zombie movie but wind up being less of a focus here.

It's also worth noting that this movie has some of the least-scary zombies even by slow-zombie standards, with very little make-up in many cases and one memorable extended moment when Mickey's response to being near the undead is rather unconventional. I also found the end rather frustrating, both in "we're leading up to this?" terms and requiring a certain lack of common sense to get there. It's a nice-looking movie and writer/director/star Jeremy Gardner does a fine job of making something intriguing from very little, but it just didn't grab me like it did some others.

Murder!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

Murder is notable for being one of the few "whodunit" style thrillers Hitchcock made, and it certainly is entertaining enough as that sort of cozy mystery. You can probably blow any number of holes in it, but it's also interesting to look at it as a sort of deconstruction of that type of mystery story, in the way Hitchcock pays particular attention to one facet that, even decades later, fans tended to take for granted.

That would be the "gentleman detective", a subset of amateur sleuths whom everyone - be they cops, suspects, witnesses, or friends and family of the victims - gives something approaching carte blanche to look into the matter. The unspoken assumption is that this upper-class fellow is presumed to simply know better by dint of his or her social position and implied education/influence. It's intriguingly magnified here, with sleuth Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) presumptuously deciding to investigate a case on his own after having been on the jury that convicts a woman for murder, cavalierly offering favors to people who are in no position to refuse. There are some strong working-class accents among the latter, and a weird combination of opportunism and deference.

Eventually, of course, it goes "the play's the thing", as it sort of must with a plot so full of actors, and it's not necessarily the most satisfying finale. But that's okay, since the murder mystery seems sort of secondary from 2013. I don't know how much of that was deliberate and how much was just "how things are done" in 1930, but it makes the movie an interesting artifact, at least.

This Week In Tickets: 2 August 2010 to 8 August 2010

It's almost late enough to go back to including the preview here, but there's logic to it - I wanted to get the Metropolis review done, as well as make as much progress on the Fantasia stuff as I could before it fell out the back of my head. Now comes the hard part - going back to the 9th of July and writing something on The Clash! Still, I haven't quite been chaining myself to the shiny new laptop they gave me at work:



Look at the fees Ticketmaster is charging on that concert ticket. $42.50 is not an unfair price, but, honestly, what do those $12.85 and $5.00 fees (applied to each ticket in the order, not just the one) buy you? To be fair, Live Nation has been experimenting with waiving or consolidating them at various points this summer, figuring that the audience might be okay with a slightly higher ticket price if they don't get whacked with a 38% mark-up on the last screen of the check-out process.

It was, at least, a fun concert, the first I'd seen with BNL in their current 4-person configuration; Stephen Page's voice and antics are missed, although Tyler Stewart taking over for him on "Alcohol" during the encore was an... energetic substitution. I also dug the stripped-down, almost a capella "Sound of Your Voice" that Kevin Hearn did. I will readily admit, though, that I can't hear "Four Seconds" without thinking of my niece singing it any more. She's going to love that clip when she's a teenager, I'm sure.

It was also cool to hang out with Matt, Morgan, Dan, and Lara while the opening acts were playing. Lara is clearly someone who believes that "pregnant" does not mean "disabled", as this was her second BNL concert in two days, the previous one being at Foxwoods in Connecticut, despite the fact that her due date was about a week and a half away when I saw her. I do sort of wish everyone could have arrived earlier, as I didn't quite figure the times right for getting the bus back from Reading after seeing Inception, and I was some kind of hungry.

Born to Kill

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Noir Centennials)

Hopefully I'll get a chance to go back and revisit these noir series in more detail, as the Brattle's series of films noir featuring cast members born in 1910 has had some fun, rarely-seen entries. Like this one, where Claire Trevor's Helen Brent discovers a murder victim on her way out of Reno (where she'd been living for a month so that she could get a divorce), only to meet and spark to the murderer, Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney) on the train back to San Francisco. He doesn't think much of her finacé, but once he meets her wealthy foster sister (Helen is adopted)...

Born to Kill isn't a perfect movie. It lacks a really great moment of Helen realizing that Sam is a killer and having to figure out how she feels about that. But it generally does a good job of mixing its soapy elements with its crime, and tends to have good forward momentum, with more fun twists and turns than usual. It's got a nice cast, too, although I tended to find the supporting cast growing on me more than the leads.

Johnny Angel

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Noir Centennials)

Another one with Ms. Trevor, this time playing the femme fatale who has a history with George Raft's title character but is married to her boss. It's certainly got a nifty hook, with Johnny finding the ship his father skippered abandoned at sea and then tailing a mysterious French girl who emerges from it.

There's a few too many characters for its short runtime, though - Signe Hasso doesn't get to do much as the damsel in distress, and Hoagy Carmichael's helpful cabbie is just sort of wedged in there as well. It makes good use of its intriguing initial mystery, though, and looks pretty slick, both in terms of faking New Orleans and creating nifty locations for the action to take place; many of them don't look like they've just been thrown together on the lot as a generic apartment, but made to look like specific, individual settings.

Inception

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2010 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (The IMAX Experience)

I feel like the last sci-fi fan to see Inception - especially considering the relatively empty theater I saw it in (as well as they've been doing, I suspect the IMAX guys are ready for Resident Evil: Afterlife). It is, as befits its reputation, pretty sweet. It's got a ridiculously good cast, does a pretty good job of introducing new ideas and then playing with the implications, and some last-act action sequences that are legitimately amazing. I had an absolutely blast watching it.

However, since I am a hard-sf-loving guy who notices details... <SPOILERS>

... that whole exciting last act seems to be predicated on a false premise, to wit, that the dream state is a perfect simulation of reality, just at high speed. In fact, it's a simulation so perfect as to be imperceptible. Myself, though, I'm not sure the whole sped-up time thing should work more than one layer down. Okay, a dream can run 20x fast than reality - but that's taxing the extent of one's brain, right? Go down a layer deeper, and your brain just isn't powerful enough - you've already gone from using 10% to 100% in order to do this, and there's no 1,000% level (let alone 10,000%) to get to.

</SPOILERS>

I suppose that's less egregious than what some sci-fi movies do, but I couldn't help but notice it.

This Week In Tickets: 19 April 2010 to 25 April 2010

Well, with the festival done and reviews trickling in, it's time to take a break from moviegoing, right? Wrong! Indeed, the weekend's two must-sees from the other side of the Pacific are getting second viewings because of how awesome they were at various festivals; I recommend them both highly.

* Hausu is properly named House - it's even in English on the prints - but we wouldn't want to confuse it with a sequel-spawing 1980s American haunted house movie, would we? No! For this is an absolutely insane bit of trippiness from Japan, which I saw on video at last year's BUFF, and loved. It's beautiful, and beautifully insane. It's running for a measly three days at the Brattle (Friday 30 April 2010, Saturday 1 May 2010, and Monday 3 May 2010, no shows on Sunday), and they will sell out. Midnights were selling the IFC Center in New York out for months after what was expected to be a two-week run, so see it in beautiful 35mm while you can, and hope that the Brattle or Coolidge bring it back for midnights later.

* The Good, The Bad, The Weird has been held in distribution limbo because of MGM complaining about the title, although IFC dropping a single conjunction seems to have done it. I saw it at the Brattle on Saturday night as part of "IFFBoston After Dark", and it is awesome. The opening train robbery is a funny, action-packed set piece that is best in class, there is near-constant action throughout, and the final chase scene could easily have been lifted out of an Indiana Jones movie, just in terms of it being one crazy thing on top of another. The thing is just a giddy delight of an action movie. It's the one-week wonder at Landmark Kendall Square, but hopefully it will stick around for a while longer once people see it and get the word out that it's a blast.

(Those are what pass for marching orders around here, people!)

* Also opening at Kendall Square are The Cartel and The Girl on the Train. The former is a documentary on the troubles with the American educational system which apparently places the blame squarely on teacher's unions, which I'm sure will play extremely well in the People's Republic of Cambridge. The latter caught my eye for featuring Emilie Duquennes, who was one of the many things I absolutely loved about Brotherhood of the Wolf and whose appearances on American screens have been rare to nonexistent since.

* Leaving the Kendall but heading to the Coolidge is The Square, which to my mild surprise will be mostly playing on film in the larger theaters (though there will be some showings off Blu-ray; make sure before you go). Also opening there are BUFF's It Came from Kuchar and foreign-language Oscar-winner The Secret in Their Eyes. Still, I think it's clear that the most important thing going on there this weekend is Tremors on the big screen at midnight.

* The Harvard Film Archive is closed Friday and Saturday night, but offers more John Ford on Sunday and Monday. The MFA has Mississippi Mermaid, The Headless Woman, and October Country

* Major openings are Furry Vengeance and the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, so it's a great time to catch up on the major releases missed during the festival.



For that price, that had better be a pretty nice seat at the Elvis Costello concert, and it was. I presume this tour - of which Boston was apparently the first show - is in support of a new album with this Sugarcanes band, which I haven't yet picked up. It was a pretty fun time, and a mostly acoustic set, and a good demonstration of one of the reasons I like Elvis: His catalog is large and varied enough that there are only a few specific songs that you have to expect no matter what. This tour is obviously going to be slanted toward country/roots/folk stuff, and he's got enough of that that there's no need to force it on songs where it doesn't work.

Anyway, here's a rundown of the festival stuff for the week, with links to what's already been reviewed. It's going to take some time to get through this, I can see.

21 April 2010: The Extra Man
22 April 2010: Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, Cracks
23 April 2010: Winter's Bone, Down Terrace, Machotaildrop
24 April 2010: Pelada, War Don Don, The Freebie, I Am Love, The Good, The Bad, the Weird
25 April 2010: The Parking Lot Movie, NY Export: Opus Jazz, Hipsters, The Killer Inside Me
26 April 2010: Tiny Furniture, Shorts 3: Animation
27 April 2010: Marwencol, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
28 April 2010: Micmacs

This Week Month-Plus In Tickets: 6 July 2009 to 9 August 2009

It's been long enough since I've done one of these that I've just about forgotten how the scanner works. Of course, there was Fantasia Daily for a good chunk of it, but now things are about back to normal. So, without a whole lot more in the way of ado...



Remember back at the beginning of July, when the Red Sox were in first place, it didn't look like they could be budged from the spot, John Friggin' Smoltz looked like he was going to strengthen the rotation, and it looked like the most significant and exciting part of the baseball season was the return of Nomar Garciaparra? Wasn't it great? I got tickets to both of those games just in case Oakland didn't play Nomar in one, and I got lucky - the seats for the first game weren't far from the Oakland dugout at all (although they weren't kidding with the "Walkway Traffic" label!), and Nomar looked unbelievably happy to be here. They didn't play him at all the second game, but at least that one the Sox won.

Then, after that, it was off to Montreal for Fantasia. The trip down was a slog, but once there, the days were as packed as ever:





Those last two days on the schedule, plus the one they added after that... Some year, I'll remember that this festival is never over when it's originally announced to be over. Of course, to make that work, I'd have to have a job that paid me to go to festivals, gorge on movies, and write about them, rather than just a hobby (anyone with such a job to offer, feel free to contact me)!

By the time I got back early on the 28th, I was, as you might imagine, kind of movied out, so I spent the next week not moving far from the house, doing pretty much nothing. So, let's skip the blank page and move to where things more or less get back to normal:



I don't generally shell out that sort of money for a concert, but the Beatles are proving much less death-resistant than other pop legends, so you see them while you can. It was a heck of a time getting there, though - the website said they would send the tickets two weeks before the show, when I was in Canada, and I didn't find them in my pile of mail when I got home. Despite buying them via Live Nation, I had to call eTix to find out what was up. Then the T bit me; I left work at in Waltham at 5pm, apparently just missed the bus connection in Watertown, wound up waiting for a #57 bus that's supposed to depart every fifteen minutes for nearly half an hour, and then sloooooowly moved through traffic. Walking from Kenmore to Fenway was one of those "we're all going the same place for something that has started already, why aren't we moving as a unit?" experiences. I wound up in the park at roughly 7:15, just in time to see the end of the opening act.

Once the concert proper actually started, though, it was a lot of fun. It amuses me that the seat would have been the best seat I have ever had for a ballgame - five rows behind home plate, not far off center - only to have all the action be waaaaay out by the bleachers (oddly, that makes those terrible monster-facing seats in right field some of the best in the house). McCartney's a guy who knows what his audience wants - the set list was something like 65% Beatles, 30% Wings, 5% more recent - has a likable befuddlement that he's still playing rock & roll at the age of 68, and works the audience well. This isn't one where you're trying to get the crowd hyped up (he had jokes about random cheering), but he's got a knack for seeming to speak directly to the audience and telling amusing stories to stitch the songs together. It helps that he can start them with "my friend George" and "my friend John".

And now... Movies!

Afghan Star

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

I'm not usually one to rail at unscripted television - at this point in the game, the ones that have had staying power are ones that tap into something pretty basic: Desire to travel, belief that talent will out, that sort of thing. The Afghan Star program, a sort of Afghani version of American/Pop Idol, seems to have that basic appeal: Reviving music and pop culture in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, feeling like a united country rather than splintered tribes, etc.

The thing is, I don't watch a lot of these shows, in large part because they feel padded and full of air, as they try to stretch twenty minutes of good content into an hour or two, and the first half of the movie, which feels like a compressed version of the season, has that same sort of problem. Once things start to hit snags in the second half, the film becomes a little more interesting, but despite some interesting details, it's still things we already know: Things still aren't really great for women there, the Taliban may be out but there are still plenty of religious fundamentalists in power ready to attack what seems like anything that involves people enjoying themselves, and struggles against common enemies have only hidden local rivalries, not ended them.

There are bits of interest - while few of the contestants really drew me in, I did grow quite fond of the Khan family, big-time fans of the show - but not enough. The talent competition was generic, and the look at modern Afghanistan, while important, seemed just like every other look at transitional-stage middle east countries I've seen.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2009 at AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run)

First, the damning with faint praise: G.I. Joe is a much more enjoyable 1980s toy/comic/cartoon-to-screen than its sibling Transformers. For all that it appears to have taken severe liberties with everything that was done with the property the first time around, it's mostly good ideas: Making the Joes an international anti-terrorist force, giving them black suits that not only looks slick on screen, but enable larger-than-life action that is both cartoonish and vaguely possible, keeping the characters down to a manageable number. The cast is mostly filled with people who, honestly, should be able to do better. Director Stephen Sommers isn't quite back to his Deep Rising form, but he's way ahead of The Mummy Returns and Van Helsing here.

And that's part of what makes it so disappointing: Enough things that shouldn't work go right that falling down on the job on really basic things undermines it terribly. Did anybody, while writing the script, ever read the lines they'd just written aloud and realize that even the best actors can't make them sound like something people would actually say? Considering how ridiculously good everybody around them is - this film boasts Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Eccleston, Arnold Vosloo, Jonathan Pryce, Sienna Miller, Dennis Quaid (who actually makes his growl of "knowing is half the battle!" work), Rachel Nichols, and Lee Byung-hun (a regular lead for both Kim Ji-woon and Park Chan-wook, who should be a huge international movie star; when the heck do we get A Bittersweet Life, I Come with the Rain, and The Good, The Bad, and The Weird over here?... but I digress) - why on earth do you settle for Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans in the two biggest roles?

It annoys me, because there's some pretty slick stuff in here - the Paris set-piece is a doozy, even with some rough CGI, and as much as this is a "nanotech can do anything!" movie, they are actually pretty clever and consistent in its usage. Sommers ODs on the effects toward the end, because that's what he does, but he at least does it in a way that we can sort of follow. A little more attention to the basics, and he's made a darn good action movie, but instead, I can't help but feel a little cheated.

A Perfect Getaway

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2009 at AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run)

New Stephen Sommers and David Twohy on the same day? Wow. Neither is around much for five years, and then, bang!

Twohy's got the better movie, although putting "Perfect" in the title is a bit of hubris. Understand, it looks great, is well-acted, and has a nice story, but in trying to be clever, it tips its hand way too early, winding up obvious. Now, normally I hem and haw and do everything I can to try to avoid saying that a thriller is a "twist" movie, because the audience deserves the surprise, but Twohy is terribly obvious in laying it out: He makes one character a screenwriter, then tosses bits about red herrings and second-act twists into the dialog. I thought maybe this might be an elaborate fake-out, but, no, once I figured out what the most complete reversal would be, I had it.

Maybe if the movie hadn't so obviously telegraphed its twisty nature, I'd have found it a cheat, but I doubt it. In Twohy's defense, even once the savvy audience has figured out just what's going down, he's not bad at planting doubts in our heads. All six members of his main cast are great fits for their characters. And when it comes time for the last act, Twohy and company don't mess around - the action is nifty and nasty, and very easy to follow. It's rough getting there, but the finale is definitely worth it.