This Week Month in Tickets: 2 March 2020 - 29 March 2020

It's been an unusual month, to say the least.









It starts normal enough, heading into the Somerville Theatre for Portrait of a Lady on Fire because I'd dilly-dallied a bit in seeing in and figured it might not be around when I got back (foreshadowing!). If you need another reminder of just how long March has been, this was also a day or two after star Adèle Haenel walked out of the Césars after seeing Polanski get an award.

The next day was the Massachusetts primary, and I voted early but didn't get the result I'd like, and then I spent the next couple days packing, getting laundry done, stocking up on comics and reading material before getting on the first of a couple planes and flying to New Zealand for vacation. Thing I didn't know when I got to the airport - you need a visa to travel to New Zealand from the United States, which the travel guide I bought a couple months earlier said was not the case! Fortunately, you can do this online more or less instantly, and then it's fly to LAX and then lose Friday while flying over the Pacific Ocean and across the international date line, to get to Auckland and learn how seriously they take biosecurity there. No outside food allowed in, and you'd better declare anything made of wood, because it might have insect eggs and island nations with fragile native life do not cotton to invasive species.



The only stop I really had the energy for that first day was the Maritime Museum, which includes (among many other nifty things) the "Black Magic", the boat with which the Kiwis won the America's Cup. I remember the Cup used to be kind of a big thing back in the 1980s - it would be reported on the national news, highlights would play after the late local news, people could name the captains, and so on. For yachting! Three or four channels on the TV, and they had room for yachting! I'd see America's Cup souvenir stores around the country a couple times on this trip, and I'm not sure whether it's weird that we ever cared about it or that we stopped or that other people didn't.



The big stop on Sunday was the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which I was delighted to see was not even primarily a military museum; apparently the veterans being honored for their service in World War I wanted something that did more than just elevate soldiering, so it became the site of the Auckland Museum, full of natural history and the like. It's also downright beautiful, located at the very center of one of Auckland's many extinct volcanoes with space around it that similar institutions don't have in other cities I've visited. It's near the really delightful Wintergarden and some really lovely parks as well.



Monday was the first of a couple day trips in a row, this one toward the south where the Hobbiton Movie Set can be found, and for as much as I joked with people about how I'm not a huge fan but knew that if I went to New Zealand without visiting this set I'd never hear the end of it, it's really a charming tourist attraction. It's a tour, so that people don't try to mess with things too much, but one that highlights just how much craft went into these movies and how fortunate Jackson was to find everything he needed in one place.



Next up was Te Puia, a site with a bunch of geysers and mudholes and other nifty geothermal things as well as a Maori cultural center that I unfortunately didn't get to see enough of because I spent so much time on the geology, and my heart genuinely sunk a bit when I realized, oh, there's just enough time to get back to the bus now. It's funny how quickly you can get used to the smell of sulphur.



Last stop of the day was the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, which don't allow photography inside because flashes and lights mess with the creatures in question, but it's a great set of caves (always look up) with an amazing finale as you pass through the crazy, semi-cannibalistic ecosystem in question.

Fun: One of the people on the tour was from Waltham, and came over on the same set of flights as I did. Small world, eh?



The next day was another tour, and not quite as much fun - it was longer on the bus, the driver wouldn't stop talking even when there was just more trees and I just wanted to read my book, and then when we got to the Bay of Islands, we were scheduled too tightly to look around much on our own, let alone get food not supplied by the tour company (which I never picked up, because I not going to go out of my way to grab a bag lunch with a chicken salad sandwich even if there's also a soda and a cookie in there). Also, the first stop for me, the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, felt like the tour was pitched toward kids even though my 46-year-old self was the youngest person in the group, although that may just be how Maori speak, with heavy emphasis and storytelling flair. Taika Waititi is the only real exposure a lot of us have to the Maori outside of New Zealand, and you see a little bit of that in his work, but it's kind of filtered.

One thing I came out of this trip fascinated with is how the country's formative document - their Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta - is a treaty between the British and the native people. On the one hand, colonialism is kind of baked right into the country, but on the other, it certainly seems to put those native people in a much better position, even a couple hundred years later, than those in other countries.



Next up, a cruise around the Bay of Islands where I learned that you apparently get sunburned much worse in the Southern Hemisphere than you do north of the equator, particularly here, as there's some very thin ozone above Australia & New Zealand. Fun!

I didn't get many great pictures of the orcas we saw, but, still, we saw them breaching, and that's apparently rare enough that the crew of the boat who take this trip every day all came up on deck to take pictures and gawk, so that was cool.

(I was hungry enough when I got back to the hotel to hit both a steakhouse which is so no-nonsense that you basically point to a slice of meat and say "that, medium rare" and an ice cream place that is fantastically elaborate.)



I planned to take the ferry to one of the islands near Auckland with cool caves the next day, but they are very limited, so I wound up going to Devonport, which has a fair amount of cool things to see, like North Head, an extinct volcano on which defensive encampments were built, and while a lot of the tunnels were still closed off, it was still basically walking around a secret base inside a volcano, which can't help make you feel a little like James Bond



I flew to Wellington on Wednesday, and was kind of regretting that I only gave myself 24 hours there when I saw people surfing right next to the airport. It took a bit of doing to get to my AirBNB - sometimes you just can't data for your phone at first in a new city, so my plans to use public transportation were clobbered - and then heading to the downtown area was another adventure, as Google Maps said "walk this short distance and then take this bus for 45 minutes", not really indicating well that said short distance on the map was all uphill and all switchbacks, and then the bus route went through a lot of one-lane/two-way streets and hugged cliff faces and was, let us say, exciting.

At the end, though was Te Papa, the national museum, which included an exhibit on Gallipoli that featured some amazing work from the nearby WETA workshop and genuine World War I 3-D photography which is just, like, pandering to me directly.



After that, I decided to try out the cable car, because as in San Francisco and Hong Kong, when a city incorporates roller coasters into their public transit, you've got to try that out. Not nearly as hair-raising as the earlier bus ride by a long shot, and it was late enough in the day that the only things open at the top were a nice botanical garden, but it genuinely seems to be used as regular transit (unlike SF) and the light shows in the tunnels were cool.



Not many photos allowed inside the WETA cave, which is a fun visit though you're not going to see a lot of actual work going on, though there are some neat demonstrations. If you've got an AirBNB next to that spot, though, it's a good thing to visit in the before-eleven-AM hours before you have to leave your accomodations and head to the harbor so that you can take a ferry across the Cook Strait, mainly so that you can say you took the ferry across the Cook Strait.

It's not necessarily the best idea; I apparently took the less reliable one, so it got delayed by about an hour, and then instead of just giving you your luggage at the dock, you've got to get on shuttle buses to the line's office in Picton, but the transportation to Blenheim, the other large city in Marlborough, is back by where you disembarked, so you get back on the shuttle buses, by which time the last train has left and the app which seems to show a bus has actually sold you a ticket from Blenheim to Picton, and there really aren't any taxis around, so you wind up getting the customer service people at the other other ferry line to call you an accessibility shuttle… Basically, these two cities really have only two big attractions between them other than the wineries, and since the season for that is close to over, the infrastructure that supports tourists pretty much shuts down.



On the other hand, that one tourist attraction in Blenheim, the Omaka Aviation Heritage Center, is kind of awesome if you like old planes. See that ca. 1940 Boeing Stearman? I got to fly in that for ten minutes, and it was amazing. The braver folks (with a bit more money) could fly in a MiG that does aerobatics, which I heard as much as saw later in the day, and which might be quite a thing.

Fair warning, if you're doing this as close to the off-season as I was without cars - it was a pleasant 4.4km walk from my rental, which is not something I do every day, and there was precious little to do in town afterward. I wound up looking for the nearest movie theater and seeing Bloodshot there, both because it was getting "things are closed but it's not early enough to sleep" late and because I've been reading dispatches from home about people being told to stay home and theaters closing, so I figured, might as well!

Sunday is when things started to get kind of surreal - there weren't any direct flights from Marlborough to Christchurch, so I had to go to the Blenheim airport (where I just printed my boarding pass, dropped off my luggage, and was waved onto the tarmac like in pre-9/11 times), fly back to Wellington, wait to transfer, and then fly across the strait again and further south.



One of the neat things about Christchurch is that one of the most interesting attractions there is actually connected to the airport, the International Antarctic Center. That's where many scientists and service employees leave for McMurdo and other bases, and the place is fun - you can ride in the tractors they use there, look at rescued penguins, and experience a room that drops to freezing temperatures with eighteen-degree wind chill, which is apparently a novelty to Kiwi kids. I opted not to enter what is basically a "walk to the subway station" simulator.



The art installation above is not actually part of the "Quake City" museum, but it's a striking first glimpse for me of how the 2011 earthquake has left its mark on the city even almost ten years later. It's been rebuilt but you still see scars and public art reflecting it all over. It's a thing that makes visiting this city at this time a little more specific than the typical visit. Ten years ago, it was very different; ten years from now, there's a good chance that the quake will be less visible and the cathedral will be repaired. Hopefully not too much, though, because it's a very charming city.



I capped Monday off in the Canterbury Museum, which has moa skeletons and is generally a terrific picture of the area's history, from the modern to an area replicating a turn-of-the-20th-century street to Maori displays all the way back to mock-ups of what the giant penguins and parrots ("Squawkzilla!") who used to live there would have looked like. Seriously, I think a 1.5m parrot would have wrecked me.

It was a strange last couple days of vacation, though - I started to see signs that things were being called off locally as I arrived in Christchurch, the social-media postings and news from home got much more aligned in focusing on Covid-19 and self-isolation, and maybe crowds were becoming a bit more sparse even as the newspapers I saw in restaurants were just starting to mention cases showing up on the South Island. You start to wonder whether you're being irresponsible going out rather than just staying in your rental and wondering just what you'll do if you can't get home, because even though you feel fine and NZ is in much better shape than the USA is, there are not-bright people in important positions back home. By the time I got to the Christchurch airport on Tuesday morning, there are announcements of mandatory 14-day isolation for everyone entering the country.

Tuesday is a long day - I left the rental at 7:30am New Zealand time, flew to Auckland, then to LAX, where the immigration and transfer process is 75 minutes in sometimes very crowded conditions, then to Reagan/Washington, and then finally to Logan, with the airports becoming progressively more deserted and with many of the vendors and spots to eat shut down despite it being what are normally peak hours. There are a dozen or so people on a plane meant to carry 125, and the flight attendant mentions that they'll probably keep flying because of cargo contracts and mentions something that I'm going to have to write a heist script around. Eventually, after 30 hours, I get home at 10:30pm and it's still Tuesday. I haven't slept, deliberately, so I drop.

I'm mostly able to get up at the regular time on Wednesday, and though we're meant to work from home, I left all of my work stuff at the office. Quiet and not quiet enough. The theaters are closed, which is good, because I am weak and would have justified going to see Onward in 3D because, hey, nobody likes to sit up front with me anyway.

After that, there was a week of getting un-jet-lagged, getting caught up on Picard and the contents of my DVR, and so on, before the Coolidge started its virtual screening room, where over the next few days I'd catch Fantastic Fungi, The Whistlers, and Bacurau, the latter preceded by "The Haunted Swordsman", which would have been part of the Boston Underground Film Festival, except, well, cancelled.

More stuff coming on my Letterboxd page, although who knows when there will be more things taped to the scrapbook? The next few months are going to be weird.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)

I don't know that I really responded that much to the romance in this film, but I do remember the jolt toward the end when we see a man for the first time in a couple of hours and it feels like a trespass, a violation of the world that the women involved have built for themselves. There's a level on which the return of the Countess from her trip would trigger the same thing - Marianne, Heloise, and Sophie had seemingly lived without class barriers and hierarchy during their absence, and this would force them into rigid roles again - and it makes one wonder just how entwined the two are. The sadness to this picture is maybe not so much that the relationship must end, but that the world that allowed it to flourish must disappear as well.

Before that, though, it's beautiful, people circling each other warily but never uncertainly, with director Céline Sciamma and her crew staging each scene with beauty but not ostentatiously so. Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel are both genuinely terrific and they've got Luàna Bajrami and Valeria Golino to provide counters, grounded in their world in different ways.

It's not quite the sort of melodrama I'm completely able to get wrapped up in, but I suspect that anybody a single quantum more romantic than I will be all in.

This Those Weeks in Tickets: 25 February 2019 - 10 March 2019

It's January 2020 and I just realized I left some big holes in this part of the blog, including this one. Not a lot of movies seen while I was on vacation, but a lot of tickets purchased!





As you may remember, I spent much of February doing marathons and catch-up for the Oscars, and by the time it was done, I had a couple of things I wanted to see on the big/3D screens ahead of vacation. Alita: Battle Angel was kind of what it was inevitably going to be with James Cameron trying to make the movie for years, never getting it to work, and finally hiring Robert Rodriguez to just get it done: A knockout visually, full of pretty capable action, but the story is just barely good enough. Crying shame more people didn't see it like this, because it's made for the giant screen. A couple days later, I hit How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World in 3D because DreamWorks movies are absolutely built for that, and this is a pretty good one regardless.

After that, it was onto a plane and to the other side of the world, seeing Hong Kong in person less than a week after taking in so many movies from the place. It's a long flight, but it was snowing when I left and beautiful when I arrived, and the street where my hotel was located was just Hong Kong as heck, looking lived-in with dried fish merchants and a tramway. I did get more frustrated by public transit than usual that first evening, and kind of dropped right away.



First order of business on Saturday was taking a tram up to the Peak, which is kind of surreal, in that it feels like the city has included roller coasters into its public transit (or at least, the creaky ascent part), and then you can actually look down on skyscrapers. After that, I spent the afternoon in Hong Kong Park - including their amazing aviary, which includes some birds I could swear were built by Jim Henson - before visiting the Man Mo Temple and the News Museum.



Sunday's activities started at the relatively nearby Sun Yat-Sen Museum and Museum of Medical Science, which were interesting if not quite so extensive an education on their very Chinese subjects as I might have benefitted from. After that, I went down to Central Pier, which included the very cool Maritime Museum and a nice little observation wheel, which I went on because that apparently is a thing I do when traveling now. The Museum included an exhibit on trade between China and the Northeastern United States, which was pretty cool to see as a New Englander.



Monday took me back to the pier so that I could get on a ferry and cross the harbor and see the exhibits and the Museum of History and Museum of Science, located right across the street from each other. The latter had a pretty terrific display of antique timepieces on loan. At the end of the day, I climbed aboard the Dukling above and watched the nightly laser-light show, which illuminates the skyscrapers in impressive fashion.



Tuesday, I took the cable car to Ngong Ping, and I've got to admit that I was a little surprised that the "cable car" that Google Maps included in my directions was a skyway rather than what they call a cable car in San Francisco. It was neat, but, boy, was the guy in line directly in front of me also surprised and not happy. Heck of a way to start a long day of walking around, being in awe at the Big Buddha and the ornate temples, with a detour out to the Tai O fishing village before coming back to see the Wisdom Path.



Wednesday wasn't exactly a bust - no day which allows me to walk around on restored vessels like the Alexander Grantham fire boat can really be called a bad day - but it was pretty rainy, the Hong Kong Film Archive didn't have a whole lot on offer that day/week, and another museum was closed for renovations. I bailed to see a movie, and practically the only thing playing was Captain Marvel, which I absolutely could have seen at home, although they're much more enthusiastic about 3D there than they are here. I did wind up going to the wrong place after buying a ticket online, but they were cool about refunding it.



Thursday started out nice, with a walk around Golden Bauhinia Square, although the Noonday Gun didn't fire when I showed up. After that, I went to the restaurant in the Blue House for lunch and made my way to the Police Museum, which is at the top of a hill (like several other stations converted to museums), and Hong Kong isn't kidding with its hills. If Google tells you that the walking directions and the bus directions take roughly the same amount of time, take the bus. I got off to look at the King Yin Lei mansion, although this was not one of the rare days when it was open to the public.



I spent a lot of the next day on the Ping Shan Heritage Trail, and I maybe should have joined an official tour; I got turned around and probably wound up a few places I shouldn't have been, as it winds through a residential neighborhood and the line between traditional halls (like Tak Tak Hall above) that tourists can look over and neighborhood shrines can be kind of hard to catch if you don't read Chinese. Nevertheless very interesting, and I had fun making my way to the Railway Museum and Tai Po Market later that day.



Saturday, I actually did spring for a tour, because that's kind of the only way you're seeing the GeoPark. We left from Sai Kung, a fishing town with a ton of massive seafood restaurants where you can either buy fish straight off boats and have the chefs work their magic or just point to the actual fish you want to eat. I must admit, I was kind of intimidated by these places, which really aren't set up for single tourists who don't speak Cantonese. The trip around the Geopark was pretty nifty, too - saw lots of great rock formations.



Sunday was my last full day and, man, I was all over the place in Kowloon, seeing the Avenue of Stars, the Yuen Po Street Bird Garden, the Tin Hau Temple, the Temple Street Night Market - where, yeah, I found a video store and loaded up with ten Blu-rays that I wouldn't have to pay shipping on to get home - and where I finally see an actual Hong Kong movie in Hong Kong, when I stumbled upon the Broadway Cinematheque and saw they were playing Three Husbands, the latest (at the time) from Fruit Chan, and probably more representative of his work than the action movie that opened later in the year. It was Hong Kong as heck, and a fine way for me to wrap my time there up.

As a result, write-ups for a couple of these movies have been confined to my Letterboxd page since March, which shouldn't happen again, but just in case...

Alita: Battle Angel

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2019 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, digital Imax 3D)

It only takes a few pages of the Battle Angel Alita manga to understand both why James Cameron was set on making it his next movie for some twenty years and why it took him forever to pound it into something close enough to filmable that he could give it to Robert Rodriguez, who can at least get a movie made without torturing himself over it not being perfect. This manga was probably unfilmable in technical terms when he started and building the tech exposed what a mess the story was.

And, boy, is this thing not perfect; it's half a story that keeps half of what's going on out of reach, but worries enough about backstory that it can't quite zero in on how Alita is a teenager with no experience but ironclad certainty of her indestructibility, and how she's got to learn her vulnerability. There's meat on that bone, but the film can't quite grab it. To be fair, there's a bunch in there about building your own identity and body that I didn't catch until I heard the film was popular in the trans community.

Still, it's a lot of fun. There's a spiffy cast, and between Cameron and Rodriguez, you've got two people who live this big 3D stuff and don't feel the need to compromise on the crazy cyberpunk visuals. The action is fast and fun and violent as heck, built in ways that defy normal human movement but still look real. For better or worse, it's Battle Angel Alita, or as close as American filmmakers can get.

Captain Marvel

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2019 in UA MegaBox BEA Imax (first-run, digital Imax 3D)

It's a bit of a shame that Carol Danvers didn't get her movie until superhero films in general and the Marvel house style in particular got common enough that we can look at this and just see another smart-aleck hero in an outfit made a little more practical for the movie than it was in the comics, fighting an enemy who threatens the entire world but who can be despatched in one big, 3D-friendly fight at the end followed by some Avengers business. It's an good example of that, but I begrudge nobody saying "another?"

But it's got Brie Larson, who puts just enough chip on Carol's shoulder and builds the sort of foundation where she can go from "pushy alien" to rediscovering her humanity without a hitch or a lot of talk. She's also got a nifty crew, from an authoritative but playful Annette Bening to Samuel L. Jackson revealing the sidekick hidden inside his Nick Fury, along with an especially delightful Been Mendelsohn and Lashana Lynch selling the reunion with her best friend perfectly.

It's really cool to see Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck get to play with the big budget, never letting the movie bloat (perhaps to a fault at times) and making some fun choices. And I suspect it will unpack well with future viewings, as viewers have a chance to note how everyone (except maybe the Rambeaus) is both adversary and ally as Carol rediscovers herself and how to trust, or how perfect her finally cutting loose is at the end.

Yes, it's Another Marvel Movie feeding into Endgame, but it does that thing really well and stands on its own for those just coming to the party.

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.

This These Weeks In Tickets: 9 December 2013 - 22 December 2013

Two weeks this time, because I didn't have a lot of time for writing while on vacation. Nor necessarily a lot of time for seeing movies, for that matter, but I saw a lot of other stuff.

9 December 2013 - 15 December 2013
16 December 2013 - 22 December 2013



The first couple days of the week were spoken for before the week started, especially Monday. I gobbled up a ticket for Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 35mm a few weeks in advance, and while that Science on Screen presentation didn't completely sell out like I expected, it was a packed crowd.



That's Melissa Franklin, Physics Chair at Harvard University, delivering a talk before the movie about cartoon physics and her own work detecting the Higgs Boson. It was a discussion designed to give a person whiplash, moving in fairly rapid fashion from the "Cartoon Laws of Physics" that got emailed around back when people still emailed things around (I'm guessing it would be a listicle/slide-show now) and some fairly advanced particle physics, but only one kid in the audience seemed to actually get impatient.

Not pictured - because he stood up and sat down from his seat a couple rows behind me too quickly - is writer Gary K. Wolf, who wrote the original novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? that the film was adapted from. I think the guy is following me; though he lives in Brookline now, he was in Worcester when I was going to college there; supposedly the Acapulco had a drink called the "Toon Tonic", as seen in his less well-known (but actually very funny) follow-up, Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?. Even back then, there was talk of a third book that he was sitting on until it could be released alongside a movie sequel; since that new movie looks unlikely to happen, as Bob Hoskins is unlikely to be up to it, he's finally decided to release it electronically; I'm looking forward to reading Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? soon.

Tuesday night's movie was also staked out ahead of time, as the latest in the Gathr preview series. Pretty Old isn't a bad movie, but it's a somewhat odd thing. As soon as somebody casually mentions what the participants in the Miss Senior Sweetheart beauty pageant pay for an all-inclusive package, it starts to sound more like a fantasy camp than a "legitimate" contest, but the movie plows on like it's the latter. It makes me wonder how much the movie is a documentary and how much it's an advertisement, making it hard to figure out what i think of its merits.

Much of the rest of the week was spent packing or otherwise getting ready, just squeezing in a quick screening of The Last Days on Mars on the afternoon I left for vacation. It was between that and The Hobbit, and while I didn't wind up seeing the better movie that day, it fit my schedule better and I wouldn't have had any other chances to see it on the big screen.

Then, that evening, after everything was all packed, I hauled my bags to Logan and flew to Paris's Orly airport by way of Heathrow, where I actually stepped through customs and back in order to pick up a Tep wireless internet device. Next time I visit Europe, I'll probably just pay for the shipping rather than do that; I left enough time between flights, but what if I hadn't or someone decided this activity was suspicious. At any rate, I made it, although my plan to sleep on the plan and arrive in Europe tired by with my clock adjusted didn't work out - there was a baby on the plane, and he or she did what babies do in an unfamiliar situation surrounded by strange people, and cried. So, when I got to the hotel at about 4pm local time, I dropped to the bed, took the sort of nap that leaves one awake but not particularly energetic when I re-awoke a few hours later, and then eventually dropped for long enough that I wouldn't have time to collect the Paris Pass/Paris Museum Pass during Sunday's crazy-short hours.

So, I figured, why not start at the Eiffel Tower.

... It's one of the things not covered by the passes, it didn't have short hours, so I could test my navigation skills inside and outside the Metro without stress, and, hey, no point in saving it for later. It actually took me two tickets to get up to the top - one for the stairs up to the second floor" (which is 622 steps up), and another for the elevator to the top. Quite well worth it for the view and further appreciating just how massive it is when viewed from the ground. Photos from there begin here on my Facebook page.

After that, I headed to my first movie shown in Paris, a subtitled screening of Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer. It was a bit of an adventure getting there - the various trains were tricky, the mall had three separate movie theaters (they love movies in Paris), and my debit card was strangely reluctant to be used any place but restaurants, but I got to see the new Bong movie on the big screen in the country of its source material's origin without it being cut, and that was pretty darn cool.



Stubless: The Arc de Triomphe (Monday the 16th), The Louvre (Wednesday the 18th), The Musee Rodin (Thursday the 19th), The Musee des Armes (Thursday the 19th), Notre Dame Cathedral (Friday the 20th), The Crypt at Notre Dame (Friday the 20th).

The Paris Museum Pass is a pretty good value; in fact, if planning a trip to Paris, I'd recommend getting one of those and not bothering with the Paris Pass - I didn't use the Red Bus, and I think the only thing I used the non-Museum Pass for was the Bateaux Parisiens. Most of the time, just showing the red museum pass (which folds out to become a brochure) got me waved into what I wanted to see without the need to log the date and receive a ticket.

Plus, maybe one of those could have been picked up/purchased without the hassle I went through that morning. Just giving my name and showing my voucher on my phone/tablet wasn't enough, they needed the printed voucher. So, back to the hotel, get that, return, pick up pass... And find out very little is open on Monday. Thus, the first stop is La Cinematheque Francaise.

It had a lot of "no photography" signs around, so the only picture I took was this one, of the spiffy-looking outside. Interestingly, most of the exhibits open to the public were from the early days of cinema, when people were still figuring out hardware standards; I don't know if it really got beyond the silent era before the exhibit on Jean Cocteau. There was also a pay exhibit on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Roma that I didn't take in which was keyed to a retrospective in their theater.

After a pretty darn good steak at Hippopotamus (a steakhouse near the Cinematheque that I later discovered was a chain; always kind of strange), I headed to the Champs-Elysees to take a look at the Arc de Triomphe (pictures start here). It's another spiffy monument with lots and lots of stairs which looks amazing lit up at night. So did the Champs-Elysees itself, although the camera on my phone didn't capture it very well.

Tuesday, I started out at La Musee des Arts et Metiers (pictures start here), literally "the museum of arts and crafts", although here it focuses on technology and inventions. It is full of nifty stuff, and while at a certain point I got a little fatigued, you get a second wind in a hurry once you get to l'Eglise, a former cathedral that has bunches of early planes and automobiles packed into it, along with Foucault's Pendulum. It's a seriously impressive room. There was also a little display with robots from various movies and a no-pictures-allowed exhibition - "Mecanhumanimal" - by comic book artist Enki Bilal. Never one of my particular favorites from Humanoids, but some of his newer stuff that was on display had me fairly interested.

After that, I did one of the boat tours of the Seine (pictures start here). I always like seeing a city from its river.

Wednesday was pretty much given over to the Louvre entirely. As with the British Museum last year, I made sure to choose the day when it would be open late, since I knew it was going to take a lot of time. That it did; this picture got taken before noon and my phone's battery crapped out before I was done at around eight-thirty. It's a place thoroughly worth an entire day's visit, with it always worth remembering to look up because something awesome may be on the ceiling. I was, admittedly, exhausted by the end, to the point where when my path took me through the German and Dutch paintings, I was kind of thinking "oh, huh, another nicely-painted portrait" and then when I got to the French sculptures, that was just warehousing. Still, an astonishing number of beautiful things.

Thursday I started off at the Musee Rodin (pictures!) on the advice of my sister-in-law Jen. It's a nifty little museum, with the bulk of the exhibits like The Thinker and The Gates of Hell actually outside in a garden. There was also a nice exhibit on Camille Claudel, a student and lover of Rodin's.

I didn't get pictures of a couple things I saw afterward - there was some sort of strike or protest going on right outside the museum when I was leaving, and then a couple blocks away there was the most nondescript gas station I've ever seen - a couple of pumps by the side of the road, and I couldn't see what they were connected to until the second or third time I walked past it and saw a tiny cubbyhole of a shop behind it.

The stop after that was nearby, l'Hotel des Invalides (pics). It is home to, among other things, the Musee d'Armes and the Tomb of Napoleon. The former was pretty cool, although I joked that the medieval section seemed to be warehousing suits of armor in case modern weaponry just stopped working. There was also a World War II section, an interesting contrast to similar exhibits in American museums because it pretty much only covers the war in Europe. As soon as the Nazis fall, it's "and then some other stuff happened in the Pacific".

Then came the Tomb of Napoleon, which is just as over-the-top and grandiose as one would hope. It really should be a set for a movie based around some sort of treasure hunt. This was followed by stopping in a burger place I came across, because there's something kind of fun about seeing how other places imitate the American diner experience.

Funny story about Friday: Ever since arriving in Paris, I've seen signs warning about pickpockets, and I kind of thought it was cute: Most places I've traveled, you get warned about being mugged, and pickpocketing is at least non-violent. Then I got to the spot where I took this picture, and couldn't find my wallet. Fortunately, it was back at the hotel, but, yeesh, that was a half-hour or so of panic I didn't need. Bummer, because I quickly grew to love Ile Saint-Louis and Ile de la Cite, where I saw Notre Dame. Astonishingly pretty church, although by the time I was halfway up the towers, I was really starting to wonder what the heck was up with this city and stairs. I must say, though, that the inside of the cathedral was kind of weird for me - aside from the constant bass hum, there are all these tourist things with price tags on them all around, and I wonder if they're covered up or moved out during services.

The Crypt isn't quite underneath Notre Dame, but the plaza next to it. It's pretty neat; not quite as impressive as the archaeological museum at Pointe-A-Calliere in Montreal, but the ruins (pictures!) are much older. Still cool, and left me enough time to look at the booksellers near Pont Neuf and even pop into a Bandes-Dessinees shop for some graphic novels I'll need to read with a dictionary open.

Saturday started with a trip to the Catacombs (pics), which is pretty darn impressive, and also creepy. I spent the rest of the day wandering through the city, stopping at various patisseries and boulangeries to try various baked goods. Highly recommended, that. I bounced around the city a bit looking at the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysees, finishing up with a couple of movies at theaters across the street from each other, The Immigrant & Zulu.

After that? Getting back to the hotel, sleeping fast, and then making my way to Orly and back to Boston. Long day of flying, and when I got back to the house, I basically had time to turn the heat back on before dropping. Can't recommend the whole experience enough, though.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2013 at Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sciene on Screen, 35mm)

When Who Framed Roger Rabbit? came out twenty-five years ago, a good amount of the hype came from how seamlessly the animated characters blended with the live actors and real-world environments. A generation later, it's not so amazing, and the seams show a little bit more - but that's okay; the border between the human world and the Toon world can be a bit ragged. It's not deliberate - director Robert Zemeckis has always been about pushing what film can do technically forward as opposed to exploiting its limitations - but it's a testament to how delightful a film he made that we're willing to try and ascribe greatness even to its imperfections.

Not that there are many of them. Zemeckis and his collaborators do something uncommon at the time - expending a lot of resources on a fairly goofy idea - and they almost unerringly hit the sweet spot where things can both be absurd but fit together just well enough to work as a detective story. Not a fair-play mystery, but a Dashiell Hammett-style pulp, albeit one whose rough edges have been sanded down to where audiences can get a thrill from grown-up material bumping up against cartoons rather than overwhelming them.

The reason I'm sad there was never a film sequel (and why I was grateful for original novelist Gary K. Wolf using the movie continuity for the later books) is that these are some genuinely fun characters. Bob Hoskins dives right into every gumshoe trope as Eddie Valiant but still makes him a guy we like and want to cheer up on his own, while Christopher Lloyd is note-perfect as Judge Doom. The main toons are pretty great, too - Roger Rabbit is a cheery, optimistic nut who wears his heart on his sleeve and could be quite annoying if played even a little bit the wrong way, but that doesn't happen. What was surprising on my first viewing in a while is just how great a character Jessica is; her face and Kathleen Turner's voice are more expressive than you likely remember, and as the movie goes on and we learn just how much truth there is in her claim that she's not bad, just drawn that way, she becomes a lot more than just a literally cartoonish bit of sex appeal.

I kind of fear what would happen if Disney were to do a sequel today; the sort of self-referentiality and packing in of details that made it a treat in 1988 is more common today, and the effects work would similarly be expected rather than a bit of a wonder. The original is still pretty amazing, though, maybe the peak of how Robert Zemeckis was once better than anyone at telling an entertaining story while rising to incredible technical challenges, and I'd love to see him do something like that again.

Pretty Old

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 December 2013 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Previews, digital)

There's a moment somewhere in the middle of Pretty Old when Lenny "Low Price" Kaplan, the guy behind the Miss Senior Sweetheart beauty pageant, mentions that the contestants pay $625 for their week taking part in the event, and it's more disappointing to hear than it has any right to be. It's a bit of information that highlights just how much of a fantasy camp the whole thing is, even though it's presented as a contest.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, it's just an odd thing for them to downplay to the extent they do, in part because it means the rest of the movie has a bit of a hard time finding focus - it's not about the women in the 2009 edition being competitive or really going all-out to win, but it doesn't really build on the friendships that perhaps form between the women who do this every year. It's not quite an advertisement, and it's not close to being a pointed commentary on how these women who have lived full lives are worried about being called pretty. And while there's something to be said about just doing a survey of this odd little phenomenon, a documentary like this often winds up feeling like the director just wasn't able to find his story, or a point he wanted to make, either on the ground or in the editing room.

He does manage to meet a fairly nice group of ladies - the core four that director Walter Matteson follows range in age from 65 to 81, with hometowns scattered from Michigan to the Virgin Islands. They're pleasant folks, facing the mental and physical challenges that the elderly face, and even the ones who maybe have way too much invested in how they look are fairly easy to like. Interestingly, there aren't many in the contest that you'd say look ten or twenty years younger than they actually are; these are old ladies revisiting their youth, as opposed to women who still haven't let go of it.

As these things go, it's fairly entertaining - Matteson doesn't linger over dull parts, and gives everybody involved their due. He presents this eccentric little event without either overpraising it or looking down upon it, and finds a couple of moments - like when he cuts between the faces of the also-rans to show that second place never really starts to taste good - that are darn clever. It amuses, and I'm sure that the Fall River civic club that operates it as a fundraiser will happily put a link to it on their website to show what the pageant is about. It's just not the sort of documentary that tells a great story or illustrates a point surprisingly well.