These Weeks In Tickets: 2 November 2009 to 29 November 2009

Is this thing on? It has been a weird month, what with Google's automated routines apparently deciding that my blog has the characteristics of a spam blog and shutting access off. Naturally, they did that on a Friday afternoon, so my response that no, I'm a real person creating real content probably wasn't even going to get looked at until Monday.

Another weird thing happened on that Saturday, when I received the latest issue of weekly British comic 2000 AD in the mail, despite the fact that I neither ordered it nor subscribed to it. At first I thought it was a gift subscription, which brings the question of who the heck knows I like that and will pay to have it airmailed to me every week - while a lot of people know I like comics, 2000 AD is pretty esoteric in the U.S. But then none came in later weeks, so it was an apparent one-off, which just seems even more random.

And then on Monday, I had to put a picture on the intranet at work, so I stuck it on Facebook and Twitter. I now hate my camera on multiple levels - it's a heavy 2 megapixel job from 2001 with a cruddy 2x optical zoom, but it won't do me the favor of breaking so I can replace it with a clear conscience - it's just too rugged to explode when I drop it. Plus, I hate having my picture taken, and self-portraiture is even worse - I got acutely nervous taking that stupid shot.

On top of that, the flash apparently brings out the gray in my hair. Wonderful.

(Since writing that, I've purchased a phone that appears to be a better camera than that old thing, in addition to being an MP3 player and handheld internet device)

The blog being offline means it hasn't been a useful tool to raise money for and report progress on my entry in the Brattle's 2009 Movie Watch-a-Thon. More or less the entire tally is visible below, aside from an Eye-Opener entry on 1 November and a couple at the Kendall on 30 November and 1 December. So the final tally is 5 at the Brattle (which are supposed to count double), 25 elsewhere, and 2 screenings for the BSFFF selection committee (which you can choose to count or not, as they were events I was invited to). If you want to donate/retroactively sponsor - and you do, the Brattle is a cause worth supporting if you like movies, especially if you're in the Boston area - you can do so through this page.

So, a lot of movies to get through. Let's hit these guys week-by-week:



Stubless: Welcome to Academia (8 November, 11am, Brattle)

The Damned United

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2009 at Landmark Embassy #3 (first-run-ish)

One often hears talk of frequent collaborations between actors and directors, or maybe actors and producers, or writers and directors, but the frequent pairing of actor Michael Sheen and writer Peter Morgan, as near as I can tell always in fact-based dramas with Sheen playing some actual figure, is unique in cinema. Perhaps there's nothing more too it than Morgan having an interest in this type of story and Sheen being the sort of chameleonic actor who sort of resembles a lot of people, but it works. As much as I loved The Queen, I love The Damned United almost as much.

As befitting a topic that causes as much enthusiasm as English Football (soccer for us colonials), The Damned United is a far more raucous, foul-mouthed movie than The Queen and Frost/Nixon; most of its characters still have one foot solidly in the working-class lives from which they came.. And as much as I hate discussing a sports movie and saying "but it's not really about sports" - I mean, nobody feels obligated to say something like "but Bright Star isn't really about poetry" to establish the story as being worth telling - there's very little actual footie in the movie, and even someone as unfamiliar as I with the nuances of "the beautiful game" can see what the filmmakers are trying to prove there.

No, The Damned United is a nigh-brilliant example of Greek tragedy, where Brian Clough's obsession with a perceived slight by Leeds coach Don Revie (Colm Meany, who invests the role with a passive-aggressive combination of sophistication and spite) drives him to push his team and himself to incredible heights - and, just as surely, set himself up for a massive fall. It is a splendid study of the almost psychotic drive that people in highly competitive fields like sport, politics, and, yes, show business require to succeed, even though they are almost always self-destructive in the end.

And it does so without ever getting introspective and navel-gazing about it. It's an exciting, entertaining way to tell that story.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

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

This should have been funnier, I think. It's got a top-notch cast, including a couple in George Clooney and Kevin Spacey who truly excel at the sort of deadpan comedy that is this film's bread and butter. Jeff Bridges is a kick. Ewan McGregor isn't bad at all, but the "what's a Jedi Knight?" shtick gets old fast. It's almost as if the movie becomes constrained by its reality - it can be funny, absurd, and crazy, but not enough where the astral projecting, telepathic soldiers are ever going to be truly real to McGregor's character, or us.

Still, there are bits that are absolutely worth taking away from the movie. There's a moment I absolutely love where Clooney's character sincerely apologizes to an Iraqi man who has suffered at the hands of both Americans and his own countrymen, and it delivers a one-two punch of seeming strange followed by the realization that there is something deeply wrong with the world if that sort of humility and decency is unusual. The movie is peppered with other bits and asides that are much funnier, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy-style, but that's probably the one which will stick with me.

The Box

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2009 at AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run)

I saw this one in a surprisingly packed auditorium considering how it sort of died at the box office, and it wasn't the greatest audience. I've never liked Chris Parry's idea of using pennies to discourage talkers, but I would have been up for it if I thought my aim was good enough to put a ding in the phone of the guy a couple rows in front and a few seats to my left. Still, I can't completely complain about the audience not sitting with church-like reverence, since the girl who said, about three-quarters through the movie, that it was "fucking creepy as fuck" pretty much nailed it.

Richard Matheson's story "Button, Button" is a great little morality tale, and when he adapted it for the 1980s edition of The Twilight Zone, he reconsidered the ending so that it ended on a perfect little ironic zinger. Richard Kelley preserves the core of it, but he fills in the world around it - honestly, to excess; a perfect short story is buried under explanation and elaboration. But, for a good long chunk of the movie, that's okay, because Kelly really does have a knack for finding the most unnerving way to do it. There's barely a moment in it where you think, well, there could be a perfectly logical explanation for that. Nope, the characters are adrift in a world both out to test their virtue and make every memory of normalcy seem out of reach. Pretty much the whole movie is one long, intriguing, disturbing, tingly feeling.

Now, Kelly overreaches, just as he did in the Director's Cut of Donnie Darko and in Southland Tales, and finally pushes us just a bit too far at the very end, but if you like freaky movies, he has banked a heck of a lot of credit by then.

Welcome to Academia

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 November 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Eye-Opener)

I'll be portions of this movie are a riot if you've ever been involved in faculty politics, either as a participant or as a hapless grad student caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately, it often seems to require very specific familiarity, because as just things that are (apparently) typical of that environment, well, it's not very funny. There's two or three jokes that are returned to over and over again, and they don't really build. For instance, Callie Thorne as the man-hating womyns' studies professor is just about as crazy at the start as she's going to be, when a slow burn might have worked much better.

The big problem is that James LeGros, as the character unexpectedly promoted to Dead over others who covet the job, and is supposed to be the sane center of the film, almost never does anything. He's not more clever than expected, or humorously put upon. He's just there, when the movie needs him to either be Job or an active participant in the story. Jess Weixler fares a little better as his favorite grad student who suddenly becomes the proxy target for other jealous faculty, but just as she's established a good comedy vibe, the movie gets serious on her.



Stubless: Slimed (11 November, 9-ish, Somerville Video Room), The New Year Parade (15 November, 11am, Brattle)

Slimed

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 November 2009 in the Somerville Theater Video Room (SF/35 selection group screenings)

I'm not sure how much it's appropriate to talk about these films, but since I'm pretty sure that this one won't get chosen for the festival, I feel pretty good about giving it a thumbs-down. Admittedly, I'm the guy in the room who has just about lost all tolerance for deliberate camp unless it's done very well, but even the folks who liked that seemed to hate this one. It's stupid and lazy, and seems to think it's a virtue.

What's almost frustrating about it is that somewhere about halfway through, they seem to discover comic timing, and the occasional bit starts working. Hopefully this group's second movie will reflect that experience, but there's no need to subject people to what they went through to gain it.

Tian bian yi duo yun (The Wayward Cloud)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Tsai Ming-liang: Then and Now)

I formulated a theory about Tsai as I watched this movie: All the discussion of him as a highly-intellectual auteur, and his presentation as such, is a smokescreen. He's just a guy trying to make silent/burlesque-style comedy, and has an extremely weird sense of humor. That plays even less well commercially than art-house films, so he disguises his goofy productions as art pieces.

I'm mostly kidding about that but there's a nugget of truth to it, too: The Wayward Cloud is in fact a very funny movie, and while I await a future Criterion Blu-ray where I can go over it and extract nuance, I do think that the best way to experience it the first time is to just sit down and enjoy it as a comedy, because it really is extremely funny, rather than worry about parsing it for intent or meaning. That can come later, and maybe it will make the movie even better.

That said, I still think the "comedy made by a guy with a weird sense of humor" explains the last act best. Yes, there may be some meaning to what's going on, but I think it makes a lot more sense if Tsai is just kind of out there, giggling over something terribly inappropriate.

An Education

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (first-run)

I've long advocated that the Academy establish a Saul Bass award for outstanding opening credits, and An Education, with its upbeat music straight out of Charlie Brown specials and doodling over a peppily-edited montage that establishes just the barest hint of discontent, has one of the year's best. The movie that follows does a pretty good job of living up to it. Every single step of the story is easily predicted from the beginning, of course, but the cast is fantastic to a one. Star Carey Mulligan is just as good as promised, and Olivia Williams is particularly fine in her small role. It's a Sunday drive of a movie, familiar but still an enjoyable path to go down.

One odd thing that stuck out was the numerous references to the casual anti-semitism of the time. I'm sure that they're an accurate reflection, and when it first shows up, it reads as Alfred Molina's Jack trying to show that he's at least striving for his family to become more sophisticated (in that he says something "common" and then stumbles backing away from it), but when it reappears coming from the mouth of Emma Thompson's headmistress, well, then it's a thing.

Black Dynamite

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (midnight)

Huh, Michael Jai White is funny. Hilarious, even. Who knew?

The sort of parody that Black Dynamite engages in - replicating a genre that is less than stellar flaws and all (especially the flaws!) - is one I usually have pretty harsh words for. It's generally either the product of laziness (like Slimed and half the shorts we've screened for the BSFFF) or just seems disrespectful. The people who made those old movies that the parody's filmmakers often claim inspired them weren't trying to make something unintentionally hilarious, and if you're trying to honor their work, you really should do it by making the best movie you can. I'm talking to you, Larry Blamire.

Black Dynamite works because the filmmakers, as much as they're doing a warts-and-all recreation of seventies blaxploitation, don't ever use that as an excuse to slack off. When the characters talk, it's genuinely funny, and instead of trying to be bad actors, they're selling their lines with perfect comic timing. And for as ridiculously over-the-top as many of the action scenes are, they're actually shot better than the fight scenes in a lot of conventional action movies; White is a good enough screen fighter that he doesn't want to look bad.

Sure, maybe the last couple of segments are a little much, but I get the impression that the filmmakers knew they might never get another chance to make a movie like this, and made sure that they could cram every idea they had in there. And it's better for a movie like this to be overstuffed than have missed opportunities.



Stubless: The Foundling (18 November, Somerville Video Room, 7.30pm), an Eye-Opener they'd prefer I didn't mention by name or discuss since it's still a rough cut but which I didn't like all that much (22 November, Brattle Theatre, 11am)

The Foundling

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 November 2009 in the Somerville Theater Video Room (SF/35 selection group screenings)

So, speaking of stuff that I should probably keep under my hat, I'm kind of worried about the line-up for the festival part of February's Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. I'm tending to be the wet blanket in the room because I don't like camp that much, but that's not the problem with The Foundling. It's serious but not very good, really in any facet, but it's one Izzy seemed to feel was borderline. Some others praised the acting, which I just can't see. It's one of those movies that folks shy away from saying sucked because the intentions are good, it's unusual to see either a science fiction film or a western centered around Asian-American women, and just looking at it, you can see that the filmmaker did the very best she could with limited resources.

Still... You're asking people to pay the same amount for this that they would for a "regular" movie. And while a regular festival audience may find learning about new filmmakers enough, I don't know that this sort of film festival is the sort where good intentions and perhaps being a filmmaker to watch are good enough for the audience. I think each entry really needs to do something well, and The Foundling doesn't have that.

The Boat That Rocked (Pirate Radio cut)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 November 2009 in Regal Fenway #5 (first-run)

I probably should have known to be a little wary when the preview for this movie, aside from changing its name from the nifty-sounding "The Boat That Rocked" to the generic "Pirate Radio", spent a good chunk of time announcing that it had music from a bunch of great classic rock groups on the soundtrack. That's nice and all, but the target audience has most of that stuff on CD, and the time period rules out much in the way of new stuff (if groups being broken up and artists being dead didn't do an even more thorough job). So, Universal was basically selling it on what a great job the people who did the music clearances did. And while I'm sure they worked hard, if that's what you're using to push a movie with this cast, it sort of suggests that the movie isn't nearly as funny or clever as a movie with this cast and pedigree should be.

And, sadly, it's not. It's never bad, especially when it pulls out weapons like Billy Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Emma Thompson, but the truly great moments have a little too much space between them, and director Richard Curtis never quite manages to communicate the excitement of the era and how playing rock & roll like this was such an act of rebellion. The heck of it is, with modern American radio becoming as soullessly corporate as the day's BBC was stodgy, this movie could have really said something to people, but doesn't quite get there. Not that I expect Brit Curtis to think in those terms, but if the energy had been there, it would have been a nice side-effect.

The movie was recut from the original UK version for its US release, since the lengths was apparently a factor in its disappointing performance across the pond (which, I guess, makes the name change a little more palatable). One thing I think might have gotten garbled in the cut is how Tom Sturridge's Carl, the teenager sent to apprentice on the boat, at one point suspects Nighy's character is his unknown father, not far from when he is being set up with said character's niece. Maybe this was re-ordered for the US release, or something was cut, but it seems like there should have been alarm bells going off for someone.

The Parallax View

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Gordon Willis: The Man Who Shot the Godfather)

Pretty darn decent as paranoid 1970s thrillers go. The action set-piece that plays out in the beginning is a bit of a classic, although jarring to modern sensibilities: It plays out with no music, and is actually over pretty quickly, although not in a "came out of nowhere" way. It's just understated, acknowledging that this sort of chase wouldn't necessarily last very long.

The rest isn't quite up to that level; Warren Beatty is decent but not great, although Hume Cronyn is a treat as his crusty newspaper editor. It does serve as an interesting time capsule about paranoia and attitudes then and now. People still seemed to really believe in the press as an important check on government and industry ambition. Somehow the secret organization at the center seems both tame and extremely unlikely. And, get this, a man could just walk onto the runway, get on a plane, and then buy a ticket in the air, like he was on the commuter rail.

Not bad, and as befits a film presented in a series about the cinematographer, it certainly looks nice.



Bronson

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 November 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

Let's talk promotion and trailers again. I saw Bronson listed in the IFFB catalog and the picture used was a reddish image of Tom Hardy, stripped to the waist and looking tough. I figured, okay, I'll give that a pass. Then I see the crazy, colorful preview and think, huh, that might be worth a look.

In the end, Bronson winds up a so-so story told rather well. It's eye-popping to look at, and having the title character narrate as a stage show proves compelling and surprising far more often than it seems gimmicky. It's still very simple - young man gets sent to jail, discovers he likes to fight and is good at it, and is so committed to it that the sentence of seven years (and likely out in four) winds up becoming over thirty years spent in solitary confinement. But it's entertaining to watch, even if that's not the sort of story one usually goes in for.

Precious (based upon the novel Push by Sapphire)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2009 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run)

At some point while watching Precious, I remarked to myself that watchiing the movie was remarkably like being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer. That's not meant as a criticism; the life of Clarice "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is remarkably like being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer, and she certainly starts the movie ignorant enough that her way of communicating her life would like be akin to... Well, you get the idea. So, to a certain extent, every ham-fisted symbol or device is evidence that director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher are doing a good job of capturing Precious's perspective. Still, there are times when it doesn't quite feel like cleverness as just fumbling.

Still, the cast is top-notch. Gabourey Sidibe is excellent as Precious, as is Mo'Nique as her monstrous mother. Paula Patton and Mariah Carey provide good support, as do the group of actors playing Precious's friends. They're all quite natural, and no matter how awkward the storytelling sometimes may be, the acting is absolutely worth seeing the film for.

Mr. Skeffington

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2009 in the Brattle Theatre (Epstein Brothers)

The Epstein Brothers' most famous screenplay is, of course, Casablanca, but there's an argument to be made that the movie is fantastic in spite of the script, rather than because of it. After all, its events are absurd, but the acting and snappy dialog make up for it. Mr. Skeffington isn't quite so peppy, covering thirty years in its two and a half hours, and the star-crossed romance between Bette Davis's Fanny Trellis and Claude Rains's Job Skeffington is far from being Rick & Ilsa.

Still, it's not bad. Claude Rains, Walter Abel, and Marjorie Riordan are all charming in their parts, and there's a nice scope to it. Bette Davis, on the other hand... Well, Fanny soon becomes a singularly unpleasant character, and she gets saddled with some astonishingly horrific prosthetic makeup.

Red Cliff (edited from Chi bi and Chi bi xia: Jue zhan tian xia)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2009 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

Surprisingly, considering that the American release of Red Cliff has been cut just about exactly in half from what it was in China (where it was released as two movies totaling five hours), it's not simply one action scene after another. That's not to say it's not action-packed - it is, with Woo staging a few battle scenes that are nothing short of breathless - but not at the expense of the story.

The main attraction, of course, is the action, and we know what we're getting into from the start, when a loyal general takes a baby prince from its dying mother, puts him in a sling, and starts hacking up members of Prime Minister Cao Cao's army; from the moment we see the sling, we know there's badassery ahead, and we'll have single men taking on armies, literally controlling the battlefield, and an entire armada set on fire. Woo works his repertoire into this wuxia film, right down to the doves.

I'm hoping that when Magnolia releases this on home video, the entire two-part film will be on the Blu-ray, because although Red Cliff is suitably epic as is, there are points that could definitely use some fleshing out; in particular, Takeshi Kaneshiro's master strategist tends to seem to be ahead of Zhang Feng-yi's Cao Cao too much of the time; hopefully the entire story contains more back-and-forth, and perhaps a bit more of a story arc for some of the other characters.

Ninja Assassin

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2009 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run)

It's good to see that fake fake blood technology has improved since the Zatoichi remake, because the folks in Ninja Assassin do plenty of slicing and dicing. There's plenty of real fake blood, too, and even the some of the CGI weapons look pretty good. It's not the same sort of awe-inspiring action seen in Red Cliff, but there is something nice about how director James McTeague and company aren't messing around - there's been little if any thought given to how this could possibly secure a PG-13. Ninja movies should be this bloody and violent.

And it's good that it has that going for it, because even if it's not quite rock-stupid, it is the sort of action movie where every moment where fake blood of one sort or another isn't spurting is pretty much filler to lead us to the next. The characters are thoroughly generic, and there isn't even an obvious twist toward the end. The ninjas seem to have some mild supernatural abilities when McTeague and company think it would look cool - although I argue that ninjas actually being stealthy rather than seeming to impossibly step out of shadows with a shimmer would actually be cooler.

Ninja Assassin also seems to suggest a corollary to the multiple-ninja rule - that is, although one ninja is an unstoppable, undetectable killing machine, an army of ninjas is basically cannon fodder. It's as though a given geographical area has a limited pool of awesomeness to be drawn upon, so when you have many ninjas, they only get a little awesome each. Ninja Assassin posits a much stronger awesome field than most movies, as even groups of ninjas prove to be pretty fierce, but it also suggests that the field is polarized, with positive and negative awesome. Rain's title character thus has an advantage because he's the only one using the positive awesome field, while all the other ninjas are splitting the negative.

New Japanese Cinema: Vacation, The Magic Hour

Haruka Ayase made four feature films in 2008. Somehow, between Fantasia and today, all four have found me at one place or another. Now, I'm probably in the 99th percentile for "Japanese films seen by Americans" during a given year, but that seems like rather a lot.

That provided me with a good laugh when her name showed up in the credits for The Magic Hour, which turned out to be a good sign. I actually also went to see Cyborg She the next afternoon, having loved it at Fantasia. I was a little disappointed to see it playing on video, especially since (I think) that's how I saw it in Montreal. I still really liked it, but was bummed that I didn't get to see it on film.

I also missed out on the previous weekend's movies because I was stupid and didn't know when to get off the #47 bus for the MFA. It wasn't a huge loss - Big Man Japan isn't hard to find and I have a Fantasia screener for Crime or Punishment?, but given a choice of spending a Saturday afternoon screwing around with the MBTA or seeing funny Japanese movies...

(Note: Vacation isn't funny. I've been talking about the comedies, so don't get reading whiplash heading to the next paragraph.)

Kyûka (Vacation)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 28 November 2009 at the Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (New Japanese Cinema)

Toru Hirai (Kaoru Kobayashi) is dragging. He falls asleep while riding the train with his fiancée Mika (Nene Otsuka) and her son Tatsuya (Shusei Uto), but you don't need that to see it. He's middle aged, but it's tough to tell whether he's deep into it or just looking old before his time. The days are just grinding by.

If that's true for Toru, though, it's a hundred times more the case for Shinichi Kaneda (Hidetoshi Nishijima). Kaneda is locked away in the prison where Toru works as a guard, on death row in fact. He does not cause any trouble, and there are signs he feels remorse. It doesn't register with him when his lawyer says he may have grounds for an appeal; it's just a bit of noise to the background of his days of solitude and carefully supervised exercise. He doesn't know, but his execution has been authorized for a Friday in November - the day before Toru's and Mika's wedding. A guard who takes the most disturbing job in the execution - "supporting" the hanged prisoner after he drops through the floor - will get the next week off, but it's not really the sort of experience one would like casting a shadow on one's honeymoon.

The parallels between the two characters are obvious; Vacation is a film about people just marking time as they live their lives. For some, like Kaneda, it's involuntary. Toru, on the other hand, is like too many of us, repeating days without getting joy out of them. It's mentioned that his last vacation was spent on his mother's funeral, and at times his engagement to Mika seems perfunctory at best. They often seem to barely know each other; foreigners like myself may watch their interactions and wonder whether arranged marriages are still common in Japan or whether there is simply enough social pressure brought to bear on widows and other singletons over a certain age that marriages might as well be arranged.

That sort of dispassionate look at Toru's circumstances might indicate him as a man to be shown pity or contempt, but Karou Kobayashi makes him more interesting than that. The script doesn't reveal hidden depths to Toru, but Kobayashi does not have him walk around as bored or hollow. He's reserved but engaged, perhaps too patient for his own good. Our feelings toward him are generally positive, and although he may not be the ideal prison guard, we measure all the others we see against him . His scenes with young Shusei Uto are great; the kid is not ready to accept a new father, and the few words that pass between Toru and Tatsuya show a boy not looking to accept a new father figure and a man who has mastered the art of being present but not forcing himself into another's life. That's maybe not the best basis for a relationship, and we seldom see exactly how things between Toru and Mika work. Nene Otsuka makes Mika appealing, and the decision to have her not outwardly desperate or appearing pressured is refreshing.

As good as the other performers are, though, and as much as this story is at its heart about Toru, it would be hard for Hidetoshi Nishijima's Kaneda not to steal a large portion of the show. Part of is that we learn just enough about him to temper any instinctive hatred we might have for a murderer on death row (assumed to be the worst of the worst); but the trick is that even once we've learned that, Nishijima does not give many hints that Kaneda is either angry at his fate or feels that it is right. We see a man where the combination of guilt and crushing routine have drained most reservoirs of personality or self away. And then, as he realizes that the end is coming, we see a truly spectacular blind panic as he realizes that he is not all gone, but that the rest will be taken away soon. It's as convincing a display of raw terror as you'll see on screen.

He gets a little help there from director Haime Kadoi. Kadoi does a great job throughout (from a script by Dai Sako and a novel by Akira Yoshimura), but the way he and cinematographer Yukihiro Okimura shoot Kaneda is particularly fascinating. From many angles, Kaneda's cell looks like a more cramped than average Tokyo studio apartment. It looks normal until we see how restrictive it is, when the doors open up and the guards stand just outside. That scenario is repeated just enough that we see just how repetitive his life must be, although not in such a way that it's obvious that Kadoi is trying to make that point. The spaces Toru inhabits are also often strangely spartan - there's something a little cold about the places where Toru and Mika plan and hold their wedding reception, especially. It's all the more remarkable that some spaces seem to turn much more friendly as Toru and Mika draw closer.

There's something a little bit inspiring about that. As much as opening up is shown as dangerous at several points during Vacation, it's also the thing that can give Toru's life something beyond honor and usefulness.

Also at HBS.

Za majikku awâ (The Magic Hour)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 November 2009 at the Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (New Japanese Cinema)

Let's face it: The whole deal with gangs and movies intersecting in such a way as to cause hilarious, self-referential misunderstanding is pretty darn played out. I groaned a little just reading the description for The Magic Hour, seeing that it would be working that territory. We've seen it all before, or at least it seems that way. I don't know if Koki Mitani has exactly found a new angle on it, but he's certainly found indications that there's a little life at this particular genre crossroads yet.

The film opens in classic style, as a carload full of goons bursts into the Minato Hotel, where club manager Bingo (Satoshi Sumabuki) is making time with the Boss's girlfriend Mari (Eri Fukatsu). In no time flat, Bingo and Mari are being fitted for cement shoes, but Bingo overhears the gangsters talking about trying to locate a mysterious assassin, Della Togashi. Saying he can find the killer gains him a five-day reprieve, but Bingo has no idea where to look. Fortunately, nobody knows what Togashi looks like, so Bingo hits upon the idea of hiring Taiki Murata (Koichi Sato), an actor with the right look but a career spent more in stunt work than acting, and telling him that he's playing hitman Della Togashi in a mostly-improvised movie. Employees Natsuko (Haruka Ayase) and Takashi (Goro Ibuki) help sell the illusion, which works a bit too well - Boss Tessio (Toshiyuki Nishida) wants to hire him.

This is a plot that generally requires at least one character to not be so bright, and for the most part, that falls to Koichi Sato's Murata. Murata is not a great thespian, but Sato plays him as a specific type of bad actor: A little too well-aware of where the camera is (or should be), trying to pick up more screen time by impressing the director with what he brings to the table, even though it's not all that great. It works in part because Murata is actually competent at some things, so when we watch him misinterpret what's going on at every step, he never actually does something foolish enough that we find it impossible for him not to get caught out, but it's funny because it is so ridiculous.

Even with that, Mitani's script does rely heavily on everything working out just right: Tessio or his lieutenant Kurokawa (Susumu Terajima) will almost always say or do something that works perfectly as a lead-in for Murata, nobody will get hit by a stray bullet and kill the mood, etc. Mitani manages this by doing a couple of things. First, and most important, he almost never asks the audience to trust him on something without giving some sort of immediate payoff: A moment which requires suspension of disbelief will lead to a joke right away, generally with the promise of more funny stuff to come.

Second, he finds little ways to remind us that we're watching a movie, and it doesn't have to be real, letting us in on the joke. The Toho logo leads to the first scene via the classic opening iris, and from the opening shots, we might almost suspect that The Magic Hour is a period piece. We're told that its harbor town setting of Sucago is often used for film shoots because it still looks like its from another time, and even when we see characters flipping open cell phones, the movie still has that screwball ambiance. Mitani zips us from one funny scenario to another quickly, and doesn't overburden us by trying to give every single character a subplot. I wouldn't be shocked if there was a cut at one point where Haruka Ayase's Natsuko had a crush on Bingo (and you can write how it goes from there), but it wouldn't make things any funnier, so it's gone.

And that's one of the sure signs of a good comedy - there are few cast members getting notable screen time without being funny. Sato gets a lot of the big laughs, of course, but Tumabuki is right there with him, adding youthful innocence and exuberance to Bingo's panic as the situation quickly becomes too much to control. Nishida is dryly witty as Tessio, giving deadpan responses to Murata's craziness without giving the game away. Eri Fukatsu is deliciously self-centered as Mari, and Goro Ibuki steals almost every scene he's in with the big-lug look on his face and the odd aptitude for pulling off this particular scheme. Ditto Keiko Toda as the older and wiser woman who seems to really run the hotel.

All this breaking down why The Magic Hour worked for me, though, gets away from the most important thing: It made me laugh, a lot. It's an amiable, goofy movie, but one with plenty of perfectly timed jokes. It's just right, which is what I want a comedy to be.

Also at HBS.

Talky pictures: William Kunstler, Disturbing the Universe and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Brief Interviews was going to be part of a double feature, but like Ichi the week before, it didn't seem like the folks at Kendall Square knew about it - The Confessional was listed in Landmark's Boston listings and on Google, but when I got there, no sign, nothing in the point-of-purchase machines, and the screening of Capitalism: A Love Story it would have displaced was still there. In the end, Brief Interviews ran past the expected 9pm start time and I was hungry anyway, so I didn't bug a box office person or manager to find out what was going on, although I am curious about these random-seeming screenings that are popping up there.

William Kunstler, Disturbing the Universe

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 November 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

For most documentaries, the narrator is relatively anonymous - a reassuringly familiar celebrity voice, perhaps with some connection to the subject matter. For William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, it is Kunstler's youngest daughter, Emily, who made the film with her sister Sarah. She announces this right from the start, and one's first reaction is likely to wonder if perhaps they might be too close to the film's subject to see him clearly, and that turns out to be a legitimate concern.

Sarah's and Emily's relationship with their father wasn't pure hero-worship, though. As the film opens, they say point out that William Kunstler landmark civil rights cases were behind him when they were growing up in 1980s New York City; then, he was by and large a criminal attorney, often taking the cases of accused rapists and terrorists, drawing threats and protesters to their door, and dangerous people to the office in the basement of their home. How to reconcile that with the heroic stories of his earlier years?

The easy answer is that Kunstler believed that every accused person deserves a fair trial and a vigorous defense, and that's roughly the answer that his daughters appear to come to. They don't come out and state as much, and when all is said and done, they still seem to have a difficult time reconciling the William Kunstler that existed before they were born with their father. The first half to two-thirds of the movie is packed with archive footage and recordings of well-known events like the Attica riots, the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial, and Wounded Knee, as well as smaller trials like his fight to allow a black couple to become his neighbors in Westchester, NY; there are plentiful interviews with those involved who are still around forty years later. The lesser amount of time spent on Kunstler's later activities is, in large part, used to describe how it impacted Sarah, Emily, and their mother. There is some commentary from Karin Kunstler Goldman, a daughter of William's first marriage, and it never seems like the two Kunstlers were completely different people, but there's a gap that Sarah and Emily have a difficult time bridging.

I don't blame them for this; Sarah and Emily are able to bring a unique perspective to their father's story, even if it may also be a limited one. Interview subjects often refer to William as "your father", and it pushes them to discuss him as a man as well as a lawyer and public figure. They also have access to his home movies and photographs, some going back to the 1950s. They are a treat, showing him before he became radicalized or grew his hair out, or discussing things with Sarah and Emily when they were very young.

Some of what he says there, and in news archive footage, can be difficult to watch. He can be eloquent and certainly earns respect for some of the cases he takes, but he'll also throw in things like "all white people are racist", or other cynical claims that, though they may be more true than we would like to think, seem far more absolute than perhaps is warranted; it often comes off as a classic case of liberal white guilt. He takes pride in how he grandstands in court, and one has to wonder if there are cases we don't see where that backfired badly. He clearly craved attention, and that is acknowledged, though seldom illustrated in a way that would show it as a serious flaw.

William Kunstler was an interesting man, and his daughters have certainly made an interesting movie about him. In some ways, I hope someone else takes a crack at a William Kunstler movie, perhaps as a narrative feature. Disturbing the Universe is informative, and in some ways the filmmakers' journey is as interesting as the subject's - Emily and Sarah seem to have their respect for their father solidified - but their unique ability to get close in some ways naturally holds them back in others.

Also at HBS.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 November 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run)

How can you spot a first film written and directed by an actor in a crowd? I've probably mentioned this before, but look for the one where the story is told entirely through talking and facial expressions. That is, after all, what actors do, and thus what they will likely consider important or interesting in a movie. I imagine if cinematographers and editors got the chance to direct their own screenplays, they'd crank out movies that leaned heavily on compositions or juxtapositions, respectively. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but, wow, does it nail John Krasinski's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

The interviewer is graduate student Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson); most of the interviews are actually monologues delivered by various character actors sitting across a metal desk from her in a room that is unmemorable but not abstract. Some are snippets of overheard conversation; others appear to be some sort of chorus. Most center around their relationships with women. The impetus behind these interviews and this eavesdropping is, supposedly, her doctoral thesis, but it's very clear that her recent breakup with boyfriend Ryan (Krasinski) is at the very least an influence.

Or it would be, if we ever saw Sara and her subjects really interact. As I mentioned, most of what we see monologues, bits of oration that may have been copied into the script verbatim from author David Foster Wallace's original work. We don't get much of a glimpse of Sara reacting to, interpreting, or directing the interviews, despite being on the lookout for it at least from the time her professor (Timothy Hutton) none-too-subtly points out that the documentarian exerts as heavy an influence on what we learn that the subject. Until late in the movie, she seems to be a fairly complete non-entity, so that when she and an undergraduate (Dominic Cooper) clash over a paper that she graded, it's hollow, manufactured conflict because she's got no point of view. She's suddenly sticking "as a woman" into her explanations of her opinions as if that's supposed to be enough, but we've got no idea what that means to her. Julianne Nicholson, unfortunately, doesn't add enough to the character to make her especially interesting in the time she's got on screen.

On the other hand, the interviews themselves are all kinds of not bad at all. Krasinski has put together an quality actors and given them the opportunity to just do their thing, and few if any falter. Ben Shankman, Chris Meloni, Bobby Cannavale, and Krasinski himself all have interesting stories to tell (you'd better believe Krasinski saved the longest and strangest for himself), and they mostly hit what they were aiming for on the bullseye, whether it be awkward comedy or predatory creepiness. A pair of standouts are Frankie Faison or Malcolm Goodwin, telling the same story without directly interacting, and making the bit that could be pulled out and released as a great little short film because it doesn't directly connect with the others, but is great regardless.

Krasinski plays around a bit in his directorial debut; that scene with Faison and Goodwin owes just as much to the way Krasinski stages it as it does to the performances, for instance. He'll often shoot both people telling a story and the story itself with the narration laid over, but knows how to push the latter back half a step, to remind us that what we're seeing is perhaps what Sara is imagining. The flaws of how he handles Sara are still there, though, and sometimes, he gets too clever for his own good. He uses the chorus of Max Minghella's Kevin and Lou Taylor Pucci's Evan to stick in ideas that he can't seem to communicate any other way, and a sequence toward the end that jumps a speech from character to character, and situation to situation, is incredibly well cut, but also weirdly disconnected from what is going on around it.

In fact, the way he cuts and shoots shows enough talent that I certainly look forward to future projects. Here, he winds up creating the odd contradictions of Brief Interviews - it does feel like a film in spite of mostly being people talking, and despite all that people pour out their hearts and histories, not a whole lot seems to be said.

Also at HBS.

Sunday, Indie Sunday: The New Year Parade and (Untitled)

Ha! I'd totally forgotten what the eye-opener was for this week when I tried writing them down in the book both to remember for when I had to put a TWIT post together and when I tried to use it as documentation for the Watch-a-thon.

And, yes, I am once again participating in the Brattle's Movie Watch-a-thon. This blog should have been a great way to keep track, but, well... Anyway, donations can be made at my FirstGiving page. As of now (12:01-ish, 1 December), the tallies are:

5 @ the Brattle, 4 of them eye-openers;
24 elsewhere;
2 screening nights for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival selection comittee.

Brattle movies count double, the screenings maybe don't count at all, depending on how generous one feels.

The New Year Parade

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 November 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

The glib description of The New Year Parade is that divorce is hard on everybody - not just parents and children, but everyone else caught up in it, including the parade orchestras. Fortunately, the movie itself isn't glib, just honest and extraordinarily well-made, given how truly independent this independent movie is.

It opens with television coverage of Philadelphia's Mummers Parade, a New Year tradition where various musical clubs march and are scored on their performances. The South Philadelphia String Orchestra didn't do so well this year, but that's not all that's on the minds of some members - Mike MacDougal (Andrew Conway) is bothered by the fact that he didn't see his daughter Kat (Jennifer Welsh) in the crowd at the usual place, although his son Jack (Greg Lyons), also a member of the orchestra, tells him that's hardly surprising, since their mother Lisa (MaryAnn McDonald) wouldn't want to come, considering the separation. It sets the next year up as a struggle, not just for the band, but for the MacDougals.

Divorce sucks. It is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, to be avoided at all costs - by the time a couple gets to where the MacDougals are, it may be the best thing they can do. Still, nobody enjoys the process, and director Tom Quinn has put together a series of scenes that capture how helpless and angry the whole thing makes a person feel, as well as how it skews even seemingly unconnected things. I can't personally look at any particular scene and say, yes, I've been there - everyone's experience is different; I was away at school and missed much of the everyday tension when my parents split - but there's not a single one that doesn't feel genuine.

That is, in large part, due to the excellent performances by the cast. The acting is doubly impressive when you consider that many of the cast members had no previous acting experience, and may not do anything else. Take Jennifer Welsh, who is fantastic as as Kat; this movie is the teenager's debut, and she has since gone to college to major in sculpture and perhaps become a high-school art teacher. She's completely genuine, whether because of that or in spite of it. Part of it is because much of what we see is her doing things, rather than talking about them, but she doesn't ever over-emote when given dialog or a scene that is about showing how Kat feels. Similarly, MaryAnn McDonald had no experience, and while she winds up with the smallest part of the four family members, she gets the job done.

Andrew Conway and Greg Lyons, meanwhile, were already performers of different sorts - Conway a tango dancer and instructor, Lyons a musician - so it's a bit less of a surprise when they impress. Lyons is particularly good, looking maybe a little older than his character's twenty-five years (or how young working-class men actually look, outside of Hollywood), capturing the character's passive-aggressive vibe beautifully: He's going to be the good son, and maybe he doesn't even realize that he's trying to show who has the moral high ground. He makes Jack very much Mike's son in that way; Conway manages to give Mike a well-realized combination of pent-up aggression and desire to do right by his family. He's great in the scene where he seems to snap; he's a little scary, enough to make us a little nervous around him even though all indications are that he hasn't done anything wrong.

That's the family drama part of the movie, which generally takes the forefront, with the scenes of the band preparing for the next Mummers Parade providing background. Quinn uses it well; it never threatens to overtake the MacDougals' story, and serves as a nice reflection of it, as the tension between father and son start to form cracks in the band. It provides an interesting and unique background, though, and Quinn has obtained excellent access. During the last act, with New Year's approaching, Quinn blurs the line between narrative and documentary footage, showing the preparation.

To be totally honest, there were moments when I might have liked to see more of that; it's unique and interesting. But they're just brief moments, where we want more, which in no way detracts from what the movie is offering us.

Also at HBS.

(Untitled)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 November 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

It is easy to make fun of the art world, especially those on the edge (or fringe, depending on how you feel about it). It's a little harder to do it well; just because something is mockable doesn't mean that the mockery is funny. What (Untitled) does that's kind of impressive is to make sport of its eccentric artists while still maintaining some sort of appreciation for them.

Two of these artists are brothers. Josh Jacobs (Eion Bailey) is commercially successful; his works are soothing circle-filled images that hang nicely on lobby walls and in medical practices. His brother Adrian (Adam Goldberg) is a musician whose compositions are harsh and atonal, mostly using unusual sounds, although he has a regular clarinet (Lucy Punch). The date Josh brings to one of Adrian's sparsely-attended performances is Madeline Gray (Marley Shelton), a pretty gallery owner who, unlike nearly everyone else, seems to get what Adrian is going for, and invites him to perform at her gallery, where she's having a new show for Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones), whose work combines absurdity and taxidermy.

Director Jonathan Parker and co-writer Catherine DiNapoli get in a great deal of jokes at their characters' expense, and they are generally pretty good ones. A lot of them are familiar: There's the collector (Zak Orth) who seems to be trying to buy respectability without having any sort of actual taste, and the minimalist (Ptolemy Slocum) whose work is so minimal and manner so affected that he must be pulling off some sort of scam. Barko's works are pure frozen slapstick, while Adrian is deadpan earnest; there is no doubt that he has carefully considered every jarring sound, with that seriousness and disdain for musical convention bleeding over into various disastrous day jobs. Madeline's outfits are bizarre but perhaps calculatedly so. Parker hits the sweet spot with it, though - he doesn't aim to gross the audience out or make them uncomfortable, just get a laugh from how weird it is.

For all the movie is getting laughs at this stuff, though, it's not dismissive. Orth's and Slocum's characters are kind of sad and ridiculous, but there's a certain awkwardness to each of them that engenders a bit of our sympathy. Adrian gets to explain atonal music in a way that makes a certain amount of sense. There's pathos to how Josh wants both commercial success and respect. And Madeline is sometimes delightfully tricky to get a read on; there's a clearly mercenary side to her, but she also seems genuinely excited by art. For a movie that makes hay out of how silly the art world can seem to insiders and outsiders alike, (Untitled) has a fair amount of respect for them.

In some ways, that either holds the movie back or makes it hard to classify. It seldom misses when riffing on the avant garde types, but it takes its characters just seriously enough that it sometimes goes a while between jokes. It dabbles in several potential romantic triangles, but never really commits to making one the main thing to drive the story. I don't mind that, really - it means that (Untitled) doesn't give us whiplash going from comedy to melodrama and back, and lets us believe that what we're seeing go on is exaggerated but not to the point of being unrecognizable.

That atmosphere is sold by a cast that hits the balance Parker is trying to strike between weird and likeable. Marley Shelton manages to be the target of jokes without Madeline (mostly) coming off as a either ditz or ice queen. Adam Goldberg works his deadpan drawl to excellent effect; he sells a lot of silly scenes by playing them completely straight. Vinnie Jones works against type, playing a pretentious artist rather than a guy who could explode at any second. Eion Bailey makes Josh a little shallow and oblivious without being pushy about it. Lucy Punch, meanwhile, is adorable and quite frequently manages to serve as the movie's straight man without ever seeming like she doesn't belong among the crazy artists. And I wish Parker and DiNapoli had given Ben Hammer a bigger role - he shows up in one scene toward the end and absolutely owns it as Adrian's musical idol.

(Untitled) is a lot like its characters - kind of silly, but basically nice, despite eccentricities. Maybe it could have been sharper satire, but that could have easily backfired, resulting in something not nearly as enjoyable as this movie.

Boston Jewish Film Festival: Mary and Max

The Boston Jewish Film Festival is a sprawling thing, one that takes place in over a half dozen venues and, I suspect, as many municipalities. There are some of them that public transit folks like me just can't reach - good luck getting to Danvers or West Newton, for instance. Well, I can get to West Newton. Getting home from there is an entirely different matter.

Mary and Max wasn't quite my first choice Thursday night. I figured that The Girl on the Train would be less likely to show up for a regular run and it would be nifty to see Emilie Duquennes in something new, as not much of what she has done since Brotherhood of the Wolf has made it to the Boston area. Too early, though, for me to get back to Cambridge from Waltham.

Mary and Max

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2009 at Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Boston Jewish Film Festival)

It's interesting how certain things seem to arrive in clusters. Stop-motion animation never seemed to disappear quite so completely as the traditional cel-based form, but what has appeared over the last year or so has been an unexpected bounty. Not just in amount, but that Australia has turned out two of these films ($9.99 and Adam Elliot's Mary and Max) that are both well-produced and perhaps more suited to the boutique house than the multiplex.

Mary Daisy Dinkle (voice of Bethany Whitmore) is an eight-year-old girl living outside of Melbourne, ostracized for the birthmark on her forehead and dealing with weird parents. Curious about where babies come from in America (in Australia, they're found at the bottom of beer glasses), she writes to an address she pulls out of the New York phone book randomly. The recipient happens to be Max Jerry Horovitz (voice of Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is obese, in his mid-forties, and has a hard time relating to the outside world. He writes back, though, starting a correspondence that will continue for years.

By then, Mary will be voiced by Toni Collette, a transition that is handled so smoothly the audience may never realize that different actress's voice the character at different ages. It's a very nice cast - Whitmore and Collette are perfect fits for Mary as she goes through her ups and downs, while Hoffman takes on a tone that is gruff and maybe a little combative. He does a nice job in making it clear how Max, by nature of his mental condition, has to really concentrate on how to interact with others. Eric Bana is good as Mary's next-door neighbor, Damien, and Barry Humphries does a fine job as the film's narrator, adding a great deal of dry wit to what could feel like dull or needless exposition.

Which is good, because the film uses him a lot. At times, this is a little frustrating; it flies in the face of the "show, don't tell" dictum. What it winds up doing, though, is emphasizing that these two pen pals only know each other through their letters, and lets us experience that friendship the same way, even though we are also seeing them do things they don't write about and are fed information that wouldn't be in the letters. It's not necessarily an easy device to accept, but it works much better than it does in other narration-heavy films. That it allows Elliot to avoid awkward lip-sync issues is a bonus.

A large bonus, though, as it would be a shame if the impressive animation were sabotaged by that (which seems especially tricky in stop-motion). The character animation is remarkably smooth; there's no stuttering, and the characters neither look like hard plastic nor pick up fingerprints or other deformations that often remind the viewer that someone is manipulating models. Some of the models are just excellent: I love the design for Mary, for instance, which is simple and very expressive, and moves from child to adult fantastically well. The same is true for Damien, and I wonder if they wound up being the two best-designed characters because the need to age them recognizably meant keeping them simple. Some of the other characters are a little busy - Max looks like a lighter-skinned Shrek, for instance. I love the model of New York, though.

The story is good, as well. It's a very true depiction of isolated people making tentative connections, none of them perfect. Characters get angry and hurt each other badly, and people die even though they might be all someone else has. It's a tightrope between hilarious and depressing, with some moments able to fit under either category. Thanks to the efforts of Elliot, the animators, and the voice actors, Mary and Max are almost always sympathetic characters, even when we want them to act differently, and well worth following.

According to a subtitle, Mary and Max was inspired by actual events, and despite the often crazy embellishments, I believe that. It's a genuine, touching story of friendship, even when that friendship is hard.

Also at HBS.

Made in Japan: Ichi and United Red Army

I've got real questions about the marketing and distribution of Ichi. This isn't a complaint against the fine folks at Kendall Square who were cool enough at the ticket window that I dropped some cash at the concession stand even though I really wasn't that hungry(*), but there was no advance word of this screening - I stumbled upon it quite accidentally looking at the day's showtimes in Google's movie page. It's being put out on DVD and Blu-ray by FUNImation, supposedly with a theatrical run between now and then, and I assume that the Warner Brothers logo at the front and back meant they have something to do with it, either producing it in Japan or handling American theatrical distribution.

There were maybe half a dozen of us there, despite the theater practically being on the MIT campus. You'd think it would be possible to get more otaku out to see it than this handful. I've got to consider that a bit of a marketing fail.

I also wonder why they're making a bit of a splash with this Haruka Ayase movie from 2008, when as far as I can tell there's no U.S. distribution for the superior Cyborg She.

(*) They probably knew what they were doing, sending me in - the margin on a Pocky & Coke is probably much better than that of a ticket. It makes me wonder if theaters could succeed by drastically cutting prices, even down to nothing, and making up what they lose on individual ticket sales with volume, both in terms of tickets and snacks.

Ichi

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (preview)

It is one of the oldest tricks in the book, despite having rather limited success, as far as I can tell: Take a franchise that has seen better days and revive it, only the new protagonist is no longer a middle-aged man, but a young, attractive girl. Maybe she's an apprentice, a long-lost (grand)daughter, or just someone who stumbled upon the legacy. The point is, the new product has got the unstoppable combination of brand awareness and sex appeal - how can it fail?

And yet, this template has seldom been a roaring success, and it's no different with Ichi, which almost certainly will not see the same sort of success as Zatoichi (26 movies, a TV series, and a Takeshi Kitano remake). Maybe it's the inevitable result of thinking in terms of product and franchise from the start, or that the alchemy of a hit is almost impossible to replicate just by following a recipe. Even franchise reboots that stick close to the source material often fail to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time; taking that further calculated step can just make it more alienating.

So we have Ichi (Haruka Ayase), a blind goze singer wandering on her own. Despite wearing rags and often sleeping outside, though, she's not completely helpless; far from it, she carries a short sword and her backslashing accuracy with it is lethal. She arrives in the town of Bito with ronin Toma Fujihara (Takao Osawa), allowing the local yakuza to assume that he is the one who killed a handful of bandits, even though he freezes when the time comes to draw his sword. Local yakuza leader Toraji Shirakawa (Yosuke Kubozuka) hires Toma to help them fight the Banki-to gang, named for its monstrous leader, Banki (Shido Nakamura). Ichi's curiosity is piqued when she finds out that Banki once knew a certain blind swordsman.

The samurai film and the western are closely related genres, and Ichi could certainly pass for an oater if it swapped its samurai swords for six-shooters. You've got a gang choking the life out of a town, local authorities (which is what the yakuza effectively were, at this point in time) unable to stop them, and a new sheriff in town who relies heavily on a trusted deputy. When the yakuza and bandits line up at opposite ends of a deserted street, a little Morricone on the soundtrack would sound just about right.

Unfortunately, while the ambiance of those scenes is just right and the action scenes which play out startlingly quickly even in slow motion can be exciting, the rest of the movie frequently doesn't measure up. The story isn't bad, even if it is pretty standard fare. Director Fumihiko Sori never seems to commit to a tone for the movie, though. The movie swings from melodrama to earnest sadness, and while the audience can see the skeleton of a love story, there's not a lot of passion to make it a great one.

The main problem, though, is that the cast is for the most part too young and good-looking. Even after we've seen the rape which saw Ichi banished from her troupe, Haruka Ayase is just too beautiful, with a face too perfectly unlined. It's not wholly her fault, of course - she plays the scenes where she is being put through the wringer well enough; it's just where we're supposed to look at her and know things have happened to her that she falls short. And someone else decided that her rags should look "distressed" rather than "tattered", or that she should always be clean and perfectly made-up and coiffed. The end result, though, is that we look at her and see her beauty rather than her character - she just doesn't give Ichi the proper gravity. Osawa is much the same, only he does a thing where he winces and looks tortured every time he starts to draw his sword. The two banter well enough together, and I might like them in a romantic comedy, but in a samurai movie (or a western), they look like kids in their high school play - dressed up in the costumes, solemnly playing their roles, but just unable to give the characters enough weight.

They can handle action, and when that's going on, the movie works well enough to be entertaining. It wants to be something a bit heftier, though, and neither Sori nor his cast has the gravitas to completely pull it off.

Also at HBS

Jitsuroku rengô sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi (United Red Army)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 November 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (special engagement)

There are two ways to look at Koji Wakamatsu's three-hour film United Red Army. The glass-half-full version is that it is a fantastically complete and detailed history of the titular group that gives special attention to some of that history's most (in)famous chapters. The other perspective is that it is a harrowing true tale of horror surrounded by exposition and epilogue that serves to distract from the really good parts. It's not a bad sign that even the glass-half-empty version admits that the film has a very solid core.

Wakamatsu's film separates into three acts even easier than most. The first tells us in documentary style how various protest movements in 1960s Japan formed and later radicalized, leading to two of the most radical, the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Left Faction, to become the Unified (later United) Red Army. The second has the URA holed up in the Japanese Alps, hiding from police as the leaders grow more and more autocratic, visiting violent punishment on their followers. In the aftermath, five members hole up in the Asama Mountain Lodge ski resort, taking the manager's wife hostage while the police laid siege for a month.

Wakamatsu's ambition with United Red Army is impressive and admirable, but also quite frankly daunting for those without prior knowledge of the subject. The film has literally dozens of characters, many of whom seem to be included for completeness's sake. People will be introduced and built up as if they were major characters only to be arrested and disappear twenty minutes later (don't get too attached to Tak Sakaguchi, likely the most familiar member of the cast for western audiences). The opening act covers roughly twelve years and features an odd combination of narration, stock footage, and scenes that seem more like crime-show recreations (in black-and-white to match the stock footage) in tone than part of a dramatic feature. The end gives us information on what happened to the group's members over the ensuing thirty years, enough information that the subtitles may change faster than the audience can read them. It is without a doubt informative, and Wakamatsu does an admirable job of not making these purely informational segments dry, but it is occasionally overwhelming.

What is somewhat dry, oddly, is the film's third act, as five escaped URA men barricade themselves in a cottage with a hostage. This is a genre film staple, but stuck on the tail end of this movie, it has a lot of issues: It brings some very minor characters to the forefront, and it never gives us a glance of the other side of the siege. In some ways, that's consistent with the rest of the movie - though there is some exposition to set the stage in the first act, Wakamatsu tells the story almost entirely from within the URA - but it reduces tension, especially since hostage Yasuko Muta (Karou Okunuki) is barely a factor. It's also hard to return to seeing them somewhat sympathetically after what had come before.

And what comes before, the middle of the movie, is dynamite. Wakamatsu is known in part for his sympathies with radical politics, but he doesn't flinch from how the months in the Japanese Alps are a microcosm on how communism went horribly wrong around the world: A movement dedicated to liberating workers from the ruling class develops its own despots, and failing to adhere to slogans and dogma is considered treasonous. Go Jibiki and Akie Namiki portray Tsuneo Mori and Hiroko Nagata as a terrifyingly complementary of true believers, Mori loud and bullying and Nagata icily terrifying - when Nagata comments that a pregnant member of the group is a threat because she thinks of her child as belonging to her rather than the party, the horrifying sincerity comes through even via subtitles. They stand in stark contrast to their victims, especially Maki Sakai's Mieko Toyama. Toyama is one of the characters we've seen since early on in the film, and though the film doesn't present her as an innocent, Sakai makes her sympathetic; we get the feeling that she followed her best friend into the movement, and winds up suffering because she is not at heart a violent person.

This central section has its problems as a movie, at least from a certain perspective. Many screenwriters would probably streamline the movement between bases and composite some characters, as at one point the same basic story (one woman and two men are tortured for not being able to "self-criticize" properly) is playing out in two locations. Even with that, it's devastatingly effective, as Wakamatsu escalates the violence and madness at a perfect clip, making it even worse by interspersing scenes showing that certain characters going to be are in trouble for just not being hardcore enough. The violence is brutal and comes across that way - it would be easy for this section to become a horror movie where the various deaths give us a secret thrill, or for the filmmaker's sympathy to the general cause to inject a hint of justification, but that doesn't happen - what we see is horrible in every way.

It's so good that at times I wished it were the whole movie, with a little narrative streamlining and just enough of what precedes and follows it included to give context. But, as the film reminds us, history is messy, and doesn't fit the standard form of a narrative feature.

Also at HBS

35 Shots [of Rum] & The Canyon

When I saw these two movies lined up as my Monday and Tuesday - 35 Shots of Rum was the Chlotrudis movie of the week, The Canyon a likely single-week run that would only fit in Tuesday because of my desire to watch the last game(s) of the World Series - I was figuring that I would like The Canyon more, on the basis that while horror/thriller/suspense films could maybe use a little more character work, it wouldn't kill Claire Denis to have her characters do something exciting.

I still believe this in general, even if I wound up liking 35 Shots of Rum a whole lot more than The Canyon. 35 Shots is an interesting movie to watch, and a poster boy for the idea of "viewing films actively", but I did fidget a lot while watching it (the couple yakking behind me didn't help - just because it's in French and I'm reading subtitles doesn't mean I want to hear you!). It's just that in this case, I wandered into a pretty good Movie Where Nothing Happens (TM) and a fairly dull adventure film.

35 Rhums (35 Shots [of Rum])

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run)

I had an odd experience reading the description in the theater's program for 35 Shots (that's the subtitle that appeared on the print; the poster adds "of Rum", probably a better translation of French title "35 rhums") after viewing the movie. I wouldn't so much say it was inaccurate, even though it didn't really match what I saw. Claire Denis expects the audience to fill in many blanks.

So, let us start with the bare facts. Lionel (Alex Descas) drives a train in the Paris Metro; his friend and co-worker, René (Julieth Mars Toussaint) is retiring. Lionel lives in an apartment with his daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop). Also living in the same building are Noé (Grégoire Colin) - Lionel and Joséphine look in on his cat during his frequent overseas trips - and Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), a taxicab driver who is friends with all of them. Jo has recently caught the eye of Ruben (Jean-Christophe Folly), a fellow student at her University.

All, other than Noé, are black, although that does not appear to be significant. Or is it? Here, we must start to piece together interpretations, based on what we see of the characters, as Denis is very seldom going to have the characters simply come out and state how they feel about each other, or fully articulate their history. They say enough to indicate that there is plenty of history in some instances, and most audience members will extrapolate a roughly similar chain of events. You have to pay attention, is all.

Which can, admittedly, be tricky. Denis and co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau do not overburden the film with a great deal of plot or dialogue. This is the sort of film that spends a great deal of time on following its characters as they go about everyday tasks: Lionel quietly drives his train, or he and Joséphine prepare dinner. Noé talks in vague terms about a new job. The two scenes that serve as the film's turning point are extremely low key - a scene in a bar is full of people pointedly not talking to each other, while the next finishes with a reaction to something that has happened off-screen. As someone who tends to like more active movies, I fully sympathize with anybody who loses patience here.

Fortunately, star Alex Descas is excellent at not saying anything. There is something occasionally rather cold about his Lionel; especially in his dealings with Gabrielle, he can seem quietly cruel. But there's also a warmth in his scenes with Mati Diop that rings very true - not demonstrative all the time, and they can get angry at each other, but something about his rugged, worn face lightens.

Diop is a good complement for him in that regard; though she mirrors some of Lionel's somewhat defensive attitude, Joséphine seems a bit more comfortable with the world around her, and also slips into the position of being daddy's girl without being immature or selfish. It's easy to imagine a background in which Lionel is an immigrant who will never be as at-home in Paris as his daughter. Dogué and Colin, as well as Toussaint and Folly, play characters that we know mainly through their relationships to Lionel and Joséphine, but make them much more complete than plot devices.

Denis and company bring them together in interesting ways. With the dialogue relatively low, the environments play an important part. Compare the tidy apartment Lionel and Joséphine share to that of Noé, for example. Examine the plentiful shots of railroad tracks; on the one hand, they indicate constraints, but the complexity of the network suggests the opposite. Note how Agnès Godard's camera lingers over a location late in the film, how different it is from where we've spent most of our time.

What does all this mean? That's up to the audience, to a certain extent - this is the sort of film where how much you take from it is tied to what you bring and how much effort you make. I've got my ideas, and they appear to be different from those of the person who wrote the program. But that's okay; it makes the film an enjoyable one to talk about.

Also at HBS

The Canyon

* * (out of four)
Seen 3 November 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, digital projection)

I skipped The Canyon at a festival this summer; it was only playing once and I figured its cast and story gave it a better chance of hitting American theaters and video than the sort-of-French, sort-of-sci-fi film also only playing once across the street. So, three and a half months later, the choice is vindicated - it did play Boston a couple weeks ahead of its video release... and the other movie was better.

The frame on The Canyon isn't bad; A pair of good-looking young people from Chicago have just eloped in Vegas, and have come to Arizona for their honeymoon. Nick (Eion Bailey) is eager to spend the weekend taking a mule down the Grand Canyon, but that's not something that can be done on the spur of the moment; you need a permit months in advance. They meet Henry (Will Patton), a guide who claims to know the right hands to grease, and while Lori (Yvonne Strahovski) is skeptical, she goes along with it. Of course, things don't go wrong until they're halfway down.

The best part of The Canyon is in the title; though I doubt that the park service allowed director Richard Harrah to shoot the bulk of the action there (and the credits point to a Utah shoot), the outdoor photography is frequently beautiful; it's a shame that Harrah and cinematographer Nelson Cragg didn't make a little more use of it. There are some nice backgrounds, but Harrah doesn't give us that great a sense of the geography. When the characters are lost, there's no indication of how far off course they are, and when one has to double back, it doesn't set of specific alarm bells (that's three hours each way, they had to pass X peril, there were a lot of paths that look alike).

That's the big problem with Steve Allrich's script: Nothing is very specific. Nick and Lori are nice enough, but they are awfully generic characters. Henry has a very familiar set of quirks. The conversations the three have seldom contain any memorable lines, and the fight for survival doesn't reflect or parallel what is between Nick and Lori on a personal level much at all. In some ways, I'd be more willing to forgive it when the script or characters have an attack of the stupids (such as deciding to test cell phone reception when hanging off the side of a cliff, rather than after having safely reached the top) if it at least seemed to be something individual, but The Canyon is far too vanilla for that.

The cast does what they can with what little they've got to work with, but they can't spin it into gold. Yvonne Strahovski generally hits the right notes whether asked to be skeptical or capable in an action scene, and doesn't quite seem like she's flipped a switch because the script requires her to be Superwoman now. Eion Bailey isn't quite on the same level; he doesn't quite give Nick enough charm to make his occasional recklessness seem appealing. Will Patton doesn't have to break a sweat to hit the target with Henry; we get the point quick enough and he doesn't bother us because Patton is an old pro, but this is pretty much a paycheck role for him. The whole cast, really.

All that might have been forgiven if there were a moment where the movie really kicks into a higher gear and became an exciting thriller, but it never manages that. It's filled with familiar lost-in-the-wilderness situations, and doesn't vary them a whole lot. With the tension between characters not exactly being played up, the movie needs some more visceral thrills, but instead, it tends to just give the audience more wolves, although in somewhat greater numbers and a little closer each time. Harrah and company handle the technical aspects well - good make-up, action staging, and animal training - but never gets us to the edge of our seats.

You can do great things with this sort of set-up - in theory, The Canyon isn't far off from The Descent or Wilderness in concept, just in details and execution. It just never grabs the audience like those movies do, and doesn't offer us great characterization to fill that void.

Also at HBS

This Week In Tickets: 26 October 2009 to 1 November 2009

If not for the World Series, I'd probably be getting my DVR cleaned up and be making a dent in the metaphorical pile of unwatched screeners/DVDs/BDs hanging around my apartment. Actually, the pile's not metaphorical any more; there's a couple actual piles of things I mean to watch as soon as possible on my coffee table. And it probably wouldn't be a big dent - more of a ding. But I expect to start making it toward the end of the week.

Of course, maybe then there will be more good movies coming out. Right now, I'm really not excited about a whole lot of what's out there, as the relative thin-ness of the last couple weeks shows:



Stubless: American Casino (1 November, 11am, Brattle).

I can't really recommend American Casino when it opens at the Brattle this Wednesday, but it's far from the worst thing coming out this week: Apparently, after threatening to do so for about a year and a half, Magnolia is actually going to put Severed Ways out in a local theater. I saw it at the IFFB last year, and, well, really despised it. I suppose it's inspiring, in a way - if that piece of crap (literally - you get to watch the writer/director/star take a dump in front of you) can get theatrical distribution, there's hope for everyone else with an HD camcorder and a vague idea.

The Spanish Prisoner

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Noir)

I first saw The Spanish Prisoner at the Keystone Theater (which apparently doesn't even seem to have an entry in Cinema Treasures) in Portland, ME, and my older and wiser self has no trouble drawing a parallel between the two: Despite both having what seem to be all the pieces for success, they don't quite work out.

This is one of David Mamet's puzzle movies, and while there's plenty of genuine delight to that, there are also times when the plot seems to require that the movie take place in a parallel universe, where a certain type of clipped speech, odd behavior, and willful obliviousness to what's going on around them make a certain kind of con game more possible. The con certainly seems to have some weak points where it could have completely collapsed.

The cast makes it work very well, though. It is a lot of fun to see Steve Martin play against type as the smooth Jimmy Dell, without irony or much in the way of comedy until his last scene. The stiffness of Campbell Scott works for this character, especially when he's got the too-sweet Rebecca Pidgeon and grumbling Ricky Jay to play off. And I do sort of love how, after playing things very straight and precise from the beginning, Mamet allows things to become whimsical in the last few scenes.

Spartan

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Noir)

I reviewed this back when it originally came out (it's somewhat gratifying to see that while I occasionally cringe at how predictable my structure has become, the actual writing has improved). The second time through, I found I liked it even more. It's a genuinely engrossing thriller, but the second time through, I was more able to appreciate the acting. Val Kilmer just about fell off the map after this (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the only really noteworthy work he's done since), which is too bad, because this is a nifty performance, a guy who knows how to be a worker bee having to strike out on his own. On the other hand, Kristen Bell would get noticed soon after, being cast in Veronica Mars, and this is an early indication of how great she could be. She may be being wasted in the comedies she's doing now.

I'm kind of surprised this didn't hit the HD formats. I really wish it would.

Movie Movie

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (Debonair: Stanley Donen on Film)

It's a rare, rare thing for this sort of homage/pastiche/parody to work nearly as well as it does. There's a number of reasons for it - Stanley Donen had actually worked in musicals in a career that already spanned 30 years at the time the film was shot, for instance, so he has the comic rhythms down pat, and he doesn't try to modernize them even as he tweaks them.

What's most interesting, perhaps, is the different reaction I had toward both mini-films, even though Donen and writers Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller seem to be going for the same deadpan parody in both. The first half, "Dynamite Hands", hit me as a funnier-than-usual idiot movie, pure parody material, while the second half, "Baxter's Beauties of 1933", actually kind of works if you take it seriously. And that's coming from someone who doesn't really like musicals as a rule.

Where the Wild Things Are

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2009 at Jordan's IMAX Reading (first-run)

When I saw the first stills from Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, what, two years ago, my first reaction was that that was exactly what a filmed version of Where the Wild Things Are should look like. My second was that that there was no way that book could be made into a feature length movie. It's ten sentences long. To my surprise, the first thought was less true than I expected, the latter maybe a little more so.

I remember the Maurice Sendak book as brighter; even when it was night, everything was sharp. There seems to be a lot more gray and brown in the movie, with Jonze, co-writer Dave Eggers, and company creating a world that seems much more lived-in than the pure fantasy of the book. But that is, perhaps, as it should be - one of the great things about adapting a short work is that you can build it up, elaborate on ideas that interest you without it being at the expense of some other part of the story. It's more creative, and more satisfying, to do that than to cut down and change.

It also makes the result unarguably a Jonze film, and I like that. The way he and cinematographer Lance Acord shoot the opening scenes has me intrigued from the start; it's clearly the work of someone looking to make something more than disposable entertainment for kids, but it's also neither edgy nor overtly nostalgic. He's not talking down to the young folks in the audience, either - there's no obvious sting on the soundtrack when Max finds an ominous set of bones on the Wild Things' island, for instance. The flip side is that the movie does go on a bit too long, dragging at some points in the middle, and the soundtrack is a little too indie at times; for a movie in large part about rage, the music is sometimes too happy.

American Casino

* * (out of four)
Seen 1 November 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

American Casino frustrates the heck out of me. The title mostly refers to to the first half of the movie, which purports to explain how the current financial crisis is the result of parts of the economy being treated as a game of chance, and it's almost completely unwatchable. If the idea is to show how it's all so confusing that even career economists can't understand it, mission accomplished, I guess, but, you know, it's no big accomplishment to demonstrate that something people already don't understand is confusing. It doesn't feel like a successful operation, though, more like sloppy filmmaking.

The second half, where the film zooms in on how it affects people on the ground, especially among Baltimore's African-American community, is much more successful, in large part because it manages a nifty trick: It introduces people to us with the implication that they are maybe not experts, but community support, and once the audience accepts that they are intelligent, capable people, reveals that they are in danger of losing their houses because they are victims. It's as manipulative a technique as any filmmaker uses, but surprising and effective. And if you can't muster up sympathy for your fellow human being, there's an intriguing bit on the environmental toll that this is taking.

So, filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn manage to do a few things right. Maybe things would have worked out better if they had narrowed their focus, because for all that individual segments are done well, the transitions between them are frequently poor, and the film as a whole feels confused, like the filmmakers knew what they wanted to talk about, but didn't know what they wanted to say.