This Week In Tickets: 27 September 2010 to 3 October 2010

Work and wanting to catch the last weekend of Red Sox baseball, even though the loss in Yankee Stadium on the 26th more or less killed any postseason delusions kept it kind of light:



Stubless: Last Red Sox game of the season

I actually do have the printout from StubHub for that game, but it's huge, my printer was balking at printing certain colors, etc., so we'll pretend otherwise. It was, at least, a pretty darn good game for the last one of the season. It's somewhat unusual for those games to play out like real, honest-to-good regular-season major league baseball games (usually, after getting an at bat or two, the starters will be pulled to applause, making it feel like a spring training exhibition). Some fun and unusual things did happen: David Ortiz went 3-3, with the last being an amusing bunt against the shift for a base hit. He was removed for a pinch-runner, and it was sort of a cool thing, because it let the crowd applaud the oddness of the play rather than the fact that this could be his last game. There was a bit of a surprise retirement party feel to the game for Jason Veritek, who started and caught most of the game before being lifted in the ninth; that applause did feel like it was saying goodbye.

And, most surprisingly, John Lackey pitched a pretty good, non-frustrating game. Naturally, Jonathan Papelbon made an effort to give it away in the 9th, but the six run lead was too much for him. Still, they let us go on the field and run the bases afterward, which was pretty darn cool - the line took us out by the wall, around the field, to the first base bag and then around the bases, exiting near the visitor's dugout. Pretty cool.

Especially considering that Fenway played a big part in the week's only non-festival film...

The Town

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run)

The opening heist in this movie takes place in Harvard Square, fairly close to where I live and where I spend a lot of my time. For a moment I wondered how long ago they filmed it, as the Alpha Omega watch shop that has been empty for a couple of years looked like a going concern. I guess the set decorators just put some stuff in the windows (which was more than they did for Surrogates last year). The other end takes place in and around Fenway Park, much more than the usual "show them in the park to remind folks we're in Boston".

In between, it's a pretty darn good crime/romance movie. I've never been close to being as down on Affleck as some folks have - the man does have an Oscar for writing, and when you get him on a project he loves or with a director who can bring out his best, he's always been pretty good (which isn't very different from most actors). Here, he's in his wheelhouse, giving us a career criminal as likable as they believably come. He and his cast make their characters real enough that we instinctively understand the relationships between them well before the specifics are spelled out. Jeremy Renner is pretty great, too, playing Affleck's partner-in-crime as a psycho you might meet on the street, with the violence just below the surface.

And he does action pretty well. The opening heist is as smooth and assured on film as it is when the FBI breaks it down later, and while the final shootout gets a bit out of hand, it's thrilling and suspenseful. I think the ending is a little bit of a cop-out (some folks seem to get too clean a resolution), but not nearly enough to damage what leads up to it.

TerrorThon '10: The Horde and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

Another week, another film festival. TerrorThon is a co-production between J. Cannibal and the folks behind the long-standing Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, and while it's got a few kinks to work out, I think it's one that has real potential to grow. Both Cannibal and SF/xx's Garen Daley have been at this for a while, so they had dedicated audiences to jump-start attendance with, good theater relations, and the contacts to get some pretty good indie horror on the schedule.

Of course, I do wish that they had cast their net a little wider, but I'm almost always going to wish that. The Human Centipede: First Sequence has been playing off and on at the Coolidge all year, Dead Snow is kind of last year's news, and The Horde is currently playing on demand. Then again, there's nothing in the definition that says a festival has to be all unreleased films. Also, both this and the February sci-fi festival (as opposed to the long-established marathon) are new for 2010; considering that both got pretty good attendance, I wouldn't be surprised if next year, they were able to go to distributors with photos of the audience and attendance figures and maybe get some more stuff that had been at Sundance or Fantasia a couple months earlier. Heck, this one had already earned a promotion from the video room to the upstairs cinemas at Somerville.

However, one thing that did frustrate me was the projection. La Horde wasn't bad, but I always wonder about the look of the film with Blu-ray projection; I know I can mess with the sharpness and contrast on my TV, and The Horde had a very pronounced video look. Tucker & Dale, meanwhile, was projected on DVD, and though I'd saved a couple bucks by purchasing my ticket ahead of time, the idea of dropping $12 to watch something on DVD irritates the heck out of me. I accept that film is becoming a more and more rare beast at festivals - prints are expensive for the producers, shipping them is expensive for the festivals, even if something isn't officially still a work in progress there may yet be tinkering to be done, etc. - but DVD? For $12? Especially considering that the folks in the next theater over paid something like $8 for an evening show (compared to the rest of Boston, The Somerville Theatre and Arlington Capitol are great deals)... The math used for upconverting DVDs is pretty good nowadays, but blown up to big-screen size, blurriness and compression still rear their heads.

Unlike most of my complaints, I did put my money where my mouth is this time - hearing that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead would be projected from DVD during the introduction to The Horde pretty much sealed my decision to hit the comic shop and go home rather than stay for a second movie on Wednesday. As much as I like the theatrical experience and festival atmosphere, I'm not knowingly paying more for something I know will look better in my living room.

Still, I don't want to be too negative - I saw a couple good movies, in a bigger crowd than I might otherwise have expected, and with any luck, the event will grow and be even better next year.

La Horde (The Horde, duh)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 September 2010 at Somerville Theatre #5 (TerrorThon 2010)

For a while, every action movie of a certain type was described using the shorthand "Die Hard in a ____". For better or worse, when someone said that, the audience knew what they were going to get, even if it likely wasn't anywhere close to as good as that film. About the only subgenre more rigidly defined is the zombie movie - "____ are thrown together when the zombie pandemic breaks out". Barring an especially creative twist, those types of movies each come down to execution. That's the case with The Horde, which is a little bit of both: Filmmakers Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher seem to have pitched the broad strokes more than the details, but still make a fairly entertaining movie.

A good cop by the name of Rivoallan (Laurent Segall) has just died, and a few members of his unit aren't planning on taking it sitting down - they're planning an off-the-books raid on the gang that killed him. Jiminez (Aurelien Recoing), Aurore (Claude Perron), and Tony (Antoine Oppenheim) are out for blood, although Ouessem (Jean-Pierre Martins) assures the deceased's mother that he's going along to make sure it doesn't get out of hand. Their target: A tenement in which Nigerian drug dealer Adewale Markudi (Eriq Ebouaney) is holed up, along with his brother Bola (Doudou Masta), partner Greco (Jo Prestia) and a number of henchman. Just when one side thinks they've got the upper hand, the informant that Adé had just killed gets up and comes at them, and when they look out the window, they see fires in the distance and a mob of the undead surrounding the building. The only other living soul in the building is nutty old veteran René (Yves Pignot), and the possibility of escape seems slim at best.

Compact that description a bit, and The Horde starts to sound like a French-language version of Versus, although the problem with Ryuhei Kitamura's calling card was that he didn't know when to stop (zombies vs. yakuza vs. cops was just where it started). Rocher, Dahan, and their co-writers don't run wild like that, although "restrained" wouldn't be the right word for this movie either - it's fast-moving, with some big action scenes and a sense of humor that's more than a bit politically incorrect. Still, it's one of those movies that is categorized as horror but isn't really scary - because there have been so many of these movies, its zombies are like robots, video game villains that can be wiped out without remorse, rather than something frightening or disturbing. There's suspense, but it's the kind of suspense that comes from a template - which will be the next character picked off, what form of betrayal will split the group apart? - than real dread.

Full review at EFC.

Tucker & Dale vs Evil

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2010 at Somerville Theatre #4 (TerrorThon 2010)

There have been plenty of slasher comedies, especially since Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson made winking self-reference popular with Scream. Few, however, have done such an entertaining job of marrying the genre with door-slamming farce, which is what you get with Tucker & Dale vs Evil - a snappy screwball comedy with a serious body count.

It begins, as many horror movies do, with a group of college kids heading out to do some camping in West Virginia. Chuck (Travis Nelson) is driving his dad's car, Chad (Jesse Moss) is hitting on Allison (Katrina Bowden); four other guys and two other girls are along for the ride. When they stop at a general store to stock up on beer, they bump into Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), a couple of hillbillies on their way to their newly-purchased vacation home. A series of misunderstandings and prejudices soon has the college kids believing that the pair are redneck psycho killers, although the kids may be much bigger dangers to themselves.

Everybody has heard the line about how dying is easy but comedy is hard, and combining the two can be harder still. Writer/director Eil Craig and his writing partner Morgan Jurgenson play on certain familiar movie situations - there are two utterly hilarious bits of that at the general store, and the finale features a bit straight out of silents and Saturday serials - but instead of making their movie into a game of spot-the-reference, they find a nice middle ground between playing on broad caricatures and making their main characters, at least, individuals. They also do a fairly excellent job of escalating their comic misunderstandings in a way that stays believable even when people are winding up dead, all the way through to getting to the last act. It's a tricky transition that a lot of horror comedies don't manage, making their characters more active participants so that the story can have a proper conclusion without changing the tone drastically.

Full review at EFC.

Cine-Caché #1: Anton Chekov's The Duel

The first entry in the Brattle Theatre's and Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film's follow up to the Sunday Eye-Opener series (last seen about a year ago) is a film that will play a regular booking there starting on the 15th, and comes recommended.

So far, time will tell if Cine-Caché manages to bring in more people than the Eye-Opener did; a weekday night should be easier to make than 11am Sunday morning, but the "soft opening" was pretty scantly attended The next entry, on 11 October, is apparently a group of documentary shorts in co-operation with the DocYard (who collaborated on the last bi-weekly Monday night program). I'm a little surprised that it's not The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, as the rest of that day's schedule is a mirror image of the entire-trilogy day on the 14th, but it doesn't seem to be shaking out that way.

At any rate, both The Duel and Cine-Caché are worth the time of Boston-area moviegoers when they reappear next week.

Anton Chekhov's The Duel

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Cine-Caché)

I cannot claim any degree of expertise on how The Duel works as an adaptation of Anton Chekov's source material; I am just educated enough to know that Chekhov is considered one of the world's great playwrights but not enough to know much more than that. I suspect that I am not alone in this, for better or worse, so those in a similar situation can take me at my word when I saw that this adaptation of his novella is, at least, a good movie for us: It's entertaining, though it does expect a little effort on the audience's part.

Laevsky (Andrew Scott) is an idle man. He is currently idling in the Crimea, neglecting some sort of official posting, sharing his home and his bed with Nadia (Fiona Glascott), who has left behind a husband in St. Petersberg. He's friendly with army medic Samoylenko (Niall Buggy) and fellow expatriot Sheshkovsky (Nicholas Rowe), but has the overt disdain of others, such as naturalist Von Koren (Tobias Menzies). He is settling steadily into debt and ennui when he receives a letter from back home, stating that his married love is now a widow. That's quite unsettling, as she may want to marry if she finds out, and he truthfully isn't quite that fond of her.

Though the title suggests decisive action, The Duel is rather focused on the opposite. It is full of characters progressing from day to day on inertia, not taking action until backed into a corner, and even then finding it rather distasteful. It's a tale of 19th Century aristocrats, not modern slackers, so there are intrigues of reputation and standing. How much that was the case in Chekhov's original story, I don't know, but in Mary Bing's script, it's a very well-balanced combination of comedic laziness and moralistic judgment, the wispiest of plots to make sure that what we're watching feels like a story rather than just observation.

Full review at EFC.

Boston Film Festival 2010 Day 06/07: Black, White and Blues, The 5th Quarter, Iron Cross

And thus we finish up with BFF 2010. As festivals go, it was a somewhat dispiriting experience, and in some days, Wednesday night is the best example of why.

The theater was dead for Black, White, and Blue. The program implied some guests - if you look through the program, some names are boldfaced; in general, that corresponds well with the guest list, but I don't think it ever specifically states that those people will be there. Thus, when something like Black, White, and Blue runs without Mario Van Peebles, Luke Perry, or Morgan Simpson showing up, that $10 ticket wasn't sold under false pretenses.

And it is pretty amazing how thoroughly guest-dependent things could be. As I said, almost nobody showed up for the first show of the evening, in part because it was unusually early (6:30pm, making it a tight thing for me to get there from Waltham after work), but, geez, you'd think a movie with Duncan and Perry, directed by Van Peebles, and also just happening to be pretty good, would get a little attention.

Folks did show up for The 5th Quarter, though. It was easy to see why in some cases, specifically the guys wearing the Wake Forest sweatshirts. It's a crying shame, though, because they got a pretty poor movie, one which poured the syrup on so thick as to be ridiculous. I imagine a fair number enjoyed it - some folks do like their inspirational sports movies to leave no room for doubt, but I found it pretty painful: Ten or fifteen minutes in, I could see how overdone it was, and just had that sinking feeling that it wasn't going to improve. It was also kind of weird that during the montage of Wake Forest winning a bunch of games, we almost never saw the main character directly involved in the action, which may be accurate, but weird for a movie. Also, for something that's apparently been in the can for a couple of years, it was surprising to see the occasional boom mike in the frame. It can't cost that much to have someone remove those digitally these days, especially with no rush on.

I think it does indicate a characteristic of the festival which I'm not sure should be properly categorized as a strength or a weakness - not many people seem to look at it as one big event. The Wake Forest football movie got people interested in the Wake Forest football movie, the Eliza Dushku movie got her fans (though she wound up not showing, despite the boldfaced name in the schedule), but you saw very few of the same faces over the course of the festival. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it almost seems like promotion was put onto the backs of the individual filmmakers, with very little push to come see a variety of good movies that might not screen elsewhere.

Then, on Thursday, we saw Iron Cross, which was an even worse movie, but also called "extraordinary" during the introduction. I'm beginning to think that "extraordinary" is code for "not very good". Of course, around that, both in the introductions and the Q&A, there were repeated reminders to go to the closing night party, because that's what this festival is all about.

Obligatory photos of people who were there:

The 5th Quarter star Ryan Merriman and writer/director Rick Bieber

They made a bad movie, but were nice folks, so I don't really hold it against Bieber and Merriman. They had the Abbate parents with them as well, watching from the back of the theater, so even more than usual, my desire to ask "at what point did you realize that you were making a bad movie?" was inappropriate.


Iron Cross co-star Alexander Newton, Hollywood Reporter and CNN reporter Martin Grove, and Iron Cross writer/producer/director/editor Joshua Newton

For one show a year, the BFF brings in a professional to lob softball questions at the guests. I suppose I can't criticize both that and the lackluster job the hosts do at the same task. Still, you'd think someone like Martin Grove, a guy with "entertainment journalist" on his business card, would ask about the Variety screening series situation, as it is (IMHO) the most interesting thing about this movie.

For those who don't remember, Iron Cross actually had a small theatrical premiere in New York and Los Angeles in late 2009 and appeared in the Variety screening series around the same time, as apparently someone at the company convinced the producers that it might be an awards contender. The producers spent significant money to have post-production finished in time, only to be met with a bad review in Variety from a freelancer who saw it during its initial run. The producers complained, saying that the movie shouldn't be judged by seeing it in that environment, the paper took the review out of their online archive, people speculated on whether this was because the filmmakers had paid them to be part of their screening series (where, apparently, they stuck out like a sore thumb), the producers sued...

There's a great book in there, and an interesting look at how Hollywood sometimes works behind the scenes. Instead, we got a lot of boilerplate about how nice Scheider was, and how Newton edited it in his bedroom - which isn't as crazy and low-budget as it sounds; digital editing systems are pretty compact, and I've read a 40-year-old pulp novel that centered around editing a feature being done in a rented apartment, and that was using a moviola. I did ask whether they'd done any work on the movie since the whole kerfuffle, which got a "we're suing them" and not much else.

Well, that's the Boston Film Festival for another year. I'd like to be able to say that I'm making a principled stand and won't be back next year, but anybody reading this blog regularly knows that I am weak where that sort of thing is concerned. Give me movies that are even vaguely interesting that I might not have another chance to see, and I'll come. Of course, I've probably shot any chance to get a media pass any time soon, but I'm okay with that.

Black, White and Blues

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

The name of Black, White and Blues is technically accurate, inasmuch as there's a black guy and a white guy in it, and they both wind up listening to a fair amount of the blues. The implication of that name, of course, is that race is at some point an issue, and aside from maybe one or two comments about the characters' musical preferences, this fairly entertaining road drama avoids that issue almost completely.

Jefferson Bailey (Morgan Simpson) has more or less reached the end of the line in Austin. He came out there to start a blues band, but right now, he's behind on rent, freezes up when he goes on stage, and drinks until he blacks out. Plus, he's not only borrowed some money from a local tough (Luke Perry), but he's been sleeping with his wife Jackie (Taryn Manning). Even still, he's not interested in going home when a man (Michael Clarke Duncan) shows up, saying his grandfather died six months ago and he has to collect his inheritance personally. At least, not until Jackie's husband gets wise and decides to extract his pound of flesh - then traveling back to Huntsville, Alabama with this Augy fellow starts to sound real good.

Jefferson likes the blues, while Augy goes for country, and while that's a bit amusing considering their respective skin colors, it's not long before the pair are commenting on how, though the two styles of music have different sounds, they often amount to the same thing. The movie itself plays like the blues and country - a recitation of sorrows set to a simple beat, but with a wry humor and open heart that helps to drive sorrow away. Augy and Bailey have both had troubles with the bottle and some bad luck in love, but this is far from being a movie about sad, irrevocably broken people; it's often funny, with the pair becoming good buddies fairly quickly.

Full review at EFC.

The 5th Quarter

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

The 5th Quarter doesn't look like a bad movie. It's well-produced, it has a nice cast, and single scenes taken in isolation look pretty good. Put it all together, though, and it becomes an unending stream of inspirational sport movie clichés that I feel bad about calling laughable, as it seems to be based on the lives of genuinely good people.

Teenager Luke Abbate (Stefan Guy) has everything going for him - loving parents (Aidan Quinn and Andie MacDowell) and siblings, and he's got the potential to be an even better football player than his older brother Jon (Ryan Merriman), who's a starter at Wake Forest (though, at the time, it's not a nationally renowned program). However, that will all be cut short, as he's involved in a single-car accident due to a friend's reckless driving. His loss leaves a void in his family, although Jon's teammates dedicate their season to him, and begin to defy expectations.

I don't care for football, but I've enjoyed movies centered around the game, from Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (silent comedy genius from start to end) to George Clooney's Leatherheads, so I feel reasonably confident in saying that it's not the game itself that makes me not care for The 5th Quarter. It's that the movie is less a story than an ordered collection of things that happened, laid out in such a way that what writer/director Rick Bieber wants the audience to think and feel is never in even the slightest doubt. Many movies do that, but few do it so obviously as this, and that's before considering the extremely incongruous moments.

Full review at EFC.

Iron Cross

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010 Closing Night)

Under normal circumstances, Iron Cross would probably go direct to video (or maybe cable) without anybody paying attention; it's a bad movie but not egregiously or hilariously so. This one, however, was not only involved in a bizarre series of events involving an awards screening series, a pulled review, and a lawsuit, but also happens to be the last movie that star Roy Scheider made. It's thus an object of curiosity to fans of a good actor and bad blood.

Retired New York cop Joseph (Roy Scheider) is flying to Nuremberg for the first time in decades to see his son Ronnie (Scott Cohen), an actor who lives and works there. It's his first time meeting his daughter-in-law Anna (Calita Rainford) and grandson. He's been away a long time, and barely by now speaks the language, even though he grew up German; as a teenager (Alexander Newton), he barely escaped being rounded up by the Nazis because he was sneaking out to see his gentile neighbor Kashka (Sarah Bolger). Now, he's certain that Ronnie's neighbor, an elderly man by the name of Shrager (Helmut Berger), is the man who killed his family - but as Ronnie points out, Joseph tends to think that every old German is a Nazi. Joseph is undeterred, and his snooping actually leads somewhere.

In addition to being the father of one of the stars, Joshua Newton writes, directs, produces, and edits the film, and it's difficult to think of any job that he does particularly well (producing, I guess - the film got made and doesn't look like any corners were obviously cut). In some ways, the writing is particularly frustrating; he starts from a solid starting point (wondering what his own Holocaust-survivor father would do if confronted with the men who murdered his family), and beyond that, there's a vein of potentially interesting material to mine from how Joseph's relationship with Ronnie parallels that with his own father. Unfortunately, he spends a lot more time concentrating on the mechanics of the plot (which are often ludicrous) than these relationships. Of course, he also writes terrible dialog, so seeing them try to connect might just make things worse.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 October - 7 October

Saturday is my birthday and that of my awesome niece Dagny and a second cousin once removed that I rarely see these days (who, despite being my grandmother's niece, is my younger brother's age). This is not a request for gifts, just a curiosity. (Although if you've got a spare cake or Amazon gift card laying around...)

For those not cool enough to have a 2 October birthday (it's not just us; we've got Sting, Mike Rutherford, DS9's Avery Brooks, Bud Abbott, Graham Greene, Groucho Marx, and Mahatma Gandhi on our team), there's some quality stuff to be seen this week(end). Also, some strange stuff. Some things in those categories may overlap.

In fact, when you look at the full line-up this weekend, insane seems to be the overriding theme:

• Kick it off with the last couple days of Terrorthon. I'll be there tonight to see Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which I maybe could have tried to get into at Fantasia but media restrictions, a projection failure across the street, etc., led to an early return to the sublet apartment. Shows tonight at 7:00, 9:30, and midnight, as well as a matinee tomorrow (Saturday 2 October) at 3:00. There's also a screening of The Revenant on Saturday at 6:15, with the whole shebang finishing up with J. Cannibal's Feast of Flesh X at 10pm, which includes a screening of Night of the Creeps, live music by Planetoid, and performances by Black Cat Burlesque.



• Remember when I mentioned a few weeks ago when I mentioned there was a crazy-looking Tamil-language robot movie with Aishwarya Rai coming up? Endhiran (aka The Robot) opens at Fresh Pond this weekend. It appears to be gigantic and insane even by Indian standards. I am down for this; who's with me? If you prefer a somewhat more conventional Bollywood romance, Priyanka Chopra is on the next screen over in Anjaana Anjaani. Remember, both of these are musicals and probably north of two and a half hours. Depending on your bladder capability, choose the large or small soda accordingly.



• The Brattle opens a couple of unusual movies. The genuinely nuts one appears to be the late show, Bunny and the Bull, which runs at 10pm from tonight until Wednesday (6 October). It's an "imaginary road trip" movie from the creator of "The Mighty Boosh". I am apparently getting very conventional/mainstream in my old age, as I can't wrap my head around either of those synopses. This may just mean they're good stuff.
  
  Before 10pm, they're presenting Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border, where he surveys the presidents of seven Latin-American countries. While making it, Stone caught some flack for being willing to talk to Hugo Chavez, but it's an interesting topic to explore. Tonight's show has a Q&A with panel of Latina experts. It plays through Thursday (7 October). Filling out the schedule are some Twin Peaks episodes Thursday night and the annual Art House fundraiser Sunday night at Oberon, 2 Arrow Street



• The Coolidge opens an adaptation of Allen Ginsburg's poem "Howl" in the video room (it's also playing in West Newton and at the Stuart Street Playhouse). Education documentary Waiting for Superman opens up on one of the main screens. The midnight series for October is Wes Craven, with Scream playing this weekend. And, if you have kids (or just like unusual, Oscar-nominated animation), The Secret of Kells plays Sunday morning at 10:30am



• Kendall Square also opens Waiting for Superman. It's a doc-heavy slate for them this week, with documentary-anthology-adaptation Freakonomics also opening and A Film Unfinished continuing. On top of that, the one-week warning is for Last Train Home, which closed out the Brattle's DocYard series a couple weeks ago and is pretty good. Woody Allen's latest, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and the hyper-claustrophobic Buried (which is apparently ninety minutes of Ryan Reynolds in a coffin with just a cell phone to use to try and escape) also pop up.



• Buried also opens at Boston Common, which is also one of the few places in the area playing Hatchet II. It's getting a fairly wide opening, considering that Dark Sky is putting it out unrated. I'm not sure about the whole "support unrated horror" campaign - I don't think there's a virtue in being unrated versus NC-17, but I'm down for letting a horror movie be what it is. Speaking of risky and unusual horror movies, Let Me In also opens. I adored the original Swedish Let the Right One In - it may have been 2008's best film - but this one's got a heck of a cast and crew, and much of the early buzz is good. A bigger risk is Case 39, which also has a nice cast - Renee Zellweger, Jodelle Ferland, Bradley Cooper - but has also been sitting on the shelf for roughly three years. You've got to think Paramount could have found a release date for that a little earlier.
  
  And, oh yeah, a little movie about the inventors of Facebook is coming out. I actually walked through the filming of The Social Network a couple times when going to and from Harvard Square, so I'm a little curious, even before considering that this is a David Fincher movie with an Aaron Sorkin script.



• It's guest weekend at the Harvard Film Archive, with avant-garde Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues in town for a retrospective of his work, from his first feature (Phantom) to his latest, To Die Like a Man. Monday has a preview of Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, featuring director Damien Chazelle and his cast in attendance. It was actually Chazelle's thesis project at VES, so it's a homecoming after taking it to festivals an securing a small upcoming theatrical release.



• The MFA has a number of interesting things on tap, including The Boston Palestine Film Festival; The Desert of Forbidden Art, an intriguing-sounding documentary about a massive collection of art in Uzbekistan created under the nose of the Soviet Union; and an independent film set almost entirely in a hotel Room in Rome.



• Finally, at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, there's locally made comedy Boyband tonight (just found out about it; sorry) and a Monday (4 October) screening of Race to Nowhere, which appears to be the flip side of Waiting for Superman, about parents and schools pushing students too hard as opposed to not doing enough.
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This Week In Tickets: 20 September 2010 to 26 September 2010 (Boston Film Festival)

Nothing on the weekend because I was out on the cape, doing some tiny bit to see that my brother Matt got married safely. Congratulations, Matt & Morgan!



Stubless: Black, White, and Blues (22 September, 6:30pm, Stuart Street); The 5th Quarter (22 September, 8:45pm, Stuart Street), and The Iron Cross (23 September, 7:15pm, Stuart Street)

Since I didn't see anything else this week (I wanted to see God of Vampires at TerrorThon on Sunday, but thought it was playing at 9pm rather than 7pm), and I'll be catching up reviewing the stubless stuff in the next couple of days, here is as good a place as any to vent about the Boston Film Festival.

I washed my hands of it last year after two days, and heard a couple of references to the current incarnation having burned bridges with their prior venues, but came back this year after seeing it put together a potentially interesting line-up. Heck, there are at least three movies I would have liked to have seen (Miss Nobody, Conviction, Arcadia Lost). The films I saw tended to be right around average, with a couple worth a look and a couple stinkers, though.

I've been making a variation on this joke for a couple of years, but after attending this year's festival and following its tweets, I'm starting to suspect there's more truth to it than sarcasm: Festival director Robin Dawson and the rest of the staff really don't seem to be interested in running a film festival. They seem to crave the glamorous surface elements, but the core of a successful festival - bringing interesting films and filmgoing experiences to an audience - is sadly neglected. Compare this festival's schedule to what now must be considered Boston's two most prominent film festivals - April's Independent Film Festival Boston and March's Boston Underground Film Festival - and the younger festivals are light-years ahead, programming multiple screens, snagging films that go on to build great buzz and show up in theaters later in the year. They also form a personal connection between the festival organizers and the audience, presenting and highlighting other films year-round. I daresay that given time, the two genre film festivals run by Garen Daly's Zoetrope Media (February's Sci-Fi Film Festival and the currently-running TerrorThon) will make some of the same strides.

The Boston Film Festival doesn't do that. Within the festival, they don't do the most basic communication, like announcing that the screening of 127 Hours in the program isn't going to happen, updating the website with whether or not certain guests will be present, or telling the folks waiting in the lobby that the film is now seating or why it isn't despite the published start time being fifteen minutes ago. It's unlikely we'll hear anything from them until roughly next August, when they start trying to promote this year's festival again. The introductions to the films do nothing to fire the audience up, and the Q&As the festival staff leads are leaden and superficial. If you look at their site or follow their updates, the focus is strongly centered on the parties and the red carpet - the hobnobbing with celebrities parts. Admittedly, those are the parts of a festival I find least interesting just by my personal nature - I don't drink and have trouble hearing in crowds, so parties do very little for me, and the red carpet seems to be something of a manufactured event. No disrespect to Melissa Leo, who is a fine actress, seemed like a charming lady when doing her Q&A for Welcome to the Rileys, and deserves to be more A-list than she is, but I had to snicker when @BostonFilmFest tweeted two or three times in the afternoon that she would be Walking The Red Carpet that evening. I sort of get the red carpet thing at a big event with many prominent people in attendance, but what's the point of rolling out twenty feet of shag between the curb and a hotel's back entrance for one guest? Is watching that really exciting to people?

But, in a way, that's not a big deal. Different people may have different priorities from their film festival experiences, and if folks living in Boston want to drop $500 for an all-access pass that gives them a chance to hang out with some actors, directors, producers, and other filmmakers (note: this festival is the only one where I've heard a film introduced with "we've got the producer here, and the director, too")... Well, hey, whatever floats your boat. It's your money, and your fun.

What really got me this year, though, is how thoroughly manufactured this is. I laughed opening night, when I checked Twitter from my phone to see them crowing about their "sold-out" screening of Locked In - the stadium was 2/3-full, and I figured they must have been counting the people who bought opening/closing or all-access passes but opted to go to the opening night party or elsewhere instead. Sketchy, but technically true.

Then, the awards were announced, either as the festival progressed or on closing night, and it wasn't so funny. Here are the individual awards:

Best Director — Ed Burns, Nice Guy Johnny
Best Actor — Sam Rockwell, Conviction
Best Actress — Leslie Bibb, Miss Nobody
Best Supporting Actress — Melissa Leo for her three roles in Welcome to the Rileys, Conviction and The Fighter
Best New Actress — Jessica Romero, Down for Life
Best Young Actor — Alexander Newton, Iron Cross
Best Cinematography — Josh Silfen, To Be Friends
Best Screenplay — Rick Bieber, The 5th Quarter
Best Soundtrack — Tree Adams, Black, White and Blues
Visionary Filmmaker Award — Joshua Newton, Iron Cross
Career Achievement — Roy Scheider
Patrons of the Arts — Ernie Boch, Jr.

Now, put aside the most obvious issue, that The Fighter didn't even play the festival (though it would have been a great get, especially if local boy Mark Wahlberg came). Unless I missed my count, only two of the twelve people awarded were not in Boston to pick up their award in person - and Roy Scheider is dead.

Given what a relatively small percentage of cast and crew can often travel to a festival, doesn't that seem a little high? Individual opinions of what's award-worthy are individual opinions, but I would really like to hear the arguments that establish Rick Bieber's screenplay for The 5th Quarter as even good, or explain what, precisely, is "visionary" about the work Joshua Newton did on Iron Cross. Why is Ed Burns being awarded as Best Director, when his work was just sort of adequate, as opposed to Best Supporting Actor, where he was genuinely good? Why isn't there a Best Supporting Actor category at all? Would there have been one if Zach Galifianakis had made the trip to Boston?

It certainly looks like these awards are at least not entirely for the work in making the movie, but partly quid pro quo for making the trip, showing up at parties, etc. And maybe this is a common arrangement. But if it is, other festivals do a heck of a lot more to disguise it. They have audience awards and/or juries whose names and qualifications are published on the website or in the program. These look bought and at least bartered for.

And that's not good. It's rare that you see "Official Selection - Boston Film Festival" on a one-sheet, but not unheard of, especially since one set of words between a pair of laurel leafs looks much like another, and who looks too closely at those, anyway (as Bob Odenkirk spoofed in "The Frank International Film Festival")? But just like quote whores (whom my fellow EFC/HBS writer Erik Childress does a fantastic job of monitoring), festival awards that may not be legitimate devalue a useful way for audiences to try to ascertain the relative quality of the mass of films we have available to us.

A few people getting a little thrill out of meeting Leslie Bibb or seeing Aaron Eckhart walk up a red carpet isn't worth that. And, personally, I hate that the first festival I ever went to appears to be not just lame, but a sham.

Boston Film Festival 2010 Day 05: Welcome to the Rileys, Down for Life

What to say, other than it's another day of the BFF. This was likely the best night of the festival by default - one average movie, one pretty good. The guests were friendly. As a night at the Boston Film Festival goes, not bad.

One thing I noticed after seeing the Scott Free logo in front of Welcome to the Rileys: The Scott family is having a remarkably productive 2010: Ridley directed Robin Hood,his son Jake directed this, his daughter Jordan directed Cracks, and his brother Tony has Unstoppable coming up. Ridley and Tony are known for being workhorses and talented in their different ways, I really liked Jordan's Cracks, and I became more impressed with Jake's work here as I wrote about it. That's an impressive track record for one family in one year.

Obligatory photos of people who were there:

Welcome to the Rileys star Melissa Leo, who also appears in Conviction

Terrible picture, as is the one that follows. I apologize for it. Real film festivals turn on the house lights when doing the Q&As.


Down for Life director Alan Jacobs and star Jessica Romero

I got a little uncomfortable during this Q&A. I'm not sure how to put this without sounding like even more of a pompous jerk than I'm accusing others of being, but there's something a little weird about sitting in a room dotted with middle-class white people in Boston praising the film for being realistic and suggesting how it might be a good teaching tool for turning at-risk kids' life around. Granted, I know nothing about the folks around me in the room (judging from other BFF audiences, it may have been all people with a vested interest in the topic, me excluded), but that's weird, right? I feel comfortable judging it to be a good movie, and saying that it feels authentic, but I really don't know enough about the setting to give it that level of praise. It seems like people talking because they want to register support of the movie's messages, not because they really have something to contribute.


Gads, I've gone from criticizing the BFF's management to its audience. This festival really brings out the worst in me.


Welcome to the Rileys

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

Welcome to the Rileys is not a tremendously complicated movie, but it is somewhat elegant in its construction. Its characters, their backgrounds, and their actions fit together like two components of a model whose pieces have been precisely manufactured to have complementary shapes, which in a certain way is what they are. Still, the filmmakers do a good enough job of disguising some of the seams, keeping it from looking too prefabricated.

It's been a few years since the Rileys' daughter Emily died, and neither of them are really in good shape. Lois (Melissa Leo) has become acutely agoraphobic, never leaving the house; Doug (James Gandolfini) has settled on a different routine, one centered around a Thursday night poker game, followed by waffles at an all-night diner, followed by a tryst with waitress Vivian (Eisa Davis). This time, he mentions to her that he's got a business trip to New Orleans soon; would she like to come? Once there, though, someone else catches his eye: Mallory (Kristen Stewart), an runaway teen stripper who stirs his paternal instincts. When he sells his business to stay down there after the convention, Lois realizes that this may be it unless she does something.

What writer Ken Hixon is going for here is pretty obvious - these people have gaps in their lives that the others can fill, although the Rileys are soon going to realize that Mallory isn't Emily. It's constructed fairly well, though. The trigger for Lois's agoraphobia is very basic, but Hixon and director Jake Scott let the audience make the connection rather than force it. Doug has a gratifyingly similar reaction to the audience upon seeing a pre-purchased cemetery plot. Scott and Hixon deftly avoid pointing out that Mallory allowing Doug to pay for the privilege of looking out for her is not far off from the stripping and prostitution that she regularly engages in, which would likely make the movie creepier than intended, but the idea is there to chew on if the viewer wants to.

Full review at EFC.

Down for Life

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

Down for Life has good bona fides where authenticity is concerned: It's based on a New York Times magazine piece, much of the cast was plucked from the South Central Los Angeles streets where it is set, and during the festival Q&A its start confirmed that it was true to her experiences. That's better than many films that flash a "based on a true" story credit, and though this one seems to fudge the ending a bit, it generally manages to balance drama and realism.

The film is presented as an essay that "Rascal" (Jessica Romero) is writing in hopes of landing a spot in a summer program. We're soon introduced to her mother Esther (Kate del Castillo), who used to run with a gang but went straight, and stepfather Rafael (Kurt Caceres). What Esther doesn't realize is that Rascal is not just a member of a gang, but the leader of its girls. Before school, they provoke a fight with an African-American group (Rascal's gang is mainly Latina), steal their car, and bring it to the chop shop. That gets the other gang as riled up as you expect. There are tensions everywhere for her, though - while her teacher Mr. Shannon (Danny Glover) is encouraging her to apply to that program in Iowa, gang leader Flaco (Cesar Garcia) sees that as a threat to his authority over all members. Tensions at home have her trying to crash with Vanessa (Emily Rios), a former classmate who has moved to a nicer neighborhood, but her mother won't have that...

The life of a gang member, whether male or female, is violent, and Down for Life does nothing to hide this. Director Alan Jacobs does an unusually good job of showing violence as both part of everyday life in this environment and genuinely terrible. The opening fight between the girl gangs is technically remarkable - the vast majority of movies with a much larger budget that are trying to sell action to an audience don't choreograph and shoot a group of nine or ten nearly so well; this one keeps them all in frame and looking much more like they are fighting than dancing - but it's partially upstaged by a detail from before the first punch being thrown: The girls take off their dangling earrings without breaking stride; this isn't a catfight, they know that someone looking to inflict damage (as they are) will go right for those, and they've got practice. He does other things, too: He keeps sexual violence to a relative minimum, keeping the focus on danger to life and limb and not making this about men vs. women; he shows it as just as likely to arise from supposed friends as enemies (violence as a tool for maintaining a hierarchy); he makes it sometimes be almost completely random, with no warning or plausible justification. Those of us living in a better area will recoil, but the cast just plays it as something they deal with.

Full review at EFC.

Boston Film Festival 2010 Day 04: Cherry, The Last Harbor

I didn't have this thought at the time I was watching it, but a day or so later, while I was writing my review for It's Kind of a Funny Story, I did sort of idly wonder if I could take my review of that movie and modify it to be one of Cherry. The two aren't really that similar, but they've got some basic pieces in common - smart kid in a math-oriented field who really loves to draw, one parent pushy and one pushed, tossed alone into an environment where most everyone is older than him, a couple pretty girls attracted to him...

They are, in fact, fairly different, but once I had the similarities in my head, it was awfully difficult to get them out!

Obligatory photos of people who were there:


Cherry writer/director Jeffrey Fine and brother/producer Matthew Fine


The Last Harbor writer/director Paul Epstein, star Wade Williams, and producer Karl Richards

I feel bad about describing the shortcomings of some of these films, because all of the folks pictured seemed like pretty cool folks. The Fines were hanging out in the theater lobby before their movie, and I imagine any of the audience members who would have enjoyed some one-on-one time with them would have been able to get it. I'm pretty hard on Wade Williams (which I'd rather not be, because I liked him on Prison Break, a show that knew how to use him), but he was a genial, friendly guy with a big smile that you don't much see in his on-screen roles.

In other words, seeing a bad movie at a festival stinks, not just because it's a bad movie, or you're paying more, or it often means you sacrificed a rare chance to see a better movie for this piece of crud. Disliking a thing doesn't really feel bad, but feeling sorry for someone because you dislike it kind of stinks.

Cherry

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

By festival-schedule happenstance, I saw Cherry roughly 24 hours after It's Kind of a Funny Story, which has a fair amount of surface similarities once you correct for their different settings. Cherry isn't nearly as polished, but it's willing to make the audience squirm a little and occasionally go for the big laugh, which is worth something.

Aaron (Kyle Gallner) is a gifted student who comes from a long line of engineers, bright enough to be starting college at an Ivy League university a year early, and like many prodigies, somewhat awkward socially, which his new roommate "Wild" Bill (D.C. Pierson) takes advantage of. Still, despite the pressure put upon him by his sponsoring professor (Matt Walsh), he manages to attract interest from three different ladies: Darcy (Zosia Mamet), the nice girl on his floor who's also a target of Bill's hazing; Linda (Laura Allen), a "resumed ed" student in her early thirties that he meets in an art class; and Beth (Britt Robertson), her fourteen-year-old daughter. That's complicated, even before you factor in Linda's current boyfriend, Wes (Esai Morales), a cop who doesn't impress Beth much at all.

When writer/director Jeffrey Fine focuses on the mechanics of the college comedy, the result is fairly bland: The suffocating mother, hazing, gross-out jokes, and academic competition with a scholarship on the line, complete with villainous faculty member, all arrive right on time, and of course Aaron is going to discover that art is what he truly loves despite his parents' prodding (just once, I'd like to see hippie parents fretting over how much their kid likes math, and the film ascribing nobility to interest in science). As college movies go, it's not bad - the material with Aaron and Bill is actually pretty decent - but more than a little rote.

Full review at EFC.

The Last Harbor

* * (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

I suspect that The Last Harbor will eventually show up on a cable channel rather than in theaters, and might be cheap and successful enough to get a follow-up or two. Mystery series have been built on less than "former big-city cop solves crimes in picturesque harbor town", but it works best with a more interesting sleuth than Ian Martin.

Ian (Wade Williams) is a drunk, and his latest outburst of behavior that gets stuff thrown out of court has him about to be drummed out of the Boston P.D. His captain offers him an alternative: The sheriff in his old hometown is looking for a promotion to a state job - why doesn't Ian transfer over there and while away the years until retirement in a two-person department in a town where nothing happens? It'll give him a chance to reconnect with his daughter Leanne (Austin Highsmith). One thing has crossed the desk, though - a girl who hasn't been seen in a couple of days. Ian starts digging and finds more than he bargained for.

As mystery stories go, The Last Harbor actually isn't bad at all. There's a full set of suspects who are all believably up to something, red herrings that don't feel like a complete waste of time when they're revealed, and motives that don't seem outlandish when finally revealed. Director Paul Epstein and co-writer Rand Marsh more or less plays fair with the audience, both in terms of not holding back clues that only the sleuth gets to see or having him do stuff behind our backs. With the right lead, this is a satisfyingly competent murder mystery.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 September - 30 September

Matt's bachelor party last week does in fact hint that a certain other event will curtail my movie-going this weekend. Fortunately, Matt and Morgan are awesome folks so I don't mind. And, besides, my niece has been practicing being a flower girl all summer, so it would be a shame to miss that.

The rest of the Boston area has no such excuse. Go see some movies!

• The big-ish event this week is Terrorthon 2010, the nine-day horror movie marathon from J. Cannibal and the guys that bring us the annual Sci-Fi marathon. Myself, I would have gone with "The Boston Terrorthon", especially since they've been calling the sci-fi event "Boston's other Marathon" for years, but I imagine that to be the thin line where trademark violation becomes actionable.
  
  As you might expect, running concurrent with Austin's Fantastic Fest, it's not getting a whole bunch of premieres. But, unlike the extended sci-fi festival in February, it does seem to be running in one of the Somerville Theatre's regular screens, and what I've seen - Dead Snow (no word on whether it's dubbed or subtitled) and The Revenant (with the director apparently coming to introduce/answer questions) - are middlin'-decent. There's a live show Saturday night, but aside from that, it breaks down pretty straightforward: Friday to Sunday is mostly Herschell Gordon Lewis-related stuff (the Godfather of Gore documentary, screenings of Blood Feast, and what is (according to the theater's listings) the remake of Wizard of Gore with Crispin Glover. Sunday to Tuesday, the 9pm shows are local horror - God of Vampires, Next Door, and Drive-in Horrorshow. Monday - Thursday is new-ish indie horror movies: Human Centipede, Dead Snow, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead, The Horde, and The Revenant. Next weekend brings the premiere of Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil



• It's fall, which means prestige pictures start coming out, and the evidence for that is on display at the Kendall Square theater where they are cleaning house: Only two of its nine screens are showing films that were playing Thursday; six new films open this week. The big two-screen opener is Never Let Me Go, whose preview seems to be attempting to hide that it's science fiction; the one-week warning is on for The Sicilian Girl, about a girl who turns against the mob. Also opening there are French action-comedy Heartbreaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman's Jack Goes Boating, romantic comedy The Romantics, and WWII/Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished. Playing for one night only on Tuesday is Tapestries of Hope, a documentary on African AIDS patients, and the belief that raping a virgin can cure the disease.



• Never Let Me Go also opens at the Coolidge on the main screen. The video rooms feature Kings of Pastry (special guests on Sunday), and the Manhattan Short Film Festival. The midnight show this weekend is The Breakfast Club, and a season of Talk Cinema starts Sunday with a preview of Stone. Another preview is Wednesday's Waiting For Superman. The really potentially cool thing is the Steamboat Bill, Jr. screening on Monday, with live accompaniment by Peter Blanchette, which also feature a short film.



• I may not make it to that, though, as the Brattle's CineCaché series begins that night, the successor to the Eye-Opener, perhaps with a few more people attending at the more convenient time. As of this writing, there's no word on what the first film will be.
  
  Also at the Brattle: The Boston Bike Film Festival on Friday and Saturday; "Framed: Art on Film" on Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday; and a special Elia Kazan event on Tuesday, featuring Martin Scorcese's new documentary A Letter to Elia and Kazan's Panic in the Streets.



• Mainstream theaters get Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, You Again, and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. Guardians will also be playing in IMAX and 3-D. There's apparently a new, CGI-animated, 3-D Roadrunner & Coyote short ahead of it, although it's not clear wheter that includes the IMAX screenings. I'm not sure whether to be excited or horrified by that. Mostly horrified, I think.
  
  There are also a pair of sort-of-kind-of-mainstream openings: Catfish, which is apparently some sort of faux-doc thriller (opening at Boston Common and Harvard Square), and The Virginity Hit, a raunchy comedy written and directed by the writers of The Last Exorcism - a change of genre, but apparently also a mock-doc. It's only opening at Fresh Pond and Revere in the Metro Boston area.



• The Harvard Film Archive has still more Pier Paolo Pasolni on Friday, Sunday, and Monday. Saturday is "A Visit with Jim McBride", an introduction to the famed documentarian.
  
  The MFA continues last week's series has a couple screenings of 45365 on Friday and Saturday, with a screening of Asbury Shorts on Friday and David Hockney: A Bigger Picture on Saturday.

Not that I'll have time for half of this stuff. Man, one's brother getting married is really time-consuming!

This Week In Tickets: 13 September 2010 to 19 September 2010

Let me tell you, the page is awesomely color-coded this week:



... green for the DocYard series, reddish-orange for "The Legacy of Psycho", pink for the Boston Film Festival, plus the various excursions outside of theaters.

It figures that Saturday had what looked like the most promising day for the Boston Film Festival - mostly for Conviction, which had Sam Rockwell in attendance to push a role that is apparently getting him some long-deserved awards buzz, although I'd have liked to see Miss Nobody; I like Leslie Bibb and the rest of the cast is nice, too - because that was the day of my brother Matt's bachelor party, which was pretty mild: Go to casino, eat at what is basically a family dining chain restaurant, and gamble. I didn't, because my high school math classes were heavy on probability and thus beat any notion that I could beat the house out of me, but my brothers and dad did. Go to stand-up comedy show, be mildly amused, gamble some more, take the bus back to the hotel because casinos are pretty dull - even the folks playing were just sort of going through the motions; it reminded me of nothing so much as playing solitaire on the computer and finding it had devoured an evening during which I could have been reading, writing, or just generally giving my entire attention to something engaging, with the added benefit that it's also likely to involve losing money. Plus, folks are smoking inside. It boggles my mind that either activity has any appeal.

Not that missing a night of the Boston Film Festival is much of a big deal in recent years; I'll be writing more about the festival in upcoming posts, but it's been fairly unexciting. Sure, only a couple movies have seen have outright sucked, but there's also no "you've got to see this" film to mention, either.

The Collector

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2010 in the Brattle Theatre (Legacy of Psycho)

This one got bounced around the Brattle's schedule in some odd ways - originally scheduled for the 8th, bumped to a matinee on the 14th when the print failed to show, given evening showings when a preview screening was canceled - but I'm glad I got to catch up with it. It's a simple, stripped-down thriller with a pair of great performances by Terrence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. Director William Wyler and his writers set up a series of alternating escape attempts and potential Stockholm Syndrome situations that become increasingly tense and clever.

I also kind of like what the actors do with their characters' accents. Both start by speaking with a so-called posh London accent, and while for Miranda (the kidnapped girl), it's something she has grown into although the traces of her original mode of speech are still there, Freddie's is a thin veneer; Stamp reveals that there's something much rougher and coarser behind his attempts to sound sophisticated. Maybe one doesn't notice it right away, but when he finally lets his pretense drop, it's much more clearly something that's been there all along.

Dressed to Kill

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 September 2010 in the Brattle Theatre (Legacy of Psycho)

It's a bit amusing that Dennis Franz would appear in Psycho II a couple of years after appearing this, which cribs liberally from the Hitchcock masterpiece. It hides just how much pretty well, but the nobody-is-safe structure is a direct life.

Still, Brian De Palma isn't just doing a remake; this is very much his own movie, with plenty of tension and voyeurism and utter unflinching delight taken from the sex and violence. Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon are a hoot as an unlikely crime-solving duo (a hooker suspected of murder and a nerdy teenager), while Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson are perfectly smooth in their roles.

As can often be the case with De Palma (and many other directors), there's a thin line between excess (whether it be of sex, violence, plot twists, and Hitchcock homagery) being fun and being wearing, and toward the end of the movie, Dressed to Kill at the very least has a foot on each side of the line. De Palma's certainly neither the first nor last guy to extend his movie too far seeking one last jump, though, and the nature of his films must make going for it almost irresistible.

Boston Film Festival 2010 Day 03: It's Kind of a Funny Story, Nice Guy Johnny

I missed the second day of BFF (including a couple movies I really wanted to see) to go to my brother Matt's bachelor party, which started out at the Mohegan Sun casino in CT and finished with a rare-seeming win for the Red Sox at Fenway Park. I didn't gamble while at the casino, because I took way too much math (specifically, probability) in high school and college to even consider it.

That carried over to seeing movies on Sunday night. I bought tickets for these ahead of time, because although I was pretty sure that the weekday films would be easy enough to get walk-ups, these might be a different story - especially once @BostonFreeFilms started posting free passes for It's Kind of a Funny story. I arrived early enough that I might have gotten a seat from standing in the "rush" line, but $10 isn't a bad price to pay for a little certainty. Of course, finding out that anyone who came to see Funny Story would be allowed to stay for the second did give me a bit of a "why did I drop $20" feeling. But, as I said, I don't gamble.

Obligatory photos of people who were there:


It's Kind of a Funny Story writer/directors Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden

For a while, Boden & Fleck were pretty strongly associated with IFFBoston, working as volunteers/staff or having a film - documentary or narrative, feature or short - in the festival for every year (this year, Boden edited Children of Invention). Last year, Sony acquired Sugar early, but it played at Kendall Square soon enough afterward with them in attendance that it felt like an extension of the festival; this year, the release pattern for Funny Story led to it playing at BFF, which was kind of weird.

They're still some of the most pleasant folks you'll find to do a Q&A with. Their genuine enthusiasm for the material and their collaborators comes across, and it was interesting to hear Anna talk about how they really wanted to make use of effects, animation, and the like to visualize what is going on in their main character's head even as Ryan mentions how shooting the opening scene was kind of boring for him. It could come across as disappointment, but doesn't, and it's also a useful reminder of how even shots we take for granted today are very technical.


Nice Guy Johnny actress Kerry Bishé, writer/director/actor Edward Burns, and festival director Robin Dawson

I've got less to say about this one. Ed Burns has been doing this for a while, and as I say in the review, I admire his dedication, even though he doesn't come across as a really outstanding writer/director. I think he'd like to be Woody Allen, and is trying to set up his career in a similar way, but he's got skill rather than genius. This was another Q&A with a fair amount of students in attendance, and as such took the inevitable "pick up a camera and start shooting, since you can do amazing things with digital now and while theatrical distribution is almost impossible, video and on-demand give you a lot of options if you can keep costs down" route.

As much as I love film, it is amazing how digital has evolved in the aughts - Lucas was doing something really radical when he shot parts of The Phantom Menace digitally before announcing that the remaining two Star Wars films would be shot that way, and now cameras like the Red One are all over indie cinema, and it has made distribution much less of a crippling expense - when I was working in a Worcester movie theater, I was told a single print cost $8K, which means the prints for even a platform release for something like Nice Guy Johnny would not just increase its budget, but multiply it.. I think Funny Story is the only film at the BFF that was screened on 35mm film; everything else was a digital projection of some sort or another.

It's Kind of a Funny Story

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

The title of It's Kind of Funny Story is its own review. It's just a matter of where you want to put the emphasis. It's got enough jokes and amusing moments to qualify as a "funny story", but plays things so safe that "kind of" might sum it up better. That's a shame, and a surprise, considering how engrossing the previous two features from the team of Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson and Sugar) are.

As the film opens, 16-year-old Craig (Keir Gilchrist) is about ready to throw himself off a bridge. He's not a victim of abuse or anything; at worst his mother (Lauren Graham) is a bit nervous and his father (Jim Gaffigan) has high expectations. He's on medication for depression, and his best friend Aaron (Thomas Mann) is dating Nia (Zoe Kravitz), the girl he adores. Instead, he goes to a psychiatric hospital and checks himself in for observation - not realizing that (1) the juvenile ward is shut down for renovations, so he'll be with the adults, and (2) it's a minimum five day stay. So he's going to be spending the better part of a week with people who have come much closer to killing themselves than he has - notably Bobby (Zach Galifianakis), who pretends to be a doctor to sneak outside, and Noelle (Emma Roberts), the other teenager on the floor.

Funny Story is an easy movie to like, in large part because Fleck, Boden, and the cast do a respectable job of creating a cast of characters that are able to sell a joke without seeming to treat mental illness in an excessively cavalier manner (disclaimer: I have never had to deal with such matters directly). Craig's family and friends are exaggerated, but for the most part manage to balance being funny with showing genuine concern while also having difficulty relating to him; they're flawed but generally likable characters performed well. The patients are by and large confused and frustrated by how their brains just won't send the correct signals, and while some like Matthew Maher's Humble seem a little more zany than troubled, others like Craig's Egyptian roommate Muqtada (Bernard White) are agonizingly paralyzed.

Full review at EFC.

Nice Guy Johnny

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

As much as I hate the bilious broadcasts that pass for sports talk radio here in the Northeast, I kind of doubt that Oakland, California, is laid back enough that a host who goes by "Nice Guy Johnny" would fly, even in the overnight slot - and that's before hearing the bland commentary he's dispensing as the movie opens. Now, Nice Guy Johnny the movie isn't going to rise and fall based on the authenticity of the similarly-named radio show, but what we see and hear is telling nonetheless - mainly, that friendly but shallow responses to artificial dilemmas are on tap.

The host of the "Nice Guy Johnny" show is Johnny Rizzo (Matt Bush), a transplanted New Yorker about to turn twenty-five, at which time he has promised fiancée Claire (Anna Wood) that, if he wasn't making $50,000/year, he would take a sensible job - and her father has just lined one up for him, as a supervisor at a company that makes cardboard boxes back East. He's less than enthusiastic. When he arrives back home and meets his Uncle Terry (writer/director Ed Burns), the bartender is openly dismissive, wondering why he's still with Claire anyway, and invites Johnny to join him on a weekend trip to the Hamptons. There, Terry and one of his girlfriends immediately try to set him up with her tennis instructor, Brooke (Kerry Bishé), who also thinks it is a dreadful idea. And, since she's a cute, athletic, outspoken sports fan, is probably perfect for him. But he's engaged, and made a promise, and is a man of his word...

That Brooke is more or less Johnny's ideal match while it's hard to see how he and Claire have tolerated each other for three years is simplistic, sure, but it's not necessarily a terrible thing to set up such a clear differentiation. It's disappointing, though, that Burns isn't willing to simply let them represent the opposing values of risk and security. No, Claire has to be a domineering, distrustful shrew. Similarly, the description of Johnny being nice to a fault is accurate, and it makes him a bit dull, while Uncle Terry is just as absurdly dishonest.

Full review at EFC.

Boston Film Festival 2010 Day 01: To Be Friends, Locked In

I try to be nice to the Boston Film Festival every year. I come in thinking that this year, I'll bite my tongue, go into movies with a positive attitude, hand out business cards and make a good enough impression that they'll actually put me on the mailing list next year. And for what seems like every year under the current management, I've failed. Something about the attitude just rubs me the wrong way, and even before the festival starts, I'm annoyed.

For instance, when clicking on the "festival" tab of their website brings you to the party schedule, and there's a line there that says

Get your exclusive party pass now, these are the biggest events of the entire festival! Don't miss out!

... then someone like me who thinks that the films should be considered the festival's biggest events starts to grind teeth. I always feel like this particular festival is built from the parties outwards, and that's no way to make an excellent festival.

It's not all the festival directors. Take opening night. I was already in a foul mood when I got there because of issues printing off my tickets and staying at work late on a Friday afternoon - I couldn't print at the office or get an internet connection at home, so I only had my ticket for To Be Friends. Naturally, the folks at the BFF table didn't have any way to check/print off a ticket, referring me to the box office, who initially tried to refer me back to the BFF folks (aside: how do you not have a laptop or something set up so that you can check this, but have three volunteers sitting at a table to hand out passes?) before handing me a pass. The Stuart Street Playhouse people were great.

Anyway, that frustration may have led to me initially giving it a slightly higher star rating than it really merited; there was a weird overcompensating for my bad mood going on, as well as trying to separate the film itself from the remarks director James Eckhart made before and after the screening - someone saying to "let the film wash over you", or something similar, tends to set off my pretentiousness alarms, but the work itself shouldn't be judged on that. It was also a weird Q&A session, mostly filled with Emerson College students who tended to introduce themselves as such and by name before each question, maybe hoping Aaron Eckhart or someone else would remember them.

Okay, that's needlessly cynical. Not so much so is a tweet about the "sold-out crowd" for the second feature of the night, Locked In. I suspect it was "sold out" in that there were people who bought passes and packages that included both opening night films and wound up going to the opening night party rather than seeing a movie.

(deep breath)

OK, for those of you who dig filmmakers on stage doing Q&As:


Left to right, Joelle Carter (who I didn't realize was Ava Crowder from Justified until IMDBing her), Todd Stashwick (between them, the entire cast), writer/director James Lawrence Eckhart, and his brother, executive producer Aaron Eckhart. Todd and James did most of the talking, with Joelle agreeing and Aaron confirming that his involvement in the picture was mostly limited to "writing a check".

And now, reviews!

To Be Friends

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

To Be Friends is beautiful in so many ways - it is exquisitely shot and scored. The acting by Joelle Carter and Todd Stashwick is true and emotional, and director James Lawrence Eckhart lets the story unfold at the right pace. The thing is, while the dialog is unquestionably artful, it's also the case where beauty may or may not be in the eye of the beholder.

A man (Todd Stashwick) and a woman (Joelle Carter) are driving to a cabin in a beautiful, secluded spot on the California coast. They are longtime friends, and she wishes that they were more; he has of late been wary of any romantic relationship, much less one with his best friend. They speak about it in aphorisms and riddles before addressing it directly, but also just spend a weekend enjoying each other's company and playing music together (he plays cello, she violin) before confronting the reason why they came to this place at this time.

There are certain expectations for the dialog in a modern movie, particularly one like To Be Friends that is, by and large, two people discussing the nature of friendship and romance, and where their relationship is situated on that spectrum. The usual inclination is to make it sound real, or at the very least, make it sound real plus two on the clever scale (how people wish they talked). Eckhart doesn't go for this; instead, he opts for a very theatrical mode of speech. Carter and Stashwick are not shouting to be heard in the balconies, but the words coming out of their mouths are, simultaneously, very declarative, laying the characters' feelings out there very directly, and very artificial. Nobody talks like this for very long, and watching it will likely bring to mind a one-act play taken off the stage and shot on location. It feels very different from even other talky films, and while some may enjoy the stylization, others (like myself, much of the time), will find the artificiality distancing.

Full review at EFC.

Locked In

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 September 2010 at the Stuart Street Playhouse (Boston Film Festival 2010)

Locked In is a pretty terrible movie, although one where the audience might be willing to make allowances for budget, or at least give some of its off-seeming moments a conditional pass, just in case the all-but-inevitable twist ending explains them. It defaults on that loaned good will, of course, but by then it already has your money and your time, and what can you do about it besides give it a one-star review on your blog?

To put it mildly, Josh (Ben Barnes) has an uncanny ability to destroy holidays. The film opens with him driving his family home, Christmas tree tied to the top of the car, and having a bizarre, apparently self-inflicted accident that somehow leaves him and wife Emma (Sarah Roemer) more or less unharmed but four-year-old daughter Brooke (Abby & Helen Steinman) in a "locked in" state - technically conscious and aware of her surroundings but unable to more or acknowledge them. To twist the knife a little more, this was an attempt at a reconciliation for Josh and Emma - on Halloween, Josh turned stepping out to pick up more candy into going into a bar, having a few drinks, and hooking up with old flame Renee (Eliza Dushku). Now, Ben's receiving mysterious phone calls that sound like Brooke and seeing other clues that lead him to believe that Renee ran them off the road. He also gets into contact with Frank (Clarke Peters), a guru who apparently can help them reach Brooke and bring her out of her unresponsive state.

The movie starts off with an absolutely bizarre car crash, a scene that feels as though director Suri Krishnamma knew the story needed a car crash but had no actual money for a stunt driver, so it's cobbled together with distorted shots of one of Boston's tunnels and sped-up footage. It's odd-looking enough that it may temporarily either blind the audience to how the scene makes no sense, or give them the mistaken impression that it's just a flawed bit of execution, rather than a character just doing something for no reason other than the plot outline demanding it - with neither Josh nor Emma remembering any particulars because the movie would fall apart if they did.

Full review at EFC.

Fantasia 2010 Catch-up Part 05: Brass Knuckle Boys, Love in a Puff, Woochi, Symbol

Looking over my notes for these movies:

* I said Brass Knuckle Boys had "two hugely funny scenes" in the original capsule, which I kept for the new one (that's how you can write a semi-coherent review two months after the fact: keep notes and do a quick first draft/outline much closer to the date). I have no idea what the first was, and I hope I didn't spoil the second too much.

* Looking at the character names for Love in a Puff - who in hell names their kid "Eunuch", even as a "Western name" in a Cantonese-speaking region? Sure, it's an obscure enough word that maybe he doesn't get teased in grade school, but when someone does know it, the taunting will be vicious.

* When I looked at what I'd written, I said "I guess I'm going to have to punt Overheard". Then I look at my notes and stuff starts coming back to me. Then I start to write, and move on to Woochi.

* The confusion mentioned in the Woochi review? All genuine and present when I first saw it, and not a result of just getting around to writing it nearly two months after seeing it. Still darn funny and a good adventure, though.

* I wonder if Symbol will show up anywhere in the U.S. As much as I dig it, I also note that the really weird stuff from Japan - Survive Style 5+, Funky Forest, and this - can be a really hard sell. Still, I strongly suspect that when people ask me what I remember from this year's trip to Montreal around Thanksgiving or Christmas, the films I mention will be the screwy ones - Symbol and Rubber. And, for those of you who have seen Symbol, there will be a tiny bit of spoiler-ish discussion after the eFilmCritic review.

Anyway, with this, I official reach the end of Fantasia reviews done from memory. 65 in two and a half months isn't a bad count, with six more coming via screeners (2 for second views, 4 for being unable to fit into the schedule), a few reviewed when they arrived in Boston, and a total of 9 punted due to drowsiness/waiting too long/not being in final reviewable shape. Not my busiest year, but respectable, I think.

Of course, the screeners will have to wait - I finished Fantasia just in time to start on the Boston Film Festival, although that's a much more lightweight assignment.

Shonen merikensakku (Brass Knuckle Boys)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)

Brass Knuckle Boys has two hugely funny scenes, including a flashback that is among the best rock 'n roll movie jokes I can remember. They're both in the beginning, though, and there's still the better part of two hours to go after the bit with the guitar-smashing. And while the movie still has plenty of amusing bits, that's a long time to go on after hitting the high point.

We start off with Kanna Kurita (Aoi Miyazaki), a perky young talent searcher for a record company who is really just absolutely no good at her job. She's got a positive attitude, though, so when she brings her latest YouTube find in to her boss Tokita (Yusuke Satamaria), she's all smiles and no hard feelings as she prepares for her inevitable firing, especially since what she's found is a punk band and they work for a pop label. The good news, though, is that Tokita used to be a punk rocker himself, back in the day, and these "Brass Knuckle Boys" ("Shonen Meriken Sakku", or SMS for short) remind him of the rock of his youth, and he dispatches Kanna to sign them. The bad news is that SMS is the rock of his youth - bass player Akio (Koichi Sato) is now a bartender in his mid-forties, and hasn't spoken to the guitar player, his brother Haruo (Yuichi Kimura), since the band broke up twenty-five years ago; Akio just posted some of their old videos for fun. But both drummer Young (Hiroki Miyake) and disabled, incomprehensible singer Jimmy (Tomorowo Taguchi) are up for a reunion tour, and after a few miscommunications and deceptions, that's what they've got, with Kanna stuck riding herd on them.

There are large parts of this premise that are comedy gold, and when writer/director Kankuro Kudo is satirizing musicians the music industry, the movie is fairly clever. I love the banter between Kanna and Tokita that opens the film, and the aforementioned flashback with the smashing guitars is just about the funniest thing I've seen in a long time; it's got a killer moment when the audience laughs because it knows that Kudo is about to do something horrible. Moments like Haruo wandering on stage, casting a disdainful look at the label's most popular act (a bland boy band that sings about playing video games) are pregnant with the possibility of the movie really letting people have it in fine style.

Full review at EFC.

Chi ming yu chun giu (Love in a Puff)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

Pang Ho-cheung made Love in a Puff during post-production for Dream Home, and though there are some certain stylistic ties - the groups huddled together for their cigarette breaks that are central to Love in a Puff show up in Dream Home, both start by telling us something about Hong Kong that serves as a major influence on the action, and both make a point of their timeframes while doing this or that to avoid being strictly linear - they wind up causing opposite reactions. This is the one that's romantic and charming.

Jimmy Cheung (Shawn Yue) is a young guy getting his start in advertising; Cherie Chu (Mirian Yeung Chin-wah) is a little bit older, selling cosmetics in a retail shop. They're both smokers, and Hong Kong's tough anti-tobacco laws cause people in the same area to congregate in small groups that have little in common but their addiction. Still, they hit it off, and while Jimmy is single (the humiliating story behind that is a popular one among their group, at least until Jimmy shows up), Cherie isn't, although her boyfriend Carl (Wong Tak-bun) will soon start to wonder what is up with the texts and calls from the new man on Cherie's contact list.

Love in a Puff takes place over the course of a week - an unusually specific week, mid-February of 2007, and in some ways, that feels awfully short; it requires that Jimmy and Cherie (and Carl) to go through a fair number of relationship stages in a relatively short period of time. Of course, that's part of what's clever about the movie - Pang shows how modern communications can accelerate romance and other relationships for good or ill, and how such things are now a part of modern life. There's a little thread about how Cherie considers changing her mobile phone provider to get more favorable rates on texting and calling Jimmy, and though a big deal isn't made of it, it's a nice little detail.

Full review at EFC.

Woochi

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

At first, it seems hard to take an action/adventure story where one of the villains is a giant bunny rabbit seriously, even when you're talking about a movie as whimsical as Woochi. Sure, the giant rat goblin, that's one thing, but the rabbit?

The goblins first show up at the turn of the sixteenth century, looking for a magical pipe created by the Archgod. They are defeated and imprisoned by three lesser gods, and the pipe split in two to prevent any further danger - one half being given to sorceror Hwa-dam (Kim Yun-seok) and the other to another master (Baek Yun-shik) - but when he ends up murdered, suspicion falls on Jeon Woochi (Kang Dong-won), his mischief-making student who embarrasses the nobility into behaving justly along with his transformed-animal servant Chorangyi (Yu hae-jin), and he is magically locked in a tapestry. But 500 years later, the goblins are free, and the gods know that the only one who can fight them is Woochi. Of course, they're fully acclimated to the twenty-first century...

And, really, that's just the half of it. Writer-director Choi Dong-hun has stuffed a lot of story into this film's two and a quarter hours - that description doesn't mention the nobleman's widow (Lim Su-jeong) who seems to have gotten her wish to be reincarnated as a commoner, working as a personal assistant for a bossy actress (Yum Jung-ah), or the mythology, or the gods' plans to double-cross Woochi. It's pretty dense for a lightweight family adventure, and while I suspect that some of the mythology is information that any Korean schoolchild would know, there were other bits that weren't nearly so clear - heck, by the end, I wasn't sure what one character's deal was - reincarnation, amnesia, possession, just being too old to remember back five hundred years, or something else? And Choi certainly takes his time during the Joseon-era scenes - it goes much longer than that sort of prologue usually does.

Full review at EFC.

Shinboru (Symbol)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

It's been a while since I've seen a movie from Japan that is as thoroughly demented as Symbol, which means it's been a long time since I've seen any movie as crazy and trippy as this. Writer/director/star Hitoshi Matsumoto also did Big Man Japan, but from what I've read that's positively conventional compared to Symbol.

The film plays out in two separate locations. In Mexico, a poor but honest man who wrestles lucha libre as "Escargot Man" (Luis Accinelli) prepares for his next tag-team match, with his son (David Quintero) cheering him on, his daughter (Adriana Fricke) looking to find a life that suits her more than her current profession (nun), and his wife (Lilian Tapia) understanding but weary, especially with their son skipping school and being teased for having a lame luchador for a father. And then, well, elsewhere, a Japanese man in a bathrobe (Matsumoto) awakens in a white room that is completely featureless except for an outcropping that looks like a really funny-looking switch. Touching it causes the walls to sprout dozens more (and reveals to the audience that, yes, they are what they look like, which is odd, because I'd always imagined cherubs like the ones they're attached to to be more or less sexless). Pressing any of those causes something to come out of the walls. Can this man use these things to find a way out? And if he does, what's that got to do with the luchador?

In case this point has not been made clear enough, Symbol is downright peculiar. It is also gut-bustingly hilarious. The scenes inside the white room are an improbably but perfect alchemy of absurdity, surrealism, and slapstick. With no-one to talk to, Hatsumoto's character is soon engaging in every kind of silent comedy imaginable, from broad pratfalls to little bits of prop comedy to letting us just admire the confusion and frustration on his face as he simultaneously acclimates to and is driven mad by his imprisonment. Initially, Hatsumoto and co-writer Mitsuyoshi Takasu use the scenes in Mexico as buffers, allowing each little silent comedy routine to stand on its own without bleeding into or being directly compared to others, while also allowing the audience to be surprised anew by this type and level of strangeness. Of course, to be fair, there's something more than a little off-kilter about the Mexican scenes themselves.

Full review at EFC.

... So, back from reading about Symbol on eFilmCritic, and figure that this here is the forum in which to discuss what I think the film is about, or at least what I take away from it?

Anyway, though the film is loaded with obvious religious symbols (lots of angels of different varieties), my outlook on it is to look at it as being about science and technological advancement. In the first section, "The Education", Matsumoto learns about critical thinking and problem solving. Although he initially concerns himself with simple matters of survival, he eventually learns to use the elements in his environment as tools, and use them together in order to solve problems. In "The Implementation", he takes control of what is hidden behind the walls, the angels (now seraphim rather than cherubs) which represent not necessarily the supernatural, but the basic forces of the universe. In "The Future", he becomes literally godlike, taking on the appearance commonly used for depicting Christ, soaring into the air, causing chaos in the world on a whim, emerging into a scene straight out of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This is the course of humanity's progress as a tool-using creature: We first needed to learn the very concept of not just tools, but how to think, how to correlate cause and effect, and how to build and use machines. The next step after that is to climb, trusting in what we as a species has learned before and building upon each discovery to move upward. Granted, using angel penises as handholds seems a little bizarre, but it makes a sort of symbolic sense - angels are agents of the divine, although the we as a species must overcome certain taboos and trepidation before making use of the natural forces and knowledge increasingly at our disposal. As we do so, we no longer need to touch them directly - we learn abstraction. Just as Matsumoto no longer needs to actually diddle angels directly to move forward - he levitates and waves in the direction of what he wants done - we are reaching a point where we individually don't need to directly understand our tools. Few reading this on a computer are likely several layers away from the actual work being done; most no longer understand basic (or BASIC) programming, much less the machine code used to build an operating system or the logic used in synchronizing a network, much less what goes on inside an integrated circuit. We are gods now, waving our hands and watching incredible things happen.

Of course, it's not without consequences. As Matsumoto ascends into godhood, he causes chaos in the normal world. Random, frightening things happen to the luchador, his family, and others around the world. Fine control is going to take a while, and this power may initially be available only to a privileged few. We can now have a massive effect on the world without truly understanding the power we wield, as any news story about global warming will tell us. Should we be able to do so? It doesn't matter; we will.

And the reward may be to start over again, on a larger scale; like the Starchild in 2001.


At least, that's what I see there. I imagine that someone less prone to taking religious/spiritual/superstitious symbols and applying them to a natural world may see it differently.