Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 March 2012 - 15 March 2012

Weird set of stuff opening this weekend. Let's see what!

• The big opening this week is John Carter, Disney's big-budget adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, with the name changed because marketing people decided boys wouldn't go see something with "Princess" in its name and girls would run screaming from "Mars". Silly, because a hundred-year-old story about a Civil War veteran who is somehow transported to a habitable Mars where he gets involved in the wars between various native races is going to sink or swim no matter what words are in the title. The Arlington Capitol and Fresh Pond split single screens between 2D and 3D (so check times); Boston Common and Fenway each have 2D and 3D screens; Harvard Square has it in 3D only; and it plays the premium screens at Jordan's Furniture, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  Stars on the way up and down take the other mainstream screens. Elizabeth Olsen follows up Martha Marcy May Marlene with Silent House; it's a real-time horror movie about a girl trapped in her family home (edited to look like a single take) from the directors of Open Water, working from an original from Uruguay. It plalys Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway. The same screens have the latest from Eddie Murphy, A Thousand Words, in which he plays an insincere talent agent who will die when he speaks the thousand words of the title.



• The Coolidge opens Friends with Kids, with Kissing Jessica Stein's Jennifer Westfeldt writing, directing, and starring in a movie about two platonic friends who decide to have a baby together. It also plays Boston Common and the Kendall.
  
  In special programs, the Boston Underground Film Festival gears up for the main event later this month by presenting the infamous Cannibal Holocaust at midnight on Friday and Saturday; it's one of the first found-footage horror movies, originally banned in many places for being thought authentic. Sunday morning is the latest Goethe-Institut presentation, Cracks in the Shell, in which a meek young actress is cast completely against type in her first role.



• Kendall Square is also finally opening We Need to Talk About Kevin in Boston, just two or three months after it hit New York and L.A. Tilda Swinton is one of several actresses criminally overlooked by the Oscar nominators, because her performance as the mother of a teenaged monster is fantastic. They also open The Forgiveness of Blood, an Albanian film from an American director (Joshua Marston, who also went abroad to make Maria Full of Grace) about a murder that turns into a blood feud.
  
  Aside from Friends with Kids, they've got a couple other movies with more mainstream appeal. Being Flynn also opens at Boston Common; it features Paul Dano as a man whose father (Robert De Niro) unexpectedly re-enters his live. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, in which Ewan MacGregor and Emily Blunt fall in love while trying to introduce a sport (and species) to a country whose environment rahter inhospitable, will almost certainly play in the multiplexes considering how many times the trailer has played everywhere over the last few months, but for now is just at Kendall Square and their sister cinema in Waltham's Embassy Square.
  
  Speaking of the Embassy, they are the only theater in the area playing Ralph Fienne's adaptation of Coriolanus, a modernized take with a screenplay by John Logan and a cast that includes Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Chastain, and Brian Cox. There's a poster or two up elsewhere, but if you want to see this movie, you may want to take the 70 bus out there.



• The Brattle has Battle Royale back this week, playing one more week of late shows in advance of it finally hitting legitimate US video and the American remake coming out. (Wait, you say The Hunger Games isn't a remake? Huh.)
  
  The things playing earlier that 9:30 are sort of mixed and matched, starting with a Film Noir Weekend: Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place play as a double feature on Friday and Saturday; The Lady from Shanghai and The Postman Always Rings Twice are the twin bill on Sunday and Monday. The Balagan show on Tuesday is A Visit from Bruce Bickford, with the stop-motion animator presenting a 90-minute program of his clay work in person. The week is finished out with two French-language films as part of Francophone Week - Switzerland's La Petite Chambre on Wednesday and Quebec's Starbuck on Thursday.



• ArtsEmerson wraps up "Portraits of New Orleans" with three screenings of Trouble the Water (Friday and Saturday), a documentary on Hurricane Katrina constructed from the home movies of someone who started shooting herself just before the storm began. The "Gotta Dance" screening on Saturday and Sunday afternoons is Kid Millions, an Eddie Cantor-starrer in which a young Brooklynite has misadventures claiming an inherited fortune; it's notable for switching from black and white to Technicolor for the big finale. And the "Crazie Cult Classics" screening on Saturday night is The Intruder, with Professor Eric Schaefer introducing a 1962 Roger Corman film that stars William Shatner as a provocateur looking to whip up unrest about school integration.



• The MFA kicks off their "Friday Night Films" series on the 9th with Such Hawks, Such Hounds, a documentary on "the American hard rock underground". It starts at 7:45, but folks who arrive at the museum by 7pm will be treated to a set by Zozobra beforehand. The other documentary playing that weekend is also musical, with A Drummer's Dream playing at various times on Friday through Sunday. The Saturday afternoon screening will also feature live performance afterward, along with a Q&A and a raffle for a cymbal set.
  
  Sunday afternoon features the full four-hour-plus Cleopatra, and when they start showing films again on Wednesday, it's a New Latin American Cinema program, with Argentina's The Prize on Wednesday and Colombia's animated Fat, Bald, Short Man on Thursday.



• The Harvard Film Archive begins The Melancholy Worlds of Béla Tarr this weekend; it will run through the 25th. The series opens with Tarr's latest (and, allegedly, last), The Turin Horse running at 7pm on Friday and Sunday evenings; also featured will be Damnation (Saturday at 7pm), The Outsider (Saturday at 9:15pm), The Prefab People (Sunday at 4:30pm), and Family Nest (Monday at 7pm).



• The Hindi movie opening at Fresh Pond this weekend is Kahaani, a thriller starring Vidya Balan as a pregnant woman from Londan searching Kolkata for her missing husband - who may or may not exist.



• And in second-run-shuffling action, the Somerville Theatre picks up both The Secret World of Arietty and A Dangerous Method as they leave Kendall Square, with The Iron Lady and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy both making their way to the Arlington Capitol.

My plans? Maybe some of the Brattle noirs, The Intruder, and Silent House. Maybe try to make it to the furniture store to see Mars on the giant screen. And if I wind up working from home, maybe catch Coriolanus (the Embassy used to be on my way home, but now I haven't been there in at least a year). Maybe Starbuck, as I tend to get unnaturally curious about movies when I see posters for them all over Montreal during my annual Fantasia visit.

Ai (Love)

I see that this is getting another week at Boston Common with a full slate of shows, which I suspect means it's doing pretty well for China Lion. My completely unscientific reading of the crowd has it as pretty good - even for three weeks after the movie opened in the Far East, where the bootlegging is fast and not stigmatized at all - leading to the secondary conclusion that Chinese people really dig Jason Statham's co-star in The Transporter.

Shu Qi is a great big star in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, right? It certainly seems to me like she is, but it's not like I've got a huge sample size to work with here. She should be, at least - she's crazy beautiful and acquits herself well on screen. And she's only drunk for one brief scene this time! Of course, I suppose China Lion might be choosing to bring movies with her over because she was in The Transporter and therefore has something like ten times the marketability of other Chinese actresses - I mean, Fan Bingbing is pretty too, but what do you put in parentheses after her name to remind American audiences where they've seen her before?

It's worth noting that China Lion seems to have made their release patterns a bit more flexible - previously, it seems as if things would open sort-of nationally and never really expand, whereas both The Viral Factor and Love have opened in new markets after playing others. It also seems like they're going to be doing it less blind than they were - there have been a few tweets from their account lately asking what people think of trailers, maybe trying to get a handle on what will play well and what won't before setting the schedule.

Ai (Love)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DLP)

Love is exactly the sort of movie that gets released for Valentine's Day, which is when it showed up in Taiwan and a few larger American cities. It's not a classic romance, but it sets the mood well, being full of good-looking people whose intersecting stories are fairly likely to work out in the end.

It opens with a positive pregnancy test for Taiwanese student Li Yijia (Chen Yi-han) and a tryst between mid-level executive Mark Na ("Mark" Zhao Youting) and his boss's famous-for-being-famous girlfriend Zoe Fang (Shu Qi) that Mark backs out from. From there, the three go their separate directions: Mark goes to look at a house in Beijing, where realtor Jin Xia-Ye (Zhao Wei) gets him into a couple of sticky situations; Yijia breaks the news to Kai (Eddie Peng), the boyfriend of her best friend Ni (Amber Kuo); and a fight with her boyfriend Lu (Doze Niu Chen-zer) leads to Zoe meeting up with Kuan (Juan Ching-tien), who is considerate and hard-working, even if he does have a bad stammer.

Kuan also happens to be Yijia's brother, and there are other connections between the various characters that actually make it a little odd that the Yijia/Kai/Ni and Zoe/Kuan/Lu stories aren't tied together even more closely than they are. It still makes the Mark/Ye thread seem comparatively isolated story-wise as well as geographically, though a closer connection might be a little more coincidence than the audience can take. The individual stories each have an issue or two - much of the second half of Ye's and Mark's is built on a silly and needlessly maintained lie, for instance, while Yijia, Kai, and Ni don't really do or say very much to resolve their situation - but the stories are big enough to matter but not really enough to carry a feature on their own.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 27 February 2012 - 4 March 2012

I'm going to try and keep this quick, in large part because most of what's on it is going to be getting its own review as well, and who really needs to write about things twice?



In some ways, seeing this particular line-up this was was the result of poor planning; I thought Japanese class started up again on Saturday, so I rushed out of the house and through the rain to get there only to realize that it was starting on the 10th. That did give me time to fit in a couple of things I would have had to find a space for later in the week, but I might have preferred to do it without being so rushed. I also was strongly considering a day-trip to NYC to see the new movie by Makoto Shinkai at the New York Children's International Film Festival, but that sold out before I stopped dithering. If it doesn't play Fantasia, I'll be kicking myself hard.

Plus, rejoice! The Red Line has been shut down between Harvard Square and Alewife during weekends for the last few months, but re-opens this Saturday. I missed a few minutes of You Only Live Twice on Sunday because the shuttle buses are much slower. I think I still might have been late anyway, unless I ducked out of Tyrannosaur while the credits were still running, but it's tremendously frustrating to watch the clock at the front of the bus tick past your movie's start time while stuck in traffic.

Hugo

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2012 in the Arlington Capitol #1 (second-run, Real-D)

There's no reason to go over Hugo's many virtues here again; I gushed over it last December, and my feelings about it have not changed that much in the interim. It's a charming little film that doesn't just gush with love of the movies but is also a really fun kids' mystery. It uses 3D extremely well, too.

It's also really fun to see a movie in theaters and then arrive home and find the Blu-ray waiting for you. The movie being an Oscar contender (and eventual winner, though The Artist took most of the marquee categories) did a nice job of extending its run and having it re-open on a few screens in the run-up to the awards. It will be interesting to see how long it sticks around the smaller 3D rooms, since the movie looks really good in that format and most of us don't have a 3D television to watch it on. Seeing a movie in the theater three times during its initial release is pretty rare for me, but who knows when I'll have another chance to see it like this?

Ai (Love)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DLP)

Not exactly the movie I thought it was going to be - there have been two different movies whose name translates to Love over the last few years, one an anthology and this one a set of three overlapping tales. This one's got Shu Qi, though, and there's not a much more pleasant surprise than sitting down for a movie and seeing her face appear.

The cast is, in general, pretty good - an attractive group that has chemistry enough to make up for some of the deficiencies in the screenplay. It's not really a bad story, but two of its three pieces overlap too much to be as separate as they are, and there's one pairing that perhaps doesn't really deliver the audience to its ending. It's a pleasant enough group of stories, though, and I suspect that each storyline is kind of a tweener - not really big enough to become a feature of its own but needing a little more room than it gets here.

Kill List

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run/IFFBoston Presents, 35mm)

You think you're pretty hip to certain genre conventions, and you even go years talking about this sort of movie without looking like some sort of ignorant goof, and then it suddenly seems like this thing is all over the place. I'm not going to say what "this thing" is, but it plays into Kill List's final act big-time, and I kind of suspect that it's something native English people are much more likely to get than me.

Potentially peculiar ending aside, Kill List is the new movie by Ben Wheatley, last seen on the festival circuit with Down Terrace, and it's immediately clear that it shares a lot of DNA with that movie. It sits squarely in the Venn Diagram intersection between "crime" and "yelling family" movies, with what seems like a decided slant toward the latter at first. And as a portrait of a volatile marriage and family, it's pretty fantastic; I could watch a lot of Neil Maskell and MyAnna Buring as a young married couple fighting over the lack of income and such even if they never did reveal that Maskell's Jay was a hired gun. And then if the new job with Michael Smiley's Gal didn't...

Ah, but that would be telling. Let me just say that, even though I personally could have used more detail there, I like Wheatley's commitment to an unusual story, and he doesn't spring the late twists completely out of nowhere. I do think the finale comes off as a little ____-for-the-sake-of-being-____, although, again, that may just be my relative ignorance.

We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, 35mm)

I'm not sure whether Habemus Papam is built with people like me in mind or if I'm a part of the audience that really doesn't matter. It is, after all, a movie about the Catholic Church, and I'm so non-religious I refer to myself as not being superstitious. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in some of what the movie has to say - indeed, I'm kind of fascinated by the idea of how a large, singular organization with a unique structure works - I just might be inclined to see it in a way that filmmaker Nanni Moretti may not intend.

To give it its due, it starts out with the right actor in the middle of a pretty fantastic hook - Michel Piccoli plays Father Melville, a long-serving Cardinal who is elected Pope, but just as he is about to be announced, he has a panic attack, leaving the Church utterly flummoxed about what to do next. Early on, Moretti does an excellent job of nailing both the satirical possibilities of the situation and a respect for Melville's faith and how that puts him in crisis. The finale picks up on the latter in a way that demands further exploration.

In between, though, he loses his way badly. The situation within the Vatican goes from absurd but incisive to just silly and tiresome, while Melville's personal odyssey seems clear enough in intention without really having the detail and big moments to give it weight. It's easy to lose patience and wish Moretti would get back to making his point more directly, because the idea and star deserve much better execution.

Tyrannosaur

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in the Museum of Fine Arts Alfond Auditorium (Special Engagement, 35mm)

This one is going to get paired with Kill List for review for a number of reasons - there's a lot of the same companies behind them and other similarities, not the least of which is an opening that spews rage and a jaw-dropping finale. It's an unfair pairing in that they are different genres looking to do very things; so saying I like this one even more kind of doesn't matter.

It's an impressive, flattening feature, though; Paddy Considine does an excellent job in his first feature behind the camera. In front of the camera, Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman are excellent as the tormented widower and traumatized woman he connects with. They've apparently played these characters before, in Considine's short "Dog Altogether", and it's impressive how nothing feels inorganic - every single horrible thing that happens moves the story forward, and it's not just empty suffering - the finale, while matching the tone of the rest of the movie thoroughly, offers more than just a crescendo of misery

Impressive. I've liked Considine as an actor since In America, and now can't wait to see what else he's going to do behind the camera, as well.

James Bond Weekend: From Dr. No to On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Not a huge amount to say here other than that the weekend practically living at the Somerville Theatre was a genuine delight. I don't know if the folks who run that place get the credit they deserve for having the lowest prices of any theater on a subway line (both for tickets and concessions) in the Boston area, high quality projection overseen by an obsessed lunatic who knows making film look good backwards and forwards, and a schedule which supplements a relatively recent move to first-run features with quality repatory and festival programming.

Of the six prints, only Dr. No looked kind of beat up; the others were quite good-looking and the three "flat" prints (Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger) each started with a United Artists cartoon. The crowds were good, and there was plenty of applause when manager Ian Judge announced that, yes, they were planning to do more of these later in the year, probably in the fall to lead up to the opening of Skyfall in November.

And, without further ado, the movies:

Dr. No

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

The thing that's kind of striking about Dr. No is how, as the first James Bond movie, a lot of stuff hasn't gelled yet. There's no Q Division yet, for instance, and in a way, that makes the balance between certain elements very different: Bond is more human here - he doesn't just get knocked unconscious to revive exactly where he needs to be for a villain to exposit at him, but he gets beat up. By the end of the movie his clothes are shredded, a great many hairs are out of place, and he's never the unflappable 007 we've come to know since (witness how he goes to town crushing a tarantula with his shoe; dude does not like arachnids). He crawls through vents like John McClane in Die Hard, all sweat and clenched teeth.

So he's just a very good MI-6 agent, not yet a super-spy, which means that when he and Honey Ryder get past Dr. No's decontamination process and into the secret base which is staffed like a luxury hotel, the situation is rather surreal. Bond's a fantasy figure, but the audience still identifies with him, and suddenly his life isn't just dangerous, but weird. That's also when we first hear of SPECTRE, as opposed to this simply being a Chinese plot - which I believe is a change made for the movies; if I remember correctly, SPECTRE really only figured in three of the books (a trilogy formed by Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice).

As an aside, Honey Ryder is unusually incidental to the plot; for as much as Bond Girls are traditionally eye-candy, it's rare for them to just be folks in the wrong place at the wrong time and fill a bikini well. It's a relatively small thing, but it shows how the formula is not really in place yet. And in a lot of ways, that's for the best, there are scenes in Dr. No that are more tense than usual for their realism and others that are stranger than expected despite likely not looking out of place in later Connery/Moore Bond films.

From Russia with Love

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

From Russia With Love has always been one of my favorite Bond films, and that's in part because I somehow got it in my head that it was a realistic spy movie. It's not, of course, although it comes closer to it than many in the series. The plot's smaller in scale, and the deceptions are a lot closer to the chess game used as an obvious but fitting metaphor in the beginning. You've still got SPECTRE in the middle, of course, and the occasional goofiness of MI-6's Istanbul station.

And, of course, there's the whole bit with the Romany camp, where "settling things the gypsy way" means "no holds barred catfight". The franchise's attitudes toward women are still thoroughly rooted in male fantasies and fears, with naive beauty Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) one one side and nasty lesbian Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) on the other. Romanova is plenty likable, though, and there's just enough chance she'll stay a double agent to keep things interesting toward the end.

The movie is still one of the best of the series, even if it's not quite the one I remember. It is really an excellent little chase film in the second half as Tatiana and 007 discover that their escape plans have been thwarted and have to get to Western Europe without being killed. The supporting characters are fun, and there's just enough intrigue to make it feel like we're watching a more cerebral spy movie than the action picture we're actually getting.

Goldfinger

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

Man, you shouldn't drop pop-culture references in your movies unless you know they'll hold up. Early on in Goldfinger, Bond dismisses something by saying he'd "rather listen to the Beatles without earmuffs". At the time, it probably made made him seem refined, a symphony-and-opera type. Now, he's totally square.

I wouldn't go nearly as far to snarkily comment on Goldfinger as Bond would on the Beatles, but, wow, does it have some fundamental problems that are hidden by its iconography. For example, Bond spends the entire movie being really terrible at his job as a covert operative - instead of observing Goldfinger, he decides to be a smirking jackass, which basically results in some poor family losing both of its daughters. His method of investigation is to show up, announce himself, and then get knocked unconscious and brought closer to the center of the villains' web but somehow not killed outright. And he pretty much stumbles through the last act uselessly, until he gets very lucky.

Despite all this, it's still a fun, memorable entry in the series. It gives us Gert Frobe as Auric Goldfinger, Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore, Harold Sakata as Oddjob, and Shirley Eaton painted gold as the doomed Jill Masterson. It's got one of the greatest lines in movie history, and Frobe seems to know that he's got a moment that will be remembered for a long time as it's coming out of his mouth. Sure, it's where the seeds are lain for the franchise to start getting really silly, but what does work and what is at the very least memorable is more than good enough to make up for the things that would get a new screenplay torn apart.

Thunderball

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

Thunderball is not quite so well-remembered as Goldfinger, in part because it led to Never Say Never Again and a weird legal battle which almost led to competing James Bond franchises in the 1990s (one of which would have had Liam Neeson as Bond), and in part because it does tend to lean rather heavily on the underwater stuff. The stuff with Kevin McClory isn't really its fault, although some of the other issues can be a little much.

It is, however, a whole lot of fun. Unlike a lot of Bond movies, especially later ones, the story here is less high-concept than execution - even in 1965, I suspect that terrorists stealing a nuclear weapon and attempting to hold the world hostage had been done a few times, but the details are a blast, from landing a bomber on the ocean floor (after a clever hijacking) to the final battle, which is one of the series' greatest. I strongly suspect that the underwater filming helped it a lot, in that the precision necessary results in clearer action, with less speeding up, extreme close-ups, quick cutting, and shaky camera work. You can see everything that's going on here clearly, and because underwater action is almost by definition a knife fight, it's vicious, mean stuff, which totally works for it.

There are issues, sure. Once the bombs are stolen, the movie does seem to be killing time until that finale, and while I dig the way these old Bond movies have a good deal of travelogue to them, the chase through the parade in the Bahamas seems kind of obligatory here. It's still fun, and was probably more so in the mid-sixties when there was no HDTV (heck, no color TV in many households), and this sort of movie was the closest a lot of people could get to world travel.

You Only Live Twice

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

I came in a bit late for this one (I can't wait for the Red Line to run all the way to Alewife on the weekends again!), so I missed the opening gambit, theme song, and a few minutes of the "real" start of the movie. Still, I liked what I got quite a bit. It's enjoyably grandiose, hitting a sweet spot midway between Thunderball's commitment to the basics and Goldfinger's enthusiastic silliness.

The plot is on the goofy side - SPECTRE has the resources for their own space program, including a base in a hollowed-out volcano, but don't want to strike at the US or USSR directly, instead snatching spacecraft from orbit to get the superpowers to declare war on each other. And the second half requires Bond to "become a Japanese man" in order to train as a ninja in less than a week. It could be worse, though - one of the things I remember about the book is that Bond was astounded by how the ninjas could take so many blows to the groin, to be told that ninjas can retract their "equipment". Kind of glad we got body-hair jokes instead.

It's a nifty-looking movie - the location shooting of Japan is very nice indeed, and while the sets for the underground lair look kind of dated now, they're enjoyably big and elaborate. So is the action; there very seldom feels like anything is being held back, and while it may be a little more chuckle-worthy than usual at times, the movie does go for it more often than not, and that makes it a lot of fun.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

There's a really good argument to be made that On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the best of the Bond movies. It's a little rough getting started - George Lazenby has a little trouble fitting into the part at times, although to be totally honest, Connery never really seemed to own the bon vivant aspects of the part either. This one's got the usual bunch of good action scenes (the ski work, especially, is tremendous) and over-the-top plot, but what it's also got are rare examples of the heroes and villains being genuinely motivated and interesting. Lots of Bond films have suspense; this one's actually got an emotional hook, something the series arguably wouldn't really have again until Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.

A large part of that comes from Diana Rigg as Contessa Teresa "Tracy" Di Vicenzo. She's one of the few Bond Girls to really be created as a potential match for 007, coming across as just as smart, adventurous, classy, and physical as he is. She's also fragile from the start, and that changes things; both the audience and Bond know that, unlike most of the women in this series, she can't be used and discarded; it would destroy her, and while Bond is a rake, he's no cad. Rigg and Lazenby really are great together and separately, with Tracy's brittle pride healing itself while Lazenby makes Connery's character his own by the time the movie is out while still keeping him recognizably Bond.

Sometime, I'd love to talk to people who saw OHMSS in 1969 without having read the book (or maybe having done so, considering that the adaptations were often quite loose). Watching it in sequence after the first five Connery movies during this weekend points up both how good and risky it is, since it genuinely feels like a radical reinvention might be going on. Given the way we meet Tracy and how she clearly becomes more than a dalliance, we know the formula is going to be broken somewhat early. But there's sharpness in other places - the relationship between Bond and M is less convivial, for instance. And the familiar Monty Norman James Bond theme doesn't appear until very late - it's like a concerted effort to give Lazenby's Bond his own feel. When that theme does re-appear, it's connected to Tracy just as much as Bond, like a signal that from then on in the series, she's going to be important.

Obviously, that doesn't happen, and the series soon returns to normal, arguably not getting under Bond's skin again until License to Kill and the recent Casino Royale reboot. Even if you don't think that has any part in a Bond movie, though, this one is done well, with pretty great action, a jaunty wit, and some somewhat creepy elements to its broad story. Meeting (and believing) the love of James Bond's life is the icing on the cake.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 2 March 2012 - 8 March 2012

Not much opening in the multiplexes, but some really fun stuff in the smaller places.

• I just spent 24 hours straight in the Somerville Theatre a couple weeks ago; what prompts me to camp out there again? James Bond Weekend - they'll be showing the first six Bond movies on their big screen from 35mm prints. You've got Dr. No and From Russia with Love on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon; Goldfinger and Thunderball on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon; and You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service Sunday evening. $10 a pop or $40 for a weekend pass.



• Over at the Brattle, they've got a special engagement of a new British thriller, Kill List. It's by the guy who did Down Terrace (at IFFBoston a couple of years ago; they co-present this run), which was pretty darn nifty, and I've been told that one is best off going in cold. No trailers, no reading reviews, no learning what director Ben Wheatley has up his sleeve.
  
  They've got a couple other special programs this week, as well. Sunday at 1pm, they'll be showing Central Square Detective Agency, a creation of the Charles River Swimming and Diving Team. It's a series of comedy/noir shorts; the first two have been running on local access TV and online; the full set of three will be showing at the Brattle. Folks will be there in person. No guests are scheduled for the DocYard's presentation of Bombay Beach on Monday at 8pm, a documentary on three people living in California's Salton Sea by noted photographer Alma Har'el featuring music by Beirut and Bob Dylan.



• If you want to see a couple of the movies nominated for the less-prominent Oscars before the broadcast... Oh. Well, if you want to see a couple of the movies nominated for the less-prominent Oscars after the broadcast, Kendall Square is still running A Separation and both the live-action and animated shorts, but they also pick up In Darkness and Chico & Rita this weekend. The former is Poland's nomination for Foreign Language Film, and tells the story of a thief during World War II and the dozen Jewish refugees he hid in the Lvov city sewers. The latter is an animated love story and musical about two musicians whose paths cross in Havana, New York, and beyond.
  
  Also opening: Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie. In it, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job get a billion dollars to make the greatest movie ever and blow it on other things. Apparently it's run for five years on Adult Swim, so they've got their fans.



• Over at the multiplexes, likely the biggest opening is The Lorax, an adaptation of Dr. Seuss's children's book that looks spiffy from the trailers but seems to have a lot of new characters and storylines bolted onto it's simple environmental message. It's running in both 2D and 3D at the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including the Imax-branded screen), and Fenway (including the RPX screen); 3D-only at Harvard Square. The furniture stores give it a pass, though.
  
  For the older kids, there's Project X, which is not a remake of the 1987 flick about chimps mistreated by the air force, but a comedy about a house party that balloons completely out of control. It's loosely based on a true story, apparently.
  
  And two-plus weeks after its Valentine's Day debut in New York and L.A., Love opens up in Boston Common. More disambiguation: This is not the meticulously built sci-fi movie by Angels & Airwaves, but an anthology film from Taiwan with four filmmakers each telling a different kind of love story.



• The Coolidge shuffles some movies around, opening A Separation and Pina in the screening rooms (A Separation has some screenings in Theater #2 as well, but I don't know if they're 35mm). Pina is in 2D here, though it's still hanging on for a few 3D showings at Boston Common. They've also got a few screenings as part of their Coolidge Award ceremonies for Viggo Mortensen, although the Lord of the Rings marathon on Sunday and award presentation on Monday are sold out (a screening of Eastern Promises at noon on Monday with post-movie Q&A still has seats available).
  
  There are other goodies, too. Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain screens Friday and Saturday at midnight on 35mm, and is as trippy as a very trippy thing. Saturday at midnight, there's the premiere of the first two episodes of web-series Super-Townie, along with some connected short films; creators Paul M McAlarney and Greg LaVoie will attempt to explain themselves afterward. The Talk Cinema screening on Sunday morning is We Have a Pope, which examines the process of papal succession, focusing on the relationship between a hypothetical new Pope and his psychologist. Tuesday night features a preview of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, for which members can RSVP ahead of time.



• Three very different-looking films play this weekend at the MFA: Tyrannosaur, the fierce directorial debut of actor Paddy Considine; a new 35mm print of Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert; and Stitched, a documentary on quilters rushing to complete their entries in America's largest quilt show. Apparently competitive quilting is a thing. Tyrannosaur has one final show on Thursday the 8th, although a few different movies are added to the mix on Wednesday the 7th: A new print of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's epic Cleopatra and the documentary A Drummer's Dream.



• Over at the Harvard Film Archive, they are awarding the Geneviève McMillan Award (for a Francophone filmmaker from Africa or of African heritage) to Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, who will be present for several screenings: Smuggler's Songs on Friday, Adhen on Saturday, and Back Home on Sunday. All those are at 7pm; he's not scheduled to appear at the screening of Wesh Wesh Sunday at 5pm.
  
  On Monday the 5th, Ernie Gehr will make his first of two visits to the Archive this month, presenting An Evening of Early Cinema from his collection of 16mm prints. No film is fewer than 100 years old, and while most are very short, the centerpiece is George Méliès's "The Impossible Voyage", which should interest the folks who've seen Hugo over the last few months. There is also a free screening of Deepa Mehta's Water at 2pm on Saturday.



• ArtsEmerson features a Portraits of New Orleans series this month, as a tie-in with their upcoming main-stage show Ameriville. It kicks off on Friday with Les Blank's 1978 documentary Always for Pleasure, double-billed with featuertte "The Florentine Collection", which Paul Gailiunas completed after his wife Helen Hill's death. Friday and Saturday also feature Tootie's Last Suit, a documentary on the Mardi Gras Indians in general and Allison "Tootie" Montana (who made impressive costumes for the festival) in particular.
  
  "Gotta Dance" also continues with Saturday and Sunday showings of Footlight Parade, a Warner Brothers backstage musical from 1933 featuring James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, and Ruby Keeler. Lloyd Bacon directs, Bubs Berkeley choreographs, and there's pre-Code spiciness!



• The Museum of Science is offering Free Film Fridays to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their OMNIMAX theater, which includes both free admission to giant-screen movies every Friday this month and a revival of "New England Time Capsule", a pre-show feature with narration by Leonard Nimoy and music by John Williams that was originally shown on that screen back in 1987.



• The Regent Theatre has one screening this week, Bicycle Dreams on Tuesday the 6th. It documents the Race Across America, one of the most grueling races in the world, if not the toughest.

My plans? I'm going to try and hit Bond, Tyrannosaur, and We Have a Pope. Anything else is a bonus.

These Weeks In Tickets: 13 February 2012 - 26 February 2012

As I mentioned last week - festivals throw the entire schedule off. But, it's not like seeing a bunch of good movies is exactly a bad thing!



So, as you can see, the science fiction film festival ate the entire week, with the marathon at the end an exclamation point. Overall, pretty good, although it was a bit of a disappointment that we were back in the micro-cinema after being on real screens last year (and having only four films playing at the theater all week) for all but the marathon and, oddly, The Golden Age of Science Fiction, when I suspect we were only sitting in screen #2 because there's a regular improv thing in the tiny room on Thursday.

The programming has improved in quantity this year, although the quality control could definitely use some work. I used the "crap" tag a lot more than I would have liked on the blog over the last couple of weeks, and I chalk this up to festival honcho Garen Daly wanting premieres. He's been rather more free with that word than he should be at times - this year, claiming Endhiran as an "East Coast Premiere" even though it played Cambridge for a month back in 2010, which frustrates me because one can check this stuff so easily - but I don't think any of the festival films were mislabeled this year. A large chunk of them just weren't very good.

Now, it's not that I don't see the value in having premieres, but it was odd to see Garen bragging about them toward the end of the week, when those of us in the audience had been saying that in a couple of weeks, nobody would care about which movies were having world premieres, but which ones were good. I have no idea whether The Last Push played elsewhere, but it's the one from the festival I'll be recommending. I think both the fest's long-term reputation and short term attendance would be helped if the lesser premieres were replaced with sci-fi stuff from Fantasia/Fantastic Fest/Sundance. Heck, I'll mail folks a program which includes contact information if they want it next year.

On the balance, though, it was a fun week, with more good than bad. The full program is a step forward, some of the premieres and other movies were pretty good, and having non-local guests on most days was pretty impressive. Here's hoping it grows for next year.



Believe it or not, I wasn't really movie-d out after the festival and marathon; I just had a couple of days at work where things are quiet all day until a bunch of stuff lands on my desk at 4pm, and getting to a 7pm show in Cambridge or Brookline from Burlington via public transportation impossible. Arietty really should have been seen on Tuesday (and, yeah, they gave me the wrong ticket on Saturday; oops). Plus, one of the movies I really wanted to see, Declaration of War, was only playing 4pm and 9:30pm, even in its first week. That 9:25 movie is a tough one to get out the door for if it's not the tail end of a double feature.

I'll be writing up Whit Stillman's first couple of movies in the next couple of days, maybe even pulling out the Last Days of Disco DVD to finish the set. He was at the Harvard Film Archive for the weekend, including a preview of his first movie in fifteen years, Damsels in Distress. That sold out, with me at the front of the line when it happened. The very front. Kind of disappointing, that.

So I went and saw The Phantom Menace in 3D instead. Don't judge me.

Metropolitan

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2012 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Discreet Charm of Whit Stillman, 35mm)

Baby-faced Chris Eigeman freaks me out; the man just doesn't look right to me.

Metropolitan is the sort of movie I'm inclined to dislike, full of privileged young people who talk a lot but don't do very much, but it works very well. This is in large part because Whit Stillman is very good at putting words in his characters' mouths; from the very first scene, it's clear that these are chatty folks, but also funny ones, and Stillman is able to have just the right amount of detachment: He's aware of how ridiculous these kids are, but he doesn't hoard it, instead giving the cast just enough self-awareness to not be hopeless cases but not be self-loathing.

It turns out to be a pretty nice little coming of age piece, with Stillman deftly narrowing the cast down to the most self-analytical characters and then confronting them with the need to actually do things. What sets Metropolitan apart is that he always does it in a funny, natural way; it's the sort of careful, clear writing where Tom's preference for "good literary criticism" to actual literature is is a clever metaphor until sitting down to write/think about it - and one which fits the present pretty perfectly.

Not bad for a movie made twenty-odd years ago and set in the 1970s. Metropolitan may seem a bit cobbled-together now, but it's surprisingly skilled and resilient.

The Secret World of Arrietty (Kari-gurashi no Arietti)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2012 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run, 35mm, US dub)

This doesn't really apply to the Coolidge, but if Boston Common is playing this digitally, why isn't, say, the 10pm show presented subtitled? Even if it's not the same as choosing different audio and titles on a DVD, a second hard drive wouldn't be as tough to wrangle as a second print. The icing on the cake is that the UK has a more promising dub than the US, with Saoirse Ronan voicing the title character rather than Disney Channel kid Bridgit Mendler. (I imagine it would still sound wrong; the first "nnh!" grunt from a kid is a reminder that that this movie wasn't made for English.)

That aside, Arrietty is pretty darn good. Hayao Miyazaki doesn't direct personally - Ghibli animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi makes a fine debut. but plans and writes the screenplay, and it reminds me of Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro in a lot of pleasant ways. It's relatively quiet and restrained compared to what other filmmakers might do, but very smart: Shawn/Shou and Arrietty are never presented romantically, but even with few scenes together, their attraction makes sense. Arrietty is reaching an age when she needs more than her family, while Shawn needs to be seen as capable - a man - rather than sickly. There's also an intriguing duality to the usual environmental message: The "Borrowers" fear extinction at the hands of man, but turning away from technology leads to a life like wild boy Spiller's, which they don't seem to want.

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2012 in the AMC Boston Common #15 (3D re-release, Real-D)

As much as the 3D in the re-release disappoints, it was a surprising pleasure to see this one again and realize that for all the attention that its faults get, the things that George Lucas does really well should get a lot more mention. There's probably nobody better at big sci-fi action than he is, the machinations of the villain are fascinating to watch, and he's committed to having something cool on-screen as much as possible. It's a fairly self-contained story and also the start of a trilogy which will grow with its main character from kids' adventure to something darker, and plants the seeds well.

Yes, it's the weakest of the six movies. It's still got terrific action, a great score, and good work from Liam Neeson, Pernilla August, and especially Ian McDiarmid. Lesser >Star Wars is still better than most other fantasy action movies being made.

Barcelona

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2012 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Discreet Charm of Whit Stillman, 35mm)

I liked Metropolitan quite a bit, but Barcelona may be a notch better for being more active and focused on a smaller group of characters. It's just as absurd at points but less arch about it, which lets Stillman build a disaster out of things that seem too strange or tiny to matter, even given what we see in the beginning.

It's not perfect - I never quite believe in Fred's attraction to Montserrat beyond "well, obviously" - but it's a light, zippy movie that shows Stillman losing none of his distinct voice and ability to get at the heart of characters despite their tendency toward circumlocution, and the extra polish makes it even more enjoyable.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival Daily, 2012.10-11 (19-20 February): The Marathon

You get early admission to the marathon with the festival pass, and apparently that's what most people by them for - when some of the fest's later shows were sold out, Garen said that technically all of them were, because they sold many more passes than the micro-cinema could hold. That's crazy talk to me - I got there at about 11:50, found a seat that was OK in the balcony, and didn't hang around in the cold waiting for doors to open. Maybe if I were the type that arrived with a large group of friends and a picnic basket and other stuff that I felt the need to spread out, it would be different.

Part of why I was so close to late was because I decided to do a diary thing (like I'd done for eFilmCritic in 2005 and 2006) and was looking for a cheap watch of some kind - so that I could note times without whipping out my bright phone - but I've got no idea where you'd find such things today. Not in CVS or the like. Maybe I should have tried Staples, but I don't know if they're even open on Sunday mornings. I wound up using the not-quite-satisfactory trick of keeping my phone inside my sleeve and hoping the screen was bright enough to show the time through the fabric but not quite so bright that it created light pollution. I'll be getting the cheap watch next time.

I do this not just for ready-made blog entries, but to keep somewhat active as the day stretches into night stretches into day. It doesn't always work (as you'll see around 2am or so), but it's fun. So without further ado...

11:48am - Major Tom appears on stage to lay down the ground rules. I idly wonder what he does with his Martian camouflage outfit the other 360+ days of the year. Fortunately, he's not instructing people on callbacks this year.

(I don't hate all the callbacks, but I say let them happen or evolve organically, rather than because people feel obliged.)

11:52am - I notice the guy in front of me has bought a noisy toy laser pistol in the lobby. I hope I won't have to "accidentally" break it.

11:55am - "Duck Dodgers" begins with the traditional popping of the Atomic Fireball, with a tribute to its inventor, who passed away this past year.

11:58am - I spit the fireball back into its plastic wrap and drop that into my trash bag. Really, those things are gross.

12:00pm - Time for the marathon to begin in earnest...

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

12:32pm - Ha! Li'l Caesar has a Statue of Liberty toy!

12:52pm - I get that the thing Caesar drew on the wall of his cell is his window from the house. Either the movie is clever or I am dense.

12:59pm - They've been calling the puzzle where you try and move a set of differently-sized discs from one spindle to the other "Lucas Towers" throughout the entire movie; I've always heard it called "Towers of Hammurabi". Is this some weird "Americans aren't cool with foreign names" thing, or has that always been a commonly-used alternate name?

1:13pm - Okay, this bit is really great, and I'm shocked that I only had it half-spoiled for me a week or so before the 'thon. It's an example of how smart the people involved are in handling the franchise, in that it feeds us a callback to the originals that is kind of obligatory and campy, but before we've really had time to laugh, drops another bomb. That's having fun and taking the material seriously, and precious few sequels/remakes/reboots do one right, let alone two at the same time.

1:17pm - Also, every bit mentioning the Mars mission makes me smile.

1:27pm - Did the CGI guys stick a "Donkey Kong Jr." reference into this? I swear, that ape climbing the Golden Gate Bridge by straddling two cables is trying to rescue his father from Mario.

1:40pm - So, that was really good, which is quite the pleasant surprise; I never really got into the original Apes pictures, but this one stands quite well on its own while calling back to the original with style.

Brainstorm

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

1:50pm - Wow, the lights went down for this early. With 24.5 hours of film to fit into 24, it looks like no time will be wasted. Also, for a movie made in 1983, this has some downright awesome, modern-looking credits.

1:54pm - Damnit, "Mark" is happening. I hate whoever started that at marathons past so much.

2:00pm - Some major product placement going on here - I think this shot of Christopher Walken going home exists just so he can pass sponsors' billboards.

2:13pm - I'm not sure if this is the first time in the movie that people have put on the helmets and had the images go from "flat" to full CinemaScope, but it makes me really wish (a) the Somerville's 70mm projection was ready and (b) 70mm prints of this were available. I bet that would be amazing.

Also, I wonder how these transitions are handled on video, because going to VR shouldn't make the image smaller.

2:21pm - Louise Fletcher is just awesome in this movie. Seriously, there's nothing not fantastic about her chain-smoking scientist. Meanwhile, Christopher Walken is making me doubt that he ever had a pre-self-parody phase.

2:25pm - Okay, moviegoers, I know we've had this talk before, but let's have it again. When there's a technical problem, don't yell "framing!" (or "focus!" or "sound!", as the case may be). If the projectionist can hear you, he knows about the problem and is trying to fix it. If not, you are annoying the guy next to you. Get out of your seat and tell an usher/manager rather than let the audience know you're annoyed.

2:40pm - (Squints at program) Yep, my parents would have let 10-year-old me see this back in 1983. Seriously, PG-rated nudity is great, just for that moment when your eyes go wide because the MPAA wouldn't have let that through.

2:59pm - The house in this movie is fantastic - it's got a river running through the living room and an observatory.

3:07pm - I didn't actually have a modem with acoustic couplers back in the 1980s, but I think they topped out at 300 bps. Go ahead, figure out how much faster the data on your phone is than that. What I'm saying is, you must have amazing compression to get immersive data through that pipe.

3:32pm - That's what you're ending it with, huh? Well, it's pretty.

A very cool movie; by a nifty coincidence, director Douglas Trumbull was recently honored by AMPAS for his contributions to special effects, and there's no doubt that he made the camera do some absolutely amazing things here. Highly recommended.

War of the Satellites

* * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

3:44pm - Ah, terrible Roger Corman special effects. Only consume in moderation.

3:58pm - "Applausewut?" That's what I wrote. I'm guessing we were applauding something silly.

4:23pm - "I'll die before joining a race that kills innocent people for abstract ideas!!" This movie was made in 1958, so there may be some Cold War irony here, but Vietnam was a ways off.

4:25pm - Not just a funeral - a space funeral

Overall, a silly Roger Corman feature notable for Dick Miller having a rare lead role and starlet Susan Cabot, who really was good/pretty enough to have a much better career than she had. Mercifully short, at least.

I think this is where I accidentally spilled my Sierra Mist into the popcorn bin. Sorry, good people at the Somerville Theatre.

Endhiran (The Robot)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

4:55pm - That animated credit for "Superstar Rajini" is a thing of awesome ego. Seriously, it's longer, louder, and more elaborate than the logos for either the production company or distributor.

5:00pm - The audience here is more into Aishwarya Rai than Rajinikanth. It's going to be very different from when I saw it with a mostly-Indian audience at Fresh Pond.

5:14pm - Huh, I could have sworn Rai didn't kiss on-screen. Scandal!

5:48pm - Isaac Asimov name-checked in the lyrics; audience cheers. That kind of crowd.

6:09pm - I'm just saying, if I had a girlfriend that looked like Aishwarya Rai, I would not give my android "hormone simulation" subroutines. No good can come of this.

6:34pm - Did she just "just a friend" the robot? Yes, she did. That's going to go well.

6:50pm - INNUENDO!: "You'll be a tree / I'll be a woodpecker ... nibble like a goat!"

(One of the sad things about not having many older movies in the festival as prints get harder to find is the lack of hilarious, obvious innuendo. Chaste Indian musicals are similar, but it's just not the same.)

7:00pm - It gets nuts. "Happy Diwali, folks!"

And from here on, I sort of just soaked up the insanity that is the last act of Endhiran. I must admit, it's a strikingly different experience with two different crowds - both times, the audience was rambunctious, but the intermission and the audience more used to Indian movies' rhythms meant the Fresh Pond crowd was more into it by the end. I think the marathoids just got worn out.

Having seen Dimensions (scheduled for a 7:50pm start time) roughly twenty-four hours earlier, I figured this was a good time to get some food. I'd heard good things about Christo's, so I headed down the street for a couple of slices. When I got back, at 8:15, the movie still hadn't started; getting picture and sound out of the DVD player was driving Dave The Projectionist nuts.

To fill some time (and make sure things didn't fall further behind later), the Alien Mating Cry contest got moved up to 8:25pm from 9:50pm. Now, understand, nobody likes the Alien Mating Cry contest - it was funny once, but there's not a whole lot of variation that can be brought to it year-to-year. Garen keeps doing it because he sees the chance for cheap, easy publicity - why, this year, we almost had NPR come to do a segment for their goofy competitions thing. Me, I have my doubts how many new people come because of a local news story on the silly noises people make to an indifferent audience.

Dimensions

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

8:36pm - It's started!

8:48pm - The folks who were there the previous night laugh a bit at something that the filmmakers pointed out but which many of us didn't catch.

9:08pm - I have no idea whether this bit about calling an apple an orange is meant to establish an alternate universe with different rules or show Stephen as eccentric. There's a lot of that in this movie.

9:45pm - Stephen really needs to be on the receiving end of the "you should pay attention to the actual living girl who likes you!" lecture.

9:50pm - Of course, Annie could do with hearing something similar about boys who will never put her first and notice how Conrad likes her more than his memories of Victoria.

Anyway, about as good as it had been the night before.

Attack the Block

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, video)

10:18pm - It's been there all day, but there's a really annoying draft in the balcony. At this hour, wind from outside is not welcome!

10:25pm - I am briefly terrified that someone in this movie is named "Mark". Fortunately, not the case.

10:40pm - I didn't really notice it the first time through, but the first act of this movie really establishes the setting in detail. There are maps, comments about making jumps from one walkway to another... Basically, every bit of geography that might come in useful during later action scenes.

11:43pm - "MOSES! MOSES!" It's funny how this movie has these conflicting themes of working together and protecting the tribe. Good movie, though.

Island of Lost Souls

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

11:52pm - First caffeine of the day, believe it or not!

11:55pm - "Take him to my room." INNUENDO! Take it where you can get it.

12:06am - Worst. Captain. Ever!

12:24am - This is where Star Trek writers learned about evolution, like it was a pre-programmed sequence heading for something.

12:55am - Uplift is just a bad idea, isn't it?

Not bad, although it's not really the best work either Charles Laughton or Bela Lugosi has done

1:05am - Tinfoil hat time. Just as silly as the Alien Mating Call one. Kind of surprised that one contestant didn't win off cleavage.

Scanners

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

1:16am - Cronenberg time!

1:22am - You know, it's it's such a rare thing to see Michael Ironside giving such a low-key perform--HOLY SHIT!

1:25am - That's why I don't drive: Cars just EXPLODE!

1:54am - I'm awake! Really, I am!

2:28am - I need me a giant 80s computer setup.

2:47am - OK, this is just awesomely gross. I miss creepy body-horror Cronenberg. I really hope his son has inherited this knack.

I can't really rate this one fairly; I zonked out at some point. Did you know this is out of print on DVD? I wound up buying a used one from Newbury Comics. Thus, we're almost certain to find out that the rights are now with Lionsgate and they're planning a deluxe Blu-ray release any day now.

Frankenstein (1931)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

3:00am - The warning from Carl Laemmle Jr.: "If any feel like you should not subject your nerves to such a strain..." "Dude, we just watched Scanners!"

3:26am - "It's ALIVE!"

3:31am - Applause for Karloff's entrance.

3:37am - Fritz is an evil f--- who gets what is coming to him.

3:50am - It's embarrassing, but as the villagers start chasing the Monster down, "Kill the Beast!" from Disney's Beauty and the Beast starts running through my head.

4:10am - "Puttin' on the Ritz" for in-between music.

Man, I love this movie, and the amazing thing is that every time I see it, it's like discovering it again for the first time.

Re-Animator

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

4:15am - I'm a bad nerd for never having really wanted to see this, aren't I?

4:43am - Kitty abuse

... and from here on out, it's "what'd I miss?" Here's another one I'll have to catch up with, because what I saw was a lot of fun, even though I generally don't like its mix of comedy and horror. A catch-up when it hits Blu-ray is a must.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

And I just stopped taking notes here. This is another one where the marathon's going to cost me money; I'm pretty sure that I saw this during its theatrical release, but both then and now I didn't know enough about the series to really get into it beyond "cool music and fight choreography". This is so slick, though, that I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to spring for the "Remix: Complete Collection" of the series on DVD and maybe the movie on Blu-ray after that.

Paul

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

Liked, but didn't quite love, this one when it hit theaters last spring, so I missed the beginning getting some breakfast (it was 7:30am-ish), vaguely remembering that it got better as it went on, and it absolutely did.

The crowd made a lot of difference. Seeing it in one of the lesser theaters in AMC Harvard Square, I had a lot of "is that really funny, or am I laughing just out of recognition?" moments, especially when the rest of the audience didn't join in. The same questions kind of come up here, but it doesn't matter, because everybody's laughing.

Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

Apparently, this pair of episodes from the original Battlestar Galactica series got edited together for a European theatrical release. It's... Well, honestly, it's better than I expected, without the casino-planet goofiness of last year's movie from the first two episodes. Not quite up to the heights of the newer series, but it kind of works.

Still, stripped of ads and edited to show up the action, it becomes clear pretty quickly that Universal did a few stock effects shots that got repeated throughout the series, and, wow, did we see them a lot.

Folklore

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, video)

It's kind of weird that I've been put in the position of defending this movie on the Festival Message Board, since I really didn't like it that much, and on the second time through, it didn't make quite the good impression that it did the first time. Even then, I couldn't help but notice that a lot of the laughs came from the same two loud ladies directly behind me.

Still, the audience hated this. Or at least, that's the way the herd seemed to go, and I sort of hope that it's a case where those of us who kind of liked it weren't as adamant in our opinions as the people who despised it. Its shortcomings really aren't short enough to deserve the venom people were hurling at it.


And with that, it was time to go home and try to stay awake long enough to get normal sleep for work the next day. Thing that really happened, though: I was writing something, had a nod-off/space-out moment, and looked up to see I had actually typed "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ". That's almost too good to be true, isn't it?

Anyway, a fun marathon, and here's hoping that the festival and thon are still going strong next year!

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival Daily, 2012.09 (18 February): Time Again and Dimensions

Have some Not-Quite-Horrible Photography:


Let me tell you, Antony Neely is a dedicated Scot: I'm not running around New England in a kilt as a joke for even one day, but he was rocking something similar the next evening at the Marathon. Sure, it probably gets you remembered, but I just have a hard time imagining packing my luggage and thinking "I should bring two of these!"

Antony Neely and Sloane U'Ren were pretty charming guests, folks who know their stuff and can speak with confidence compared to the first-time filmmakers that make up the bulk of this festival's visitors. They had plenty of stories, and were happy to discuss details with the audience.


One question I get a lot after film festivals, especially the likes of Fantasia or SXSW where I see a pretty massive amount of films in a short amount of time, is how I keep them straight. The truth is, most of the time it's not that hard - unless you go to festivals that are very narrow or just see the studio films at major festivals, these events are composed of movies that tend to stick out in a crowd. Indeed, things only really get difficult in cases like this day, when there's little flexibility built into the schedule and you find yourself having to write about the same sort of thing twice in a row.

In this case, it's time travel that doesn't quite "diagram". And because this involves talking about the ends of movies, I'll pick this up after the reviews & links to EFC.

Time Again

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre Micro-cinema (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, video)

It would be nice if Time Again were a little better. The filmmakers are trying so hard to make an entertaining movie, and at times they've got the right idea. Energy, enthusiasm, and good intentions can only take a movie so far, though, and this one could probably use a little more in the way of resources and experience.

Sam (Tara Smoker) and Marlo (Angela Rachelle) are sisters who live, work, and play together - although Sam is older and more responsible while Marlo is impetuous. And yet, it's Sam who disappears in the aftermath of a bloodbath at the diner where they work on her birthday. Six months later, a man with an office in the same building (Scott F. Evans) tries to have Marlo kidnapped because he thinks Sam stole something from him and now Marlo has it, though she's rescued by Detective Lym (John T. Woods). Things get really strange when an old woman (Gigi Perreau) shows up with a set of strange coins, somehow sending Marlo back in time to the day of the incident.

Director Ray Karwel knows what he wants to make here - a fun action movie which can be done with limited locations and budget, with a story simple enough for the audience to not have to worry about it but just enough twist to keep things interesting. On the larger scale, he gets the tone right more often than not. Things move fast enough to keep from getting dull, there's just enough irreverence for the tone to be breezy despite the real danger, with the silly, pulpy nature of the central plot device helping in that regard too. Karwel and his co-writers don't strive for more importance than the story can support, and that serves them well.


Full review at EFC.

Dimensions

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2012 in Somerville Theatre Micro-cinema (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, video)

As much as I found the festival describing Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads (to give it its full title) with "Imagine a sci-fi film on PBS' Masterpiece Theatre" to be a bit too glibly "X meets Y", there's no denying that it is a very proper little English period science fiction story. Though there may in fact be less to it than meets the eye, it's handsomely mounted enough to be a real pleasure.

We start in 1921 - "one of many", as a subtitle informs us - watching three children play: Stephen (Sam Harrison) and Conrad (George Thomas), cousins who are more like brothers and now living together, and Victoria (Hannah Carson), the next-door neighbor who is mutually smitten with Stephen. A strange old Professor (Patrick Godfrey) drops in on the garden party and delights them with talk of time travel and other dimensions, but that will, unfortunately, be what the week is remembered for fifteen years later. In 1936, Stephen (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) is still living with his mother (Camilla Rutherford); he's a brilliant theoretical physicist obsessed with building a time machine even though his theories suggest, with ninety-nine percent certainty, that changing the past is impossible. He's aided at first by Conrad (Sean Hart), with the pair later joined by Annie (Olivia Llewellyn), who attended one of Stephen's lectures and may perhaps have grown interested in more than just the structure of spacetime.

It's interesting that writer Antony Neely (through Stephen) implies not just a "many worlds" cosmology for Dimensions, but the extreme one where every possible binary decision is made both ways (perhaps even at the quantum level), because the implication is not just that you can't change the past, but that free will itself is an illusion. This is done early, and sets the tone for the rest of the movie - it won't be a story of the mechanics of getting a specific result; rather, it will be a story of paths that cannot be left - a tragedy of unavoidable obsession.


Full review at EFC.

From here on out, the ends of the movie will be discussed

When I talk about time travel films in particular not "diagramming", what I basically mean is that you can draw a flowchart of the movies' events and find clear paths of cause and effect for all characters. It may sound like a ridiculous, nerdy thing to worry about, but a post on whether or not a direct-to-video movie fits together or not likely has the most pageviews and comments of anything I've done on this blog.

Time Again has problems in the area. It seems, structurally, to be a "closed loop" sort of story, where the circumstances that cause a character to travel in time are the results of that character traveling in time. The Terminator, pre-sequels, is close to the platonic idea of this structure; David Gerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself" is it taken to its absurd extreme. If Time Again were a shorter movie, we could probably plot it something like this:

T+0. Marlo leaves Sam to get ready for the Vegas trip; remains off-screen until T+3.
T+1. Marlo from T+4 arrives to prevent Sam's death
T+2. Marlo and Sam leave the building, thus jumping forward to T+5. At this point, there is no Sam in the timeline.
T+3. Six months later, Marlo from T+0 is almost kidnapped by Mr. Way.
T+4. Sam from T+6 appears, gives Marlo the coin, and Marlo jumps to T+1.
T+5. Marlo and Sam return from T+2; final fight; old Sam leaves the building and jumps back to T+6
T+6. 45-ish years later, Sam jumps back to T+4, apparently comfortable waiting so long because she knows this is a closed loop and her jumping back is destiny.

That's actually kind of tight. The trouble is, there's not just a T+4; there's T+4.1 and T+4.2, with Marlo not getting things right the first time, changing history, and actually seeing Sam die at least once, which breaks causality - once Sam has died at T+2, where does the Sam from T+6 come from? Normally, this is the point where sci-fi films start doing handwaving ("we've got to jump back quickly before the time waves catch up and collapse this reality!"), but this movie doesn't even do that. I suppose with magic coins, you don't need to make sense, but it bugs me.

Dimensions sort of has the opposite problem - it diagrams perfectly, in part because it's built so that it it can't help but do so. When Stephen travels back in time to become "The Professor", his theory explicitly states that he can't actually change history, and his attempts to do so wind up not even creating alternate universes; by its logic, all possible timelines exist and all paths are taken.

And, that's kind of unsatisfying. Larry Niven once mentioned in an essay that he hated this sort of thing - it meant that nothing we do matters, and even our mistakes should be things we own. Sure, there is the inevitable line at the end about how Stephen was only 99% sure - and maybe his taking Victoria's jump-rope creates a new timeline where she survives, becomes best friends with Annie, and two couples pair off to live happily every after... But that's a last-second bit of bet-hedging.

Kudos to Dimensions for offering up a fairly clear view of this sort of structure, but by suggesting all timelines "count", it implies none of them do, and that does sort of suck the wind out of the movie's sails a bit.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 February 2012 - 1 March 2012

Whoa... SF/37 over, no Japanese class this weekend... It feels like a strangely vast expanse of free time!

It ends with the Oscar telecast, and I wish I had thought of buying Statler and Waldorf puppets and setting up shop in one of the corners of the Brattle's balcony and heckling Billy Crystal all evening. However, they apparently don't make those things and I totally forgot about RSVPing. And, if you follow me on Twitter Sunday night, you will se that I probably am not nearly quick-witted enough to make it work.

• If you want to do some last-minute catch-up for the smaller awards, the Coolidge is the place to go - not only do they still have the Animated and Live Action shorts programs playing in the GoldScreen, but they are also opening Bullhead in the screening room. It's nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and while A Separation seems to be the prohibitive favorite, it's pretty darn good.
  
  Arietty and The Artist continue in the 35mm rooms, along with a few special engagements. The Toxic Avenger plays at midnight on Friday and Saturday; somehow, this gory Troma flick spawned a kids' cartoon back in the day. On the other side of the class-o-meter, they will be presenting a repatory series featuring Viggo Mortensen starting on Tuesday the 28th: It kicks off with A History of Violence that night, A Walk on the Moon on Wednesday the 29th, and The Road on Thursday, March 1st, continuing during next weekend with a Lord of the Rings marathon on the 4th and the award presentation on the 5th.
  
  If you'd like to see something cool and support Independent Film Festival Boston, they're presenting a live performance of The Tobolowsky Files, the popular spoken-word podcast of ubiquitous actor Stephen Tobolowsky. Well, I assume it's cool, considering that Tobolowsky is a scene-stealer who makes every movie or TV show he's in better.



• Kendall Square also has the Oscar Shorts, but otherwise remain mostly the same, swapping Declaration of War out for Addiction Incorporated, a documentary on how tobacco companies knowingly made cigarettes more addictive.



• The mainstream theaters are much busier. The most screens go to Act of Valor, a military thriller with the distinction of being cast with actual Navy SEALs. Likely not the strongest of plots, but might be interesting in a documentary fashion. It plays at Somerville, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, and Harvard Square. Other thrills come from Gone, in which Amanda Seyfried plays a woman who escapes from a serial killer, who comes back to finish the job but kidnaps her sister. It plays the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway.
  
  On the lighter side, there's Wanderlust, in which down-on-their-luck married couple Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston get sidetracked into a hippie community on their way to move in with Rudd's brother. Director David Wain and his co-writer Dan Marino have done some great stuff, especially with Rudd. It plays Somerville, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway. There's also Tyler Perry's Good Deeds,, in which writer/director/star Perry plays a successful businessman discovering what he really wants in life. No Madea, apparently; it plays Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway.



• The Brattle is all special events this week. They finish up the Bugs Bunny Film Festival with Friday and Saturday matinees of the "Looney Tunes Revue", with Battle Royale playing evenings. Sunday is the Oscar party, with a special fundraising gala at 5:30pm and the awards at 8pm - but if you're going, you've probably already RSVPed. Monday is a screening of Dirty Old Town presented by Karmaloop; it's about a New York storekeeper trying to keep his shop open. On Tuesday, Balagan presents "Highlights of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival" with Q&A from curator Calmin Borel. Wednesday is a special "Leap Day" double feature of two movies chosen by popular vote, Network and Empire Records. And Thursday is the local premiere of "unromantic comedy" Party Like It's a Verb, with cast and crew in attendance for Q&A afterward.



• If you're not into the whole Oscars thing, the Harvard Film Archive is actually scheduling a screening opposite it, with a special guest no less. Whit Stillman will be there all weekend to introduce his films, including his new one, Damsels In Distress on Saturday. He'll also be presenting Metropolitan on Friday and The Last Days of Disco on Sunday, all at 7pm, with a Whit-less screening of Barcelona on Sunday at 5pm. After Mr. Stillman leaves, there will be a Monday evening screening of To the Starry Island to finish off the Park Kwang-su retrospective, and a free VES screening of Rear Window on Wednesday.



• ArtsEmerson combines their Gotta Dance series with the anniversary of the original opening of their Paramount Theater on 25 February 1932 with Torch Singer (a Paramount musical from 1933; they did 1932 a year or two ago and intend to keep moving forward each year) and Moonlight and Pretzels, which is from Universal but not available on DVD. They're a double feature on Friday and Saturday, with Moonlight and Pretzels also having a matinee screening on Sunday. Saturday's matinee is, once again, a new print of Stand by Me.



• The MFA continues a pair of series, with The Films of Dervis Zaim running through Sunday with scattered showings of Shadows and Faces, Dot, Waiting for Heaven, Mud, Elephants and Grass, and Somersault in a Coffin. The week's "Exiled in Hollywood" entry is Destination Tokyo, with Cary Grant and company on a secret WWII mission in Japanese waters.
  
  The February schedule ends on Wednesday the 29th with a preview screening of Free Men, a French film set in WWII about a black-marketer blackmailed into spying on a Paris mosque. Director Ismaël Ferroukhi will be present afterward for a Q&A. The March schedule starts the next day, with the first days of brief runs of both a new 35mm print of Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert and Paddy Considine's much-lauded Tyrannosaur.



• The Bollywood opening at Fresh Pond is Jodi Breakers, a romantic comedy featuring Bipasha Basu and R. Madhavan as a pair who break engaged couples up for money. Looks like Heartbreaker, whose producers threatened legal action. Make sure to check times on iMovieCafe site if you go, as it's sharing its screen with unsubtitled Tamil and Telegu films.



• In addition to the new films opening there, the Arlington Capitol gets a couple of second-run shows - Hugo re-opens in 3D and Chronicle moves over from Somerville.

My plans? Well, I'll try and hit the Whit Stillman shows, and maybe (finally) get to The Phantom Menaces, Arietty, and the Oscar-nominated shorts. And, of course, weak live-tweeting of the Oscars.