The Fantasia Daily, 2012.03 (21 July 2012): Fists of the White Lotus, Cold Steel, Sushi Girl, Wrong, and Zombie Ass

Got a bit of a late start (as I am today), so I missed both the animated films playing at 11am on Saturday. The heck of it is, I burned a subway ticket doing so, and likely would have made it if I had walked left rather than right when trying to find the entrance at the McGill station.

I wound up having brunch at Pino's and choosing Fists of the White Lotus over A Little Bit Zombie. Maybe, if I'd known that the print for Lotus was in such rough shape, I might have gone for the other movie, but I did enjoy it. It won't be getting a full review, as I was kind of in and out after a less than full night's sleep, but I had fun. Sad to hear that Gordon Liu had a stroke last year, but glad that Fantasia is going to have Get Well cards for attendees to sign at the kung fu screenings this year. That's human-scale cool right there.

David Wu stopped by that screening to share some of his memories of working at Shaw Brothers, but he was mainly in town to introduce/do Q&A after his own movie, Cold Steel, and the folks at the festival surprised him with an award:



A lot of Wu's stories involved John Woo, which is not surprising, since David served as John's editor for a long time and they came up through the industry together. One of the more amusing ones is how, when they were in the editing room, David would suggest John go out to the 7-11 to get them some ice cream, and then he would cut twenty minutes from the movie. John would be impressed at how tight and quickly it moved, but after it was David's turn to get ice cream a few days later, the movie would be twenty minutes longer again.

Next up was one of the bigger cast/crew pictures, Sushi Girl:



Aw, nuts, both pictures I took have co-writer Dustin Pfaff blacked out by the back of the host's head. Anyway, left-to-right, you have producer Neal Allen Fischer, writer/director Kern Saxton, where Destin Pfaff would be, and actors Tony Todd, James Duval, Noah Hathaway, Andy Mackenzie, Michael Biehn, and Mark Hamill. Amusingly, the girl in the lower-left-hand corner is doing Harley Quinn cosplay, so I'll bet she was trying to get her picture taken with Mark Hamill later.

That the cast and crew really bonded and became friends over the course of making this movie was something that was emphasized a lot, and this sort of turnout suggests that it's not just an empty platitude. The crowd also seemed to genuinely love Tony Todd, and he seemed to appreciate that, although it's clear that his first love is the theater. He'll be on Broadway this fall, and I'm tempted to head down; he's a guy you can always tell is very charismatic but often seems kind of stilted on screen. He didn't answer many questions, but he sounds like a completely different guy just talking than he does when performing.

Oh, and Michael Biehn would like you to know that his movie The Victim plays Fantasia Monday night at 10pm

No guests for Wrong, but the night ended with a Noburu Iguchi movie, and you know what that means:



I have no idea how this became a thing with the Sushi Typhoon guys.



When photos like this show up on the internet, what do you think Rina Takeda's parents think when they consider the money they spent on her karate lessons? She's not in Zombie Ass, but was on-hand to promote Dead Sushi, which screens tonight at 7pm.

I'll be there; it looks like my plans for the day are The Haunting of Julia, Dead Sushi, and Starry Starry Night.

Hong Wending san po bai lian jiao (Fists of the White Lotus)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia 2012, 35mm)

Even if Fist of the White Lotus weren't a direct sequel to another movie - it actually opens with the final battle from Executioners of Shaolin - it certainly feels like something that came out of a factory. Shaw Brothers was a factory that produced high-quality products, though, and even if you can sort of see how this one is running - initial defeat, training/creating new techniques, attempt to vanquish the evil master, repeat until successful - it's got a few pretty good fights in it, and Gordon Liu is always fun to watch on-screen.

Unfotunately, it's not in good shape - a good chunk of the print had gone red, and we were informed that the only other surviving 35mm print was dubbed in English. Support film preservation, folks.

Bian di lang yan (Cold Steel)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012, 35mm)

"Do you like guns?" is a line that appears in more or less every action movie of this type, where the heroes skill set is specifically tied to how well he can shoot, and the answer usually changes between the first and last acts. Here, though, it seems safe to say that either the filmmakers or the original novelist really liked guns, arguably to a fault.

As the movie starts in 1938, Mu Lianfeng (Peter Ho) is already a crack shot with a rifle, and an unlikely series of events has him joining Sgt. Zhang Mengzi (Tony Leung Ka-fai) in the 204th riflemen on a mission to assassinate four Japanese generals and their Chinese interpreter. Eventually, Mu's legend grows in his hometown - as does his relationship with young war widow Liu Yan (Song Jia) - while Japanese Colonel Masaya, an expert marksman himself, is apparently channeling all of his frustration from his recent broken engagement into hunting this Chinese sniper team down.

Early on in Cold Steel, sniper work is described as being about waiting, making sure you've got your shot, and aborting the mission if you don't have it. There's a tense, white-knuckle thriller to be made from that premise, or how this is solitary work (or very tight teamwork, if you go with the modern sniper/spotter pairing). Screenwriter/director David Wu, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have that sort of patience or nuance, offering up Mengzi growling about such things but treating them as empty and incorrect platitudes while fetishizing guns and bullets in a way that completely lacks either self-awareness or irony. It's as though Wu and company feel the need to say that, yeah, killing people is bad and damages your soul, but they don't really believe it.

Full review at EFC.

Sushi Girl

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012, HD)

Ugh, what an unpleasant movie. Sure, it's the sort of grittily flamboyant crime flick that has an audience, but it's a hollow, mean-spirited thing that isn't nearly clever or well-executed enough to be worth it.

After serving six years, Fish (Noah Hathaway) is being released from jail for good behavior, and although his ex-wife hangs up on him when he calls, there's a car waiting for him outside the prison. It takes him to an empty space across town, where Japanophile gangster Duke (Tony Todd) is preparing a special sushi dinner as a welcome home party, with the meal served off a beautiful naked girl (Cortney Palm). And while Fish didn't give anybody up while in jail, Duke and the other guests - fey-but-sadistic Crow (Mark Hamill), thuggish Max (Andy Mackenzie), and twitchy addict Francis (James Duval) would like to know where the diamonds they stole six years ago are.

There's a good set-up here - mysteries, chances for flashbacks, the underlying tension of the witness who is often out of sight but is learning some dangerous things. The trouble is that writers Kern Saxton and Destin Pfaff spend a lot of time running in place. The scenes in the restaurant start out as a lot of posturing (guess what, Crow and Max don't like each other!) and then devolve into those two characters trying to one-up each other as torturers. While some is kind of creative, it's mostly just straight-ahead nastiness; these devices aren't used to pull secrets out or suddenly change the balance of power in the room. The tough-guy stuff and the torture is the point.

Full review at EFC.

Wrong

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012, DCP)

Wrong, meanwhile, is nonsense from start to finish, but it is whimsical, deadpan nonsense that never tries to be otherwise. And for all its seeming randomness, it engages the audience as it goes along; the gags may be throwaways, but they build, connect back with each other, and are almost sweet even when mean would be much easier.

Plus, it's got William Fichtner able to just be out there as "Master Chang", and that's worth the price of admission alone.

Full review at EFC.

Zonbi Asu (Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012, HD)

This movie is exactly what it sounds like; it may be the tackiest thing Noboru Iguchi has done yet, and that's saying something. But you know, it's fun. It's got a pretty winning lead in Asana Mamoru, a serviceable cast, and plenty of bad-taste gore work by Yoshihiro Nishimura, who is really good at that sort of thing.

Like many an Iguchi movie, it peters out a bit and plays to movie clichés as much as real characters. And if you've got zero patience for fart jokes, really, just stay away. It's Iguchi doing Iguchi things, and he's got his technique down pretty well by now.

The Fantasia Daily, 2012.02: Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below, The Ambassador, Juan of the Dead, and Gyo

I need to shower and head out before the first movie of the day, so two three full reviews and two one very quick one. If you're in Montreal, my plan is Zarafa, A Little Bit Zombie (probably), Cold Steel, Sushi Girl, Wrong, and Zombie Ass.

Hoshi o ou Kodomo (Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012:Axis, HD)

Makoto Shinkai has occasionally been described as "the new Miyazaki", which is tremendously unfair, both for how Hayao Miyazaki is almost universally beloved for a large body of work and for how it diminishes Shinkai's own distinct gifts. With his latest, the comparisons seem more apt; Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below has the mythic feel of Studio Ghibli's more ambitious classics even while having Shinkai's denser plotting and focus on separation and loss.

Asuna Watase (voice of Hisako Kanemoto) is a smart, independent girl, getting top marks in her classes and looking after herself while her widowed mother works long hours at the hospital. She's made herself a little hide-out at the top of a nearby cliff, where she tunes into all manner of broadcasts with a homemade crystal radio. One day, she hears an especially strange song; that night, she sees a new light from her bedroom window. And when she meets the boy who made it (voice of Miyu Irino), it's only the first step into a world that is bigger and stranger than she could imagine.

And what a phenomenally grand world it is! Shinkai starts with the story of Izanagi and Izanami, a Japanese version of the Orpheus myth, adds a paramilitary secret society, monsters, magic, and an unknown underworld. Then the film fleshes that new world out. And then there's more. Every time that it seems like Shinkai has reached the point where it might be time to just play out what he's already built, he comes up with another wonder. Even the horrors - and make no mistake, there are some creepy, nasty things to be found here - are kind of awe-inspiring. This is a truly amazing example of world-building, with each facet both stunning to behold and a logical piece of the whole.


Full review at EFC.

The Ambassador

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia 2012 Documentaries From The Edge/Spotlight Denmark/Norway, HD)

More than with most documentaries, I find myself in a bind when watching something like The Ambassador. The part of me that goes to the movies for a good story winds up in conflict with the part that is (hopefully) a decent human being, in that I want events to play out to their logical conclusion even as I'm aware that those are real people on the screen who could either wind up in danger or have their lives ruined. That probably means that the movie is getting its point across, even if the filmmaker doesn't have exactly the material that he may have gone looking for.

The filmmaker, in this case, is Mads Brügger, a Danish television journalist who begins this movie by constructing a new persona: Mads Cortzen, a Danish businessman who aims to become a diplomat to the Central African Republic, from whence he would make the contacts necessary to use his new credentials to smuggle conflict diamonds back to Europe. It turns out that there are actually brokers for that sort of thing; Mads is able to set himself up as a Liberian envoy to the CAR for about $135,000. It is not, however, an entirely smooth operation, and that's not counting what he must do once on the ground.

That corruption is especially rampant throughout less-wealthy nations is something that everybody knows, if only as a vague concept or something read in a news report; it is something else again to see it in action, and Brügger does a good job of presenting that reality to his audience in a simple, unadorned manner. The apparent ease with which one can make these sorts of contacts is saddening, and Brügger deserves respect for putting himself on the line to get the footage.

Full review at EFC.

Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012, digital)

As "zombie-movies-that-aren't-really-scary" go, Juan of the Dead is pretty good, with a fine deadpan sense of humor and enough gross-out gags to fill its running time, even if it does tend to meander in the middle. Alexis Dias de Villegas is a fun, unassuming lead, and the characters surrounding him are at least entertaining.

What really works about it, of course, is what it says about living life in a dictatorship - services go to hell, it becomes kill-or-be-killed, and the disaster never gets better, but you stay and try to make the best of things because, damn it, this is your home, and what else are you supposed to do? That's in every frame of the film, and gives it a little more heft than it might otherwise have.

Full review at EFC.

Gyo

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012: Axis, HD)

There's a weird look to Gyo; it's one of those animated movies where detail levels don't quite match, with the monsters drawn and colored differently than the protagonists than the background. It's not a crippling issue, but it does make the movie look kind of cheap, or like filmmaker Takayuki Hirao didn't quite know how to bring Junji Ito's manga to life.

Although, by the same token, I don't know that I'd want to see this in live action; there's something properly unreal about this story of fish mounting spider legs and crawling onto land before stuff gets really weird. It's often in a hurry, with Hirao and company trying to cram a lot of gross strangeness into 70 minutes, even while the most horrific stuff - the blossoming of overt, violent hostility between a pair of supporting characters - could benefit from a somewhat slower burn even more than the sometimes contradictory-seeming apocalyptic A story.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2012.01: For Love's Sake and Wu Xia (Dragon)

And we're back, for another three weeks of updates on my favorite film festival! The getting here was actually smoother than usual - I wouldn't necessarily recommend staying up straight through the night before a trip to make sure that laundry was done, the house was in good enough shape that it wouldn't fall apart while one is gone, and all the food in the fridge that might go bad is well and truly eaten, especially if the rationale is that you can sleep on the 7am bus ride. That's not going to happen, ever.

A few issues getting into the apartment I've sublet for the duration - the roommates seem nice, but it is really important to make sure you've got all the information you need ahead of time. I had to hang around waiting for someone else to go through the doors to get in, the keys weren't where anyone expected. I'm good now, but I sort of see why people like the service of hotels. Not enough to spend three times as much, but the appeal is there.

It's always great to be back in Montreal, though. It's a fantastically unpretentious city which manages to have both a commitment to the arts (especially during the summer, when there are generally no less than two or three festivals running at once) and a pragmatic, we're-not-making-ourselves-shiny-just-to-impress-tourists look to the downtown area. It doesn't force quirk, tone, or anything - it's been accumulating cool things for centuries and doesn't need to overcompensate.

Dinner was a variant on that most unpretentious of Montreal dishes: Poutine topped with pulled pork, bacon, and italian sausage. I'm not going to lie, the Smoke's Poutinerie that opened across from the Hall building may get a fair amount of my business this year just for being nearby and filling.

My media pass apparently doesn't include the Opening and Closing night shows, so I bought myself a ticket for For Love's Sake, meaning these guys were already going when I got in:



Seriously, every movie everywhere should start with traditional drumming. It was a blast. It was followed up by a lengthy introduction by festival co-director Marc Lamothe (aka DJ XL5) which pretty much destroyed my high school French. The enthusiasm came through, though. Same as it did later, when King-wei Chu introduced Dragon, thanking us for being here and not in line for a certain movie opening at midnight. "After Fantasia's over," he said, "you all have our permission to watch Batman... and learn kung fu!"

As is always the case with martial arts movies at Fantasia, the movie opened with a 35mm trailer for a bonkers-looking classic, in this case Bastard Swordsman. It looked so nuts that it immediately went on my list.

Speaking of film formats, it looks like most of the 35mm screening this year will be French-dubbed stuff, although For Love's Sake was on film. Interesting, the print was subtitled in French, with English subtitles being projected from a computer about a half-second later. I'm kind of surprised they don't do this sort of dual subtitling more often, actually, although it can leave me a bit dizzy as I try to listen to the Japanese for tone of voice, read the French that appears first, and then get the English. The really funny thing is that I remember seeing the word "bourgeois" a lot more in the English titles than the French.

Anyway, that's day 1 of Fantasia, just in time for me to get started on Day 2 (where my plans are Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below, The Ambassador, Juan of the Dead, and Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack).

Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012 Opening Night, 35mm)

For Love's Sake is the sort of crazy mix of adolescent emotions that seem over-the-top when you describe it, often going from pure sweetness to eye-rolling to angry violence in the very same scene. It's just what one might expect from Takashi Miike's take on the team romance genre, right down to the musical numbers.

Ai Saotome (Emi Takei) is a top student and sports star at the Aobodichi Prep School, able to have her choice of boyfriends if she so desires. The one she chooses comes way out of left fiend, as she uses her wealthy and connected parents to get Makoto Taiga (Satoshi Tsumbuki), a violent delinquent from Nagano, into the exclusive Tokyo academy. This causes consternation for her would-be boyfriend Hiroshi Iwashimizu (Takumi Saito), as well as attention from students at an underfunded local public school: "Gumko" (Sakura Ando), a strange girl-gang leader, weirdly-mature-looking teen tough Ken Gonta (Tsuyoshi Ihara), and Yuri Takahara (Ito Ono), the girl he adores.

Emotions are strong and quickly changeable for teenagers, and the particularly clever thing about For Love's Sake is that they and their presentation is heightened in both directions. There are songs, and they are by and large cheerful, upbeat love songs, but there are also fights, rumbles which sometimes look like they could have been transplanted directly from Miike's Crows films. They occasionally happen at the same time, but not that often; Miike and writers Takayuki Takuma & Takumi Nagayasu use them to create emotional swings rather than to suggest that all passion is basically the same.


Full review at EFC.

Wu Xia (aka Dragon)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2012 in Concordia University Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2012, HD)

Though Harvey Weinstein has saddled this movie with a generic name for when he finally gets around to releasing it in the USA (the man can't help himself), the original Chinese name of "Wu Xia" is even more basic - it's the name of the "martial hero" genre as a whole. And while this is certainly not the last word on martial arts movies, it's a nifty and memorable one.

The time is 1917; the place is a small village outside Yunnan, China. Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen), a humble family man who works at the paper mill, is making a stop at the general store when two bandits come in to rob the place. He hides, but when the criminals start to lay into him, he is able to defend himself well enough to be the last man standing while his attackers lay dead. It looks like he got very lucky indeed, but Xu Baijiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the city detective investigating the incident, finds that one of the bandits was on the nation's most-wanted list, but the blow that killed him is far too incredibly precise to be lucky. Is Jinxi more than just the devoted husband of Ayu (Wang Tei), and what interest does the leader of the 72 Demons gang (Jimmy Wang Yu) have in this?

Lots of action and adventure movies lend themselves to being described as mysteries to be solved, but Wu Xia is the rare example that genuinely feels like a detective story. It's a modern one, with special effects to illustrate the nature of the killing blow straight out of CSI or House, but the movie runs on a detective trying to put together what happened and a suspect who is having his secrets slowly revealed. It's an interesting and frequently engrossing change of tone for a type of movie that by design emphasizes the big action scene rather than the things which come between them. It's not a complicated mystery at all, but the process is very watchable.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 20 July 2012 - 26 July 2012

So, who wants some Batman this weekend? Because that's what you're getting.

• Specifically, The Dark Knight Rises, a name which I figure sounds weird because night usually falls. The capper to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy opens on a whole bunch of screens, including most of the premium ones; in descending order of awesomeness, that means the real IMAX screens at Jordan's Furniture in Reading and Natick, the main room at the Somerville Theatre (which also has it on one other screen, likely #3 or #5), the RPX screen at Fenway (which also has it on up to 6 others), the Imax-branded screen at Boston Common (plus 5 more), and the three screens at Fresh Pond. Nolan really wants you to see this on film, and the chain theaters are pretty much all-digital now, so why not save a little money by heading a few extra stops up the Red Line to Somerville?



• If you'd like something a little less mainstream, there are a few other options, and Kendall Square has two of them. First up is Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles that relocates the story to contemporary India and features Frieda Pinto in the title role alongside Riz Ahmed. It played IFFBoston earlier this year and has been getting reasonably good response. The one-week booking is Unforgiveable, in which a French writer travels to Venice to work on his new novel only to find himself entangled with the realtor who rented him a house on an isolated island.
  
  The week also features an even shorter booking, with a single show of Bill W. on Thursday the 26th; as you may have guessed, it's a documentary look at the founder of Alcaholics Anonymous.



• The Brattle's main weekend booking is the new one from Hong Sang-soo, The Day He Arrives, in which a retired filmmaker takes a trip to Seoul to visit an old friend but finds himself wandering the city when the friend doesn't show. It's a sort of artsy, meditative drama type of thing. It splits the screen with the latest installment of "Hooked on Who", which features Matt Smith on Friday, Tom Baker and the Daleks on Friday, John Pertwee Sunday afternoon and two episodes of Torchwood Sunday night.
  
  On the vertical part of the schedule, The Story of Film continues on Monday and Tuesday, with Citizen Kane as the illustrative half of its double feature. Only matinees on Tuesday, though, as IFFBoston hosts another preview of Ruby Sparks on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, they kick off the weekly "Recent Raves" series with Once Upon a time in Anatolia, a Turkish film which starts with a murder suspect apprehended and works backwards to find the motive and means. And on Thursday, they start the International Asskicking series with a Gareth Evans/Iko Uwais double-feature, with Evans giving Uwais the chance to show off some awesome silat skills in The Raid and Merantau. The Raid has been getting a lot of love as one of the best action movies in decades, but I actually like Merantau more.



• The Coolidge does a little shuffling in the digital rooms, opening Take This Waltz in the tiny Goldscreen, but otherwise it's the special screenings to look out for. Joe Dante's The 'Burbs plays Friday and Saturday at midnight on the big screen; it's a mystery/horror/comedy from back when star Tom Hanks was mostly thought of as funny. The Room also pops up Friday at midnight, returning from its brief stay at the Kendall to where it... well, where it was before. The other midnight show on Saturday is The Devil's Carnival, the latest musical horror phantasmagoria from the makers of Repo! The Genetic Opera. It features a carnival that has a direct line to Hell!
  
  One I'm sad not to be able to make is the Monday Big Screen Classics show of Jurassic Park; that's one of the great sci-fi adventures in beautiful 35mm on the Coolidge's big screen. Wednesday has a screening of Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, this time with Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor and Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature (from a performance well before Miller was cast in Elementary, so there's no awkwardness).



• The Harvard Film Archive begins one new series and continues another. The new series is Buñuel's Mexico, which self-explanatorily features the work that Luis Buñuel did in Mexico before his somewhat better-known European work. It starts with Los Olvidados at 7pm on Friday (with a second screening at 5pm on Sunday), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz at 9pm Saturday, and The Young One at 7pm on Sunday. Around that, the Paramount series continues, with Artists and Models at 9pm Friday, Ministry of Fear at 7pm Saturday, and One-Eyed Jacks at 7pm Sunday.



• The Museum of Fine Arts continues their 17th Annual Boston French Film Festival with screenings on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday, with films mostly of recent vintage - A Happy Event, The Well-Digger's Daughter, 17 Girls (based on a news story out of Gloucester, MA, so coming full circle), Black Venus, The Art of Love, Outside Satan, Pater, and Bachelor Days Are Over - but also a Thursday presentation of Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black and a "French Edges" shorts program.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has a pair of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals during the week - a London performance of The Phantom of the Opera on Monday and Wednesday, and its sequel, Love Never Dies on Tuesday and Thursday Yeah, there's a sequel to Phantom, based on a book by Ben Elton, so, that's something.

My plans? Well, I'll be in Montreal for Fantasia, and haven't really looked at the schedule much beyond Friday. Of the stuff listed here, maybe I'll find a slot for The Dark Knight Rises or take in the stop The Devil's Carnival is making there, but mostly I'll be playing it by ear; look for "Fantasia Daily" posts starting Friday.

This Week In Tickets: 9 July 2012 - 15 July 2012

Last TWIT before Fantasia. I'm excited!



At some point, I'd like somebody to explain why you don't see the so-called economies of scale at work in the movie exhibition business more. That's a $10 matinee ticket for Savages, a lousy 13% savings over an evening ticket at the same theater and more than the evening price at Somerville for the same film. That's not a strict apples-to-apples comparison - Davis Square and downtown Boston are different neighborhoods, one's an old and long-paid-off theater and the other's only been there for ten years or so, but it's still the big nationwide chain that's more expensive. A lot of the same issues come into play for To Rome with Love and Take This Waltz; while the $6 you see on the ticket to the former is artificially low (it doesn't include a 75-cent restoration fee and reflects a $3 member discount), it's still less than the $11 Landmark charges. The Coolidge is also a non-profit (as is the Brattle, where I saw Sleepless Night), so that evens the gap a little, too.

Ghosts with Shit Jobs was free, but MIT LSC usually charges $4. That was kind of fun, actually, reminding me of seeing second-run movies in a lecture hall during my college years. Except that while I'm not quite the oldest guy in the room now, I'm more likely to be mistaken for faculty than even a grad student. Thus the haircut the next day; somehow it's much less gray when it's shorter.

Savages

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2012 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, Sony Digital 4K)

Blake Lively is kind of terrible, which isn't enough to make Savages a bad movie on its own, but having an uninteresting character played by an unimpressive actress as the narrator is not exactly a selling point. Instead, it's an indication of how dull it is possible to make a movie that should be awash with juicy pulp.

It's not, though. Instead, we get a ton of narration that describes the business model of Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Johnson), the southern California dope dealers who have risen to the top via superior product and fair dealing, and the most boringly stable love triangle in cinematic history. There are signs of life from the supporting cast - John Travolta as the DEA man working for both sides, Salma Hayek as the head of the cartel trying to take over Chon's & Ben's business, and Benicio Del Toro as her top SoCal enforcer - but, man, is this pretty dry material for the longest time, even when director Oliver Stone and his co-screenwriters (including original novelist Don Winslow) try to perk things up with some bloody violence.

Even once things start rolling, Stone and company seem determined to drain the excitment from things. Where the movie is going is obvious from pretty early on - the high-minded Ben (and the less altruistic Chon) are going to be dragged down to the same level of savagery as the cartel. But it never feels either natural or at least fierce; Ben has to be pushed down each step by Hayek's Elena without it ever feeling something like something happening inside of him. It takes the movie seemingly forever to get around to the symmetrical kidnapping that everyone in the audience can see coming from the beginning, and which never gets really mean.

Call me crazy, but I think that at some point, a movie called "Savages" should feel genuinely savage, but this one never has its claws out.

Ghosts with Shit Jobs

Memo to self: Before Fantasia, switch Facebook to "selected tweets", not just so I can swear without my mother seeing it, but so that the inevitable review of a movie about the Japanese porn industry isn't thrown in front of my grandmother's face.

I suppose that, much as with Sleepless Night, this was sort of Fantasia practice, as I saw it in a college lecture hall, complete with flip-up desks on the seats. The screen wasn't close to what you find in Concordia's Theatre Hall, but the seats were much more comfortable!

Also practicing some Horrible Photography. After showing a couple of trailers for other crowdsourced/DIY movies (Iron Sky & Manborg), we had about a half hour panel discussion:



Left to right, that's xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe, interactive fiction guru Andrew Plotkin, and GwSJ director Jim Munroe (no relation). Little known fact: You can't be called a guru with a conservative haircut. It's just not allowed.

Jim Munroe said he wasn't going to just talk about Kickstarter, but, well... They wound up talking a lot about Kickstarter. It's something you can't avoid right now, really, but there's not a lot to say about it right now, at least until there's enough data to really determine some trends. There is plenty of indication that it's at least possible to make what could otherwise be hobbyist productions profitable, although it does sometimes mean being rather less polished.



After the film, Jim Munroe was joined by producer Anthony Cortese (l) and actor/producer Sean Lerner. They talked a lot more about the mechanics of making the movie here, and one thing that I might be interested in learning more about is how the writer-director dynamic was somewhat inverted here. Auteur theory has become so pervasive that one almost assumes that the director is the person who "owns" the movie, and the person given the WGA credit was one of many hands, but it seemed to work much differently here, with Munroe having sole credit on the screenplay but being one of four credited directors, each of whom handled a thread (it wasn't clear who handled the framing scenes and the last act when the threads crossed). The suggestion was that the directors' work was parceled out on the basis of availability, without a lot of talk about how each director was matched with their segment.

Munroe mentioned liking subtle effects, and that is one of the things that the movie did really well - although I wouldn't describe them so much as "subtle" compared to "effectively integrated". It was mentioned that most of the effects work was compositing shots together so that all the babies in the "Babymakers" segment were the same kid, which a lot of people didn't notice, and it's a clear paradox - does it quite seem like money well-spent to not show the seams if people don't get the joke? Sure, the money using different babies probably wouldn't have made a giant spider possible, but...

In any event, it was an interesting talk, and I dig the way they are promoting it: You can watch the first 20 minutes at the film's website, and Munroe is selling it on DVD, BD, or USB Bracelet at his No Media Kings site. I'm amused by the USB bracelet, just because I figured USB sticks and SD cards would be the next sort of mass media (this was when my Windows Mobile phone was chunky enough to have a full-sized SD card slot), because I am old and fixated on physical media.

But, hey, you'll wish you had that bracelet when they repossess the cloud!

Ghosts with Shit Jobs

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2012 in MIT Building 10, Room 250 (summer movie series, 1080p)

The "ghosts" of this movie's title are not supernatural; "gwai lo" in Cantonese is both the word for ghost and slang for white/foreign people, and since this movie posits a future where the Western economies have collapsed... Well, the rest of the title then explains itself. It does so in fairly amusing fashion, too, poking fun at the modern world and documentary conventions.

Presented as a special episode of Chinese television show Window on the World, the presentation follows a group of people living on the fringes of Toronto. In "Babymakers", we meet Karen (Kelly Spilchak) and Gary (Jason Wrubell), a married couple who assemble and test disturbingly realistic toys even though Karen would much rather be designing killer robots. Brothers Anton (Jonah Hundert) and Toph (Taylor Katz) are "Silk Gatherers", the grown children of refugee European acrobats who collect the valuable webs left behind by the giant mutant spiders that ran amok years ago. There's a "Digital Janitor", Oscar (Sean Lerner), who pixilates copyrighted material in a virtual reality copy of the city, while Serina (Rachel MacMillan) is "Human Spam", making a living by dropping product names into conversation.

Even before the recent found-footage boom, the sci-fi mockumentary would pop up on a fairly regular basis; they're a fun way to play around with ideas without the audience feeling disappointed when the movie doesn't have a whole lot of people shooting laser pistols at each other (it helps keep laser pistol-related expenses down, too). Writer (and "Silk Gatherers" director) Jim Munroe has more than a few fun ideas here, and for the most part he and the other directors do a fine job of putting oddball characters, observational humor, and spoofs of the documentary medium itself. It's not the most cutting satire one will ever see, but it is chuckle-worthy even at its lowest ebb.

Full review at EFC.

Ah, Indie-Auteur Romance: To Rome with Love & Take This Waltz

Now that I think about it, I don't know how much actual romance you'll find in either To Rome with Love or Take This Waltz. A fair amount of attraction and infatuation, sure, but romance? Maybe not.

One thing I do find kind of interesting is how both films' writer/directors - Woody Allen and Sarah Polley - are also well-known as actors, and how that affects these particular movies. In the review for To Rome with Love, I describe the leads in all four threads of the movie as Allen-surrogates, which is perhaps not precisely fair: Allen actually plays one, and has talked about how he might have played Jesse Eisenberg's role when younger, but I don't know if the roles played by Alessandro Tiberi and Roberto Benigni are necessary Woody Allen roles, even if I could see him playing them, were the setting transported to New York.

Still, it's kind of interesting that so much of Woody seems to seep into the movie when he does a comedy. His dramas have more varied protagonists, but his comedies are still basically Woody Allen telling Woody Allen-style jokes, which is not a bad thing at all; he's been good at this for a long time.

It is a contrast with Polley's approach to Take This Waltz, though. This is Polley's second feature as a writer/director, after a number of shorts, and while there's no real template for actors moving behind the camera, it's not unusual to see their first film as director be something where they don't have to split their attention, although soon enough they're starring in their own movies. Polley's first movie, about an elderly couple dealing with Alzheimer's, would obviously keep her safely behind the camera, but this one almost seems like it could have started as a vehicle for Polley herself: The lead is, after all, a woman about Polley's own age.

It's not, though; instead, she has Michelle Williams play Margot. It's by no means a bad decision - if you can have Williams play the lead in your movie, it's usually a pretty good idea to do so. She arguably fits the part better physically - even though both are young and blonde and about the same body type, there's a softness to Williams's features compared to Polley's that seems to match the character better. I've got no doubt that Polley could have played Margot if she'd chosen to do so, but I'm impressed that she doesn't; it's a fairly self-aware decision for a young writer/director/star.

I'm thinking of that especially in comparison to the mumblecore crew. (Yes, I know that nobody whom it's applied to likes the term; they're welcome to build a time machine and go back to force Andrew Bujalski to speak up and make his dialogue more memorable.) Take This Waltz has a lot in common with that sort of film ("young people figuring adult relationships out" in the review), but it's better in many ways. One scene that really stands out is when Margot, Gerry, and a number of (mostly older) women are showering after the aquatic exercise portion. I don't think most of Polley's contemporaries and the likes of Lena Dunham get that scene right; they often have trouble with anything outside their own limited experience, while Polley seems to have a broader base of knowledge.

That's really impressive, I think - you don't hear Polley's name alongside the hyped young filmmakers her age, in part because she is still primarily an actress with a six-year gap between this and Away from Her, but she's been absorbing a lot of knowledge from a young age, and producing very polished work as a result.

To Rome with Love

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

I'm not saying Woody Allen is exactly running a scam in his golden years, but he has worked out a way to get international financiers to send him to a different beautiful city every year, and all he has to do is produce a movie with a cast of actors drawn by the reputation he has built over decades to work for a fraction of their usual price. And, hey, he's still got enough of the talent that built that reputation that the result isn't exactly a disaster.

To Rome with Love is a set of four or five stories mostly connected by being set in the Eternal City: In one thread, Tourist Hayley (Alison Pill) and native Roman lawyer Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) meet and fall in love, but the story is how her father Jerry (Allen), a retired A&R man, discovers how Michelangelo's father Giancarlo (Fabio Armiliato) has an incredible singing voice and wants to share it with the world. Elsewhere, opinionated office worker Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) is suddenly the most famous man in Rome, and the relationship between two American students (Greta Gerwig and Jesse Eisenberg) is threatened by the arrival of her friend Monica (Ellen Page), with a man who had once been in his situation (Alec Baldwin) serving as a chorus. And, finally, newlyweds Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) arrive from the country to work for the family business, but when Milly gets lost, a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) appears in his room and has to take Milly's place.

Why is there a call girl in Antonio's room? Never explained, and it's not the only place where Allen is fairly vague. Despite the film cross-cutting between stories and not being set apart by title cards or some similar device, To Rome with Love is at heart four smaller movies that have been stitched together, and it causes some problems. Though the various stories have a similar somewhat off-kilter tone, their omissions and quirks seem more exposed when each is effectively stretched to the length of a feature. The switching from one story to another also makes for an odd timeline - one story is apparently playing out over weeks, another over days, and yet another over hours. All seem to finish somewhat climactically, as well, and four finishes of that variety make for a very muted ending.


Full review at EFC.

Take This Waltz

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 35mm)

It took me some time before I decided what, exactly, the end of Take This Waltz meant to me, even though writer/director Sarah Polley probably couldn't be much more clear. It's a movie that has every chance to be very frustrating, but is executed so well that it becomes sadly beautiful.

The story centers on Margot (Michelle Williams), a copy writer who, while on a research trip, meets a charming guy and winds up sitting next to him on the flight home. It would just be a harmless flirtation that ends there, except that it turns out that Daniel (Luke Kirby) lives right across the street, and Margot is married. Her husband Lou (Seth Rogen) is as good a man as they come and his sister Geraldine (Sarah Silverman) is one of Margot's best friends, but Daniel is a temptation she may not be able to resist.

Much of the time, where Polley is going with this seems pretty clear. Margot speaks early on about being afraid of being caught "in-between", and a lot of her banter with Lou lapses into a sort of playful baby talk; the implication seems to be that she's still got a fair amount of growing up to do - a lot of growing up, if you take one of the more memorable scenes as being part of that metaphor. The natural course of events is that her eventually choosing Lou or Daniel will demonstrate some sort of new-found maturity, but what makes the movie interesting, especially in its last act, is that the characters don't quite fit together that way without some puzzle pieces being left over.

Full review at EFC.

Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche)

It's the weekend before Fantasia, and I guess my pre-fest warm-up isn't going to be the usual "get on a bus, ride a long way, see a bunch of movies and sleep in a bed other than my own" of going to NYAFF that it has been for the past few years, but "staying up until 2am to see a foreign action movie". Not the most intense ramp-up, but there it is.

Not much to say, other than digital projections make me wonder where to sit. I usually like the front row, but digital doesn't look quite good from there. Especially since there were portions of the movie that looked really digital - certain action scenes in particular. They seemed to use a different camera it came time to go hand-held for close-up shots. A bit weird, but not jarringly so.

I guess it was a bit of a brush-up on my French, too, but just enough for me to recognize that "Nuit Blanche" is kind of a cooler name than "sleepless night", and wondering if anybody calls French crime movies of this type "flic-flicks", or if that sort of cross-lingual slang is just two specialize a bit of nerdiness.

Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, digital)

As much as action movies and thrillers will often try to impress by their intricacy and build-up to a spectacular climax, there is something tremendously satisfying to the two-step process that Frédéric Jardin uses for Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche, in the original French): Set it up, play it out. It doesn't always work, but here it makes for a lean, efficient flic flick.

The set-up: Two corrupt Paris cops, Vincent (Tomer Sisley) and Manu (Laurent Stocker) steal ten kilos of coke from its couriers, but in the process Vincent gets both stabbed and recognized, leading Corsican gangster José Marciano (Serge Riaboukine) to kidnap his son Thomas (Samy Seghir) and demand the drugs in exchange. Things play out when Vincent heads to José's elaborate "Club Tarmac" to make the swap, with internal affairs detectives Lacombe (Julie Boisselier) and Vignali (Lizzie Brocheré) not far behind.

One can often spot an especially well made film of this genre by the way it transitions from the set-up to the payoff, and it's seldom because that switch is invisible. Sometimes, a situation suddenly and violently explodes into chaos. That's not Jardin's game; instead, he nudges the audience to pay attention: Vincent is putting the drugs here and a gun there, but he doesn't notice that Vignali is watching him or that she's doing this other thing. The filmmakers are telling the audience It will be cat-and-mouse time very soon, so scoot forward in your seat a little so you can have a closer look at the game to be played.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 13 July 2012 - 19 July 2012

This is a quiet week, making a quick trip to NYC really tempting.

• One wide opening this week: Ice Age: Continental Drift. It's the fourth movie about a group of animals banding together for adventures, with the cruel irony being that soon, mammoths and saber-toothed tigers will be extinct, but the progeny of a moron like Sid the Sloth survive to the present day. This one has the gang cast away at sea. At the very least, the Scrat bits should be funny. In both 3D and 2D at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  In addition to picking up Beasts of the Southern Wild, Boston Common has one other movie opening, Drunkboat - and that's only playing once or twice a day. It's got a surprisingly good cast, though: John Malkovitch as a bottomed-out drunk returning to his family, Dana Delany as his sister, and John Goodman as the guy selling his nephew a boat. It's based on a play by co-writer/director Bob Meyer, and has been sitting around for two years, so be warned.



• It's also a quiet week at Kendall Square; the only movie opening there is Neil Joung: Journeys. On the other hand, that movie is Jonathan Demme cutting together Neil Young telling him stories about his youth during a road trip with music from the concert at the end of the trip, so that's kind of a big deal.
  
  They do have one other program, and it's also musical - they'll be running Shut Up and Play the Hits for two nights on Wednesday the 18th and Thursday the 19th, which also splits time between a concert (LCD Soundsystem's final show) and the performer (James Murphy, pondering his decision to disband the successful group).



• The Coolidge keeps From Rome with Love and Moonrise Kingdom in their main rooms, but bring Pelotero (Ballplayer) to the screening room. It's a pretty darn good documentary about young Dominicans with big-league dreams, and the exploitation thereof by the major leagues. Friday night, executive producer Andrew Muscato will do a Q&A after the 7:15 show, which means that this movie will have played Boston with three different special guests (directors Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin, and Jonathan Paley at IFFBoston in April; executive producer/Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine last Wednesday).
  
  There's a few interesting special events there as well. There are two midnight shows this Friday and Saturday; Night of the Creeps is a 1980s sci-fi/horror/comedy that I wished I'd stayed awake for at SF/35 a couple years ago, because it looked like a lot more fun than this sort of deliberately campy homage usually is. That's downstairs; upstairs, the "Fresh Blood" screening is The Pact, a creepy-old-house story with Caity Lotz, Agnes Bruckner, and Casper Van Dien. Writer/director Nicholas McCarthy will pop up on Friday night for an introduction and Q&A. On Monday, there's a Big Screen Classics presentation of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - an unweildy title that sounds so much better when you say it like they do in the trailer, and also a very funny movie.



• The Brattle has two special engagements this weekend. Afternoon and evenings from Friday to Sunday are given to a 25th anniversary run of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, in which an angel played by Bruno Ganz falls to Earth after falling in love with a mortal woman (Solveig Dommartin). Those of us who've only seen the American remake with Nicolas Cage should probably check it out. The late show (9:30pm, with 11:30pm shows on Friday and Saturday) is Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche), what is apparently a very tight French action film that takes place in one night and one location (an admittedly very large nightclub). The French don't mess around with this sort of thing, so this is likely a heck of a thriller.
  
  On Monday and Tuesday, The Story of Film continues with episodes 3 & 4, with the hilarious Twentieth Century as its illustrative double feature partner (and worth seeing on its own, as it is Howard Hawks directing Carole Lombard and John Barrymore). Note that the showtimes are a bit odd on Monday, as they must accommodate an 8pm DocYard screening of Tchoupitoulas, a documentary about New Orleans as night as seen through the eyes of three young boys; filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross will be there to answer questions.
  
  The rest of the vertical schedule doesn't kick in until next week, but in the meantime, Wednesday offers a musical double feature in Color Me Obsessed: A Film About the Replacements and What Did You Expect? Archers of Loaf Live at Cat's Cradle. And Thursday, after Grub Street's author talk with Susan Orlean (sold out, but there's a wait list if you want to try your luck), she'll stick around to introduce Clash of the Wolves, as this 1925 film stars the subject of her latest book... Rin Tin Tin.



• MIT has free/cheap movies most weekends (especially during the school year), but this weekend's presentation is of special interest. Ghosts With Shit Jobs is a mock-documentary, with the twist being that it's episodes from a Chinese television series in 2040 that chronicles the economically disadvantaged population of Toronto after the North American economy collapsed. The guest list includes writer/producer/director Jim Munroe, a good chunk of the cast and crew, "interactive fiction guru" Andrew Plotkin, and XKCD creator Randall Munroe (no relation). It's in building 10, room 250 at 8pm on Saturday, and it's free.



• I'm admittedly terrible about mentioning the various film programs at the local libraries, but the folks who made Shellshocked, a documentary on the efforts to save wild oyster reefs, inform me that it will be playing at the North End Branch of the Boston Public Library on Wednesday the 18th at 6:30pm, with director Emily Driscoll, UMass Boston's Dr. Anamarija Frankic, and journalist Erin Byers Murray there for a Q&A afterward. There will also be an oyster tasting as well.



• The Harvard Film Archive begins a summer-long series commemorating 100 Years of Paramount Pictures with some good stuff: Trouble In Paradise and A Foreign Affair on Friday, Serpico on Saturday, El Dorado and a dobule feature of Shanghai Express & City Streets on Sunday. Amusing that this is happening at the HFA and not ArtsEmerson (whose Paramount Theater still has the mountain logo if you look up), and that the prints of older films are supplied by Universal, but fitting in that it takes place nearly 100 years to the day after Adolph Zukor's "Famous Players" (as it was originally called) opened their first film.
  
  The rest of the weekend's showings are a continuation of their Erich von Streheim retrospective, with a reconstruction of Queen Kelly playing Saturday evening and The Wedding March on Monday. Both will have live piano accompaniment.



• Over at the MFA, it's time for their 17th Annual Boston French Film Festival, which actually began on Thursday with a sold-out showing of Farewell, My Queen. They will be screening contemporary French cinema for the rest of the month, with the screenings on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday including Belleville Tokyo, Guilty, The Art of Love, My Worst Nightmare, A Happy Event, The Screen Illusion, and The Minister.
  
  It's not just French film, though - Broke screens Saturday at 7pm. It's a documentary by and about musician Will Gray, a young artist trying to record his first album while also documenting the process, which shows how the music industry is either self-destructing or evolving, depending who you ask. Gray and Reva Williams will be on-hand for a performance after the movie.



• One Hindi movie with English subtitles opens up at Fresh Pond this weekend: Cocktail has Saif Ali Khan as an Indian expatriate in London, where his parents try to arrange a marriage to Diana Penty on the one hand and he falls into a love triangle with Deepika Padukone and Randeep Hooda on the other. We should all be so lucky. There are screenings of Eega (in which a murdered man is reincarnated as a housefly and seeks to avenge his death) if you speak Telugu and gangster movie Billa 2 if you know Tamil.



• And, finally, though The Dark Knight Rises does not open until the 20th, many theaters will be doing a "Dark Night Marathon" of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight leading up to it, including Fenway and Boston Common (Fandango also claims Harvard Square, but given that it closed on Sunday, I find that unlikely). The one you want, though, is the one at the Somerville Theatre, which will be in 35mm, as per the strong preference of director Christopher Nolan.

My plans? Oooh, I want to go to New York and see Scabbard Samurai and Potechi so badly, but those are the ones that transportation makes difficult and practically everything in between will also be playing Fantasia, so it's probably not a great idea. There's interesting stuff in between, anyway, so I'll probably try to check out the likes of Drunkboat, Ghosts with Shit Jobs, Sleepless Night, Savages, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and, yeah, Ice Age 4 before heading to baseball on Monday and Montreal on Thursday.

That's right, it will be three weeks before I get to see The Dark Knight Rises, unless their playing it at the Science Museum or some other genuine IMAX theater there and I feel like hitting it. I'd appreciate if you held off on discussing it until I get back to Boston, Internet.

This Week In Tickets: 2 July 2012 - 8 July 2012

Very, very quiet week:



Yeah, just The Amazing Spider-Man. On the one hand, it's sort of the calm before the Fantasia storm - I spent a couple of evenings trying to secure lodgings, then stayed up late to watch the Red Sox playing in Oakland, so I wound up not doing much on the Fourth before it was time for the Pops and fireworks. Funny night - at around 9:30, the music cut out and an announcement went out over the loudspeakers that a thunderstorm was coming, so seek shelter. I didn't, of course, and didn't get wet. Things got back on track for the national broadcast at ten, and at ten-thirty, just as they started to launch explosives from the barge in the middle of the Charles, it starts coming down hard. I think all of Boston and Cambridge went to bed smelling like rain and gunpowder. More than a few tourists, as well; the couple beside me was shrieking "oh my gawwwwwwd", to the point where you think, lady, it's been two minutes; are you going to need heart medication for the climax? I guess not everything is bigger in Texas.

There was actually a bunch at the boutique places that I wanted to see over the weekend, but my brother and his wife through a first birthday party for their twin girls, who remain adorable. Though not identical, they look much closer to the same than they did the last time I saw them (Christmas). They act different, though - Makenna is a little tentative, and likes to watch people play ball on her parents' basketball court (it's kind of an insane house), while Naomi runs and bangs on things and has her hair flying all over the place in ten minutes even though Makenna's top-knot stays put pretty much all day. So I got her a toy that both makes noise and has a hammer.

(Fun fact: No matter how old the little kid you're shopping for is, the really cool toys are for kids six months to a year older. It never fails.

Anyway, that's why there was little moviegoing this week. Next week should be different, even if I don't make it out to NYC for the last weekend of The New York Asian Film Festival, as I try to cram everything that's out that I want to see into the next week.

The Amazing Spider-Man

I did my best to keep the comic book and Sam Raimi fandom out of the main eFilmCritic review, but on my blog, that stuff's fair game.

Raimi's Spider-Man 3 gets a bit of a bum rap; it's not his best work, but it at least seems to enjoy being a movie about a superhero fighting supervillains. Amazing seems embarrassed by it; it had me checking my watch a lot during the first half as it slowly went back over material Raimi had covered in zippier fashion. What struck me as really odd, though, was reading tweets from comic book pros like Kurt Busiek saying it was the best comic book movie ever, saying the campiness of the Raimi movies never really set well with them.

Which was odd, because I never found the Raimi movies campy. Colorful, yes, in a way that was loyal to the source material. Funny on occasion. Aware that it's telling a larger-than-life story and not feeling the need to diminish that. It's something Marvel has done well in its Avengers movie cycle, knowing how far to push, to the point where what is a relatively grounded (by superhero movie standards) thing like Iron Man can stand side-by-side with Thor and an alien invasion, and where there is a very good chance that the Marvel Movie Universe will include Rocket Raccoon in a couple of years.

The Amazing Spider-Man (the movie) is a little more disappointing because Amazing Spider-Man (the comic) is doing a pretty good Lizard story to tie in right now, and seeing a Lizard who actually looks like a lizard, and has clear motivations (as opposed to a pointless conspiracy story that makes the movie feel like it's deferring things until later) makes the version Rhys Ifans is playing seem bland, even when he's doing the closest thing that this movie will allow to supervillainous ranting. Plus, man, I can't tell articulate how disappointing the visual of the Lizard is. The human-shaped head combined with the obviously CGI mouth just doesn't work; it's the exact wrong combination.

(Aside: Dan Slott is killing it on the Amazing Spider-Man twice a month right now. It had a rough patch a few years ago when Marvel had a forced DC-style rollback to undo Pete & MJ's marriage, bring back Harry Osborne, and otherwise make things more like what they felt the platonic ideal of Spider-Man was, but ever since the "Big Time" period started a year or two ago, Slott has quietly pushed Harry off-stage, tacitly acknowledged that no other girlfriend character was going to get over, and stopped with the "Peter's a sad sack who is always broke and unlucky" bits. It's awfully close to where it was before "One More Day", without it seeming to have gotten there unnaturally.)

For all that disappointed me about the movie, though, I think it was the last Peter/Gwen scene that really bugged me:

SPOILERS!

Peter Parker is motivated by guilt, and worry, and a pathological need to protect people. Slott's doing good stuff with that in the comic right now, as Peter's "no-one dies" pledge is something he can't possibly live up to and threatening to crush him. For the most part, the movie gets that, and the last act piles it on thick - Gwen mentions how not knowing whether her father will come home is a tremendous burden on her, the Lizard's plan is possible in part because of Richard Parker's work that Peter gave to Conners, and Peter watches George Stacy die because of it. With his dying words, George asks Peter not to put Gwen through it, and, well, of course Peter's going to obey that. Honestly, George doesn't need to ask. But, he does, and there's a tearful scene.

AND THEN, there's another scene, where Peter sits behind Gwen in class and whispers something about not keeping certain promises, and with that, the movie betrays the one thing it unquestionably got right. Sure, you can say it makes a certain amount of sense, because they're teenagers and their actions vary with their hormones, but... Come on, why would the movie undercut a perfect ending like that, leaving it in that uncommitted spot? It's just sloppy.

Then, of course, there's another scene mid-credits, hinting that there's a guy behind the guy and a secret where Peter's dad is concerned. The mastermind who sends someone to speak to Conners is probably Norman Osborne, just because Spider-man doesn't really have many mastermind-level villains (I don't see them going this direction with Dr. Octopus and Mr. Negative is too new). Whatever; it's annoying because Spider-man doesn't need a secret history; like Superman, he works much better as a character who steps up on his own rather than having been manipulated into place. But, if you're going to do a trilogy rather than just let the character have other adventures, that means backfilling mythology.

Bleh.

!SRELIOPS

Yes, I'm a big Raimi fan, and I'm tremendously disappointed not to see just what Raimi would have done with these characters. I half-suspect that a good chunk of this movie's script started as Spider-Man 4, as in previous films, Raimi and company had set up the Stacys (played by Bryce Dallas Howard and James Cromwell) and Curt Conners (played by Dylan Baker), and I'm pretty sure that Raimi would have had no problem taking the lizard in the lab coat and running with it.

One last thing: One thing neither set of movies really gets right is Peter Parker's tendency to wisecrack as Spider-man. What comes across in the comics as nervous energy or Peter feeling unburdened seems mean in the movies, just Peter venting without consequence. It's worse here than it is in Raimi's movies - that scene where Peter mocks the car thief almost makes the viewer sympathetic for the crook, and it's hard to imagine this Peter Parker refer to himself as your "friendly neighborhood spider-man" in future movies.

The Amazing Spider-Man

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2012 in Arlington Capitol #1 (first-run, RealD 3D)

The Amazing Spider-Man is done no favors by arriving when Sam Raimi's trio of Spider-Man movies is still fairly fresh, but that's not indefensible; in the ten years since his first Spider-Man came out, Marvel Comics has started at least two new series for the character that went back to the start, released a bunch of other #1 issues, produced two different animated series... This sort of thing is part of the landscape. What's important is how well the story is told, and this particular Spider-Man origin falls short of amazing.

There's a little more intrigue to it - largely unseen in most versions of the Spider-Man story, here we see Richard Parker (Campbell Scott) and his wife Mary (Embeth Davidtz) leaving their son in the care of his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field). A dozen years later, the orphaned Peter (Andrew Garfield) is still with them when he finds his father's old satchel, which leads him to his father's old Oscorp colleague Curt Conners (Rhys Ifans), a bite from a genetically engineered spider, and an armed robber he tragically doesn't stop. He meets a nice girl, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), though her NYPD father (Denis Leary) is none too fond of new masked vigilante Spider-Man, while Conners's experiments in using reptilian DNA for cellular regeneration go monstrously awry.

This story has been told enough that by now, it's less about the particular variations on the theme than how its told, and the way this movie fails is kind of fascinating. Director Mark Webb and the producers - with three writers at one end of the pipeline and three editors on the other - manage to make a movie that focuses so resolutely on the things it does best as to weaken itself in every other area. And for as nice as the scenes between Pete & Gwen or Pete & Ben are (except the last Pete/Gwen scene, which seems to throw the filmmakers' understanding of Peter Parker out the window), the balance between that and the actual plot that involves Peter Parker becoming a superhero and fighting supervillains is terribly out of whack. Conners goes from mentor to antagonist off-screen, with just voiceover flashbacks to scenes apparently cut from the movie to bridge the gap. The movie joins its big Brooklyn Bridge action sequence halfway through, depriving the audience of not just a cool set-piece, but seeing Peter and Captain Stacy confront "supercrime" for the first time.

Granted, the stuff with The Lizard is not very good, but by not just rolling with the innate strangeness of it, the filmmakers make what's left feel shoehorned-in and out of place. It feels like they're doing a Batman Begins-style reboot - go back to a previously untold starting point, scrape away the parts that make for easy parody, focus on what resonates with the audience - without realizing they are removing all the fun parts. Webb and company get the horror-movie surface of The Lizard well enough, but the grandiosity of a were-lizard in a lab coat who sssspeakssss like thisssssss and wants to rule over a world of transformed lizard-people just doesn't seem to be something they're willing to embrace. The lab coat is shed at the first opportunity and the snout-less CGI model is neither convincing nor entertaining.

The cast, at least, is solid. Andrew Garfield makes an appealing Peter Parker while still remembering that he's a teenager and can often tend to be well-meaning and self-centered at the same time. Martin Sheen makes a great, folksy Uncle Ben - he's grandfatherly without ever seeming frail. Rhys Ifans does pretty well with what he's given, and Emma Stone wrings a fair amount of charm out of what she's given. Denis Leary, Sally Field, Campbell Scott, and Irrfan Khan get the job done.

It's a nice-enough looking movie, with some impressive stuntwork and a consistent style. It does tend toward the dark - this Peter Parker does much of his webslinging at night - which doesn't do the 3D cinematography any favors, although there are a few moments which show off the climbing abilities of both spiders and lizards. Still, as much as Webb can build action sequences around emotional beats, they often aren't as viscerally exciting as they could be, even with relatively little emphasis use of digital stuntpeople.

The Amazing Spider-Man does a few things pretty well, and they're the things people generally say are important: Decent acting, getting the emotion right. But for a long movie featuring a guy with spider-powers facing off against a mad half-reptile scientist, it's not nearly as much fun as that description and remarkably short on memorable action.

(Formerly at EFC)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 3 July 2012 - 12 July 2012

Wow, but does the holiday do weird things to the release schedule, to the point where it makes more sense to organize by day rather than location.

• Tuesday, 3 July: Or, by the time you're reading this, yesterday. That's when Columbia opted to open The Amazing Spider-Man. Not Spider-Man 4, but a rollback to the beginning with a new cast and director (although, oddly, it seems like the script with the Lizard and the Stacys is what Sam Raimi was heading for anyway). It's shot in native 3D and plays in IMAX 3D at Reading and Natick Jordan's Furniture Stores, and also plays the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (Imax-branded), and Fenway (RPX) in both 3D and 2D.



• Wedesday, 4 July: Remember back in February, when the Brattle didn't play Casablanca for Valentine's day because Warner was doing anniversery screenings of a digital "upgrade"? Uncool. Apparently, WB is now letting the 35mm prints out of the vault, and the Brattle's got one. It plays 2pm, 4:30pm, and 7pm through Sunday.



• Thursday, 5 July: On Thursday, they add late shows of The Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard's pretty spiffy love letter to the horror genre. If you missed it, was it perhaps because it looked like just any other slasher and you didn't see that Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, and Amy Acker were going to be a big part of it? Because they are a huge part of what makes it pretty great.
  
  The multiplexes open Katy Perry: Part of Me, one of those documentary/concert movie hybrids. I'll leave the snark or praise for people who know anything about music. It plays Somerville in 2D, Boston Common in 3D, and Fenway in both formats, depending on the time of day
  
  The Coolidge pays tribute to the late Nora Ephron by playing one of her most beloved films, When Harry Met Sally, on the big screen in 35mm at 7pm.
  
  The MFA has their last screening of The Turin Horse on Thursday, and also their first of Never Stand Still, a documentary on innovative dancers and choreographers shot at a Berkshires dance festival, with interview, archive, and performance footage. It also plays Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and the next Thursday at various times.



• Friday, 6 July:Two big-name directors have films opening on the usual day. For Oliver Stone, it's Savages, a return to pulp for the first time in fifteen years. I'm rooting for Taylor Kitsch, who has done a couple of movies this year that deserved better than they got. Wouldn't mind seeing Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta, and Salma Hayek be in a good movie, either. It plays Somerville, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  Woody Allen's offering this year is To Rome with Love, an overlapping group of romances set in Roma featuring Allen, Judy Davis, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penelope Cruz, Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig, Jesse Eisenberg, and more. It plays the Coolidge and Kendall Square.
  
  The Coolidge also picks up Kirby Dick's documentary The Invisible War, which aims to shine a light on the problem of sexual assault within the military, and how it is often swept under the rug. It plays in the screening room, and the 7pm show on Friday will have Congresswoman Niki Tsongas on-hand, who is included in the film and working to draft legislation to curb the issue. The screening rooms will also be showing matinees of A Cat in Paris, and the midnight show on Friday and Saturday is From Dusk Til Dawn, the pretty damn great Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino Mexican vampire movie that features Salma Hayek, George Clooney, and three Cheech Marins (count 'em!).
  
  The Kendall picks up three other movies. Take This Waltz is the latest from Sarah Polley, who has gotten past wunderkind status to simply be a darn good filmmaker. Here, she gives us Michelle Williams an Luke Kirby as potential lovers, despite Williams's Margot being married to a genial Seth Rogen. They also get Beasts of the Southern Wild, which follows a six-year-old girl in the Louisianna bayou whose world literally threatens to fall apart after a massive storm. The one-week booking sort of gets a raw deal, as Natural Selection is stuck splitting a screen with another movie. It features Rachel Harris as a pious woman trying to unite her dying husband with one of the many children he fathered via sperm donation.
  
  The Harvard Film Archive starts Cruel and Unusual: The Exquisite Remains of Erich von Stroheim, featuring one of the titans of the silent era. The first weekend features Greed (Friday), Hello, Sister! (Friday & Sunday), Blind Husbands (Saturday), Foolish Husbands (Sunday), and The Merry Widow (Monday). All will include live piano accompaniment (aside from Hello, Sister!, his only sound film)



• Saturday, 7 July: It's the last call for The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Harvard Square, with the Full Body Cast doing an extra show this week (9:30pm as well as 12:30am) before moving the whole shebang across the river to Boston Common on 4 August. One thing I just started wondering - with those AMC theaters going pretty much all-digital about a year ago, has this still been running on film or has Fox been providing an HD file? I think it would be wonderfully perverse if the theaters are keeping 35mm projectors on one screen and employing projectionists just to show RHPS once a week.
  
  Sunset Boulevard is part of the Erich von Stroheim series at the HFA, although its one that he does not direct, but appears in. It's a classic and worthy of being singled out.



• Monday, 9 July: In a sure sign of summer, the Brattle begins its old-school "vertical" schedule, with what's playing determined by the day of the week. Mondays and Tuesdays will feature The Story of Film: An Odyssey, a massive 15-hour documentary being run in two-hour chunks that follows the history of cinema from its start to the present. It recently played the MFA, but the Brattle will be pairing it with films from the period covered. This week, the film is Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr., a nifty fantasy that includes some pretty great in-camera special effects.
  
  While those will be shown digitally, the Coolidge's "Big Screen Classics" screening this week is in beautiful 35mm - Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Believe it or not, new Tim Burton films used to be exciting and unpredictable, and this is a great example of that. Pre-show activities and contests are promised and should be fun.



• Tuesday, 10 July: The Regent Theater in Arlington is doing "Andrew Lloyd Webber classics in July", with this week's entry a 25th-anniversary performance of The Phantom of the Opera beamed in from London.



• Wednesday, 11 July: The Brattle's "Wordless Wednesday" feature also ties into "The Story of Film" with a presentation of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer's famed silent dramatization of Jeanne d'Arc's story.



• Thursday, 12 July: One of the Brattle's most fun events, "Trailer Treats", pops up with a night of great and terrible previews from the Brattle's extensive collection, with live music, Blue Ribbon Barbecue, Narragansett beer, and the 2012 Trailer Smackdown, with the finalists of the Brattle's annual contest to create a trailer for a fictitious feature, this year named "Ten" to honor the event's tenth anniversary.
  
  Regal Fenway has a Turner Classic Movies screening of Singin' in the Rain. It's a digital broadcast, but includes a new interview with Debbie Reynolds.
  
  The Regent has a "New England Promotional Screening" of The Rise and Fall of the Clash that includes a Q&A by director Danny Garcia. It's a documentary on the success and self-destruction of a group once called "the only band that matters".

Well, let's not do that again. But, anyway, my plans are in flux depending on how much time I'm spending in Maine to celebrate my twin nieces' first birthday. I'm thinking Amazing Spider-Man (though getting to the furniture store will be tough), Take This Waltz, and To Rome with Love, as well as Trailer Treats, but who knows how things will actually shake out.

This Week In Tickets: 25 June 2012 - 1 July 2012

Check it out - the time I got off work aligned with when movie's started, and the Red Sox being on a west-coast trip made it so I didn't miss anything:



A nice, solid week there - Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter was maybe not all it could have been, but frequently good enough to be worth recommending to those that like the screwy; A Cat in Paris is pretty charming for all ages (it moves to the Coolidge's screening room on Friday).

In summer-reading news, I finished The Devotion of Suspect X and really liked it.

Oh, and before we get to the main review of Ted, I've got to say it was kind of neat to see a movie in a cinema that appears in the movie (even if, in 1999, the Somerville probably wasn't showing The Phantom Menace on opening night because it was mostly a second-run place at the time).

Ted

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 June 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

Give the man his due - Seth MacFarlane can be a pretty great voice actor in the Mel Blanc "broad but capable of several distinct characters" mode. Between his work and that of the CGI team, Ted's title character is seldom anything less than a hundred percent believable. MacFarlane is a lot iffier as a writer/director; his first feature has some darn good jokes but also some stuff that isn't nearly as funny as MacFarlane thinks.

That is, to an extent, par for the course; from what I've seen of Family Guy, the non-sequiter pop-culture reference and "ha ha, the character doesn't realize he's being really offensive" bit have been easy go-tos for him for a long time. As isolated bad jokes, you can sort of overlook them, but the plot also tends to be this sort of randomness, which means that when the jokes aren't working, there's not a whole lot to pull you through. The big finale is kind of the worst in that respect - why Fenway Park? What's the deal with Giovanni Ribisi's villain, other than "we need a villain to have a climax"? Is this really saying anything?

Fortunately, the cast is able to make a lot of the movie go smoother than it otherwise would. Mark Wahlberg has the sheer charm and comic timing to make his John Bennett quite likable despite often being an irresponsible twerp, and Mila Kunis is pretty awesome as John's girlfriend Lori. Give MacFarlane some credit here - this is a character that is often written as a shrew or someone who just doesn't fit with her schlubby boyfriend at all, but Lori's got self-respect even if she finds farts funny, while Kunis makes her a lot more than a plot device.

If MacFarlane could refine his material past the initial idea, that would be great. It would certainly make Ted better than just "pretty decent".

People Like Us

* * (out of four)
Seen 1 July 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, Sony Digital 4K)

People Like Us has a nice enough hook that maybe isn't hugely original - hidden relatives discovered after a death in the family - but it's got a good cast to execute that plot with and, at least at the start, is enthusiastic about letting us get to know these characters through their deeds rather than their words. It may not be subtle, but it's at least enthusiastic for a while.

And then, well, it isn't. Chris Pine's Sam learns that Elizabeth Banks's Frankie is a half-sister he'd never known about, but not vice versa, and the movie runs in neutral there for a while. Writers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Jody Lambert throw a lot of subplots in there to give Pine, Banks, and company something to do while they put People Finding Stuff Out off until the last minute, but it all seems like so much filler: Frankie's obnoxious little brat is just annoying to watch, the FTC investigation Sam is dealing with sometimes gets treated like a ticking clock and sometimes gets ignored; significant others played by Olivia Wilde and Mark Duplass just disappear for long stretches. It's like Kurtzman (who directs) and his co-writers know that the stuff with Sam and Frankie is the actual important, interesting material, but don't know any other way to structure it.

Too bad; Pine and Banks are quite nice together, and as much as the last scene is as likely to make one say "you know, you could have done this sooner" as "hey, that all goes together", it works, producing at least semi-legitimate warm fuzzies. I've always thought that Kurtzman & Orci did fairly decent genre work, but maybe without a strong director and/or large-scale action scenes to dazzle, there's just not that much to them.

Moonrise Kingdom

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 July 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

Is it giving too much away for me to wonder if Wes Anderson has reconnected with his father and gotten the hug he so clearly craved (or maybe become a doting father to kids of his own, redefining the relationship for him)? I ask because while Fantastic Mr. Fox was much less about yearning for that connection than his previous films, and this one SPOILERS! actually ends on a father figure coming into a boy's life, rather than dwelling on the loss of one !SRELIOPS.

It's nice to see Anderson seem to get past certain hang-ups, at times addressing them very directly - when Kara Hayward's Suzy talks about finding an orphan's life romantic, Jared Gilman's Sam says he loves her, but she doesn't know what she's talking about, and maybe that's Anderson scolding himself a little. Of course, he's not past everything; he's still so precise and controlling in his direction as to nearly choke the life out of the movie. He does avoid that, but sometimes only by the thinnest of margins, although he has always lived right on the border of deadpan and dead.

That's a bit more negative an attitude than the movie likely deserves, though. As much as the adults are generally characters that the great cast doesn't really have to exert themselves much to play (although Bruce Willis and Edward Norton both play their characters like they have much larger roles), the kids are pretty wonderful. One thing Anderson does that's really impressive is that he allows them to be both misunderstood eccentrics and genuinely troubled. There's a flashback where we see that Suzy is not just an outsider because she's smarter than the people around her that is genuinely shocking, but Anderson allows it to inform rather than dominate the rest of the movie. Hayward and Gilman, in addition to anchoring the large chunks of the movie when no adults are around, have as much chemistry as anybody has ever had in a Wes Anderson movie.

The real romance in a Wes Anderson picture is between Anderson and his imagery. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman and production designer Adam Stockhausen are the matchmakers here, and from the start, it's clear there's something special going on. There are lots of kid's-eye-view camera angles and sharp, noticeable pans, as well as a frequently deliberate fuzziness that comes from using wide shots and 16mm film. Anderson and Stockhausen (re)create a child's 1965 just as obsessively as one might imagine - I'm pretty sure some of the props are exact matches for things my frugal, never-throw-anything-away grandmother still had in her house a generation later - but their best work comes out as absurdity. There are shots that seem more cartoon-inspired than anything in Fantastic Mr. Fox, and others which are almost like brainteasers: I half-suspect that split-screens of telephone calls were shot by building half of two sets, putting them together, and having the camera placed just so, and half-suspect that they were stitched together with a computer to look like that's the case.

That's kind of how Wes Anderson movies work, for better or for worse - they're the result of so much attention to detail and droll wit that one can often actually feel empathy for the characters crowded out. Moonrise Kingdom manages to survive that, and often even thrive, making it the best thing he's done since The Royal Tennenbaums.