This Week In Tickets: 4 March 2013 - 10 March 2013

Ah, stupid snow and work and knowing I'm not going to make it through a two-hour-plus midnight movie, leaving all that white space:



I meant to see a couple other things, but for some reason Tuesdays have been keeping me at work late (stuff you can't put off until tomorrow just always seems to spring up at 4:30pm on Tuesday), while Thursday's attempt to see Side Effects was thwarted by MoviePass not bloody working again. Honestly, when I'm standing in the lobby and it's giving me "please wait" for ten minutes while trying to verify my location...

To be fair, it did get me into two movies during the weekend - neither Dead Man Down nor Emperor was particularly good - but that's the kind of frustrating thing about its user experience - the 75% of the time when it works smoothly do not stick in one's memory nearly as well as the 25% where it either fails or feels like it's about to fail.

Other on-line offers got me into the other movies for cheap - discount Aquarium IMAX tickets for "The Last Reef" and another offer got me $13 toward Oz: The Great and Powerful on Fenway's premium screen, and those were both pretty good. 10am-on-Sunday shows at Fenway can be pretty odd, though, since there's a church that rents a room there (whether it's for live preaching or something beamed in, I don't know), so when you arrive at 9:45 there are smiling folks handing things out while the manager has to hop behind the counter when she realizes that this guy is here to see the movie with witches in it and wants popcorn for his brunch.

A fair amount of walking both days, leaving me a bit worn down, which was probably as much a factor as uncertain weather in me not seeing ABCs of Death at the Coolidge (did I feel like walking home from that at 2:30am? No, I did not!). Not sure I'll see it this coming weekend, either, what with all the keen wuxia at the Harvard Film Archive.

"The Last Reef"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 March 2013 in the New England Aquarium Simonx IMAX Theatre (first-run, IMAX 3D)

Venues like the New England Aquarium and Boston Museum of Science don't use the same playbook as other cinemas in booking their screen. A new IMAX film will be released, it will go into the rotation, and then stick around potentially forever, especially if its subject matter matches what's on display at the institution. Which means that there's a good chance that the Aquarium will keep this one around for, say, a year or two, if not longer.

Which is cool, because "The Last Reef" is a pretty good IMAX documentary. It's informative, entertaining, and impressively put together. It's an nicely focused featurette, not trying to focus on the whole ocean as opposed to this one facet of it, which has left more than one of these movies feeling somewhat shallow. The movie makes the unavoidable points about what increased carbon dioxide levels do to coral without seeming too strident or taking the focus off how amazing coral reefs are; the end includes a lot of hope to go with the caution. It's pretty basic information, but when you figure that kids are the primary audience, it's a good start.

Not that you need to be a kid to enjoy the main draw of these movies: Amazing photography. The ocean is a fertile setting for IMAX 3D movies, since they're full of amazing things moving about in three-dimensional space as opposed to hugging a surface like we land-dwelling creates do, and the movie serves up plenty of colorful creatures with improbably structures like sea slugs and flatworms that make the CGI creations in fantasy films seem boring. Other cool things include symbiotic relationships that have small fish feeding on stuff that sticks to much larger rays, fiercely territorial clownfish weaving in and out of reefs, and massive schools that fill the six-story screen. Plus, jellyfish (the Aquarium could probably sell me a ticket to an IMAX film called "forty-five minutes of jellyfish swimming" every time I feel a little tense).

Filmmakers Luke Cresswell & Steve McNicholas (who write, direct, edit, and compose the music; D.J. Roller shoots) break things up a little so that it's not all just schools of fish, lest the audience take what it's seeing for granted. Some attempts are a little over-thought, like the bit about atomic bomb testing on bikini atoll that opens the movie, though the basic idea is revisited at the end. The cutaways to New York City sometimes seem to fall in this category, but they do serve to connect the themes of reefs being natural cities and modern life stressing the world's CO₂ capacity; they're also some nifty bits of 3D time-lapse cinematography in their own right. There are occasional bits of whimsy, as well, especially when human divers enter the picture.

On a certain level, the three underwater documentaries playing the Aquarium are kind of interchangeable - you're going to see them for the same basic reason, and may wind up choosing which one based on what fits your Aquarium visit. It's a good IMAX doc on its own, too, if you're looking for forty-five minutes of nifty photography and cool science.

Dead Man Down

* * (out of four)
Seen 9 March 2013 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, digital)

It doesn't seem that way at first, but once Dead Man Down gets started, it's basically a movie about rooting for a Batman villain, making big elaborate plans for revenge when he could just put a bullet in someone's head, and who knows what sort of collateral damage is going to go on in the meantime?

Kind of a silly story, though it admittedly acknowledges how overcomplicated it is and mostly overcomes it with a strong cast: Colin Farrell tends to be a little too low-key and hangdog, but it works opposite Noomi Rapace, who tends to see just how far she can push as the neighbor who sees he's a killer and wants to use it to further her own revenge. Terrence Howard is a fine villain, and Dominic Cooper has a nifty supporting role is the crook who is smarter than you might expect - maybe a little too smart for his own good.

And while the plot may grind forward fairly slowly, director Niels Arden Oplev does a pretty good job of camouflaging it. He also stages one or two fairly well-done action sequences, especially a finale that may not quite fit the rest of the movie - it's raucous where what comes before is often dour - so it's far from a complete loss. It means the movie is just below average, rather than really bad.

Oz: The Great and Powerful

Funny thing; before a few years ago, I would have really been down on this movie before seeing it, in a "why the heck is Peter Jackson spending so much valuable career time on those freaking midget movies" way. I love Sam Raimi but was never particularly fond of The Wizard of Oz. It's weird; the family watched a large chunk of it most Thanksgivings (CBS would play it every year), but for some reason, the scary parts didn't make the lasting impression on me that they did others. The songs, either, for that matter.

Then Marvel released some art from the comic book adaptations they were doing, written by Eric Shanower and drawn by Skottie Young. They're gorgeous, sort of why Young is in the comic-drawing business. It was great fun to see them go back to the source material and adapt the stories without being especially influenced by the famous movie. It's a comic worth getting in hardcover, and while I haven't become a hardcore Oz fan, I've gained some affinity for the world.

And while I don't particularly love The Wizard of Oz, my nieces apparently do. The part of me that hates the Lord of the Rings stories for how they represent Tolkein's disdain for modernity and technology similarly reads too much into Wizard, thinking "there's no place like home" is a terrible message for that story to give kids - you get transported from the Kansas dustbowl to a magical land where you make amazing friends and have grand adventures, and all you can think of is getting back to your boring farm?

Anyway, the girls love it, so I'm naturally even more curious than I usually am when I go to see a family-friendly movie at how they'd react to it. I don't know about recommending it - I don't see them enough to know what would scare them for one thing, and there's some scary bits in it, though I don't think anything worse than the 1939 movie.

It's kind of neat that my six-year-old niece and I might both be excited for this movie, though, albeit from different directions (I'm guessing she's not a big Sam Raimi fan, what with being six).

Oz: The Great and Powerful

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2013 in Regal Fenway #13 (first-run, RPX)

I must admit, I groaned upon finding out that one of my favorite filmmakers would be making a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. Not just because I'm not a particularly big fan of the original, but because it seemed like kind of a dumb idea: Why do this exercise in putting things into place when L. Frank Baum built so much more? Of course, that question ignores how Oz has thrived for a hundred years in part because many beyond Baum have made fine contributions, with this group being just the latest.

Still, it can't be denied that director Sam Raimi and writers Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire aim to recreate as much as expand: The movie starts in black-and-white, with circus magician Oscar "Oz" Diggs (James Franco) stopped near where he grew up in Kansas before a tornado transports him to the magical land of Oz. There, he meets friendly witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), who tells him of a prophecy that that a great and powerful wizard would fall from the sky and defeat the wicked witch who poisoned the king of the Emerald City, becoming King himself. Well, this Oz isn't exactly a wizard, but being King sounds nice, so he heads off down the yellow brick road, picking up a couple of fantastical companions - Finley the flying monkey (voice of Zach Braff) and a China Girl (voice of Joey King) from a teapot village - along the way.

Yes, the filmmakers take every visual and storytelling cue they can from the MGM musical that won't lead to legal action from its current owners, but they create enough of their own and update it with enough modern special effects to grab the attention of those who don't appreciate what 1939 had to offer. The landscape Oz finds when arriving in this new world is big, colorful, and beautiful, and while the visuals don't always look fully real, they always look like something that could spring from a child's imagination. New sights like the China Girl's village are fun discoveries, and there's always just enough going on in the background so that the fantasy world doesn't seem to stop at the edges of the screen but not enough to distract.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Emperor

One thing I didn't particularly worry about when reviewing this movie was accuracy. Part of that is not really having time to dig through a bunch of WWII history for a movie review that I want to get posted while it's still in theaters (and not necessarily being inclined to do so, to be honest); part of it is that the movie itself was disappointing enough that you don't really need to talk about actual accuracy to feel it did history a disservice.

Still, it's kind of amazing just how thoroughly the filmmakers seem to have missed the mark on what is interesting and what is not. A quick search on Gen. Bonner Fellers yielded both his Wikipedia page and this book excerpt which suggested that Fellers and MacArthur proactively acted to prevent Hirohito from coming before a tribunal, as opposed to that being a hoped-for conclusion. I suspect that it's not so easy to make a movie about subverting the machinery of justice to achieve what one feels may be a greater good, but who needs the easy movie? The moral ambiguities there are more interesting to chew on, as well: Consider how the second link mentions how this action influenced Japan's perception of the war, allowing them to more easily cast themselves as victims as opposed to aggressors.

And then there's Aya Shimada. I don't know whether she's real or not, but she feels like something a lazy screenwriter would come up with, from how she seems to exist to fulfill plot necessities to how she really doesn't fit into the real Fellers's timeline: She's a college student in 1932, and while it's possible that Fellers could have been on campus working on a doctorate at the time, but what I could see online was the Fellers became interested in Japanese culture by meeting an exchange student in 1914. Still possible in the movie's timeline, but in that case, is meeting Aya not quite so transformative, and she's less the direct representation of Japan to him as he tries to rebuild it.

In the end, Emperor may not be strictly inaccurate, but it seems to choose the least interesting parts of the story. Which is a shame, because there's fascinating stuff there.

Emperor

* * (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2013 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, 4K digital)

Under normal circumstances, I might grumble about Emperor being a case of keeping an interesting story and larger-than-life characters at arm's length in favor of someone that the audience can perhaps more easily relate to. In this case, though, things seem like they've been made a bit more bland beyond that. There's a fascinating moment of history here that too often seems to be playing second fiddle.

That moment is in 1945, when General Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) arrives in Tokyo after Japan's surrender to oversee the occupation and reconstruction of Japan. Initially, Emperor Hirohito is not on the list to be arrested for war crimes, but many in the United States want him to hang, and have given MacArthur ten days to provide a recommendation one way or the other. MacArthur delegates the job to General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox), the member of his staff who understands Japan the best - although Fellers is also spending a fair amount of time looking for Aya Shimada (Eriko Hatsune), a former girlfriend he last saw before the war.

It's not hard to see what the filmmakers are looking to do here (and perhaps author Shiro Okamoto, whose work was adapted), showing the war and its aftermath on both the scale of nations and individuals. The trouble is, the thread of Bonner & Aya is just not that interesting. It's a story that we've seen a great many times before, right down to the flashbacks of meeting while she's in college (what the World War I vet Bonners is doing there in 1933 is not clear), happier times, and separation, and neither these particular characters or situations seem special. That flashback structure is a chestnut, and a particularly silly and limiting one here: It keeps Bonners from looking in the most obvious place until the viewer is caught up, and not because there's a particular sense of him not being ready to face it until then.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 March - 14 March 2013

Hey, a miracle could happen and that March 25th screening of Back to 1942 could come off! I will be trying again later, though. I'm also trying for this screening of The Brass Teapot; why not join me?

In the meantime... NEW SAM RAIMI! And, uh, other stuff.

• The new Sam Raimi movie is the big deal this week, with Oz: The Great and Powerful grabbing a whole big thwack of screens, including 3D and 2D showings at Somerville, Boston Common (including the Imax-branded screen), Fenway (including RPX), Jordan's Furniture (IMAX), and Fresh Pond. Admittedly, I'm not sure why they did a prequel when Baum wrote a whole bunch of Oz novels, but word is that Raimi loves them along with the MGM movie and tried to do right by them (and also applied his signature style to 3D). James Franco, Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams, and Rachel Weisz star. With any luck, Bruce Campbell and Ted Raimi will be playing munchkins.
  
  If you're looking for a less all-ages thrill ride, Dead Man Down reunites director Niels Arden Oplev and star Noomi Rapace (they did the first Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, easily the best Lisbeth Salander movie) in an English-language movie where Salander's character blackmails a killer played by Colin Farrell into taking revenge on the man who maimed her. It plays Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Boston Common also picks up Stoker, the first English-language movie by another pretty darn great foreign director, Chan-wook Park. It's really good.
• Emperor opens at both Boston Common and Kendall Square, and features Tommy Lee Jones as Douglas MacArthur deciding Japan's fate - most specifically, that of its emperor - in the wake of World War II.
  
  The end of the war on its other front is the setting for another movie opening at Kendall Square, Lore, which follows the children of imprisoned Nazi war criminals who must cross Germany on their own to reach an aunt, as a result facing the results of what their parents fought for. In another corner of the world, No tells the story of how an advertising executive, among others, spearheaded a plan to win a 1988 referendum on Chilean dictator Pinochet's regime. That's not the end of the theater's globetrotting, though - they've got a week of Israeli director Eytan Fox's follow-up to Yossi & Jagger, Yossi, which catches up with the title character ten years later, meeting a new young lover.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up a couple new movies as well, both documentaries playing in the video screening rooms. Don't Stop Believing: Everyman's Journey, focuses on Arnel Pineda, a fan of the band Journey who apparently nailed them so well in his YouTube clips that he was chosen to be the new frontman. Greedy Lying Bastards, meanwhile, sets its sights on the energy industry and efforts to prevent meaningful action on climate change. I'm guessing it is not a calm, even-handed approach.
  
  They also go midnight-crazy this weekend, with three separate movies playing Friday and Saturday at 11:59pm. John Dies at the End gets held over for a second weekend, albeit in the screening room. The other upstairs screen has The ABCs of Death, in which a murderer's row of genre filmmakers from around the world each have an average of five minutes to kill someone in a way inspired by a different letter of the alphabet. It also will play the Brattle next week. The main screen, meanwhile, goes old-school with a 35mm print of the original Brian De Palma adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.
  
  The polar opposite of those movies plays Sunday at 10am, with a Kids' Show of The Care Bears Movie. Monday night offers a "Stage & Screen" showing of Fritz Lang's M, a fantastic movie with Peter Lorre in the role of his life as a serial child-killer who is ultimately hunted by the underworld as well as the police; it's introduced by playwright Ryan Landry, who has apparently made a comedy of it which will play at the Cedarwood Pavillion from 29 March through April. There's also a special screening on Thursday night of recent French critical darling Aujourd'hui, which follows a Senegalese man putting his life in order before his impending death.
• Endings loom in Night Across the Street as well; the final film of Raoul Ruiz plays the Brattle. Created while the dying Ruiz knew the end was near, it follows an elderly man as he takes a trip down memory lane, where life merges with fantasy. In only runs three days, from Friday to Sunday, and plays from a digital source.
  
  After that, it's a series of one-night stands. Monday's DocYard presentation is Planet of Snail, an award-winning documentary about the lives of people who are both deaf and blind. After the screening, director Yi Seung-jun will conduct a remote Q&A via Skype. There will be guests in person for Tuesday's presentation of Royal Wedding - film critic/Turner Classic Movies host Leonard Maltin and star Jane Powell, to be precise, talking about the classing Fred Astair dance movie as part of TCM's "Road to Hollywood" tour. After a Harvard Book Store reading/discussion with The Boston Globe's Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy (from their new book on Whitey Bulger), there will be an 8:15pm screening of The Departed, which clearly drew on Bulger's legend almost as much as Infernal Affairs. Finally, Thursday is a Balagan show, DIY Dystopia, which includes both hands-on manipulation of 16mm film and "a special collaboration with the Papercut Zine Library".
• The Harvard Film Archive reaches the end of Action! Action! Action! A Raoul Walsh Retrospective with Pursued and The Man I Love on Friday night, The Strawberry Blonde and The Bowery on Saturday, and Sadie Thompson on Sunday afternoon (all single-admission features; The Man I Love is 16mm rather than 35mm, and Sadie Thompson is silent with accompaniment by Martin Marks).
  
  After that, they have a pair of anti-war anthologies: Far from Afghanistan plays Sunday night with directors John Giavito and Yoo Soon-mi there in person. It combines documentary, fiction, found-footage and avant-garde looks at the war in Afghanistan, and is inspired by Monday night's Far from Vietnam, which had Chris Marker joined by the likes of Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, and more.
• The MFA'sfilm programming continued what it started Wednesday, with Habibi and Little Fugitive each playinig Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday at various times. Habibi also screens Thursday afternoon, with the first screenings in the New Latin American Cinema series, Thursday Till Sunday and La Sirga, playing that evening.
• ArtsEmerson's film program has Coen Brothers classic Barton Fink playing Friday night and Sunday afternoon, with Saturday featuring repeats of last week's "Metamorphasis" tie-ins for those who missed them watching the play: The Trial at 1pm, Cronenberg's The Fly at 6pm, and the original with Vincent Price at 9pm. All are on DVD. The Bright Lights screenings (which I feel terrible about not knowing about before now, since they're free and programmed by Anna Feder who is one of many to have done great work with the Boston Underground Film Festival) include documentary Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story on Tuesday and a selection of student films on Thursday.
• The ICA has just one screening this week, the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts on Sunday at 3pm.
• iMovieCafe bumps popular cricket-academy drama Kai Po Che back up to main-feature status, also bringing back Special 26 for single shows on Saturday and Sunday. There's also one show daily of Telugu-language Gundello Godari through Wednesday.
• The Arlington Capitol once again picks a movie up after it leaves Kendall Square; this week that would be Lincoln.

My plans? Well, I think I might try to hit the furniture store for Oz, then come back for Dead Man Down, Emperor, Lore, and maybe No. Plus catching up on the Buried Treasure nominees I've been procrastinating on at home.

Boston Sci-Fi Marathon Redux: The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

Well, I was going to review two or three from the Marathon, but ultimately decided I did't need to write more about Battle Royale after the big ol' post where I compared it and The Hunger Games, and I kind of conked out a bit toward the end of Reptilicus. Besides, reviewing that one would have meant a double-whammy of "eh, fifties sci-fi silliness isn't really my thing, and apparently that's just not done.

Part of it's principle - I'm not a big fan of science fiction as a nostalgia act, something you look back upon fondly. The golden age of science fiction should always be in the future, and fetishizing the way it was in the past strikes me as missing the core appeal of the genre, the discovery and imagination of new things, in favor of the trappings. A part of me wonders if The Ghastly Love of Johnny X doubles down on this in a way by paying such tribute to the pop-culture of the time; is this fondness for the actual thing, or what was learned via Happy Days and Grease?

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, DCP)

Many films boast of firsts, but The Ghastly Love of Johnny X has to settle for lasts: Last film shot on Kodak's Super-X black-and-white film stock. Last role for Kevin McCarthy of Invaders of the Body Snatchers fame. Last... Well, almost certainly not the last tongue-in-cheek homage to 1950s sci-fi movies. Probably not even the last musical one - though the songs do give it a little more energy than usual.

Johnny Xavier (Will Keenan) is a teenager from outer space, banished from his home world for being too much of a rebel, banished to... Earth! When next we see him, he's chasing down Bliss (De Anna Joy Brooks), the girlfriend who was also banished, who falls in with nice soda jerk Chip (Les Williams), who figures they can hide with his uncle King Clayton (Reggie Bannister), who is trying to mount a comeback show for legendary rock & roller Mickey O'Flynn, The Man with the Grin (Creed Bratton), who may be a big part of the reason Johnny got himself banished to Earth in the first place!

That description is relatively straightforward compared to the way the story actually winds up running; it's a mess of antagonists suddenly being sold as heroes, sidekicks becoming villains, and couplings that happen and disintegrate seemingly at the writers' distracted whims as opposed to any sort of thing that the audience feels from the characters or might find satisfying. The characters do everything for what feel like arbitrary reasons, right from the set-up of "you can come home if you do this" and then never bothering to convince the audience of why Johnny would even want to go home.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 25 February 2013 - 3 March 2013

Thought it was going to be busier, but there was baseball to watch. Baseball! On television! That makes ignoring snow outside easy!



Stubless: Stoker, Brattle Theatre, at 7pm on 28 February 2013.

I honestly meant to take in more Park Chan-wook stuff at the Brattle last week, but the late-ish show time on Monday made it difficult to overcome inertia to see Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance at 9:30, and though I was already there after "Kokoyakyu" on Tuesday, I didn't feel like hanging around for an hour and, besides, work the next day. Ah, well, I've got them all on Blu-ray, so I can give them another viewing another time. Wouldn't quite have been the same as seeing them on 35mm, which is one of the reasons why I was glad to get to the preview of Stoker.

I originally intended to see more first-run stuff over the weekend, but I opted to watch both a spring training and World Baseball Classic game Friday night, and then when I was done hanging around with my brother and grocery shopping on Sunday, well, did I really need to see The Last Exorcism Part II? No, I don't think I did. Jack the Giant Slayer and Phantom made a pretty nice ad-hoc double feature, though - neither great movies, but enjoyable, especially when you're not laying out a whole lot of cash for them specifically.

Which leaves us with one last little ticket on the page, "Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball'. I actually got a heads up on that one from my Japanese teacher at Boston Language Institute emailing me - a nice thing to do, as I was not a particularly good student (and a ton of what I've learned is just gone now - lack of opportunity to practice has really hurt me). She'd never been to the Brattle before, despite being in Boston for a while, and seemed interested when hearing about the range of things that played there. That seemed to be the case with a lot of the folks attending, especially those in education; hopefully, they'll come more often, especially now that they're going to be putting some upgrades in.

The screening was for a group called "Primary Source", which mainly looks to connect educators with material that will help them bring the world to their students. Thus, this documentary that originally aired on PBS's P.O.V. series back in 2006. While I half-suspect that Japan isn't nearly the sort of strange, mysterious place it was to me growing up - a guy living in suburban Maine didn't see much manga, anime, and proudly Japanese videogames in the 1980s, especially compared to WWII in history class - but this is probably a pretty good way to introduce kids to Japanese culture; it's familiar but also quite different.

(Especially here in New England, where we like the baseball; perhaps you noticed that from the rest of the post?)

"Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Primary Source, video)

High school baseball is kind of a big deal in Japan, especially the annual koshien tournament. How big? Imagine high school football in Texas, only there's a nationally televised single-elimination tournament that has been played since 1915 and gets the same sort of national attention as the NCAA Basketball tourney does in the USA. "Kokoyakyu" is a relatively rare behind-the-scenes look at the high school baseball culture, and a fairly enjoyable one.

The movie follows two high school teams in the Osaka prefecture - Tennoji, a public school whose coach Masa sees this as a class for developing its players as men, and Chiben, a private academy known as a baseball powerhouse whose coach Takashima played in koshien as a boy and has brought his team to the promised land before. Both feature long hour of practice year-round, dedicated players, managers, and cheering sections, and, of course, a shared dream, although only one can win the six consecutive games they must to represent the prefecture in the national tournament.

Director Kenneth Eng opts to spend most of his time as a fly on the wall, capturing the daily routines and pressures of the teams rather than spending a lot of time on interviews or filling the audience in on the history of baseball in Japan. There's little time for the rest, as the documentary had to fit in a one-hour PBS timeslot, but the focus works to the movie's advantage - by not setting up comparison to American institutions or practices, or questioning their subjects much beyond acquiring information, Eng and writer Alexander Shear let the audience have its own reactions and form its own opinions.

It's entertaining and enlightening to watch, though I did occasionally wonder if some of the more intense bits were held back or kept out of the filmmakers sight (other accounts of Japanese high school ball describe a win-at-all-costs pressure we don't quite see here). The strong emotions and occasionally blunt assessments of not just the players but the highly-organized cheer sections are often as surprising as they are intriguing, with great contrasts between the two environments, It's also quite clear that Eng and Shear love baseball itself; the games are not just edited for suspense, but with a fan's eye. You're not just watching a movie, but also watching baseball.

SPOILERS! They're also an example of how baseball is fairly unpredictable at the individual game level, as neither team makes it to koshien. While that may have been disappointing for the filmmakers at the time, it winds up working for the movie: Instead of being an underdog story, or look at how the big guys win, it just becomes about the game itself, which will break the hearts of most but is beautiful even without a trophy being hoisted - and the scenes of the players being graceful in defeat even after being so intensely competitive tell us something vital about the character of this game in this country. !SRELIOPS

Sure, that result leaves the audience missing some of what they might have watched for, and there's plenty that would have been interesting to explore if there had been more time. For instance, it was a big deal when someone received the number 18, presumably because it represented being the last person to make the cut for the tournament roster and thus being considered a leader, and I wondered if there was meaning to Daisuke Matsuzaka wearing it with the Red Sox that I had missed these past five years. Then again, I figure it's a good thing if a doc like this makes one want to learn more - and there's certainly more to learn!

Stoker

I suppose I could have passed on doing a review of Stoker, what with there already being one on eFilmCritic, but I've done one for each of Park's other movies (including one for Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance that suggests I really need to give it a second look), so might as well keep the streak alive, right?

It wasn't quite the early preview I'd thought - I half expected Stoker to only open in NYC/LA this weekend and hit Boston seven days later, but instead we got it right away. Almost not worth winding up in one of the side-sections to the Brattle and, if not actually deliberately missing my bus in the morning, not being too broken up when I would up telecommuting rather than trying to make it back from Burlington in time for a 7pm movie, right? Maybe. On the other hand, I got to see the movie on 35mm film, and who knows how many chances I'd have for that in the Boston area, right? Heck, a few months from now when the Brattle's successful Kickstarter has paid for DCP to be installed, maybe Fox wouldn't supply them a print even if that's what the theater prefers.

One thing that has been both amusing and impressive to me is how happily and effectively Palisades Tartan has jumped on the Stoker train. They're the company with the rights to all three "Vengeance trilogy" movies, and their Twitter account has been merrily retweeting any review of Stoker or interview with Director Park that might mention them, apparently figuring that they should do everything they can to benefit from being in the Park Chan-wook business at the same time Fox is. This includes getting their movies into theaters - from what I've seen, the Brattle's quick Vengeance Trilogy program (running once more as a marathon this Wednesday) isn't the only one happening across the nation. Not sure if it's a concerted push on Palisades' part or just trying to be accommodating, but either way, it's a pretty canny thing to do.

Stoker

* * * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (preview, 35mm)

With any luck, a fair number of the people seeing Stoker will do so without already being fans of director Park Chan-wook, drawn in by the nifty cast and striking previews. They're in for a treat, because Park has crossed the Pacific without losing any of what made him a big deal in South Korea, which means that not only is this movie a chilly thrill unlike most anything else in theaters right now, but there's half a dozen other good to great movies like it for them to discover.

India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) lost her father on her eighteenth birthday, and being a somewhat odd girl to begin with, the funeral is a special kind of torture, especially since it seems to highlight the differences in temperament between her and her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). As strange as the whole thing seems, the arrival of her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) makes it even more unsettling: For as much as Evelyn quickly hooks onto him as a younger, more attentive version of the husband from whom she drifted apart, nobody ever told India about him, and neither longtime housekeeper Mrs. McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville) nor great-aunt Gwendylon (Jacki Weaver) seems particularly happy to see him return from his travels.

Much of the first act of Stoker takes place at the large family home and its grounds, and what Park and his cohorts do with that location is kind of clever: It feels expensive and tony and until someone mentions their cellular telephone, it could be any time within the past fifty years there, with some things like India's wardrobe and the live-in help almost seeming deliberately anachronistic. Park and his design team (who really should be remembered next awards season) create a perfect, spotless upper-class New England environment - even tubs of ice cream have an idealized look to them - before visually pointing out that there are dark passages underneath or showing India in a normal public school and letting the audience chew on that juxtaposition.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Jack the Giant Slayer & Phantom

If there's a theme to the movies I saw on Saturday, it would probably be something along the lines of "not getting a fair shake". I won't claim either Jack the Giant Slayer or Phantom are masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination - when giving them star ratings (because I can't break bad habits), I vacillated between the ones that say "OK/average" and "I like it", in part because a lot of folks don't take two and a half stars here or three on eFilmCritic - basically, the midpoints - as good movies. Maybe I'm forgiving or just like movies a lot, but an average movie isn't a bad thing, and these two are each worth a matinee ticket.

Their troubles come from different directions, though. At least I gather they do, because I tend to avoid the box-office prediction and "buzz" columns on entertainment websites; I care about the business only so far as good movies making a profit means more money spent on things like those good movies.

Jack the Giant Slayer seemed to get a lot of the same treatment as John Carter did last year - pot shots taken at a high profile director, big budget being spent on lots of effects rather than name stars, the whole thing falling out of favor with the studio. And like that movie, it's not really bad. It's probably not a great investment; two hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and even if there's a good chance it can make that back once foreign markets and post-theatrical life is taken into consideration, it's a lot of risk for what is probably never going to be a great movie.

But, you know what? I'm not paying $200M for it; I'm paying $15 (well, $6.50 by paying new release/RPX/3D surcharges on a rewards program ticket, but anyway...). And for an afternoon's entertainment, it's not terrible value. All the reporting on the behind-the-scenes stuff poisons the well early, though; people hear there's something wrong with it, and that impression sticks, no matter how the previews and reviews look (and influences those who write the reviews some; we're only human). It's a spiral that a movie has to be extraordinary to climb out of, but Titanic doesn't happen very often.

Phantom, meanwhile, seemed to have trouble enough just getting seen. It was produced by a small company that seems to make most of its money on doing direct-to-video sequels to franchises that the originating studios feel have been more or less tapped out, and was the first film they distributed theatrically. They got it into about 1100 screens nationwide, which isn't bad - gets you into every market, though not in the same way Jack was, where it's on multiple screens in multiple theaters.

Getting the word out, though, is tougher. RCR is not going to be doing a television blitz like Warner is, and while AMC Boston Common did set up the standee that they were sent, I don't recall ever seeing a trailer for this one. I kind of get that - with some restrictions, previews are attached to movies at the theater/chain's discretion, and when I worked at a multiplex, we often didn't know what we'd be running on Friday until Tuesday morning. So a theater might have had a DCP file for Phantom for months, but given the small studio and lack of buzz elsewhere, it probably seems unlikely that they'll be playing that movie at that theater, so what's gained by putting the trailer in the rotation? Sure, if it were my theater and I was going to be programming 20-minute blocks of previews like AMC does, I'd throw two or three previews for movies that may or may not play into the package and see which ones got a reaction, but I suspect it doesn't work that way in chains.

Even beyond that, though... The screening times for evening shows are at 6:15pm and 10:50pm, for a 97-minute movie - or, as I tend to look at it, "too early to get there from work" and "too late to get home on the T". Even if you add twenty minutes for previews and another twenty for the First Look thing, that still leaves about two hours and fifteen minutes between showtimes. Just looking over their schedule, it looks like they're jamming an extra screening of The Last Exorcism Part II into that gap, and while that may do better for them at the box office - in part because they didn't promote Phantom, of course - a movie that doesn't have any screenings within "prime time" is going to have an uphill battle.

Jack the Giant Slayer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2013 in Regal Fenway #13 (first run, RPX/digital)

Here's a fun thought experiment - what if you took the cast and design work for Jack the Giant Slayer, and instead of shooting a live-action 3D movie, you did a little work on the script with the idea of moving the rating down a notch and had Disney animate it? You would not necessarily get a classic, but you'd maybe get something about as good that might be looked upon a little more fondly.

As in every version of the fairy tale, Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is a farmboy who winds up with a handful of magic beans instead of a farm animal, which grow into a beanstalk that leads to a land of giants, taking his house and runaway princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) with it. King Brahmwell (Ian McShane), naturally, dispatches top knight Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to retrieve her, with Jack and Isabelle's fiance Roderick (Stanley Tucci - it's an arranged marriage) in tow.

Traditionally, the hero of Jack and the Beanstalk is kind of a jerk - making a foolish trade, trespassing, stealing, and ultimately killing the giant when his crimes are discovered. Not exactly a fitting protagonist or plot for a family movie, so the four credited writers have added some backstory and a brace of other characters, which all conspire to cast Jack in a rather more heroic light. It brings the story to the modernized fairy-tale template, with the princess who bristles at her fate and what seems like the occasional anachronism, but it's a style that's tried and true; director Bryan Singer and the rest play it straight enough for it to be comfortable while still giving the characters enough room to be funny and individual.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Phantom

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2013 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first run, 4K DCP)

Many elements of Phantom are almost certain to remind audiences of The Hunt for Red October, and it actually draws heavily on one of the incidents that inspired Tom Clancy's novel and the later film adaptation - or at least, the popular theories about the sinking of Soviet submarine K-129. It's not quite in Red October's class, but by the time it's done, it's hit a nice little peak as a fairly decent thriller.

It opens with Dmitri (Ed Harris), a Soviet submarine captain with a revered father but a more checkered personal history being told that he and his crew will be having their scheduled shore leave cut short to staff D-23, an ancient submarine on a secret mission to test some new equipment. First officer Alex (William Fichtner) notices a few other red flags - the sailors supplementing the crew members who could not return in time have the sort of empty personnel files that indicate KGB, and members of a radical branch at that. Bruni (David Duchovny), the man in charge of this "Phantom" device, is the worst, keeping secrets close to the vest and constantly undermining Dmitri's authority.

Phantom has its problems, especially with how writer/director Todd Robinson chooses to get things started and dole out information in the beginning - there's a fair amount of speaking cryptically about things that will perhaps get explained later (and perhaps won't), bits of Soviet protocol like naval political officers that viewers who weren't born while there was still a Soviet Union may not pick up, and things that just aren't clear: Does Dmitri see what Lance Henriksen's Admiral Markov does as the D-23 sets sail, or not? The framing and cutting suggests he would, but it's not referenced. Are the scenes of Dmitri's wife and daughter supposed to be present day or flashbacks indicating he messed things up long ago? And there's a whole thing about Dmitri having hallucinations and epileptic seizures that sits there like a Chekhov's Gun only to figure into the movie very little.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

These Weeks In Tickets: 11 February 2013 - 24 February 2013

It's okay to miss a week during festivals, right? When you're seeing two movies a day but can only really write up one and a half, falling behind is sort of inevitable.



As you can see, the Boston Sci-Fi Film Fest ate my week (and, yes, it was apparently a "fest" versus a "festival" this year). I've managed to review everything I saw at the festival - The Final Shift, War of the Worlds: The Untold Story, Found in Time, Earthbound, Mars et Avril, When Time Becomes a Woman, Juan in a Million, El Xendra, S.I.N. Theory, Love & Teleportation, 95ers: Echoes, Space Milkshake, Motivational Growth, The History of Future Folk, and War of the Worlds: Goliath- and put up a diary of the marathon. Like always, I wish this event would grow a little faster; the emails I got for the Philip K. Dick science fiction festival in Brooklyn last fall suggests that it has already leapfrogged the festival portion of Boston's in its first year, although I don't know what sort of funds they have to go after movies rather than just rely on what showed up in their Withoutabox.

Like before, I'd really like to see a little more professionalism - better communications (which includes burning the website down and rebuilding from the ground), not projecting industry screeners, and, honestly, giving the awards out on merit rather than just because someone from the production showed up. Just as I felt in the last few years that the festival abused the "premiere" designation, both by advertising it for studios that weren't premieres and being the first to show movies because there were no other takers (honestly, would you recommend a festival on the basis of the movies being terrible but you get to see them first?), I think bypassing superior movies to give a best-in-fest award to Motivational Growth and giving War of the Worlds: Goliath a best animated film award when there's a field of one sends the right message to the wrong people: Sure, it might encourage some filmmakers to bring their movies in person, but does it impress those who could win the award on merit? I suspect not, and since a good reputation is the most valuable asset a festival can have, I don't see how these shortcuts can work.

Hope I'm wrong, though; as I say every year, this is something I'd love to see grow into a real "studios premiere their spring movies here and indies value Boston more than SXSW's midnight screenings" festival.

I did have time to squeeze one more movie in, and it sure was squeezed: I caught the Saturday midnight screening of Lost in Thailand on Saturday night, then walked home (no T after 1am-ish), wrote until I fell asleep, and then somehow made it to the marathon at noon as a non-zombie. Mostly worth it; it's a broad comedy, but that broadness translates reasonably well. I half-wonder if it's one of those movies that got a special, less-nationalistic cut for foreign distribution, because what I saw does much less to shove Chinese prosperity down one's throat than many similar movies from the People's Republic do.



Stubless: The second half of the marathon. Scroll up.

The Monday afternoon following the marathon is kind of weird - I'm generally actually pretty alert as things let out, get home, take a shower, and then start to drag mid-afternoon, at which point it's a struggle to get to eight or nine o'clock so that the rest of the week isn't messed up. I'd actually considered Happy People: A Year in the Taiga for that afternoon, but in that situation, Werner Herzog's voice and the relatively mild material would have knocked me out.

I caught it on Tuesday, and then didn't get to anything until the weekend, when it more or less revolved around The Alloy Orchestra's Buster Keaton show - I'd purchased the ticket a while ago, so it meant I was only going to see a bit of the Brattle's Matthew McConaughey mini-series (Magic Mike on Friday). For some reason or another, I didn't feel like heading back home immediately after that, so I headed to Boston Common and went for the next one I hadn't seen, which turned out to be Snitch, which wasn't bad. Sunday's movie was A Good Day to Die Hard, and I didn't dislike it nearly as much as others (faint praise!).

Had time after that to get some groceries before the Oscars started, although missing that might not have been a particular tragedy, as Seth McFarlane was more or less terrible, and I really didn't get the celebration of Chicago's tenth anniversary. That was pretty bad.

Magic Mike

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Matthew McConaughey, 35mm)

So, when did we start taking Channing Tatum seriously? 21 Jump Street seems like a reasonable if unlikely place to date it from, although some people did like him in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.

But, here he is now in the title role of this movie, pretty darn charming as an exotic dancer who isn't ashamed of that job but has other ambitions, eventually including the sister (Cody Horn) of the new kid (Alex Pettyfer). Add in Matthew McConaughey as the owner of the club and Olivia Munn as Mike's regular booty call, and it's a pretty nice cast, although not so star-powered that anyone overpowers the ensemble.

What's interesting is how it inverts a number of expectations. The biggest, of course, is going for the beefcake instead of the cheesecake, not just in finding reasons for characters to have their shirts off, but having scenes that are just there for the ladies to ogle men. Even more unusual, though, is how the apprentice winds up providing the object lesson for the mentor; Pettyfer's Adam spirals out of control in the way that Mike never did, and it's not really "man, I've gotten lucky" moment as much as seeing that he's the one that doesn't quite fit.

Buster Keaton Shorts

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Alloy Orchestra, digital)

Well, actually it's more Keaton & Arbuckle, as the first two of the three shorts are Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle things in which Buster has a supporting role - although the last one certainly makes up for that. It's a surprisingly stark difference, with Arbuckle going for very broad material while Keaton is still doing physical comedy, but it's incredibly precise and well-planned. To a certain extent, it shows why (beyond scandal and never really doing features) Keaton has endured and Arbuckle hasn't; Arbuckle's material feels dated and primitive while Keaton's, though clearly of its time, is narratively and technically sophisticated enough to hold up.

"The Butcher Boy", for instance, is certainly funny enough, but it's basically a collection of slapstick that you'd mostly find in kids' movies nowadays. It also becomes basically an entirely different movie halfway through, going from hijinks in a general store to Arbuckle and co-star Al St. John both sneaking into the boarding school where the owner's daughter has been sent (which means she's, what, 17 at most? Ick!). Amusing stuff.

"Good Night, Nurse!" is interesting in that it seems more like Buster is playing a part than usual, as the sadistic doctor running the sanitarium to which Fatty has been sent to with the intention of curing his alcoholism. Large chunks of it are completely arbitrary, but the cast (which overlaps a great deal with the previous movie) sells each joke pretty well.

"The Play House", though, is pretty amazing, especially in the opening sequences, as Keaton playing every part on screen, sometimes ten or eleven at once, and the compositing is pretty incredible. The funny thing is, as much as the trick photography is something to be marveled at there, it doesn't necessarily cross the audience's mind that Keaton and company are using it to make twins out of a single actress later. That's in part because Keaton is surprisingly good at the technical aspects, and in part because he's making good jokes that lead from one to the next.

It's pretty amazing, really, just how good Keaton was from an early age; he was 21 when he made "The Butcher Boy" (his first movie) and only 25 when creating something as technically impressive as "The Play House". Alloy was pretty good, too, although kind of low-key - I wasn't sure just how much anybody but keyboardist Roger Miller was playing; the others were in the pit and it was tough to see much activity.

Snitch

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2013 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)

Man, does Dwayne Johnson need to find better parts. The guy is tremendously charismatic, has the sort of physical presence that the likes of Schwarzeneggar and the other action stars of the 1980s and 1990s did. And yet, this one has him behind the wheel of a truck for most of the action, which is still more impressive than a lot of what he's done in the past.

It is some pretty impressive action, though - writer/director Ric Roman Waugh came up through stuntwork, and he knows what he's doing. The last big chase scenes are actually pretty incredible, especially since, as far as I can recall, there were no digital effects companies listed in the closing credit crawl - Waugh and company just smashed the crap out of a bunch of cars, trucks, and a big rig or two. The execution of the action stuff, and a good deal of the crime story, is pretty darn good.

Unfortunately, there's an agenda at work, and while it's a noble one - I sympathize with the film's message of how mandatory minimum sentencing laws prevent the system from considering people as individuals - it's incredibly heavy-handed. There's also perhaps too little effort to sell the main premise of the movie, that Johnson's character, who works in construction, can do this sort of undercover work on behalf of the government to help his son.

A Good Day to Die Hard

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2013 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, 4K DCP)

It's kind of amazing, really - you can spot the exact moment when A Good Day to Die Hard goes wrong. The first half of the movie makes a concerted effort to call back to the first, with John McClane (Bruce Willis) out of his league, confronted by his failure as a father, wandering into a mess orchestrated by folks who are, let's face it, much smarter than him. Even when he gets involved in a gigantic car chase, he seems to be kind of desperately making it up as he goes along.

And then, pretty close to the mid-point, son Jack (Jai Courtney) tells him to "do what you're good at - kill bad guys!" From that point on, McClane is in super-hero mode, tossing off cocky wisecracks rather than nervous ones, and often obviously right rather than really working to get things right. It actually makes the movie go too quickly at times - between John being too good at this and Jack being a very capable CIA guy, there's not time for the traditional Die Hard stuff where regular law enforcement is being played or a step behind, McClane just gets physically worn down, and the pieces of the real puzzle take a while coming together. They're too able to move from set-piece to set-piece.

Still, there are enough good parts that this movie won't actually sully the box set. The breakout and car chase in the first act are insanely good - I've been impressed with the stunt driving they've got in Russia ever since Junk, and while I'm sure there's a lot of CGI enhancement going on in this chase, it's insanely elaborate and dangerous-looking. There's also a nifty little scene toward the end, where John looks at Jack and says the day's been fun, that's easy to look at as macho neanderthal crap but which Willis acts well enough that it says, no, this has actually been a nightmare, but he is really happy to be with his boy anyway. There's a lot of dumb stuff in the movie's last act, but that bit makes a lot of it worthwhile.

(Still, given what everyone thinks they know about Jack in the beginning, would it have killed the producers to bring in Bonnie Bedelia for the last scene? Although, now that I think about it, it would kind of be great if Die Hard 6 were to include her in a bigger role than that sort of cameo, especially if the kids are going to be around. Let the facts of being divorced and knowing he screwed it up make John McClane squirm!)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 March - 7 March 2013

Before getting to the new releases, reminders of upcoming events you can help make happen: I'm trying to schedule a March 25th screening of Back to 1942 via Gathr; it needs a bunch of tickets sold by the 11th, so let's see what we can do! The Boston Underground Film Festival has a Kickstarter which they'll use to bring cool guests to town.

• The Oscars being over is not quite the reason why Kendall Square shuffles things around (the only nominee being cleared out is The Impossible), but they do turn over four screens this week after being content to squeeze one or two new movies in weekly. Half of that is for Stoker, the English-language debut of Park Chan-wook, acclaimed Korean director of a whole ton of great movies. I saw this last night, and it's pretty great, with Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, and Matthew Goode as a mother, daughter, and heretofore unknown uncle who get even creepier after the funeral of the father. Gorgeous to look at, but on the weird side.
  
  The other two movies are documentaries. A Place at the Table has the one-week booking, with the makers of Food Inc. attempting a detailed examination of how the United States has high rates of both childhood hunger and obesity, and what can be done to stop it. The Gatekeepers is an Oscar-nominated collection of interviews with six men who have headed Israel's domestic security agency, discussing the dark, dark gray area that job places them in and how it has changed their perception of the ongoing conflict. It also opens at the Coolidge
• The multiplexes have a fair amount of turnover, too, with perhaps the most surprising being that Die Hard 5 is down to single screens or gone entirely after a mere two weeks; how the mighty have fallen. A fair amount of those screens go to Jack the Giant Slayer, with Nicholas Hoult as the title character, who really shouldn't have traded his cow for those beans (they are keeping the traded-the-cow-for-beans thing, right?), and a fun cast including Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Eddie Marsan. Christopher McQuarrie worked on the screenplay and Bryan Singer directs, but they can be uneven. Plays 2D & 3D at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including the Imax-branded screen), and Fenway (including the RPX screen).
  
  Those theaters all have 21 & Over, a kids-getting-drunk-and-crazy-things-happening movie that takes place as one turns twenty-one. Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond also have The Last Exorcism Part II, which seems like a terrible idea, as the first one worked best when the supernatural stuff was toned down and the new one lacks both the documentary conceit and Patrick Fabian as the exorcist. But the team they've hired to put it together - writer/director Ed Gass-Donnelly (Small Town Murder Songs) and co-writer Damien Chazelle (how does the guy who made Guy & Madeline on a Park Bench wind up doing this?) - make me genuinely curious.
  
  Boston Common has another screen to fill, so they've got Phantom, which stars Ed Harris as the captain of a Soviet submarine who may be going insane. It's also got David Duchovny, William Fichtner, and Lance Henriksen, which is a pretty nice ensemble. Probably a week and done, considering that I can't recall seeing any advertising for it at all.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre, as mentioned, opens The Gatekeepers on one of its film screens, pushing Amour to the screening room. The other screening room gets Let My People Go!, in which a French Jew returns home to his zany family after an fight with his boyfriend just before Passover. Wackiness ensues. Things get serious again in "Never Forget to Lie", an autobiographical film that Marian Marzynski produced for Frontline that will have a special presentation on Sunday evening; it's a look at his and others' experiences as child survivors of the Holocaust
  
  The Midnight Movie on Friday and Saturday night is John Dies at the End, so if you missed it during its week at the Kendall, you've got a couple chances to see it on a bigger screen. Monday night's Big Screen Classics presentation is Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's black-and-white "noir comedy" featuring Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni, and John Lurie. And on Thursday night, the Swiss Consulate has a special screening of Sister in the larger video room; I believe it had a short run at the Kendall earlier this year and tells the story of a 12-year-old grifter who looks after his older sister.
• The folks at the Brattle deserve a bit of a rest after their big Kickstarter push over the past month, and the schedule does thin out a bit for March. Still, they've got Rubberneck playing Friday through Sunday, with writer/director/star Alex Karpovsky there for Friday's 8:15pm and Saturday's 7:30pm shows. Not my favorite from last year's IFFBoston, but locally made and with an interesting bit or two.
  
  Sunday afternoon, they've got a special screening of After Words, a documentary on living with aphasia, that will also include a panel discussion including the filmmakers, several of the film's subjects, and presumably some other experts. The theater will be closed Monday and Tuesday, but Park Chan-wook's complete Vengeance Trilogy will run Wednesday (starting at 4:30pm, so consider bailing on work early!). Thursday night is the annual Boston Cinema Census, a night of locally made short films of every variety.
• The Harvard Film Archive sticks to one program this weekend, Film = Activisim, the Revolutionary Underground Cinema of Masau Adachi. Adachi took his revolutionary ideals seriously, joining the Japanese Red Army and other underground groups (living as a fugitive and, later, in jail) between making art-house films, pinks, and documentaries. The series includes "Bowl" & "Closed Vagina" (7pm Friday), Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War (9pm Friday), AKA: Serial Killer (7pm Saturday), Gushing Prayer (9pm Saturday and is that thing bizarre), Galaxy (4:30p Sunday), Prisoner/Terrorist (7pm Sunday with a Skype conversation with Tadachi), and finally It May Be that Beauty has Reinforced Our Resolve on Monday, with director Philippe Grandrieux on-hand to discuss his documentary on Adachi.
• New month, new calendar for the MFA'sfilm programming, although How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire (one show each Friday, Sunday, and Wednesday) got a slight jump on the calendar. So did New South Asian Cinema, which offers a second screening of Delhi in a Day on Sunday and the 5.25-hour Gangs of Wasseypur (about a multigenerational feud) on Saturday. The next week's programs start on Wednesday, with both Palestinian romance Habibi and a re-issue of 1953's Little Fugitive playing the 6th and 7th and continuing into the next weekend.
• Ha! The main stage at the Paramount Theater is presenting an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis this weekend, so ArtsEmerson's film program is going bug-crazy: Both versions of The Fly on Friday (original at 6pm, Cronenberg at 9pm, repeating in the opposite order on the 9th); A Bug's Life at 1pm Saturday; and Guillermo Del Toro's Mimic Saturday at 9pm. They approach Kafka from the other direction, with Orson Welles's The Trial, at 1pm on Sunday. All screen from DVDs.
  
  So does Arjun & Alison (6pm Saturday), part of the same New South Asian cinema program, which features Indian and American students looking to avenge the murder of their friend at a British university. Director Sidarth Sharma will be on-hand to discus the movie afterward.
• The ICA continues to run the Oscar-nominated shorts, with the animated and live-action programs running at various times on Saturday and Sunday. A museum ticket will also include a screening of "Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of My Mother" on Saturday (1pm) and Sunday (12:30pm & 1:30pm). Saturday's screening will be followed by a discussion with director Mickalene Thomas, whose art (including some featuring mother Sandra Bush) is currently on display at the ICA.
• The Regent Theatre has a "Film Premiere Event" of The Bitter Buddha on Tuesday the 5th; it's a documentary on comedian Eddie Pepitone who will also be on-hand with director Steven Feinartz and local comic Jimmy Tingle, who opens the movie with stand-up and will host the post-film Q&A.
• Folks, the main character of I, Me Aur Main - the English-subtitled Bollywood film iMovieCafe has at Fresh Pond this week - is a musical producer, so be prepared for lots of singing and dancing as the egotistical main character learns to be a better man, especially where women are concerned. It splits a screen (mostly) with Kai Po Che, so I guess the cricket-academy movie did well enough to get a second week.
• The Arlington Capitol seems to be down a screen, but they've still got room to pick up Django Unchained now that the Kendall's let it go. If it were at Somerville, I'd feel confident in predicting 35mm, but the theater's website doesn't say.

My plans? Yeah, I want to see Jack, plus Gatekeepers and Phantom, and I've got morbid curiosity where The Last Exorcism Part II is concerned. Still haven't seen Side Effects, either, and should probably correct that.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

If you were reading this at the very moment I posted it, you would have roughly three hours before its last show in the Boston area. Sorry, all; I honestly thought I was going to get through the SF/38 stuff faster. Worth the trip to Kendall Square if you are reading it on Thursday, 28 February, before 9pm or so, though.

I had initially played with the idea of seeing it after the sci-fi marathon, but let's be honest - even though pretty much any movie would have put me out that afternoon, a leisurely documentary narrated by Werner Herzog would have done the job immediately. Sometimes he sounds creepy, but this would have been a soothing bedtime story from Uncle Werner.

Not much else to say that's not in the review, although I kind of wish I'd snuck a photograph of one of the credit screens, as I'm not sure how often you'll ever see Werner Herzog and Timur Bekmambetov credited two lines apart (both are executive producers)?

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run, 2K digital)

Werner Herzog is the name that will (and should) draw people to Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, although it's likely that the other credited director, Dmitry Vasyukov, actually spent more time in Siberia gathering footage. However the labor is divided, the documentary still has Herzog's voice - both literally and in terms of being an exploration of a far-off place for the curious.

That far-off place is the village of Bakhta, Russia, situated on the Yenisei River in the middle of the Siberian taiga (a relatively barren, mostly coniferous forest), itself larger than the United States and frozen for most of the year. It is so remote that it can only be reached by helicopter or boat (and the latter only during the summer), and is primarily supported by fur-trapping. Though the actual trapping mainly takes place during the winter, the preparation is a year-round process.

Our main guide is Gennady, who has been working his territory of over a hundred square kilometers since 1970 and favors the traditional koolyomka, a deadfall trap that has the advantage of not leaving bloodstains on a sable's pelt. He is in many ways the ideal subject for the filmmakers, with a weathered face and a crusty pragmatism that goes well beyond no-nonsense, although not so far as hostility to the filmmakers or audience. He's a good teacher, and the personality that comes out when the camera crew offers him an unusual respite from his winter solitude both makes him more human and shows him as well-suited to this life.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Fest 2013 Day 8-9: The Marathon

As much as I will often claim that it's not really that hard to keep a bunch of different movies straight during a film festival - and it's really not - something like the Marathon is a different beast altogether; there's enough drifting in and out of consciousness (and not always at the times you'd expect), audience participation that becomes intertwined with the movie in one's mind, and potential sameness among the movies that it all sort of blurs together.

I began keeping a diary early on, both as something to put on the blog and just because the activity of writing helps to keep me awake. I certainly don't miss big chunks of movies any more, although I may want to come up with a new gimmick sometime soon.

Anyway, as usual this year, I arrived not long before the start of the marathon, hot chocolate in hand. I've heard that most of the festival passes actually go to people who want early entry into the theater on 'Thon day, but I need that morning sleep (not that I got much this year, having hit the midnight show of Lost in Thailand on Saturday. I took a fairly familiar seat, in the center of the back row of the front of the balcony, and settled in. A short was already playing...

11:35am - "I filed my plans at the patent office; the clerk was a dullard." (punches Einstein) OK, I may have to hunt this "Dr. Fang" short down later, even if that's the only really good moment in it.

11:53am - Somehow, I managed to lose my Atomic Fireball between the door and my seat. I don't actually mind; those things are awful.

12:02pm - Announcement time - Motivational Growth will be taking the place of The Hands of Orlac (which itself was a replacement for Woman in the Moon) in the 4am slot. I'm mildly annoyed, because I just saw it at the festival. There is no ironic cheering or dread that I can see.

12:05pm - "Duck Dodgers, in the Twenty-Fourth and a Half Century!" You can't argue with tradition, I guess

12:13pm - John Carter of Mars

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, DCP)

Full review on EFC.

12:18pm - After five minutes introducing the villains, we're given a prelude set in 1881 New York City.

12:24pm - After six minutes of Daryl Sbarra as Edgar Rice Burroughs, we start the main flashback to 1868 Arizona.

12:30pm - So, why does Carter save the officer while seeming content to let the enlisted guys die? Is it some weird 19th-century class thing?

12:32pm - At last, John Carter's on Mars!

12:38pm - Lily Collins is dropping a whole lot of exposition here, although I'm kind of surprised that they can get away with just this much.

12:51pm - A translation miracle! It's always funny to see just how much effort writers will put into saying "screw it!" when this obvious problem comes up.

1:00pm - Dejah Thoris is pretty awesome, and Collins is pretty great in the role. If they'd called this "A Princess of Mars" and put her more front and center, I think the movie would have done a lot better.

1:15pm - See? "A Princess of Mars", right in the dialogue!

1:42pm - Good dog/monster/thing!

2:06pm - Morteverybul. Writing in a darkened theater is hard! I suspect that I was suggesting they end the movie then, and maybe forgo the "Carter being an idiot" necessary to set up a cliffhanger that sets up a second movie that will likely never happen.

2:15pm - Roll credits.

Seeing it for a second time, I definitely feel like this got a pretty raw deal last year. I'm not demanding a sequel or anything, and I think shaving the ends off would have done this film a lot of good, but this is a fun, entertaining movie. I also think I liked it better in 2D from a little further away, versus my close-to-the-front IMAX viewing last year.


2:27pm - "In Memorium"

2:32pm - Okay, that's enough.

2:37pm - Call me heartless, but that was kind of awful, especially since it often took on the feel of a guessing game ("what person who died to these clips have in common?"), and the honoree occasionally didn't even appear in the trailer used.


2:49pm Reptilicus

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

2:56pm - I'm not sure why the paleontologist in this film works in an aquarium, but it sounds awesome in Danish. Say it with me - "Akvarium"!

3:01pm - "Ya, he will be busy." - INNUENDO! isn't quite as much fun when it's so obvious, but I think it's the best part of the old, not-so-good movies.

3:06pm - Ha, you thought the amazingly stupid-looking redneck was going to be the one to screw things up, but the movie zigged when it could have zagged!

3:08pm - "Brigadier General Mark--" Oh, hell.

3:08:02pm - "MARK!" Ah, my least favorite Marathon tradition. It's only funny for Planet of the Vampires, people (and really not then)!

3:16pm - Amusing inevitability when the idiot handyman and the electric eel are on screen, although the response of "something happened!" when the alarm goes off is among the most absurdly obvious lines of dialogue ever written.

3:17pm - It's not the movie suddenly taking a side trip into American General Mark & scientist's daughter Connie doing a little Copenhagen travelogue that strikes me weird as much as it is that Mark does most of the narration.

3:30pm - Rubber Monster time!

3:34pm - Wait, was that bit of FX done with obvious paper cutouts... Yes, yes it was. wow.

3:41pm - INNUENDO!: "I'll stay with you!" ... "I'm firm!" Really, it seemed vaguely dirty at the time.

3:54pm - You suck, soldier manning the drawbridge. You suck more than any incompetent soldier who has ever appeared in a monster movie before or since. Really, you're just the worst.

4:10pm - May have zonked out a bit for the end there, because I've got no memory of how they got from Denmark's worst soldier dooming a bunch of civilians to bombing the hell out of the monster.

As these things go, Reptilicus is okay. I don't really enjoy the "laugh at the crappy B-movie" section of the Marathon (or any SF event) as much as others; I didn't grow up with drive-ins or creature double features on TV and watching something just to mock its incompetence strikes me as little but mean-spirited. It's the sincere and unexpectedly good parts of these movies I respond to, and for this one, that's kind of rare.


4:27pm - The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, DCP)

Write-up here.

Oh, it's in "GhastlyScope"! I love GhastlyScope!

4:35pm - Say this much - De Anna Joy Brooks, the actress playing Bliss, can vamp it up with the best of 'em.

4:37pm - Aaaand it's a musical. Somehow I'd missed that.

4:58pm - Puppets, too. OK...

5:18pm - I may have rolled my eyes a bit at the singing earlier, but the talking is terrible. The monologues and expositional conversations that don't have to be set to music are kind of brutal.

5:36pm - Hey, it's Paul Williams! That's kind of cool!

6:00pm - Credits roll, and I learn that the cute girl in the second half is Kate Maberly. She's worth keeping an eye on (and, apparently, starred in a much-loved version of The Secret Garden twenty years ago).

I'll probably give this a a more thorough review when everything else is caught up. It's kind of cute, with some fun songs and surprisingly decent performances. The script is a mess, though, and it's a real shame that a movie that prides itself on using the last of Kodak's Super-X black & white film stock to shoot had to be shown on video.


6:13pm - War of the Worlds: Goliath

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, screener DVD)

Full write-up here.

Well, that's actually when Garen got up on stage and made the announcement that they would be running the movie off the screener DVD again, trying to make it sound like this was a special treat. It sort of solidified my decision to head across the street for some supper, though.

First, though, it was time for the trivia contest, and this year it went from a piece of paper you handed in to shouting out questions and calling on raised hands, a final surrender to the reality that everyone at a sci-fi film festival is going to have a smartphone and can check IMDB before turning it in.

6:37pm - I got seated quickly at Boston Burger Company because I was by myself while the folks in front of me were told there was a half-hour or so wait for their groups of four and six. So, uh, yay for coming to events alone?

I had myself a King (bacon, fried bananas, peanut butter) burger. It was, as always, delicious, although I must admit to being terrified of trying to replicate it at home.

7:30pm - Did I make it back in time for the movie's good part?

7:34pm - Oh yeah, Teddy Roosevelt is killin' Martians.

7:39pm - Man, I really hadn't noticed just how phallic come of the Martian tripods' guns were. Positioned right between the two front legs and pointed somewhat upwards!

7:54pm - Garen gives the movie a Gort for "Best Animated Feature". Note: It is the only animated feature.

I'd seen it the night before, so I didn't mind skipping out on this one. I've seen much worse, but also much better.


7:59pm - "Asternauts"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, Blu-ray)

Starting early, I see. It's unusual for an event like this to run ahead!

8:00pm - Hey, is that Matt Frewer... No, it's not. But it could have been.

That was a quick, 10-minute short, but a pretty good one. I liked that it could have easily been something that made fun of rural folks but mostly backed away from that. Also had fun with the sexy girls swarming on the asteroid crash site being surreal, but not exploitative.


8:16pm - Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royale)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, Blu-ray)

Previous write-up here (smaller one here).

8:18pm - The opening minute of this movie is great, just encapsulating the whole idea without making the rest redundant.

8:47pm - This thing just flies; no chance to really put down thoughts.

8:48pm - Kitano eating Shuya's cookies is just great casual bastardy.

9:14pm - I've heard that Chiaki Kuriyama was, for a while, more well-known in the US for Kill Bill than she was in Japan. Crazy, considering what an impression she makes in a relatively small role here.

9:24pm - As great as this movie is, it's got its weak moments, like characters saying "I can't tell you until later", which is cheating.

9:38pm - The lighthouse sequence is amazing - exaggerated but true-to-life for teenagers. Shows what BS The Hunger Games was.

9:52pm - Mitsuko's flashback is just f---ed up, even if it is almost conventionally twisted.

10:02pm - Kitano winks at the audience here. That's awesome.

I love this movie. It's harsh, but smart, and never loses sight of its central idea of how kids should distrust authority, even as there's a certain amount of understanding of why the grown-ups are clamping down on the kids so hard.


10:28pm - The Alien Mating Cry is, always has been, and always shall be lame. Gotta wonder if the crowd would have been kinder later if they realized that the MC directed Motivational Growth


10:32pm - Safety Not Guaranteed

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, DCP)

Full review here.

10:34pm - I swear I heard the basic set-up for the movie (a classified ad looking for a second for time travel) years ago, as the premise of an old sci-fi novel, way before this movie or the real-life ad that inspired it came out. Searching for it online just gets me a lot of information on this movie, though.

10:47pm - Obligatory question of why Mark Duplass has not been cast as a relative of Nathan Fillion's character on Castle or something else.

10:55pm - You know, I'd forgotten just how funny this movie was.

11:21pm - "This is f---ing intense!" / "This is 15 miles an hour." As I said, funny.

11:37pm - The crowd did not expect Kristin Bell.

11:51pm - That "time machine" is beautiful.

11:53pm - Great moment when the movie sort of shifts into less reality. You can feel it change, but not too much.

11:54pm - And the audience loves it.

It's funny, I gave this a really high star rating the first time I saw it, and second-guessed it almost immediately - I enjoyed it, but it's kind of slight, isn't it? A second time through, yeah, it's not Big and Dramatic, but it's very funny and well-done, and I feel like I got it right the first time.


12:07am - The Twilight Zone: "Time Enough at Last"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, video)

12:08am - The jackass in front of me is starting to lean back and stretch into my personal space a lot. In related news, it's probably my bedtime and I'm getting a bit cranky.

12:30am - Some guy down in the orchestra section just yelled "break the glasses already!" Ass. I hope the folks nearby pounded him into unconsciousness.

Despite crowd issues, I enjoyed this quite a bit, and really should start going through that 24-disc set of the series on Blu-ray sometime. That guy toward the end does represent what I hate most about 'Thon callbacks, though - why not just experience the movie, as opposed to trying to make yourself the entertainment?


12:34am - The Incredible Shrinking Man

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, video)

Full(er) write-up here.

12:40am - INNUENDO! - "People don't just get smaller!" / "We'll go back to the doctor, surely he's got a pill for it." Maybe it wasn't innuendo back then, but it's funny now.

1:06am - Bad kitty!

1:51am - Expected nap confirmed!

Fortunately, I saw this back during the Universal series at the Brattle, and pretty much retain the same opinion: It's pretty darn good, maybe not in an absolute sense, but in terms of clearly having more ambition than other science fiction movies of its time and not letting the B-movie aspect undercut that.


2:00am - "Death of a Shadow"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, DVD)

Full write-up here.

I wrote "time to see if this is less nonsensical than I remember" here, and... Yeah, still not a big fan. I really do think it's the kind of fantasy that makes the audience feel like they've seen something special but doesn't really have much to it.


2:18am - Phase IV

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

Full review at EFC.

Darn right a Saul Bass movie starts with striking imagery.

2:29am - Up to now, all ants, and it's creepy.

2:40am - Oh, yeah, piss off the ants - great idea!

3:11am - A shrieking noise makes the audience stir.

3:26am - Phase III begins. I'd say it gets weird, but let's face it - this whole movie has just been downright strange.

3:41am - Aw, bring on the weird trippy ending!

Seriously, get that weird ending on a special edition Blu-ray. I want to see it.


3:47am - It strikes me that the villains over the past few hours have gone from Martians in big tripods, to kids, to a cat, to a spider, to ants. Next up: Mold.


3:50am - Motivational Growth

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, video)

Full write-up here.

3:56am - The audience is audibly grossed out by the disgusting bathroom and the Adrian DiGiovanni's Ian folivor dropping trou to take a crap.

3:59am - I check to see that The Mold does, in fact, have a mouth shape even before Ian's head trauma.

... and soon after that, I head to the restroom myself, though it's been a while coming. I sort of hang out in the lobby for a while after that, talking with a few folks who walked out, some of whom actually walked out during its Friday night screening. Kind of funny; I didn't notice anyone disliking it then, but I think both then and during this screening, the loudest voices got heard the most.

5:06am - Man, this movie is vomit-intense.

5:25am - The audience really hates this movie, and it seems to have poisoned them to how great Jeffrey Combs's last monologue is.

Can't much blame them; it's got issues. But I can't really hate it; it's at least got a little ambition, and I think I'd rather see something like this than mock Reptilicus.


5:30am - V for Vendetta

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, B34-ray)

The title cards for this have fake film scratches, which seems weird; I don't immediately remember it as having that sort of style.

6:14am - Well, that can't have been a long nap; Natalie Portman still has hair.

6:28am - I never read the comics; was Stephen Fry's character basically Stephen Fry in them?

6:37am - At the time, I wondered if this was shot in HD, because even for Blu-ray, it looks video-y to me, like the production values are sub-par. It's the same sort of "this doesn't feel right" vibe I got off the HFR version of The Hobbit. Later, projectionist Dave Kornfeld would tell me that it's just projecting Blu-ray which doesn't have the ability to reproduce the movie's dark blacks.

7:43am - Wow, we're running like a half-hour ahead of schedule as the movie ends!

Had the same feeling as when I first saw it; fairly well-done, but heavy-handed and a little too concerned with symbols, though not as intellectual about it as Alan Moore tends to be in his original works.


8:00am - Well, we're running 15 minutes ahead.

8:07am - "La Luna"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

Full write-up here.

Yeah, this Pixar Short is still pretty great.


8:10am - Escape from L.A.

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

8:13am - "2013: Now" title on the screen. Movies set in the current year but made when it was the future should be a regular part of the marathon, I think.

But, wow, that mid-1990s CGI!

8:25am - Speaking of, they certainly 90s up Snake's wardrobe a bit, don't they?

8:44am - Obligatory use of that Randy Newman song.

8:46am - Bruce Campbell and the crowd goes crazy!

8:58am - As much as Snake Plissken is meant to be a badass, he's kind of like James Bond in Skyfall here, isn't he? Looking tough and occasionally doing something cool, but more or less failing from one thing to another.

More or less just watched the movie after that. It's fun and goofy, and while it's full of things that make a mess, I do kind of get the vibe that it's some of the most sheer fun John Carpenter and Kurt Russell have had making a movie.


9:50am - Final announcement time, which includes making excuses for Motivational Growth that the audience wasn't buying and saying that the movie was getting a Gort Award as much because director Don Thacker showed up and it would hopefully encourage more visiting filmmakers. I don't think it really works that way, myself.


10:02am - The Fifth Element

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, 35mm)

Full(er) write-up here.

10:10am - That spaceship is so Moebius.

10:24am - For some reason, Dallas's cat watching TV cracks me up.

10:36am - The picture looks OK to me, but I see Dave running into the booth to ahead of a splice just to make sure.

10:44am - Ever seen film actually melt in the projector? The folks near me (where we were close enough to smell it) hadn't. Someone made snarky remarks about film versus digital. Lucky Dave was too busy darting up from his seat to hear them.

11:11am - Why, exactly, is the tag on Dallas's door moved? It seems random but useful.

11:19am - Well, this crowd likes Ruby Rhod!

11:29am - Milla Jovovich just has a great expressive face that I don't think anybody has really made great use of since.

11:40am - Luc Besson loves his cross-cutting and does it well.

11:45am - Two melts. Dave did warn us that it was a crappy print on the festival message board.

11:58am - All the money spent on this movie, and the detonator in the climactic scene is a combination lock.

12:10pm - Time to roll credits, go home, take a shower, and try and stay up the rest of the day.


Pretty darn good movie still (though it's not a particular surprise that my opinion hasn't changed much in a couple of months). A pretty excellent note to leave on, too.