I don't have a whole lot to say about this movie beyond what's in the review; The Company You Keep is what it is - an enjoyable movie with a very impressive cast. From reading the description of the book as I created an Amazon link, it looks like director Robert Redford and screenwriter Lem Dobbs did a good job of reconfiguring it, downplaying the suspense aspects and giving room for the performances to take over, while also compacting the story, at the very least. It does make me somewhat curious to hear what a fan of the original novel thinks of it.
Anyway, I'll just let this post be the "yes, I live in Boston but am okay" post after today's events. It's naturally had me distracted all afternoon, to say the least - although I was off at work in Burlington this year, I've gone to the Patriot's Day Red Sox game in previous years, once or twice even winding up in Copley Square around the time the bombs went off. This isn't about "it could have happened to me", though - I'd like to think that despite not always showing it, I'm empathetic enough to be disgusted without it. It's more a case of wanting to know why someone bombs the Boston Marathon. It's an event that people from all nations, ethnicities, faiths, and social strata take part in. Many use it as a way to raise money for charity. What evil thing can it possibly represent?
At least I don't feel dirty posting this tonight, just because this is the thing I was writing on the bus this morning and writing movie reviews keeps me sane better than watching news coverage that goes wall to wall without a lot of information I can use dribbling out; this movie doesn't have much sympathy for the terrorists who used violence in the past, even if there is a bit of a redemption arc at play.
On a lighthearted note: In one of the first scenes of the movie, Susan Sarandon's character stops at an Esso station, making me wonder if she was hiding out in Canada all this time. No, she was apparently making her way from Vermont to New York. Kind of struck me as weird, seeing as movies usually make a little more effort to disguise obvious differences between where they shot and where they're set, and that would have been an Exxon station on this side of the border.
The Company You Keep
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run, 2K DCP)
The Company You Keep can play a bit like a brute-force attack at times - sure, it's kind of slow at times and eventually the audience winds up a couple steps ahead of the protagonist, but every ten or fifteen minutes, Robert Redford will throw another great actor from his generation at the audience, perfectly cast and with at least one scene that makes them warmly received. You can only take so much of this before wearing down and enjoying the movie quite a bit.
Decades ago, a bank guard was killed in a robbery carried out by Weather Underground members, and three of the four perpetrators got away. One, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), has just been captured on the way to turn herself in, and while she won't give any of the others up, both the FBI and young journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) find a trail that leads to Jim Grant (Redford), a public-affairs attorney in upstate New York. As they get closer to sniffing out his secret, he starts looking for Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), the member of this group of "Weathermen" that never settled down.
Grant's and Shepard's quests will take them halfway across the country, and while it may occasionally seem like it could be done in fewer steps, would you eliminate the ones where Richard Jenkins or Nick Nolte show up, so that their characters can reminisce with Redford's, debating about what they did back in the day and how it figures in their lives now before pointing him to the next stop? No, those scenes are gold. Maybe you could do without Shia LaBeouf's reporter, make this a more conventional thriller with Terrence Howard's FBI agent the main pursuer. But then you don't get the jailhouse interview where Sarandon's and LaBeouf's characters face off with their generations' different forms of principle - or at least, you'd have something very different with either Howard or Anna Kendrick (playing a junior agent) on the other side of the table.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Koch
Went with this one at the last minute as sort of a third or fourth choice - I was intending to see the 6pm 42 at Boston Common, got there only to find out MoviePass's list of times didn't include that one. So, okay, turn around to go back to Boston Common for The Company You Keep, only the Red Line was apparently a mess along its entire length even if only Porter to Alewife was off-line for the weekend. By the time I got there, it was too late, and approaching too late for From Up On Poppy Hill. But, I remembered that there was a director Q&A attached to this and grabbed a ticket just in time.
Filmmaker Neil Barksy doing Q&A.
Not a bad Q&A, in that it had a filmmaker who was happy to answer questions about making the film and his subject. As sometimes happens with documentaries that are kind of high-level examinations of a subject, there will often be questions about something relatively specific, and when the filmmaker answers them, it's not hard to ask why that bit wasn't in the final film. Barksy had a great line about how Ed Koch has written fifteen books - eight of them autobiographies - that sort of has to make it in there.
Barksy also was able to talk at a bit of length on what he felt about Koch's personality and motivations were, sometimes seeming to hash it out while talking - for instance, he thinks Koch was gay, probably couldn't have been elected mayor in 1977 if he were out, but might have found a good reception if he came out later, perhaps during the AIDS crisis. I wonder, though - considering that a scandal throughout his office but seemingly not actually involving him made re-election impossible, he might have felt his reputation couldn't stand having that lie confirmed, no matter how sympathetic i might have made him.
He also said that Koch was in many ways a dream subject, in that he quite enjoyed being on camera, had entertaining things to say, and didn't expect to exercise much influence over the film in exchange for extensive access, which isn't always a given. Koch just wanted to see the final cut before it started playing. He apparently did get impatient about it eventually - like many independent docs, it spent a lot of time in post-production, and Koch was in his mid-eighties. It's kind of a shame that he didn't get to review the movie as he wanted to - Koch was a big movie-lover and did reviews for alt-weeklies and online on a regular basis.
Knowing that, I did feel a bit of an extra bit of sadness watching the scenes of Koch alone in his apartment toward the end; I don't really feel like I'm on the path to marrying and/or starting a family, and watching him just drop newspapers on the floor of his apartment when he's done reading because who the heck else cares seemed uncomfortably familiar (as did other things). Parts emphasized how alone he was - although I don't know if that necessarily translated to "lonely" - and that's a thing that can cause nightmares.
Then again, I've still got a few years to go before I get to the age he was in 1977, when he started his twelve year run of doing the thing he seemed to want and love the most. If I can get a dozen years of that sort of satisfaction under my belt, I may yet like the quarter-century after that yet.
Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, Koch is playing at Kendall Square now, although as part of a one-week booking and splitting a screen, so if it sounds like your thing, I suggest not delaying.
Koch
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)
The lettering used for the main titles of Koch is the same as that used at a New York City subway station. That's fitting; the subway is how New Yorkers (or those who visit) most frequently interact with the great machine that keeps the city running, and it the mayor is that machine's operator, it's hard to imagine anyone with a closer association with the role - in both directions - than Ed Koch.
Aside from a couple of quick present-day clips, the film starts with him running for mayor in 1977 and has little to say about his life before then. Similarly, his activities since losing the 1989 election are almost all viewed through the lens of him being mayor emeritus, a man whose influence and importance is tied to those twelve years. It's almost as if he arrived at that first election fully formed and hung on as the ghost of his true self afterward, to hear director Neil Barsky tell it.
And while those are certainly some of the most productive and eventful years of Koch's life, they are just twelve out of eighty-plus. And for all the time Barsky spends on those years, the film can occasionally come across as a list of events - not even necessarily accomplishments. There are a few moments during the section focused on the '77 campaign that paint him as shrewd, but relatively little that shows what sort of master politician he must have been in order to be both effective at making tough decisions and popular enough to get re-elected. Just what role Koch had in the scandals that eventually drove him from office is never seriously examined.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Filmmaker Neil Barksy doing Q&A.
Not a bad Q&A, in that it had a filmmaker who was happy to answer questions about making the film and his subject. As sometimes happens with documentaries that are kind of high-level examinations of a subject, there will often be questions about something relatively specific, and when the filmmaker answers them, it's not hard to ask why that bit wasn't in the final film. Barksy had a great line about how Ed Koch has written fifteen books - eight of them autobiographies - that sort of has to make it in there.
Barksy also was able to talk at a bit of length on what he felt about Koch's personality and motivations were, sometimes seeming to hash it out while talking - for instance, he thinks Koch was gay, probably couldn't have been elected mayor in 1977 if he were out, but might have found a good reception if he came out later, perhaps during the AIDS crisis. I wonder, though - considering that a scandal throughout his office but seemingly not actually involving him made re-election impossible, he might have felt his reputation couldn't stand having that lie confirmed, no matter how sympathetic i might have made him.
He also said that Koch was in many ways a dream subject, in that he quite enjoyed being on camera, had entertaining things to say, and didn't expect to exercise much influence over the film in exchange for extensive access, which isn't always a given. Koch just wanted to see the final cut before it started playing. He apparently did get impatient about it eventually - like many independent docs, it spent a lot of time in post-production, and Koch was in his mid-eighties. It's kind of a shame that he didn't get to review the movie as he wanted to - Koch was a big movie-lover and did reviews for alt-weeklies and online on a regular basis.
Knowing that, I did feel a bit of an extra bit of sadness watching the scenes of Koch alone in his apartment toward the end; I don't really feel like I'm on the path to marrying and/or starting a family, and watching him just drop newspapers on the floor of his apartment when he's done reading because who the heck else cares seemed uncomfortably familiar (as did other things). Parts emphasized how alone he was - although I don't know if that necessarily translated to "lonely" - and that's a thing that can cause nightmares.
Then again, I've still got a few years to go before I get to the age he was in 1977, when he started his twelve year run of doing the thing he seemed to want and love the most. If I can get a dozen years of that sort of satisfaction under my belt, I may yet like the quarter-century after that yet.
Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, Koch is playing at Kendall Square now, although as part of a one-week booking and splitting a screen, so if it sounds like your thing, I suggest not delaying.
Koch
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)
The lettering used for the main titles of Koch is the same as that used at a New York City subway station. That's fitting; the subway is how New Yorkers (or those who visit) most frequently interact with the great machine that keeps the city running, and it the mayor is that machine's operator, it's hard to imagine anyone with a closer association with the role - in both directions - than Ed Koch.
Aside from a couple of quick present-day clips, the film starts with him running for mayor in 1977 and has little to say about his life before then. Similarly, his activities since losing the 1989 election are almost all viewed through the lens of him being mayor emeritus, a man whose influence and importance is tied to those twelve years. It's almost as if he arrived at that first election fully formed and hung on as the ghost of his true self afterward, to hear director Neil Barsky tell it.
And while those are certainly some of the most productive and eventful years of Koch's life, they are just twelve out of eighty-plus. And for all the time Barsky spends on those years, the film can occasionally come across as a list of events - not even necessarily accomplishments. There are a few moments during the section focused on the '77 campaign that paint him as shrewd, but relatively little that shows what sort of master politician he must have been in order to be both effective at making tough decisions and popular enough to get re-elected. Just what role Koch had in the scandals that eventually drove him from office is never seriously examined.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Boston Underground Film Festival Closing Day: Los Chidos, Vanishing Waves, and Big Ass Spider!
Ah, at last, the end, two weeks later!
Weird day, beyond what you might expect for an Underground Film Festival. I could have started earlier - remember how last year I said maybe I'd actually stay awake through Mondomanila if I saw it under different circumstances? Well, I could have - it played at 12:30pm - but after staying up late for Samurai Cop, that wasn't going to happen.
Also, it was apparently Easter that Sunday! As a non-religious person, I find that an easy holiday to lose track of, what with it moving around and mainly affecting me in terms of being able to find Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs cheap afterward, but it put a crimp into browsing and finding something to eat between Los Chidos (yes, I could still eat after that) and Vanishing Waves - a lot of people really take this thing seriously!
I'm actually kind of surprised it wasn't played up at the festival more; aside from the easy "perfect day for zombie movie" jokes, their mascot has always been Bacchus the Bunny, and while there was a bunny theme to most of the "no talking/texting" clips, nobody explicitly made the connection to Easter. Going soft, guys?
Last bit of Horrible Photography of the festival, with Big Ass Spider! producer Travis Stevens and director Mike Mendez. I recognized Mendez's name from The Gravedancers, which I saw at Fantasia in 2006, and I'm actually very surprised he hasn't done a movie since. That movie was good, darn it, and fun, and while I gather he's worked steadily as an editor since then, there's something wrong with the system when a guy who makes this movies this entertaining can't get work.
I guess that's why he joked about receiving a "Megaspider" script and saying "has it come to this? Yes, apparently it has..." before putting his own mark on it. And, based on Gravedancers, it seems like he did; it's very much the same style and tone. He also spoke pretty highly of Epic, the company that made the movie, saying that they want to be at least a little better than Asylum, both in how they found a little extra money to get some music rights and were working on a theatrical release rather than just going straight to VOD and/or SyFy.
He also mentioned that Grunberg and Boyar improvised a lot of their material, even before being asked. Does that count on your festival Q&A bingo card or not?
At any rate, this was a pretty darn good edition of BUFF, and I'll try to get to the short films soon. Here's hoping it's just as much fun next year!
Los Chidos
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Yes, Los Chidos goes there. Fill whatever twisted thing you want in for "there", and that statement is likely to be true, although in actuality it's not even in answer to a question - it's doing something jaw-droppingly crude and awful before the audience has asked how far writer/director Omar Rodriguez-Lopez intends to push things and will soon enough be moving on to the next. It's impressively energetic in its vulgarity.
On the outskirts of Jalisco, there's a tire shop owned by a long-married couple (Maria de Jesus Canales Ramirez & Manuel Ramos), their kids (Cecilia Guitierrez & Erasmo Rodriguez), and their niece and nephew (Alejandro Rodriguez & Monica Guzman). Well, in theory; in practice they're lazy slobs shooing business away from their run-down shack. That is, until Kim, an American who doesn't speak any Spanish (Kim Stodel), shows up and refuses to take no for an answer, not just actually coming back mañana, but sticking around with them, even as they rob, berate, and abuse him. It may have something to do with their cute neighbor Alma (Maimuna Achleitner Jimenez), who though married could probably do better, what with her husband tending to drug her and go out wearing her clothes and make-up.
So, yeah, all that happens, and that's really just the set-up for the movie; the actual events that this situation facilitates are even more weird and transgressive. It's a series of gross-outs and people treating each other terribly that will, sooner or later, hit something that causes automatic rejection because you can't joke about that for many, and that's okay. What's surprising is how well Rodriguez-Lopez manages to play with tone and pacing to keep it from happening more often: He'll hit the awful thing quickly and casually enough that it's over before the viewer has the time to work himself or herself into an offended lather. There's also a farcical feel to the whole thing, so that bits that don't really make sense still seem to work in the outsized world he's created. An ironically upbeat narrator adds to the feeling, even when his actual lines aren't that funny.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Aurora (Vanishing Waves)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I suspect that every film director would like to make a film that takes place inside dreams at some point - it's free reign to create imaginative visuals, dig right into a character's subconscious, and make the occasional narrative leap that skips right over the boring parts. Telling a story that way is trickier than it looks, though, even before you get to the science fiction bits, though Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte and company do quite well here.
We enter the story with Lukas (Marius Jampolskis), one of several scientists working on a mind-reading project. He's the one who will be shaving his head and donning a cap of electrodes to interface with a comatose test subject - a mentally active person would produce too much noise to sift through - and when he does, he's almost immediately plunged into a quite sexual dream with Aurora (Jurga Jutaite). He keeps this secret from the project leader (Vytautas Kaniusonis), the psychologist meant to interpret his findings (Rudolfas Jansonas), and his girlfriend (Martina Jablonskyte), telling them what they want to hear lest the program be halted.
And that, folks, is why an experiment should always have more than one test subject! Well, maybe the team does and we're just not seeing the less-spectacular results they achieved, which wouldn't surprise me, as the film actually seems to do an unusually good job in presenting science to its audience. There are details like Lukas not knowing who the coma patient is initially to prevent his findings from being biased that could easily have been omitted to streamline the story but instead make it feel more solid. Buozyte and co-writer Bruno Samper also fill the team with characters who can butt heads without falling into "intuitive rule-breaker versus petty bureaucrat" traps.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Big Ass Spider!
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Well, there's certainly no denying that Big Ass Spider! delivers what it promises - that is certainly one big-ass spider menacing Los Angeles from the very start. For those that want maybe a little more to their movies, it's at least got a fairly charismatic cast and a crew that both recognizes that monster movies should be fun and is able to reach that goal.
Alex Mathis (Greg Grunberg) is in pest control, and is in fact brilliant at it, though he still winds up in the emergency room with a spider bite after a customer panics. That's fortuitous, though, because an unusually large spider has arrived there inside a corpse, and the administrators put him and janitor Jose Ramos (Lombardo Boyar) to work finding it. They're soon joined by the army in the persons of Major Braxton Tanner (Ray Wise), Lieutenant Karly Brant (Clare Kramer), and Lucas (Patrick Bauchau), a scientist who knows that this thing's not going to stop growing at "unusually large".
Well, we know that from the start, which gives us a preview of the last act with pumped-up dramatics and a cool song on the soundtrack before doing the twelve-hours-earlier thing. It more or less lays out what the audience can expect from the next hour and a half: An everyman hero, decent but not incredible special effects, and the filmmakers playing with their genre but not stooping to making fun of it. That's a crucial difference, because Big Ass Spider! is a throwback to the monster movies of the fifties and sixties, and while a fair amount of "homages" to that period come out, most recreate the surface warts and all while making fun of folks doing the best they can with limited resources as opposed to doing the best they can to create the same sort of thrills with modern-day resources.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Weird day, beyond what you might expect for an Underground Film Festival. I could have started earlier - remember how last year I said maybe I'd actually stay awake through Mondomanila if I saw it under different circumstances? Well, I could have - it played at 12:30pm - but after staying up late for Samurai Cop, that wasn't going to happen.
Also, it was apparently Easter that Sunday! As a non-religious person, I find that an easy holiday to lose track of, what with it moving around and mainly affecting me in terms of being able to find Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs cheap afterward, but it put a crimp into browsing and finding something to eat between Los Chidos (yes, I could still eat after that) and Vanishing Waves - a lot of people really take this thing seriously!
I'm actually kind of surprised it wasn't played up at the festival more; aside from the easy "perfect day for zombie movie" jokes, their mascot has always been Bacchus the Bunny, and while there was a bunny theme to most of the "no talking/texting" clips, nobody explicitly made the connection to Easter. Going soft, guys?
Last bit of Horrible Photography of the festival, with Big Ass Spider! producer Travis Stevens and director Mike Mendez. I recognized Mendez's name from The Gravedancers, which I saw at Fantasia in 2006, and I'm actually very surprised he hasn't done a movie since. That movie was good, darn it, and fun, and while I gather he's worked steadily as an editor since then, there's something wrong with the system when a guy who makes this movies this entertaining can't get work.
I guess that's why he joked about receiving a "Megaspider" script and saying "has it come to this? Yes, apparently it has..." before putting his own mark on it. And, based on Gravedancers, it seems like he did; it's very much the same style and tone. He also spoke pretty highly of Epic, the company that made the movie, saying that they want to be at least a little better than Asylum, both in how they found a little extra money to get some music rights and were working on a theatrical release rather than just going straight to VOD and/or SyFy.
He also mentioned that Grunberg and Boyar improvised a lot of their material, even before being asked. Does that count on your festival Q&A bingo card or not?
At any rate, this was a pretty darn good edition of BUFF, and I'll try to get to the short films soon. Here's hoping it's just as much fun next year!
Los Chidos
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Yes, Los Chidos goes there. Fill whatever twisted thing you want in for "there", and that statement is likely to be true, although in actuality it's not even in answer to a question - it's doing something jaw-droppingly crude and awful before the audience has asked how far writer/director Omar Rodriguez-Lopez intends to push things and will soon enough be moving on to the next. It's impressively energetic in its vulgarity.
On the outskirts of Jalisco, there's a tire shop owned by a long-married couple (Maria de Jesus Canales Ramirez & Manuel Ramos), their kids (Cecilia Guitierrez & Erasmo Rodriguez), and their niece and nephew (Alejandro Rodriguez & Monica Guzman). Well, in theory; in practice they're lazy slobs shooing business away from their run-down shack. That is, until Kim, an American who doesn't speak any Spanish (Kim Stodel), shows up and refuses to take no for an answer, not just actually coming back mañana, but sticking around with them, even as they rob, berate, and abuse him. It may have something to do with their cute neighbor Alma (Maimuna Achleitner Jimenez), who though married could probably do better, what with her husband tending to drug her and go out wearing her clothes and make-up.
So, yeah, all that happens, and that's really just the set-up for the movie; the actual events that this situation facilitates are even more weird and transgressive. It's a series of gross-outs and people treating each other terribly that will, sooner or later, hit something that causes automatic rejection because you can't joke about that for many, and that's okay. What's surprising is how well Rodriguez-Lopez manages to play with tone and pacing to keep it from happening more often: He'll hit the awful thing quickly and casually enough that it's over before the viewer has the time to work himself or herself into an offended lather. There's also a farcical feel to the whole thing, so that bits that don't really make sense still seem to work in the outsized world he's created. An ironically upbeat narrator adds to the feeling, even when his actual lines aren't that funny.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Aurora (Vanishing Waves)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I suspect that every film director would like to make a film that takes place inside dreams at some point - it's free reign to create imaginative visuals, dig right into a character's subconscious, and make the occasional narrative leap that skips right over the boring parts. Telling a story that way is trickier than it looks, though, even before you get to the science fiction bits, though Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte and company do quite well here.
We enter the story with Lukas (Marius Jampolskis), one of several scientists working on a mind-reading project. He's the one who will be shaving his head and donning a cap of electrodes to interface with a comatose test subject - a mentally active person would produce too much noise to sift through - and when he does, he's almost immediately plunged into a quite sexual dream with Aurora (Jurga Jutaite). He keeps this secret from the project leader (Vytautas Kaniusonis), the psychologist meant to interpret his findings (Rudolfas Jansonas), and his girlfriend (Martina Jablonskyte), telling them what they want to hear lest the program be halted.
And that, folks, is why an experiment should always have more than one test subject! Well, maybe the team does and we're just not seeing the less-spectacular results they achieved, which wouldn't surprise me, as the film actually seems to do an unusually good job in presenting science to its audience. There are details like Lukas not knowing who the coma patient is initially to prevent his findings from being biased that could easily have been omitted to streamline the story but instead make it feel more solid. Buozyte and co-writer Bruno Samper also fill the team with characters who can butt heads without falling into "intuitive rule-breaker versus petty bureaucrat" traps.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Big Ass Spider!
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Well, there's certainly no denying that Big Ass Spider! delivers what it promises - that is certainly one big-ass spider menacing Los Angeles from the very start. For those that want maybe a little more to their movies, it's at least got a fairly charismatic cast and a crew that both recognizes that monster movies should be fun and is able to reach that goal.
Alex Mathis (Greg Grunberg) is in pest control, and is in fact brilliant at it, though he still winds up in the emergency room with a spider bite after a customer panics. That's fortuitous, though, because an unusually large spider has arrived there inside a corpse, and the administrators put him and janitor Jose Ramos (Lombardo Boyar) to work finding it. They're soon joined by the army in the persons of Major Braxton Tanner (Ray Wise), Lieutenant Karly Brant (Clare Kramer), and Lucas (Patrick Bauchau), a scientist who knows that this thing's not going to stop growing at "unusually large".
Well, we know that from the start, which gives us a preview of the last act with pumped-up dramatics and a cool song on the soundtrack before doing the twelve-hours-earlier thing. It more or less lays out what the audience can expect from the next hour and a half: An everyman hero, decent but not incredible special effects, and the filmmakers playing with their genre but not stooping to making fun of it. That's a crucial difference, because Big Ass Spider! is a throwback to the monster movies of the fifties and sixties, and while a fair amount of "homages" to that period come out, most recreate the surface warts and all while making fun of folks doing the best they can with limited resources as opposed to doing the best they can to create the same sort of thrills with modern-day resources.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 April - 18 April 2013
It's a holiday weekend, so the studios bring out... Oh, just in Massachusetts and Maine? And I don't get Monday off? Well, then, it's no wonder it's not a big new release weekend. Might as well start with the local independent theaters, then, especially since they've got good stuff.
My plans? 42, Trance, From Up on Poppy HIll, and whatever other catch-up I can manage. Maybe head to the furniture store for Jurassic Park in IMAX 3D. If you're free Tuesday morning, go see Starry Starry Night. It's terrific and (mostly) kid-friendly.
- The Brattle, for instance, starts its regular run of Upstream Color on Friday. I saw it when director Shane Carruth came in the do a preview, and it's pretty keen; I highly recommend going in to see it cold.
I'm guessing this is school vacation week, although the Brattle's Muppet Madness! series only continues through Patriot's Day with matinee double features Saturday (The Muppets & The Muppet Movie), Sunday (The Great Muppet Caper & The Muppets Take Manhattan), and Monday (The Dark Crystal & Labyrinth). - I hope that when The Coolidge Corner Theatre installs their DCP projectors soon, they'll make sure to label when they're using that and when they're using film. I think they're still all-35mm, so that makes it the place to see Trance, the new one from Danny Boyle with James McAvoy as the inside man in a heist who loses his memory of where he hid a painting, Rosario Dawson as the hypnotist charged with getting it out of his head, and Vincent Cassel as the thief who will beat it out of him otherwise. It also plays Kendall Square and Boston Common, while the Coolidge's 7pm show on Tuesday is an "Off the Couch" screening, at which I suspect members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society will debunk as well as discuss.
The Midnight Road Trip movie this weekend is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Terry Gilliam directing Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro in an adaptation of Hunter Thompson's roman a clef. They've also got two special screenings on Tuesday - Marian Marzynski's featurette Never Forget to Lie at 7pm and a sneak preview of the first two episodes of Sundance Channel's original series Rectify - while Wednesday has MassMouth taking over the main room for their "Story Slam Grand Finale". - The mainstream theaters, meanwhile, tie into the opening of baseball season and the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947 with 42, with Chadwick Boseman playing Robinson and Harrison Ford growling as Branch Rickey. Nice cast beyond that and writer/director Brian Helgeland has some good scripts on his resumé. It's at Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Meanwhile, a lot of guys whose careers have seen better days star in Scary Movie 5, since it's been a couple years since the last one and there are new obvious pop-culture jokes to make. It's at Somerville, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway.
Boston Common also has Disconnect (as does Kendall Square), an interconnected-story drama that appears to be playing the "there's less real connection despite all the ways we can talk electronically" angle, which seems a bit stale. On the other hand, nice ensemble and a lot of folks speak highly of director Henry Alex Rubin's documentary Murderball. They also devote a screen to The Boston International Film Festival - not to be confused wtih the Independent Film Festival of Boston, which happens a few days later - and if you can dig through their terrible website, there are some interesting movies there, but there's a lot with just the vaguest of descriptions and no trailers or stills. - It's got to be considered a pretty busy week at Kendall Square; not only are they among the places getting Trance and Disconnect, but they've got new ones by notable filmmakers: Robert Redford directs and stars in The Company You Keep as a public interest lawyer whose past as a member of The Weather Underground resurfaces; amazing ensemble to it. Then there's To the Wonder from the suddenly-prolific Terrence Malick, with Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko as a married couple faced with temptation in the forms of Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem.
It's busy enough that they've barely got room to open Koch, a biographical documentary on New York's iconic 1980s mayor who recently passed away. It's marked down as a one-week booking, and only playing twice at day (4:15 and 7pm) at that. Still, if you go on Saturday, director Neil Barkshy will be at both shows to introduce and take questions. - The MFA has some good stuff; the biggest series is The National Center for Jewish Film’s Jewishfilm.2013 with five films playing at various times on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday (and at other times at the ICA and West Newton, plus a preview of No Place on Earth Monday at Kendall Square. The MFA also has three more screenings in the Hollywood Scriptures series - Taste of Money on Friday, A Separation on Saturday, and The Kid with the Bike on Sunday.
The other event is The Boston International Children's Film Festival, which has some really terrific movies for all ages playing Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (and continuing into next weekend). It kind of kills me that these are all matinees, because I would love to see Starry Starry Night again, but I can't skip work Tuesday morning. - Hey, the Harvard Film Archive has its program descriptions for the next couple months online! They're running two programs this weekend. Toward a Proustian Cinema ties in with a conference celebrating the work of Marcel Proust on the centennial of the publishing of Swann's Way. Two adaptations of Proust's work play this weekend - Time Regained (Friday 7pm) and La Captive (Sunday 4pm) - with a third coming up next weekend.
They've also got a visit from South Korean filmmaker Lee Jang-ho, featuring three films connected by "Art Cinema as Rebellion". He will be there for three 7pm showings: The Man with Three Coffins (Saturday), Eudong (Sunday), and Good Windy Day (Monday). - There's a pattern to ArtsEmerson's film program this weekend, but I'm not sure what it is. It includes Far From Heaven (Friday evening and Saturday night), Medicine for Melancholy (Friday night), Swimming to Cambodia (Saturday afternoon), and Zabriskie Point (Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon). The Bright Lights screenings are YERT: Your Environmental Road Trip with director Ben Evans on Tuesday and two student films with their directors on Thursday.
- iMovieCafe has a Hindi movie with English subtitles, Nautanki Saala!, starring Ayushmann Khurrana as an actor who plays matchmaker between Kunaal Roy Kapur and Pooja Salvi.
My plans? 42, Trance, From Up on Poppy HIll, and whatever other catch-up I can manage. Maybe head to the furniture store for Jurassic Park in IMAX 3D. If you're free Tuesday morning, go see Starry Starry Night. It's terrific and (mostly) kid-friendly.
Beyond the Hills
Plenty more I'd like to say about this one, but it ends in Boston (well, Cambridge) today and I need some sleep before work. I do strongly recommend it, though - it covers some fairly familiar ground with what I think is unusual grace, far mroe than I could manage when talking about its subjects (religion, sexuality, mental illness), and leaves an impressive amount for the audience to at least feel like they're figuring out themselves.
One thing I will mention is that I did look original author Tatiana Niculescu Bran up on Wikipedia, and it was interesting from the descriptions of her "non-fiction novels" to see how much Mungiu left out, but sort of didn't. It looks like the end of his movie shifts the ambiguity around a little:
SPOILERS!
In the description of the books, who is ultimately responsible for Alina's death appears to be vague, with the hospital staff taking potentially dishonest steps to absolve themselves of the blame, causing the priest and nuns to be imprisoned for murder; the film appears to place the blame much more squarely on the exorcism but leaves the ultimate fate of the clergy up in the air, the implication being that the church is too much a part of society for them to completely take the fall.
!SRELIOPS
At any rate, it's worth checking out, even if it is a bit of a long one.
Dupa dealuri (Beyond the Hills)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)
Beyond the Hills is a slow builder, with writer/director Christian Mungiu's point almost never in doubt. He knows, though, that you don't change someone's beliefs with one bold demonstration, especially if it's built on a premise that the audience doesn't necessarily believe, so he spends his time nudging, not seeming to do anything big, until finally stepping back, having attacked points that are often far from subtle obliquely but still creating something engrossing.
Things start quietly, with Alina (Christina Flutur) returning to her home village in Romania after having lived in Germany after aging out of an orphanage. She's met by her best friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), who stayed behind to enter a convent. Though Alina protected Voichita when they were children, she is the one who seems fragile now, begging her friend to return abroad with her. Voichita would like to help Alina, but she has found a home in the monastery, and the priest in charge (Valeriu Andriuta) demands her commitment to God be total.
There's a wonderful shot early on in this movie where Alina and Voichita walk away from the town toward the convent which, despite taking them up a mountain, feels like sailing away from a shoreline - the clumped-together buildings a land mass with a very definitive border. The landscape becomes important again toward the end, as mounting snow makes the environment more perilous, despite there not being talk of a storm. I wonder if this is fortuitous or deliberate - the film was shot in sequence, so the filmmakers may have just taken the weather they got and made it work - but it's impressive how Mungiu works these perhaps less-obvious characteristics of the setting more than well-worn ones. He could have had the nuns using horses or donkeys to travel to and from the town to mark their home as a place stuck in the past, for instance.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
One thing I will mention is that I did look original author Tatiana Niculescu Bran up on Wikipedia, and it was interesting from the descriptions of her "non-fiction novels" to see how much Mungiu left out, but sort of didn't. It looks like the end of his movie shifts the ambiguity around a little:
SPOILERS!
In the description of the books, who is ultimately responsible for Alina's death appears to be vague, with the hospital staff taking potentially dishonest steps to absolve themselves of the blame, causing the priest and nuns to be imprisoned for murder; the film appears to place the blame much more squarely on the exorcism but leaves the ultimate fate of the clergy up in the air, the implication being that the church is too much a part of society for them to completely take the fall.
!SRELIOPS
At any rate, it's worth checking out, even if it is a bit of a long one.
Dupa dealuri (Beyond the Hills)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)
Beyond the Hills is a slow builder, with writer/director Christian Mungiu's point almost never in doubt. He knows, though, that you don't change someone's beliefs with one bold demonstration, especially if it's built on a premise that the audience doesn't necessarily believe, so he spends his time nudging, not seeming to do anything big, until finally stepping back, having attacked points that are often far from subtle obliquely but still creating something engrossing.
Things start quietly, with Alina (Christina Flutur) returning to her home village in Romania after having lived in Germany after aging out of an orphanage. She's met by her best friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), who stayed behind to enter a convent. Though Alina protected Voichita when they were children, she is the one who seems fragile now, begging her friend to return abroad with her. Voichita would like to help Alina, but she has found a home in the monastery, and the priest in charge (Valeriu Andriuta) demands her commitment to God be total.
There's a wonderful shot early on in this movie where Alina and Voichita walk away from the town toward the convent which, despite taking them up a mountain, feels like sailing away from a shoreline - the clumped-together buildings a land mass with a very definitive border. The landscape becomes important again toward the end, as mounting snow makes the environment more perilous, despite there not being talk of a storm. I wonder if this is fortuitous or deliberate - the film was shot in sequence, so the filmmakers may have just taken the weather they got and made it work - but it's impressive how Mungiu works these perhaps less-obvious characteristics of the setting more than well-worn ones. He could have had the nuns using horses or donkeys to travel to and from the town to mark their home as a place stuck in the past, for instance.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Boston Underground Film Festival Day 04: Pieta, White Reindeer, Cheap Thrills, and Samurai Cop
Time flies - not even done writing about BUFF, and I'm already starting to obsess about my IFFBoston schedule. Saturday, at least, was a pretty good day, even though it did start out on a high note and have trouble equalling that as it went on.
The high note was Pieta, one of the movies with names I recognized that had me excited for the festival, all of which more or less delivered. I'm kind of surprised in some ways that I've warmed up to Kim Ki-duk as much as I have; he's a guy who does a lot of the pretentious art-house stuff with characters who don't speak and the like. For some reason, though, I kept going to his movies - maybe because at the time, they were some of the only Korean movies that were playing local theaters; maybe because if a guy's movies show up often enough, he feels like someone you should know about. It didn't hurt that some of his movies started playing genre festivals as well as hoity-toity ones.
The "only Korean films playing" thing has something to do with it, and it's kind of funny the way it colors the way I write about it. Once the full plot really reveals itself, my brain went immediately to Park Chan-wook, and while I think that's justifiable - the guy has made his name on a trio of movies called "The Vengeance Trilogy", after all - there's a joke (half-serious) about how baseball players are generally only compared to folks within their ethnicity, to the extent that a decent all-around outfielder coming over from Japan was once described as a "cross between Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki", two complete opposites as ballplayers. Can't compare him to a player of European or African descent, though!
Could have been worse. I was this close to comparing it to Bong Joon-ho's Mother.
I've really got to remember to take notes during Q&As, if only so I don't wind up wondering just which producer the guy on the left who isn't listed in the festival program is the next day (that's producer Melodie Sisk and director Zach Clark in the center). Nice folks, Sisk also worked on See You Next Tuesday (spot her in the horrible photography!) and appears on-screen here in a mostly-silent part that I kind of felt must have seemed clever at the time but struck me as a bit of a mis-step (and likely would have been if she hadn't been stepping in for a model who got another job at the last minute).
One thing that they mentioned was that Clark, in particular, wasn't a big fan of Christmas when he started working on raising money for this movie, so having to live in that holiday more or less non-stop for the next two years was not always the greatest experience. At least they said they grew to appreciate it more by the time it was done, because otherwise - yikes. They did a nice job of avoiding clichés with it, though, limiting themselves to one "true meaning of Christmas - not the presents and decorations et cetera" bit. Someday, I'm going to write a screenplay that has characters sincerely and (hopefully) convincingly declaring why they strongly believe in the presents and decorations that tracks why I love Christmas. The monologue has been in a half-formed state in my head for years, and I'd like to have it down if only to use once or twice in real life.
Once again, missing the name of a filmmaker. I'm pretty sure the shorter guy is director E.L. Katz, one of the two folks on the left is producer Travis Stevens (after a weekend of horrible photography, I presume the readers all know Kevin Monahan by now), but the fourth person. No clue.
I mention in the review that I was kind of disappointed in this one; it seemed to get a tidal wave of positive reviews during SXSW, so great movie, right? Well, no. I think I've written before about how the internet can become a sort of echo chamber as various websites pass around the same news, especially since we'll often find ourselves focusing on those that align closely to our interests, creating a sense of unanimity that doesn't really exist. SXSW seems to amplify it, as the folks who have already gravitated toward Austin's film scene show up in force, see the movies together, talk about it, and sort of homogenize their general feeling before writing about it.
I think their strong love for the Alamo Drafthouse plays into it, too - folks trust Tim League and his business, and Drafthouse Films. What played BUFF is a pretty strong statement on how much of a force Drafthouse has become in the niche-film world - just for this day, both Cheap Thrills and Pieta had managed to be picked up for distribution by that label by the time they played BUFF (as did I Declare War and maybe another one or two).
It does still make me wonder just how influential the Austin/Drafthouse group is going to be on genre films over the next few years, and whether it's necessarily good for that one group to have so much influence that is properly reserved for east-coast cities with many storied academic institutions.
(Kidding, mostly)
Speaking of distribution, I saw that Samurai Cop was distributed by Cinema Epoch, a company operated by Blue Dream director Gregory Hatanaka. I half-wonder if having Blue Dream play the festival was a quid quo pro for having a midnight show of Samurai Cop.
Also, it's worth mentioning that I attended Samurai Cop in no small part because "Bio-Cop", the latest short film/fake trailer by Steven Kostanski and the Astron-6 gang, was playing before it. It's a parody that is arguably better than the real thing, and as much as Kostanski seems to be getting a lot of make-up work from big studio productions, folks should hire these guys just to do awesome 1980s-throwback title sequences.
Pieta
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Kim Ki-duk has a reputation - well-deserved, honestly - for movies with strange premises, minimal dialogue, and execution that's maybe a bit pretentious. It's not all he does, though; he'll occasionally serve as a writer and producer for something a little less iconoclastic. Pieta plays like he decided to direct one of those more commercial scripts himself, making for a movie that's undeniably his but also a much more mainstream Korean movie.
Much of the action takes place in an industrial area that's not doing well; things are rough enough that Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) can practically go door to door collecting and enforcing for a loan shark. A pitiless sort, Kang-do's method for collecting from those who cannot repay is to take out an insurance policy and injure them with their own equipment. Then one day Mi-seon (Jo Min-soo) shows up at his door, explaining that she's his long-lost mother and wants to make up for lost time. Perhaps this can restore some amount of his missing humanity.
If it does, it's not going to be through long, revealing conversations; this is, after all, a Kim Ki-duk movie, and that is really not his thing. Kim likes his stubborn silences, and there's plenty of those here, with Mi-seon abjectly refusing to explain the reasons for her absence and return, or what she has been doing in between. Kang-do isn't nearly so laconic as Kim's usual male lead, although he certainly does know that relatively few words are a nice way of demonstrating control and domination - watch how much more he runs his mouth when revisiting people in a panic compared to his cool initial visits. It's a well-known trick by now - keeping a character silent often makes another spill more than he or she might otherwise, and it forces the audience to examine what they see on-screen much more closely than usual.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
White Reindeer
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
It would be kind of amusing if, in the future, White Reindeer winds up dropped into the Christmas rotation of independent-minded theaters, television stations, and online-streaming-lists as an apparent poison pill. Not that there aren't already plenty of those, but this one's a bit different: It's neither gleeful in mocking the holiday nor secretly trying to convince the audience of its true meaning.
Suzanne Barrington (Anna Margaret Hollyman) loves Christmas; just as soon as Thanksgiving has passed, the realtor is trying to create that sort of homey environment. She sells one house to Patti & George (Lydia Hyslop, Joe Swanberg) , assuring them that she lives in the neighborhood and the worries about recent break-ins are overblown. But on the first of December, her own husband Jeff (Nathan Williams) is killed during a home invasion, and to make things worse, she soon learns that he had an affair with Fantasia (Laura Lemar-Goldsborough), a twenty-two year-old stripper. It's going to be a rough holiday season.
White Reindeer isn't a yelling movie, nor is it one where the poor widow spends every moment visibly brittle and on the edge of breaking down. Indeed, the angle often played here is that sometimes losing a person you love is not constant outward torture, which can make a person feel even more horrible. So, instead, there's a great deal of quiet loneliness, online binge-shopping to try and bring oneself a little happiness, and befriending her husband's mistress because she'd understand, right? Even when this sort of thing leads to weird misadventures, it's fairly low-key.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Cheap Thrills
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Given the fairly impressive cast, decent behind-the-scenes talent, and loudly proclaimed praise for Cheap Thrills coming out of its festival appearances, I expected more from the movie. What I got was an acceptable gross-out movie with a nugget or two of commentary somewhere in its body, but overall it feels kind of hollow and familiar. It's got its moments, but it's not much more than passably entertaining.
Craig (Pat Healy) is still a writer in that he has a blog he posts to regularly, but these days he works as a mechanic - at least, until he gets laid off on the day he was going to ask for a much-needed raise. Drowning his sorrows in a bar afterward, he runs into old high-school buddy Vince (Ethan Embry), who runs in some shady circles these days. They wind up sharing a very expensive bottle of tequila with Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Sara Paxton), a wealthy couple slumming it for Violet's birthday. At some point, the "$20 if you..." dares start, naturally escalating in both price and outlandishness.
That's not quite all there is to the story, but it's pretty close. The plot takes a turn when the group wind up at Colin's & Violet's house, but it winds up being less of an interesting twist than an acknowledgment that the characters will almost certainly have a certain idea, so the script therefore must detour through it before returning to the main path. Before and after that, the movie basically comes down to details, with stunts that go from tacky to gross to mean in a pretty straight line as the film goes on. Maybe, somewhere, writers Trent Haaga and David Chirchirillo have something to say about the rich exploiting the poor for their own amusement and the poor going along with it because they think they can get rich too, but that's not exactly cutting, original insight presented in a new way.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Samurai Cop
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I'll readily admit, I don't have enough memory of this a week and a half later to give it a full review. That may argue that it's just mediocre rather than actually terrible, or just that it was pretty late and I occasionally napped.
At any rate, Samurai Cop is pretty awful, with terrible actors speaking terrible lines in a terrible story and production values that are really rather sub-par. It's the sort of all-around ineptitude that makes Robert Z'Dar, in the role of the film's villain, somehow look worse because even though he's not nearly as bad as the rest of the cast, his moderation seems out of place. Though director Amir Shervan is credited with the screenplay, that's probably because the WGA will not allow the Scriptotron Mark III to be credited.
But, hey, you've seen worse. Shervan and company know that they're making a terrible movie, so they do the only thing they can: Turn up the volume. The action isn't exactly great, but it's bloody as hell. There's plenty of nudity and sex as well, and the filmmakers are equal opportunity where the pandering is concerned, letting buff star Matt Hannon play a chunk of the movie in little but a tight speedo and somewhat awe-inspiring mullet. I kind of love Dale Cummings as the screaming captain, especially when he just goes "screw it, kill all the yakuza you can!" toward the end. Mark Frazer is the kind of trying-too-hard-to-be-cool that is hilarious a quarter-century later.
That may be the way to go with this sort of mess - don't even try to make it a commercial success when you first make it, but rather stick it in a vault and allow it to accumulate camp value for a couple decades.
The high note was Pieta, one of the movies with names I recognized that had me excited for the festival, all of which more or less delivered. I'm kind of surprised in some ways that I've warmed up to Kim Ki-duk as much as I have; he's a guy who does a lot of the pretentious art-house stuff with characters who don't speak and the like. For some reason, though, I kept going to his movies - maybe because at the time, they were some of the only Korean movies that were playing local theaters; maybe because if a guy's movies show up often enough, he feels like someone you should know about. It didn't hurt that some of his movies started playing genre festivals as well as hoity-toity ones.
The "only Korean films playing" thing has something to do with it, and it's kind of funny the way it colors the way I write about it. Once the full plot really reveals itself, my brain went immediately to Park Chan-wook, and while I think that's justifiable - the guy has made his name on a trio of movies called "The Vengeance Trilogy", after all - there's a joke (half-serious) about how baseball players are generally only compared to folks within their ethnicity, to the extent that a decent all-around outfielder coming over from Japan was once described as a "cross between Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki", two complete opposites as ballplayers. Can't compare him to a player of European or African descent, though!
Could have been worse. I was this close to comparing it to Bong Joon-ho's Mother.
I've really got to remember to take notes during Q&As, if only so I don't wind up wondering just which producer the guy on the left who isn't listed in the festival program is the next day (that's producer Melodie Sisk and director Zach Clark in the center). Nice folks, Sisk also worked on See You Next Tuesday (spot her in the horrible photography!) and appears on-screen here in a mostly-silent part that I kind of felt must have seemed clever at the time but struck me as a bit of a mis-step (and likely would have been if she hadn't been stepping in for a model who got another job at the last minute).
One thing that they mentioned was that Clark, in particular, wasn't a big fan of Christmas when he started working on raising money for this movie, so having to live in that holiday more or less non-stop for the next two years was not always the greatest experience. At least they said they grew to appreciate it more by the time it was done, because otherwise - yikes. They did a nice job of avoiding clichés with it, though, limiting themselves to one "true meaning of Christmas - not the presents and decorations et cetera" bit. Someday, I'm going to write a screenplay that has characters sincerely and (hopefully) convincingly declaring why they strongly believe in the presents and decorations that tracks why I love Christmas. The monologue has been in a half-formed state in my head for years, and I'd like to have it down if only to use once or twice in real life.
Once again, missing the name of a filmmaker. I'm pretty sure the shorter guy is director E.L. Katz, one of the two folks on the left is producer Travis Stevens (after a weekend of horrible photography, I presume the readers all know Kevin Monahan by now), but the fourth person. No clue.
I mention in the review that I was kind of disappointed in this one; it seemed to get a tidal wave of positive reviews during SXSW, so great movie, right? Well, no. I think I've written before about how the internet can become a sort of echo chamber as various websites pass around the same news, especially since we'll often find ourselves focusing on those that align closely to our interests, creating a sense of unanimity that doesn't really exist. SXSW seems to amplify it, as the folks who have already gravitated toward Austin's film scene show up in force, see the movies together, talk about it, and sort of homogenize their general feeling before writing about it.
I think their strong love for the Alamo Drafthouse plays into it, too - folks trust Tim League and his business, and Drafthouse Films. What played BUFF is a pretty strong statement on how much of a force Drafthouse has become in the niche-film world - just for this day, both Cheap Thrills and Pieta had managed to be picked up for distribution by that label by the time they played BUFF (as did I Declare War and maybe another one or two).
It does still make me wonder just how influential the Austin/Drafthouse group is going to be on genre films over the next few years, and whether it's necessarily good for that one group to have so much influence that is properly reserved for east-coast cities with many storied academic institutions.
(Kidding, mostly)
Speaking of distribution, I saw that Samurai Cop was distributed by Cinema Epoch, a company operated by Blue Dream director Gregory Hatanaka. I half-wonder if having Blue Dream play the festival was a quid quo pro for having a midnight show of Samurai Cop.
Also, it's worth mentioning that I attended Samurai Cop in no small part because "Bio-Cop", the latest short film/fake trailer by Steven Kostanski and the Astron-6 gang, was playing before it. It's a parody that is arguably better than the real thing, and as much as Kostanski seems to be getting a lot of make-up work from big studio productions, folks should hire these guys just to do awesome 1980s-throwback title sequences.
Pieta
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Kim Ki-duk has a reputation - well-deserved, honestly - for movies with strange premises, minimal dialogue, and execution that's maybe a bit pretentious. It's not all he does, though; he'll occasionally serve as a writer and producer for something a little less iconoclastic. Pieta plays like he decided to direct one of those more commercial scripts himself, making for a movie that's undeniably his but also a much more mainstream Korean movie.
Much of the action takes place in an industrial area that's not doing well; things are rough enough that Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) can practically go door to door collecting and enforcing for a loan shark. A pitiless sort, Kang-do's method for collecting from those who cannot repay is to take out an insurance policy and injure them with their own equipment. Then one day Mi-seon (Jo Min-soo) shows up at his door, explaining that she's his long-lost mother and wants to make up for lost time. Perhaps this can restore some amount of his missing humanity.
If it does, it's not going to be through long, revealing conversations; this is, after all, a Kim Ki-duk movie, and that is really not his thing. Kim likes his stubborn silences, and there's plenty of those here, with Mi-seon abjectly refusing to explain the reasons for her absence and return, or what she has been doing in between. Kang-do isn't nearly so laconic as Kim's usual male lead, although he certainly does know that relatively few words are a nice way of demonstrating control and domination - watch how much more he runs his mouth when revisiting people in a panic compared to his cool initial visits. It's a well-known trick by now - keeping a character silent often makes another spill more than he or she might otherwise, and it forces the audience to examine what they see on-screen much more closely than usual.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
White Reindeer
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
It would be kind of amusing if, in the future, White Reindeer winds up dropped into the Christmas rotation of independent-minded theaters, television stations, and online-streaming-lists as an apparent poison pill. Not that there aren't already plenty of those, but this one's a bit different: It's neither gleeful in mocking the holiday nor secretly trying to convince the audience of its true meaning.
Suzanne Barrington (Anna Margaret Hollyman) loves Christmas; just as soon as Thanksgiving has passed, the realtor is trying to create that sort of homey environment. She sells one house to Patti & George (Lydia Hyslop, Joe Swanberg) , assuring them that she lives in the neighborhood and the worries about recent break-ins are overblown. But on the first of December, her own husband Jeff (Nathan Williams) is killed during a home invasion, and to make things worse, she soon learns that he had an affair with Fantasia (Laura Lemar-Goldsborough), a twenty-two year-old stripper. It's going to be a rough holiday season.
White Reindeer isn't a yelling movie, nor is it one where the poor widow spends every moment visibly brittle and on the edge of breaking down. Indeed, the angle often played here is that sometimes losing a person you love is not constant outward torture, which can make a person feel even more horrible. So, instead, there's a great deal of quiet loneliness, online binge-shopping to try and bring oneself a little happiness, and befriending her husband's mistress because she'd understand, right? Even when this sort of thing leads to weird misadventures, it's fairly low-key.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Cheap Thrills
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Given the fairly impressive cast, decent behind-the-scenes talent, and loudly proclaimed praise for Cheap Thrills coming out of its festival appearances, I expected more from the movie. What I got was an acceptable gross-out movie with a nugget or two of commentary somewhere in its body, but overall it feels kind of hollow and familiar. It's got its moments, but it's not much more than passably entertaining.
Craig (Pat Healy) is still a writer in that he has a blog he posts to regularly, but these days he works as a mechanic - at least, until he gets laid off on the day he was going to ask for a much-needed raise. Drowning his sorrows in a bar afterward, he runs into old high-school buddy Vince (Ethan Embry), who runs in some shady circles these days. They wind up sharing a very expensive bottle of tequila with Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Sara Paxton), a wealthy couple slumming it for Violet's birthday. At some point, the "$20 if you..." dares start, naturally escalating in both price and outlandishness.
That's not quite all there is to the story, but it's pretty close. The plot takes a turn when the group wind up at Colin's & Violet's house, but it winds up being less of an interesting twist than an acknowledgment that the characters will almost certainly have a certain idea, so the script therefore must detour through it before returning to the main path. Before and after that, the movie basically comes down to details, with stunts that go from tacky to gross to mean in a pretty straight line as the film goes on. Maybe, somewhere, writers Trent Haaga and David Chirchirillo have something to say about the rich exploiting the poor for their own amusement and the poor going along with it because they think they can get rich too, but that's not exactly cutting, original insight presented in a new way.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Samurai Cop
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I'll readily admit, I don't have enough memory of this a week and a half later to give it a full review. That may argue that it's just mediocre rather than actually terrible, or just that it was pretty late and I occasionally napped.
At any rate, Samurai Cop is pretty awful, with terrible actors speaking terrible lines in a terrible story and production values that are really rather sub-par. It's the sort of all-around ineptitude that makes Robert Z'Dar, in the role of the film's villain, somehow look worse because even though he's not nearly as bad as the rest of the cast, his moderation seems out of place. Though director Amir Shervan is credited with the screenplay, that's probably because the WGA will not allow the Scriptotron Mark III to be credited.
But, hey, you've seen worse. Shervan and company know that they're making a terrible movie, so they do the only thing they can: Turn up the volume. The action isn't exactly great, but it's bloody as hell. There's plenty of nudity and sex as well, and the filmmakers are equal opportunity where the pandering is concerned, letting buff star Matt Hannon play a chunk of the movie in little but a tight speedo and somewhat awe-inspiring mullet. I kind of love Dale Cummings as the screaming captain, especially when he just goes "screw it, kill all the yakuza you can!" toward the end. Mark Frazer is the kind of trying-too-hard-to-be-cool that is hilarious a quarter-century later.
That may be the way to go with this sort of mess - don't even try to make it a commercial success when you first make it, but rather stick it in a vault and allow it to accumulate camp value for a couple decades.
Sunday, April 07, 2013
Boston Underground Film Festival Day 03: See You Next Tuesday, Jug Face, and The Rambler
So, when we last left BUFF, I had worked from home so that I could see the first film on the program and not particularly enjoyed it. You can only do that so many times during the work week, though, so the second day I opted to skip the shorts program at 5:45 and maybe get a little to eat before hitting the 7:30pm show.
BUFF sets its programming unusually tightly - the schedule often only allows for fifteen minutes between the end of one movie and another, so when you factor in Q&A, it's not unusual for things to run over, which means that See You Next Tuesday starting at 8pm was unusually late, but not impossibly so.
Still, sometimes the way it's handled can tick you off. That's Drew Tobia, director of See You Next Tuesday in the middle of the photo above (star Eleanore Pienta is on the right, and I only know the name of Melodie Sisk on the immediate right of Tobia because she was introduced for another movie), and he apparently spent about twenty minutes trying to get the presentation of his movie just right while the audience was standing out in the cold, and didn't seem terribly apologetic about that or how doing so might have a domino effect on the other movies on the schedule. Maybe I"m wrong about that, but between how he yelled out that his movie's title was a play on "cunt" after festival director Kevin Monahan commented on his previous short film's vulgar names... Well, for all the times when it's great to hear people talk with enthusiasm about their movies, sometimes a guy just rubs one the wrong way, and he did for me this time. Probably more me than him, but it didn't help that I was not very fond of his movie, either.
I wasn't able to get nearly as good a picture of the Jug Face crew, unfortunately. That's producer Andrew Van Den Houten, director Chad Crawford Kinkle, and Kevin Monahan hosting the Q&A. They didn't wind up with nearly so much time as the See You Next Tuesday folks, but also didn't have quite so much to get through - they talked about how the face jugs were a real thing in the south and part of the inspiration, but most of the other mythology was invented from whole cloth. There's not really a whole lot to discuss with this movie, as it doesn't go the ambiguous route and is pretty well-done but still kind of rough. I liked it, but as I saw in the review, might have liked it more if there was nothing supernatural about it.
See You Next Tuesday
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
There's a guy on a mailing list I subscribe to who tends to judge movies in large part based on how much he agrees with how the characters act. I suspect most of us do so a little more than we'd like, and See You Next Tuesday certainly had me doing it: I hated watching this movie a little more every time a character did something stupid and self-destructive, which means that by the end I'd worked up some good anger. On reflection, some of that reflects a well-executed presentation of imperfect characters, although I don't know if that gets me from disliking this movie to actual positive feelings.
The movie is mostly the story of Mona (Eleanore Pienta), who is fairly upbeat despite reasons not to be: Most of the other employees at the neighborhood market where she works pick on her, she's in her third trimester but the father of the baby is so absent as to not be worth mentioning, and her best friend is her mother May (Dana Eskelson), a recovering alcoholic who leans on Mona for support and hasn't spoken to her other daughter Jordan (Molly Plunk) in a few years. She seems to be doing okay, considering all that, but she's actually just a couple steps away from falling to pieces.
Even if the movie can be frustrating in a number of other ways, it's at least got an impressive turn by Eleanore Pienta at its center. Mona enters the screen fully formed, working-class but not showing that via the usual ignorance or combative nature, instead tending toward a sort of worn persevering nature. She's pretty easy to like rather than judge, and as the movie goes on and Mona goes into a downward spiral, Pienta does a fine job of conveying the character's desperation to keep from falling down completely. It's easy enough to remember why one liked her in the beginning when she's being somewhat alienating toward the end, and not everyone can manage that.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Jug Face
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Jug Face is the sort of horror movie that I often have trouble with, where any hint of supernatural activity actually seems somewhat deflating, as there's plenty of real-world unpleasantness at work. It's done well enough to overcome that much of the time, in part because its mythology is at least original.
There is, it says, a community out in the Tennessee backwoods whose residents worship at a pit of what looks like blood - which, of course, demands regular sacrifices. That's where Ada (Lauren Ashley Carte) has grown up, but now she's in trouble, betrothed to an unexciting neighbor by her parents (Larry Fessenden & Sean Young) but quite possibly pregnant from her brother Jessaby (Daniel Manche). That blind artisan Dawai (Sean Bridgers) has made a jug with her likeness, generally taken as a sign of who should be fed to the pit next.
So which is scarier - a pit that contains a demonic presence which will kill whoever is nearest when not given its tribute, or a reasonably intelligent young woman surrounded by people who think that a hole in the ground demands human sacrifices? There's not necessarily a right or wrong answer to this question, but it is kind of tricky to make both work at once, as the one tends to lessen the impact of the other more often than it reinforces the pair. That's less of the case here than usual, as writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle builds the earthly situation steadily before adding the paranormal elements to it in a similar slow burn, introducing new bits without often stopping to explain, so that the situation with the pit often feels part and parcel with the isolation as opposed to two different things going on.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
The Rambler
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Much of the time, a movie that was expanded from a short will feel bloated and kind of boring, as though the striking idea behind the original work has been watered down and made bigger without gaining more detail (last year's BUFF selection Excision struck me that way). For The Rambler, that may be a plus - could a twelve-minute film really capture the vastness and leisurely pace of the title characters rambling the way that this movie does?
The rambler of the title (Dermot Mulroney) is a quiet man with a way with horses who has just been released from prison to an obnoxious wife (Natasha Lyonne) and a miserable job in a pawn shop. Fortunately, there is another option - a job on his brother's horse farm in the northwest. Not starting out with much, if any, cash, he opts to walk and hitchhike, encountering a girl (Lindsay Pulsipher) and an inventor who claims he can record dreams (James Cady) among others. The further he gets down the road, the more surreal his adventures become.
At times, things become downright fantastical. Things don't get quite strange enough for the genre to take a full right turn into sci-fi, horror, or the like, but it's enough to push our conception of what writer/director Calvin Reeder is getting at. We're never really told what this man was in prison for, but there are enough hints through repeated encounters of various natures to work the basics out, although that's not those scenes' only purpose; even as they're only vaguely implying what happened, they're also saying that it's something he can't escape in his mind. The very strangeness of some events suggests that after four years behind bars, he doesn't fit in the world - or at least, doesn't think he does.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
BUFF sets its programming unusually tightly - the schedule often only allows for fifteen minutes between the end of one movie and another, so when you factor in Q&A, it's not unusual for things to run over, which means that See You Next Tuesday starting at 8pm was unusually late, but not impossibly so.
Still, sometimes the way it's handled can tick you off. That's Drew Tobia, director of See You Next Tuesday in the middle of the photo above (star Eleanore Pienta is on the right, and I only know the name of Melodie Sisk on the immediate right of Tobia because she was introduced for another movie), and he apparently spent about twenty minutes trying to get the presentation of his movie just right while the audience was standing out in the cold, and didn't seem terribly apologetic about that or how doing so might have a domino effect on the other movies on the schedule. Maybe I"m wrong about that, but between how he yelled out that his movie's title was a play on "cunt" after festival director Kevin Monahan commented on his previous short film's vulgar names... Well, for all the times when it's great to hear people talk with enthusiasm about their movies, sometimes a guy just rubs one the wrong way, and he did for me this time. Probably more me than him, but it didn't help that I was not very fond of his movie, either.
I wasn't able to get nearly as good a picture of the Jug Face crew, unfortunately. That's producer Andrew Van Den Houten, director Chad Crawford Kinkle, and Kevin Monahan hosting the Q&A. They didn't wind up with nearly so much time as the See You Next Tuesday folks, but also didn't have quite so much to get through - they talked about how the face jugs were a real thing in the south and part of the inspiration, but most of the other mythology was invented from whole cloth. There's not really a whole lot to discuss with this movie, as it doesn't go the ambiguous route and is pretty well-done but still kind of rough. I liked it, but as I saw in the review, might have liked it more if there was nothing supernatural about it.
See You Next Tuesday
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
There's a guy on a mailing list I subscribe to who tends to judge movies in large part based on how much he agrees with how the characters act. I suspect most of us do so a little more than we'd like, and See You Next Tuesday certainly had me doing it: I hated watching this movie a little more every time a character did something stupid and self-destructive, which means that by the end I'd worked up some good anger. On reflection, some of that reflects a well-executed presentation of imperfect characters, although I don't know if that gets me from disliking this movie to actual positive feelings.
The movie is mostly the story of Mona (Eleanore Pienta), who is fairly upbeat despite reasons not to be: Most of the other employees at the neighborhood market where she works pick on her, she's in her third trimester but the father of the baby is so absent as to not be worth mentioning, and her best friend is her mother May (Dana Eskelson), a recovering alcoholic who leans on Mona for support and hasn't spoken to her other daughter Jordan (Molly Plunk) in a few years. She seems to be doing okay, considering all that, but she's actually just a couple steps away from falling to pieces.
Even if the movie can be frustrating in a number of other ways, it's at least got an impressive turn by Eleanore Pienta at its center. Mona enters the screen fully formed, working-class but not showing that via the usual ignorance or combative nature, instead tending toward a sort of worn persevering nature. She's pretty easy to like rather than judge, and as the movie goes on and Mona goes into a downward spiral, Pienta does a fine job of conveying the character's desperation to keep from falling down completely. It's easy enough to remember why one liked her in the beginning when she's being somewhat alienating toward the end, and not everyone can manage that.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Jug Face
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Jug Face is the sort of horror movie that I often have trouble with, where any hint of supernatural activity actually seems somewhat deflating, as there's plenty of real-world unpleasantness at work. It's done well enough to overcome that much of the time, in part because its mythology is at least original.
There is, it says, a community out in the Tennessee backwoods whose residents worship at a pit of what looks like blood - which, of course, demands regular sacrifices. That's where Ada (Lauren Ashley Carte) has grown up, but now she's in trouble, betrothed to an unexciting neighbor by her parents (Larry Fessenden & Sean Young) but quite possibly pregnant from her brother Jessaby (Daniel Manche). That blind artisan Dawai (Sean Bridgers) has made a jug with her likeness, generally taken as a sign of who should be fed to the pit next.
So which is scarier - a pit that contains a demonic presence which will kill whoever is nearest when not given its tribute, or a reasonably intelligent young woman surrounded by people who think that a hole in the ground demands human sacrifices? There's not necessarily a right or wrong answer to this question, but it is kind of tricky to make both work at once, as the one tends to lessen the impact of the other more often than it reinforces the pair. That's less of the case here than usual, as writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle builds the earthly situation steadily before adding the paranormal elements to it in a similar slow burn, introducing new bits without often stopping to explain, so that the situation with the pit often feels part and parcel with the isolation as opposed to two different things going on.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
The Rambler
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
Much of the time, a movie that was expanded from a short will feel bloated and kind of boring, as though the striking idea behind the original work has been watered down and made bigger without gaining more detail (last year's BUFF selection Excision struck me that way). For The Rambler, that may be a plus - could a twelve-minute film really capture the vastness and leisurely pace of the title characters rambling the way that this movie does?
The rambler of the title (Dermot Mulroney) is a quiet man with a way with horses who has just been released from prison to an obnoxious wife (Natasha Lyonne) and a miserable job in a pawn shop. Fortunately, there is another option - a job on his brother's horse farm in the northwest. Not starting out with much, if any, cash, he opts to walk and hitchhike, encountering a girl (Lindsay Pulsipher) and an inventor who claims he can record dreams (James Cady) among others. The further he gets down the road, the more surreal his adventures become.
At times, things become downright fantastical. Things don't get quite strange enough for the genre to take a full right turn into sci-fi, horror, or the like, but it's enough to push our conception of what writer/director Calvin Reeder is getting at. We're never really told what this man was in prison for, but there are enough hints through repeated encounters of various natures to work the basics out, although that's not those scenes' only purpose; even as they're only vaguely implying what happened, they're also saying that it's something he can't escape in his mind. The very strangeness of some events suggests that after four years behind bars, he doesn't fit in the world - or at least, doesn't think he does.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 5 April - 11 April 2013
Aw, crap. Roger Ebert just died. Go see some great movies and talk about why you loved them with your friends. Or at least fun ones.
My plans? Schlocking around the clock, Evil Dead (maybe even hitting up a midnight!), From Up on Poppy Hill, and some other catch-up, plus my first Red Sox game of the year.
- There does seem to be some potential fun at the multiplexes, with the new Evil Dead (no "The", no Ash) opening on a bunch of screens and promising a gory, legitimately frightening, no-CGI take on Sam Raimi's 1981 horror classic. It's interesting how, though the previews sort of look like all the other recent remakes, they've pushed intensity over the brand while still having Bruce Campbell and company up front saying that it's okay to like this if you liked the original. It plays Somerville, Boston Common, and Fenway (including the RPX screen).
Not quite going back quite so far is a re-release of Jurassic Park in 3D, hopefully done nice. It's at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, Fenway (including one 2D matinee daily), the Imax-branded screen at Boston Common, Jordan's Furniture, and Fresh Pond. Boston Common also picks up Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, Shola Lynch's documentary on college professor Angela Davis, a social activist whose membership in the Black Panthers and Communist Party found her linked to a kidnapping attempt and on the FBI's Most Wanted list in the 1970s. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre (along with Boston Common and Kendall Square), meanwhile, gets The Place Beyond the Pines, featuring Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper on opposite sides of the law whose confrontation will apparently have lasting effects, with their kids picking things up a generation later. Note that Tuesday's 6:30pm screening is an "Off the Couch" screening, with members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society hosting and leading discussion afterward.
There are three midnight movies this weekend, with Natural Born Killers being the Road Trip movie (a theme for their April selections) in the main theater, Tattoo Nation playing upstairs (and also at The Regent Theatre Friday night), and Trash Humpers in the screening room for those who want more Harmony Korine after Spring Breakers (what's wrong with you?). Sunday morning, there's a Talk Cinema screening of Renoir, where the same woman inspires both the famed Impressionist painter and his future-film director son. Monday night's BIg Screen Classic is Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, a truly great one. - Kendall Square, as mentioned, also gets The Place Beyond the Pines on two screens, as well as three other movies, including a couple from noteworthy filmmakers. Hayao Miyazaki, admittedly, primarily writes From Up On Poppy Hill for son Goro to direct; it's a nostalgic look back at kids trying to save their school's clubhouse in the early 1960s. Looks like decent Ghibli stuff, although I have to wonder - if the theater is all digital now, why isn't the 9:20pm screening in Japanese rather than what sounds like a pretty lifeless dub in the previews.
Cristian Mungiu, of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days fame, is the one doing Beyond the Hills, in which a pair of friends who grew up together find themselves heading in different directions - one to the city, another to the convent. And the scheduled one-week booking is Gimme the Loot, a SXSW award-winner about taggers looking to do an amazing caper in the period of a couple days. - The Brattle has a quite varied week on hand. The weekend features this year's Schlock Around the Clock, which starts with a double feature of restored prints of Carnival of Souls & Spider Baby (Friday night/Saturday afternoon); Saturday single screenings of the Wonder Woman TV pilot, Phantasm 2, and Drafthouse's Trailer War; a Sunday matinee of The Giant Claw & Earth vs the Flying Saucers; and finally singles of two British icons - the color, 35mm version of Doctor Who and the Daleks with Peter Cushing and the recent excellent Dredd.
Monday's DocYard screening is Ricky on Leacock, which features both a documentary on influential non-fiction filmmaker Ricky Leacock and a 1994 short film ("A Hole in the Sea") that he directed. The feature's director, Jane Weiner, will be on-hand to discuss. Tuesday evening is a special 10th anniversery double-feature from The 48 Hour Film Project, with family-friendly movies made in two days at 7pm and more grown-up stuff at 9:15. And on Wednesday and Thursday, they get a jump on April Vacation with the start of Muppet Madness - a sing-along screening of The Muppet Movie on Wednesday and a double feature of The Dark Crystal & Labyrinth on Thursday. - The Harvard Film Archive has the second half of their Art Theatre Guild retrospective, with Funeral Parade of Roses (Friday 7pm), Dear Summer Sister (Friday 9:30pm), Silence Has No Wings (Saturday 7pm), The Human Bullet (Saturday 9:15pm), Lost Lovers (Sunday 7pm), and Human (Monday 7pm). VES will be screening In the Mood for Love on Tuesday and Thursday at 7pm, free for the public.
- The MFA's film program wraps up the 12 Annual Turkish Film Festival over the weekend, with screenings of Beyond the Hill, Mahmut & Meryem, Voice of My Father, and Strangers in the House. There are also more screenings of Chinese citizen-journalist documentary High Tech, Low Life (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday), as well as the start of two new series: Roman Polanski's Carnage is the first of four "Hollywood Scriptures" on Wednesday, which also sees the start of The National Center for Jewish FIlm's Jewishfilm.2013, with Numbered and Hannah Arendt on Wednesday and My German Friend on Thursday.
- ArtsEmerson's film program is sort of a hodgepodge (all on DVD or Blu-ray) this week: Thelma & Louise with a post-screening conversation with Polly Carl on "The End of Feminism" after the Friday evening show (and another show on Saturday night). Chilean film Machucha Friday night, matinees of Moonrise Kingdom on Saturday & Sunday afternoons, and The Battle of Algiers on Saturday evening. The Bright Lights series includes a lecture from Disney executive Kevin Campbell on Tuesday and Far from Afghanistan with two of its directors (john Gianvito and Robb Todd) in person on Thursday.
- iMovieCafe's screen at Fresh Pond looks to be subtitle-free with again, with Telugu action comedy Baadshah and Tamil/Telugu caper flick Settai.
My plans? Schlocking around the clock, Evil Dead (maybe even hitting up a midnight!), From Up on Poppy Hill, and some other catch-up, plus my first Red Sox game of the year.
Starbuck
A quick detour from BUFF reviews, since it leaves the Boston area after Thursday, which is a bummer; it's a fun little movie that I wish I could have let people in on sooner.
Theoretically, I could have let people in on it a lot sooner, as it was playing Montreal when I was there for Fantasia back in 2011. Funny thing; for all that I read about Quebec having its own film industry and set of stars, it appears to be a fairly compact one - the subway walls, buses, and other public signage usually only seems to be advertising one at a time. Maybe it's a function of when I'm there - middle of the summer, with all the big Hollywood movies sucking up screens. Anyway, I've yet to catch a local movie there that wasn't playing the festival - no time, so I haven't even bothered to check whether any of the version français films playing have English subtitles.
Of course, part of the reason this is a bit late is a bit of idiocy on my part - I saw this after work Monday, then did my grocery shopping, got back to the house... and realized that I'd left my keys on my desk. So, instead of sitting down and getting some stuff off the DVR while writing, I'm finding the nearest hotel and crashing. An expensive lesson in not forgetting your keys or having a second set, there, although likely less expensive than forcing the door and having to explain to my landlord why there needs to be some work done. Probably could have taken a cab back to the office and crashed on a couch there or something (or even retrieved my keys and returned). Ah, well.
On to the movie itself. Amusing. I used to hear a movie like this described as "remake-ready", in that it doesn't have a particularly non-Hollywood ending or a plot that is overly dependent on where it's set. And, sure enough, it is getting an American remake, later this year in fact, also directed by Ken Scott.
I used to grumble about this sort of English-language remake, but I suppose this one isn't so bad an idea - I don't think the mainstream audience is as anti-subtitle as it's often portrayed as being, but for something this light, I don't know if you'd want to put barriers or effort between the movie and its audience. I am kind of worried about the specifics, though for somewhat opposite reasons. Vince Vaughn will be playing the lead, and he tends to have a very different sort of persona than the character Patrick Huard plays in this movie. I don't know if Vaughn can play the sort of sweet guy Huard does. Which is potentially okay; given the various possibilities inherent in the premise, I wouldn't mind Delivery Man being a different thing from Starbuck. However, if you've got the same guy in charge, I'm not sure how much he's going to change the focus. It can happen, but if Starbuck was a success and Delivery Man shares the same writer/director, I don't know how motivated he'll be to change things.
(It doesn't help, I don't think, that I am sick of seeing the preview for The Internship. I was after the first time, honestly, and by now...)
Starbuck
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
No matter how bound and determined a viewer is to just sit back and enjoy Starbuck for the light comedy that it is, there are going to be moments when he or she can't help but think it's maybe being a little too cute. It's good at cute, though, so it's got a fair shot at entertaining its audience, unless someone is bound and determined to be cynical.
It starts with David Wozniak (Patrick Huard), an amiable fellow who drives the delivery truck for his family's Montreal butcher shop and tends to run late at that. He's kind of a bigger screw-up than that, though - he has $80,000 in debts and finds out his girlfriend Valerie (Julie LeBreton) is pregnant when she says that she doesn't think he's father material. It turns out she's way off on that, at least on one count: About twenty-odd years ago, he donated quite a bit to a sperm bank, and due to some bad practices there, he now has 533 biological children, roughly a third of which have filed suit to reveal his identity.
This is, if you'll pardon the pun, actually a pretty fertile idea. What does a guy who has never really accomplished much do when confronted with dozens-to-hundreds of examples of his potential, good or bad? What sense of responsibility does he have to each one or the group as a whole? And for all that the average person hearing about this situation may instinctively recoil, what does it mean for young adults who more than likely grew up only children in single-family households?
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Theoretically, I could have let people in on it a lot sooner, as it was playing Montreal when I was there for Fantasia back in 2011. Funny thing; for all that I read about Quebec having its own film industry and set of stars, it appears to be a fairly compact one - the subway walls, buses, and other public signage usually only seems to be advertising one at a time. Maybe it's a function of when I'm there - middle of the summer, with all the big Hollywood movies sucking up screens. Anyway, I've yet to catch a local movie there that wasn't playing the festival - no time, so I haven't even bothered to check whether any of the version français films playing have English subtitles.
Of course, part of the reason this is a bit late is a bit of idiocy on my part - I saw this after work Monday, then did my grocery shopping, got back to the house... and realized that I'd left my keys on my desk. So, instead of sitting down and getting some stuff off the DVR while writing, I'm finding the nearest hotel and crashing. An expensive lesson in not forgetting your keys or having a second set, there, although likely less expensive than forcing the door and having to explain to my landlord why there needs to be some work done. Probably could have taken a cab back to the office and crashed on a couch there or something (or even retrieved my keys and returned). Ah, well.
On to the movie itself. Amusing. I used to hear a movie like this described as "remake-ready", in that it doesn't have a particularly non-Hollywood ending or a plot that is overly dependent on where it's set. And, sure enough, it is getting an American remake, later this year in fact, also directed by Ken Scott.
I used to grumble about this sort of English-language remake, but I suppose this one isn't so bad an idea - I don't think the mainstream audience is as anti-subtitle as it's often portrayed as being, but for something this light, I don't know if you'd want to put barriers or effort between the movie and its audience. I am kind of worried about the specifics, though for somewhat opposite reasons. Vince Vaughn will be playing the lead, and he tends to have a very different sort of persona than the character Patrick Huard plays in this movie. I don't know if Vaughn can play the sort of sweet guy Huard does. Which is potentially okay; given the various possibilities inherent in the premise, I wouldn't mind Delivery Man being a different thing from Starbuck. However, if you've got the same guy in charge, I'm not sure how much he's going to change the focus. It can happen, but if Starbuck was a success and Delivery Man shares the same writer/director, I don't know how motivated he'll be to change things.
(It doesn't help, I don't think, that I am sick of seeing the preview for The Internship. I was after the first time, honestly, and by now...)
Starbuck
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
No matter how bound and determined a viewer is to just sit back and enjoy Starbuck for the light comedy that it is, there are going to be moments when he or she can't help but think it's maybe being a little too cute. It's good at cute, though, so it's got a fair shot at entertaining its audience, unless someone is bound and determined to be cynical.
It starts with David Wozniak (Patrick Huard), an amiable fellow who drives the delivery truck for his family's Montreal butcher shop and tends to run late at that. He's kind of a bigger screw-up than that, though - he has $80,000 in debts and finds out his girlfriend Valerie (Julie LeBreton) is pregnant when she says that she doesn't think he's father material. It turns out she's way off on that, at least on one count: About twenty-odd years ago, he donated quite a bit to a sperm bank, and due to some bad practices there, he now has 533 biological children, roughly a third of which have filed suit to reveal his identity.
This is, if you'll pardon the pun, actually a pretty fertile idea. What does a guy who has never really accomplished much do when confronted with dozens-to-hundreds of examples of his potential, good or bad? What sense of responsibility does he have to each one or the group as a whole? And for all that the average person hearing about this situation may instinctively recoil, what does it mean for young adults who more than likely grew up only children in single-family households?
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Boston Underground Film Festival Day 02: Blue Dream, A Band Called Death, and Guilty of Romance
I worked from home this Thursday, since Blue Dream was only playing at 5:30pm and as those who have read a few dozen comments about my commute to the suburban hellscape of Burlington, Massachusetts will guess, that sort of start time doesn't work. Of course, by about halfway through the movie, it was pretty clear why this picture with a number of recognizable names was playing an hour that a lot of people couldn't make: It's worth skipping.
It wasn't a complete waste of time, though, if only because it led me to think a bit about sex and nudity in movies, especially when paired with Guilty of Romance. Not to complain about it - I'm not necessarily going to do that anyway, but grumping about adults-only content at the Underground Film Festival is a good indication that you might be in the wrong place - just to observe how differently Gregory Hatanaka and Sion Sono use it, especially since variants of "nice breasts!" made it into both reviews.
It's much closer to mere exploitation in Blue Dream - in that movie, girls get naked to show how high the male character is riding - he's surrounded by girls offering up the goods and getting into the kind of kinky situations that only the privileged have access to. At one point, I thought that this might have been a way to show how Harmon is climbing the ladder without the movie ever showing that he's particularly good at either writing or playing office politics- the offhanded admission that he's someone's nephew comes late in the movie and doesn't seem to explain how he's kept going after that guy's gone, and since there are a lot of female editor characters in the movie, maybe he's screwing his way to the top - but he doesn't stand out in those scenes and his partners don't seem unusually impressed. Mostly, it seems like a way to show off the body of the porn star(s) they hired - and to be fair, I liked what I saw of Kayden Kross in both uses of the term - rather than something which helps tell the story.
Which is cool and fine; after all, when Megumi Kagurazaka gets naked for the first time in Guilty of Romance, the first reaction is "hey, where have those been hiding?" The thing is, Sion Sono then takes that reaction and runs with it beyond the obvious; as she poses and touches herself in front of the mirror, the idea that she's been hiding the sexual part of herself away comes through pretty clearly. The scene is helping to tell the story while being enjoyable in its own right. It made for a better movie, I think, and that scene stuck in my mind more than any similar scene from Blue Dream.
In some ways, it's not a fair comparison - Guilty of Romance is about sexuality, so you'd kind of expect its skin to have more meaning than that of Blue Dream, which didn't seem to be about much of anything to my eyes. Still, Sono's movie was twenty minutes longer and never left me bored, something I can't really say about Hatakana's, and a large part of that was a director using what appeared on screen and how to further his story and ideas rather than just putting them in to spice things up.
Well, that wound up giving A Band Called Death short shrift. It shouldn't, because it's a pretty darn fun rock-doc, even if it doesn't break down the music that much.
Blue Dream
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I spent a lot of my time watching Blue Dream feeling like I didn't know what was going on. That wasn't strictly the case - I could certainly recognize what was happening in a given scene and could see the bigger story that Gregory Hatanaka and his co-writer Tony Young were trying to tell, but the maze between these levels is just a pain to navigate and mostly not worth the effort.
The film opens in 1999, with Robert Harmon (James Duval) starting at a Los Angeles weekly newspaper edited by Ted Sellers (Richard Riehle), while at the same time George Weber (Sal Landi) is starting a blog. Harmon begins an affair with his editor Amanda (Pollyanna McIntosh), and while he's interested in crime - fascinated by a map kept by intern Gena (Dominique Swain) - he's eventually made film critic. When the paper is purchased by a wealthy family whose patriarch Lassie (Walter Koenig) and the sons he puts in charge know nothing about the business, he begins a relationship with daughter Tara (Kayden Kross). Between all of that, he's swept up in booze, drugs, sex, the usual.
At least, that's what seems to be going on. The movie feels like Hatanaka had a sort of vague idea about the decline of print, alter egos, serial killers, and corporate America but rather than build a story out of them, he decided to instead haphazardly connect them with a chemically-induced daze on the part of the protagonist and enough sex and violence to at least preserve the appearance of some sort of momentum. It's a frantic mess that is presented with just enough skill that the excuse that the seeming randomness is a reflection of Harmon's head can't be immediately discounted - it's the sort of chaos that tries to play as a deliberate rejection of order as opposed to sloppiness.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
A Band Called Death
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
You can say what you want about Detroit - that its main industry needs propping up, that its population is collapsing, that arson seems to be the most popular local activity - but you have to admit, hope does spring eternal: According to the movies, if you pick up a guitar and pour your very soul into making music, you might just be recognized thirty years or so down the line. Last year a documentary re-introduced Rodriguez; this time around, it's African-American proto-punk band Death.
The band formed in the early 1970s, the second group to include brothers Dannis (drums), Bobby (bass), and David (guitar) Hackney. Encouraged by their parents to have broad tastes in music, the boys were influenced just as much by groups like The Who and Alice Cooper as Motown. David, the oldest of the trio (eldest brother Earl didn't play in the band), was the driving force, and came up with the band's name as a spiritual signifier - and when he refused to change that name, a record deal became impossible. They got their master tapes back, put out a single with a mere 500-disc pressing. The brothers kept playing, even after a move to Burlington, Vermont, but went in very different directions from Death's punk-before-punk. And then...
It's the "and then..." part that makes this sort of documentary so much fun. Not that every development is positive - there's no getting around the fact that the interview footage is missing David, who died from lung cancer in 2000 and had moved back to Detroit well before then. But as long as there's something out there, and for all that earlier parts of the movie feature frustration and disappointment, the latter suggests that greatness will eventually make itself known. In the case of Death, it's not the international detective work of Searching for Sugar Man, but a network of record collectors and rock scholars still come into play, and the mechanics of the surviving Hackneys finding out are kind of delightful.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Koi no tsumi (Guilty of Romance)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital, international cut)
I'm not quite sure what the rationale is for cutting a half hour out of Guilty of Romance for non-Japanese audiences; Sion Sono's fans have proven quite willing to sit through a long movie over the past few years (Love Exposure was four hours long with no good place to put an intermission) and his movies are singular enough that they're not going to break through to the mainstream. The audience that comes for an erotic thriller or a gruesome murder mystery will get something impressive but also something stranger.
Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka) is the dutiful wife to best-selling author Yukio Kikuchi (Kanji Tsuda), who barely seems to regard her beyond noting that his slippers are turned around when he returns home. Bored, she takes a job at a supermarket, where Eri Doi (Chika Uchida) spots her and says she's model material. That escalates from lingerie shoots quickly, and a dalliance with Karou (Ryuju Kobayashi), a man she meets in the love-hotel distriict, leads her to Mitsuko Ozawa (Makoto Togashi), a university lecturer who moonlights as a prostitute. The question then becomes whose murder Detective Kazuko Yoshida (Miki Mizuno) is investigating, as the body parts the police found are of a woman in her late twenties or thirties, but don't include hands or a head.
Actually, it's not just those parts missing; a nasty autopsy scene confirms that this case has a heck of a sexual component even before we've met the initially-innocent Izumi. As much as those early scenes will certainly make an impression on the audience, the cop-show stuff isn't really that important in terms of having Yoshida solve a mystery or saying anything about crime and how likely it is that one can get away with it. It's a way for Sono to prepare the audience for when things get grotesque later on - he gets a sizable portion of the shock value out of the way early, so that the end of the film doesn't feel like an empty twist but the logical result of the themes he's playing with.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
It wasn't a complete waste of time, though, if only because it led me to think a bit about sex and nudity in movies, especially when paired with Guilty of Romance. Not to complain about it - I'm not necessarily going to do that anyway, but grumping about adults-only content at the Underground Film Festival is a good indication that you might be in the wrong place - just to observe how differently Gregory Hatanaka and Sion Sono use it, especially since variants of "nice breasts!" made it into both reviews.
It's much closer to mere exploitation in Blue Dream - in that movie, girls get naked to show how high the male character is riding - he's surrounded by girls offering up the goods and getting into the kind of kinky situations that only the privileged have access to. At one point, I thought that this might have been a way to show how Harmon is climbing the ladder without the movie ever showing that he's particularly good at either writing or playing office politics- the offhanded admission that he's someone's nephew comes late in the movie and doesn't seem to explain how he's kept going after that guy's gone, and since there are a lot of female editor characters in the movie, maybe he's screwing his way to the top - but he doesn't stand out in those scenes and his partners don't seem unusually impressed. Mostly, it seems like a way to show off the body of the porn star(s) they hired - and to be fair, I liked what I saw of Kayden Kross in both uses of the term - rather than something which helps tell the story.
Which is cool and fine; after all, when Megumi Kagurazaka gets naked for the first time in Guilty of Romance, the first reaction is "hey, where have those been hiding?" The thing is, Sion Sono then takes that reaction and runs with it beyond the obvious; as she poses and touches herself in front of the mirror, the idea that she's been hiding the sexual part of herself away comes through pretty clearly. The scene is helping to tell the story while being enjoyable in its own right. It made for a better movie, I think, and that scene stuck in my mind more than any similar scene from Blue Dream.
In some ways, it's not a fair comparison - Guilty of Romance is about sexuality, so you'd kind of expect its skin to have more meaning than that of Blue Dream, which didn't seem to be about much of anything to my eyes. Still, Sono's movie was twenty minutes longer and never left me bored, something I can't really say about Hatakana's, and a large part of that was a director using what appeared on screen and how to further his story and ideas rather than just putting them in to spice things up.
Well, that wound up giving A Band Called Death short shrift. It shouldn't, because it's a pretty darn fun rock-doc, even if it doesn't break down the music that much.
Blue Dream
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I spent a lot of my time watching Blue Dream feeling like I didn't know what was going on. That wasn't strictly the case - I could certainly recognize what was happening in a given scene and could see the bigger story that Gregory Hatanaka and his co-writer Tony Young were trying to tell, but the maze between these levels is just a pain to navigate and mostly not worth the effort.
The film opens in 1999, with Robert Harmon (James Duval) starting at a Los Angeles weekly newspaper edited by Ted Sellers (Richard Riehle), while at the same time George Weber (Sal Landi) is starting a blog. Harmon begins an affair with his editor Amanda (Pollyanna McIntosh), and while he's interested in crime - fascinated by a map kept by intern Gena (Dominique Swain) - he's eventually made film critic. When the paper is purchased by a wealthy family whose patriarch Lassie (Walter Koenig) and the sons he puts in charge know nothing about the business, he begins a relationship with daughter Tara (Kayden Kross). Between all of that, he's swept up in booze, drugs, sex, the usual.
At least, that's what seems to be going on. The movie feels like Hatanaka had a sort of vague idea about the decline of print, alter egos, serial killers, and corporate America but rather than build a story out of them, he decided to instead haphazardly connect them with a chemically-induced daze on the part of the protagonist and enough sex and violence to at least preserve the appearance of some sort of momentum. It's a frantic mess that is presented with just enough skill that the excuse that the seeming randomness is a reflection of Harmon's head can't be immediately discounted - it's the sort of chaos that tries to play as a deliberate rejection of order as opposed to sloppiness.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
A Band Called Death
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
You can say what you want about Detroit - that its main industry needs propping up, that its population is collapsing, that arson seems to be the most popular local activity - but you have to admit, hope does spring eternal: According to the movies, if you pick up a guitar and pour your very soul into making music, you might just be recognized thirty years or so down the line. Last year a documentary re-introduced Rodriguez; this time around, it's African-American proto-punk band Death.
The band formed in the early 1970s, the second group to include brothers Dannis (drums), Bobby (bass), and David (guitar) Hackney. Encouraged by their parents to have broad tastes in music, the boys were influenced just as much by groups like The Who and Alice Cooper as Motown. David, the oldest of the trio (eldest brother Earl didn't play in the band), was the driving force, and came up with the band's name as a spiritual signifier - and when he refused to change that name, a record deal became impossible. They got their master tapes back, put out a single with a mere 500-disc pressing. The brothers kept playing, even after a move to Burlington, Vermont, but went in very different directions from Death's punk-before-punk. And then...
It's the "and then..." part that makes this sort of documentary so much fun. Not that every development is positive - there's no getting around the fact that the interview footage is missing David, who died from lung cancer in 2000 and had moved back to Detroit well before then. But as long as there's something out there, and for all that earlier parts of the movie feature frustration and disappointment, the latter suggests that greatness will eventually make itself known. In the case of Death, it's not the international detective work of Searching for Sugar Man, but a network of record collectors and rock scholars still come into play, and the mechanics of the surviving Hackneys finding out are kind of delightful.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Koi no tsumi (Guilty of Romance)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital, international cut)
I'm not quite sure what the rationale is for cutting a half hour out of Guilty of Romance for non-Japanese audiences; Sion Sono's fans have proven quite willing to sit through a long movie over the past few years (Love Exposure was four hours long with no good place to put an intermission) and his movies are singular enough that they're not going to break through to the mainstream. The audience that comes for an erotic thriller or a gruesome murder mystery will get something impressive but also something stranger.
Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka) is the dutiful wife to best-selling author Yukio Kikuchi (Kanji Tsuda), who barely seems to regard her beyond noting that his slippers are turned around when he returns home. Bored, she takes a job at a supermarket, where Eri Doi (Chika Uchida) spots her and says she's model material. That escalates from lingerie shoots quickly, and a dalliance with Karou (Ryuju Kobayashi), a man she meets in the love-hotel distriict, leads her to Mitsuko Ozawa (Makoto Togashi), a university lecturer who moonlights as a prostitute. The question then becomes whose murder Detective Kazuko Yoshida (Miki Mizuno) is investigating, as the body parts the police found are of a woman in her late twenties or thirties, but don't include hands or a head.
Actually, it's not just those parts missing; a nasty autopsy scene confirms that this case has a heck of a sexual component even before we've met the initially-innocent Izumi. As much as those early scenes will certainly make an impression on the audience, the cop-show stuff isn't really that important in terms of having Yoshida solve a mystery or saying anything about crime and how likely it is that one can get away with it. It's a way for Sono to prepare the audience for when things get grotesque later on - he gets a sizable portion of the shock value out of the way early, so that the end of the film doesn't feel like an empty twist but the logical result of the themes he's playing with.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Friday, March 29, 2013
Boston Underground Film Festival Opening Night: I Declare War
There's a part of me that wonders if it's right and proper for BUFF to be the relatively well-oiled machine that it is - shouldn't it be like it was the first years I went, screening things in random rooms of college campuses and community centers as much as theaters with distribution seeming extremely unlikely? That's what "underground" sounds like, but the festival grew from that, and while it later contracted from its peak of seven days on two screens, it had built the sort of reputation and network that led to it continuing to get high-quality material.
They've also got running things pretty much down pat - as much as it was a three-line process to get into I Declare War (pick up pass, pick up ticket/t-shirt, enter theater) and the Brattle's lobby is not large (I'm kind of glad I bypassed snacks), it was pretty painless. I didn't take much time to look over the merch table in the back, though I may come away with a DVD/BD or two later in the weekend. I did wind up spending a lot of that time in line between people who thought Stoker was terrible and Spring Breakers was brilliant, which is a lot of just-plain-wrong to be assaulted with, but otherwise, no trouble at all!
Anyway, got to my seat, waited for things to start the standard fifteen minutes late, as that's just how some film festivals worked, watched the movie, and got some Q&A:
Left to right: I Declare War producer Patrick Cameron, co-director Robert Wilson, producer Lewin Webb; "Worlds We Created" director Nicholas Santos; and BUFF's Nicole McControversy and Bryan McKay.
Surprisingly non-horrible photography! It was a pretty decent Q&A, too, not really becoming the audience explaining the movie to the filmmakers until pretty late in the game. The movie itself is straightforward enough that, for all that it's thematically fairly rich, there's not a whole lot to talk question the filmmakers about. They had some interesting stories about shooting a movie with kids and guns, among other things. Perhaps the most interesting topic was Mackenzie Munroe's character Jess, the only girl in the film - she's a character they seemed to intend as sympathetic, and I think she is more than not. A lot of audiences seem to hate her, though, including a lot of women. I can sort of see why - she winds up playing a different game than the boys, and using feminine wiles in a game of war seems kind of like cheating. In some ways, I don't really see her as much different from the others, trying to figure out more adult emotions and still pretty charmingly naive in some ways, and I wonder how it would play if she hadn't seem to show some disgust at the suggestion she use her special girly powers on the other team before going out and doing it for her own ends. I also think that a lot of folks really hate girls who mess with a friendship pretty viscerally.
Santos's short ran just before I Declare War, and was a pretty on-the-nose companion piece to it, enough so that I think I'll hold off writing about it until a post-festival "short stuff" roundup. Pretty neat, though, and good enough that I wouldn't mind seeing it fleshed out a bit.
After the Q&A, I went across the street to pick up the week's comics; the festival options were The Manson Family and a party, with neither really being my thing. I suspect I would have done the same even if I had a press pass; my general commitment to seeing a festival through when they're letting you in for free doesn't necessarily apply to anniversary screenings of movies I wouldn't have seen ten years ago, and I did have to work the next day!
I Declare War
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I Declare War is a terrific little coming-of-age movie that's made all the better because there are no adults and no real crises in it; it's just kids evolving into something that's not quite the same as what they were. Well, not just that; the path is tremendously funny and imaginative, even if it may be a little eyebrow-raising for some who may have forgotten some of what being a kid was like.
These kids, for instance, play elaborate games of war in the woods during their free time. The rules are simple: Two generals choose teams, and then each secretly chooses a base in which to defend their flag. Get "shot" with a toy gun, and you're down for a toy count; get hit with a paint balloon grenade, and you're out, go home. P.K. (Gage Munroe) is the undisputed champion, having never lost a war; his team includes his best friend Kwon (Siam Yu), loudmouth Joker (Spencer Howes), altar boy Wesley (Andy Reid), and silent ninja Caleb (Kolton Stewart)... Plus Caleb's dog Shadow. The other side is led by Quinn (Aidan Gouveia) and includes hothead Skinner (Michael Friend), grumpy Sikorski (Dyson Fyke), his motor-mouthed buddy Frost (Alex Cardillo), and Jess (Mackenzie Munroe), the first girl to play, and that's in part because of the crush she's got on Quinn. Today, though, the game is going to change, when Skinner takes Kwon prisoner and stages a coup against his own general.
An adult watching these kids play in real life is probably just going to see what's happening on the surface, not quite understanding how to a kid, these games are deadly serious and able to take on a whole heightened reality in their imagination. So directors Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson will sometimes show them holding real weapons instead of toys, with squibs going off around them and the sounds of combat mixed into the soundtrack. It's a kid's idea of war, and that comes through - scenes of the kids shooting at each other, no matter how augmented, don't seem nearly as violent as when they throw rocks or kick each other.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
They've also got running things pretty much down pat - as much as it was a three-line process to get into I Declare War (pick up pass, pick up ticket/t-shirt, enter theater) and the Brattle's lobby is not large (I'm kind of glad I bypassed snacks), it was pretty painless. I didn't take much time to look over the merch table in the back, though I may come away with a DVD/BD or two later in the weekend. I did wind up spending a lot of that time in line between people who thought Stoker was terrible and Spring Breakers was brilliant, which is a lot of just-plain-wrong to be assaulted with, but otherwise, no trouble at all!
Anyway, got to my seat, waited for things to start the standard fifteen minutes late, as that's just how some film festivals worked, watched the movie, and got some Q&A:
Left to right: I Declare War producer Patrick Cameron, co-director Robert Wilson, producer Lewin Webb; "Worlds We Created" director Nicholas Santos; and BUFF's Nicole McControversy and Bryan McKay.
Surprisingly non-horrible photography! It was a pretty decent Q&A, too, not really becoming the audience explaining the movie to the filmmakers until pretty late in the game. The movie itself is straightforward enough that, for all that it's thematically fairly rich, there's not a whole lot to talk question the filmmakers about. They had some interesting stories about shooting a movie with kids and guns, among other things. Perhaps the most interesting topic was Mackenzie Munroe's character Jess, the only girl in the film - she's a character they seemed to intend as sympathetic, and I think she is more than not. A lot of audiences seem to hate her, though, including a lot of women. I can sort of see why - she winds up playing a different game than the boys, and using feminine wiles in a game of war seems kind of like cheating. In some ways, I don't really see her as much different from the others, trying to figure out more adult emotions and still pretty charmingly naive in some ways, and I wonder how it would play if she hadn't seem to show some disgust at the suggestion she use her special girly powers on the other team before going out and doing it for her own ends. I also think that a lot of folks really hate girls who mess with a friendship pretty viscerally.
Santos's short ran just before I Declare War, and was a pretty on-the-nose companion piece to it, enough so that I think I'll hold off writing about it until a post-festival "short stuff" roundup. Pretty neat, though, and good enough that I wouldn't mind seeing it fleshed out a bit.
After the Q&A, I went across the street to pick up the week's comics; the festival options were The Manson Family and a party, with neither really being my thing. I suspect I would have done the same even if I had a press pass; my general commitment to seeing a festival through when they're letting you in for free doesn't necessarily apply to anniversary screenings of movies I wouldn't have seen ten years ago, and I did have to work the next day!
I Declare War
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)
I Declare War is a terrific little coming-of-age movie that's made all the better because there are no adults and no real crises in it; it's just kids evolving into something that's not quite the same as what they were. Well, not just that; the path is tremendously funny and imaginative, even if it may be a little eyebrow-raising for some who may have forgotten some of what being a kid was like.
These kids, for instance, play elaborate games of war in the woods during their free time. The rules are simple: Two generals choose teams, and then each secretly chooses a base in which to defend their flag. Get "shot" with a toy gun, and you're down for a toy count; get hit with a paint balloon grenade, and you're out, go home. P.K. (Gage Munroe) is the undisputed champion, having never lost a war; his team includes his best friend Kwon (Siam Yu), loudmouth Joker (Spencer Howes), altar boy Wesley (Andy Reid), and silent ninja Caleb (Kolton Stewart)... Plus Caleb's dog Shadow. The other side is led by Quinn (Aidan Gouveia) and includes hothead Skinner (Michael Friend), grumpy Sikorski (Dyson Fyke), his motor-mouthed buddy Frost (Alex Cardillo), and Jess (Mackenzie Munroe), the first girl to play, and that's in part because of the crush she's got on Quinn. Today, though, the game is going to change, when Skinner takes Kwon prisoner and stages a coup against his own general.
An adult watching these kids play in real life is probably just going to see what's happening on the surface, not quite understanding how to a kid, these games are deadly serious and able to take on a whole heightened reality in their imagination. So directors Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson will sometimes show them holding real weapons instead of toys, with squibs going off around them and the sounds of combat mixed into the soundtrack. It's a kid's idea of war, and that comes through - scenes of the kids shooting at each other, no matter how augmented, don't seem nearly as violent as when they throw rocks or kick each other.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 March - 4 April 2013
In case you missed it because this one's coming close on its heels, this week's This Week in Tickets. I'll probably skip it next week as I try and catch up with stuff from...
My plans? Living at the Brattle for BUFF and Thale, then maybe fitting something else in between. Or not, because BASEBALL.
- The Boston Underground Film Festival! It kicked off Wednesday night and continues through to Sunday, with plenty of nifty and/or messed up features and shorts, including new stuff from Sion Sono & Kim Ki-duk, plus the highly-touted Cheap Thrills and Big-Ass Spider! as the closing film. The only thing I've sort-of seen is Mondomanila, which knocked me out at Fantasia last year and isn't necessarily something I'll be revisiting..
It's all at the Brattle, which has programming in a farily similar vein later in the week. For instance, Monday night is a Balagan show, "An Evening with Sami van Ingen", in which the Finnish experimental filmmaker will introduce and discuss his work, with the films presented on 16mm and 35mm. The theater will be closed for a couple of days to recover, and then Thursday they have a one-night-only premiere screening of Thale, in which a pair of Norwegian crime scene cleaners discover a huldra - a beautiful nymph with a tail, and have to figure out where she came from. - If you're reading this within a couple hours of me posting it, you may still have a chance to see Where Heaven Meets Hell as part of the UMass Boston Film Series. It's a documentary about sulfur mining in Indonesia, and director Sasha Friedlander will be on-hand to answer questions after the free screening. If that's too-short notice (I'll be better about that in the future!), there's another screening next Thursday, China Heavyweight, with Yung Chang on-hand to discuss his documentary about teenagers in rural China learning western boxing. Also free!
- The multiplexes are doing a little bit of Thursday opening as well, with G.I. Joe: Retaliation finally showing up after a 3D conversion, including filming new scenes to take advantage of the third dimension, and supposedly bulking up Channing Tatum's role now that folks like him. It's apparently a different bunch of Joes from the original cast, with Ray Park, Lee Byung-hun, and Jonathan Pryce being the main returnees joined by Dwayne Johnson, Bruce Willis, and Adrianne Palicki. It plays the Capitol, Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond in both 2D and 3D, and gets the RPX and Imax-branded 3D screens at Fenway, Boston Common, and Jordan's Furniture through Wednesday (when Jurassic Park's 3D reissue shows up). Fenway also seems to have a screening of surfing movie A Deeper Shade of Blue tonight (28 March), presented by Hawaiian Airlines.
Also getting early shows tonight but considered to be opening tomorrow are The Host, in which a pretty good screenwriter/director (Andrew Niccol) and a great young actress (Saoirse Ronan) attempt to make a watchable movie out of anovel by Twilight author Stephanie Meyer. Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the books or seen any of the movies, including this one about the alien "souls" taking over human bodies. It also plays the Capitol, Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Tyler Perry' Temptation opens at Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond; it involves a marriage counselor who finds herself attracted to another man herself. There's also a single screening of Tattoo Nation at Boston Common next Thursday (4 April), tracing the tattoo's trasition from scandalous rebellion to commonplace (it also plays The Regent Theatre). - Huh, I could have seen two of the movies opening at Kendall Square elsewhere last year: Starbuck was running in its native Montreal last August, and features Patrick Huard as a man who donated a lot of sperm to fertility clinics in his youth, and now finds out he has 533 biological children. The Sapphires was in the UK last December; it's an Australian movie about a girl group made of aboriginal women that performed for troops during the Vietnam war. And the one-week booking goes to Reality, an Italian film by Gommorrah director Matteo Garrone which follow a guy who is apparently charming enough until he tries to parlay that charm into a spot on the local version of Big Brother
- The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up the fairly nice Ginger & Rosa, featuring Elle Fanning as a girl coming of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis; it (mostly) plays in the screening room, allowing On the Road to spend more time on the big screens. They've also got two midnight shows this Friday & Saturday: A 40th anniversary presentation of Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon on 35mm, as well as 10 Things I Hate About You for those looking for a likable-enough modernization of The Taming of the Shrew for the 1990s.
Oh, and remember the Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper lecture scheduled for last February? That's been rescheduled for Wednesday the 3rd, with original tickets honored (or refunds available) for this multimedia presenation. - No more King Hu at the Harvard Film Archive (although the canceled screening may be rescheduled later this spring), making me sad. Lovers of avant-garde cinema should be happy, though, as Nathaniel Dorsky comes to town for a couple of presentations of his silent short films: "The Illuminations of Nathaniel Dorsky" on Friday evening and "Imagnining the Ineffable" on Saturday afternoon, no latecomers admitted. Different guests arrive on Sunday evening, with Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki present their documentary People's Park, a single-shot look at what people do in a park in Chengdu, China. Monday night's guest is Nicolas Pereda, who will present Greatest Hits, a compilation of movies he made that share many of the same cast members.
Between those guests, the archive present an introduction to Art Theatre Guild, a radical group of Japanese filmmakers from the 1960s and 1970s. Death By Hanging plays Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon and The Man Who Left His Will on Film plays Saturday night; the program will resume next weekend. - The MFA's film program continues what was going on last week - The 12 Annual Turkish Film Festival has various screenings on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday; War Witch continues with single screenings tonight and on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. That last night, it hands the screen over to High Tech, Low Life, which follows two citizen journalists in China as they try to establish that as an idea. Director Stephan Maing will discuss after the Wednesday night showing.
- ArtsEmerson's film program features movies made in Latin America this weekend, with La Nana playing Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, Joven y Alocada Friday night, Neighboring Sounds Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and Plan B Saturday night. La Nana and Plan B are screened from DVDs, the others from Blu-rays. The theme continues into the Bright Lights screenings, with Tuesday's Mejures Women: We Built the City of Medellin a collection of seven short documentaries about women in that city with a post-screening conference with the filmmakers in Columbia. Thursday's screening will feature director Jae Williams presenting two short films, "Listen" and"Harmony".
- The ICA will be screening Suticase of Love and Shame on Thursday evening with Q&A by director Jane Gillooly on Saturday evening; it will also play IFFBoston later next month.
- iMovieCafe brings Tamil comedy Kedi Billa Killa Di Ranga to Fresh Pond on friday, splitting the screen with Telugu action movie Swamy RaRa. No English subtitles.
My plans? Living at the Brattle for BUFF and Thale, then maybe fitting something else in between. Or not, because BASEBALL.
This Week In Tickets: 18 March 2013 - 24 March 2013
Looking at how late this one is running, and how many movies I'll be seeing at BUFF before Sunday's done, I think it's pretty safe to say that TWIT will be doing a festival skip week next week. But, as you can see, this one's late-ish because of a busy moviegoing week:
Heh, Upside Down and Upstream Color on consecutive nights. I don't think I actually noticed that until putting the tickets side-by-side like that.
I'd hoped to keep the streak of peculiar movies going with The ABCs of Death on Wednesday, but the clock in the comic shop is off by ten minutes and for a 26-shorts-in-just-over-two-hours anthology like that, that means walking in for "C", and for all I know, "A" and "B" are the coolest parts. Anybody have an opinion on whether the Blu-ray is worth ordering sight unseen? I'm tempted, as there are a lot of people involved that I really like.
The weekend was all about the second weekend of the HFA's King Hu series, with everything else having to work around it. I must say, that was a genuinely fun binge - eight or nine hours of high-quality martial arts in one weekend, leading to me appreciating King Hu, Hsu Feng, and what almost amounted to a repertory cast. I wasn't expecting to see some of Sammo Hung's early work as a fight choreographer, either (although seeing his character get referred to as "the fat one" in A Touch of Zen made me sigh a bit; he wasn't that big yet).
I did wind up cutting it fairly close on both weekend evenings because it's a bit of a toss-up as to whether the subway or the bus gets one from Fenway to Harvard Square faster (it basically comes down to how soon long before the next 47 bus), so I wound up doing a bit of rushing after seeing The Croods on Saturday and Olympus Has Fallen on Sunday. Worth the rush on the "after" end both nights, but for "before", well...
Olympus Has Fallen
* * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2013 in Regal Fenway #8 (first-run, DCP)
I don't know that this is something I can really recommend; it is really just chock-full of stupid, starting from North Korea being able to get the amount of manpower necessary for this operation - that's a LOT of spies who have infiltrated the south or turned traitor there put in one group which just gets improbably bigger as the movie goes on. Then there's the "why are you letting it be known that someone's been rescued when you could make the terrorists waste resources by continuing to look for him?" thing, the terrible security on a system much more important than my email account, the way it pretty much photocopies a script of Die Hard but sucks a lot of the wit and personality out. It's a pretty dumb movie.
On the other hand, it knows what it is and embraces that. Not necessarily the "stupid" part, but it's the sort of action movie that wants to reach directly into a primal part of the audience's brain where killing your enemy feels good - there's a finality to it, a sense of solving a problem for good. It feels even better if their crimes are especially heinous, so if they can be some sort of foreign boogeyman, so much the better. Thus, lots of mayhem, national landmarks destroyed, and headshots. Lots and lots of headshots. It's the sort of movie where the audience cheers at a character fulfilling a promise to put a knife in a brain, and as much as it's fairly easy to step outside of oneself and say, hey, that's not good, it works on a gut level. Even most of the women in this movie get to be pretty badass - we expect it from Angela Bassett, of course, and Malana Lea mostly has to look the part as the North Korean hacker, but who here recognizes Melissa Leo not made up like poor white trash - while Robert Forster doesn't particularly impress as an actor but growls in exactly the way you'd expect the Army General in charge of the operation to. Gerald Butler maybe overdoes it a little, but there's Morgan Freeman to counter that.
So it's a movie awash with testosterone, but director Antoine Fuqua is just good enough at channeling it that it's hard to fault the filmmakers for giving the audience what they want, at least while you're watching it. Afterward, some of its attempts to be inspirational - national unity through violence and righteous anger! - are kind of disturbing, even if you were enjoying the headshots an hour earlier.
Heh, Upside Down and Upstream Color on consecutive nights. I don't think I actually noticed that until putting the tickets side-by-side like that.
I'd hoped to keep the streak of peculiar movies going with The ABCs of Death on Wednesday, but the clock in the comic shop is off by ten minutes and for a 26-shorts-in-just-over-two-hours anthology like that, that means walking in for "C", and for all I know, "A" and "B" are the coolest parts. Anybody have an opinion on whether the Blu-ray is worth ordering sight unseen? I'm tempted, as there are a lot of people involved that I really like.
The weekend was all about the second weekend of the HFA's King Hu series, with everything else having to work around it. I must say, that was a genuinely fun binge - eight or nine hours of high-quality martial arts in one weekend, leading to me appreciating King Hu, Hsu Feng, and what almost amounted to a repertory cast. I wasn't expecting to see some of Sammo Hung's early work as a fight choreographer, either (although seeing his character get referred to as "the fat one" in A Touch of Zen made me sigh a bit; he wasn't that big yet).
I did wind up cutting it fairly close on both weekend evenings because it's a bit of a toss-up as to whether the subway or the bus gets one from Fenway to Harvard Square faster (it basically comes down to how soon long before the next 47 bus), so I wound up doing a bit of rushing after seeing The Croods on Saturday and Olympus Has Fallen on Sunday. Worth the rush on the "after" end both nights, but for "before", well...
Olympus Has Fallen
* * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2013 in Regal Fenway #8 (first-run, DCP)
I don't know that this is something I can really recommend; it is really just chock-full of stupid, starting from North Korea being able to get the amount of manpower necessary for this operation - that's a LOT of spies who have infiltrated the south or turned traitor there put in one group which just gets improbably bigger as the movie goes on. Then there's the "why are you letting it be known that someone's been rescued when you could make the terrorists waste resources by continuing to look for him?" thing, the terrible security on a system much more important than my email account, the way it pretty much photocopies a script of Die Hard but sucks a lot of the wit and personality out. It's a pretty dumb movie.
On the other hand, it knows what it is and embraces that. Not necessarily the "stupid" part, but it's the sort of action movie that wants to reach directly into a primal part of the audience's brain where killing your enemy feels good - there's a finality to it, a sense of solving a problem for good. It feels even better if their crimes are especially heinous, so if they can be some sort of foreign boogeyman, so much the better. Thus, lots of mayhem, national landmarks destroyed, and headshots. Lots and lots of headshots. It's the sort of movie where the audience cheers at a character fulfilling a promise to put a knife in a brain, and as much as it's fairly easy to step outside of oneself and say, hey, that's not good, it works on a gut level. Even most of the women in this movie get to be pretty badass - we expect it from Angela Bassett, of course, and Malana Lea mostly has to look the part as the North Korean hacker, but who here recognizes Melissa Leo not made up like poor white trash - while Robert Forster doesn't particularly impress as an actor but growls in exactly the way you'd expect the Army General in charge of the operation to. Gerald Butler maybe overdoes it a little, but there's Morgan Freeman to counter that.
So it's a movie awash with testosterone, but director Antoine Fuqua is just good enough at channeling it that it's hard to fault the filmmakers for giving the audience what they want, at least while you're watching it. Afterward, some of its attempts to be inspirational - national unity through violence and righteous anger! - are kind of disturbing, even if you were enjoying the headshots an hour earlier.
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