Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 June - 20 June 2013

The big news this week: Showcase Cinemas opened a new "Showcase Superlux" near the Chestnut Hill T stop in Newton, which is operating under the theory that people will pay $20-28 for extremely comfortable (reserved) seats, a high-end menu, and table service in the more expensive levels. I won't be trying them out this weekend, but let me tell you - if the seats that include iPads for ordering food are down in front, somebody has screwed up.

• They're opening up with This Is the End and Man of Steel, which also grab screens at Somerville, Fenway, Boston Common, and Apple Cinemas. The former has a number of popular young comic actors (Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Danny McBride, and many more) playing themselves hanging out in Hollywood when the apocalypse hits; the latter is a new take on the Superman mythos with the writers and producers of the Dark Knight series overseeing things and Zack Snyder behind the camera.
  
  Man of Steel, as you might expect, is getting a lot of the top-tier screens in the area - the Jordan's Furniture stores, the RPX screen at Fenway, and the Imax-branded screen at Boston Common. Unusually, each of those getting 2D screenings as well as 3D, while the Somerville Theater has managed to land a 35mm print for their main screen (2D, obviously). Unusual, but producer Christopher Nolan's love for film and lack of interest in 3D is well known.
• In addition to Man of Steel, the Somerville Theatre's main screen hosts two special presentations this weekend. Saturday at midnight, they kick off the Cinema Slumber Party series with Errors of the Human Body, which I missed at Fantasia last year. It looks pretty nifty, a bit of sci-fi horror set and shot in Germany about a scientist whose dangerous work mirrors his collapsing personal life. I doubt they will let us take the "slumber party" part too literally, though, which means we'll have to leave and then come back for Sunday afternoon's "Silents, Please" presentation of The Kid at 1pm on Sunday afternoon. It screens in 35mm with live accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, so it should look and sound great. Note that I only think the slumber party is on screen #1; that's the time that fits, and they seem to be presenting it as something bigger than would fit in the micro-cinema.
  
  Meanwhile, their sister cinema (The Arlington Capitol) starts their own "Summer Rewind" series, which has 1980s classics at night and kid-friendly matinees. This week, that means Back to the Future at 10:30pm on Friday and Saturday and The Sandlot at 11am on Saturday and Sunday.
• The Coolidge has midnights every weekend, and this week it's a 35mm print of Fire in the Sky, an alien abduction story that I gather gets downright strange as it goes on. Since it's summer, their Big Screen Classics series is running (mostly) weekly, with the entry on Monday the 17th being Gimme Shelter, initially planned as just a Rolling Stones concert film only to capture the chaos that broke loose at their Altamont concert. It's also a 35mm print.
• If that's not enough of the Rolling Stones on film for you, the Brattle Theatre has more, with a quick "The Rolling Stones at 50: repatory series. Charlie Is my Darling - Ireland 1965 plays Tuesday, Rock & Roll Circus (with "Get Yer Ya Ya's Out") & Godard's Sympathy for the Devil play as a double feature on Wednesday, and Scorcese's Shine a Light runs on Thursday. Shine a Light is 35mm; the rest are digital.
  
  Before that, they will be showing Terrence Nance's debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty from Friday to Sunday, with Nance on-hand for a moderated Q&A to follow Saturday's 5:30pm and 7:30pm shows. It's a combination of live-action and various forms of animation set around the moment when a friendship may turn romantic. There will also be a guest on Monday, as director Angad Bhalla visits for the DocYard's screening of Herman's House, a picture that follows a collaboration between an artist and an inmate for a piece of conceptual art.
• Kendall Square also has guests for Dirty Wars, a documentary that recounts reporter Jeremy Scahill's attempts to learn what sort of off-books operations the Joint Special Operations Command is performing: Massachusetts ACLU representative Kade Ellis will be there Friday evening, while director Richard Rowley and co-writer David Riker be there for the 4:10, 7:20, and 9:50pm screenings on Saturday.
  
  Another documentary has the designated one-week booking, Pandora's Promise, whose previews have been making me scratch my head by talking about how it's claim that nuclear power could be a cornerstone of a green-energy future is controversial. I keep forgetting that a lot of folks don't see it that way. They also debut two thrillers about undercover agents: The East (which also opens at Boston Common) reunites Zal Batmanglij with Brit Marling, his co-writer and star from Sound of My Voice; this time she plays the undercover agent infiltrating the titular anticorporate group. In Shadow Dancer, Andrea Riseborough plays an Irish wife & mother blackmailed by an MI-5 agent (Clive Owen)to work as a mole. It's directed by James Marsh, who has done some fiction films but is best known for documentaries like Man on Wire.
• The Regent Theatre just has the one film this week, the Gathr preview screening of The Good Son, the story of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, a lightweight-division boxing champion in the early 1980s whose national adoration disappeared after a knocked-out contender never regained consciousness.
• The MFA's program continues as it was last week, with Post Tenebras Lux playing single shows Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday and the Global Lens Film Series wrapping up with China's Beijing Flickers (Friday), India's Shyamal Uncle Turns Off the Lights (Friday), Mexico's The Fantastic World of Juan Orol (Saturday), Egypt's Cairo 678 (Saturday & Sunday), and Iran's Modest Reception (Sunday & Wednesday).
  
  As those programs wrap up, they pick up a couple other movies for brief runs: The Iran Job follows an American basketball player who is brought in by an Iranian team and has a front-row seats to the protests around the recent Presidential Election; it starts Wednesday and continues through the next week. Sign Painters starts its run Thursday; it looks at the history and resurgence of traditional hand-painted signage in America.
• iMovieCafe brings something called Fukrey to Apple Cinemas, with four college friends getting into various forms of trouble. Not sure how that's pronounced, so I'm not sure quite how crazy a comedy it will turn out being. It's Hindi and subtitled; the other Indian films playing there this week are not.
• Belmont's Studio Cinema doesn't get any of the new releases, but they do pick up Iron Man 3 second-run. In other second-run shuffling, Now You See Me moves from the Somerville Theatre to the Arlington Capitol.

My plans? Living in Somerville for This Is the End, Man of Steel in 35mm, Errors of the Human Body, and The Kid; seeing The Good Son, and maybe trying to fit the likes of The East, Oversimplification, Shadow Dancer, and others in. Plus I still haven't seen Stories We Tell or Before Midnight yet.

More Than Honey

For some reason, the Gathr series moved from Tuesday to Monday this week. I half-suspect it was meant to be Monday in the first place (I believe the Providence venue was running on Mondays from the start), but the Regent had other things booked, but I can't remember any on their website. I kind of hope it moves back to Tuesday, honestly - too many other venues nearby have programs on Mondays, and, guys, I really don't want to choose between a sneak preview and Raiders of the Lost Ark on July 1st. If that's even a concern; the website currently doesn't show anything beyond June 24th.

But enough about the preview series; let's attack this movie. There's something I mostly kept out of the review but which colored how I viewed the film which merits acknowledgment:

BEES FREAK ME THE HELL OUT.

Now, the obvious reason for this probably comes from when I was a little kid; my grandfather kept bees for a while, and I stepped on one. I got stung, obviously, and this particular bee had evidently been infected with something, because my foot swelled up pretty good - enough more than usual to make an impression. I'm not allergic and it wasn't particularly dangerous or anything, but it was memorable.

Honestly, though, the takeaway from this story should be less "Jay is scared of bees" than "Jay's Grampa Gordon had a ton of interesting hobbies and skills". I am relatively cautious around the things, though, and I have to admit, when watching this movie, I was uncomfortable a lot. More uncomfortable than I feel during most horror movies, and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if nothing I see at Fantasia in Montreal has me on pins and needles the way this did. There was an element of "science is awesome!" to it, sure, and I wouldn't say I was scared...

Well, okay, I was pretty sure that varroa destructor would be nightmare fuel. It's bad enough that these mites are nasty little parasites who wedge themselves in between the segments of a bees body and both suck blood and spread bacteria. Then, as they're showing these things on-screen, which is creepy-looking enough, the narrator mentions that, at the human scale, these guys would be the size of rabbits. Which means, of course, that everyone in the audience is imagining rabbits biting into them and hanging on, draining their blood and making them sick.

Or maybe that was just me.

I kid, but it's hard not to watch some of this movie and not recognize that there's a little horror-movie stuff going on here. The opening "birth of the queen" scene truly does feel more alien than a lot of similar sequences from sci-fi/horror movies, and the type of work Dr. Menzel does stirs interesting reactions: On the one hand, I think we'd more readily recognize it as kind of horrific if it were done on vertebrates, but the capability to do some of it - tiny cameras, real-time brain activity monitoring - is really amazing.

Perhaps a little less tongue-in-cheek, there's plenty to be uneasy about, real-world-wise. The idea that humanity has so domesticated and twisted most bees to serve our needs that the species has become fragile - and in many cases dependent upon manufactured supplements - is deeply disturbing. If we, as a species, have so twisted the ecosystem in this way, it really does become incumbent upon us to at the very least maintain, if not repair, what we've made it. But are the biotech and agribusiness companies going to be inclined to do so, if there's not necessarily an obvious, immediate profit to be had? I'm skeptical, as it seems more likely that they would instead try to consolidate their influence, rather than treat the Africanized "killer" bees serve as evolution in action; the movie implies that's what's already happening.

As easy as it is to go to the big business guys, though, it's something the beekeepers have done steadily over decades. We think of genetic engineering as the bogeyman, but the eugenics that the beekeepers have practiced has done the same work, just as effectively. It's crudely done at times - as much as I'm squeamish with bees, I didn't much like watching keepers decapitating queens or putting down entire hives - but this is the way we've twisted the plant and animal kingdoms to our will for centuries, so it's not a new issue.

That I'm thinking about this stuff as well as the bees freaking me out thing means the movie did its job pretty well. I don't know how well it will play for folks who don't get really excited about science, but I do think that it presents that science better than a great many films of its type.

More Than Honey

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2013 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)

Many potential audience members will see a preview for Markus Imhoof's documentary More Than Honey and perhaps wonder if it has anything particularly new to tell them; we learn about bees and their symbiotic relationship with the local flora in elementary school science class and it's not that hard to grasp. As it turns out, the details can be surprising, and Imhoof presents them in a wonderfully vivid way.

We know the broad strokes - that, as Imhoof so quaintly puts it, the buzzing of a swarm of bees is the sound of trees having sex, with the bees carrying pollen from male plants to female ones as a by-product of gathering the trees' nectar. What the audience might not realize is quite how managed a process it is in the twenty-first century. As American migrant beekeeper John Miller tells the audience, having hives of bees in the right place to pollinate large groves of trees when they blossom can be big business, even if it does mean unnaturally transporting them around the country and giving them drugs to counteract the fungicides being sprayed as the bees try to do their work. We also meet Swiss beekeeper Fred Jaggi, whose family has also been doing this for generations and employs some crude eugenics to keep his swarm from being contaminated by the ones from the next valley; Liane & Heidrun Singer, Austrians who breed queen bees for a successful mail-order business; Zhang Zhao Su, who gathers, sells, and transports pollen in China where bees are rare; and scientists in both Europe and Australia who study the creatures.

But first, we watch a swarm of worker bees tend to a chamber containing a pupating "princess" just as it's about to hatch, and it's this sort of amazing close-up high-definition footage that may prove the most memorable for audiences. Imhoof gets us right inside the hives, giving a stunningly clear look at the insects' life cycle from egg-laying to mid-air mating, along with things like the little dance that scouts do to communicate the position of good food sources. It's all kind of beautiful, even if some it is unnerving enough to certain members of the audience that it could be dropped into a bee-related spinoff of Phase IV (go ahead, try to forget about the existence of verroa destructor, a parasitic mite that attaches itself to a bee and drains its blood). Even if seeing insects blown up to the size of a movie screen is nightmare fuel, it's undeniably fascinating and astonishing.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

This Week In Tickets: 3 June 2013 - 9 June 2013

I did not actually curtail my moviegoing at all to get things to fit on the page; it was just a nice weekend for sitting on the deck and reading, especially after a couple days of downpour. Good for grilling, too, although I messed it up by not opening the bottom vents on my charcoal grill. Surprisingly, that made a pretty good baked potato, but by the time I was ready to put the steak tips on, they were being done few favors.



Stubless: Kill Bill Volume 1, 9 June 2013, 10pm-ish, in the living room.

The theme of the week: Things that are only there for a blip, whether they be special screenings (William and the Windmill); previews for things that may or not play later (The Attack); the Quentin Tarantino repatory series (>Jackie Brown, Foxy Brown, and, sort of, Kill Bill); or stuff that leaves after Thursday because a one-week booking was either advertised or inevitable (The Prey and Wish You Were Here). Heck, it sort of felt like I was rushing to get to Mud because it was going to be moving to one of the smaller screens at the Coolidge the next day. The funny thing is, I'm getting the feeling like it's just now getting noticed across the country while it feels like it's been in Boston for quite a while. Nice little sleeper success.

Another funny story: I watched Kill Bill on Sunday night because I knew I was going to hit the back end of it's double feature at the Brattle on Monday but wouldn't be able to make the screening of the movie itself, plus I figured to see the second part on Tuesday. Well, I spent Tuesday night in with a headache, so there was no need for the urgency, other than it being a great movie.

Anyway, I figure to go back and do the QT stuff as its own post in a few days, once the series at the Brattle has finished, so you'll pardon me if those entries are a bit perfunctory.

Mud

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 June 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run, 35mm)

I hope there are a fair amount of kids still having summers full of freedom and adventure like the ones in Mud. Not adventure in the sense of getting into fights and nearly dying in a couple of different ways so much as being able to build things or get on the river and poke around with no particular aim, of course, although my motives are selfish: I don't really want to consider the sort of movies that folks who grew up with scheduled play dates that graduated to online gaming after being given their first iPhones at the age of five so that their parents could keep tabs on them will make.

The funny thing about Mud, though, is that as much as it venerates that sort of carefree youth, it is also chronicling its end: The state is cracking down on the sort of houseboats where Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his family live, letting the folks living that way now stay but demolishing them when they leave - and Ellis's mother (Sarah Paulson) wants to move to town. And when you get right down to it, everything Ellis does seems to be paralleling a story from the youth of Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a fugitive romantic hiding on an island, likely to drag Ellis and his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) down with him because Ellis sees his own family falling apart and wants to pull something together.

Maybe that's the point, not often made quite so explicitly in coming-of-age movies: What you do as a child is wonderful and important, but would be dangerous and destructive as an adult, so Ellis has to go to the town and learn how society works, have his heart broken, and the like, rather than staying the same, because that direction leads to being Mud.

At any rate, writer/director Jeff Nichols does it very nicely. He's got a fine cast, whether they be stars (McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon), great character actors (Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon, Paulson), or perfectly-cast kids (Sheridan & Lofland). He connects his setting to them, and is able to balance the surreal nature of a boat in a tree with the practical question of fixing it and getting it in the water without ever hurting the strange beauty of the idea. The story gets better the more the audience thinks of it, even if it does hit my pet peeve of a climax being someone tripping and falling down, but other than that, it's an impressive little movie.

Jackie Brown

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 June 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (QT Chronicles, 35mm)

Robert Forster had better send Quentin Tarantino a very nice Christmas present and card every year, because it's not difficult to imagine a parallel universe where he's got the dopey sidekick role and Robert De Niro is the co-star of the movie, rather than vice versa. It likely wouldn't have been as good - has De Niro ever been able to convey the sort of low-key, lived-in sincerity as Forster? - but you can easily see a studio wanting that, just looking at their star power at the time and the number of lines in the script for each.

Fortunately, it didn't go down that way (although I seem to recall that when it was still being called Rum Punch, Sylvester Stallone was attached to one of those roles; that might have been interesting). And it's kind of sad that Pam Grier didn't get the same sort of career boost Forster did - she's worked since then, sure, and maybe she's had better roles than I think because directors don't often think to cast someone like her in a role she can kill unless they're specifically making something for a black audience, which doesn't get in my face very often. It's sad because, for as much as this movie reminded people of how awesome the young blaxploitation star Pam Grier was, she was much more pin-up than actress then, which is not the case here. She's fantastic, an utter joy to watch as she brings Jackie from this low place to the point where the audience realizes that she is always the smartest person in the room - and gets some delight out of how she's discovering this.

Consider the film's opening scene, where she's standing still on an airport people-mover, then has to run to catch her flight. The credits run during that scene, so the audience really notices the odd rhythm of it, but still maybe doesn't quite make the connection to later in the movie, just before when everybody is trying to con each other, when Jackie is again walking right to left (unusual itself), but striding purposefully. She's the same woman, but her attitude has completely changed. It's a great example of the way Tarantino is playing this movie - laid-back, adopting Elmore Leonard's style in many ways, but with purpose. He gives himself enough time not to build Jackie, Max, Ordell, and company up as more than they are but to still make them individually interesting without giving them easy quirks.

Foxy Brown

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 June 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (QT Chronicles, 35mm)

Huh - given how this movie is the one people usually bring up when talking about how awesome early-seventies Pam Grier was, I figured it came before Coffy, which was trying to recapture what made it work, when in fact it's the other way around. Now, neither of those movies are really good, but imagine what they'd be without Grier: Even if she isn't really much of an actress yet and is getting parts mostly based on her bust, she's still got the sort of charisma that makes a B movie more entertaining than it has any right to be.

This one isn't really good at all, and is downright ugly at times, both in how it treats its heroine and how bad the rest of the cast is. But it's got Grier as Foxy, who is fantastic as the stalwart heroine who is capable of anything that needs to be done once she's been roused from her hibernation. It's a better part than it might be; for all it's built as a woman using her sex appeal as her main weapon, it's just as much about her unwillingness to back down. And that's pretty great.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2013 in Jay's Living Room (QT Chronicles, Blu-ray)

It seems like a strange thing to say about a movie that is so plainly built as a genre homage mash-up, but I kind of think that this is the movie where Quentin Tarantino became a great filmmaker. Oh, sure, he'd gotten a lot of praise for his screenplays before, and getting fine performances out of guys that nobody expected much from, but from the very start of this one, where Vivica A. Fox opens the door for Uma Thurman and they start wailing on each other, it's crazy action time, and that's great.

After all, before Kill Bill, Tarantino's films were known for their violence, sure, but it was always about how shocking it was - "holy crap, that came out of nowhere!" - bunch more about the fact of the violence than using action to let the audience understand these characters. But from that first great fight, we learn about the Bride not just from what she's willing to do, but the relentless way she does it. Same for Vernita, O-Ren, and all her henchmen. And while it's easy for critics to talk about how the strength of Tarantino is in his dialogue - that's the part that's obviously writing, and thus easy for them to understand - the fact that he is really starting to get the job done with movement and action here means that he's mastering an essential tool.

It's not always a smooth transition to being a more action-oriented filmmaker; there are times when his pop-culture-referencing dialogue is as unreal as it usually is, often mimicking the weaknesses of the movie's he's recreating, which doesn't quite work when you're trying to be fairly clever in other places. But, man, when this movie is on, it's on: It's hard to imagine a sequence that does a better job of pumping the audience up than the Bride's arrival in Tokyo, complete with model city, samurai swords openly displayed in the plane, brightly colored motorcycles, and the music from "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" on the soundtrack. And then you get a pretty darn amazing action scene after that, and the perfect cliffhanger.

I should watch this thing more often, whether I see Part II afterward or not.

Wish You Were Here

Originally, I was thinking of pairing this up with The Prey as sort of a de facto import thrillers double-feature, but the times didn't line up particularly well - it was the sort of situation where there's about an hour between movies, which isn't enough time to sit down to eat or do some shopping if you're going to give yourself any margin with the T - so they got pushed to separate days while the nice weather for sitting outside and reading got The Purge and Before Midnight pushed to "sometime later next week". It's fine, though; as it turns out, the two would have been more of a complementary double feature than a thematic one, with The Prey pretty much all action and plot while Wish You Were Here was much more a character piece. Heck, I'd argue that only one of the two thriller moments was successful.

Still, it wound up being a pretty good drama, and pulled off a nice balancing act in how it establishes this big set of unusual things happening before spending a bunch of time on a story that is much more conventional and domestic. It's the sort of thing that I usually don't like at all - why use a big canvas to tell a small story? - but it's pulled off unusually well here, in large part because the bigger-seeming story is never that far off.

It's also kind of fun to hear some of the actors with their actual Australian accents. Joel Edgerton is probably best known for an Aussie role (Animal Kingdom), but I'm not sure how much that was seen compared to The Great Gatsby or Zero Dark Thirty (or, hey, the Star Wars prequels). I get the feeling that he's going to be unfairly overlooked as a pretty great actor over the next few years because he does blend into his parts so seamlessly, no matter where he's working. Similarly, I saw and liked Teresa Palmer in Warm Bodies earlier this year, and it looks like she's done a fair amount of movies where she plays an American teenager lately, but she's ten times better as an Australian adult.

(It is amazing, though, how well Australian actors slip into playing Americans or Brits as necessary. I've heard it's mostly just a matter of exposure - they import a lot of US and UK media and thus develop an ear for all the various ways English can be spoken early - but when you think of all the high-profile American and English actors who can't blend in nealry so well, it's pretty amazing.)

Wish You Were Here

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

Wish You Were Here pulls off something of a neat trick, even if it doesn't always mean to: The filmmakers might not have anticipated Joel Edgerton and Teresa Palmer getting top billing Stateside (they've each put on North American accents in a few movies here) even though it's star and co-writer Felicity Price that has the spotlight for much of the movie, but the way they slide the focus over to another character deliberate and well-done. It makes for quite the satisfying little movie.

Things start off in Cambodia, mostly presented in as an opening-credit montage of two Australian couples on vacation: Dave (Edgerton) and his wife Alice (Price) are taking a quick break from their two kids along with Alice's younger sister Steph (Palmer) and her new boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr). When the movie reconnects with Dave & Alice back in Sydney, the fun times of just days ago seem completely forgotten; Jeremy has disappeared and Steph is coming back, feeling like there's nothing more she can do. And it's not long before Alice notices both her husband and her sister behaving strangely.

The question of Jeremy's disappearance is what supplies a fair amount of Wish You Were Here's tension, but Price and director/co-writer Kieran Darcy-Smith don't treat it as a traditional solvable mystery with clues and connections that the audience is going to be able to merge into an answer at roughly the same time as the characters. On a practical level, they can't - the evidence is all in Southeast Asia; what are they going to play detective with? So they find another set of screws to twist that could quite easily connect to the other story, and even if it's not quite clear how, it's dramatic enough on its own.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

The Prey (La Proie)

What a random booking this was: A French thriller from 2011 (heck, it was actually released on French-language Canadian DVD over a year ago), somehow sneaking into a few theaters across the country (Box Office Mojo says five), and in Boston, it's not the boutique-ish place in Kendall Square, but the big AMC multiplex in Boston Common. Granted, that's sort of where it belongs - if it weren't in French, it would be seen as a pretty good thriller with plenty of running and jumping and shooting and fighting. But, for some reason, folks don't come out to see them; I think I even saw a couple of people walking out once subtitles started popping up.

Not that I initially connected it with subtitles; I was just thinking "really, guys, you need to hit the restroom now?" See enough foreign-language films as a matter of course, and it becomes easy to forget that a lot of people don't go for non-English-language movies. I don't blame them, really; Hollywood puts out more entertaining movies than most folks have time to watch, so why make things more difficult by having to deal with a foreign language or subtitles?

Well, here's the funny thing - as I noted a couple years ago, the French do this sort of mid-budget action thriller better than anyone else right now, and there's not really a whole lot like it out in theaters right now. Now You See Me would be the closest (it's directed by a French guy for what it's worth), but it's trying to be something bigger. Fast & Furious 6 is spiritually similar, but that's a nine-figure blockbuster (which shares a fight choreographer with The Prey). There's not a lot of actionout there right now that isn't looking to overwhelm you, and that makes The Prey hit the spot.


One other thing I recalled as a result of watching The Prey: This is the 20th anniversary year of The Fugitive (recalled by both this movie's "man-on-the-run" plot and seeing a bald, menacing Harrison Ford in the trailer for Paranoia). That movie deserves a theatrical re-release. No need to 3-D-ify it like Jurassic Park got, just find a relatively quiet weekend and put it out there. I mean, I suppose we'll see it here in five years when the Brattle does their annual reunion weekend shows, and I see Warner is putting an anniversary-edition Blu-ray out in September (necessary, as the BD/HD-DVD edition from a few years ago is not great), but I want to see it on the big screen again.


La Proie (The Prey)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 June 2013 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, 4K DCP)

The Prey isn't a big summer blockbuster by American standards; for all I know, it wasn't a big deal when it played its native France as "La Proie" two years before its American release. It is a lean, mean, no-messing-around entry in the genre, and if you're not averse to people speaking French as they play a nifty game of cat-and-mouse, it's well worth checking to see if it popped up in your area.

Franck Adrien (Albert Dupontel) is in prison for bank robbery, and does not have many friends there: One of his partners-in-crime, Novick (Olivier Schneider), would really like to know where Franck hid the money; his cellmate Jean-Louis Maurel (Stéphane Debac) is in on molestation charges and his claims of innocence (backed up by his accuser recanting her testimony) give a bunch of prisoners and guards who want him beat to a pulp no compunctions about going through Franck to do it, as they don't like his attitude anyway. He does have a beautiful wife (Caterina Murino) and daughter (Jaïa Caltagirone) waiting for him on the outside, and has Maurel pass them a message on his release - which may not have been a good idea according to an obsessed detective (Sergi López). When Franck can't get Anna on the phone, he escapes, and the gendarmes put a crack team led by Claire Linné (Alice Taglioni) on his tail.

There are crime movies that are about examining the complexities of seemingly amoral characters who live by their own code, and there are ones where the characters are who they are in order to get the audience from confrontation to trap and back again. The Prey is unequivocally in the latter category; writers Laurent Turner & Luc Bossi and director Eric Valette don't quite feed one action scene straight into another, but while things will sometimes decelerate just enough for the characters to plot their next move, it almost never shows down enough for actual introspection. That can sometimes be looked at as a weakness, but it works here, in large part because Turner & Bossi have come up with a villainous master plan that is genuinely diabolical without getting stretched to the breaking point by the finale. Part of this is because they don't overcomplicate things, allowing characters to be opportunistic rather than anticipating specific details; part is just that French guys are not inclined to have something come out of nowhere to force them to pull their punches.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

The Attack

A few weeks ago, you may recall, we had a bomb go off during the Boston Marathon. There was a manhunt, they shut the whole city down to catch the guys responsible. It was a big deal. Anyway, one of the more worrisome things I saw afterwards was people sharing a Facebook status (and sentiment) about not wanting there to be any press coverage of the trial, or why the ones responsible did it, because they didn't care about the motives, so don't give these people any more publicity.

I get the idea behind it, that giving murderers a platform is the exact opposite of how we should respond to that sort of crime, especially since that it is, on a certain level, what the criminals want. There is a very strong, and sensible, feeling that this sort of violence should not be a viable means to an end. But on the other side - if we're not open to learning what motivates an attack like that, what sort of feeling of otherwise being disenfranchised pushes someone to feel that this is the only way to make their feelings known, how are we making the world any better? It just leads to more escalation on the one side and a tighter, more authoritarian government on the other - and does anybody really want to live in a society built on intimidation?

That ran through my mind after watching The Attack. The groups in this movie have gone so far down that road that the ultimate message is that they simply can't understand each other, and any attempt to do so is treated as treacherous and threatening. Granted, it's not just ideological - I think Amin, the film's main character, is stunned and disgusted by how he is treated as a pariah for trying to save lives while a suicide bomber is venerated for killing children - but ultimately, I think this is what I find the most shaking about the movie and the reaction to the Marathon bombing: That we are so dug-in and worried about ceding any ground, so afraid of letting the other guy have any sort of victory, that we can't examine the world as it is and try to figure out what kind of changes can be made to prevent people from wanting to commit this sort of violence, rather than just using force to intercept it or, more often, try to capture and punish the perpetrators.


L'attentat (The Attack)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 June 2013 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)

There have been a fair number of movies, books, and the like about terrorism over the years, but many, in their perfectly reasonable attempt to illuminate the phenomenon, ignore a simple truth: Most people just can't understand. This is a good thing - murder should be seen as aberrant! - but it can also be disquieting knowledge, and that's what gives the last act of The Attack (L'attentat) a fair amount of power.

The man about to come face to face with this idea is Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman), an ethnically Palestinian but non-religious surgeon who lives and works in Tel Aviv. He receives an award for his outstanding work - the first Arab to be so honored - the day before an explosion at a cafe puts him to work saving lives. It's after that a personal bombshell hits him: One of the victims is his wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem), and her injuries are consistent with a suicide bomb. He cannot believe this is possible, and returns to his hometown of Nablus to find answers.

That search consumes the latter half of the movie, but the lead-up to it is somewhat interesting as well; co-writer and director Ziad Doueiri spends some time painting terror attacks and their aftermath not as commonplace, but as something akin to bad weather: Not an everyday occurrence or something you can predict, but there are systems in place and inconveniences you accept. There's not pure visceral horror in the far-off bang that Amin hears from the hospital roof, and while the Shin Bet guy who torments and interrogates him is unpleasant... Well, we may not approve even if we weren't relatively sure of Amin's innocence, but it's part of the landscape now. Doueiri could choose to push these events as horrific, but if he did, it might be taken as justification for what comes later. Instead, we're allowed to disapprove but still think we understand the world we live in.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 June - 13 June 2013

Rejoice, frequent moviegoers! You don't have to see the trailer for The Internship ever again! But you can see an interesting Ethan Hawke double-feature.

• The first of Hawke's movies is probably one of the most eagerly-awaited movies of the summer. Before Midnight is Richard Linklater's (and Ethan Hawke's and Julie Delpy's) once-a-decade check in on Jesse and Celine, the couple who met on a train in Before Sunrise and reconnected in Before Sunset. Those two movies are legitimately fantastic, and who doesn't want to see what happened after that last finale? It's got the big screen (for the most part) at the Coolidge, including a "Box Office Babies" screening on Friday morning.
  
  Things by and large stay on one screen without moving around or skipping shows this week, so the main special screenings are the Friday & Saturday midnights, 15th anniversary screenings of The Faculty, with high-school kids discovering their teachers are invading aliens. Robert Rodriguez directs, mainly so that he could learn how to do digital effects for Spy Kids, and it screens on 35mm. There's also a Monday night screening of Our Mockingbird, a sort of preview of the Roxbury International Film Festival, which features a pair of Birmingham high schools, one white and one black, putting on a production of To Kill a Mockingbird. Director Sandra Jaffe will do a post-film Q&A.
• Hawke's other movie is The Purge, a home invasion thriller with the twist that it takes place in a near-future America where for one night a year, all crime is legal. It's apparently getting good enough buzz that there's a sequel already being planned. It plays Boston Common, Fenway, and Apple Cinemas. Add the Arlington Capitol to that list, and you've got the list of theaters on the T opening The Internship, in which Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play salesmen trying to get a job at Google. They're wacky slobs among the nerds! They spend the entire preview spewing pop-culture references but don't recognize when someone mentions the X-Men!
  
  In completely random things filling out screens at the multiplex, Boston Common opens The Prey, a French action-thriller just making its way to the States that seems to pack an awful lot of crime into eighty minutes: A bank robber's suspected child-molester cellmate is exonerated, but wait, he may be a serial killer, spurring the robber (who hid the money, natch) to escape to protect his family while being hunted down by the cops. Busy!
• So, yeah, French movie at Boston Common but not Kendall Square. They do get a couple screens of Before Midnight, but the one-week booking is a different thriller, Wish You Were Here, where four Australians (including Joel Edgerton and Teresa Palmer) take a trip to Cambodia but only three come back. They've also got The Kings of Summer, in which three kids having troubles at home take the "as long as you live in my house, you'll follow my rules" thing seriously and start building their own house in the woods.
• Over at the Brattle Theatre , The Tarantino Chronicles continues pairing Quentin Tarantino's movies with the ones which inspired them. So Friday brings a double feature of Jackie Brown & Foxy Brown, Saturday Django Unchained & The Mercenary (from the director and star of the original Django), Sunday The Dirty Dozen & Inglorious Basterds, Monday Kill Bill: Volume 1 & Lady Snowblood (screening digitally as opposed to on 35mm), Tuesday Volume 2 and Fists of the White Lotus. Wednesday has the full-length Death Proof and the original Gone with 60 Seconds (replacing Vanishing Point with a pristine collector's print). No double feature on Thursday, but the series concludes with another chance to see Django Unchained.
• The Regent Theatre repeats "Ain't in It for My Health": A Film about Levon Helm on Sunday, for those who missed the documentary on the Rock & Roll HOFer on Thursday. Gathr's Preview Series moves to Mondays starting this week, with More than Honey playing on the 10th. The documentary examines Colony Collapse Disorder, and features some pretty darn stunning photography of bees close-up.
• The MFA's program has a number of films from around the world grouped together as the Global Lens Film Series, including Brazil's Southwest (Friday/Sunday), Iran's About 111 Girls (Friday/Saturday), Serbia's apparently-non-horrific The Parade (Friday/Saturday), Kazakhstan's Student (Saturday/Sunday), Chile's Life Kills Me (Sunday/Wednesday), China's Beijing Flickers (Wednesday), Mexico's The Fantastic World of Juan Orol (Thursday), and India's Shyamal Uncle Turns Off the Lights (Thursday); the latter three continue into next weekend. Not part of the series but starting a run mid-week is Mexico's award-winning Post Tenebras Lux, which plays Wednesday & Thursday and also continues into the next week.
• You can do a Hindi-with-subtitles double feature via the iMovieCafe screen at Apple Cinemas this week, as Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani continues in the main timeslots but Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 plays early and late, apparently featuring the con-artist family from the first attempting to con a guy they don't know is bankrupt. An orangutan is apparently also involved.
• No sign of Star Trek Into Darkness coming to the New England Aquarium any time soon, but they do add "Great White Shark 3D" to their rotation of marine-life-related featurettes.
• Screens haven't quite been carved out yet, but This Is the End will be getting a Wednesday opening this week, likely at Somerville, Fenway, Boston Common, and Apple.

My plans? Before Midnight, The Prey, Wish You Were Here, and whatever QT double-features I can fit in. Maybe The Purge, Stories We Tell, and/or This Is The End.

William and the Windmill

I'm kind of disappointed in myself for this review - it seems like a natural place for me to make some sort of tortured science/engineering metaphor, but it wasn't until the last paragraph that something about potential energy being released even began to coalesce, but it didn't work. See, windmills take something that's already kinetic energy and... Well, anyway, you can be nerdy, but there has to be some sense to it.

This was a DocYard screening, so we got a post-film Q&A. I don't go to as many films in the DocYard series as I might like to see - their Monday-night schedule isn't quite ideal and, let's face it, one's interest in the subject can be just as big a factor in seeing a documentary as anything else - but every one I've been to has been fairly impressive. Sometimes the program can have a little over-clever - this one opened with an "experimental audio short", which... Nice at first, got heavy handed quickly.


Director Ben Nabors and moderator Erin Trahan

It was a nice Q&A. Nabors is apparently moving to Boston soon (cue lots of "hey, we got someone from Brooklyn!" jokes), and was happy to talk about anything people asked about. Much of the Q&A was less question than "very good movie!" statements, but there was a fair amount of other discussion. One big top of conversation was how subject William Kamkwamba's American patron (for lack of a better term) Tom Rielly seemed sincere but also kind of an example of the exploitation you can sometimes see of young people from humble circumstances. Nabors didn't really dance around the topic, saying it's not a movie about exploitation as much as expectation, but also sort of acknowledging that it was occasionally not quite the portrayal and movie Tom envisioned.

Nice guy, and nice movie. I haven't yet had a chance to watch "Moving Windmills", Nabors' original short on Kamkwamba and his windmill (it's on YouTube), but I may sometime later, especially since Nabors implied that it's more about the original windmill project than what came after. That's not necessarily more interesting, but it's a different focus, marking William and the Windmill less as an expansion than a different look at the subject.

William and the Windmill

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 June 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (The DocYard Presents, digital)

William and the Windmill does not so much tell the tale of a boy who builds a windmill to generate electricity for his poor village as one who has built such a windmill. After all, that's the sort of story which is over by the time a filmmaker can hear about it and get to Africa to shoot. Still, The question of what comes next can be an interesting one, even if it's not quite so obviously dramatic.

William Kamkwamba did build a wind turbine out of spare parts, scrap, and whatever else he could find at the age of fourteen; he figured out how from an English-language book in the village's library despite not yet knowing the language (a drought had left his farming family too poor to continue his formal education). The story spread, leading William to a TED event in a neighboring country, where he met an American patron, Tom Rielly, and was given a chance to attend the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, even though by then he was a bit older than the other students. A book is written (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind), and other opportunities present themselves, along with other pressures.

William is such a soft-spoken guy, especially when he initially seems uncomfortable with English, that it's very easy to imagine him being exploited; there are people around him who talk a lot and make plans while he nods his head and agrees or mostly listens. It's certainly a sharp contrast to Tom, who states early on that Africa and Africans have often had trouble with white dilettantes who either lose interest in their projects or are chiefly interested in reflected glory. And for all that self-awareness, Tom certainly does frequently seem like one of those guys. Director Ben Nabors, thankfully, decides to let this dynamic play out on-screen even though it's not the story he's trying to tell; it's a reminder of how hard it can be to see the line between sincerity and self-interest on one side or naivete and shyness on the other.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

This Week In Tickets: 27 May 2013 - 2 June 2013

This week's page looks both more and less busy than it is:



Monday (Memorial Day) was spent on a quick round-trip to Maine because the single guy can come to a family thing given just a few days' notice even if when nobody can get to the ballgame to which he bought tickets months prior with the intention of sharing them. That, folks, is how the world works for Last Single Friends/Family Members.

It was fun, though - I hadn't seen my grandparents for a while, nor my nieces, so there's an eighty-odd-year spread of reasons to head north. The nieces (two-year-old fraternal twin girls) have a new swingset, and let me tell you, they can do that all afternoon.

I intended to see 100 Bloody Acres as part of the Gathr preview series at the Regent on Tuesday, only to discover I had a ticket to the ballgame. Now, I wouldn't say that it was worth skipping out on baseball to see the movie, but Cliff Lee dominated the Red Sox pretty thoroughly. Ridiculously so, only being pulled for the closer in the ninth because that closer was Jonathan Papelbon, he likes drama, so they might as well give it to him.

For the weekend, I was able to schedule my moviegoing around watching the evening ballgames (where the Sox took two of three from the Yankees). Saturday was the magic double feature of Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay & Now You See Me (the first is better, if not by quite so much as one might hope). Sunday was a lesson in checking the MoviePass app before walking to a movie, as it didn't show After Earth playing Fenway at all. It wasn't hard to get to Boston Common, and the it wasn't tight to see We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, but that's not a cool surprise (though seeing the Somerville Theatre pop up on the list of available venues was)!

After Earth

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 June 2013 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)

There were a lot of weird choices made for After Earth, and while they're not all to the film's benefit - not by a long shot - I find myself respecting it for doing the expected things in unusual ways. That some of those odd choices appeal to me is nice, although I don't know quite how well folks will react to the in an all-ages sci-fi adventure movie.

Weird choice number one: Will Smith as the strict, distant father. Smith, after all, is a guy who is as aware of what makes him a movie star in addition to an actor as anybody is, and while he has been taking on roles that require him to stretch a bit as opposed to relying on his considerable charm over the past few years, Cypher Raige is something else again. The name is rather on-the-nose, after all - Cyper is a clenched fist of a man who just isn't ever going to have the moment when he softens and tells his son Kitai that he's not angry at him for that. He's a difficult guy to be fond of, so it's kind of surprising to see that Smith has story and producer credit on the film; he chose to play pretty strongly against type.

I'm going to guess that the flat, strange-sounding accent and cadence the characters often speak in isn't Smith's doing, but I kind of like it, too. Some of it's just exaggerating the militarism of certain characters and some is probably Sophie Okonedo's African accent, but they come together and emphasize the far-future nature of the setting much better than the usual "throw in some different slang" method. It does a decent job of covering how, while Jaden Smith has inherited a fair amount of his father's charisma, he's not quite there as an actor yet. He handles the physical parts of an action/adventure movie well enough, and enough of what he does works well enough to at least seem deliberate, but enough clunks in a way that doesn't seem to happen with his father that it's an open question of whether Jaden Smith or co-writer/director M. Night Shyamalan is responsible.

Shyamalan doing this sort of movie is kind of questionable, too - I don't think there's much doubt that, when he's at his best, he's grounding his stories quite firmly in the real world and having the fantastical intrude. After Earth is a big sci-fi epic, with characters crash-landing on an Earth that has been taken over by bigger, fiercer versions of the animals we know - I'm presuming that they are the work of the same aliens who engineered the "Ursa" which cannot see but can literally smell human fear as much as mutations arising from human damage to the ecology - but it's kind of a neat one. It's beautifully conceived, at the very least - Shyamalan and his production design group take their cues from interesting places, and both the ship that crashes and the Raiges' home on "Nova Prime" feel biologically inspired without going the full Cronenberg.

Along with the effects guys and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, they make a slick-looking movie, although, again, big action and effects aren't necessarily Shyamalan's thing. A lot of the creature effects have room for improvement, for instance, and as much as the design of the ship and the Ursa's container is well-conceived, it can look a bit cheap. The action is fairly well-choreographed, but it can sometimes seem to be over too quickly. Also, for a movie that seems to be made with a younger audience in mind, it has some fairly scary imagery, and the editing could probably stand to be a bit more linear, rather than flashing back so much and letting the main source of conflict between Cypher and Kitai emerge somewhat obliquely.

Underneath, though, there's some pretty interesting stories going on. Sure, it's basically an estranged father and son trying to connect, with the father learning how to trust his son while the son tries to become more responsible, but the context is interesting. As much as this sort of movie is generally about letting go of one's fear, that is in many ways Cypher's problem - he's gotten so good at "ghosting" to fight these Ursas that he often can't express his concern for his children's safety as anything but anger. Maturity for both Cypher and Kitai is learning how to control and channel these potentially destructive feelings, and Cypher's repeated calls for Kitai to "take a knee" are interesting - it's visually reminiscent of prayer, but not quite, though it's a notch above "take a breath"; it's a sort of meditation, knowing one's spirit.

It strikes me that with these themes of mastering those sorts of dark emotions, "cutlasses", and the like - well, that's Jedi Knight material, isn't it? It's kind of a crying shame that Shyamalan doesn't seem to be as tight with Disney as he was when he made several hits in a row with the studio, because he seems to have an excellent handle on what would make a fine Star Wars movie.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

As much as I suggest i this review that the intersection between the sets of people who are interested in this film's subject and those who have not been following the story is fairly small, I must also admit to fitting into it. Like many Americans who fit into what we call liberal (but which the rest of the world would call "slightly less conservative"), I talk a good game about wanting more transparency and hating the way the last couple of administrations have throttled the Constitution, I don't exactly keep on top of the news where it's concerned.

Thus, I didn't realize that PFC Manning's trial (after three years of detention) was finally getting under way today. It really should be a bigger deal than it is, because while in most cases the question of "did this guy do that thing?" is fairly open-and-shut, there's a fair amount of room for debate on whether that thing should be considered a crime. I'm inclined to think it's a necessary one, doing something potentially harmful to fight against things that are unquestionably harmful, but the rule of law doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for those sort of considerations.

In a movie, the compromise would be for Manning to be found guilty but have a judge who recognized that it was in the service of the greater good, giving him a trivial sentence. I'm not sure exactly what the Hollywood ending for Assange would be - I suspect it would be for the people accusing him of sex crimes to be the character assassins people have painted him as. Or maybe he'd be ironically brought down by the system he helped to create, which would be found all the stronger for not being at one person's command.

Neither is likely. A shame, that. This is probably why I tend to stick to fiction and science/nature documentaries.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 June 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, DCP)

Toward the end of We Steal Secrets, one of the interview subjects calls back to an early online handle of Julian Assange's, "Mendax", an abbreviation of "noble liar". That is, however, not the first (possible) online alias of his that is mentioned, and some might suggest that "wank" is more appropriate. That both are raised as possibilities certainly suggests that director Alex Gibney is taking a fairly even-handed look at the topic.

"WANK" was the name of a group that managed to get a worm into NASA's systems out of fear of the shuttle carrying a nuclear-powered payload in the late 1980s; it was believed to have originated from Assange's Melbourne circle of hackers. And while Assange's activism would eventually morph from direct action to creating WikiLeaks, a spot where whistleblowers can anonymously upload documents in the interest of transparency. After getting a certain amount of international renown by exposing misdoings in an Icelandic bank, he hits paydirt when somebody - by all evidence, troubled US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning - uploads a treasure trove of military and diplomatic information.

It's quite possible that the time might not yet be right for a WikiLeaks documentary. The very nature of the story means that it played out in public quite recently, so many people with interest in the subject have likely been consuming the primary sources as events unfolded. There is also an argument to be made that the story is unfinished; there are on-screen updates dated March 2013 just before the closing credits roll and it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that text to be updated again before the home video release. That doesn't necessarily make the film's narrative incomplete - whatever happens to Assange and Manning, the implosion of WikiLeaks is unlikely to reversed.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

It's Magic?: Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay and Now You See It

Another week, another themed double feature, although unlike last week's, it more or less went as expected - I'd heard Now You See Me wasn't very good, but I figured Deceptive Practice had a pretty good chance to be good; after all, who doesn't love Ricky Jay?

It's not a bad movie, it just suffers from a magician being too unwilling to give up his tricks, and I was kind of feeling lousy throughout - hot day, a fair amount of walking in the morning, not really acclimated to sleeping with the fan on because the temperature in Boston went from the mid-sixties to the nineties overnight this week.

Ricky Jay consults on magic for a great number of movies, but his name wasn't on the credits for Now You See Me, which instead mentioned being inspired by the magic of David Copperfield. There were some bits that carried over between the two, most notably characters throwing playing cards as weapons. Jay can throw them hard enough to embed them in a watermelon's epidermis, although the guys in the fictional movie mostly seem to be delivering nasty paper cuts.

My biggest problem - among the great number of issues Now You See It has - is with a certain plot device which is rather poorly used.

SPOILERS!

What the heck is "The Eye of Horus", anyway? There's talk of them being the ancient guardians of "real magic", but despite the impossible things the characters do, there's never any indication that it's meant to be anything but high-tech illusion. So the logical thing to assume is that it's a fiction that Dylan (hey, I said "spoilers!") co-opted to manipulate the magicians - although I suppose him being part of this super-secret organization would explain why he had the resources necessary to pull this off. Why the Eye decided to go along with this revenge plan, well, who knows?

Of course, if there is no real Eye, there's a somewhat logical if nasty way this plays out - the magicians meeting Dylan at the carousel is not them being recruited, but a trap, and the scene where the master villain eliminates his accomplices off-screen. I mean, that car chase on the bridge isn't exactly the plan of someone who particularly cares about the safety and lives of others, right? I suspect the idea that Dylan takes his revenge - including putting an old man in prison for the rest of his life, kills his henchmen, and then jets off to France to get the girl is a little darker than the filmmakers intended. Unlike the rest of the movie, though, it makes a vicious sort of sense.

!SRELIOPS


Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 June 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)

Even those of us who have never seen Ricky Jay do close-up magic will likely recognize the man from his side gigs as a character actor - and if you stay through the credits of those movies and others, he'll often be credited as a consultant on card-sharping, con artistry, and of course magic. He's also a prolific author, and I suspect that while his enthusiasm where the magicians who inspired him are concerned comes through well here, his books on the subject must be exceptional.

Ricky Jay Potash, we soon learn, was practicing magic from an early age, picking up the bug from his grandfather Max Katz, an enthusiastic and highly-regarded amateur. Through Katz, Jay met many of New York's great magicians like Cardini, Slydini, and Al Flosso; after moving to California, he would meet Charlie Miller and Dai Vernon. He talks about these mentors backstage at his performances, as clips of those shows and some of his TV appearances.

There's a well-known and mostly-respected code of secrecy among magicians that marks it as a brotherhood, and while it's admirable enough in its way, it leaves something of a gap in stories that the movie is telling: As much as Jay is able to give entertaining background on the magic scene and describe what various illusionists did well, he is obviously loath tell how those feats are accomplished. It's maybe not necessary information, but it perhaps makes pinning down what each mentor contributed to Jay's development as a magician beyond vague generalities.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Now You See Me

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 June 2013 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)

The tagline for Now You See Me - both within the film and in its advertising - is kind of shameless in how it basically tells the audience not to examine things too closely, although I don't know if looking at the bigger picture makes things any less dumb. Still, if you go along with what the filmmakers present, it kind of looks like a good movie, though that's an illusion.

That sounds like a horribly snobby thing to say about the folks who enjoy it, so perhaps its more apt to say that director Louis Leterrier and everyone else involved do a good enough job of putting the pieces of a fun caper movie up on screen and zipping between them fast enough that even when the audience gets ahead of the characters or realizes that things don't quite make sense, it's not boring. There's enough scale and style that it feels like a big-screen movie, and the well-assembled cast is mostly tasked with the sort of things that they do well. The script by Boaz Yakin, Edward Ricourt, and Ed Solomon is completely hollow, but it checks off a lot of things that people like to see in movies, so the surface goes down smooth.

It does show its weakness from the very beginning, though, when four magicians - would-be-Copperfield Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), and street hustler Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) are recruited by an unknown benefactor. A year later, they're playing Vegas as a sort of magical supergroup presented by billionaire Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), but when they incorporate a seemingly impossible bank robbery into their act, that gets the attention of FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), French Interpol detective Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent), and professional debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman). It asks the audience to swallow something very elaborate to start with, while giving the characters just the most basic of personality quirks to define them. It's flashy and kind of instinctively engaging, but thin.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 31 May - 6 June 2013

It seems like this is an extra week in the summer movie season - after Memorial Day, but (mostly) before June. Sort of threw the studios' rhythm off a bit. Or is that just me?

• For instance, The Purge and After Earth wound up switching places on the schedule as it got adjusted a few weeks ago. That puts the latter out this week, and it's kind of an odd duck - a big FX-driven thing where neither co-star Will Smith nor writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has been mentioned much by name in the advertising. Not sure what to take from that. It plays the Capitol, Apple, Fenway (including the RPX screen), and Boston Common.
  
  It seems like I've been seeing previews for Now You See Me forever, although it hasn't been the painful saturation of The Internship. It's got a nifty cast - Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Melanie Laurent, Mark Ruffalo - and Louis Leterrier from the Luc Besson action factory guiding the story of magicians who seem to be pulling off impossible heists from the other side of the world. It feels like it's bounced around the calendar, and hopefully landing here is a better sign than it landing in February or so. It plays Somerville, Apple, Boston Common, and fenway.
• Kendall Square picks up two documentaries. The "big" one is We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, in which Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room director Alex Gibney attempts to present a cohesive, even-handed view of the controversial website, its founder Julian Assange, and its most (in)famous source, Bradley Manning. A less momentous (but likely just as fascinating) subject is profiled in Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, in which director Molly Bernstein turns a camera on one of the greatest close-up magicians working and learning about those who inspired him. It's got the "one-week warning".
• The Coolidge opens Frances Ha, which opened at Kendall last week. In addition to playing on a bigger screen in 35mm, star and co-writer Greta Gerwig will do a remote Q&A after Friday's 9:45pm show. Friday (and Saturday) night also features the 1958 remake of The Blob on 35mm. Otherwise, it's a quiet week for special presentations, with the only other one being Gregorio Smith presenting his Jehovah's Witness documentary Truth Be Told in the screening room, with another guest or two on-hand for post-film discussion.
• As I noted walking through Harvard Square last night, the eponymous university's Commencement and Reunion is going on this week, and as usual the Brattle Theatre contributes to the festivities with anniversary screenings. Friday has single features of 1963's Beach Party and 1988's Earth Girls Are Easy; Saturday a double feature of 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood and 1963's From Russia With Love with a late show of 1988's They Live; and Sunday pairs 1938's Holiday with 1963's The Pink Panther and also has 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown at 9:15.
  
  On Monay, the DocYard brings director Ben Nabors in to screen and discuss his SXSW award-winning documentary William and the Windmill, featuring a young man who build an electricity-generating turbine out of scraps and spare parts. The theater is closed to the public on Tuesday, but re-opens Wednesday for the start of The Tarantino Chronicles, which pairs a QT film with one of its inspirations. On Wednesday the 5th, Reservoir Dogs shows with Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (the latter screening digitally), while Thursday has Kiss Me Deadly lead into Pulp Fiction.
• Speaking of Harvard, the Film Archive completes their Raoul Walsh Encore with The Cock-Eyed World and Dark Command on Friday; a four-film marathon of Salty O'Rourke, The Enforcer, Jump for Glory & The Horn Blows at Midnight on Saturday (the last, appropriately, at about 12am) on Saturday; and The Big Trail and Gentleman Jim on Sunday. After that, they close up shop for the rest of June before the summer program starts in July.
• The Regent Theatre finishes the "Boston Surfs!" Film & Music Festival on Friday with a combination of movies and live music. On Tuesday, they screen the next film in Gathr's Preview Series: The Attack, in which a Palestinian doctor living in Tel Aviv loses his wife to a terrorist action - and then learns she may be responsible for it. I've got four or five free tickets, for anybody who wants one. And Thursday the 6th, they have two screenings of "Ain't in It for My Health": A Film about Levon Helm; the documentary on the Rock & Roll Hall-of-Famer will also play Sunday the 9th.
• The MFA's program continues what it started a few days earlier, screening documentaries Becoming Traviata and One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das once each on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Times vary.
• The iMovieCafe screen at Apple Cinemas is (mostly) playing an English-subtitled Bollywood film this week. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani features Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor in a musical that follows them from their meeting at 21 through a lifelong romance. Telugu-language film Iddarammailatho fills in the other timeslots.

My plans? Well, I think you've got to pair Now You See Me and Deceptive Practices somehow, then work in After Earth, We Steal Secrets, The Attack, and maybe Wiliam and the Windmill. Oh, and I haven't seen Stories We Tell or Mud yet. Should get on that. And the 35mm classics at the Brattle and HFA look good too...

Oh, and seriously - I've got extra tickets for The Attack. Leave a comment or an email or something if you want them.

This Week In Tickets: 20 May 2013 - 26 May 2013

Ah, festival reviewing and post-festival catch-up done, so it's time to just sit back and take it easy...



Stubless: Rabbit Horror 3D (24 May 2013, Jay's Living Room, 10pm-ish)

... or, alternately, I could spend a week more or less gorging on movies, stopping only to watch baseball. That's another option.

The two overlapped on Monday, as I saw 42 at the Fenway cinema, complete with hot dogs (tip: the hot-dog sliders are not actually a bad deal, costing $5 or so for the equivalent of roughly two full-sized franks, which cost $4.50 a pop). Not a great dinner, but I'd likely have much worse by the time the week was over. It was actually kind of relaxing to have a half-hour more than usual to get to the Fenway area compared to the usual time for a ballgame. I sort of had the opposite problem on Tuesday, getting to the Regent Theatre well early for What Maisie Knew but not really hungry enough to choose one of the local restaurants.

Wednesday was comics day, and I met up with a friend from the comic shop for Thursday night's ballgame. The Red Sox lost, pretty decisively, at the hands of former manager Terry Francona. It got so ugly that by the time Tony left, we knew to check the Bruins score when we heard happy sounds. By the end, the Bruins had lost, it was raining, and it seemed like sports in Boston sucked - a feeling which (spoilers!) would not last the weekend.

Friday I stayed in, watched the game on TV, and eventually decided to finally give the Blu-ray player and 3D converter I purchased a month earlier a field test with Rabbit Horror 3D (sure, it says "Tormented" on the box, but c'mon!). Decent movie, and while the tech I used to watch it in 3D wasn't great, it was capable and a neat thing to have. I spent long enough writing it up on Saturday that I sort of blew past my original plans for moviegoing, which involved Pain & Gain and one of the newer shows at the Aquarium, but Fast & Furious 6 followed by the Alloy Orchestra performing life with From Morn to Midnight, a strangely (and unjustly) obscure bit of silent German Expressionism, made for an interesting double feature.

Sunday was initially a bummer - I'd purchased a four-pack of baseball tickets during the winter figuring someone in my family could use them, but everyone turned out to be busy for what seemed like legitimate reasons (if I find out anybody was marathon-watching Arrested Development, there'll be hell to pay), so they missed a really great game that ended on a fantastic comeback. After, I did another double feature which seemed much more logical on the surface (Epic & The Painting), although they wound up not quite so similar as one might think for both being animated family movies about small people living in a hidden world.

Busy week. But when watching baseball with a friend from good seats is the only part that doesn't really turn out as well as one might expect, you're doing pretty well.


42

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 May 2013 in Regal Fenway #6 (first-run, 4k DCP)

42 turned out more or less exactly as expected. That's not really a bad thing - it's a good story, told fairly well, and the audience is going to feel pretty good after watching it. Its biggest shortcoming, perhaps, is that baseball fans have been told this story rather a lot - MLB can be rather self-congratulatory about being ahead of the curve on civil rights every April 15th, and Ken Burns's Baseball miniseries was just as much about race in America as the game, with Jackie Robinson obviously a central part of that - so it would have been nice to see details and facets of this story that don't get told as much. Writer/director Brian Helgeland doesn't really do that.

Of course, it just may be the case that the legend is close to the truth, and side characters like Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni) and his temporary replacement as Dodgers manager Clyde Sukeforth (Toby Huss) didn't add that much, and there would be no satisfying way of continuing beyond the end of Jackie's first season with the Dodgers and showing how things maybe changed when he was no longer being asked to not fight back. The cast does well with these characters that circumstances made larger-than-life, though - Chadwick Boseman, in particular, always has a look about him that says Robinson wasn't necessarily comfortable being a piece of history, that he sees exceptions being made for him and doesn't know if he merits it. I kind of liked that; it makes him the right guy at the right time rather than something predestined. Harrison Ford goes the other way as Branch Rickey, giving a broad performance that never lets the audience forget that it's a movie star playing someone just as famous, but Rickey needs to be big, and Ford really captures how Rickey (at least, in Helgeland's version) may not be completely altruistic in having Robinson break baseball's color line, but is less mercenary than he lets on.

But you know what I like most about 42? It's a baseball movie. Not "just" a civil rights movie where baseball happens to be the industry integrated, but one where the audience feels like they're being brought onto the field, noticing the details of how the bases look, what the radio play-by-play sounds like... How the game differed from today, and how in part that was because it was an all-white game that was undeniably improved by Robinson bringing the Negro Leagues' style of play with him. It feels like watching baseball, not a sermon, even while it's showing how integrating the game made it better for everyone.

Fast & Furious 6

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2013 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)

Of all the strange things to happen in the movies this century, the Fast & Furious series has to be right up there. The third, Tokyo Drift looks like the sort of "in-name-only" extension of a series that would be released direct-to-video back before VOD rearranged the whole paradigm, but somehow it kept the series alive long enough to bring the original cast back and somehow have writer Chris Morgan and director Justin Lin build it into a series that produces fun individual installments that tie together as well as anything with this sort of ongoing continuity.

Not that Morgan is writing particularly great scripts - this is a pretty dumb movie that doesn't make a lot of sense, but it knows how to use all of its characters. Well, except the evil versions of the crew whom DSS Agent Hobbs has brought them in to catch, but all the ones that matter. It's a group that is just fun enough to tie action scenes together, and while some of the plot bits don't make a whole lot of sense, they get the film from car chase to car chase, and the bit during the end credits which ties the series together is kind of a brilliant bit of retconning.

Plus, yeah, the car chases are pretty great. Not all of them - after a fun opener, the more conventional action is good but not fantastic (full disclosure: I arrived fairly late and thus wound up in the front row, which isn't the greatest vantage point for this sort of movie). The big ones featured in the previews, though, are pretty much everything I wanted them to be - the tank chase is just gloriously over the top, makes the characters improvise, and just as I'm starting to have "man, this is asking me to be okay with a lot of people being crushed to death" thoughts, the movie uses that, showing that Michelle Rodriguez's Letty belongs with the good guys. And then the plane chase... Good lord, that's awesome. It's got so many moving parts that a lesser filmmaker might produce a confusing mess, but Lin jumps between the different elements with great dexterity, and has both great action beats and emotional ones as well.

Oh, and Rodriguez and Gina Carano throw down twice, once being intercut to Joe Taslim beating the crap out of Tyrese Gibson and Sung Kang, and those fights are kind of awesome, too.

Hidden Animated Worlds: Epic and The Painting

It's funny how, when one plans what seems like an obvious double feature, the pieces don't quite seem to go together so well as they do on paper. Take Epic and The Painting, both of which I wanted to review earlier because it didn't look like anyone else on EFC would take them (clearly, we needed multiple Fast & Furious 6 and Hangover 3 reviews instead!) but where the schedule didn't really line up until Sunday evening - both animated, both aimed at a younger audience, and both about tiny people in worlds hidden within our own dealing with things at a different scale. Seems like an obvious pairing. In fact, maybe the sort of obvious pairing that is so on the nose that you don't do it, lest it seem repetitious or mark one film as obviously inferior.

Thankfully, it doesn't wind up being like that at all. Yes, the two have a lot of surface similarities and The Painting is a great movie while Epic is just pretty good, but they wind up being very different experiences. Epic plays things very safe while trying to appear ambitious, while The Painting sneaks a lot of ideas into its decptively simple frame.

One thing that surprised me when opening the IMDB page up for reference while writing up Epic is that its director, Chris Wedge, hasn't had that credit on a movie since 2005's Robots, which kind of puts a llittle bit of a lie to my attempts to pigeonhole him. He has produced a few sequels to his feature debut, Ice Age, and a few other Blue Sky pictures, but that strikes me as a long time to go between directing gigs, even if animation does have a long development cycle. Even with his more prominent position at Disney, I don't think John Lasseter is quite that subsumed in the business end of things.

Giving the film that particular name (a generic thing likely meant to keep it from seeming too obviously kid-oriented) probably saddles it with some too-big expectations, as well. The funny thing is, I think it would actually seem more epic without its main character. Without M.K., the world would seem big; having her around and constantly fretting about returning to her regular size just reinforces how small it is. She also winds up being one of those teenagers that sounds too adult when talking with her dad, and the filmmakers never really find a way to use that.

The Painting, on the other hand...

First, I'd just like to say how glad I am that there were subtitled screenings available. One of the potentially frustrating things about GKIDS is that, while they absolutely do fine work in bringing great international animation to the American audiences, they do tend to push their dubs pretty heavily. Given who their main audience is (right in the name), it's understandable, but there are a lot of us who want it as-is. One advantage to DCP projection is that it should be less of a hassle for theaters to have both versions on tap, and hopefully this split will continue with the rest of the releases.

So with that said, lets get right to the part where the atheist talks about the movie's handling of religious issues!

I don't think that this is a picture that can be completely construed as anti-religious; looking at it from the outside; there's no denying the existence of the characters' deity. The big difference between the Painter and the Christian God, though, is that the Painter does not seem to make any particular demands of his paintings - not even ones that are invented by them. Certainly, the Allduns use him as a way to justify their position of power, while the lower classes predict that he will return someday, but there aren't any scenes where anybody worries about displeasing their creator and being punished for it.

So skepticism isn't necessarily what Jean-François Laguionie and Anik Leray are trying to get across as much as practicality: Even if there is a God, his perspective is different than ours - he may move on to the next painting or tear things up for reasons we can't understand (and "God works in mysterious ways" does not necessarily mean "He has a plan for us"). Ultimately, the Painter is not necessarily relevant to one's everyday life, so you had best learn how to paint yourself.

SPOILERS!

Still, there is room for different perspectives. As the movie goes on, we see that Lola appears to have a different view - where the others worry about bringing themselves up to Alldun status, she seems to recognize that there is something wonderful about being unfinished or just who she is - she hears the self-portrait talk about being stuck feeling one way, and while the nude worries about her missing dress, Lola points out that she is beautiful as she is. And when the others are all painting themselves new colors willy-nilly, she sneaks away, meets the Painter, and doesn't flinch at him. Her response to the knowledge she gains is wonderful: More cuirosity; she wants to find the one who painted the Painter.

!SRELIOPS

That's an awesomely grand idea - truly epic, you might say - and it's handled in a way that doesn't seem disrespectful at all. That's a rare feat, and kudos to The Painting for managing it.

Epic

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2013 in Regal Fenway #1 (first-run, RealD)

It's a bit surprising to see a movie called "Epic" come from Blue Sky Studios and its founder Chris Wedge; of all the studios making animated features today, they are the one whose style is most based on kid-friendly cartooning; how will they mix with a story that promises more grandeur and danger? And while this is still something of a light adventure, this group is so good at putting things on screen that it's always a feast for the eyes,

There are two scales to the world, it posits. At the human scale, Mary Katherine (voice of Amanda Seyfried) is coming to live with her estranged father after her mother's death. At a much smaller scale, the Leaf People are locked in a battle for the fate of the forest with the Boggins. Today, when the summer solstice coincides with the full moon, Queen Tara (voice of Beyoncé Knowles) can choose an heir, though her chief guardian Ronin (voice of Colin Farrell) warns of an attack. It comes, and since M.K. was in the the woods, she winds up shrunk down to Leaf Person size, and will have to help Ronin and young hot-shot Nod (voice of Josh Hutcherson) keep the pod safe from the Boggins' king Mandrake (voice of Christoph Waltz).

Say this for Blue Sky: They make absolutely beautiful movies, and Epic is no exception to this rule. While some of the human faces sometimes seem to lack some of the detail given to everything else, they're expressive enough, and they're dropped into an amazingly detailed world - it's a sheer joy to just look at the leaf-based clothing and armor the Leaf People and Boggins have, especially the ones that are based on specific flowers or insects. The environments are similarly elaborate, and animals like mice and hummingbirds look nifty from that scale.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Le Tableau (The Painting)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)

The Painting (Le Tableau in the original French) is beautiful, and witty, and smart; you can tell that from the first frame of this movie about the lives of the figures inside a painting. And if it merely maintained that level of cleverness it would be something special. Instead, it kicks things up a notch, giving the audience even bigger ideas to chew on when it could just be tidying up.

Within one particular painting, there is a rather rigid class system - those who have been completely painted, the "Allduns", live in the castle; the ones who lack some finishing brushstrokes, "Halfies", are shut out and occupy the garden; while both look down on the "Sketchies". Alldun Ramo (voice of Adrien Larmande) and Halfie Claire (voice of Chloe Bertier) are in love but must meet clandestinely, and one of those meetings results in Ramo, Claire's young friend Lola (voice of Jessica Monceau), and Quill (voice of Thierry Jahn) - a Sketchie with good reason to be resentful - on a boat heading for the edge of the painting, then emerging into the studio with the aim of asking the Painter to finish them.

As the film starts, it looks like director Jean-François Laguionie and his co-writer Anik Leray are primarily going to be using the painting as a metaphor for race and class, and they get a lot of good material out of that: There's no mistaking the fascism in the words of Alldun leader Candlestick, and even the younger, more idealistic characters like Ramo and Lola can find themselves unconsciously treating Quill poorly. A pit stop in another painting of armies battling features a pointless war based entirely on whether the soldiers' uniforms are painted red or green. It's not always subtle, but it's well-done.

Full review on eFilmCritic.