It's been a while since I've been out to the West Newton Cinema; in fact, it's quite possible I haven't been there since that one time the Sci-Fi marathon ran there a little under a decade ago. I haven't been avoiding it so much as it's a tough trip for those of us without cars: It may be located right next to both a bus stop and a Commuter Rail station, but those are both focused on getting Newtonians into Boston for work and back at the end of the day. You're not getting there on Sunday, and you're not getting back in the evening without a pretty serious hike down Washington Street to Newton Corner, where you can catch the 57 bus to Kenmore.
That was the route I took getting back to the city, although I took the 553 between the two sections of Newton. It meant that I could not quite make it to Kendall Square in time to catch Bethlehem, which would have made a heck of a double feature with Omar, a real shame (Omar is a Palestinian movie about an Arab turned informant trying to avoid serving his friends up to the Israelis; Bethlehem comes from Israel and has a case-worker finding himself sympathizing with the Palestinian youth he's recruited to spy on his brother). Maybe it's better that way, though, so that the two don't merge too much in my mind.
The getting there was kind of surreal, though, as the first leg on the 70[A] bus is the route I used to take to work every day, so I was constantly noting what had changed and what had not in the ensuing couple of years. It kind of saddens me to see The Construction Site's storefront sitting empty but still having its distinctive facade; it was a great little toy store with lots of building toys and train sets, and my nieces are the right age to dig its wares. Of course, I'd also forgotten that the schedule for the 70 &70A was occasionally optimistic, and that sometimes the two buses on the same route until they diverge in Waltham Center will often pass each other, despite starting out with tween minutes between them. Almost made me miss my connection to the 553!
It was, however, fun to visit the West Newton again. It's one of the most unusual theaters in the general area from the black marquee with white lettering to the cash-only policy at the box office. Unlike a lot of the neighborhood theaters in the Boston area, they don't focus on first-run studio films at all, instead focusing almost all six of their screens on boutique films that on some occasions don't even play Cambridge or Brookline, although it's rate that they only have six movies playing, with kids' movies hanging around for extra weekend matinees and senior-targeted films playing afternoons. Movies aimed at a Jewish audience also seem to do especially well there. In many ways, it seems to be the very model of the sort of theater that should have died in the last few years, crippled by megalopolises and the conversion to digital, but the surprisingly robust crowd for a Saturday matinee of a foreign film that couldn't find big-city screens says otherwise. I suspect that this is the result of the building being owned free and clear and the owners knowing their area and its tastes much better than the guy booking for a whole chain from hundreds of miles away.
Of course, some part of that survival likely comes from not doing a whole lot to modernize the place beyond the digital projectors that are likely there. The architecture betrays that this was one a palace that has been cut into smaller screens (there's a tell-tale asymmetry to the room I was in downstairs, and I suspect that at least some of the four upstairs were once balcony seating. The general open feel of the lobby, more designed to hold people than sell them popcorn, speaks to this. So doors the design of some of the fixtures as well. It is likely not nearly as efficient as many newer - or contemporary-but-remodeled - theaters, but it gets the job done.
I like it. Not enough to make my way out there when something is playing elsewhere in the Boston area - it is still a best-case 70 minutes each way on the bus and using MoviePass is obviously right out - but I will stop discounting it as an option when a film only opens there or hands around the place longer than anywhere else.
Omar
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2014 in West Newton Cinema #2 (first-run, DCP)
Omar starts with its title character scaling a wall to travel between two Palestinian areas of Jerusalem, and while I don't know the exact rationale for that arrangement, a spy movie can do a heck of a lot with a wall like that. In fact, it might be tempted to do everything it can, crushing the story under more symbolism that it can really handle. This one, fortunately, knows the story it wants to tell and doesn't miss a beat with it.
Omar (Adam Bakri) is climbing that wall to meet with Tarek (Iyad Hoorani), a lifelong friend who is active in the Jerusalem brigades, with Omar and their other friend Amjad (Samer Bisharat) under his command; a chance to see Tarek's cute sister Nadia (Leem Lubany) is just a bonus. And while their operation is something of a success, it doesn't take the Israelis long to track them down and capture Omar. An agent by the name of Rami (Waleed Zuaiter) offers him freedom for delivering Tarek, but Omar is not about to simply roll over and do what Rami demands.
The basic plot of Omar is that of a spy movie, but because of the way geography and politics are set up in the West Bank, it in many ways has the feel of cops trying to develop sources inside the mob, and I suppose that from inside, which type of situation is the proper analogy depends on which side one is on. Writer/director Hany Abu-Assad takes how close walls are in this situation and takes great advantage of it, highlighting how, to a certain extent, cloak-and-dagger is part of everyday life in Palestine, from the dead-serious but almost comical amount of feelers Omar receives from various groups when his in prison to the way that courting involves sneaking over walls and exchanging notes like they were state secrets. This is how he finds new and exciting ways of tightening the screws toward the end, when many other filmmakers might have settled for the solution to the mystery that the movie is pointing to or just acknowledge that, in a city claimed by two groups, there's never any getting out.
Full review at EFC
Monday, March 17, 2014
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Tiger Tail in Blue
The Gathr Preview series moved to Sunday night in order to avoid colliding with the Belmont World Cinema series on Mondays for the next couple of months, but signs don't seem to point to this laying the whole length of the layer series. This weekend's preview of The Raid 2 has disappeared from the calendar, and while the March 30th show still does as playing on Sunday, the weeks after that have TBD screenings on Mondays.
That I was the only person who showed for this one didn't help, or that I mentioned not being sure if I would make it to the next one, even though I wanted to be there. It was also darn cold, and the other subscribers might have found themselves a little more confused and unwilling to press on upon seeing the main theater closed and the signage on the Underground (which is kind of inadvertently hidden, being new and all) indicating the afternoon's event, even fifteen minutes before the movie.
Or maybe folks are just well and truly done with mumblecore, even in the case of fairly decent examples of it like this one.
Tiger Tail in Blue
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2014 in the Regent Theatre Underground (Gathr Previews, digital)
Give the latest wave of young independent filmmakers this: They seem to recognize that they don't yet have much life experience to mine for movie plots, and the films they make show that awareness. It doesn't stop them from making things like Tiger Tail in Blue that never really advance its characters beyond being blank slates, but at least it means that this particular example is not weighed down by a mistaken estimate of its own significance.
It focuses on a young married couple in the Chicago area. Melody (Rebecca Spence) is a first-year high school teacher; Christopher (Frank V. Ross) is a writer, which means he waits tables every night and spends more time hanging out with the quiet restaurant's pretty bartender (Megan Mercier) than his wife. It is, as yet, unclear whether their opposing schedules are doing more to put a strain on their marriage or keeping a different sort of strain from building up.
Frank V. Ross writes, directs, edits, and makes the unfortunate misjudgment that the character he plays is the one that will capture the audience's interest. Christopher is kind of a self-centered little twerp, the kind who gets upset enough to rant about thoroughly innocuous things and could probably stand to be a lot more considerate of his wife's schedule, but he's not enough of a jerk to rise to the level of "a real piece of work", and as such never really becomes interesting. Meanwhile, the audience is seeing hints of a story around Melody's everyday life; the rookie teacher who doesn't know if she can handle the job or if it will even be around next year isn't exactly a new or innovative story, but at least it gives the viewer a hook (Ross, like many writers, profoundly overestimates how much sympathy the broke young writer waiting tables and engenders among non-writers), and that viewer can at least see it affecting her.
Full review at EFC
That I was the only person who showed for this one didn't help, or that I mentioned not being sure if I would make it to the next one, even though I wanted to be there. It was also darn cold, and the other subscribers might have found themselves a little more confused and unwilling to press on upon seeing the main theater closed and the signage on the Underground (which is kind of inadvertently hidden, being new and all) indicating the afternoon's event, even fifteen minutes before the movie.
Or maybe folks are just well and truly done with mumblecore, even in the case of fairly decent examples of it like this one.
Tiger Tail in Blue
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2014 in the Regent Theatre Underground (Gathr Previews, digital)
Give the latest wave of young independent filmmakers this: They seem to recognize that they don't yet have much life experience to mine for movie plots, and the films they make show that awareness. It doesn't stop them from making things like Tiger Tail in Blue that never really advance its characters beyond being blank slates, but at least it means that this particular example is not weighed down by a mistaken estimate of its own significance.
It focuses on a young married couple in the Chicago area. Melody (Rebecca Spence) is a first-year high school teacher; Christopher (Frank V. Ross) is a writer, which means he waits tables every night and spends more time hanging out with the quiet restaurant's pretty bartender (Megan Mercier) than his wife. It is, as yet, unclear whether their opposing schedules are doing more to put a strain on their marriage or keeping a different sort of strain from building up.
Frank V. Ross writes, directs, edits, and makes the unfortunate misjudgment that the character he plays is the one that will capture the audience's interest. Christopher is kind of a self-centered little twerp, the kind who gets upset enough to rant about thoroughly innocuous things and could probably stand to be a lot more considerate of his wife's schedule, but he's not enough of a jerk to rise to the level of "a real piece of work", and as such never really becomes interesting. Meanwhile, the audience is seeing hints of a story around Melody's everyday life; the rookie teacher who doesn't know if she can handle the job or if it will even be around next year isn't exactly a new or innovative story, but at least it gives the viewer a hook (Ross, like many writers, profoundly overestimates how much sympathy the broke young writer waiting tables and engenders among non-writers), and that viewer can at least see it affecting her.
Full review at EFC
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 March 2014 - 20 March 2014
As much as I enjoy the annual Chlotrudis awards, it's not cool that the after party for this one will probably bleed into one of the Gathr Previews events I've gotten the most excited for--
HEY! Where the heck is that preview of The Raid: Berendal? Just because I mentioned last week that I might not be able to make it is no reason to cancel the whole thing!
HEY! Where the heck is that preview of The Raid: Berendal? Just because I mentioned last week that I might not be able to make it is no reason to cancel the whole thing!
- Well, at least priority two for the week is still coming out - the Veronica Mars movie. I contributed to the Kickstarter for this, but it's not like that means I own a piece of it or even get a code to enter in Fandango for a free ticket (although there is other stuff coming on the level I donated). Still, I loved the series and am genuinely excited about seeing how things pick up seven years later. That's at Boston Common (most of the screenings in the US are at AMC theaters); it should also be available On Demand right away as well. Boston Common also has The Grapes of Wrath as their weekly classic on Sunday and Wednesday.
The big, mainstream opening is Need for Speed, which takes a game with no plot other than racing cars and grafts a tale of revenge and honor onto it. Hopefully the vehicular mayhem is quality (very little CGI is apparently used), and the cast full of people that folks seem to like - Aaron Paul, Dominic Cooper, Imogen Poots, and Michael Keaton - are doing more than picking up paychecks. It was post-converted to 3D, which the director is at least saying is great. It plays at the Capitol, Apple, Boston Common, Fenway (including 3D RPX), and the SuperLux.
Tyler Perry's new movie, The Single Moms Club, also hits theaters, with Nia Long, Amy Smart, Cocoa Brown, Xulay Henao, and Wendi McLendon-Covey in the title roles. They meet when something happens at their kids' school and apparently become fast friends that wacky stuff happens to. It's at Apple, Fenway, and Boston Common. - Another opening is strangely narrow in terms of the number of sites but big in each location. That would be The Grand Budapest Hotel, which the Coolidge is taking the relatively unusual step of opening on both their main screens (Kendall Square has it on three, and Boston Common on at least three). It makes sense for it to have that sort of opening - it's a very funny movie featuring Ralph Fiennes as a suave concierge and Tony Revolori as his lobby boy in a Wes Anderson period piece - as it's kind of eccentric but still has a bunch of movie stars and wide appeal.
The Coolidge will be programming some other things around it. The main midnight film this weekend is Bubba Ho-Tep with Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK in a retirement home long after both were believed dead, fighting a mummy in Don Coscarelli's adaptation of a Joe Lansdale story. It's on screen one on Friday and Saturday. Saturday night only, they've got a special double feature - James Franco's new experiment Interior: Leather Bar, in which he and some friends attempt to re-create 40 minutes cut from Cruising, and also discuss what you can and cannot do in the movies. It's followed by the movie itself.
For something completely different in tone, Saturday morning's Kids' Show is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Doesn't look like they're going to be showing the whole series, though, which might have been kind of fun and given me an excuse to finally see those last two. Sunday morning has a Goethe-Institut film, Shores of Hope, about East German dock workers with dreams beyond their closed nation. Monday evening has Scott Freiman back for another multimedia presentation on The Beatles, this one focusing on The White Album. The week finishes with another Francophone Film Series entry in the screening room, this one Quebec's Sarah Prefers to Run. - Kendall Square shuffles a fair amount of things around to fit in those three screens worth of Grand Budapest Hotel, but they've also got space for a one-week engagement of Visitors, a wordless black-and-white film from the team that did Koyaanisqatsi and the like, this one apparently focused on technology and its impact upon the Earth.
- I should probably cover (and visit) the West Newton Cinema more often, as they actually play a fair number of films that don't otherwise play the Boston area, even if the relatively scant transit routes in the area mean Saturday afternoons are the only time I can get out there. I may try that for Omar, Palestine's Oscar submission which nominee which features Adam Bakri as a freedom fighter/militant forced to act as an informant. They also pick up Stalingrad, for those who missed it in Imax 3D a couple weeks ago.
- Apple Cinemas/iMovieCafe looks to be keeping Queen around, alternating it with Bewakoofiyaan for your Bollywood-viewing pleasure. It features Ayushmann Khurrana and Sonam Kapoor as an upwardly mobile couple very much in love, although her father thinks he isn't good enough for her.
- The bulk of the Brattle Theatre lineup this week goes to Martin Scorcese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema, with an average of two newly-restored films from Poland's often avant-garde - and sometimes very pointed despite being made in a Communist ountry - film history. There are new features every day, from blockbusters to very strange art-house films.
There are a couple other events during the weekend, including a screening of Tiger & Bunny: The Rising, a feature-length adventure in a popular anime series. The other is Sunday afternoon's Chlotrudis awards, in which a group of film fans (including yours truly) recognize some of the best films from 2013 which did not have wide releases. - The Somerville Theatre keeps showing good stuff in 35mm to celebrate their centennial. This weekend includes double features of The Bridge on the River Kwai & Some Like it Hot on Friday, A Face in the Crowd & On the Waterfront Saturday, and Viva Las Vegas & Elvis: That's the Way it Is on Sunday. Clearly, some of these pairings are more about theme and others are more about release date.
Downstairs, the - Somerville Subterranean Cinema has three screenings of The Devil's Rook on Saturday. I had tried to fit that into my Fantasia schedule last year, but a combination of exhaustion and conflicts kept me from taking in James Sizemore's gory, practical-effect filled throwback about a portal to a demon-filled world. The theater will also be hosting Irish Film Festival Boston starting on Thursday, with opening-night "Best Breakthrough Feature" Run & Jump playing on the big screen. (This may explain why they've add matinee screenings of Philomena to the schedule as well).
- The Harvard Film Archive welcomes Eyal Sivan, and Israeli documentarian who will host two of his films as part of a "Clockwork of Power" series: The Specialist on Friday and Jaffa, the Orange's Clockwork on Saturday; Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, will run without him on Sunday (note: 4.5-hour film starting at 4pm). That leaves scant time for the "Fortunes of the Western" series, which has its penultimate presentation on Monday with Day of the Outlaw.
- The Museum of Fine Arts continues its look at New Latin American Cinema with Workers (Friday), Summer of Flying Fish (Friday, Saturday, Wednesday, Thursday), Heli (Saturday, Wednesday), Wolf at the Door (Saturday, Thursday), and All About Feathers (Wednesday). It overlaps with the Boston Turkish Film Festival, which starts Thursday with Jin.
- This week's entry in the Belmont World Film Series at Studio Cinema is Ilo Ilo, which hails from Singapore and tells the story of a Filipino maid who changes the dynamics of a well-off family, but whose position is threatened by the financial crisis of 1997.
- The Regent Theatre and Gathr, as mentioned, appear to be skipping the preview this week, but there will be a free screening of Project Wild Thing, which tells the story of David Bond, who appoints himself the "Marketing Director for Nature".
- the ICA has its last screenings of the Oscar-nominated short films on Sunday, with the animated shorts at noon and the live-action shorts at 3pm.
- Emerson's Bright Lights has one presentation in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening room this week. Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, is a documentary on Anita Hill, whose accusations of sexual harrassment did not derail Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court in in 1991.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel
I half-joke about thinking I like Wes Anderson less than I do in the eFilmCritic review, but there's a germ of truth in that description. When I was linking reviews in last week's "Next Week in Tickets" post, I noticed that I gave his films consistently high marks, only really hating The Darjeeling Limited. Maybe it's just the fact that he can take a few years between movies, giving a bad impression time to fester and maybe infest one's opinion of something like The Life Aquatic, which I quite liked at the time but now I can barely remember other than Harry Selick's animated creatures.
In a somewhat weird way, I almost feel bad about being unsatisfied with his movies at times. The one I mentioned disliking is also arguably the one where he is trying hardest to communicate something personal and emotional , so it almost feels kind of hypocritical to get frustrated with how his later films like Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest can almost seem hollow. Not quite, but he certainly sometimes seems to leech the life out of those movies by focusing so squarely on the technical minutia and noodling that the amount of attention being paid to that makes it hard to think about anything else.
Indeed, the way he seems to be so carefully targeting something in this one made me hem and haw on the star rating a lot more than I usually do or want to. For the bulk of the running time, this movie got full marks for making be laugh, but something about the end rubbed me the wrong way, and though it's one minute or two that doesn't really counter the rest... Well, spoilers after the EFC review.
In the meantime, it opens tomorrow in Boston, with limited locations but a lot of screenage where it is playing, and I recommend it highly. It's a fine and very funny comedy, and deserves to be loved for that.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2014 in the Brattle Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
When trailers for The Grand Budapest Hotel first started appearing a few months ago, I felt some apprehension. Not so much because I often think I like director Wes Anderson less than I do, but because a large fraction of the enterprise seemed to rest upon Ralph Fiennes being light and funny, and when has that ever happened on-screen? It happens here, though, with Fiennes one of the major moving parts that keeps Anderson's meticulously constructed machine moving.
Fiennes plays Gustave H, the head concierge at a resort hotel in a small Eastern European country who sees to the guests' every need with efficiency and a certain variety of perfumed charm - especially the rich old ladies. When one (Tilda Swindon) kicks the bucket and leaves Gustave a priceless painting, her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) is enraged; he has a Pinkerton-type thug (Willem Dafoe) frame Gustave for her death. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, with Gustave, lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori), and Zero's beloved Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) facing war, secret societies, and murder most foul.
There are plenty of other players involved, to an almost absurd degree. The list of on-screen talent for this movie reads like the work of a downright gluttonous casting director, and they are stuffed into the film in every way possible. There are a couple of gags whose entire punchline seems to be "hey, isn't that [famous actor]?". There are folks buried under so much makeup that one wonders why the filmmakers didn't just cast someone age-appropriate. There are quick glimpses of analogous characters that make one wonder about alternate casting scenarios where Bill Murray or Bob Balaban took Fiennes's role. And finally and firstly, the main body of the movie is contained within no less than three layers of bookends, allowing multiple different characters to look back and be played by more than one actor. Wes Anderson has always assembled cool, star-studded casts, but one wonders if he is engaging in some sort of self-parody here.
Full review at EFC
SPOILERS!
What ticked me off about this movie? A seeming inability to recognize when "happily ever after" isn't a cop-out, even if the movie in question is squarely aimed at adults. When F. Murray Abraham's narrator mentioned that not only did Saoirse Ronan's Agatha die just a couple years after the happy ending being shown on screen, but so did Zero's and Agatha's newborn child, I couldn't help but think, why you gotta be a jerk like that? This thing is already a fantasy, and you've already supplied some irony by having Gustave end tragically just as he emerged from his amorality. This just feels like deciding that grown-up movies can't have happy endings, and it maybe makes the filmmakers feel more clever to talk about sadness but show happiness. The thing is, this movie really doesn't have the thematic heft for that sort of mixed emotions at the end. It's muddying up something that, even when it was serious, was still pretty escapist.
Plus, I couldn't help but feel, this is Anderson, and I found myself imagining him pondering just what was the proper amount of buzzkill. Agatha dying apparently wasn't enough to make Zero melancholy for the rest of his life, so add in the child. But don't actually show that; it would make the audience too depressed. And so on. Every filmmaker does this, of course, but few are known for their obsession and precision quite as much as Anderson, so instead of being organic or emotional, the mind jumps to pure mechanics.
!SRELIOPS
In a somewhat weird way, I almost feel bad about being unsatisfied with his movies at times. The one I mentioned disliking is also arguably the one where he is trying hardest to communicate something personal and emotional , so it almost feels kind of hypocritical to get frustrated with how his later films like Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest can almost seem hollow. Not quite, but he certainly sometimes seems to leech the life out of those movies by focusing so squarely on the technical minutia and noodling that the amount of attention being paid to that makes it hard to think about anything else.
Indeed, the way he seems to be so carefully targeting something in this one made me hem and haw on the star rating a lot more than I usually do or want to. For the bulk of the running time, this movie got full marks for making be laugh, but something about the end rubbed me the wrong way, and though it's one minute or two that doesn't really counter the rest... Well, spoilers after the EFC review.
In the meantime, it opens tomorrow in Boston, with limited locations but a lot of screenage where it is playing, and I recommend it highly. It's a fine and very funny comedy, and deserves to be loved for that.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2014 in the Brattle Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
When trailers for The Grand Budapest Hotel first started appearing a few months ago, I felt some apprehension. Not so much because I often think I like director Wes Anderson less than I do, but because a large fraction of the enterprise seemed to rest upon Ralph Fiennes being light and funny, and when has that ever happened on-screen? It happens here, though, with Fiennes one of the major moving parts that keeps Anderson's meticulously constructed machine moving.
Fiennes plays Gustave H, the head concierge at a resort hotel in a small Eastern European country who sees to the guests' every need with efficiency and a certain variety of perfumed charm - especially the rich old ladies. When one (Tilda Swindon) kicks the bucket and leaves Gustave a priceless painting, her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) is enraged; he has a Pinkerton-type thug (Willem Dafoe) frame Gustave for her death. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, with Gustave, lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori), and Zero's beloved Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) facing war, secret societies, and murder most foul.
There are plenty of other players involved, to an almost absurd degree. The list of on-screen talent for this movie reads like the work of a downright gluttonous casting director, and they are stuffed into the film in every way possible. There are a couple of gags whose entire punchline seems to be "hey, isn't that [famous actor]?". There are folks buried under so much makeup that one wonders why the filmmakers didn't just cast someone age-appropriate. There are quick glimpses of analogous characters that make one wonder about alternate casting scenarios where Bill Murray or Bob Balaban took Fiennes's role. And finally and firstly, the main body of the movie is contained within no less than three layers of bookends, allowing multiple different characters to look back and be played by more than one actor. Wes Anderson has always assembled cool, star-studded casts, but one wonders if he is engaging in some sort of self-parody here.
Full review at EFC
SPOILERS!
What ticked me off about this movie? A seeming inability to recognize when "happily ever after" isn't a cop-out, even if the movie in question is squarely aimed at adults. When F. Murray Abraham's narrator mentioned that not only did Saoirse Ronan's Agatha die just a couple years after the happy ending being shown on screen, but so did Zero's and Agatha's newborn child, I couldn't help but think, why you gotta be a jerk like that? This thing is already a fantasy, and you've already supplied some irony by having Gustave end tragically just as he emerged from his amorality. This just feels like deciding that grown-up movies can't have happy endings, and it maybe makes the filmmakers feel more clever to talk about sadness but show happiness. The thing is, this movie really doesn't have the thematic heft for that sort of mixed emotions at the end. It's muddying up something that, even when it was serious, was still pretty escapist.
Plus, I couldn't help but feel, this is Anderson, and I found myself imagining him pondering just what was the proper amount of buzzkill. Agatha dying apparently wasn't enough to make Zero melancholy for the rest of his life, so add in the child. But don't actually show that; it would make the audience too depressed. And so on. Every filmmaker does this, of course, but few are known for their obsession and precision quite as much as Anderson, so instead of being organic or emotional, the mind jumps to pure mechanics.
!SRELIOPS
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Two at the Brattle: Jimmy P. & A Field in England
This bit of movie-watching advice is really just common sense, but, honestly, when you've worked a complete day that leaves you bleary-eyed from trying to find noteworthy discrepancies when comparing one 12,000 line database summary to another, the best thing to do might be to just go home and crash, as opposed to trying to do a triple feature at two different theaters because it looks like much of the weekend might be spoken for. I got through Jimmy P. without much trouble, but missed large swaths of A Field in England, and then hemmed and hawed about getting on the 66 bus to head to Coolidge Corner for Almost Human but finally went for it, finishing the last pepperoni pizza at Otto's before they closed at midnight. Then I slept until about 11am the next day, worked from home, and then gave A Field in England another try at 9:30pm.
I'll be totally honest: I think I might have missed a couple of minutes there. There's a big jump at around 2/3 the way through the movie that I might have just missed twice, but there's enough exposition afterwards that it would have seemed odd if Wheatley had actually showed it as well. I don't think I'll get to the movie a third time in theaters, but I'm certainly looking to give it another view on Blu-ray in a couple of months. At like 7pm, because I'm clearly old.
At any rate, both of these are good movies, and if you're in the Boston area, I'd recommend seeing them before they leave the Brattle after Thursday.
Jimmy P.
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2014 in the Brattle Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
Early on in Jimmy P., a character apologizes for the way he talks, and it's a bit of an odd moment, as he's not the one whose manner of speech is likely to give a modern audience pause. Confronting that is what makes this movie a little more interesting than it might be - as much as we today attempt to respect different cultures, we often get uncomfortable with actually treating them as different. That is likely not quite the intent of the original work, but it's hard to watch the movie without thinking about it.
We are introduced to James Picard (Benicio Del Toro) as he works his sister's farm in Browning, Montana, in 1948. He is suffering debilitating pain and occasional spells of blindness, and has been since returning from the way. He is referred to Winter Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, where the doctors can find nothing physically wrong with him but are very hesitant to label him as schizophrenic based on his responses to the standard psychiatric tests. So one calls in an old friend, Dr. Georges Deveraux (Mathieu Amalric), an anthropologist whose work focuses on American Indians, although he is looking to learn as much as help.
The decision to call Deveraux is made after one of the doctors in residence says rather bluntly that they cannot tell whether Jimmy is mentally ill or just an Indian and this beyond their comprehension, and it's a comment that shapes how the movie engaged with Jimmy's culture in a challengingly honest way: At first, it seems awful, like Native Americans are not quite human, but it eventually proves to be both honest and useful. This tension between how most in the audience likely want to be respectful to Native peoples and how that respect often takes the form of depicting them as assimilated rather than "primitive" is a constant throughout the movie, whether expressed through Deveraux's note-taking, the drums on the soundtrack, or Jimmy's halting speech. It's a facet that one must sort of stand outside the movie to appreciate and which could easily rub a viewer the wrong way, but which turns out to be an interesting and crucial layer.
Full review at EFC
A Field in England
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7, 8 March 2014 in the Brattle Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
Having an annual pass to the Brattle Theater means that it's no big deal to come back the next night when the attempt to see three movies after a full day in the office means that something gets napped through. That bit of zoning-out during my first attempt to watch A Field in England should not be laid at the movie's feet; after all, even knowing the end, I wanted to catch the whole thing the next day, and doing so cost it none of its strange appeal.
The audience is thrown right into its odd world as academically-inclined servant Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) pleads that he needs more time to complete his mission on the edge of a battle during the English Civil War. The man threatening him is killed, and he joins with the soldiers deserting and/or cut off from their armies - Cutler (Ryan Pope), Jacob (Peter Ferdinando), and Friend (Richard Glover) - to rest at a pub one knows. On the way, they stumble across Whitehead's quarry, but this O'Neil (Michael Smiley) appears to have some occult power as well as knowledge of a treasure hidden somewhere within the seemingly endless field.
Director Ben Wheatley and writer Amy Jump have never been ones to waste much time getting the audience into a story and they don't start here, introducing their characters in rapid succession and having them tell each other what the audience needs to know to get an idea of the circumstances without it ever seeming like a targeted release of information. It's a snappy, often witty way to get the viewer into the picture, and it never feels nearly as aimless as some movies whose makers try that structure do (including, arguably, Wheatley's own Down Terrace). Which is good, because once O'Neil shows up, things start happening pretty quickly, and it wouldn't do for a movie that's already starting to get weird to leave the audience completely at sea.
Full review at EFC
I'll be totally honest: I think I might have missed a couple of minutes there. There's a big jump at around 2/3 the way through the movie that I might have just missed twice, but there's enough exposition afterwards that it would have seemed odd if Wheatley had actually showed it as well. I don't think I'll get to the movie a third time in theaters, but I'm certainly looking to give it another view on Blu-ray in a couple of months. At like 7pm, because I'm clearly old.
At any rate, both of these are good movies, and if you're in the Boston area, I'd recommend seeing them before they leave the Brattle after Thursday.
Jimmy P.
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2014 in the Brattle Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
Early on in Jimmy P., a character apologizes for the way he talks, and it's a bit of an odd moment, as he's not the one whose manner of speech is likely to give a modern audience pause. Confronting that is what makes this movie a little more interesting than it might be - as much as we today attempt to respect different cultures, we often get uncomfortable with actually treating them as different. That is likely not quite the intent of the original work, but it's hard to watch the movie without thinking about it.
We are introduced to James Picard (Benicio Del Toro) as he works his sister's farm in Browning, Montana, in 1948. He is suffering debilitating pain and occasional spells of blindness, and has been since returning from the way. He is referred to Winter Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, where the doctors can find nothing physically wrong with him but are very hesitant to label him as schizophrenic based on his responses to the standard psychiatric tests. So one calls in an old friend, Dr. Georges Deveraux (Mathieu Amalric), an anthropologist whose work focuses on American Indians, although he is looking to learn as much as help.
The decision to call Deveraux is made after one of the doctors in residence says rather bluntly that they cannot tell whether Jimmy is mentally ill or just an Indian and this beyond their comprehension, and it's a comment that shapes how the movie engaged with Jimmy's culture in a challengingly honest way: At first, it seems awful, like Native Americans are not quite human, but it eventually proves to be both honest and useful. This tension between how most in the audience likely want to be respectful to Native peoples and how that respect often takes the form of depicting them as assimilated rather than "primitive" is a constant throughout the movie, whether expressed through Deveraux's note-taking, the drums on the soundtrack, or Jimmy's halting speech. It's a facet that one must sort of stand outside the movie to appreciate and which could easily rub a viewer the wrong way, but which turns out to be an interesting and crucial layer.
Full review at EFC
A Field in England
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7, 8 March 2014 in the Brattle Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
Having an annual pass to the Brattle Theater means that it's no big deal to come back the next night when the attempt to see three movies after a full day in the office means that something gets napped through. That bit of zoning-out during my first attempt to watch A Field in England should not be laid at the movie's feet; after all, even knowing the end, I wanted to catch the whole thing the next day, and doing so cost it none of its strange appeal.
The audience is thrown right into its odd world as academically-inclined servant Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) pleads that he needs more time to complete his mission on the edge of a battle during the English Civil War. The man threatening him is killed, and he joins with the soldiers deserting and/or cut off from their armies - Cutler (Ryan Pope), Jacob (Peter Ferdinando), and Friend (Richard Glover) - to rest at a pub one knows. On the way, they stumble across Whitehead's quarry, but this O'Neil (Michael Smiley) appears to have some occult power as well as knowledge of a treasure hidden somewhere within the seemingly endless field.
Director Ben Wheatley and writer Amy Jump have never been ones to waste much time getting the audience into a story and they don't start here, introducing their characters in rapid succession and having them tell each other what the audience needs to know to get an idea of the circumstances without it ever seeming like a targeted release of information. It's a snappy, often witty way to get the viewer into the picture, and it never feels nearly as aimless as some movies whose makers try that structure do (including, arguably, Wheatley's own Down Terrace). Which is good, because once O'Neil shows up, things start happening pretty quickly, and it wouldn't do for a movie that's already starting to get weird to leave the audience completely at sea.
Full review at EFC
Saturday, March 08, 2014
Almost Human
I suppose I should have suspected the Almost Human filmmakers were local when I saw that they'd be at the Coolidge in person, but the film being another "folks from Rhode Island" special after last week took me a bit by surprise. Many, many people who were involved with the production or knew the cast & crew showed up.
See? (Left to right: Someone whose name I didn't catch, co-star Vanessa Leigh, someone else I don't know, co-star/editor Josh Ethier, co-star Anthony Amaral III, writer/director Joe Begos. Cut me some slack on not knowing people, it was 2am!)
I must admit, though, that as writer/director Joe Begos and co-star/editor Josh Ethier exhorted folks to scream for the kills and everything else, and then answered questions afterward, I recognized that we have strong philosophical differences on the subject of horror movies. The biggest was when he was talking about how technology ruined horror, and I kind of wanted to call him out on that. Oh, no, the fact that characters have mobile phones and the internet makes it harder to keep characters isolated and ignorant? Good! Use that. Write something aout how the demonic descendants of the ancient evils can haunt and curse and borrow from other mythologies like their progenitors never could but don't really feel passionate about it. Play with how instant portable communication creates the weird dichotomy of being there and not there at the same time, and use it to make people feel more helpless. Collaborate with people around the world to give your basic body-snatcher or zombie story the scale that's always been implied. Make something that speaks to your audience's fears rather than just repeats the things that made their parents jump.
Then again, given how much Joe enjoyed that IFC Midnight made them 100 VHS tapes to keep, give away in contests, etc., it's hard to argue that they're enjoying horror the wrong way. This is, after all, entertainment and having fun should be part of the plan.
You know, I think that awful picture works here. But here's a better one:
Anyway, everybody will be at the Coolidge again at midnight tonight (four hours from now, so, no, I didn't get this written/posted with great speed). It's a fun time, and you can't deny their enthusiasm.
Almost Human
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (@fter Midnite Fresh Blood, digital)
Almost Human is a splatter movie aimed squarely at the sharp objects and shotguns crowd, and if you're in the mood for that sort of thing, it delivers without a whole lot of other distractions. It's not really scary, but it moves quickly and has a couple of better-than-average moments, which is something that not every movie of its type can say.
Two years ago, in 1987, Seth Hampton (Graham Skipper) burst into his friend Mark Fisher's house, raving to Mark (Josh Ethier) that their friend had disappeared in a flash of blue light, and while neither Mark nor his girlfriend Jen Craven (Vanessa Leigh) gave that tale much credence, an ear-piercing whine incapacitates Seth and Jen but leads Mark to leave the house, never to be seen again. Well, at least not for another two years, when Jen has moved on better than Seth - she's engaged to well-off Clyde Dutton (Anthony Amaral III) - and a couple of hunters a hundred miles away find a naked man in the woods.
They're quickly dispatched and the returned Mark starts heading back to Patten (a small town in southern Maine where the cars all have Rhode Island plates), leaving a few more bodies in his wake. It would, perhaps, be nice if what was going on in Mark's head was a little more fleshed out; he's off-handedly murdering people and doing weird things with the bodies, but in demeanor and physicality he often seems to be the guy from the opening minutes. If writer/director Joe Begos were more interested in the whys and hows of this story, there would be some interesting material there - it's not often that aliens return an abductee (or a duplicate) to where they were taken and have the desire to execute some creepy master plan exist alongside his old self rather than displacing them, and that might have been a neat take. That's shoved off to the side, along with Jen's unexplained uneasy feeling and Seth's nosebleeds and bad dreams, so that he can get to the gore.
Full review at EFC
See? (Left to right: Someone whose name I didn't catch, co-star Vanessa Leigh, someone else I don't know, co-star/editor Josh Ethier, co-star Anthony Amaral III, writer/director Joe Begos. Cut me some slack on not knowing people, it was 2am!)
I must admit, though, that as writer/director Joe Begos and co-star/editor Josh Ethier exhorted folks to scream for the kills and everything else, and then answered questions afterward, I recognized that we have strong philosophical differences on the subject of horror movies. The biggest was when he was talking about how technology ruined horror, and I kind of wanted to call him out on that. Oh, no, the fact that characters have mobile phones and the internet makes it harder to keep characters isolated and ignorant? Good! Use that. Write something aout how the demonic descendants of the ancient evils can haunt and curse and borrow from other mythologies like their progenitors never could but don't really feel passionate about it. Play with how instant portable communication creates the weird dichotomy of being there and not there at the same time, and use it to make people feel more helpless. Collaborate with people around the world to give your basic body-snatcher or zombie story the scale that's always been implied. Make something that speaks to your audience's fears rather than just repeats the things that made their parents jump.
Then again, given how much Joe enjoyed that IFC Midnight made them 100 VHS tapes to keep, give away in contests, etc., it's hard to argue that they're enjoying horror the wrong way. This is, after all, entertainment and having fun should be part of the plan.
You know, I think that awful picture works here. But here's a better one:
Anyway, everybody will be at the Coolidge again at midnight tonight (four hours from now, so, no, I didn't get this written/posted with great speed). It's a fun time, and you can't deny their enthusiasm.
Almost Human
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (@fter Midnite Fresh Blood, digital)
Almost Human is a splatter movie aimed squarely at the sharp objects and shotguns crowd, and if you're in the mood for that sort of thing, it delivers without a whole lot of other distractions. It's not really scary, but it moves quickly and has a couple of better-than-average moments, which is something that not every movie of its type can say.
Two years ago, in 1987, Seth Hampton (Graham Skipper) burst into his friend Mark Fisher's house, raving to Mark (Josh Ethier) that their friend had disappeared in a flash of blue light, and while neither Mark nor his girlfriend Jen Craven (Vanessa Leigh) gave that tale much credence, an ear-piercing whine incapacitates Seth and Jen but leads Mark to leave the house, never to be seen again. Well, at least not for another two years, when Jen has moved on better than Seth - she's engaged to well-off Clyde Dutton (Anthony Amaral III) - and a couple of hunters a hundred miles away find a naked man in the woods.
They're quickly dispatched and the returned Mark starts heading back to Patten (a small town in southern Maine where the cars all have Rhode Island plates), leaving a few more bodies in his wake. It would, perhaps, be nice if what was going on in Mark's head was a little more fleshed out; he's off-handedly murdering people and doing weird things with the bodies, but in demeanor and physicality he often seems to be the guy from the opening minutes. If writer/director Joe Begos were more interested in the whys and hows of this story, there would be some interesting material there - it's not often that aliens return an abductee (or a duplicate) to where they were taken and have the desire to execute some creepy master plan exist alongside his old self rather than displacing them, and that might have been a neat take. That's shoved off to the side, along with Jen's unexplained uneasy feeling and Seth's nosebleeds and bad dreams, so that he can get to the gore.
Full review at EFC
Normal (2013)
I'll write about it a bit more when I get around to doing This Week that covers the past month, but this was the second Saturday in a row where I did more than two movies in as many municipalities, and those can be some long, sleep-til-noon-on-Sunday marathons, especially when they wind up tighter than expected. In this case, I think I figured that I had a little more time to hang styling the Coolidge and chat with Brian Tamm than was actually the case, although it's not his fault that the 66 bus likes to seemingly go backward if the MBTA tracking apps are correct, or that it delivered me to Harvard Square just in time for there to be a longer-than-usual wait for the Red Line. Which means that at about around ten, I was in the T station, hoping hard that the 8pm screening ran long or that Chris Hallock and company were doing a long intro for the 10pm show.
Ha-ha! Ten-fifteen and the Q&A for the last one was still going on! Obviously, I didn't see the intro, but I think that's director Richard Griffin on the right, wrote Lenny Schwartz in the middle, and Chris on the left. Well, him I know. Sorry about the red-eye. As I got in, Griffin was answering a question about cinematography, and then things broke up to adjourn to a nearby bar.
And, it turned out, leave me there to watch the movie by myself. I found that kind of amusing; the tickets for the 5pm and 8pm shows sold out fairly quickly, and Chris talked about adding the late show, but it appears that two shows was just about the level of demand for some pretty decent locally-produced psychological horror, and who knows how much of that was friends and family of people involved traveling up from Providence, where the movie was shoot minus some Boston exteriors.
(Don't feel too bad for Chris having to stick around and run it for just me, though; he headed upstairs and watched Citizen Kane in 35mm.)
If you go to the eFilmCritic review, you'll see that I end by comparing it, and by extension Griffin's other movies, to the cinematic equivalent of community theater, but I don't necessarily do that to dismiss them. What better metaphor is there for Griffin's Scorpio Film Releasing, which specializes in getting the same group of writers, directors, and actors together to do a few low-budget movies per year? That's what they do and good for them.
Especially since they do, in fact, seem to be getting better. Not many of these groups seem to last as long as this one, and at least based on what I've seen, Griffin is getting better: Atomic Brain Invasion was a somewhat better than usual 1950s sci-fi parody, still not good but at least better than most of that fundamentally misbegotten genre, while Murder University was the same sort of thing, except with 1980s slashers, and at least managed to have it's moments. You could at least see potential and progression there. And while i admit that I'm more likely to rate a movie which actually tries to do a higher than one that looks to spoof it, I think that Normal is just a stronger movie all around than the others.
A good part of that is the cast; I seem to recall liking Sarah Nicklin in Atomic Brain Invasion, and it looks from IMDB that this is her and husband Michael Reed's last movie in New England before decamping for the West Coast. I hope they do well there, not just because ones hours everyone succeeds in what they set out to do, but because they seem ready for the promotion to the big leagues. Leaves Griffin with a heck of a hole to fill, though.
Normal (2013)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, digital)
This is not the first time independent director Richard Griffin has tried to give his audience the creeps without having his tongue planted in his cheek - given how prolific the Rhode Island filmmaker has been since he started making movies about 15 years ago, it's no surprise that he's done a bit of everything - but it's likely his best so far. It's occasionally as shaky as one might expect from an off-the-grid production that straddles the art-house and the grindhouse, but it works out pretty well.
It starts out with Jim (Michael Reed) interrupting a rather one-sided conversation with the body in his bathtub to take a call from one of the residents of the building he and brother Tom (Nathaniel Sylva) own where Jim is the superintendent. The tenants are odd - newlyweds David (Patrick Keeffe) and Lucy (Monica Saviolakis) seem normal enough, but Kate (Elyssa Baldassari) is clearly disturbed, while both middle-aged George (David Erin Wilson) and seedy roommates April (Samantha Acampora) & June (Shannon Hartman). He only has eyes for a call girl (Sarah Nicklin) whose affections seem more sincere but who won't let him use her name when she's there in a professional capacity. Tom wants to sell and move away with his girlfriend, but Jim refuses. It probably has something to do with that corpse.
There are two types of serial-killer story that leap to mind from this situation, and while the second has probably been done enough that it's familiar enough on its own way, it is still more interesting and less purely mechanical than having Jim do nothing but murder his way through his neighbors as they complain about their apartments not receiving the maintenance they need. Griffin and writer Lenny Schwartz don't tease the audience by being needlessly cryptic for longer than they need to, but they do make good use of ambiguity and misdirection well enough that things can go in different directions without it being too obvious. The end is, perhaps, a little too weirdly metaphorical for the film's own good, but it gets there more honestly than some other movies of this type, in part because of an amusing (but still creepy) self-awareness.
Full review at EFC
Ha-ha! Ten-fifteen and the Q&A for the last one was still going on! Obviously, I didn't see the intro, but I think that's director Richard Griffin on the right, wrote Lenny Schwartz in the middle, and Chris on the left. Well, him I know. Sorry about the red-eye. As I got in, Griffin was answering a question about cinematography, and then things broke up to adjourn to a nearby bar.
And, it turned out, leave me there to watch the movie by myself. I found that kind of amusing; the tickets for the 5pm and 8pm shows sold out fairly quickly, and Chris talked about adding the late show, but it appears that two shows was just about the level of demand for some pretty decent locally-produced psychological horror, and who knows how much of that was friends and family of people involved traveling up from Providence, where the movie was shoot minus some Boston exteriors.
(Don't feel too bad for Chris having to stick around and run it for just me, though; he headed upstairs and watched Citizen Kane in 35mm.)
If you go to the eFilmCritic review, you'll see that I end by comparing it, and by extension Griffin's other movies, to the cinematic equivalent of community theater, but I don't necessarily do that to dismiss them. What better metaphor is there for Griffin's Scorpio Film Releasing, which specializes in getting the same group of writers, directors, and actors together to do a few low-budget movies per year? That's what they do and good for them.
Especially since they do, in fact, seem to be getting better. Not many of these groups seem to last as long as this one, and at least based on what I've seen, Griffin is getting better: Atomic Brain Invasion was a somewhat better than usual 1950s sci-fi parody, still not good but at least better than most of that fundamentally misbegotten genre, while Murder University was the same sort of thing, except with 1980s slashers, and at least managed to have it's moments. You could at least see potential and progression there. And while i admit that I'm more likely to rate a movie which actually tries to do a higher than one that looks to spoof it, I think that Normal is just a stronger movie all around than the others.
A good part of that is the cast; I seem to recall liking Sarah Nicklin in Atomic Brain Invasion, and it looks from IMDB that this is her and husband Michael Reed's last movie in New England before decamping for the West Coast. I hope they do well there, not just because ones hours everyone succeeds in what they set out to do, but because they seem ready for the promotion to the big leagues. Leaves Griffin with a heck of a hole to fill, though.
Normal (2013)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Somerville Subterranean Cinema, digital)
This is not the first time independent director Richard Griffin has tried to give his audience the creeps without having his tongue planted in his cheek - given how prolific the Rhode Island filmmaker has been since he started making movies about 15 years ago, it's no surprise that he's done a bit of everything - but it's likely his best so far. It's occasionally as shaky as one might expect from an off-the-grid production that straddles the art-house and the grindhouse, but it works out pretty well.
It starts out with Jim (Michael Reed) interrupting a rather one-sided conversation with the body in his bathtub to take a call from one of the residents of the building he and brother Tom (Nathaniel Sylva) own where Jim is the superintendent. The tenants are odd - newlyweds David (Patrick Keeffe) and Lucy (Monica Saviolakis) seem normal enough, but Kate (Elyssa Baldassari) is clearly disturbed, while both middle-aged George (David Erin Wilson) and seedy roommates April (Samantha Acampora) & June (Shannon Hartman). He only has eyes for a call girl (Sarah Nicklin) whose affections seem more sincere but who won't let him use her name when she's there in a professional capacity. Tom wants to sell and move away with his girlfriend, but Jim refuses. It probably has something to do with that corpse.
There are two types of serial-killer story that leap to mind from this situation, and while the second has probably been done enough that it's familiar enough on its own way, it is still more interesting and less purely mechanical than having Jim do nothing but murder his way through his neighbors as they complain about their apartments not receiving the maintenance they need. Griffin and writer Lenny Schwartz don't tease the audience by being needlessly cryptic for longer than they need to, but they do make good use of ambiguity and misdirection well enough that things can go in different directions without it being too obvious. The end is, perhaps, a little too weirdly metaphorical for the film's own good, but it gets there more honestly than some other movies of this type, in part because of an amusing (but still creepy) self-awareness.
Full review at EFC
Friday, March 07, 2014
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 March 2014 - 13 March 2014
Dear people who book movies for Boston theaters,
I understand there aren't a whole lot of screens here compared to cities of similar size, and we don't tend to leave our neighborhoods or get terribly adventurous, but, guys: Special ID starring Donnie Yen opens in many places that are not Boston today. Yen is a great big action star and grew up here. We should take more pride in that.
Your friend, Jay.
My plans? Uh, clone myself to see all the cool things playing Thursday. Not possible? Dang. Then probably a Brattle double feature of Jimmy P. & A Field in England, Almost Human, try for Tiger Tail in Blue and Playing Dead, see if Generation War can possibly fit in as well as Bethlehem and Found.
(And, no, all that stuff does not make me any less annoyed that Special ID is not playing here!)
I understand there aren't a whole lot of screens here compared to cities of similar size, and we don't tend to leave our neighborhoods or get terribly adventurous, but, guys: Special ID starring Donnie Yen opens in many places that are not Boston today. Yen is a great big action star and grew up here. We should take more pride in that.
Your friend, Jay.
- What's opening in all those theaters that are not showing Special ID (or, for that matter, Journey to the West, the new Stephen Chow movie also opening today)? Two 3D movies that come from pre-existing material. The first is Mr. Peabody & Sherman, which expands the recurring segment from Jay Ward's Rocky & Bullwinkle show into a feature where the dog and his boy (and the girl he likes) attempt to fix the history they messed up rather than just make a goofy pun. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Boston Common, and Fenway; most screenings are in 2D, even though DreamWorks does 3D better than most everybody.
The other big opening is 300: Rise of an Empire, a sequel nominally based upon Frank Miller's Xerxes comic, although that never actually came out. Eva Green plays a Spartan naval genious who, along with Xerxes, battles Greek hero Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton). It plays at Somerville (3D only), Apple, Jordan's Furniture (Imax 3D only), Boston Common (including the Imax screen), Fenway (RPX), and the SuperLux. Interestingly, Fandango is listing Fenway's RPX screenings as Dolby 3D rather than Real3D; not sure if that's a misprint or an upgrade or what.
Boston Common will also be showing Chicago on Sunday and Wednesday. They'll also have two screens showing the special Veronica Mars "fan events" on Thursday, along with the openings of Mars, Need for Speed, and Single Moms Club. - Fenway and Apple Cinemas/iMovieCafe have keep Shaadi Ke Side/Effects for single shows daily, but Apple is also opening two other movies in Hindi with English subtitles: Queen stars Kangana Ranaut as a woman left at the altar who uses her already-paid-for honeymoon to see the world and discover herself. There's also Total Siyappa (aka Total Chaos aka Aman Ki Aasha), a romantic comedy where a Pakistani living in London has trouble impressing his Indian girlfriend's parents.
Apple also has a couple American independents. Awful Nice is a comedy about two brothers (one a screw-up, one not) who have to work together to renovate their vacation home in Branson, MO after their father dies. They've also got Hank: 5 Years from the Brink, Joe Berlinger's new documentary. It's an extended interview with former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who claims to find the bailout and what led to it "reprehensible". - Kendall Square turns some things over post-Oscars, picking up three or four movies, depending how you count them. The "or" comes from the one-week booking of Generation War, a German miniseries about five young Germans in the early days of the war. It shows in two separate-admission parts, with Part 1 showing Friday to Thursday, and Part 2 starting Saturday. They split a screen, so plan your trip(s) to the theater carefully.
There's also Bethlehem, a spy thriller set in the West Bank about a Mossad agent who has cultivated a Palestinian asset in order to get at his brother, only to find things getting complicated. There's also Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, a profile of the 87-year-old theater legend that I seem to recall got pretty good notices when it played IFFBoston last year. - The Brattle Theatre has two films opening this week. The afternoons and evenings are given to Jimmy P., which features Benicio Del Toro as the title character, a Blackfoot WWII veteran whose mental health problems remain intractable until a French anthropologist (Mathieu Amalric) takes the case. Then, later at night, there's A Field in England, the latest from Ben Wheatley, a black-and-white head trip about deserters during the English Civil War of the 1600s searching for a treasure that may be something stranger than gold.
The exception is Monday evening, when the DocYard will present First Cousin Once Removed, which introduces viewers to Edwin Honig, a poet and teacher suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Director Alan Berliner, who is in fact Honig's cousin, will be there for Q&A afterward. - The Coolidge also has guests, but those will be for the Friday and Saturday midnight showings of Almost Human, with director Joe Begos and actor Mark Ethier there to introduce and maybe face interrogation on their horror movie in which a man (Ethier) vanishes in a flash of light which somehow ties into a set of murders two years later. That's upstairs; a rare, X-rated 35mm print of Wild at Heart will be playing midnights downstairs.
The 14-seat Goldscreen will have Child's Pose, last year's Golden Lion winner and Romania's Oscar submission, which stars Luminita Gheorghiu as a mother doing everything possible to keep her son out of jail for vehicular manslaughter. It didn't make the final cut, but two other films showing this week did: The Great Beauty, which eventually won and makes a return engagement (albeit with limited showtimes), and Omar, the Palestinian entry which is the "Talk Cinema" screening at 10am Sunday. There's also a potentially fun "Stage & Screen" presentation of Juan of the Dead, a Cuban zombie comedy which will be introduced by Becoming Cuba playwright Melinda Lopez and director M. Bevin O'Gara. Tuesday has the monthly "Open Screen" in the screening room, which also plays host to this week's entry in the month-long Francophone Film series, Longwave - All Things Horror makes their monthly visit to the Somerville Theatre on Saturday for a "The Kids Aren't All Right" program anchored by Found, in which a kid discovers that his older brother is a serial killer. There will also be three short films playing with it.
That's in the micro-cinema; in the big house, the centennial programming chugs along with some great stuff: Saturday offers a double feature from the 1940s of Bogart in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Judy Garland in Vincente Minelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. The double feature on Sunday is at least thematically linked, even if it is two very differnt looks at old Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard & Singin' in the Rain. Touch of Evil takes the screen on Wednesday, while Thursday goes to Seven Samurai. All, of course, in 35mm. - The Harvard Film Archive has more of the Fortunes of the Western on tap with The Tall T and Duel in te Sun on Friday (separate admission), I Shot Jesse James at 9pm Saturday, and The Violent Men at 5pm Sunday. The weekend will also have them playing host to John Akomfrah, a Ghanan emigrant to the UK whose films focus on the African diaspora. Two of his short documentaries presented through the lens of science fiction play at 7pm Saturday - "The Last Angel of History" & "Memory Room 451", while Akomfrah and producer Lina Gopaul will be on hand for Handsworth Songs on Sunday (shown with "Peripeteia") and The Stuart Hall Project on Monday.
- The Museum of Fine Arts has one last screening of Cousin Jules on Friday aftrenoon. The fourth annual Hollywood Scriptures Film Series ("The Search for Meaning: Home, Hope, and Identity") continues, with discussions after the screenings of Herman's House (Friday evening), Departures (Saturday morning), and Homegoings (Sunday morning). As that winds down, a series of New Latin American Cinema begins, with All About Feathers (Satuday & Wednesday) and Summer of Flying Fish (Wednesday); the series will continue through the end of March. There's also a special free presentation Sunday afternoon of "Great Beethoven Piano Performances on Film", curated and introduced by Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer.
- The Regent Theatre is moving the Gathr Preview Series to Sundays for the next couple of months to avoid some friends' programming, with this week's presentation, Tiger Tail in Blue, screening in the Underground space at 8:15pm. It's an independent film about a young married couple who barely see each other because of opposing schedules.
- They're looking to not conflict with the Belmont World Film Series, which will be running Monday nights at the Studio Cinema in Belmont through May 5th. The opening night program, Playing Dead, follows an out-of-work actor reduced to playing the victim in a crime scene re-enactment who takes it upon himself to solve the murder. Director Jean-Paul Saomé will be addressing the crowd via Skype, and thre is also a "Fabulous Fondue Party" at 6pm (though tickets must be purchased by the 7th) to kick things off.
- Though they've left the Coolidge, the ICA still has some screenings of the Oscar-nominated short films. The live-action shorts will run on Sunday afternoon, and if you ask me, "Just Before Losing Everything" was robbed.
- Emerson's Bright Lights film program has two screenings in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening room, both free. On Tuesday, Whitey Bulger: The Making of a Monster plays with producer Susan Gray in person (not to be confused with the other Whitey Bulger documentary from Joe Berlinger; this one is made for TV and directed by Ben Avishai and Dan Mooney). Steven Soderbergh's final film (which only played HBO in the US despite starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon), Behind the Candelabra, plays Thursday.
UMass Boston Film Series is also free and showing something on Thursday, with director Kaspar Astrup Schröder on-hand to introduce his documentary Rent a Family, Inc., an I-can't-believe-it's-not-fiction picture of a Japanese man who pretends to have a regular job at home but actually runs a service where he and others he knows pretend to be related to people who don't want to be embarrassed by their solitude at social events.
My plans? Uh, clone myself to see all the cool things playing Thursday. Not possible? Dang. Then probably a Brattle double feature of Jimmy P. & A Field in England, Almost Human, try for Tiger Tail in Blue and Playing Dead, see if Generation War can possibly fit in as well as Bethlehem and Found.
(And, no, all that stuff does not make me any less annoyed that Special ID is not playing here!)
Thursday, March 06, 2014
The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu)
When the Studio Ghibli retrospective made its first stop in Boston a couple of years ago, Laputa: Castle in the Sky made me ponder how Miyazaki's love of flight and his environmentalism are often at cross-purposes, and how his then-next film (not yet fleshed out or identified as his swan song) would likely address this dichotomy more directly. At the time, it looked like he might be discussing the very recent (at the time) Fukushima nuclear disaster, although instead he winds up focused on a real-life figure who designed airplanes.
In some ways, though, it's the most fitting way to say what he means. As much as Miyazaki loves flight, it's an activity that consumes a lot of energy, and that's a constant concern in the parts of The Wind Rises that are about the practical design of aircraft: The engines available in Japan are not powerful enough for the planes that Jiro Hirokoshi wants to build and that the army demands. Of course, it's not just mechanical energy that is needed to fly these machines; Jiro must build a thing that will be used to kill, which not only damages his own soul, but that of his country. Miyazaki explicitly seems to be saying that this thing he loves isn't worth it; that it is corrosive and damaging and that building airplanes means doing things that are harmful to the country, much the same way that Japan's high-energy-use lifestyle is also damaging. That inevitably causes the country to do things like build nuclear power plants [with inadequate oversight and inspection] which are capable of quite literally hurting the country.
I must say, I'm impressed by the way Miyazaki does this. It would be very easy to make this film accusatory, a lecture, and somewhat insufferable. Using this particular metaphor, though, means that Miyazaki is including himself among the guilty rather explicitly, and while he doesn't offer any solutions or remedies, real or metaphorical, the quiet humility of this project is impressive. On a certain level, he does suggest that the problem is industrialization and urbanization (themes that were even more central in Howl's Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke), with characters constantly describing Japan as "backwards" and how discussing how difficult it would be to catch up to Western countries, and even has Jiro suggest that they stick with wood and canvas before his friend and colleague Honjo shoots that idea down.
In some ways, that's an old man's indulgence in nostalgia, suggesting that there was some ideal point that we blew right past, and the wonderful airplanes he loves are good enough. Miyazaki has provided us with enough sincere, thoughtful entertainment over the years to be allowed that perspective, even if it's not particularly practical.
I wish he was doing more after this - and I will almost certainly pick up his samurai manga if that ever gets published in the United States - but given how The Wind Rises does, in fact, approach the contradiction inherent in his loves and works, it's probably a good place to stop. It's a great movie in part because of its self-reflection, but you don't want to fall too far down that rabbit hole.
Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theartre #1 (first-run, DCP)
When Hayao Miyazaki discussed his work on the film that eventually became The Wind Rises soon after the Fukushima disaster, he spoke of how his next film would be upsetting as a reaction to that. Now, that film has been revealed to be his last - which is upsetting for a different reason - and while the subject matter is only vaguely connected, he has still made a pointed film on modem concerns. Even though his skill as a storyteller and gentle style disguise it as a historical romance, he leaves the film business on a thoughtful, serious note.
Initially, The Wind Rises seems like a simple biography of Jiro Horikoshi, who is introduced as a young boy so plane-crazy in the early years of the twentieth century that he works his way through English-language aviation machines and dreams of meeting legendary aeronautical engineer Caproni. He studies hard, even as his university is damaged in a massive earthquake, and eventually lands a job at Mitsubishi. Most of the projects there are military, although Jiro simply worries about designing fine aircraft. Well, that and Nahoko Satomi, the love of his life whom chance brings back into his life after they had meet on a train years earlier.
Miyazaki does not shout to make sure the audience gets the message; there is no scene where Jiro is asked to justify building a machine that will be used to kill people. On the other hand, the fact that he is making that deal with the devil is never far in the background. Consider an early sequence, where young Jiro fights off a group of bullies, is admonished by his mother that violence is never a good solution, and give the sort of assent that indicates he's not going to change at all. At first it looks like a way to show Jiro as a man of decency and principle, and it does, but on reflection it also suggests that he can't adhere to the hard values. Throughout the entire movie, Jiro never stops to consider whether what he is doing is right, in the grand scheme of things. He is a man made to design planes, and the army needs them.
The director may not ultimately condone this mindset, but he sympathizes. Love of aviation has been one of the most recurrent themes in Miyazaki's films, and he does a fantastic job of showing how it can consume Jiro so, whether by showing his quite charming determination to get even the design of a small paper airplane right, meticulously recreating the aircraft of the period, or providing an exploded view of a small part of a wing to see not just how Jiro views it, but how the intricacy fascinates him. Airplanes are beautiful things to both character and director, and even if the viewer comes away questioning Jiro's legacy, they will probably come away with a new respect for mechanical engineering.
The airplanes Miyazaki draws and animates are especially beautiful. One of his underrated talents has always been how he takes mechanical things like airplanes - things that many animators would render digitally even in an otherwise traditionally animated picture - and put them on screen with not only obsessive accuracy but a unique sort of warmth. Other Miyazaki specialties are on display, too: A kid with big, sardonic eyes, non-Japanese characters with details like Caponi's mustache that are lovingly emphasized and yet no more serve to make them unreal than the way he renders Jiro's short boss with the funny haircut. Miyazaki has always been the sort of matter cartoonist who knows how to use exaggeration to deliver a message, and he similarly always seems to have the proper amount of motion happening at any given time.
It builds nicely, perfectly moving from a child's fantasy to an increasingly solid reality interweaving Jiro's and Nahoko's love story into what could have been very mundane depictions of study and work, but always making what is going on interesting and giving it a weight that the audience can feel but which never threatens to crush them. There are one or two moments when the story makes a bit of an odd jump, but even when it does, the film tends to earn it with something beautiful. There are moments of great charm and humor sprinkled throughout,occasionally quite striking visuals, and a well-earned sentimentality that seldom overrides the sincere, serious thoughts he wishes to share.
While Miyazaki never makes any obvious references to the likes of Fukushima, the underlying theme is clear - worrying about being "backwards" or "behind", as the engineers in this film constantly characterize Japan, seldom leads to a good end. It's nothing he has to state, though; instead, he leads us to a point where this can't be missed, and because all the details of the route that leads there are so wonderful, we thank him for it, and most likely find The Wind Rises a finale worthy of the master's career.
(Formerly at EFC)
In some ways, though, it's the most fitting way to say what he means. As much as Miyazaki loves flight, it's an activity that consumes a lot of energy, and that's a constant concern in the parts of The Wind Rises that are about the practical design of aircraft: The engines available in Japan are not powerful enough for the planes that Jiro Hirokoshi wants to build and that the army demands. Of course, it's not just mechanical energy that is needed to fly these machines; Jiro must build a thing that will be used to kill, which not only damages his own soul, but that of his country. Miyazaki explicitly seems to be saying that this thing he loves isn't worth it; that it is corrosive and damaging and that building airplanes means doing things that are harmful to the country, much the same way that Japan's high-energy-use lifestyle is also damaging. That inevitably causes the country to do things like build nuclear power plants [with inadequate oversight and inspection] which are capable of quite literally hurting the country.
I must say, I'm impressed by the way Miyazaki does this. It would be very easy to make this film accusatory, a lecture, and somewhat insufferable. Using this particular metaphor, though, means that Miyazaki is including himself among the guilty rather explicitly, and while he doesn't offer any solutions or remedies, real or metaphorical, the quiet humility of this project is impressive. On a certain level, he does suggest that the problem is industrialization and urbanization (themes that were even more central in Howl's Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke), with characters constantly describing Japan as "backwards" and how discussing how difficult it would be to catch up to Western countries, and even has Jiro suggest that they stick with wood and canvas before his friend and colleague Honjo shoots that idea down.
In some ways, that's an old man's indulgence in nostalgia, suggesting that there was some ideal point that we blew right past, and the wonderful airplanes he loves are good enough. Miyazaki has provided us with enough sincere, thoughtful entertainment over the years to be allowed that perspective, even if it's not particularly practical.
I wish he was doing more after this - and I will almost certainly pick up his samurai manga if that ever gets published in the United States - but given how The Wind Rises does, in fact, approach the contradiction inherent in his loves and works, it's probably a good place to stop. It's a great movie in part because of its self-reflection, but you don't want to fall too far down that rabbit hole.
Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theartre #1 (first-run, DCP)
When Hayao Miyazaki discussed his work on the film that eventually became The Wind Rises soon after the Fukushima disaster, he spoke of how his next film would be upsetting as a reaction to that. Now, that film has been revealed to be his last - which is upsetting for a different reason - and while the subject matter is only vaguely connected, he has still made a pointed film on modem concerns. Even though his skill as a storyteller and gentle style disguise it as a historical romance, he leaves the film business on a thoughtful, serious note.
Initially, The Wind Rises seems like a simple biography of Jiro Horikoshi, who is introduced as a young boy so plane-crazy in the early years of the twentieth century that he works his way through English-language aviation machines and dreams of meeting legendary aeronautical engineer Caproni. He studies hard, even as his university is damaged in a massive earthquake, and eventually lands a job at Mitsubishi. Most of the projects there are military, although Jiro simply worries about designing fine aircraft. Well, that and Nahoko Satomi, the love of his life whom chance brings back into his life after they had meet on a train years earlier.
Miyazaki does not shout to make sure the audience gets the message; there is no scene where Jiro is asked to justify building a machine that will be used to kill people. On the other hand, the fact that he is making that deal with the devil is never far in the background. Consider an early sequence, where young Jiro fights off a group of bullies, is admonished by his mother that violence is never a good solution, and give the sort of assent that indicates he's not going to change at all. At first it looks like a way to show Jiro as a man of decency and principle, and it does, but on reflection it also suggests that he can't adhere to the hard values. Throughout the entire movie, Jiro never stops to consider whether what he is doing is right, in the grand scheme of things. He is a man made to design planes, and the army needs them.
The director may not ultimately condone this mindset, but he sympathizes. Love of aviation has been one of the most recurrent themes in Miyazaki's films, and he does a fantastic job of showing how it can consume Jiro so, whether by showing his quite charming determination to get even the design of a small paper airplane right, meticulously recreating the aircraft of the period, or providing an exploded view of a small part of a wing to see not just how Jiro views it, but how the intricacy fascinates him. Airplanes are beautiful things to both character and director, and even if the viewer comes away questioning Jiro's legacy, they will probably come away with a new respect for mechanical engineering.
The airplanes Miyazaki draws and animates are especially beautiful. One of his underrated talents has always been how he takes mechanical things like airplanes - things that many animators would render digitally even in an otherwise traditionally animated picture - and put them on screen with not only obsessive accuracy but a unique sort of warmth. Other Miyazaki specialties are on display, too: A kid with big, sardonic eyes, non-Japanese characters with details like Caponi's mustache that are lovingly emphasized and yet no more serve to make them unreal than the way he renders Jiro's short boss with the funny haircut. Miyazaki has always been the sort of matter cartoonist who knows how to use exaggeration to deliver a message, and he similarly always seems to have the proper amount of motion happening at any given time.
It builds nicely, perfectly moving from a child's fantasy to an increasingly solid reality interweaving Jiro's and Nahoko's love story into what could have been very mundane depictions of study and work, but always making what is going on interesting and giving it a weight that the audience can feel but which never threatens to crush them. There are one or two moments when the story makes a bit of an odd jump, but even when it does, the film tends to earn it with something beautiful. There are moments of great charm and humor sprinkled throughout,occasionally quite striking visuals, and a well-earned sentimentality that seldom overrides the sincere, serious thoughts he wishes to share.
While Miyazaki never makes any obvious references to the likes of Fukushima, the underlying theme is clear - worrying about being "backwards" or "behind", as the engineers in this film constantly characterize Japan, seldom leads to a good end. It's nothing he has to state, though; instead, he leads us to a point where this can't be missed, and because all the details of the route that leads there are so wonderful, we thank him for it, and most likely find The Wind Rises a finale worthy of the master's career.
(Formerly at EFC)
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Gathr Previews: Next Goal Wins, The Forgotten Kingdom, On My Way
I missed one Gathr preview series during the sci-fi festival, and I was actually kind of disappointed about that one; Adult World with John Cusack, Emma Roberts, and Cloris Leachman looked like it could be entertaining. On the other hand, that was the night of Bunker 6 at the festival, and that was one of the best, so I'm guessing that in the duel of Things I Had Prepaid For was won by the proper presentation.
The next week was an interesting one - I had done the 24-hour marathon from noon Sunday to noon Monday, and spent the afternoon kind of woozy, although I was able to pick up a second wind in time for Next Goal Wins. Fun little movie, although it was kind of amusing that the Regent guys filled as many seats as they could by contacting local youth soccer programs and seeing if they'd be interested - only to be a little surprised at all the swearing Thomas Rongen and the other coaches did. On the bright side, I didn't hear anybody complaining about the transgendered player who figures prominently in the documentary, so that was good.
The 24th was my first time in the new "Regent Underground Theatre", which is part of the Dance Inn next to the main theater. It's an odd little space, next to the rehearsal area, with folding chairs and café tables set up ahead of a stage area with the screen in the back. It says something, I suppose, that seeing a movie there feels genuinely unusual, what with the open area to the left and obvious evidence that it's not purpose-built for this function; not so very long ago, movies like The Forgotten Kingdom would have been exclusively shown in places like that, or wherever a film club could set up a screen and a 16mm projector. Now we go to something like that and ponder whether paying $10 for the experience is a good value in comparison to paying roughly the same amount to rent it as a new release on Video On Demand or via Amazon Instant Video.
It was back upstairs yesterday for On My Way, with folks from Belmont World Film handing out programs for their upcoming series, which I thought was kind of odd, as that one is also scheduled for Mondays, albeit over at the Studio Cinema in Belmont. It turns out that won't be the case; instead, the Gathr Previews Bookings look to be shuffled to Sunday through the length of that series. It looks like it's going to be really tight for Tiger Tail in Blue this week - the theater is booked until 8pm, so the movie will be starting at 8:15 - although it will be back to the regular 7:30pm time for The Raid 2: Berandal on the 16th.
I'm a bit of two minds about this - on the one hand, this makes it a bit more difficult for me to get there, as I'll be trying to fit it into my weekend rather than hopping off the 350 bus early, but I suspect that it might be more enticing for the people who don't go directly past this theater on public transportation every day. Gripping hand is that it does get this away from the other Monday-evening programs, whether in Belmont or at the Coolidge.
At any rate, this is proving to be a fairly resilient series, and it does seem to be starting to gather regulars aside from me. It also seems to be getting some slightly better movies right now - there was a pretty barren period late last year, but I am kind of excited about The Raid 2 - which can only help going forward.
Next Goal Wins
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in the Regent Theartre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)
Next Goal Wins is an inspirational sports story that follows a familiar enough template that if it were fictional, we might be tempted to roll our eyes at just how far the filmmakers were pushing it. This kind of extreme-underdog story does occasionally happen, though, and one of the great things about sport is the way that it occasionally serves this kind of story up. The story of American Samoa's national team is a button-pushing crowd-pleaser, sure, but it's a darn good one.
The American Samoan side, you see, was infamously bad at soccer. They were 0-32 in FIFA-sanctioned matches, with the most infamous loss coming in 2001, when they lost to Australia 31-0, an absurd score for a game where the point totals are usually in the low single digits. The film picks up ten years later, with a volunteer coach attempting to lead this team of amateurs in their first international competition in for years. When that doesn't go so well, they turn to help from the US Soccer Association, which helps them hire fiery Dutch coach Thomas Rongen, who helps recruit Samoan-American Rawlston Masantai & soldier Ramin Ott to join captain Liatama Amisone Jr., Jaiyah "Johnny" Saelua, and redemption-seeking goalkeeper Nicky Salapu.
It's easy to forget just how difficult sports can be at the highest levels, not just for spectators but for the coaches. There are a ton of laughs to be found in how both Rongen and volunteer coach Larry Mena'o react with mounting levels of frustration and profanity, not having realized just how far below their expectations a national team could fall (amusingly, the parents who brought their young soccer-playing kids to the screening I attended did not anticipate the amount of swearing involved). It's what makes Salapu kind of a fascinating story; he's probably the best player in his Seattle rec league, for example, and during the clips of various matches, the commentators almost seem sorry for him, implying he's a good keeper who is not helped by a porous defense or being just a cut below the pro-quality guys he's facing. It helps firmly establish what a lot of sports movies can't, that just making a respectable show against some of these other teams is in some ways just as good as a victory.
Full review at EFC
The Forgotten Kingdom
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2014 in the Regent Theartre Underground (Gathr Preview Series, digital)
Anybody who has ever owned a globe or a world map has probably found himself or herself curious about Lesotho; the small landlocked kingdom in the middle of South Africa is one of only two or three nations in the world to be completely encircled by another. And while director Andrew Mudge's new film set there doesn't necessarily give much insight on how that geography affects life there, it's still a fine, intimate story set in a place many in the audience haven't even visited cinematically before.
It starts out in Johannesburg, where Atang Mokoenya (Zenzo Ngqobe) is spending his twenties getting into trouble. A trip out to the township for a rare visit with his father reveals that the man has died, and has already set money aside for a burial back in the village in Lesotho where Atang was born. He intends to return to the city after the funeral, but seeing childhood friend Dineo (Nozipho Nkelemba) gives him his first reason to stick around a little longer, while other things will also prevent a speedy return to the city.
It's actually almost comical at times how Atang finds reasons to get off a bus although Mudge has something a bit heavier in mind to get him to have a greater appreciation for his father and the land he called home. It's far from subtle - at the start of the movie, he's using a European name and eager to sell the mementos that have been handed down to him and even get some money by downgrading the casket - and at times, it's quite forced, as when Atang takes a job in a textile plant for no apparent reason. Sure, it has been mentioned that his father once had that sort of job, and Atang does need to be kept occupied while some other things happen elsewhere, but that's a reason for Mudge to put him there, not for Atang to go along that path.
Full review at EFC
Elle s'en va (On My Way)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2014 in the Regent Theartre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)
At one point in On My Way, Catherine Deneuve's Bettie looks at the kid singing some English-language song in the passenger seat, then at the freeway outside the window, and grumbles that she feels like she's in America. It's a funny bit that nevertheless makes me wonder if the road trip, and therefore the books and movies chronicling same, is a particularly American phenomenon, seldom seen in countries that connect their urban areas with quality passenger rail systems. A bit of a shame, if so, because On My Way is a fine example of the freedom that sort of story brings.
Bettie, being French - Miss Brittany for 1969, in fact - didn't really intend to go on a road trip, of course. Frazzled from running a restaurant that is starting to run worrisomely late on its bills, she is further stressed out when he mother Annie (Claude Gensac) makes sure Bettie know that her longtime lover has finally left his wife, but for a 25-year-old girl, and take a quick drive to clear her head. And keeps driving, because this is the sort of situation that makes one start smoking again, but it's hard to by cigarettes on Sunday except at a bar. Then... well, is the next day, and her daughter Muriel (Camille) calls, asking if she will come pick up her son Charly (Nemo Schiffman) and bring him to stay with his grandfather (Gérard Garouste) while she travels for a job interview. And then...
Well, a number of other things happen. Bettie does not particularly have adventures as she makes her way around her corner of France - what happens probably doesn't even rise to the level of misadventures - but she does have encounters. Some are very brief, such as the people at the food truck who let her charge her phone, and some go on for long enough to form some sort of a bond, if a temporary one. In many cases, things seem to go easier with lesser connections, but there is generally someone worth meeting at each stop and a nifty little scene as Bettie stop and speaks with them.
Full review at EFC
The next week was an interesting one - I had done the 24-hour marathon from noon Sunday to noon Monday, and spent the afternoon kind of woozy, although I was able to pick up a second wind in time for Next Goal Wins. Fun little movie, although it was kind of amusing that the Regent guys filled as many seats as they could by contacting local youth soccer programs and seeing if they'd be interested - only to be a little surprised at all the swearing Thomas Rongen and the other coaches did. On the bright side, I didn't hear anybody complaining about the transgendered player who figures prominently in the documentary, so that was good.
The 24th was my first time in the new "Regent Underground Theatre", which is part of the Dance Inn next to the main theater. It's an odd little space, next to the rehearsal area, with folding chairs and café tables set up ahead of a stage area with the screen in the back. It says something, I suppose, that seeing a movie there feels genuinely unusual, what with the open area to the left and obvious evidence that it's not purpose-built for this function; not so very long ago, movies like The Forgotten Kingdom would have been exclusively shown in places like that, or wherever a film club could set up a screen and a 16mm projector. Now we go to something like that and ponder whether paying $10 for the experience is a good value in comparison to paying roughly the same amount to rent it as a new release on Video On Demand or via Amazon Instant Video.
It was back upstairs yesterday for On My Way, with folks from Belmont World Film handing out programs for their upcoming series, which I thought was kind of odd, as that one is also scheduled for Mondays, albeit over at the Studio Cinema in Belmont. It turns out that won't be the case; instead, the Gathr Previews Bookings look to be shuffled to Sunday through the length of that series. It looks like it's going to be really tight for Tiger Tail in Blue this week - the theater is booked until 8pm, so the movie will be starting at 8:15 - although it will be back to the regular 7:30pm time for The Raid 2: Berandal on the 16th.
I'm a bit of two minds about this - on the one hand, this makes it a bit more difficult for me to get there, as I'll be trying to fit it into my weekend rather than hopping off the 350 bus early, but I suspect that it might be more enticing for the people who don't go directly past this theater on public transportation every day. Gripping hand is that it does get this away from the other Monday-evening programs, whether in Belmont or at the Coolidge.
At any rate, this is proving to be a fairly resilient series, and it does seem to be starting to gather regulars aside from me. It also seems to be getting some slightly better movies right now - there was a pretty barren period late last year, but I am kind of excited about The Raid 2 - which can only help going forward.
Next Goal Wins
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in the Regent Theartre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)
Next Goal Wins is an inspirational sports story that follows a familiar enough template that if it were fictional, we might be tempted to roll our eyes at just how far the filmmakers were pushing it. This kind of extreme-underdog story does occasionally happen, though, and one of the great things about sport is the way that it occasionally serves this kind of story up. The story of American Samoa's national team is a button-pushing crowd-pleaser, sure, but it's a darn good one.
The American Samoan side, you see, was infamously bad at soccer. They were 0-32 in FIFA-sanctioned matches, with the most infamous loss coming in 2001, when they lost to Australia 31-0, an absurd score for a game where the point totals are usually in the low single digits. The film picks up ten years later, with a volunteer coach attempting to lead this team of amateurs in their first international competition in for years. When that doesn't go so well, they turn to help from the US Soccer Association, which helps them hire fiery Dutch coach Thomas Rongen, who helps recruit Samoan-American Rawlston Masantai & soldier Ramin Ott to join captain Liatama Amisone Jr., Jaiyah "Johnny" Saelua, and redemption-seeking goalkeeper Nicky Salapu.
It's easy to forget just how difficult sports can be at the highest levels, not just for spectators but for the coaches. There are a ton of laughs to be found in how both Rongen and volunteer coach Larry Mena'o react with mounting levels of frustration and profanity, not having realized just how far below their expectations a national team could fall (amusingly, the parents who brought their young soccer-playing kids to the screening I attended did not anticipate the amount of swearing involved). It's what makes Salapu kind of a fascinating story; he's probably the best player in his Seattle rec league, for example, and during the clips of various matches, the commentators almost seem sorry for him, implying he's a good keeper who is not helped by a porous defense or being just a cut below the pro-quality guys he's facing. It helps firmly establish what a lot of sports movies can't, that just making a respectable show against some of these other teams is in some ways just as good as a victory.
Full review at EFC
The Forgotten Kingdom
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2014 in the Regent Theartre Underground (Gathr Preview Series, digital)
Anybody who has ever owned a globe or a world map has probably found himself or herself curious about Lesotho; the small landlocked kingdom in the middle of South Africa is one of only two or three nations in the world to be completely encircled by another. And while director Andrew Mudge's new film set there doesn't necessarily give much insight on how that geography affects life there, it's still a fine, intimate story set in a place many in the audience haven't even visited cinematically before.
It starts out in Johannesburg, where Atang Mokoenya (Zenzo Ngqobe) is spending his twenties getting into trouble. A trip out to the township for a rare visit with his father reveals that the man has died, and has already set money aside for a burial back in the village in Lesotho where Atang was born. He intends to return to the city after the funeral, but seeing childhood friend Dineo (Nozipho Nkelemba) gives him his first reason to stick around a little longer, while other things will also prevent a speedy return to the city.
It's actually almost comical at times how Atang finds reasons to get off a bus although Mudge has something a bit heavier in mind to get him to have a greater appreciation for his father and the land he called home. It's far from subtle - at the start of the movie, he's using a European name and eager to sell the mementos that have been handed down to him and even get some money by downgrading the casket - and at times, it's quite forced, as when Atang takes a job in a textile plant for no apparent reason. Sure, it has been mentioned that his father once had that sort of job, and Atang does need to be kept occupied while some other things happen elsewhere, but that's a reason for Mudge to put him there, not for Atang to go along that path.
Full review at EFC
Elle s'en va (On My Way)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2014 in the Regent Theartre (Gathr Preview Series, digital)
At one point in On My Way, Catherine Deneuve's Bettie looks at the kid singing some English-language song in the passenger seat, then at the freeway outside the window, and grumbles that she feels like she's in America. It's a funny bit that nevertheless makes me wonder if the road trip, and therefore the books and movies chronicling same, is a particularly American phenomenon, seldom seen in countries that connect their urban areas with quality passenger rail systems. A bit of a shame, if so, because On My Way is a fine example of the freedom that sort of story brings.
Bettie, being French - Miss Brittany for 1969, in fact - didn't really intend to go on a road trip, of course. Frazzled from running a restaurant that is starting to run worrisomely late on its bills, she is further stressed out when he mother Annie (Claude Gensac) makes sure Bettie know that her longtime lover has finally left his wife, but for a 25-year-old girl, and take a quick drive to clear her head. And keeps driving, because this is the sort of situation that makes one start smoking again, but it's hard to by cigarettes on Sunday except at a bar. Then... well, is the next day, and her daughter Muriel (Camille) calls, asking if she will come pick up her son Charly (Nemo Schiffman) and bring him to stay with his grandfather (Gérard Garouste) while she travels for a job interview. And then...
Well, a number of other things happen. Bettie does not particularly have adventures as she makes her way around her corner of France - what happens probably doesn't even rise to the level of misadventures - but she does have encounters. Some are very brief, such as the people at the food truck who let her charge her phone, and some go on for long enough to form some sort of a bond, if a temporary one. In many cases, things seem to go easier with lesser connections, but there is generally someone worth meeting at each stop and a nifty little scene as Bettie stop and speaks with them.
Full review at EFC
Stalingrad and where Imax has gone
It wasn't that long ago that IMAX screens were mostly in science museums of various sorts, and that's what the pictures made for them reflected. Sure, there was an occasional "Santa vs. the Snowman", but the typical Imax film was 40-odd minutes, built with the expectation of being seen on a screen that required the audience would be using their peripheral vision. Even when they were built as part of a multiplex, they were treated as a sort of special attraction.
That hasn't been the case for a while - in a weird sort of cycle, studios started releasing movies in IMAX format, theaters as a result started putting in Imax screens, Imax developed a less-massive digital system that regular theaters could be converted to use, the demand for more Imax-formatted movies grew, and now it's no longer any sort of major event. I predicted a few years ago that while this may be more profitable for Imax-the-company - they've now got a lot more locations that cost a lot less to maintain - it would eventually devalue the brand. It hasn't completely happened yet - while I generally think the RPX screen 5 Green Line stops away from the "Imax" screen looks and sounds just as good, it's a rare movie that advertises any of the other premium formats that are generally chain-specific (and called something like AVX or UVX or the like; lots of X-es) - but it's slowly getting there.
The interesting thing is that Imax still seems to do enough proprietary processing on the image, presumably so that it can be put on its large-format film for the places still using it without it looking awful, that there are still only a relative few movies that show on those screens, and when something crashes, it must make things a little awkward for theaters, with hasty revivals of things from a few months back when something runs out of gas quicker than expected or just never has any to begin with. Places cleared out I, Frankenstein in a hurry to bring Gravity back. Fortunately, this also sometimes means that something unusual or interesting can grab the screen under similar circumstances.
Like this week; I doubt very many places would be showing Stalingrad if RoboCop was a hit, much like Flying Swords of Dragon Gate managed to stake out a couple of slow weekends, only to scramble when Paramount had the same idea with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Still, it makes me wonder if (hope that) whoever has the rights to Donnie Yen's Monkey King movie is eying any weekends that might look weak, just in case.
One unfortunate side effect seems to be that old-school IMAX movies (all-caps indicating movies run on 70mm film run through a projector sideways and illuminated with a bulb that can also be used as a death ray) seem to be languishing. The New England Aquarium seems like it hasn't put a new movie into the rotation for almost a year, and the Museum of Science mostly seems to be rotating existing movies in and out. Heck, the Aquarium hasn't even been picking Hollywood stuff up second-run any more, and I figured it was pretty likely they would do so for Gravity or The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the latter if only because they eventually showed most of the previous features with segments shot on actual IMAX film before.
This change in what Imax is hasn't wholly been a bad thing - it did get Flying Swords and Stalingrad onto screens where they could be appreciated - but between how common the use of the brand as become and the way Jordan's Furniture downgraded themselves to digital projection a year and a half ago, it's not the exciting draw that it used to be. Now, if something is showing in Imax, I maybe head out to Reading if it was shot using the big cameras (they may be digital, but they've still got a screen with the classic square-ish shape, which Boston Common lacks) or if I otherwise really want that sense of scale, but I'm just as likely to walk to the RPX screen at Fenway or take the D-line to the SuperLux to get fed for about the same price/time commitment. After all, it's not like something marked "Imax" is shot differently from everything else most of the time, and it's just become a brand that suggests a small (real, but small) boost over what everyone else is doing.
It makes me wonder if they might try to go for more exclusive content like this going forward. Foreign movies probably won't be that big a deal, though, so likely they'll be pushing for early releases as happened a few times in recent years. Now that they're not head-and-shoulders best quality-wise, it's something they need to distinguish themselves.
Stalingrad
* * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)
Columbia Pictures is releasing Russian blockbuster Stalingrad almost entirely in 3D on Imax screens, and I only include that "almost" just to cover all bases. This is not a bad strategy, as this is the sort of film where projection onto a screen the size of a medium-sized office building does not particularly magnify its many flaws, but certainly does highlight the big, loud spectacle of the thing. If you'r going to see this movie at all, that's the way to do it.
The battle of Stalingrad was one of the longest and bloodiest in the history of warfare, but this movie focuses tightly on a few days in one apartment building that is well-positioned to defend the best place to cross the Volga. After the Russians take it from the Nazis, five soldiers man this battlement: Astakhov (Sergey Bondarchuk), an artillery spotter; Chvanov (Dmitriy Lysenkov), a sniper; Gromov (Pyotr Fyodorov), an already much-decorated hero; Nikiforov (Aleksey Barabash), a former opera singer turned deadly hand-to-hand fighter; and Polyakov (Andrey Smolyakov), a widower old enough to be their father. Also in the building is its last remaining resident, 19-year-old Katya (Mariya Smolnikova), initially shell-shocked but brave. Across the way are the Nazis, with Captain Peter Kahn (Thomas Kretschmann) spearheading the attempt to retake this crucial building, although Colonel Khenze (Heiner Lauterbach) worries that Khan is spending too much time obsessing over Masha (Yanina Studilina), a Russian girl who reminds him of his dead wife.
There's also a Russian naval officer in the building (Oleg Volku), although for reasons the movie doesn't make terribly clear, he's not considered one of the "five fathers" of the present-day narrator who recounts this story for some German tourists trapped underneath the rubble during the recent Tokyo earthquakes. It's an odd way to frame the story on a number of levels - did writers Sergey Snezhkin and Ilya Tilkin feel that two hours spent crawling around one devastated city wasn't enough? And while this story is a tale of bravery, it's the sort of war story where a lot of people die, and it seems like kind of a weird story for a Russian man to tell a German girl under any circumstance, even if it is about a war seventy years in the past between two countries that have been more or less disassembled and rebuilt since. More importantly, though, the main story never shows the strength necessary to justify it. Which soldier Katya would take as a lover is never a particularly interesting mystery, and once that's been established, it's hard to see them as of equal importance to her, especially since they don't establish that sort of identity as a unit.
Full review at EFC
That hasn't been the case for a while - in a weird sort of cycle, studios started releasing movies in IMAX format, theaters as a result started putting in Imax screens, Imax developed a less-massive digital system that regular theaters could be converted to use, the demand for more Imax-formatted movies grew, and now it's no longer any sort of major event. I predicted a few years ago that while this may be more profitable for Imax-the-company - they've now got a lot more locations that cost a lot less to maintain - it would eventually devalue the brand. It hasn't completely happened yet - while I generally think the RPX screen 5 Green Line stops away from the "Imax" screen looks and sounds just as good, it's a rare movie that advertises any of the other premium formats that are generally chain-specific (and called something like AVX or UVX or the like; lots of X-es) - but it's slowly getting there.
The interesting thing is that Imax still seems to do enough proprietary processing on the image, presumably so that it can be put on its large-format film for the places still using it without it looking awful, that there are still only a relative few movies that show on those screens, and when something crashes, it must make things a little awkward for theaters, with hasty revivals of things from a few months back when something runs out of gas quicker than expected or just never has any to begin with. Places cleared out I, Frankenstein in a hurry to bring Gravity back. Fortunately, this also sometimes means that something unusual or interesting can grab the screen under similar circumstances.
Like this week; I doubt very many places would be showing Stalingrad if RoboCop was a hit, much like Flying Swords of Dragon Gate managed to stake out a couple of slow weekends, only to scramble when Paramount had the same idea with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Still, it makes me wonder if (hope that) whoever has the rights to Donnie Yen's Monkey King movie is eying any weekends that might look weak, just in case.
One unfortunate side effect seems to be that old-school IMAX movies (all-caps indicating movies run on 70mm film run through a projector sideways and illuminated with a bulb that can also be used as a death ray) seem to be languishing. The New England Aquarium seems like it hasn't put a new movie into the rotation for almost a year, and the Museum of Science mostly seems to be rotating existing movies in and out. Heck, the Aquarium hasn't even been picking Hollywood stuff up second-run any more, and I figured it was pretty likely they would do so for Gravity or The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the latter if only because they eventually showed most of the previous features with segments shot on actual IMAX film before.
This change in what Imax is hasn't wholly been a bad thing - it did get Flying Swords and Stalingrad onto screens where they could be appreciated - but between how common the use of the brand as become and the way Jordan's Furniture downgraded themselves to digital projection a year and a half ago, it's not the exciting draw that it used to be. Now, if something is showing in Imax, I maybe head out to Reading if it was shot using the big cameras (they may be digital, but they've still got a screen with the classic square-ish shape, which Boston Common lacks) or if I otherwise really want that sense of scale, but I'm just as likely to walk to the RPX screen at Fenway or take the D-line to the SuperLux to get fed for about the same price/time commitment. After all, it's not like something marked "Imax" is shot differently from everything else most of the time, and it's just become a brand that suggests a small (real, but small) boost over what everyone else is doing.
It makes me wonder if they might try to go for more exclusive content like this going forward. Foreign movies probably won't be that big a deal, though, so likely they'll be pushing for early releases as happened a few times in recent years. Now that they're not head-and-shoulders best quality-wise, it's something they need to distinguish themselves.
Stalingrad
* * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2014 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)
Columbia Pictures is releasing Russian blockbuster Stalingrad almost entirely in 3D on Imax screens, and I only include that "almost" just to cover all bases. This is not a bad strategy, as this is the sort of film where projection onto a screen the size of a medium-sized office building does not particularly magnify its many flaws, but certainly does highlight the big, loud spectacle of the thing. If you'r going to see this movie at all, that's the way to do it.
The battle of Stalingrad was one of the longest and bloodiest in the history of warfare, but this movie focuses tightly on a few days in one apartment building that is well-positioned to defend the best place to cross the Volga. After the Russians take it from the Nazis, five soldiers man this battlement: Astakhov (Sergey Bondarchuk), an artillery spotter; Chvanov (Dmitriy Lysenkov), a sniper; Gromov (Pyotr Fyodorov), an already much-decorated hero; Nikiforov (Aleksey Barabash), a former opera singer turned deadly hand-to-hand fighter; and Polyakov (Andrey Smolyakov), a widower old enough to be their father. Also in the building is its last remaining resident, 19-year-old Katya (Mariya Smolnikova), initially shell-shocked but brave. Across the way are the Nazis, with Captain Peter Kahn (Thomas Kretschmann) spearheading the attempt to retake this crucial building, although Colonel Khenze (Heiner Lauterbach) worries that Khan is spending too much time obsessing over Masha (Yanina Studilina), a Russian girl who reminds him of his dead wife.
There's also a Russian naval officer in the building (Oleg Volku), although for reasons the movie doesn't make terribly clear, he's not considered one of the "five fathers" of the present-day narrator who recounts this story for some German tourists trapped underneath the rubble during the recent Tokyo earthquakes. It's an odd way to frame the story on a number of levels - did writers Sergey Snezhkin and Ilya Tilkin feel that two hours spent crawling around one devastated city wasn't enough? And while this story is a tale of bravery, it's the sort of war story where a lot of people die, and it seems like kind of a weird story for a Russian man to tell a German girl under any circumstance, even if it is about a war seventy years in the past between two countries that have been more or less disassembled and rebuilt since. More importantly, though, the main story never shows the strength necessary to justify it. Which soldier Katya would take as a lover is never a particularly interesting mystery, and once that's been established, it's hard to see them as of equal importance to her, especially since they don't establish that sort of identity as a unit.
Full review at EFC
Sunday, March 02, 2014
Boston Sci-fi Film Festival Day 10-11: The Marathon
Well, that took longer than expected. Not the marathon - that was the standard twenty-four hours, by definition - but writing it up. I didn't necessarily intend to write a full review of every movie that kept me awake where I hadn't done one before, but that's how it turned out, which speaks fairly well of this year's line-up - they weren't all good movies, but they were for the most part interesting. That is sort of the best thing you can expect of this event - there is a noteworthy chunk of the audience that wants cheese and a staff willing to supply it, so all one can do is hope that there's something worth seeing for reasons beyond laughing at its ineptitude.
Attendance was pretty good this year, enough so that when I made my usual somewhat late arrival at quarter of twelve (I had just gotten this posted a half-hour earlier), the usual swag-bags were gone. I did the now-customary routine, if two years counts as a custom, of accepting the Atomic Fireball, putting it in a pocket, climbing up to the balcony and finding a spot roughly in the center of the lower section, and then not being able to find the fireball when "Duck Dodgers" started up. Somehow it turned up again later, after the pants had gone through the laundry. No big deal, as I am not terribly fond of the things anyway.
Somewhere in there, our hosts got up on stage, with Garen exaggerating the quality of the movies that played the festival and Major Tom laying out the rules. And, honestly, I think it's time for Tom to stop even mentioning that there are callbacks and such tolerated and encouraged, because when you do that and then start with a movie like First Men in the Moon, you're just asking for trouble. In this case, it was people deciding that every open door for the next twenty-four hours must be accompanied by yelling "door!", no matter whether the current film was a clunker or a movie that people were trying to just watch and enjoy for its own sake.
One of the guys behind me was, really, just the absolute worst; he wasn't in his seat for half the time, but when he was, he was talking to no-one, and not particularly creative. I eventually had to ask if it was even possible for him to try and watch something good without making wiseass comments.
Check it out, it's Coherence co-star Nicholas Brendon on stage way below me on the stage, finally doing a Q&A after a little snow kept him from appearing at either Thursday's or Saturday's screenings. He's also demonstrating the limits of my camera and my skills in using it - someday I'll figure out how to get a picture that's neither blurry nor dark, rather than just choosing one. It's worth mentioning that the red curtain and the fact that I was way the heck up in the balcony didn't do the picture any favors.
Mr. Brendon is a funny guy, as those who are familiar with his work are likely not shocked to discover. It was certainly an entertaining Q&A as well as fairly informative, with Brendon very generous to those who didn't come, mentioning that while the film was mostly improvised, the two best lines were fed to him.
Dave Kornfeld's tip jar. That dollar on top is mine, because you know Dave would genuinely rather be doing changeovers every reel than setting a DCP up and letting it run.
I'm slowly becoming a convert to the "eat relatively little" school of how to get through the marathon; I had a breakfast sandwich from the nearby Au Bon Pain just before things started, some ice cream at seven-ish (I didn't feel like like dealing with the line for pizza), and some Twizzlers at 1am. I think the only really noteworthy nap I had was during The Visitor (still boring!), although there were some missing minutes during Children of Men and Flash Gordon at the end, but I was surprisingly alert even without keeping notes. I finished up by getting some doughnuts at Verna's, and was kind of a zombie all afternoon. Strangely, I was able to get a second wind for the Gathr preview series at the Regent that night and did pretty well at work on Tuesday. Kind of unusual, but I'll take it.
I must admit, the increased level of people not shutting up bugged me this year; I spent a lot of the event wondering if this was the year that I finally said that seeing a bunch of things I might not otherwise catch wasn't worth the expense, dealing with an audience full of talkers and containers of smelly food, etc. The back end of The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Grabbers, Children of Men, and, yeah, Flash Gordon makes up for a lot of it, so I'm probably down for one more year. Neither the festival nor the marathon is an ideal event, but it's the one we've got, and this year's was a pretty good time.
First Men in the Moon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
I suspect that, had I been around 50 years ago, I would have become fairly agitated watching First Men in the Moon, because there was amazing actual science and engineering going on where that subject was concerned and a bunch of H.G. Wells fantasy was just going to set people up for disappointment. Now, though, it's so much a product of its time(s) that it's easy enough to look at it as just a big Ray Harryhausen adventure and enjoy it on those terms.
Of course, being released in 1964, it has to make a nod to the actual space race, and so it shows a UN mission landing on the Moon, quite perplexed when they find a Union Jack and a document claiming the satellite for Queen Victoria. Running that down eventually leads to Arnold Bedford, an old man who tells of how, in his youth, he (Edward Judd) invested in the crazy anti-gravity experiments of his neighbor Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries). By a sequence of events too crazy to believe, that led to the men flying to the Moon with Arnold's American fiancee Kate Callender (Martha Hyer) along for the ride. They would find that while the surface of the Moon is just a dead field of rock, danger lurked under the surface.
Almost the entire text of that description seems almost comically quaint today, and that's not including little details like how the diving apparatus Cavor uses as spacesuits lack things like gloves. To a certain extent, though, "quaint" is probably a big part of what writers Nigel Kneale & Jan Read and director Nathan Juran are going for - something that will entertain the kids who were the film's main audience while also capturing a certain rural English character. It's silly, and it wouldn't be surprising if a great many of the people involved knew better, but there's something to be said for capturing a specific tone. And when the film does get away from things being charmingly bucolic, there's an argument to be made that it actually stumbles on a pre-punk form of steampunk.
Full review at EFC
Westworld
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
Nowadays, it's hard not to think of Michael Crichton's Westworld as a rough draft of Jurassic Park, and to wish that it included a Pirate World, if only so that a certain Jeff Goldblum line would be even funnier. In some ways, that's an unfair way to judge the movie, but in others, it's rather fitting - even without considering that later multimedia blockbuster, there are a lot of ways that this one falls short of its potential.
We're initially treated to an infomercial-like bit hinting at how the Delos resort is sold to potential tourists in its world, but soon we meet two friends headed there for an expensive but elaborate bit of role-playing: John Blane (James Brolin), who has been there before, and Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin), who had just been through an ugly divorce. They will be staying in "Western World", while others on the Delos hovercraft are heading to Medieval World and Roman World, all of which are populated by androids of every variety. At the saloon, Peyer has a shootout with a gunslinger (Yul Brynner) as John eggs him on. They treat themselves to a night at the cathouse, unaware that in the underground service areas, the technicians are noticing an increasing number of catastrophic failures.
There's a peculiar frankness about just how much of the place's appeal is the chance to shoot people and have it feel real; debates about violence in video games were far in the future on 1973. Sex, on the other hand, gets a bit more of a winking treatment, although Crichton doesn't hide it behind too much innuendo. It is kind of a shame, though, that he does very little to directly engage the idea; for all that one may argue that the robots going haywire is a sort of symbolic payback for how the people who come to Delos not only embrace their bloodlust but have created people (of a sort) whose sole reason for existence is to be raped and murdered, that layer of the plot is buried deep. There's never a sense of purpose to all this beyond a glitch bit of self-replicating code, and there's no thematic weight to the confrontations, either.
Full review at EFC
Coherence
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
Coherence is one of the talkiest, most actor-centric sci-fi films you're ever likely to see, but this is a case where that's a pretty good thing. Sure, something this odd and improv-heavy can invite disaster when a neat idea isn't able to thrive, but this is a case where things go far more right than wrong.
The initial bit of strangeness doesn't seem like a big deal - Emily (Emily Foxler) is talking to her friend Laurie (Lauren Maher) while driving over for a dinner party when her screen suddenly shatters for no reason, but then it is an iPhone and those things crack when you look at them too intently. She gets to Laurie's house okay, and the women and Laurie's actor husband Mike (Nicholas Brendon) are soon joined by Emily's boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling) and two other couples - Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) & Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), who brings some suspect botanicals, and Amir (Alex Manugian) & Lee (Lorene Scafaria), who also happens to be Kevin's ex-girlfriend. There's a comet passing fairly close to Earth that night, and soon the power and mobile phone service go out. One house down the street still has the lights on, but when a couple of the guys go over to see if they have a landline, things quickly get strange.
And then they get stranger; while much of the dialog may be improvised, director James Ward Byrkit (who created the scenario with co-star Alex Manugian) puts his cast into situations that have the potential to make a viewer's head hurt a little more with each bit of elaboration - that the passage of this comet has somehow warped space and time in the area around this house quickly becomes an insufficient explanation. Fortunately, he doesn't overburden the audience with explanations - a few references to thought experiments that have familiar names but may not be strictly applicable is enough, especially since it wouldn't necessarily do to have the audience understand things well enough that they get exasperated with the characters.
Full review at EFC
The Power
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
You could probably re-adapt The Power today without changing a whole heck of a lot - a little more gender and ethnic diversity among the academics who serve as suspects/victims, perhaps, and maybe some sort of having-related subplot to explain why certain information is not available. Fear of a mutant developing strange mental powers doesn't seem to get old, which means this sci-fi thriller from 1968 is far less creaky than many of its contemporaries.
It starts with Dr. Norman Van Zandt (Richard Carlson) being assigned as the government liaison for a University program that measures human endurance, and his first staff meeting is eventful: Professor Henry Hallson (Arthur O'Connell) claims that the results of an anonymous questionnaire circulated among the staff indicates that someone has off-the-charts brainpower, and while committee chair Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) dismisses the idea as pseudoscientific quackery, indications are that there something to it -- especially when Tanner and colleague/lover Prof. Margery Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette) discover Hallson's murdered body. Jim is framed for the crime, and goes on the lam to find the mysterious "Adam Harte" named in Hallson's notes, even if the man does seem to be a ghost, having left scant record of his existence behind; there's not even a consistent physical description!
The Power is built as a murder mystery, although the constraints of the time hurt it to a certain extent: Aside from Margery, the whole suspect/victim pool is rather similar middle-aged white men with similar backgrounds (with Jim not that much younger) and a motivation that is more or less a given. To a certain extent, that makes the movie a sort of proto-slasher, except that the anonymous people getting dispatched in progressively more bizarre ways are a little older. There's also a inescapable sense that because every murder that brings the numbers of suspects closer to one by literal process of elimination, it's not a very good plan, although the last few scenes do provide a bit of an explanation.
Full review at EFC
Europa Report
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, Blu-ray)
Europa Report is one of a number of fairly good spaceship-set movies coming from independent producers in the past few years, and this pleases me; it's enormously satisfying to see that the sort of stories that leap to mind when someone says "science fiction" don't necessarily need to be the territory of large studios that will strangle any creativity from them as a matter of course. Sure, this is the "highly-distributed international co- production" sort of independent film as opposed to the "guys doing something with whatever resources they can dig up locally" type, but you do need that middle ground.
I still like it quote a bit on a second viewing; in fact, I think I'm a little more inclined to look at its tendency to jump around in time a little more favorably. I still think it's a bit of an odd choice for the sort of future documentary it is presenting itself as, but it's not like I haven't seen this style in real life. The ending seems a little more inevitable, though. One of the nifty things about the movie is that it engages in just enough sleight-of-hand throughout that the actual finale could come as a surprise even though the viewer knows that something big and climactic will happen because it's a movie, but the strings are much more visible on a second run through.
It's still a pretty impressive flick, though and If certainly like to see more like it, both in terms of general attitude and polish.
Full review at EFC
Silent Running
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
I don't wholly agree with those who would frame the 1970s as a golden age of cinema for mature adults tragically destroyed by the coming off the sci-fi blockbuster, although that's in part because I can't bring myself to hate big, broadly-entertaining movies. I do occasionally find myself wondering about an alternate history of the movies where there were more movies like Silent Running that combined 1970s edge with beautiful, meticulous special effects.
It follows Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), part of a four-person crew on a space cargo ship and the only one who has any interest in tending to the domes containing some of the last trees from a dead Earth. Certain that the company president will announce plans to return home and reestablish the forests, he is crushed when the announcement instead is to eject the domes and destroy them with nuclear bombs. Unable to convince his crew-mates (Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin & Jesse Vint) that this is a horrible idea, he takes matters into his own hands. He saves the yes, but is all alone aside from robot drones Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
Douglas Trumbull directs, the first of his only two features, but his impact is felt just as strongly (if not more so) in his other jobs, heading up the visual effects department and creating the surprisingly expressive done units. Even without considering the time and the pre-digital tools he's working with, the right world he creates is something amazing, distinctive while seldom looking like functionality was compromised in order to make things look cool. The inside of the ship has an intriguing contrast of vastness for cargo with right spaces for the crew that quietly demonstrates the corporation's priorities (and shows how it's probably a miracle that the not-obviously-profitable nature preserve lasted this long), and is decorated with the sort of product placement that lends an earnestly cynical air. The outside is a thing of beauty, detailed but not shiny and busy like a modern digital creation might be, and while the signature feature of the three domes may not be strictly accurate scientifically, they certainly make this ship something that viewers will remember.
Full review at EFC
The Truman Show
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
After The Truman Show screened during this 24-hour movie marathon (from a gorgeous 35mm show print), I tweeted somewhat hyperbolically that it was the best work everybody involved has ever done. There was some disagreement about specific people, but I think it's telling that people responded with exceptions rather than wholesale disagreement with the premise. Truman is excellent from top to bottom, a somewhat overlooked classic.
15 years on, its premise is still somewhat audacious: Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has been raised on a soundstage the size of a small seaside town for his entire life, unaware that everybody in that life - his mother (Holland Taylor), his best friend (Noah Emmerich), even his wife (Laura Linney) - are actors improvising around his actions and nudging him in the direction dictated by the show's creator Christof (Ed Harris). Today, though, a crack appears in this perfect artifice when a stage light falls from the sky, and he's still haunted by the true love (Natacha McElhone) that the products whisked away before she could reveal the truth.
There are some people who will look at that description, invoke the words "reality TV", and comment that Andrew Niccol's screenplay was prophetic. I think they are rather far off-base, though - while many television programs today are technically unscripted but heavily guided down a certain path, the stars are all willing, active participants, and this style has become popular because it's cheap enough to produce that it can turn a profit in a world whose tastes are incredibly fragmented. The Truman Show's concept of everyone the world over watching an elaborate, expensive program whose star is not taking his personal brand into account is the opposite of prescient, and that's fine. It's better than fine, really; it's the reason why the movie endures.
Full review at EFC
Electric Dreams
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
Electric Dreams is, even by the standards of being a movie about a dangerous home computer from a time when such consumer machines were just starting to come with more than 64K of memory, communicated with online bulletin boards via 1200 baud modems, and could maybe run a crappy ELIZA program to laughably simulate artificial intelligence, is a pretty stupid movie. Despite that, it's not a bad thing for a theater to throw into its midnight rotation, as it demonstrates just how far you can go on an upbeat soundtrack, a co-star with potential, and a little more effort than attempts to cash in on a trend usually get.
Things start with Miles Harding (Lenny von Dohling), an architect at the bottom of a California firm, always being late and disorganized, so he splurges on one of those new personal computers to help him get his stuff together. He goes all-out, getting an X-10 home control system and everything - and then accidentally spills coffee on the box. Rather than just making it a useless brick with a voided warranty, it makes the system hyper-intelligent, and it not only develops the ability to speak (with the voice of Bud Cort), but soon starts to share Miles's crush on Madeline (Virginia Madsen), the pretty musician who just moved in upstairs.
1984 wasn't completely the stone age for personal computers, but some pretty hard-core suspension of disbelief is necessary to buy into what Edgar (a name that appears on the poster, but isn't awkwardly inserted into the film until the end) is capable of. This doesn't really matter in a certain sense, as it's not as though the filmmakers are actually linking any sort of suspense to a false assumption rather than presenting a then-new variation on the Cyrano de Bergerac story, albeit one where Cyrano is something of an unwanted interloper. Rusty Lemonade's script is still kind of silly in how Miles disconnecting Edgar's power or deciding that telling Madeline about his bizarrely sentient computer would help make him seen interesting would solve 90% of his problems right away, but the basic fantasy mostly works, and the filmmakers do get some points for not seeing new technology as an unadulterated evil.
Full review at EFC
The Visitor
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
If the various people who talk at length about cult movies could stop trying to make The Visitor happen, I'd really appreciate it. I say that like it hasn't already happened, but there's really not much denying it; the Brattle had it back for encores, it's been given the Drafthouse vertically-integrated-entity seal of approval, and even if it got "what?" responses and a mild "that sucked!" chant as the credits rolled, I suspect the guys pushing the film will take that as a badge of honor.
And while I admit that it's not quite boring in the same way I thought it was when I saw it last October - there really isn't a point where it's not peculiar, even though I initially characterized it as trippy-dull-dull-dull-trippy - but maybe it's worse that it's consistently weird but never actually interesting. It's a movie filled with half-ideas and characters that run counter to expectations without ever generating curiosity about how they got in their current situation or where they will wind up afterward.
And the finale is still striking but stupid, all the more so for how obvious the terrible doubling is. Lovers of weird movies deserve better.
What I thought in November
The World, the Flesh and the Devil
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DVD)
End-of-the-world movies looking to be thoughtful tend to reflect on what could cause such a cataclysm, often making the cynical argument that humanity just won't learn from its mistakes, with the survivors repeating them. There's merit to that, but the approach taken by The World, the Flesh and the Devil - using its blank slate to create a tight focus on other parts of society - is just as interesting, with the execution fantastic enough that the movie draws the audience in week before getting to the meat of it.
It starts with miner Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) inspecting an excavation in Pennsylvania for safety, and being trapped inside by a cave-in. After being seemingly abandoned, he did himself out to find that this event actually protected him from something apocalyptic, and there are no signs of other survivors. He heads to New York City, thinking there are more likely to be other people there, but finds himself alone... At least until Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens) shows up.
Even though the opening credits suggest that this movie will not be a one-man show, Belafonte gives writer/director Ranald MacDougall such a great performance during the first section of the movie that the audience can be forgiven if they forget. MacDougall himself deserves plenty of credit for what he's putting into place: He's set it up so that the practical issues of how Ralph sets himself up to live in some comfort and how he starts to crack from the quiet and loneliness are each interesting on their own but also feed on each other. It's done so well that when he finally introduces Sarah, it may not quite be surprising, but it's exhilarating and even shocking, upending everything the viewers have settled in for. That it's a damn well-executed entrance, going from the camera peeking around the corner to putting Stevens on screen to having the characters meet at just the right pace to maximize the emotion of every step - is a bonus.
Full review at EFC
Grabbers
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
I think that I recommended Grabbers as a fun for the festival and/or marathon more or less immediately after I saw it at Fantasia a couple years ago, so I'm going to take credit for the good time everybody still awake (or just waking up) at 6am Monday morning had. Seems reasonable, right?
Honestly, though, I'm not sure why this well-made movie in the Tremors mold about folks on a picturesque Irish island fighting off blood-ducking alien sea monsters that can't handle alcohol didn't play Boston in the first place. Is fun and funny and you'd think if it would play anywhere, it would play here. Yet another reason why I should have my own theater to show independent and imported genre movies!
Full review at EFC
Children of Men
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
There's not necessarily a lot in Alfonso Cuarón's early filmography to indicate just how great he would be at large-scale science fiction and fantasy, but there's a strong argument to be made based upon his last three films that he's the best thing going in that corner of the movie business. Of those three, Children of Men best exemplifies why; it's a dark, detailed ride that always manages to pull viewers further in when it should be seemingly be pushing them away.
Why is that? I think it's because Cuarón does not fall for the trap of thinking that darkness, itself, makes a work sophisticated. Instead, it's something that gives a storyteller opportunities, and because he is willing to have the worst happen at seemingly random times or use P.D. James's novel to build a world that may be unfair but is meticulously constructed, Children of Men always has interesting new paths to follow, and some of them can run counter top what the viewer might expect. Indeed, seeing this movie for the first time in a few years, I was actually surprised at just how bleak it was; the rare uplifting moments shine so brightly in my memory that I forgot just what sort of awful things happened immediately afterward. The tenor of the movie makes both powerful, and that's because Cuarón has made sure that the audience believes anything can go wrong, but hasn't made it predictable.
Granted, most of the time this predictability manifests itself as disaster occurring in a way that hurts more than the audience has any way to expect, with the pain coming because he, his co-writers, cast, and presumably James have infused every character with a battered but beating heart. Take Julianne Moore as the outlaw activist who recruits her ex-husband into helping out her cause; there's a way to portray this character so that she's harsh and running on little but anger and inertia, and Moore certainly gives us a fine version of that old standby, but it's the moment when it's clear that she not only still loves Theo, but still likes him and has plenty of humanity to show that solidifies why she can be so central. Michael Caine supplies comic relief and wisdom the way his character supplies cannabis, and his sincere belief that there are still things that make life worth living and love for those around him makes things much sadder than if he were simply deluding himself. The way they and certain others come off forces the cynicism of other characters into sharper relief, which really helps Clare-Hope Ashitey solidify Keep so that the young woman pregnant with the first baby to be born in seventeen years can be more than a plot device.
Full review at EFC
Flash Gordon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
I'm not really find of the idea of a movie being called a "guilty pleasure" or so bad it's good", and movies like Flash Gordon serve as an example of why: The things people like about it are legitimately entertaining, and if you like them enough to sit through the parts that are frankly terrible, there's no reason to be ashamed. It's not a very good movie, but it's got some impressive parts, and there's nothing wrong with just saying that.
Among the less impressive parts is the story, taken from a newspaper strip that started in the 1920s: That Ming the Merciless (Max Vin Dydow), absolute monarch of planet Mongo, is playing Earth with natural disasters, crashing the plans carrying college football star "Flash" Gordon (Sam Jones) and reporter Sale Arden (Melody Anderson). But they're soon on a ticket built by brilliant-but-eccentric scientist Dr. Zarkov (Topol), where they find that Ming is far from the only potential enemy or ally on Mongo - there Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen (Brian Blessed), Prince Barin of Arboria (Timothy Dalton), Ming's daughter Aura (Ornella Muti), and plenty more.
The plot is a silly thing, thin and complicated and full of reversals because it needed a surprise or cliffhanger every day, and both writers Michael Allin & Lorenzo Semple Jr. and director Mike Hodges opt to keep the kitsch that results when you take that and age it for fifty years in. It's a reasonably defensible decision, because even though bits of this movie are elaborately and impressively constructed, George Lucas had just raised the bar for everyone, and even if this films producers were looking to get some of that Star Wars box office, they could only get so far matching it on screen. And to give credit where it is due, my favorite line is the result of the filmmakers' tongues being firmly in their cheeks, and some moments like a fight scene turning into a football game are admirably peculiar.
Full review at EFC
Attendance was pretty good this year, enough so that when I made my usual somewhat late arrival at quarter of twelve (I had just gotten this posted a half-hour earlier), the usual swag-bags were gone. I did the now-customary routine, if two years counts as a custom, of accepting the Atomic Fireball, putting it in a pocket, climbing up to the balcony and finding a spot roughly in the center of the lower section, and then not being able to find the fireball when "Duck Dodgers" started up. Somehow it turned up again later, after the pants had gone through the laundry. No big deal, as I am not terribly fond of the things anyway.
Somewhere in there, our hosts got up on stage, with Garen exaggerating the quality of the movies that played the festival and Major Tom laying out the rules. And, honestly, I think it's time for Tom to stop even mentioning that there are callbacks and such tolerated and encouraged, because when you do that and then start with a movie like First Men in the Moon, you're just asking for trouble. In this case, it was people deciding that every open door for the next twenty-four hours must be accompanied by yelling "door!", no matter whether the current film was a clunker or a movie that people were trying to just watch and enjoy for its own sake.
One of the guys behind me was, really, just the absolute worst; he wasn't in his seat for half the time, but when he was, he was talking to no-one, and not particularly creative. I eventually had to ask if it was even possible for him to try and watch something good without making wiseass comments.
Check it out, it's Coherence co-star Nicholas Brendon on stage way below me on the stage, finally doing a Q&A after a little snow kept him from appearing at either Thursday's or Saturday's screenings. He's also demonstrating the limits of my camera and my skills in using it - someday I'll figure out how to get a picture that's neither blurry nor dark, rather than just choosing one. It's worth mentioning that the red curtain and the fact that I was way the heck up in the balcony didn't do the picture any favors.
Mr. Brendon is a funny guy, as those who are familiar with his work are likely not shocked to discover. It was certainly an entertaining Q&A as well as fairly informative, with Brendon very generous to those who didn't come, mentioning that while the film was mostly improvised, the two best lines were fed to him.
Dave Kornfeld's tip jar. That dollar on top is mine, because you know Dave would genuinely rather be doing changeovers every reel than setting a DCP up and letting it run.
I'm slowly becoming a convert to the "eat relatively little" school of how to get through the marathon; I had a breakfast sandwich from the nearby Au Bon Pain just before things started, some ice cream at seven-ish (I didn't feel like like dealing with the line for pizza), and some Twizzlers at 1am. I think the only really noteworthy nap I had was during The Visitor (still boring!), although there were some missing minutes during Children of Men and Flash Gordon at the end, but I was surprisingly alert even without keeping notes. I finished up by getting some doughnuts at Verna's, and was kind of a zombie all afternoon. Strangely, I was able to get a second wind for the Gathr preview series at the Regent that night and did pretty well at work on Tuesday. Kind of unusual, but I'll take it.
I must admit, the increased level of people not shutting up bugged me this year; I spent a lot of the event wondering if this was the year that I finally said that seeing a bunch of things I might not otherwise catch wasn't worth the expense, dealing with an audience full of talkers and containers of smelly food, etc. The back end of The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Grabbers, Children of Men, and, yeah, Flash Gordon makes up for a lot of it, so I'm probably down for one more year. Neither the festival nor the marathon is an ideal event, but it's the one we've got, and this year's was a pretty good time.
First Men in the Moon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
I suspect that, had I been around 50 years ago, I would have become fairly agitated watching First Men in the Moon, because there was amazing actual science and engineering going on where that subject was concerned and a bunch of H.G. Wells fantasy was just going to set people up for disappointment. Now, though, it's so much a product of its time(s) that it's easy enough to look at it as just a big Ray Harryhausen adventure and enjoy it on those terms.
Of course, being released in 1964, it has to make a nod to the actual space race, and so it shows a UN mission landing on the Moon, quite perplexed when they find a Union Jack and a document claiming the satellite for Queen Victoria. Running that down eventually leads to Arnold Bedford, an old man who tells of how, in his youth, he (Edward Judd) invested in the crazy anti-gravity experiments of his neighbor Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries). By a sequence of events too crazy to believe, that led to the men flying to the Moon with Arnold's American fiancee Kate Callender (Martha Hyer) along for the ride. They would find that while the surface of the Moon is just a dead field of rock, danger lurked under the surface.
Almost the entire text of that description seems almost comically quaint today, and that's not including little details like how the diving apparatus Cavor uses as spacesuits lack things like gloves. To a certain extent, though, "quaint" is probably a big part of what writers Nigel Kneale & Jan Read and director Nathan Juran are going for - something that will entertain the kids who were the film's main audience while also capturing a certain rural English character. It's silly, and it wouldn't be surprising if a great many of the people involved knew better, but there's something to be said for capturing a specific tone. And when the film does get away from things being charmingly bucolic, there's an argument to be made that it actually stumbles on a pre-punk form of steampunk.
Full review at EFC
Westworld
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
Nowadays, it's hard not to think of Michael Crichton's Westworld as a rough draft of Jurassic Park, and to wish that it included a Pirate World, if only so that a certain Jeff Goldblum line would be even funnier. In some ways, that's an unfair way to judge the movie, but in others, it's rather fitting - even without considering that later multimedia blockbuster, there are a lot of ways that this one falls short of its potential.
We're initially treated to an infomercial-like bit hinting at how the Delos resort is sold to potential tourists in its world, but soon we meet two friends headed there for an expensive but elaborate bit of role-playing: John Blane (James Brolin), who has been there before, and Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin), who had just been through an ugly divorce. They will be staying in "Western World", while others on the Delos hovercraft are heading to Medieval World and Roman World, all of which are populated by androids of every variety. At the saloon, Peyer has a shootout with a gunslinger (Yul Brynner) as John eggs him on. They treat themselves to a night at the cathouse, unaware that in the underground service areas, the technicians are noticing an increasing number of catastrophic failures.
There's a peculiar frankness about just how much of the place's appeal is the chance to shoot people and have it feel real; debates about violence in video games were far in the future on 1973. Sex, on the other hand, gets a bit more of a winking treatment, although Crichton doesn't hide it behind too much innuendo. It is kind of a shame, though, that he does very little to directly engage the idea; for all that one may argue that the robots going haywire is a sort of symbolic payback for how the people who come to Delos not only embrace their bloodlust but have created people (of a sort) whose sole reason for existence is to be raped and murdered, that layer of the plot is buried deep. There's never a sense of purpose to all this beyond a glitch bit of self-replicating code, and there's no thematic weight to the confrontations, either.
Full review at EFC
Coherence
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
Coherence is one of the talkiest, most actor-centric sci-fi films you're ever likely to see, but this is a case where that's a pretty good thing. Sure, something this odd and improv-heavy can invite disaster when a neat idea isn't able to thrive, but this is a case where things go far more right than wrong.
The initial bit of strangeness doesn't seem like a big deal - Emily (Emily Foxler) is talking to her friend Laurie (Lauren Maher) while driving over for a dinner party when her screen suddenly shatters for no reason, but then it is an iPhone and those things crack when you look at them too intently. She gets to Laurie's house okay, and the women and Laurie's actor husband Mike (Nicholas Brendon) are soon joined by Emily's boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling) and two other couples - Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) & Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), who brings some suspect botanicals, and Amir (Alex Manugian) & Lee (Lorene Scafaria), who also happens to be Kevin's ex-girlfriend. There's a comet passing fairly close to Earth that night, and soon the power and mobile phone service go out. One house down the street still has the lights on, but when a couple of the guys go over to see if they have a landline, things quickly get strange.
And then they get stranger; while much of the dialog may be improvised, director James Ward Byrkit (who created the scenario with co-star Alex Manugian) puts his cast into situations that have the potential to make a viewer's head hurt a little more with each bit of elaboration - that the passage of this comet has somehow warped space and time in the area around this house quickly becomes an insufficient explanation. Fortunately, he doesn't overburden the audience with explanations - a few references to thought experiments that have familiar names but may not be strictly applicable is enough, especially since it wouldn't necessarily do to have the audience understand things well enough that they get exasperated with the characters.
Full review at EFC
The Power
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
You could probably re-adapt The Power today without changing a whole heck of a lot - a little more gender and ethnic diversity among the academics who serve as suspects/victims, perhaps, and maybe some sort of having-related subplot to explain why certain information is not available. Fear of a mutant developing strange mental powers doesn't seem to get old, which means this sci-fi thriller from 1968 is far less creaky than many of its contemporaries.
It starts with Dr. Norman Van Zandt (Richard Carlson) being assigned as the government liaison for a University program that measures human endurance, and his first staff meeting is eventful: Professor Henry Hallson (Arthur O'Connell) claims that the results of an anonymous questionnaire circulated among the staff indicates that someone has off-the-charts brainpower, and while committee chair Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) dismisses the idea as pseudoscientific quackery, indications are that there something to it -- especially when Tanner and colleague/lover Prof. Margery Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette) discover Hallson's murdered body. Jim is framed for the crime, and goes on the lam to find the mysterious "Adam Harte" named in Hallson's notes, even if the man does seem to be a ghost, having left scant record of his existence behind; there's not even a consistent physical description!
The Power is built as a murder mystery, although the constraints of the time hurt it to a certain extent: Aside from Margery, the whole suspect/victim pool is rather similar middle-aged white men with similar backgrounds (with Jim not that much younger) and a motivation that is more or less a given. To a certain extent, that makes the movie a sort of proto-slasher, except that the anonymous people getting dispatched in progressively more bizarre ways are a little older. There's also a inescapable sense that because every murder that brings the numbers of suspects closer to one by literal process of elimination, it's not a very good plan, although the last few scenes do provide a bit of an explanation.
Full review at EFC
Europa Report
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, Blu-ray)
Europa Report is one of a number of fairly good spaceship-set movies coming from independent producers in the past few years, and this pleases me; it's enormously satisfying to see that the sort of stories that leap to mind when someone says "science fiction" don't necessarily need to be the territory of large studios that will strangle any creativity from them as a matter of course. Sure, this is the "highly-distributed international co- production" sort of independent film as opposed to the "guys doing something with whatever resources they can dig up locally" type, but you do need that middle ground.
I still like it quote a bit on a second viewing; in fact, I think I'm a little more inclined to look at its tendency to jump around in time a little more favorably. I still think it's a bit of an odd choice for the sort of future documentary it is presenting itself as, but it's not like I haven't seen this style in real life. The ending seems a little more inevitable, though. One of the nifty things about the movie is that it engages in just enough sleight-of-hand throughout that the actual finale could come as a surprise even though the viewer knows that something big and climactic will happen because it's a movie, but the strings are much more visible on a second run through.
It's still a pretty impressive flick, though and If certainly like to see more like it, both in terms of general attitude and polish.
Full review at EFC
Silent Running
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
I don't wholly agree with those who would frame the 1970s as a golden age of cinema for mature adults tragically destroyed by the coming off the sci-fi blockbuster, although that's in part because I can't bring myself to hate big, broadly-entertaining movies. I do occasionally find myself wondering about an alternate history of the movies where there were more movies like Silent Running that combined 1970s edge with beautiful, meticulous special effects.
It follows Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), part of a four-person crew on a space cargo ship and the only one who has any interest in tending to the domes containing some of the last trees from a dead Earth. Certain that the company president will announce plans to return home and reestablish the forests, he is crushed when the announcement instead is to eject the domes and destroy them with nuclear bombs. Unable to convince his crew-mates (Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin & Jesse Vint) that this is a horrible idea, he takes matters into his own hands. He saves the yes, but is all alone aside from robot drones Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
Douglas Trumbull directs, the first of his only two features, but his impact is felt just as strongly (if not more so) in his other jobs, heading up the visual effects department and creating the surprisingly expressive done units. Even without considering the time and the pre-digital tools he's working with, the right world he creates is something amazing, distinctive while seldom looking like functionality was compromised in order to make things look cool. The inside of the ship has an intriguing contrast of vastness for cargo with right spaces for the crew that quietly demonstrates the corporation's priorities (and shows how it's probably a miracle that the not-obviously-profitable nature preserve lasted this long), and is decorated with the sort of product placement that lends an earnestly cynical air. The outside is a thing of beauty, detailed but not shiny and busy like a modern digital creation might be, and while the signature feature of the three domes may not be strictly accurate scientifically, they certainly make this ship something that viewers will remember.
Full review at EFC
The Truman Show
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
After The Truman Show screened during this 24-hour movie marathon (from a gorgeous 35mm show print), I tweeted somewhat hyperbolically that it was the best work everybody involved has ever done. There was some disagreement about specific people, but I think it's telling that people responded with exceptions rather than wholesale disagreement with the premise. Truman is excellent from top to bottom, a somewhat overlooked classic.
15 years on, its premise is still somewhat audacious: Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has been raised on a soundstage the size of a small seaside town for his entire life, unaware that everybody in that life - his mother (Holland Taylor), his best friend (Noah Emmerich), even his wife (Laura Linney) - are actors improvising around his actions and nudging him in the direction dictated by the show's creator Christof (Ed Harris). Today, though, a crack appears in this perfect artifice when a stage light falls from the sky, and he's still haunted by the true love (Natacha McElhone) that the products whisked away before she could reveal the truth.
There are some people who will look at that description, invoke the words "reality TV", and comment that Andrew Niccol's screenplay was prophetic. I think they are rather far off-base, though - while many television programs today are technically unscripted but heavily guided down a certain path, the stars are all willing, active participants, and this style has become popular because it's cheap enough to produce that it can turn a profit in a world whose tastes are incredibly fragmented. The Truman Show's concept of everyone the world over watching an elaborate, expensive program whose star is not taking his personal brand into account is the opposite of prescient, and that's fine. It's better than fine, really; it's the reason why the movie endures.
Full review at EFC
Electric Dreams
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, 35mm)
Electric Dreams is, even by the standards of being a movie about a dangerous home computer from a time when such consumer machines were just starting to come with more than 64K of memory, communicated with online bulletin boards via 1200 baud modems, and could maybe run a crappy ELIZA program to laughably simulate artificial intelligence, is a pretty stupid movie. Despite that, it's not a bad thing for a theater to throw into its midnight rotation, as it demonstrates just how far you can go on an upbeat soundtrack, a co-star with potential, and a little more effort than attempts to cash in on a trend usually get.
Things start with Miles Harding (Lenny von Dohling), an architect at the bottom of a California firm, always being late and disorganized, so he splurges on one of those new personal computers to help him get his stuff together. He goes all-out, getting an X-10 home control system and everything - and then accidentally spills coffee on the box. Rather than just making it a useless brick with a voided warranty, it makes the system hyper-intelligent, and it not only develops the ability to speak (with the voice of Bud Cort), but soon starts to share Miles's crush on Madeline (Virginia Madsen), the pretty musician who just moved in upstairs.
1984 wasn't completely the stone age for personal computers, but some pretty hard-core suspension of disbelief is necessary to buy into what Edgar (a name that appears on the poster, but isn't awkwardly inserted into the film until the end) is capable of. This doesn't really matter in a certain sense, as it's not as though the filmmakers are actually linking any sort of suspense to a false assumption rather than presenting a then-new variation on the Cyrano de Bergerac story, albeit one where Cyrano is something of an unwanted interloper. Rusty Lemonade's script is still kind of silly in how Miles disconnecting Edgar's power or deciding that telling Madeline about his bizarrely sentient computer would help make him seen interesting would solve 90% of his problems right away, but the basic fantasy mostly works, and the filmmakers do get some points for not seeing new technology as an unadulterated evil.
Full review at EFC
The Visitor
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
If the various people who talk at length about cult movies could stop trying to make The Visitor happen, I'd really appreciate it. I say that like it hasn't already happened, but there's really not much denying it; the Brattle had it back for encores, it's been given the Drafthouse vertically-integrated-entity seal of approval, and even if it got "what?" responses and a mild "that sucked!" chant as the credits rolled, I suspect the guys pushing the film will take that as a badge of honor.
And while I admit that it's not quite boring in the same way I thought it was when I saw it last October - there really isn't a point where it's not peculiar, even though I initially characterized it as trippy-dull-dull-dull-trippy - but maybe it's worse that it's consistently weird but never actually interesting. It's a movie filled with half-ideas and characters that run counter to expectations without ever generating curiosity about how they got in their current situation or where they will wind up afterward.
And the finale is still striking but stupid, all the more so for how obvious the terrible doubling is. Lovers of weird movies deserve better.
What I thought in November
The World, the Flesh and the Devil
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DVD)
End-of-the-world movies looking to be thoughtful tend to reflect on what could cause such a cataclysm, often making the cynical argument that humanity just won't learn from its mistakes, with the survivors repeating them. There's merit to that, but the approach taken by The World, the Flesh and the Devil - using its blank slate to create a tight focus on other parts of society - is just as interesting, with the execution fantastic enough that the movie draws the audience in week before getting to the meat of it.
It starts with miner Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) inspecting an excavation in Pennsylvania for safety, and being trapped inside by a cave-in. After being seemingly abandoned, he did himself out to find that this event actually protected him from something apocalyptic, and there are no signs of other survivors. He heads to New York City, thinking there are more likely to be other people there, but finds himself alone... At least until Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens) shows up.
Even though the opening credits suggest that this movie will not be a one-man show, Belafonte gives writer/director Ranald MacDougall such a great performance during the first section of the movie that the audience can be forgiven if they forget. MacDougall himself deserves plenty of credit for what he's putting into place: He's set it up so that the practical issues of how Ralph sets himself up to live in some comfort and how he starts to crack from the quiet and loneliness are each interesting on their own but also feed on each other. It's done so well that when he finally introduces Sarah, it may not quite be surprising, but it's exhilarating and even shocking, upending everything the viewers have settled in for. That it's a damn well-executed entrance, going from the camera peeking around the corner to putting Stevens on screen to having the characters meet at just the right pace to maximize the emotion of every step - is a bonus.
Full review at EFC
Grabbers
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
I think that I recommended Grabbers as a fun for the festival and/or marathon more or less immediately after I saw it at Fantasia a couple years ago, so I'm going to take credit for the good time everybody still awake (or just waking up) at 6am Monday morning had. Seems reasonable, right?
Honestly, though, I'm not sure why this well-made movie in the Tremors mold about folks on a picturesque Irish island fighting off blood-ducking alien sea monsters that can't handle alcohol didn't play Boston in the first place. Is fun and funny and you'd think if it would play anywhere, it would play here. Yet another reason why I should have my own theater to show independent and imported genre movies!
Full review at EFC
Children of Men
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
There's not necessarily a lot in Alfonso Cuarón's early filmography to indicate just how great he would be at large-scale science fiction and fantasy, but there's a strong argument to be made based upon his last three films that he's the best thing going in that corner of the movie business. Of those three, Children of Men best exemplifies why; it's a dark, detailed ride that always manages to pull viewers further in when it should be seemingly be pushing them away.
Why is that? I think it's because Cuarón does not fall for the trap of thinking that darkness, itself, makes a work sophisticated. Instead, it's something that gives a storyteller opportunities, and because he is willing to have the worst happen at seemingly random times or use P.D. James's novel to build a world that may be unfair but is meticulously constructed, Children of Men always has interesting new paths to follow, and some of them can run counter top what the viewer might expect. Indeed, seeing this movie for the first time in a few years, I was actually surprised at just how bleak it was; the rare uplifting moments shine so brightly in my memory that I forgot just what sort of awful things happened immediately afterward. The tenor of the movie makes both powerful, and that's because Cuarón has made sure that the audience believes anything can go wrong, but hasn't made it predictable.
Granted, most of the time this predictability manifests itself as disaster occurring in a way that hurts more than the audience has any way to expect, with the pain coming because he, his co-writers, cast, and presumably James have infused every character with a battered but beating heart. Take Julianne Moore as the outlaw activist who recruits her ex-husband into helping out her cause; there's a way to portray this character so that she's harsh and running on little but anger and inertia, and Moore certainly gives us a fine version of that old standby, but it's the moment when it's clear that she not only still loves Theo, but still likes him and has plenty of humanity to show that solidifies why she can be so central. Michael Caine supplies comic relief and wisdom the way his character supplies cannabis, and his sincere belief that there are still things that make life worth living and love for those around him makes things much sadder than if he were simply deluding himself. The way they and certain others come off forces the cynicism of other characters into sharper relief, which really helps Clare-Hope Ashitey solidify Keep so that the young woman pregnant with the first baby to be born in seventeen years can be more than a plot device.
Full review at EFC
Flash Gordon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2014 in Somerville Theartre #1 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)
I'm not really find of the idea of a movie being called a "guilty pleasure" or so bad it's good", and movies like Flash Gordon serve as an example of why: The things people like about it are legitimately entertaining, and if you like them enough to sit through the parts that are frankly terrible, there's no reason to be ashamed. It's not a very good movie, but it's got some impressive parts, and there's nothing wrong with just saying that.
Among the less impressive parts is the story, taken from a newspaper strip that started in the 1920s: That Ming the Merciless (Max Vin Dydow), absolute monarch of planet Mongo, is playing Earth with natural disasters, crashing the plans carrying college football star "Flash" Gordon (Sam Jones) and reporter Sale Arden (Melody Anderson). But they're soon on a ticket built by brilliant-but-eccentric scientist Dr. Zarkov (Topol), where they find that Ming is far from the only potential enemy or ally on Mongo - there Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen (Brian Blessed), Prince Barin of Arboria (Timothy Dalton), Ming's daughter Aura (Ornella Muti), and plenty more.
The plot is a silly thing, thin and complicated and full of reversals because it needed a surprise or cliffhanger every day, and both writers Michael Allin & Lorenzo Semple Jr. and director Mike Hodges opt to keep the kitsch that results when you take that and age it for fifty years in. It's a reasonably defensible decision, because even though bits of this movie are elaborately and impressively constructed, George Lucas had just raised the bar for everyone, and even if this films producers were looking to get some of that Star Wars box office, they could only get so far matching it on screen. And to give credit where it is due, my favorite line is the result of the filmmakers' tongues being firmly in their cheeks, and some moments like a fight scene turning into a football game are admirably peculiar.
Full review at EFC
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