This Week Month In Tickets: 14 July 2014 - 10 August 2014

Before getting to the big scans and long rambling description of what I did in Montreal this summer, big thanks to everybody I saw up there: The great folks who run the Fantasia International Film Festival, the diminished but still friendly front row crowd, regular seatmates Paul Kazee and Gabriela McLeod... Heck, even the folks at the U.S. Consulate whom I'd kind of rather not have to deal with again!

Stubless: Ju-on: Black Ghost & Ju-on: White Ghost, on BluRay in the living room, 15 & 16 July; Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder, screener DVD on the laptop, 31 July; Steel Cold Winter, screener DVD on the laptop, 1 August; Ruroni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno, 7 August, Hall; I Am a Knife With Legs, 7 August, de Seve.

And, while we're here, a list of movies seen by day and the pages with the reviews:

17 July (Fantasia Day 01): Jacky and the Kingdom of Women and The Mole Song - Undercover Agent Renji
18 July (Fantasia Day 02): Kite, Live, and Zombeavers
19 July (Fantasia Day 03): The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow, Cold Eyes, Late Phases, Han Gong-ju, Suburban Gothic, and Zombie TV
20 July (Fantasia Day 04): Bayonetta: Bloody Fate, Red Family, In the Land of the Head Hunters, The Reconstruction of William Zero, and The Suspect
21 July (Fantasia Day 05): Thou Wast Mild and Lovely/Butter on the Latch and Hwayi: A Monster Boy
22 July (Fantasia Day 06): White Bird in a Blizard, Cheatin', In Order of Disappearance, and No Tears for the Dead
23 July (Fantasia Day 07): The Fatal Encounter, The Huntresses, and Kumiko the Treasure Hunter
24 July (Fantasia Day 08): Faults and Predestination
25 July (Fantasia Day 09): Mr. Go, Yasmine, and Goal of the Dead
26 July (Fantasia Day 10): The Zero Theorem, Uzumasa Limelight, Heavenly Sword, Puzzle, Let Us Prey, andDead Snow 2: Read vs. Dead
27 July (Fantasia Day 11): Hal, Giovanni's Island, The White Storm, The Midnight Swim, The Man in the Orange Jacket, and The Seventh Code
28 July (Fantasia Day 12): The Creeping Garden, Hana-Dama: The Origins, Guardian, and Creep
29 July (Fantasia Day 13): To Be Takei, At the Devil's Door, The Search for Weng Weng, and The Snow White Murder Case
30 July (Fantasia Day 14): The One I Love, Slipstreams and Eclectic Sheep, Ju-on: The Beginning of the End, and Four Corners
31 July (Fantasia Day 15): The Creep Behind the Camera, The Fake, When Animals Dream, and Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder
1 August (Fantasia Day 16): Steel Cold Winter, Kabisera, Miss Granny, Bros Before Hos, and WolfCop
2 August (Fantasia Day 17): Hunter X Hunter: Phantom Rouge, From Vegas to Macau, The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Black Butler, Time Lapse, and Naked Ambition
3 August (Fantasia Day 18): Hunter X Hunter: The Last Mission, Real, Fuku-chan of Fuku-Fuku Flats, Ejecta, and Housebound
4 August (Fantasia Day 19): Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, Thermae Romae II, and Closer to God
5 August (Fantasia Day 20): The Desert, Monsterz, Metalhead, and Welcome to New York
6 August (Fantasia Day 21): Preservation, The Outer Limits of Animation, and Killers
7 August (Fantasia Day 22): Guardians of the Galaxy, Ruroni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno, and I Am a Knife With Legs
10 August (Chaplin Shorts): "A Dog's Life", "A Day's Pleasure", "Sunnyside", and "Shoulder Arms"

Didn't get much done in the days ahead of the festival, but did watch the two Ju-on mini-features in case they were referenced in the new one at the festival (they weren't). For once, got to the bus station in plenty of time, even though I think the bus was actually earlier than in previous years. Got to Montreal, took a bit of a roundabout route to get to the apartment I'd rented but it was easy enough to get things set up, get the press pass, and be ready for the first show. Then it was basically "watch movies, sleep, write, repeat" for close to a solid week, before I had much time to do some touristy stuff.

I think it was in here that dumb thing #1 happened, with my tablet dropping out of my pocket and dropping a foot and a half to the floor of de Seve. When I picked it up, there was a hairline crack on the screen, and though I've seen phones and tablets work with much less, mine wasn't accepting input. It was showing a picture, connecting to a laptop and transferring data, but no touch screen input. Fortunately, there was one of those phone/tablet repair places right near the Concordia campus, though they would wind up charging me two-thirds of what I paid for my refurbished Nexus 7 last year.

Dumb thing #2 might have happened sometime while I was poking around the Vieux-Port on Thursday and Friday (the 24th & 25th). Likelly not the first day, when I was in familiar territory at Pointe-a-Calliere (nifty Marco Polo exhibit, and kids should love the new pirate ship), but on Friday, I went to the King Tut exhibit only to have my (beat to crap) debit card not work, then not work at on unaffiliated ATM. I eventually had to go practically back to Place des Armes to find a bank with their own ATMs, which was weird. I also went to one of the touristy spots and had a poutine with smoked meat. Anyway, lots of pulling stuff in and out of my pockets frustrated, so this could be where my passport went missing.

I recommend the Tutankhamon exhibition, though. It's old, cool, and authentic, and the warehouse space they've put it in gives the audience room to poke around without the place having the stuffiness of a formal museum. You can almost touch, but, well, don't.

The next week was quiet,in part because that's the one where I worked for the day job in the morning. There's stuff that needs to get done and there's no point in using all your vacation up in one go. In addition to the movies highlighted on the page, I also saw two on screeners: Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder and Steel Cold Winter. The screener policy was pretty strict this year - you could only check DVDs out for 48 hours and they weren't hosting their own online. That's OK - if either of these two play Fantastic Fest or someplace local, I'll check them out again so that I can see them properly.

With the last week, I took advantage of a thing Fantasia veterans know: The festival always runs an extra day or two after the initially announced end date, both in a bump from 20 days to 21 on the official schedule and an extra day of encores. I added a couple of trips to the consulate in there - this is about when I had the "hey, I haven't seen my passport in a few days" revelation, so I went Wednesday afternoon, only to be told to come back Thursday at 8:15am. That started a long final day of the festival - consulate, then breakfast, then the Lascaux exhibit at the science museum, the Napoleon exhibit at Notre Dame de Montreal, checking out the Redpath museum at McGill, and then, finally, because there was still a few hours until the festival screenings I hadn't seen, popping into Guardians of the Galaxy to escape rain. No wonder I was severely dragging by the time I Am a Knife with Legs was done.

With a couple days left in Montreal, I spent Friday being lazy - sleeping in, eventually checking out the Canadian Center for Architecture, which had need displays on using digital tools and a movement to recreate a very large haystack in Paris.

Saturday was check-out day, and I did dumb thing #3. I had found something online about a Lachine Canal Museum that, on Saturdays, had a different sort of tour, with visitors not just in a boat but rowing in the historic canals (now only used for small craft). Anyway - even if you think you've got a good idea of how to get somewhere when away from home, get a map, or at least something that lets you easily look stuff up online. I wound up walking the wrong direction from the subway station, getting back on, underestimating the distance to walk, not finding the place I was looking for but stumbling on a different Lachine museum with modern art, a sculpture garden, and a historic trading post. After looking around those places, I eventually stumbled on the one I was looking for originally, well after it closed. So, for next year: Green line to Angrinon, 110 bus, off at the corner with both museums. Give yourself an hour and a half.

Then came the time-killing until the 11:30pm bus, the ride back to Boston where I didn't get a whole lot of sleep, and jumping right back into seeing movies with a group of Chaplin shorts at the Somerville.

(Note to folks attending silent movies: Just because there's no dialog on-screen doesn't mean you need to talk. And, man, the kids behind me were active, to be kind!)

"A Dog's Life"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 August 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)

I was still kind of getting my bearings on this one, but I think it is in many ways the quintessential Tramp short, with Chaplin literally playing a tramp trying to scrape up any food he can, down and out but not bowed. Plus, it's got an enormously cute dog. I do kind of wonder whether the "sad girl singing at dance club" bit is something that might have worked better with sound or if being silent means the audience is free to imagine.

Original review from 2012 (not that much longer!)

"A Day's Pleasure"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 August 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)

As mentioned last time I saw this, Chaplin outside of Tramp mode, at least during the silents, can both be a little disconcerting and a case of a guy not playing to his strengths. "A Day's Pleasure" is gags. Funny gags, to be sure, but also kind of mean-spirited and knockabout, which isn't quite how he works best.

Original review from 2011

"Sunnyside"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 August 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)

"Sunnyside" is where you can most clearly see Charlie Chaplin transitioning, somewhat uneasily, from the gag-based short filmmaker that was the norm in the teens to the story-oriented writer and director of features he would become in the 1920s. It's kind of a mess at times, but when it's on, it's on.

It gets to be on a lot, as Chaplin continually finds new things for his farm handyman character to do. There are bits about not wanting to get out of bed, working on the farm, running the inn/general store that his employer also seems to own, and wooing Edna Purviance's local beauty, even though a guy from the city is getting in the way. Chaplin throws just about everything he can think of in, including a fantasy sequence. They're funny jokes, though kind of disconnected.

And Chaplin is the guy to deliver them, which helps immensely. He played this sort of pathos-laden (but capable of mischief) character wonderfully while doing precision physical comedy. He's the face of the silent era for a reason, and even if the story here is all over the place, his execution is great.

"Shoulder Arms"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 August 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)

This is the biggest, most-feature-like film Chaplin made before actually starting to do features, and it's kind of fascinating to see. Lots of silents, whether shorts or features, often feel like separate shorts that can be broken down into their component reels and shown separately, and this one has that sort of multi-stage feeling, but it also has an unusually natural progression from one to the other.

And those bits are pretty good wartime comedy. Chaplin comes up with a bunch of funny scenarios that don't necessarily have a lot to do with actually shooting other people, actually thinning a tough line admirably: He depicts trench warfare as kind of miserable and dangerous while still giving the audience plenty of funny slapstick. He builds it up to quite the adventure and romance in the meantime.

It's quite the funny little adventure comedy, maybe a little stretched as it played (there were some weird off-speed moments, although I would think that playing it 24fps would make a movie listed on IMDB as 17fps shorter rather than longer), but an enjoyably silly silent war comedy.

A Most Wanted Man

Come on, other contributors to eFilmCritic - I don't have time to write these things before Fantasia screenings fall out of my head.

Aside from that, that thing I say in the opening of the EFC review about thinking John le Carré was no longer with us - completely true; I could half-swear I've read an obituary at some point, and this movie was an update of some Cold War-era novel. Not the case!

Okay, back to the Fantasia stuff.

A Most Wanted Man

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2014 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)

I must admit to bring a little surprised that John le Carré is still with us and writing contemporary works; I had sort of aimed he faded away with the end of the Cold War. This, it turns out, is not the case; age may have slowed him down some but his stories of quiet men doing ethically questionable things in the names of their countries continue to come and intrigue a patient audience. This impressive adaptation of a more recent work is low-key, but nevertheless a fascinating story of espionage's unusual ethics.

The scene is Hamburg, where Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman) heads a small, very secret operation trying to discover terrorist plots and money in the port city. His main target is Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a moderate philanthropist of Arab descent who tends to have a little money disappear on the way to the good works, at least until Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) shows up. A Chechen immigrant with jihadist ties, Karpov enlists Annabel Richter (Rachel MacAdams), a young lawyer specializing in refugee cases, to serve as a go-between with Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), whose bank is holding a great deal of money deposit by Karpov's Russian father. Gunther sees a plan and a pattern here, but he'll need some help from American observer Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright) to gain some time, as the regular police would like to take the bird in the hand.

There are all manner of spy stories, from the James Bond and Tom Clancy stories which focus on taking out the enemy with varying degrees of stealth to the almost amoral ones where the conflict is so abstracted that those involved simply treat it as a game. This one sounds very much like the latter; while it reminds the audience right off the bat that the 9/11 attacks were largely planned in and staged from Hamburg, it doesn't offer up any sort of secret plot of its own, whether terrorist or governmental, and of the two or three scenes that have what one would usually describe as "action" in a movie of this type, only one comes away feeling like that sort of moment. There's still excitement, though; director Anton Corbijn stages characters tailing each other as well as anybody you'll see, while he and screenwriter Andrew Novell make le Carré's story built around possible dirty money worth listening to closely.

Full review at EFC

Singham Returns, The Admiral: Roaring Currents, and some Fantasia catch-up

Maybe, if I went to Showcase Cinemas Revere more often, I'd know the schedule better and getting there wouldn't be such an adventure when they played something not showing elsewhere. Today (well, yesterday, technically) I tried to give myself a bit of a cushion because transit instructions that involve the subway are generally not to be treated as precise in the way ones that just involve commuter rail and buses are. I just missed one Red Line train, but made a quick enough transfer to the Orange Line that it might have been close at Malden if the bus that would have brought me to the theater half an hour early wasn't ten minutes late. Then I got off a couple stops earlier than necessary... Well, still made it to the theater with time enough to spare to get some pizza, but, boy, would it save me an awful lot of trouble if these things played at Boston Common or Fenway.

I'm genuinely curious as to whether there's a notable Korean population in/around Revere, whether CJ Entertainment has a better relationship with Showcase than they do AMC or Regal, or whether the theater in Revere is just more likely to have an extra screen than the ones downtown. I'm not going to complain about any Asian genre film playing near me, but it can seem so random where and when they show up.

Speaking of genre films from foreign lands, I'm working my way back through the Fantasia movies that I couldn't review in "real time", so here's a closer look (on EFC, with excerpts below) at Live, Cold Eyes, Late Phases, and Han Gong-ju. Scroll waaaay to the bottom of this post for some ending-discussion where that last one is concerned.

Singham Returns

* * (out of four)
Seen 15 August 2014 in Regal Fenway #2 (first-run, DCP)

Not having seen Ajay Devgn's first go-round as Bajirao Singham, I have no idea of this sequel - which stands alone well enough - is an improvement or disappointment relatively speaking. There are elements which suggest it could be either or both; the title character is a cut above most no-nonsense cops, but is stuck in a movie whose high stakes seldom translate into excitement.

Though he grew up in a smaller village, Singham is now working in Mumbai, where his reputation for honesty is not yet quite so well-known. His newest assignment will involve protecting Guruji (Anumpam Kher), the leader of a progressive political party fielding a slate of young, uncorrupted candidates in the coming election. This possess a threat to their uneasy allies in the current coalition government, rival party leader Prakash Rao (Zakir Hussain) and bogus spiritual leader Baba (Amole Gupte), who intend to take the election by spreading around "black money" - and it soon looks like one of Singham's most trusted men is delivering it.

That's not a bad story, and there's even a chance at a little more mystery-solving than is typical as Singham's team tries to figure out just how one of their own wound up dying while driving an ambulance full of dirty money, but it's far from complicated. Heck, it cuts from someone asking who would want to harm Guruji to Baba saying "me", and doesn't significantly complicate the conspiracy from there. It's probably a little bit too basic for a movie that runs close to two and a half hours without taking much of a turn at intermission. There is a bit of a romantic comedy subplot that chews up a little time, but the movie does not mix tones enough for the time it does go for something lighter to work.

Full review at EFC

Myeong-ryang (The Admiral: Roaring Currents)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2014 in Showcase Cinemas de Lux Revere #2 (first-run, DCP)

Let's be honest about The Admiral: Roaring Currents ("Myeongryang - Huiori Bada" in the original Korean, and apparently sometimes only either half of the English title is used): Roughly 95% of why people buy a ticket is for the great big battle sequence at the end, and the intrigues that set it up and put human faces on the combatants really just need to be not-awful. That's about where it lands - good enough for the first hour or so, but coming through with what it promised.

The battle of Myeongryang took place on 26 October 1597, with Admiral Yi Sun-shin (Choi Min-sik) standing between the capital of Joseon and an invading Japanese Navy commanded by General Wakizaka (Cho Jin-woong) and augmented by "Pirate King" Kurushima (Ryu Seung-ryong). It is far from a fair fight - Yi is ailing since being arrested and tortured under suspicion of being a Japanese double agent before being reinstated after a devastating defeat, and the Korean Navy is so desperately outnumbered - roughly 300 to 12 - that he's been ordered to have his men reinforce the army. He does not intend to die on dry land, though, and a look at a nearby whirlpool gives him an idea.

The first half of Roaring Currents isn't actually filler, and I suspect that Korean history buffs will enjoy it. It does contain a certain amount of set-up for what comes later, with characters introduced and a look at what motivates everyone beyond trying to win the war. It's not bad at all, but it doesn't exactly feel illuminating: Folks buying a ticket for this movie probably know the basics of what's going to happen, and while there are some exciting moments to it, there are few moments either during the run-up or the battle where the viewer stops and thinks that this moment had or would have a major effect on the ultimate outcome.

Full review at EFC

Live

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I get the impression that Yusuke Yamada's novel Live could be made into a fairly successful movie if the filmmakers had some resources to work with; the story is nothing revolutionary, but it's the sort of basic young adult adventure that American studios have been betting big on. In this case, though, it wound up in the hands of Noboru Iguchi and with a budget low enough to just reference the novel rather than properly adapt it.

In the book, Naoto Yamura is the hero; the guy with the same name in the film (Yuki Yamada) is an entitled little twerp who initially doesn't pay any attention to the package he gets containing a copy of Live, a cell phone, and a directive to follow instructions or his mother dies. He arrives at the "starting line" to find about thirty others in the same situation, notably including Shinsuke (Yuki Morinaga) and Runi (Ito Ono), fans of the book; gymnast Akari (Mari Iriki), and kickboxer Tamaki (Mitsuki Koga). The book contains clues on how to proceed and hints of the lethal challenges and weapons to be found along the way. The whole thing is being broadcast online, and only the winner saves his or her loved ones.

Not actually being familiar with the book or the film's reception in Japan, I can't say that much about whether Iguchi's metatextual take on the material helps or hurts it. For all I know, this may be the most interesting possible take on a route but popular story. Export seems to hurt it, as some moments assume a familiarity with the source material that Iguchi's western fans won't have, and while there's an argument to be made that the movie is satirizing game-like linear plots and audience addiction to violent media, it's far more example than commentary.

Full review on EFC.

Gamsijadeul (Cold Eyes)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

It's been a while since I've seen Eye in the Sky, long enough that when I looked up my original review, I was surprised how lukewarm I was toward it at the time. Maybe the folks who were talking about this South Korean remake being better than the original had something.

It's still built on a nifty idea for a cop movie or series, following a squad whose specialty is maintaining surveillance by means both high and low tech. Both versions also start out with a memorable sequence, where what seems like one big game of cast-and-mouse separate into two threads, with potential surveillance squad member Ha Yoon-ju (Han Hyo-ju) trailing team leader Hwang-sou (Sol Kyung-gu) as an audition to join the squad while a mastermind later called "Shadow" (Jung Woo-sing) watches his own crew's crime play out his own all-seeing vantage point. It has the makings of a potentially fantastic game of cat-and-mouse as Shadow starts taking on even larger jobs.

As with the Hong Kong version, there's a sense that this idea might work better as the pilot to a TV series - there's even a mysterious group of villains pulling Shadow's strings who may be gangs or North Korean spies for all audience knows to serve as recurring threats - than as a movie. That squad room full of characters who barely get names here would certainly appreciate it. Happily, it mostly serves to give the movie some texture when it could have wound up a very dry game of chops and robbers with the main emotion being whether Yoon-ju is cut out for a job where following a potential subject means passing by an actual crime in progress. It’s a fairly self-contained story, but doesn't feel small.

Full review on EFC

Late Phases

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As soon as he or she sees Nick Damici in this movie, blind but still a gruff former soldier, about to be placed in a retirement community, even the jaded moviegoer may smile a bit. It's not the usual hero or setting for this type of film, but horror movies about old folks are often kind of great - old guys know stuff but are often shoved aside to be forgotten - and this one is no exception.

Damici plays Ambrose McKinley, a Vietnam vet who has just buried his wife and is now being moved into a seniors' community with the help of his son Will (Ethan Embry). Though he generally blows past being curmudgeonly to outright hostility, he hits it off with his neighbor Gloria (Rutanya Alda) - so when she is the victim of an "animal attack" - which he finds out are surprisingly common in this isolated, wooded area during the full moon - he sets out to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Director Adrian Garcia Bogliano and writer Eric Stolze don't play particularly coy with the audience at the start; though Ambrose may be blind, the audience can quite clearly see that his new home has a werewolf problem during that first attack. The surprising bit is how they handle things from that point forward: Rather than screw around having the hero play catch-up with what the audience already knows, they have Ambrose figure the basic problem pretty quickly, and without having secretly been a werewolf hunter or otherwise encountering the supernatural in his youth. It may be a bit of a leap for the audience, but it lets the filmmakers strip a lot of the counterproductive delay that tends to bog horror movies down despite being completely logical from this one so that they can concentrate on Ambrose doing some detective work and figuring out how he can fight a monster despite being a blind senor citizen. The audience can imagine the inevitable scene of sad younger people feeling really sorry for the old man making up crazy stories, so even though the filmmakers plant the prerequisites, they make Ambrose smart enough to avoid it.

Full review on EFC

Han Gong-ju

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival: The Best Years of My Life?, DCP)

It is almost never difficult to figure out where Han Gong-ju is heading, and that's okay. It may, in fact, be part of the point. Surprise is not the only way a movie can punch the audience in the guy, and between the excellent performance of Chun Woo-hee as the title character and the precision filmmaking by writer/director Lee Su-jin, this is one of the most quietly devastating teen-focused movies you'll see.

It starts off on an uncomfortable place, with Gong-ju's former teacher Nan-do (Min Kyung-jin) calling in a favor to get her enrolled at a new school and begging his mother (Lee Young-ran) to let the teenager stay at her place, at least temporarily. After that, the girl tries to keep her head down, taking swimming lessons and helping out in Mrs. Cho's shop, although one of her classmates, Eun-hee (Jung In-sun), is eager to befriend her after hearing her practice in the music room. Every once in a while, there's a glimpse of her old life and friends like roommate Hwa-ok (Kim So-young) or Dong-yoon (KimChoi Yong-joon), the cute son of the boss at her part-time job, but they are very much not a part of her present.

Director Lee does an extraordinary job of doling out information on just what happened to the title character to make her change schools at exactly the rate to keep the audience half wondering and half dreading having its suspicions confirmed. Even while saving that for the last act, the movie is well-able to examine the fallout as this girl who is getting the rawest of deals tries to just get by. Holding the specific reasons for page back allows Lee to do something impressive, giving the viewer a close look at just how society undercuts and fails girls and women in Gong-ju's situation generally while not allowing something big to overshadow who she is specifically.

Full review on EFC

SPOILERS! It makes me want to take the most optimistic view of the final scene, a gut-punch by its very nature. I think, though, that this is why Gong-ju put so much importance in the swimming lessons - she knew that, at some point, things would get low enough that she would throw herself off a bridge, and she aimed to make sure that, when she came to her senses moments later, she would be able to get through it. I ay be hoping for this to happen enough to be ignoring what was actually on-screen, in that I maybe saw a shadow on the Han to indicate Gong-ju swimming, although it may just be wishful thinking. It changes the meaning of the movie tremendously: On the one hand, it's a tribute to Gong-ju that she was able to steel herself for when depression and despair eventually overwhelmed her, but it's probably reasonable to say that no matter what she does, you really can't compare yourself for what this sort of victim is going to go through.!SRELIOPS

Mood Indigo

I skipped this when it was closing IFFBoston - there was going to be baseball until there wasn't - and I can't remember whether that was going to be the full 135-minute version or not. The listing showed one that was roughly 121 minutes, so I was actually rather surprised to get out of a 7:20pm movie with ten minutes or so of previews at 9:08. As you might expect, these different cuts and lengths leave me very curious as to how much of my impatience and feeling of twee overload came from an edit that made sure to keep every bit of Michel Gondry style in but gutted what might have actually held the movie together.

Not much more to say, because, honestly, it's no fun disliking this sort of movie, which does so much to try and entertain but falls short.

L'écume des jours (Mood Indigo)

* * (out of four)
Seen 14 August 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

I haven't seen every movie that Michel Gondry has made, but I'm reasonably confident that, barring some truly bizarre experimental shorts made early in his career, this is the Michel-Gondriest. While there are definite upsides to that, it also means that the film can be exhausting if you don't absolutely love it, and that's where I landed, fidgety and impatient by the end despite the American cut of the movie being a good half-hour shorter than I thought.

It follows Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloe (Audrey Tautou), who meet at a party and fall in love, to eventually get married, although events on the honeymoon set the stage for less happy times. Anther couple of lesser note is Nicolas (Omar Sy), said to be Colin's lawyer and adviser but mostly seen doing the work of a servant, and Isis (Charlotte Le Bon), who threw the party where the first two met; there's also Chick (Gad Elmaleh), Colin's best friend and devotee of author Jean-So Partre (Philippe Torreton), and Alise (Aïssa Maïga), Nicholas's niece.

To say that Colin and Chloe meet at this party makes it sound like something much more exciting than it is. They are pointed at each other by Nicolas and Chloe and just sort of fall in together. There are cute moments and whimsy to the set-up, but it's emblematic of the rest of the movie that Colin and Chloe don't actually do anything. Nobody does much throughout the entire movie except Nicolas, who does so many types of things with so little apparent effort that it barely registers beyond a running joke. People will declare their love and devotion quite earnestly in exchanges that the audience has heard many times before, but they seldom show it in an individual way or even have personality traits that can be seen to connect with each other.

Full review at EFC

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 15 August - 21 August 2014

Thing I would not have predicted at the start of the year: Getting to see four movies featuring Choi Min-sik in regular theaters before the end of August.

• As mentioned last week, Let's Be Cops opened on Wednesday; the story about two guys with a scanner and costumes pretending to be police officers plays at the Somerville, Apple, Boston Common, Fenway, and Assembly Row.
  
  Also opening up: The Expendables 3, which has made it to a third movie without anyone really getting expended and now has a pretty gigantic cast, with Antonio Banderas, Wesley Snipes, Ronda Rousey, and Harrison Ford being added to the team and Mel Gibson playing the villain. It's at the Somerville, Apple, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, Assembly Row, and the SuperLux. And I really feel like I should know something about The Giver, another movie based on a young adult novel in a dystopian fantasy world. It's got an unreasonably good supporting cast - Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes - and Phillip Noyce directing, so I really feel like I should have seen one preview for it at some point. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Embassy Square, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and the SuperLux.
  
  All three of those movies are also opening at Showcase Cinema in Revere, which also has The Admiral: Roaring Currents - I guess there's a notable Korean community in that area or something, because they also had The Attorney six months back, and is getting this two weeks after it opens in South Korea. Choi Min-sik plays a Korean naval legend, who in 1597 fought off a 300-ship Japanese armada with a fleet of 12 ships.
  
  Apparently the $3 movies are done at Boston Common, but the $6 screenings on Sunday and Wednesday continue; this week's is Elvis: That's the Way It Is.
• Kendall Square has two new ones this week. The one-weeker is Finding Fela, a documentary on Nigeria musician Fela Kuti, which also integrates archived interviews, performance footage, and material from the Broadway play Fela!. They've also got Land Ho! (as does West Newton), a road movie about two American senior citizens, formerly married to sisters, who take a trip to Iceland.
• Apple Cinemas/iMovieCafe is doing the thing where they open up the same movie under different names in Tamil (Anjaan) and Telugu (Sikandar), but nothing subtitled. Over at Fenway, Bollywood action movie Shingham Returns opens, with Ajay Devgn reprising his role as a tough cop (now Deputy Commissioner) looking to crack down on crime. Kareena Kapoor co-stars.
• The Brattle picks up another IFFBoston selection for a weekend run in Rich Hill, a documentary on three brothers in the Missouri town of the title, a dirt-poor spot in the heartland. There's a panel discussion after the 7:30pm show on Friday. It plays three times a day through Sunday, and one 7:30pm show on Monday. The other shows on Friday to Monday are a return of Only Lovers Left Alive in 35mm, replacing Life After Beth. Well, there's one other, an 11:30pm screening of Videodrome (in 35mm) at 11:30pm Saturday.
  
  The Robert Wise screenings include a matinee of The Sand Pebbles on Monday and The Sound of Music on Tuesday. The "Girls Rule!" double feature on Wednesday is Pretty in Pink in 35mm and Ghost World. And then on Thursday, there's a special premiere screening of Exposed, a documentary on cutting-edge burlesque performers.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up Brendan Gleeson Calvary for its second week, meaning Snowpiercer has finally left town (but give it a hand - it outlasted Trans4mers here!). They also pick up one 9:45pm screening nightly in the GoldScreen of The Dog, a documentary about the man who inspired the main character in Dog Day Afternoon (which has a special screening on Thursday night).
  
  In other special screenings, the midnight "Postmortem" zombie series continues with a 35mm of Stuart Gordon's Reanimator, which I recall being fun from the other times I've seen bits and pieces late at night. There are apparently still tickets available for Monday's Big Screen Classic, the annual Big Lebowski Bowling Party, which has the movie in 35mm, contests, costumes, and bowling.
• The Somerville Theatre has Clue in 35mm at midnight on Friday and Saturday. Their sister theater, the Capitol, picks up Chef second-run, while The Princess Bride pulls double duty as both the family movie playing at noon and the Summer Rewind flick playing at 10:30pm Friday and Saturday.
• It's still Fritz Lang time at the Harvard Film Archive, with The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Friday 7pm), Hangmen Also Die! (Friday 9pm), Man Hunt (Saturday 7pm), While the City Sleeps (Saturday 9pm), Woman in the Moon (with Jeff Rapsis accompanying on piano Sunday at 7pm), and Human Desire (Monday 7pm).
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues The Films of Mohammad Rasoulof with screenings of Goodbye (Friday) and his new one Manuscripts Don't Burn (Saturday, Sunday, Thursday). Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale has one last screening on Friday. Closed Curtain, the latest from Iran's Jafar Panahi (supposedly not supposed to be making movies), plays Friday, Saturday, and Thursday
• The Regent Theatre has some local films on Sunday, with feature film 10 bookended by TV pilot Lives of Will and Ray and short film "The Test". Can't find much information on them, though. There's also a free screening of Tim's Vermeer on Wednesday, with details at this site.
  
  There's also a month to get tickets for a Gathr screening of Who Is Dayani Crystal? (co-directed by Gael Garcia Bernal) there on 24 September, which needs 50 purchases in the next 28 days. Tugg needs 107 more pre-orders for a 16 September screening of Last Call at the Oasis at Kendall Square (tickets must be purchased by the 5th)
• The ICA is still screening Jim Hodges's Untitled film, a portrait of fellow artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, at 1pm on Sundays as part of their summer exhibition of Hodges's work.
• From Joe's Calendar, noteworthy free outdoor films this week include the silent Evangeline at the longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, Roman Holiday at DCR North Point on Wednesday, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in Revere on Thursday. Beetlejuice is the one shownig up in multiple spots.

Unlikely I'll get back from my niece's birthday party in time for Woman in the Moon on Sunday, but I will be looking to take in Expendables 3, The Admiral, maybe Singham Returns and/or The Giver. Still haven't caught Boyhood, Calvary, or A Most Wanted Man yet, either.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

Regal: Please stop showing that terrible extended preview for When the Game Stands Tall before every movie. Aside from just not looking very good - and it has the appearance of a terrible movie - concentrating so much on the steak seems kind of tone-deaf. Oh, the high school jocks who are probably worshipped more than is healthy even by Texas football standards lost their first game in twelve years and you're talking about adversity? Screw. You.

(And, everyone? Stop showing that Dracula Untold preview for any reason.)

So much negativity. I also feel like I bag on director Lasse Hallström's reputation more than I should here; I'm pretty sure that his career is more than studio films meant to look indie, but I'll be darned if I can remember the rest.

Sorry, again. Mediocre studio films after a month of awesome genre eccentricity shouldn't make me so cranky.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 August 2014 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

Good food is wasted on me, but I can generally enjoy a good food movie as much as anyone. But for all that it talks a good game about spice and creativity, The Hundred-Foot Journey is rather bland fare. It looks nice enough, but it meanders never finds something that will grab the audience, despite trying a bit of everything.

That meandering starts early on, as the Kadam family arrives in Europe at Rotterdam, having first fled India when their restaurant burned down after a disputed election, then spent a year in London in between. Their car breaks down in a French village, where "Papa" (On Puri) decides to purchase a vacant restaurant and open it with son Hassan (Manish Dayal) cooking. One of the reasons this space is so affordable is that it's directly across the street from a traditional French place with a Michelin star, and while Hassan and sous-chef Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon) become fast friends, owner Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren) is none too enamored with the new neighbors. Hassan developing an interest in French cuisine just complicates things.

I'm curious about the Richard C. Morias novel that screenwriter Steven Knight and director Lasse Hallström adapted. Is it thick with subplots for Hassan's four siblings (or is that three siblings and his sister's husband)? Are the three distinct phases of the story more well-balanced, with at least one character seeming like an active participant in each? As it stands, the film feels like the filmmakers had dozens of ideas that needed to either be fleshed out or pruned away to give the rest some room. It hurts the film two ways, on the one hand connecting the movie's parts with thin threads, and on the other blunting the moments that should be sharp. Especially at the center, when a certain bit of history repeating should yield a much more dramatic reaction from the Kadams while Mme. Mallory's dissection of some of the lyrics to "La Marseillaise" seems like the end of the film having anything to say about European xenophobia, rather than the beginning.

Full review at EFC

The Fantasia Daily 2014.22: Guardians of the Galaxy, Ruroni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno, I Am a Knife with Legs

Okay, I didn't actually see Guardians as part of the festival, but it played there and I saw it before the festival ended, so it counts.

Before that, though, it was a busy day, involving getting down to the US Consulate early in the morning to get an emergency passport to replace the one I misplaced at some point in the festival. Friends: Do not lose your passport. Ever. Even if I can rationalize it as basically renewing it a year or two early, it means getting up at 7am on a vacation day (a thing to avoid), a rigmarole that involves passing through a security cordon, then being told to fill out a form that includes contact information that I generally don't remember because it's in my phone, which is down at security, being sent back down 19 floors to get your picture taken in a photo booth that costs $10, being called to three windows in succession with a wait between them, one of which has two lines whose separate purposes aren't clear...

I could probably think of a half-dozen ways to streamline this process, but I strongly suspect that the State Department wants it inconvenient because that serves as an incentive to not lose your friggin' passport again.

Anyway, after that it was still only ten thirty or so, which meant breakfast at Eggspectation and then a trip to the Vieux-Porte, where I went to the science museum to see the Lascaux Caverns exhibition. It's an odd thing going to a science museum as an adult, because a large chunk of what you see is aimed at nine-year-olds, which while fun and still including things you didn't know, means you're surrounded by a bunch of loud nine-year-olds, probably skipping parts of the exhibit, and a little bit patronized by what you do see. But, in the middle of all of that, there's this:



Obviously, not the real Lescaux. It's still an impressive as heck recreation done with technology that is impressive itself. This section of the exhibit is darkened and muted, not just kid stuff.

After that, I still had plenty of day left, so I went up the street to the back side of Notre Dame de Montreal, where they had an exhibit on the treasures of Napoleon. I didn't take any pictures, but it was worth a look, especially since I didn't know that much about the guy, having taken less history (and French) in high school than I could have. Then it was a hike to McGill's Redpath Museum, which I'd only heard about from some fellow Boston-based attendees a week earlier. It's kind of a curiosity cabinet expanded to three floors, small and crowded with everything crammed together, but it does have this:



A cast rather than an original, if I read the signage correctly, though one that has been in the museum long enough to have become an artifact in its own right. Plus: It's a dinosaur skeleton. I defy you to think of any better way to end a day that starts with trying to explain one's absent-mindedness to bureaucracy than dinosaurs.

It started to rain as I was in there, which is why I decided to jump into a movie, and since Guardians was playing in Imax-branded 3D at the right time, in I went. Afterward, I got another Coke Zero with my take-out "Mighty Protein Poutine" and hit Ruroni Kenshin 2 before crossing the street for I Am a Knife with Legs.

You'd think all that caffeine would have ben still going strong, but I guess the walking did me in, because I nodded off during Knife, enough that I can't even really fake reviewing it. I figure I'm doing pretty good, though - I cleared 80 movies in three weeks this year and I didn't hit the wall until the very last one



It was a shame, because Bennett Jones either came back or was still hanging around despite the movie's first screening being a couple weeks ago, which can be unusual filmmaker behavior; I was disappointed a couple of times this year to see no Q&As for movies getting a matinee show the day after it screened in the evening. He's an entertaining guy, too, making the Q&A a lot of fun and then doing part in character as Bene, including songs and an argument that Quebec's official language should be English with a French accent.


This doesn't quite close the book for me on Fantasia; I've got four or five online screeners that I'd like to watch and write up and about 40 reviews to flesh out to full length. Hopefully, it won't actually take me until Fantastic Fest (which I hope to attend this year) and the process starting again right away. My other hobbies need attention, too!


Guardians of the Galaxy

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2014 in Cinema Banque Scotia Montreal #13 (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)

I wouldn't dream of spoiling the post-credit stinger of Guardians of the Galaxy, but I love what it and the movie itself represents: A willingness to own and use every part of a Marvel Universe that has expanded in every possible direction over the last fifty to seventy-five years, no matter how obscure, weird, convoluted, silly, or downright embarrassing (for one reason or another) it might be. Get the right people involved, and any of it can be a complete blast.

James Gunn turns out to be one of right people, a guy who will take a cast of characters that includes a talking raccoon and a walking tree and on the one hand take them seriously enough to build a story around them that matters even without a villain who threatens the entire galaxy, and on the other have them be very funny people. One of the things that has made Marvel's movies interesting is that while conventional wisdom has always said that superhero movies are only as good as their villains, ten movies have only produced one really memorable bad guy (though they have leaned hard on him thus far). Guardians doesn't change this; rebel Kree general Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) means business but will not be missed once the movie is over like Loki or Heath Ledger's Joker; he's there to inspire and focus how five misfits come together.

Those five are a great group, too. Chris Pratt plays Peter Jason "Star-Lord" Quill as the anti-Batman, a goof who has run and hidden from his tragic past to an impossible extent but is still with a decent heart underneath and a childishness that comes through in ways both silly and noble. Zoe Saldana is the more serious-minded pairing with him as green-skinned assassin Gamora, and the pair have great chemistry even as potential romance is pushed toward the back. Dave Bautista's Drax the Destroyer is a dry bruiser carrying the sadness of his family's murder, seeming to genuinely enjoy a scrap. The two animated members of the crew, Rocket Raccoon and Groot, are full of personality whether bantering with each other or the rest of the cast, with Rocket an especially terrific creation - it's no small thing to take Sean Gunn's on-set/motion capture performance (the one that the rest of the cast played off), hand it off to a brace of visual effects artists, and then put that together with Bradley Cooper's voice work to get something you can put in the center of a movie.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Rurouni Kenshin Kyoto Taika Hen (Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Action!, DCP)

The first Rurouni Kenshin movie had the look of a franchise starter in the best sort of way, an introduction to an appealing setting and group of characters that leaves the door open for new adventures. The second follows through on that promise, delivering a bigger adventure with even higher stakes, and its a fine place to start on its own.

In November 1878, a maniac murders dozens inside a Hyogo mine. He is Makoto Shishio (Tatsuya Fujiwara), a samurai who took on the role of assassin when "Battosai" laid down his sword ten years ago, until the new Meiji government found him a liability, though the attempt to eliminate him only resulted in his being badly burned. Now that he has re-emerged as a terrorist, the government calls upon the former Battosai, Kenshin Himura (Takeru Sota), despite his pledge not to kill that extends to carrying a "back-bladed" sword with a blunt leading edge. But with a monster like Shishio...

This isn't just a one-on-one match between Himura and Shishio, of course - Shishio has a fair number of mercenaries working for him and other followers, including the ominously named Ten Swords. When Himura makes a couple of new friends on the road to Kyoto, including Misao Makimachi (Tao Tsuchiya), it looks for a while like the series is going to go full wandering-ronin and leave the last movie's supporting cast behind after a relatively brief reprise at the start, but that's not the case, and as a result things are actually fairly crowded by the end. It feels a bit like director Keishi Otomo and his co-writers Kiyomi Fujii & Nobuhiro Watsuki are trying to fit a lot of Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga (published as "Samurai X" in the United States) into three movies that can't quite expand and contract or give the audience time to pause and process the way that comics can.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

I Am a Knife With Legs

Seen 7 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)

I am genuinely disappointed in myself for not making it all the way through this one, both because a three-week festival that I hit aggressively without any "can't remember this well enough to review" would be great, but also because everyone I talked to who saw this movie absolutely loved it, and it got an introduction that built it up pretty high, even by enthusiastic Mitch Davis standards.

And true to expectations, at least the first half-hour or so is quite funny, with Bennett Jones - a veritable Swiss Army Knife with legs for all the jobs he did on this movie - spitting out deadpan absurdity at an impressive clip that still never feels rushed. The songs are funny and catchy, the narration amusingly dim, and the bizarre plot always going off in some weird new direction.

And then I started losing the thing. It was two parts being tired after a long day, one part not seeing a tiny budget as a virtue in and of itself. Eighty minutes is a lot of eccentricity and hoping that the good material is balancing out the low production values or that it adds some extra intensity, and I just wasn't in the right place for it to work that way.

The Fantasia Daily 2014.21: Preservation, Outer Limits of Animation, Killers

Wednesday was the second last day of Fantasia - that is, the final day announced with the full schedule, though it takes place after the "closing night" film. It winds up a group of second screenings and things that couldn't fit.

Including, this year, the "Outer Limits of Animation" show. As per usual, there were a fair number of local animators included, and Marc LaMothe introduced them before the screening:



It was all in French, so these identifications are the best I can do, from left to right: Yoshino Aoki, who directed "Unordinary Journey in an Ordinary Day"; Duy Hoang, who directed "Mise à jour"; Jean-Philippe Malouin, who directed "Lachose qui m'a suivi"; Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre, who directed "Flocons"; and Marie-Christine Lévesque, who directed "Battlements". I think it's accurate, though.

Killers came after that, my last "official" show of the festival. I was invited to hit the Irish Embassy - the official post-screening place, more or less - while being told to fill out a ballot because I'd seen a lot more movies than many of the folks who would be turning in a ballot, which didn't give me a lot of time to say that I was sorry, but I was already wiped out, don't drink, can barely hear in crowded rooms, and had an 8:15am appointment at the consulate the next morning.

On top of that, I left the ballot in the auditorium. I just completely suck.


Preservation

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Wilderness survival movies don't get much more basic than Preservation, which takes this budget-friendly premise and builds a passable movie out of it. It's not going to change the genre, or even necessarily stand out as particularly innovative among that sub-category, but it delivers what it promises, so it's not a bad choice when you're looking for this sort of movie.

It starts with Sean Neary (Pablo Schreiber) and his brother Mike (Aaron Staton) heading out on a camping trip like the sort they used to go on as kids, reminiscing about all the trouble that they used to get into before Sean went to the army and Mike became attached to his cell phone. It's not just a couple of brothers (and Sean's dog) getting away, though - Mike's wife Wit (Wrenn Schmidt) is there too. And maybe that's not all - when Mike and Wit wake up, their tent has been cut away and Xes are marked on their heads. Sean says he's got a handle on how to find the ones who did it, but Mike can't help but wonder if Sean is all there, what with the discharge even though he says he is just on leave.

Writer/director Christopher Denham doesn't leave this ambiguous for particularly long, which is fine in and of itself; there's actually something kind of refreshing in how Preservation plows ahead more or less without detours: Get to know the characters, put them in danger, and then keep at it until the bleeding's done. Part of the trouble is that sometimes one gets the impression that Denham wants to get a little more ambitious than that - that he wants to comment on the motivation behind the violence - but he doesn't get beyond showing it with an implicit "that's messed up, right?" There's a scene where Wit asks Sean why he was discharged , and the rambling, metaphoric speech he gives in response only gets halfway back to the question.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Au-delà de l'animation 2014 (The Outer Limits of Animation)

Seen 6 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, HD)

As usual, there's a lot of good stuff packed into Fantasia's annual animation block, which has previously been a big enough deal and which has enough local interest that I was kind of surprised that it was scheduled for de Seve on the last official day of the festival, potentially after some folks have gone home or what have you because the originally announced dates only went through the fifth. Maybe the "local interest" part explains it At any rate, though, this year's program had about twenty animated shorts, most pretty good:

The first was one I'd seen before, "The Missing Scarf", but it has lost nothing in the past six months since playing in the "Oscar Shorts" program as an honorable mention. It's still a funny cartoon with cute graphics, George Takei narration, and woodland animals voicing deep fears of the inevitable doom that awaits us all in seven odd minutes.

"Battlements" is considerably shorter but shows how a nifty visual concept and a simply told story can carry this sort of short, with skeletal creatures fighting because one envies the bird resting in the other's ribcage. It's striking, memorable, and knows just what point it's trying to make.

I must admit, I didn't quite get the political commentary that the online listing mentions for "Big Hands Oh Big Hands,Let It Be Bigger and Bigger", although there was certainly something going on with the one guy who, because his head had been inflated rather than his hands, can't stop talking to the annoyance of the authority figures. Clearly, I'd be a lousy censor, only seeing the trippy Yellow Submarine-like visuals, cute and catchy song sung by a preschool class, and general charm.

Like that film's director, "Cargo Cult" director Bastien Dubois has other material in the block, and this is a bit unweildy by comparison to the others: Its twelve minutes tell the story of Papuan natives who, as occasionally happened, formed a cargo cult around material scavenged from a crashed plane out of context, but some parts feel elongated and others truncated. Still, the animation that has been motion captured is rendered with a nifty pencil-like look, and the music that goes along with it sets the mood very well indeed.

Because I didn't understand that the title to "Épouventable Épouvantail" means something like "scared scarecrow", I thought it was a cute little movie about a woman inventing the scarecrow rather than a scarecrow afraid of crows who nevertheless faces her fears. It's an adorable little short with just the right amount of scary in it, two minutes that would fit nicely it any Halloween animation block.

"Mise à jour" is another short, cute one from a young local animator, this one dramatizing a robot antivirus program fighting gremlins on a motherboard. It's zippy and enough fun to look at that I thought it was bigger than its one or two minute running time.

On the other hand, "La chose qui m'a suivi" (which also appeared in one of the local blocks during Le Week-end Fantastique) is odd but just kind of hangs there as a guy encounters a weird gremlin in his kitchen. It gets a laugh, but seems even smaller than its minute.

Compared to those, "Escarface" seemed luxurious in its six-minute length, in which a couple of old ladies rob a bank and have a crazy chase afterward. The computer graphics are rounded and slick - I kind of wonder if it was produced with 3D in mind - and it manages the neat trick of being able to tell jokes where these grannies are new to crime one second and seasoned pros the next.

While most of the shorts coming before it basically used style as a way to give themselves a different look, Tess Martin shifts between styles, including live action shot in time lapse, as unseen people discuss their pets and whether they really feel anything for human beings. The anecdotes don't much overlap, but they're interesting, and the way Martin often draws the animals in outline, as if to emphasize their otherness.

Though rendered in a style similar to that of "Cargo Cult", Bastien Dubois's three Portraits de Voyages are quick but well-packed vignettes filled with nifty characters and information, whether it's the meanings of the colorful fabrics worn in Ivory Coast, how everybody breaks the rules in Pakistan's Basant festival of kites, or how Americans come on moose-hunting safaris in Quebec (fun fact: "Office" is often a euphemism for "mistress" in Ivory Coast). The subjects of various interviews are lovingly rotoscoped, and Dubois manages to capture the feel of locations without being photorealistic.

Even not knowing the backstory, "Flocons" is a nifty bit of animation, an old-school piece where a person interacts with animated objects (snowflakes) drawn directly on the film, with footage of the animator doing the work. It's a fun throwback to the early days of the medium, even more so considering that it's not built on new footage, but test material from a 1957 short, which aside from helping to celebrate the 100th birthday of "The Chairy Tale"'s director also makes it a more authentic experience.

"Gloria Victoria", meanwhile, is beautifully abstracted for long stretches, with Theodore Ushev synching a number of striking images to Dmitri Shostakovich's "Invasion". Sometimes unrecognizable as human figures and other times all-too-specific scenes of warfare, with plowshares being beaten into swords in between. It's a stirring short whose martial themes still generate a very strong anti-war sentiment.

"Lady and the Tooth" is the second one in the program I'd seen before, and I must admit to being no more fond of it and its look at a horrifying tooth-based status system than I was a BUFF.

"Leviathan Ages" is another that seems bigger than its quick 4-minute runtime, with the memorable image of an octopus in a robe and images of ancient stone monuments combined with steampunk elements converging. As great as it looks, the sound mix could maybe use a little work, with the narration garbled enough that the plot listed in the synopsis was difficult to extract.

The next one ("Theory of Color")has striking images of pigments diffusing and mixing in water as voiceover narration talks about Red and Blue falling in love but their families having issues with their children Light Red and Dark Red, deciding that they must be various shades of blue. A switch to live action scenes of a model in layered body paint makes the metaphor of society arbitrarily defining people's identity a little clearer, but it still gets away from director Ilana Coleman just a bit.

One of the longer pieces in the package, "The Master's Voice: Caveirão" is a mix of animation and live action that shows animated madness occurring in São Paulo as the clocks stop at 3:33 am and various phantasmagorical creatures come out to play - at least until a skull-faced cop arrives to break it up. It's a charming if meandering short that still delivers some memorable moments.

This is the biggest, though, both in length (17 minutes) and scale, as "The Looking Planet" depicts the construction of our universe - and solar system within - from the perspective of Lufo, a young entity in the family business. It's got a look that is both grand and whimsical, and a bunch of science-minded jokes from a subtitle that describes it as a tale from the cosmic background radiation and numbers in scientific notation, although Eric Law Anderson's movie would be even better if it got its ideas into the film in context as opposed to mostly relating them as part of the introduction.

Another from Lei Lei, the director of "Big Hands...", "This Is Not a Time to Lie" almost feels like a warm-up, testing the style, although it seems to have been made later. It's another charming short which has a character traversing a trippy, geometric world that is apparently made from highly-stylized book covers.

The block finishes with "Unordinary Journey in an Ordinary Day", which also played in one of the "Mon Premiere Fantasia" programs, and is a spiffy bit of stop-motion animation that starts out with a violinist serenading a blind old lady before going off on a number of tangents, with numbers themselves often featured as part of the picture. It's a nifty little short, and a great old-school way to end the show.

Killers

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Antisocial Media, DCP)

Advertising and crediting Killers as being directed by "The Mo Brothers" may do it a bit of a disservice in terms of drawing an audience, as it doesn't indicate that one of the Mos is Timo Tjahjanto, who in another collaboration (with Gareth Huw Evans) made the best part of V/H/S/2. His work with Kimo Stamboel isn't bad either, with this one being a darn good thriller that does much better with a split story than is typical.

Half of the story is in Japan, where we're introduced to Yumi just long enough for her to make love, get chased, and be killed on camera, with masked Nomura Shuhei (Kazuki Kitamura) posting the results on-line. It's eventually seen in Thailand by Bayu Aditya (Oka Antara), a journalist whose pursuit of criminal-turned-politician Dharma (Ray Sahetapy) was thwarted, reducing him to working as a cameraman and alienated from wife Dina (Luna Maya) and daughter Elly. When he has occasion to post his own video, Nomura contacts him, while being drawn to florist Hisae Kawanawa (Rin Takanashi) and her brother Soichi as something other than victims.

In part, though, that may be because the Mo Brothers and Tjahjanto's co-writer Takuji Ushiyama portray the urge and willingness to kill as a stain upon humanity that spreads and connects in every way possible. At times, the story seems like one of violent media begetting violence - would Bayu do what he does without Nomura's example? - but it's also a story of like being called to like, with Nomura being drawn to Bayu, Hisae, and Soichi in a different way than his victims in part because he sees potential in them. Bayu may think he is doing right, but he is contributing to a cycle that could consume more than himself.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 August - 14 August 2014

Back home Sunday. What've you got for me, Boston movies?

• I honestly thought three movies were being released in 3D today, since Into the Storm was presented by the glasses company at Fantasia. Apparently it's not, just a mostly-found-footage movie of tornado chasers during a hypothetical superstorm. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Embassy, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, Assembly Row, and the SuperLux.
  
  The two that are getting 3D releases are the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Step Up: All In. TMNT is from Michael Bay's production company and has Megan Fox playing April O'Neil, so it's nice that they're getting along again, I guess. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Fenway (including RPX). I've got no idea how connected the Step Up movies are, but they at least put something visually cool on-screen. That's at Apple, Fenway, Boston Common, and Assembly Row.
  
  Also getting a fairly wide release is The One Hundred Foot Journey, in which a family of Indian immigrants opens a restaurant across the street from renowned chef Helen Mirren's traditional French establishment, which she fights until discovering that the son is brilliant beyond his specialty. It's at the Somerville, West Newton, Kendall Square, Boston Common, Fenway, and the SuperLux.
  
  Boston Common's special screenings this week are Beverly Hills Cop for $6 on Sunday and Wednesday, and Monday-Wednesday encores of Ride Along for $3. And apparently more funny-cop shenanigans start on Wednesday, with Let's Be Cops getting an extra jump on the weekend at Apple, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row (and probably others).
• A couple of other movies opening at the Common are also opening at Kendall Square. Calvary has Brendan Gleeson reuniting with the writer/director of The Guard in a story of a priest threatened during confession (likely involving another crime). It's at Kendall, West Newton, and Boston Common, and will come to the Coolidge next week. Also kind of wide is What If (which, from the posters I saw at the theater yesterday, is called "The F Word" in Canada); it has Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan as new friends who may actually be perfect for each other.
  
  They've also got IFFBoston closing film Mood Indigo, the latest surreal concoction by Michel Gondry which features Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou as new lovers, although she is soon beset with a bizarre illness. And, finally, there's one more screening of the Monty Python show on Saturday morning.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre continues the "Zombie Postmortem" series at midnight Friday & Saturday by screening Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later... on 35mm. Monday's Big Screen Classic if Thelma & Louise, there's the monthly "Open Screen" on Tuesday, and a special "Deaf and Hard of Hearing" screening of Sound and Fury presented by the HLAA Boston chapter on Thursday night. That's a terrific documentary about Deafness as a culture as well as an aliment; it really should have won an Oscar. They also continue screening A Most Wanted Man, Boyhood, Snowpiercer, and Magic in the Moonlight.
• The Brattle has the last couple days of the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival on Friday and Saturday afternoon, with each ticket generally getting a feature and a couple of shorts; check the website for details. The weekend also has screenings of the new digital restoration of Sorcerer (Friday 9:30pm, Saturday 8pm, and all day Sunday), as well as a "Reel Weird Brattle" screening of Satoshi Kon's Paprika on 35mm at 11:30pm Saturday night.
  
  On the repertory side, Monday & Tuesday's Robert Wise tribute is West Side Story, while the "Girls Rule" shows on Wednesday are 35mm single features of Stick It and Hanna. Thursday's Recent Raves are a double feature and both IFFBoston alums - Locke and The Double.
• Apple Cinemas has a bunch of Indian iMovieCafe movies playing this week, with It's Entertainment is a Hindi-language comedy starring Akshay Kumar as (if I have this right) a man set to inherit a huge fortune, only to find out that he's second in line to a dog, who resists the man's schemes to put him down. So that's an actual thing.
• The Somerville Theatrepicks up Boyhood, and also has three special 35mm shows this weekend: National Lampoon's Vacation plays midnight on Friday and Saturday from what is apparently a pristine studio archive print, while Oliver! plays Saturday morning for $3, apparently the conclusion of the summer's "Affordable Family Flicks" series. Sunday afternoon's "Silents Please!" entry is four Charlie Chaplin shorts: "Shoulder Arms", "A Dog's Life", "Sunnyside",and "A Day's Pleasure", with Jeff Rapsis on the organ as per usual. They move Begin Again up Mass Ave to The Capitol, which has The Lego Movie playing at noon all week and Clerks as part of the Summer Rewind at 10:30pm on Friday and Saturday.
• More Fritz Lang at the Harvard Film Archive! This week it's You and Me, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, Moonfleet, Fury, and Clash By Night.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has two final screenings of ER documentary Code Black on Friday and Saturday, and also continues The Films of Mohammad Rasoulof with screenings of Head Wind (Friday), and Goodbye (Sunday). They've also got a mini-run of Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale, with screenings on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Thursday also has a special screening of Closed Curtain, the latest instance of Iran's Jafar Panahi finding ways to ignore being banned from making movies, as a screenwriter with an illegal pet dog (really, Iran?) encounters a mysterious woman who may be a spy.
• The Regent Theatre has another Gathr "Alive Mind" presentation of Yangsi on Tuesday, or I messed up the listing last week. Gathr's screening of Next Goal Wins at Fenway on the 28th still needs 36 tickets sold by the end of Wednesday.
• The ICA willl be screening Jim Hodges's Untitled film, a portrait of fellow artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, at 1pm Sunday (and every Sunday through the rest of August), as part of their summer exhibition of Hodges's work.
• From Joe's Calendar, noteworthy free outdoor films this week are a festival of local animation in Arlington Friday night, and East Somerville Bad Movie night with live heckling of Street Fighter by local comedians on Saturday, Star Wars at Christopher Columbus Park on Sunday, Jurassic Park at Bloc 11 on Monday, Raiders of the Lost Ark at North Point Park in Cambridge on Wednesday (and in East Cambridge on Thursday), with The Lego Movie popping up in a couple of places too. That's a pretty good week of outdoor moviegoing; I hope it doesn't rain.

Since I'm coming back from Montreal early Sunday morning, I should be able to catch the Chaplin shorts and catch up on Lucy, A Most Wanted Man, Boyhood. I am almost tempted to catch an earlier bus home for Paprika. Almost.