This That Week In Tickets: 20 October 2014 - 26 October 2014

The plan during October: Try to see movies that start early and run short so that you can also catch a full night of playoff baseball.

... And sometimes have work run just late enough that you can't get to the ones you planned to see at all. That's what happened early in the week, with an issue arising at quarter of five scuttling the evening's plans, pushing a couple things forward a day. That meant #Stuck got seen on Tuesday (after the initial special screening I had intended to see a week and a half earlier was canceled), and The Blue Room was Wednesday's flick. They actually pair fairly well, both hitting the fractured timeline idea and relying heavily on the characters' personal perspectives, although the French mystery thriller was much better than the American romantic comedy.

The fixed point on the schedule was Thursday's Revenge of the Green Dragons at the Brattle. It was the opening film of the Boston Asian American Film Festival and had a whole ton of guests. Perhaps more than a ton, as they were in good shape but numerous. Hong Kong director Andrew Lau and his American co-director Andrew Loo were front and center, and it was kind of amusing to see them refer to each other as "Lau" and "Loo" like a Chinese comedy team.

It was back to the Brattle the next night for the first film in their William Castle series, The Whistler, which wound up being the only one I'd see because, aside from the World Series, I sort of wrestle with questions like "is the experience of seeing The Tingler in a theater rigged for Percepto worth seeing The Tingler?" I just don't love B-movies enough sometimes.

Saturday, I went for a double feature because I didn't foresee being too lazy to go far from the house on Sunday. John Wick, happily, did a pretty good job of living up to the buzz that came out of Fantastic Fest, which I had kind of worried was inflated by Keanu Reeves being a thoroughly charming guy. After that, I headed down the Green Line (well, actually, it was a nice enough day to walk, but my conception of Boston geography is T-based) to Fenway to check out Happy New Year, this Diwali's big caper movie. It's okay, but Deepika Padukone takes much too long to show up.

The Whistler

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (William Castle, 35mm)

In 1944, not only was CBS a radio network, but the "C" in "Columbia Broadcasting System" actually indicated an actual connection to the film studio and record label. It was also long enough ago that William Castle had not yet become an independent, iconoclastic film producer and director, but was still working his way up, cranking out B-movies for Columbia Pictures. In this case, it was an adaptation of a popular radio mystery program, disposable by its nature but still fairly enjoyable.

It's actually got a neat little hook: Earl C. Conrad (Richard Dix), whom the whole community has looked at accusingly since his wife disappeared under suspicious circumstances, has taken out a life insurance policy and made sure that his business would be in good hands should he pass - and then gone and hired an assassin to kill him through a cutout so that the plan cannot be traced back to him. Of course, as soon as he's done that, he's given a reason to live, and it becomes impossible to get back in contact with the middleman (Don Costello).

The Whistler himself is a narrator who lurks in the shadows, face unseen, although one whistle from him does prevent things from ending too soon. It's the sort of conceit that anthology shows on the radio (and early television, which also had a Whistler series) would use to craft an identity that carries from one week to the next. It's a bit out of place here, especially with the film playing to an audience of Castle's fans now as opposed to folks who listened to the radio show seventy years ago, but it's not intrusive, even if it is a bit odd.

Full review at EFC

John Wick

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2014 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

I prioritized John Wick low when making my choices at Fantastic Fest, and not just on the basis of "it will play regular theaters later"; it just didn't have much buzz around it, and sort of looked like something that could wind up going straight to video (on demand), much like the last movie Reeves brought to the festival. Instead, it not only hits theaters, but winds up playing the Imax screens as well. Go figure.

And it's kind of surprising, because to a certain extent I cynically expect action this good to get passed over in favor of something bigger in scale but not so well crafted in the details. And the details of this are fun, both in writer Derek Kolstad's world-building and the way directors David Leitch & Chad Stahelski shoot action with exceptional clairty. There's a sequence that has Reeves's title character slicing his way through a nightclub like a hot knife through butter, not quite a single shot but still constant, smooth motion, with Wick moving from one target to another without stopping, kind of like the gun katas in Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium. Leitch & Stahelski come from a stuntwork background, and they are dedicated to showing off that part of the movie in a way that few directors outside of Hong Kong have a vested interest in doing.

Plus, Keanu Reeves. The guy knows his strengths and weaknesses as well as any actor out there, and he's not only quite able to execute physically, but he's got a nice gravitas as Wick, mourning with a cold fury that explodes from his whole body. There's a nifty ensemble around him, all fitting into the heightened underworld that Kolstad came up with. What's particularly nifty (aside from the awesome dog whose brief time with Wick kicks everything off) is how Wick can be built up as larger than life without making him a overblown caricature of badassness.

There's not necessarily anywhere to go with Wick at the end of the movie, but I want more anyway. Kolstand came up with a neat environment, Leitch & Stahelski brought it to exciting life, and Reeves gets a part that fits him like a glove. It seldom comes together this well.

The Lookalike

Another month, another attempt to support indie/world tweeners (too offbeat for the multiplexes, too lightweight for the arthouses) playing the Boston area with money. Sometimes, unfortunately, that means you see a stinker, and you do it with just one other person in the room - and to be totally honest, I kind of suspect he wasn't really supposed to be there from the way an usher honed in on him during the movie.

One thing I noticed while looking at the IMDB listing for it - director Richard Gray and writer Michele Davis-Gray are apparently in pre-production on a remake of Audition to shoot and be released next year. Good luck with that, guys. I mean that sincerely - if that's going to happen, I'd rather it be good, and that applies to any movie - and I can almost see how the problems I had with The Lookalike might seem like assets for this one: Starting odd and offbeat and then going very dark indeed was what Takashi Miike did fifteen years ago and it made his name, but he didn't just go dark but nuts, and there was an idea at the center of Miike's film, and I'm not sure that's the case with The Lookalike. There are connected characters, and various bits that may be shocking, but no central thrust to make up for the letdown when the audience realizes that this isn't really going to be fun after a certain point.

SPOILERS!

There's also a sort of secondary ugliness here in how by and large women and to a lesser extent minorities are killed in a very casual, off-hand way, while the white males fight back and need to be taken down. I don't think the Grays really mean anything by that, but it's the sort of thing that seems like it would be part of a discouraging pattern when you look at a lot of this sort of movie.

!SRELIOPS

The Lookalike

* * (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2014 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #9 (first-run, DCP)

To say that The Lookalike starts out kind of charming overlooks what happens in the first few minutes to set things in motion, but it still does well enough in introducing its cast of characters that it looks like the rare crime movie that makes quirky work despite being built a core of bad people doing bad things. That's hard to sustain for the full length of a movie, though, and this one starts losing steam early enough to be a real drag by the end.

There's a girl out there, Sadie, that retiring crime boss William Spinks (John Savage) will pay half a million dollars to sleep with, and having found her, Bobby (John Corbett) and Frank (Steven Bauer) probably have the inside track to taking over his business. Except, well, they screwed up and she's no longer available. Meanwhile, one of Bobby's best dealers, former college hoops star Joe Mulligan (Jerry O'Connell) is looking to quit, having paid his father's gambling debts to Vincent (Luis Guzman), and although on the one hand he could use a little money to shoot that pilot for a cooking show, on the other he's just met a really nice girl, Mila (Scottie Thompson). Back at Joe's apartment, his brother Holt (Justin Long) has a run-in with Lacey (Gillian Jacobs), one of Joe's customers, and they connect. Of course, they're both hiding something as well.

Writer Michele Davis-Gray shovels a fair amount of stuff into the script, sometimes to seeming excess - not only has Mila recently lost her hearing, but she's got a prosthetic leg, for example; she also just happens to cross paths with Sadie early on in a way that brings another player into the story. Oh, and Lacey is apparently a hairdo away from being a dead ringer for Sadie, which is kind of convenient. Still, in the early going, she and director Richard Gray (and the cast) make it work. Things may be in bad taste, but they'll come with a jolt, or the odd incongruities will amuse. Plus, the fact that Joe is far from the only character involved who really doesn't want to be in the business of hurting people may not push grimness away entirely, but the fact the characters have better natures does make things more fun and a bit unpredictable.

Full review at EFC.

ROAR: Tigers of the Sundarbans

Funny-ish coincidence: The RiffTrax Live encore screening of Anaconda was happening just a few screens down, which popped into my head both because this is a general "go into the jungle and get messed up by nasty animals" film and because there are snakes later on. Not that it was between those two, since I tend to think of those sort of things as kind of parasitic. No, I was thinking Nightcrawler, but figured that would stick around and I was kind of in the mood for something a bit lighter.

Not many others were; I was just the only one in there when I arrived just in time for the movie to start, although a few others arrived soon after. The ad package was winding down, though, and I found myself amused by that. It's about a twenty minute presentation, so it must have started without a ticket having been sold, and the film itself probably would have too, because everything is on a timer now. Seems like kind of a waste of electricity, at the very least, especially since I remember how when I worked in a theater, the show was just off if we didn't get a ticket sale by showtime, although sometimes (if the time between screenings was tight), we might have started the trailer reel but shut it down if nobody came before that was over.

(I half expect this to be used as a justification for theater-hopping sometime - "the film was playing anyway, and I saw no need for it to go to waste!")

That this played for a week (albeit sharing the screen with a held-over Happy New Year - kind of points out what a weird situation movie distribution could be, though. I'll bet I could find a half-dozen movies of similar types and better quality among those that played Fantasia and/or Fantastic Fest which won't play much outside of video on demand, but this one got booked because Regal plays a Bollywood movie or two when they've got room for it, even though the potential audience might be smaller.

ROAR: Tigers of the Sundarbans

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 November 2014 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

I ask this question half in jest, and half out of curiosity: Can you make the equivalent of an R-rated movie in India? If one can, then I'm not sure why Roar: Tigers of the Sundarbans is holding back; this movie wants to be a bloody bit of man-versus-nature exploitation, but something keeps holding it back. I'm not sure what does short of an actual or effective prohibition on excessive blood and guts, because the pulpiest, most enjoyable moments indicate that it's not good taste.

Heck, when wildlife photographer Uday Singh (Pulkit) finds a white tiger cub tied up in the Subdarbans preserve and doesn't just free it but brings it back to the nearest, his guide Madhu (Pranay Dixit) says, in so many words, that this will be disastrous. And it is, as the cub's mother comes seeking her child. That leaves Uday's brother Pandit (Abhinav Shukla) looking for revenge, bringing five of his army buddies in to help hunt the tigress down, with Madhu and local guide Jhumpa (Himarsha) helping them navigate the salt-water canals and dangerous animals of the Sundarbans region.

That's two boats' worth of cast to get whittled down, and considering the circumstances, director Kamal Sadanah and his co-writers seem to take their sweet time getting around to it. What circumstances are those? Well, first, there is that few of the people in the cast are as memorable as Cheena (Virendra Singh Ghuman), a hulking beast of a man who stretches his camo to the breaking point, Crazy Jenny (Nora Fatehi), aka "CJ", who gets the best action scene despite a costume that really doesn't seem combat-ready, or Jhumpa, who somehow makes her bare midriff look more practical than CJ's. She also reminds us of the other thing that might make the audience impatient: Despite understanding Pandit's anger, who among us is really going to root for these guys to kill a mama tigress, not to mention a beautiful one-in-a-thousand variation of a species that is already endangered? I suspect most of us will be rooting for the big cat on a certain level.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 November - 13 November 2014

Not a whole lot opening this weekend, but the movies which are opening are kind of big deals.

• The big one is Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's grand-scale science fiction story starring Matthew McConnaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts searching for a new human home world. Michael Caine plays the head of the project, and Jessica Chastain the daughter who grew up while McConnaughey's character was aging slowly because of time-dilation. Nolan filmed an hour of the nearly three-hour epic using full-sized IMAX cameras, and urges people to see it on film. It's playing on 35mm film at the Somerville Theatre and Boston Common; digital Imax at Jordan's, Boston Common, and Assembly Row; DCP at Apple, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. for Bostonians who want to see it in real IMAX film, the closest place is in Providence (I wouldn't be surprised if the Aquarium eventually, but I wouldn't count on it); the nearest 70mm bookings (supposedly the best) are in New York City).
  
  The other new release is Big Hero 6, Disney's first 3D animated adaptation of a Marvel comic book, although it is not in the same continuity as the other Marvel movies. The comics were fun, although the adaptation looks to take some liberties (such as setting it in "San Fransokyo"). It's playing at the Capitol, Apple, West Newton (2D only), Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  In this week's oddly-small booking, Fenway will be screening On Any Given Sunday: The Next Chapter at 10:10pm nightly; it's a sequel/update to a 1971 feature on motorcycle racing. Boston Common has the first Tim Burton Batman as the $6 show on Sunday & Wednesday.
• Kendall Square has the latest by Lynn Shelton, Laggies, which stars Keira Knightley as a woman who freaks out when her boyfriend proposes, and winds up hiding out with a new 16-year-old friend and her father. It's also at Boston Common.
  
  The one-week booking is Diplomacy, in which the Swedish Consul General in Paris during World War II attempts to convince the commander of the German forces not to execute Hitler's plan to leave the City of Light in rubble should it fall to the Allies. It's based upon a stage play, so I suspect it will be nice and tense. There's also a Tuesday night "Globe on Screen" show of MacBeth.
• Apple Cinemas has a surprisingly busy week, with two indies not playing elsewhere. The Lookalike is a thriller that looks quite frankly bonkers, with a drug lord's men scrambling to find a double for the woman their boss is obsessed with. They're also screening Awake: The Life of Yogananda, a documentary on the man who introduced yoga and meditation to the western world.
  
  The iMovieCafe guys there have The Shaukeens, a Hindi-language comedy about three friends in their sixties who strive to live their lives to the fullest. That's subtitled; you'll need to speak Telugu to understand Brother Of Bommali (an action/adventure) and Malayalam for romantic comedy Vellimoonga.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens IFFBoston alum The Overnighters in their smaller rooms, although it gets a show on the bigger screen Friday night, when director Jesse Moss will be Skyping in for a remote Q&A. It's a documentary about how the oil boom in North Dakota has led to a huge shortfall in lodging.
  
  The weekend's midnight film is a 35mm print of Highlander, which used to be a pretty big-deal cult movie a couple decades ago, but seems to have become a less essential part of the canon lately. There's also a kid's show of the original Hayley Mills-starring The Parent Trap on Saturday morning, a Talk Cinema presentation of Two Days, One Night on Sunday morning, and a Big Screen Classics presentation of Hannah and Her Sisters dedicated to the late Boston Globe film critic Jay Carr on Monday.
• The Brattle has a hodgepodge of a schedule this weekend, starting off with a visit from Kier-La Janisse to launch her new book Kid Power!. She'll be introducing The Bad News Bears on Friday night, while Saturday afternoon has a double feature of the original Escape to Witch Mountain and Return to Witch Mountain. Sunday, the guest is Casey Affleck, who will be introducing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. On Wednesday, a related book signing will be followed by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; all of those will be on 35mm.
  
  IFFBoston has yet to announce their Tuesday "Fall Focus" preview, but another festival - The International Pancake Film Festival will be returning on Thursday at 8:30pm. $7 gets you a program of animation & puppets, as well as a plate of hot, buttery pancakes.
• The Boston Jewish Film Festival takes Friday evening off, because Jewish Film Festival, but picks back up at various theaters afterward - the MFA (Saturday/Sunday), the Coolidge (Saturday/Sunday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday), the Brattle (Saturday), West Newton (Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Thursday), Showcase Patriot Place (Monday), the Arlington Captiol (Tuesday/Wednesday), the Somerville (Tuesday), Framingham (Wednesday), the Warwick in Marblehead (Wednesday), and The ICA (Thursday).
  
  The Museum of Fine Arts has a few more screenings of Listen Up Philip (Friday/Wednesday) and Fifi Howls from Happiness (Thursday), adding National Gallery to the mix on Wednesday & Thursday; it's a three-hour documentary by Frederick Wiseman that takes a look of the titular London institution. They also have selections from the Turkish Festival's Documentary and Short Film Competition on Friday and Saturday.
• The Harvard Film Archive starts a new set of programs this weekend, including one for Malian filmmaker Cheick Oumar Sissoko, the latest Geneviève McMillan/Reba Stewart Fellow, with screenings on Friday, Sunday (no English subtitles on that one), and Monday. On Saturday and Sunday, Ukranian director Sergei Lonznitsa will visit to present Maidan (Saturday) and My Joy. There's also a free VES screening of The Turin Horse on Wednesday.
• ArtsEmerson continues their Polish Film Festival, with Wajda's The Promised Land (Friday), The Wedding (Saturday), and Man of Iron (Sunday); along with Krzystztof Zanussi's The Illumination and The Constant Factor (both Saturday).
  
  The Bright Lights free screenings this week are Finding Vivian Maier (with faculty member Camilo Ramirez leading discussion) on Tuesday and the annual Silversonic music video showcase on Thursday.
• The Regent Theatre has one film presentation this week, Inside Metal: The Pioneers of Los Angeles Hard Rock and Metal. Apparently, the documentary has lots of rarely-seen interviews and concert footage.

My plans? Interstellar, Big Hero 6, Nightcrawler, Whiplash, St. Vincent, Laggies, The Lookalike.

Bitter Honey

I suspect that the way Bitter Honey is rolling out across the country is similar to the way films used to release: Book it in a theater, have someone make an appearance if possible, rely on the venue to advertise it locally. On top of that, I'm not sure I can remember another time when I've seen a director visit and do a Q&A for the very last screening; usually, whether it's a festival or a local booking, they'll come to the first. That way, you start off with an event which hopefully generates some word of mouth for the rest of the run. I guess this is just when director Robert Lemelson could make the trip to Boston and New York easiest.

That the visit seemed almost entirely unpublicized was strange, too - I saw that the film was playing for a week in the usual places, and probably would have seen it earlier in the run but for some bad timing, and then, on Wednesday, seeing a Facebook ad that mentioned Lemelson's visit on Thursday. Nothing on Apple Cinemas' website. Crazy, that; it's often like they're using a standard movie theater site template that includes a news feed that often has little if anything to do with what's actually going to play there (many is the time I've gotten excited for a coming attraction only to have it not show). I want to like them a bit more; they're on my way home, have been upgrading their facilities, and seem to make a genuine effort to play movies that would otherwise slip through the cracks, but they don't make it easy sometimes!



Lemelson did an interesting Q&A, rather different than many I've seen. The format was the same, but Lemelson seems to be a different sort of director, an anthropologist first and a filmmaker second. That was the jargon he would toss off, and there wasn't any sort of moment when someone in the audience with an interest in the subject matter asked about doing more along those lines only to be disappointed that the director who had just spent years on one subject planned to move on to something else. Lemelson is interested in the culture of this part of the world, and that was very clear.

One interesting bit that didn't make it into the film might have put things in a bit more context: Polygamy is legal in Bali because it is part of Indonesia, but it exists in a very different cultural place there than it does in the rest of the country. Most of Indonesia is Muslim, whereas Bali is mostly Hindu, and while both cultures apparently have the option for multiple wives, it seems less strictly regulated in Bali than it would be for the Muslim majority. He described it as a source of friction, which I don't doubt.

It didn't make it into the movie, though, in part because the future of this movie is as an educational tool; he spoke about pieces of it already being used in local community centers and the like. It will probably do quite well in that role, even if it's not quite something you'd bring people to the cinema to see.

Bitter Honey

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2014 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #7 (first-run, DCP)

Bitter Honey opens with a bit of informative text, including the fact that it was filmed over a seven year period. It's an odd bit of information to include, because while director Robert Lemelson does a fair job of expanding upon the statistics about polygamy in Bali and how it affects the people involved, it is not nearly as successful at the storytelling aspect which would make the film's time axis genuinely important. Instead, Lemelson concentrates on being informative and lets the audience handle empathy and anger.

As those opening words inform us, polygamy is legal in Indonesia, and is particularly common in Bali, an island with a mostly Hindu population. Ten percent of all officially registered marriages there include multiple wives, and unregistered arrangements likely boost that number even higher. Lemelson presents us with three: Sadra married Purniasiah when they were teenagers and added a "honey" (Balinese slang for a second wife) later; Darma has five wives and seems a prosperous man about town; and elderly royal descendant Tuaji has had ten wives, with five still living and two sisters.

The film does not wind up spending much time with the Tuaji family past the initial introduction, which may in some ways be for the best; described at one point as a "vicious" member of the Nationalist Party back in the day, his backstory is the sort that could derail Bitter Honey into being a different movie (that movie is The Act of Killing and you should absolutely see it). That still leaves Lemelson with plenty of voices to contribute, and though Sadra's and Darma's families' stories are similar in many ways, they do have different shapes: Sadra seems to have basically left Purniasiah to fend for herself while taking a younger wife and Darma (who says he wants a "lively household") has a home that is divided into sectors, with each wife having her own kitchen and rooms for her children.

Full review at EFC.

This That Week In Tickets: 13 October 2014 - 19 October 2014

Some people claim Columbus Day is a real holiday, but the MBTA didn't even mess with my commute on Canadian Thanksgiving.

Actually, the somewhat lower number of people heading to their reflective offices did make the system somewhat quicker, showing things enough that I won't be recording Monday's trip to Coolidge Corner to see One Chance in my ongoing "66 bus or C Line - which is the best route from Alewife?" experiment. It wound up an enjoyable little movie, although a tiny booking for one which was pretty heavily trailered earlier in the year.

Tuesday's selection, Art and Craft, was another true story, this one told as a documentary, although I kind of wondered what kind of a fictionalized feature you could get out of it. It's a good movie, but also one that clearly focused on the part of the story that the filmmakers had the most access to.

I got some silent movies mixed up in my head on Wednesday, thinking that the King Vidor film playing at the Harvard Film Archive as part of the VES curriculum (to which the general audience is invited) was the same one I missed at the Somerville a week and a half earlier, giving me a second chance. Not quite; it was The Big Parade rather than The Crowd, which is about an hour longer in addition to having very different subject matter. Kind of a long sit, to be honest.

Speaking of long sits, The Golden Era on Friday was just about three hours long, but worth it. I'm kind of enjoying this new situation where Chinese movies play mainstream theaters and people show up, to the point where it's actually crowded. Didn't even feel the need to do violence to the guy who kept checking his phone two seats away. Much. I was back in the same place early the next morning for The Book of Life, a fairly charming animated feature that pulls from Mexican mythology.

The weekend wrapped up with a fairly enjoyable double feature at the Somerville - Gone Girl on the big screen followed by Fury on the next-biggest. That's a pretty good afternoon there, even including a bit of the projectionist mocking David Fincher's love of digital. They are really looking forward to getting actual 35mm for Interstellar over there.

The Big Parade

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2014 in the Harvard Film Archive (VES, 35mm with live accompaniment)

King Vidor was a filmmaker who strove to make serious films within a studio system that wanted crowd-pleasers, likely even harder in the silent era with the Academy Awards still in the future and film criticism still in its infancy. The Big Parade exemplifies that in a lot of ways, wrapping an earnest war movie up in something that wants to make the audience smile.

It opens in 1918, just as the United States is about to enter the Great War. We're quickly introduced to three young men in and around New York City - "Slim" Johnson (Karl Dane), a construction worker building skyscrapers; "Bull" O'Hara (Tom O'Brien), who tends bar in an establishment with a suspicious clientele; and James Apperson (John Gilbert), the layabout son of a mill owner. All three enlist, with James's fiancee Justyn (Claire Adams) expecting he'll look so smart in an officer's uniform, but he winds up a private (Bull makes sergeant). The three become fast friends as they wait for action in Champillon, even if all three do find their eyes drawn to farmer's daughter Melisande (Renée Adorée).

Given how the opening makes no small effort to give this trio very different backgrounds, it's interesting how quickly the filmmakers apparently decide that it isn't important. The idea, perhaps, might be that war flattens social classes, but if that's the case, it's not something the filmmakers go into specifically. This doesn't make the cast of characters completely interchangeable - Bull is going to tend toward the wiseacre and Slim is quite the well-meaning lunkhead, though James becomes much more of an a average Joe than an upper-class twit fairly quickly - but it's odd to see something that appeared to be set up with intent set aside without even an "all men are brothers on the front line". The cast works fairly well together - John Gilbert slides into the leading man's space without making James too square-jawed or noble, while Karl Dane contributes a very good yokel sidekick - so it mostly works out all right.

The somewhat odd thing is that for much of the movie, what they're doing well is comedy. The characters arrive in rural France and face wacky language barriers, uncomfortable but not truly miserable sleeping accommodations, mix-ups with the mail, and a shared interest in Melisande that never exactly scream that war is hell. This material is light enough and occupies a large enough portion of a long movie (as projected at this screening, The Big Parade was about two and a half hours long) that a contemporary viewer may wonder if they are in the right place. Even in 1925, audiences may still have been thrown by how quickly the flirtation of James and Melisande becomes heart-clutching melodrama when he is sent to the front.

(Or not; many in the audience were likely young veterans who had been through something like that.)

That sequence may seem a little drawn-out or overwrought, but there's no question that, from that point on, this is a pretty serious war movie, and a good one. Vidor and company pull out to show the massive march of the title, and suddenly the the film not only has gravity but scale, and when it soon returns its focus to the main trio, the audience's familiarity with them does make sequences that are already fairly intense even more so. It's not exactly the trench warfare that has come to represent World War I in the years since but it's still tense and gets across just how terrifying and horrific the new method of warfare is.

There's even time given to the postwar experience, although the urge to make the something more easily digestible results in an epilogue that seems overlong and tacked-on. To be fair, this is an early film, so the elements that seem drawn out and out of balance here would be refined and pared-down to this very day (I would see some of the elements of this movie in Fury a few days later). So, while The Big Parade may be imperfect and frustrating to a modern audience, it's also foundational.

(Previously at EFC)

Gone Girl

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

Gone Girl is probably David Fincher's best movie since Fight Club, and I suspect that part of the reason for that is from an interview he gave while promoting that movie, where he said that initially, he felt like the only one who realized that Fight Club was a comedy. Gone Girl isn't a comedy, but it does have a vein of dark humor that most of his best movies feature, and while making the audience laugh is far from this movie's primary goal, it actually does kind of get funnier as it goes along, from nervous-making bits of tension to satirical jabs to some outright jokes when we see the missing-presumed-dead Amy Dunne's side of the story rather than that of her husband and presumed killer Nick. The trick is that Fincher knows exactly how far to push things to not undercut the noirish story, keeping things in the realm of the thriller and the guilty laugh.

The other thing that works really well is the cast; there's been a lot of talk about how Ben Affleck works really well here because the public perception of him is in line with Nick - nothing truly objectionable about the guy but something about him just rubs people the wrong way and makes them think the absolute worst. Still, I think that that's less unique than a great example of how nobody in the entire cast of characters, save perhaps Nick's twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) is particularly warm, but everyone in the cast finds ways around that to get across what the character is feeling. Affleck is particularly great as the guy who is acknowledged as not always coming off right, but all around him are very good performances as people react to a disappearance/murder with less than the outright hysteria - David Clennon & Lisa Barnes as Amy's parents, Neil Patrick Harris as an old boyfriend, and Tyler Perry as the lawyer hired to defend him in court and the media. This sort of thriller is just generally more fun when characters can jump in any direction, as opposed to being revealed as playing against type.

SPOILERS!

Of course, I think that what makes Gone Girl great is that rather than teasing the audience for the entire two and a half hours, it switches things up at around the halfway mark, putting the focus on Rosamund Pike's Amy, how she engineered the whole thing, and how she reacts to watching her plan in action. It's the sort of thing that could derail the movie, but Rosamund Pike gets what is probably the best role she's ever had. I like her, but she's often in rather bland roles because she's pretty in a very smooth, unblemished way, and I kind of love the way the movie plays on that before revealing that this persona, even with a bitter and sarcastic edge to it, is a crazy person pretending to be normal, and, surprise, Ms. Pike winds up playing this sort of sociopath really well. There's this fantastic glee to her as she watches her husband twist from afar or relays how much she really despises the people around her that lets the audience join in a bit.

The way the end twists is at times a little out there, making the movie a metaphor for how an insane person like Amy thinks marriage works. But while the filmmakers put it right out there, the fact that Amy is nuts keeps it from being an overbearing equivalence; it works as a dark, ironic end to a thriller that keeps the audience in a scary place all the way out the door, which is pretty great.

!SRELIOPS

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 31 October - 6 November 2014

Halloween on a Friday, which means theaters want something scary, but opening something that day means most of its weekend is after the day, so it's actually kind of quiet.

• The big release is Nightcrawler, featuring Jake Gyllenhaal as a freelance crime-scene videographer who starts crossing lines in his zeal to get even closer to the story. It's at Apple, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway (including RPX), Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  The next-biggest opening is a tenth-anniversary rerelease of the original Saw, which means it's been ten years since the first Boston Fantastic Film Festival, which means that actually predated Fantastic Fest. I thought it was the same year. Huh. Anyway, nifty little movie that spawned an increasingly convoluted series and kicked-started James Wan's career. It's at Apple, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Square, and Revere. Boston Common also brings back Harry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas on Friday, Sunday, and Wednesday, and also has The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday as well as the usual Saturday. Showcase Cinemas (including Revere) are showing John Carpenter's Halloween on Friday.
  
  There's also Before I Go to Sleep, with Nicole Kidman as a woman with no memory, short or long-term. Colin Firth and Mark Strong co-star, and it plays at Apple, Fenway, Boston Common, and Assembly Row.
• The Brattle opens Horns on Halloween and has it play through Wednesday; it'sbased upon the book by Joe Hill and stars Daniel Radcliffe as a murder suspect who wakes to to find horns have grown from his head and people are compelled to tell him their sins. It's directed by Alexandre Aja and has a pretty spiffy cast. It's also playing at Boston Common, in case the other programs at the Brattle get in the way.
  
  Those include a special 10pm screening of the original theatrical cut of Donnie Darko on Halloween night, which figures in the movie. There's also DocYard presentation Hoax_Canular on Monday, with filmmaker Dominc Gagnon on hand to discuss his movie stitched together from teenagers' YouTube videos about the end of the world. Tuesday night is Trash Night, which this month is The Taking of Beverly Hills, and, come on, that's a movie I have on VHS because I enjoyed it unironically, not really sub-cult crap (I hope)! Then on Wednesday, there's a late-afternoon show of Gringo Trails and an evening screening of Tom Rush: No Regrets to benefit FOLK New England.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre mostly keeps the same line-up, but is one of three venues taking part in the Boston Jewish Film Festival's opening days, with opening night film Run Boy Run on Wednesday, while Transit andGett, the Trial of Viviane Ansalem play there Thursday. That's the day the Brattle has "The Gordin Cell" and Zero Motivation, while the Museum of Fine Arts shows the "Footsteps in Jerusalem" shorts program.
  
  Before that, they finish up their Halloween programming with a 35mm print of the Bela Lugosi Dracula at midnight on Friday and Saturday. Monday has another 35mm print, The Abyss, as part of the "Science on Screen" series, with marine geochemist Dr. Graham Shimmield there to introduce the movie.
• Kendall Square has two one-week bookings this week. Citizenfour is a documentary about a filmmaker who goes to Hong Kong to meet a source that turns out to be Edward Snowden. The other is White Bird in a Blizzard, a pretty good mystery from Gregg Araki that features Eva Green as a dissatisfied wife who just disappears one day, Shailene Woodley as the daughter left behind, and Christopher Meloni as the husband. I liked it at Fantasia.
• The only new Indian movie from Apple Cinemas/iMovieCafe, Karthikeya is in Telugu without subtitles, but Fenway has two opening. ROAR: Tigers of the Sundarbans is an action/adventure about a guy who brings an apparently-orphaned tiger cub into his village only to face the wrath of its mother, while features Rekha as a grandmother who becomes a model.
• The Harvard Film Archive concludes their Hou Hsiao-hsien series with Three Times (Friday 7pm), Daughter of the Nile (Friday 9:30pm), and Flowers of Shanghai (Sunday 4:30pm), all in 35mm, the latter a new print. Saturday they have a tribute to Robert Gardner, screening about three hours of the man's documentarian's work starting at 5pm with free admission. On Sunday night they have a program of very rare Fritz Lang Silents (Four Around a Woman and "The Wandering Image") at 7pm with Jeff Rapsis accompanying the restored 35mm prints. Then on Monday night, they will be showing a 35mm print of Tian Zhuangzhuang's 2002 version of Springtime in a Small Town (note that a visit by cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin has unfortunately been cancelled).
• Before getting to the BJFF, The Museum of Fine Arts continues screening Listen Up Philip (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday) and Fifi Howls from Happiness (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday). There's also a special screening of John Stewart's directorial debut Rosewater on Tuesday, with tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis starting at 5:30pm
• ArtsEmerson's film program in the Bright screening room features the first weekend of their Polish Film Festival: Three Andrzej Wajda classics in Ashes and Diamonds (Friday & Saturday), Innocent Sorcerers (Saturday), and The Wedding (Sunday). The Festival also includes new film In the Name of (Saturday, with star Andrezj Chyra on-hand). Sunday evening also features AWAKE: The Life of Yogananda, a biographical documentary on the life of the man who brought yoga to the west in the 1920s. During the week, the Bright Lights free screenings include three short films by Emerson professor Cristina Kotz Cornejo on Tuesday and "Stumped", a short documentary about a filmmaker who suddenly finds himself a quadruple-amputee. The subject will do a comedy set and participate in a Q&A session with the director afterward.
• The Regent Theatre has an "Alive Mind" presentation of Monk with a Camera, the story of photographer and Buddhist monk Nicholas Vreeland, on Tuesday. There's also a presentation of MOTO 6: The Movie, with tons of motorcross action, on Thursday.
• The Somerville Theatre's Halloween program is only half film, as they'll have Jeffrey Combs's one-man Edgar Allan Poe show Nevermore on stage to celebrate the recent unveiling of the Poe bust at the Boston Public Library. Ticketholders for that get to stay for the 10pm show of The Masque of the Red Death with Vincent Price, presented on 35mm film. They also have a Boston Asian-American Film Festival presentation of To Be Takei on Monday night, with subject George Takei on hand. The 5 Point Film Festival, a collection of adventure films, runs Wednesday and Thursday.
  
  Those are also the days that they get Interstellar early because they didn't rip all their 35mm projectors out when adding digital like so many theaters did, so go see it there and give Ian & Dave high-fives for keeping real film alive as much as they can. Boston Common will also be screening it on film those days, and I'm mildly curious as to whether they're bringing projection in for the occasion or if they kept one or two around, because I can't remember the last time I saw 35mm there.

My plans? All the stuff I meant to see last weekend but didn't, Nevermore, Nightcrawler, and hopefully The Abyss. Plus supporting the Somerville showing what looks like some pretty darn hard sci-fi on real film with money.

This That Week In Tickets: 6 October 2014 - 12 October 2014

When we last left "This Week in Tickets", Jay had managed to catch a cold just before heading to Maine for various family things. Would the lingering effects of said ailment put a crimp in his moviegoing schedule?

No, not really. I did manage to give it to my mother and her husband, though, forcing them to cut their vacation short. Sorry about that.

I did wind up feeling kind of lousy for most of the week, but for better or worse, I need the situation to be more drastic than that before I stop going out. Thus, I headed to the Coolidge on Monday night for the monthly "Science on Screen" presentation, less because of the attached lecture (which was fun and informative if not exactly sticky) than because the movie in question, Soylent Green, is one that I really should have seen by now as someone who lives science fiction and good movies. Happily, it lives up to its reputation as a legitimate classic.

Tuesday night wound up being a second shoot at my original plans for Friday the 3rd, when Chinese import Breakup Buddies surprised me something fierce by being sold out despite a second screen being added. It was probably giveaway-aided to a certain extent, but it is still kind of cool to actually have an enthusiastic crowd for a mainstream foreign film like this without having to go to a festival. The film itself was fairly decent as well, even if I may be giving it more credit than it deserves for clever misdirection that may have been a function of subtitling more than intent.

Then the cold kind of came back and I kind of stayed in for the rest of the week before giving Saturday to the Somerville Theatre's thirteen-hour Terror-Thon. It wasn't quite the cool "one film per decade" format as last year, but it was still all 35mm and great-looking, and a fun and varied line-up: The Cat and the Canary (silent, with Jeff Rapsis on the organ), Poltergeist, Creature from the Black Lagoon (anaglyph 3D), The Thing (on a fantastic print), Wait Until Dark, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and Let the Right One In.

It's probably not the greatest idea to get home from a marathon that ends at 1am and then go to a morning matinee the next day, but that's when the not-horrible-expensive 3D screening of The Boxtrolls was, so I tried to sleep quickly. Not a bad movie, and it certainly looked gorgeous, as Laika's stop-motion tends to do.

Soylent Green

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Science on Screen, 35mm (?))

Say what you want about Charlton Heston, but the man had a knack for choosing genre projects that would burrow their ways so deep into popular culture that one needn't have actually seen them to be up on their iconic finales. Plus, they let Heston be a star of sorts without having to try and be charming in a way that really would not have suited him. He'll be an icon for much longer than contemporaries who were better-known (or better actors) because of those choices.

Of course, while the end of Soylent Green is what everybody knows, it's not all that makes the movie great. Director Richard Fleischer and screenwriter Stanley L. Greenberg take the standard trick of making their sci-fi story a police procedural and ground it even more by making Heston's Detective Thorn casually corrupt instead of any sort of idealistic seeker of justice, even if there is a sort of dogged determination underneath. It really does fine job of highlighting what sort of dystopic future these people are living in while still saving the crushing blow for later. I also suspect that it's the result of a lot of the crew knowing real suffering, either in World War II or even the Depression. Despite taking place in an exaggeratedly overcrowded New York, the little details seem true-to-life, and there certainly has to be some intent in having the "books" near the end resemble Holocaust survivors.

Part of what's amazing, though, is just how wonderfully melancholy the movie is. The idea that most of the women we see are "furniture girls" is pretty disheartening, but watching Leigh Taylor-Young fret about her future in that position is a great little detail that arguably plays into the theme of human beings as a commodity. And, man, those last scenes with Edward G. Robinson, as he realizes he can't live in a world where what he's discovered is true are heartbreaking, especially watching the gruff Thorn break down. I feel awful about not recognizing him, because I love Robinson during his film noir prime. At least he went out with a good movie, even if he might have thought doing sci-fi was slumming it at the time.

The Boxtrolls

* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 October 2014 in AMC Boston Common #5 (first-run, RealD)

Yow, what a great-looking movie. Not necessarily pretty, but with a level of detail that is kind of mind-boggling in this type of stop-motion animation, and combination of smoothness and a slight hitch (maybe exaggerated by the 3D projection) that makes sure that the audience knows just what is being pulled off

It's an oddly prickly movie at times, though, in large part due to the kid characters at the center. Winnie (voiced by Elle Fanning with a bratty British accent) is the kind of kid who revels in being pushy and in charge, even if it's reined in enough to mostly be funny. Newcomer Isaac Hempstead Wright voices Eggs - a boy raised by the Boxtrolls of the title (scavengers who live beneath the city streets) - and manages to capture not just how he is something of an innocent in the human world but that he also has an impatience to him that feels like a real kid who hasn't yet learned that lashing out can be a bad idea even if you are right.

There's a fun group of grown-up voices around them - Ben Kingsley as the villain, Nick Frost as a hulking henchman unsure of the morality of their actions, Jared Harris as Winnie's inattentive father - and the filmmakers use them to tap into a dry Brit-type class-skewering humor that is anything but reserved. Character designs and settings are fairly extreme caricatures, sight gags are peculiar (and sometimes grotesque) but funny, and when it comes time for a chase or confrontation, the animators do some pretty amazing things. It might be odd enough to be a tough sell for kids and parents at times, but it's at least always something impressive to look at.

One question, though: Where do jokes about English folks loving cheese come from in these movies? It's one of the recurring gags in Wallace & Gromit, too, and I don't know if I've seen this cheese-obsession in real life. I'm guessing it's a matter of going into obsessive detail over anything commonplace, and kids like cheese much more than other targets like wine, beer, electronics components, etc. Of course, it's best exemplified by Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, which isn't exactly kid's stuff.

Okay, that's enough overthinking things for one post.

Terror-Thon 2014: The Cat and the Canary, Poltergeist, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Thing, Wait Until Dark, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Let the Right One In

I wasn't sure I was going to do this, because it was just a week after the miserable day where a cold decided to manifest on the bus on the way to a wedding. But a combination of a silent, some big deal movies I'd never seen, and some favorites got me there, and it was a pretty good time. I don't think I infected too many people.

At some point, Ian commented that they might choose a different weekend next year, because overlapping Honk! Fest meant that Davis Square was really crowded, and when we paused for a dinner break at around five, the environment was far from spooky

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Terror-Thon 2014, 35mm with live musical accompaniment)

There really should be some sort of revival of "old dark house" movies, because for as much as everything about them would likely come off as absurdly dated today, there is a great deal of fun to be had when you play by the rules in place at the time. But given that you're already kind of doing that with silent movies anyway, it's not that big a leap, and it makes for an amusing diversion.

This one starts from the premise that old Mr. West died two decades ago, hounded by greedy relatives, and aiming to deny them any sort of quick satisfaction, he insisted his will not be read until midnight of the twentieth anniversary of his death (he also resented his family calling him crazy, and one of the conditions of the will is that the inheritor be medically examined to have his or her sanity confirmed). That day has come, and now lawyer Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall) and the maid who has been keeping the place tidy (Martha Mattox) await the would-be heirs: Charles Wilder (Forrest Stanley) and Harry Blythe (Arthur Edmund Carewe), who have some sort of grudge between them; blonde flapper Cecily Young (Gertrude Astor) and her aunt Susan Sillsby (Flora Finch); easily frightened Paul Jones (Creighton Hale); and Annabelle West (Laura La Plante), said to resemble her great-uncle - including, perhaps, his madness, although she seems nice enough. Everyone winds up staying the night, even if the locals say the house is haunted and a guard the nearby asylum (George Siegmann) warns of an escaped lunatic.

That's a lot of characters for somebody to potentially be picking off, but the stabs in that direction are actually rather minimal; director Paul Leni and the various writers adapting John Willard's play aim as much for goofy hijinks as mystery and suspense. That's not to say there's never any sort of sinister air to the production; the opening scenes set up things to keep in mind as things play out later, and a low body count is probably far more effective than a high one if the goal is to either drive Annabelle mad, or at least to make her appear that way. A modern audience may find something campy about early-twentieth-century attitudes toward mental illness or the secret panels and passages that appear to riddle this old house, but Leni does not present then that way - a hand emerging from a bed's headboard to menace a sleeping woman comes off as genuinely creepy, for instance, and it's possible that certain bits can be scary or funny depending on what the accompanist does with it.

Full review at EFC.

Poltergeist (1983)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Terror-Thon 2014, 35mm)

Every movie-lover, even those whose whose affections tend to fall along specific lines, has a few things that they haven't seen, because time and opportunity is just not distributed fairly. Poltergeist was one of mine, which is strange, because I really like Steven Spielberg when he decides that it would be fun to scare kids in a movie.

I'm glad I saw it this way, though, because I found myself wondering early on if the flickering effect when a room is primarily lit by the television would have had the same feel on video or digital projection; it feels like an effect that is kind of film-specific, enhanced by the differences between how film and television work. I could be talking completely out of my butt here, but it feels fairly film-specific. On top of that, though, seeing the film in its natural environment brings out how great the effects were, and how even if a part didn't necessarily make you jump, there was still plenty of fun in hearing the guy two seats down yelp.

Something that can easily get lost in the spookiness, though, is just how fun and occasionally funny this movie is. There's a dark, sarcastic streak that runs through the first half of the movie, along with something really charming in how the mother living in the haunted house initially has a "this is kind of neat, let's see how it works" attitude toward the poltergeists in the house. It gets tense in a hurry, though, although I do kind of love the down-to-earth group of paranormal investigators that soon arrives. There's a genuine feeling of not knowing how to react in the face of something truly incomprehensible. It's why I think a little air leaves the movie when Zelda Rubinstein shows up as a medium. As much as the story needs a way toward resolution (other than everybody dies and the house remains haunted and dooooom...), that sort of sudden, instant credibility sort of feels like a cheat, with her weirdness kind of destabilizing the protagonists' easy relatability.

Still, I'll probably pick this up on Blu-ray sometime, especially if they release a super-spiffy version to tie in with the upcoming remake. Despite Tobe Hooper's name being on it (and his contributions not being minor), it's got enough Spielberg DNA expressed well to become a potential favorite.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Terror-Thon 2014, 35mm/anaglyph 3D)

Looking at my review from almost ten years ago, I seem to have given it a lot more thought back then than I did this time around. I didn't see anything gay at all this time!

I still think that this is one of the lesser Universal Monster movies, in large part because there's no humanity to the Creature. I think this makes it ripe for a remake, though - as much as it's remembered as a classic and thus a sort of brand name, there's plenty of room for improvement, and I'd love to see what a modern FX crew could come up with for an updated monster. There's a chance to build mythology here as opposed to try and retrofit the source material, and the underwater environment is perfect for the inevitable 3D shooting.

Speaking of which, I'm kind of disappointed that this is the 3D movie the Somerville Theatre guys chose to include/could get their hands on for the marathon, as it meant anaglyph 3D, and that's the way I saw it before, when Universal supplied it to the Coolidge that way despite them gearing up for "Natural-Vision". The Kendall played it in 3D a week later as part of their "Midnight Madness" series, and I suspect that said DCP would have used the current polarized tech. I wasn't going to see a movie I don't love twice in two weeks, but I'm curious what this thing looks like without red and blue filters on my eyes.

Full review (from 2005) at EFC.

The Thing (1982)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Terror-Thon 2014, 35mm)

Same thing I said back in 2007: This is really a near-perfect movie that, if it shows any age now, does so in a way that makes even someone like me pine for the good old days when they actually built things for movies. It's utterly tactile and any issues I might have are completely put aside by the great work John Carpenter and his team, from cinematographer Dean Cundey to composer Ennio Morricone, put in.

In fact, the tight way they melded atmosphere with storytelling is what really impresses me. I really like to keep track of what is going on, who has been killed and replaced when, etc., but I stop worrying about such things quickly when watching The Thing. Carpenter pulls me into this movie in a way that I tend to resist, and I appreciate the heck out of that.

Wait Until Dark

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Terror-Thon 2014, 35mm)

Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin were born five years apart, but while Wait Until Dark is near the beginning of Arkin's career, Hepburn would would enter semi-retirement afterward, not yet forty. This means that while Audrey is still Audrey, young Alan Arkin (with hair!) might seem rather jarring to those who know him as an older character actor. But you get used to it, especially since the movie itself is a thriller so taut that it's not uncommon to have people describe it as a horror movie.

It starts with some heroin being sewn inside a doll so that it can be smuggled from Montreal to New York, but it went astray on the way. Mr. Roat (Arkin) knows that courier Lisa (Samantha Jones) gave it to unsuspecting graphic designer Mike Talman (Efram Zimbalist Jr.). Roat strong-arms small-time crook Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) and former cop Carlino (Jack Weston) into getting it out of the Hendrix apartment - ideally by talking wife Susy (Hepburn) into giving it to them. And if words aren't enough, well, Susy recently lost her sight, and is still somewhat dependent on the neighbors' daughter Gloria (Julie Herrod) for help - and might not realize what's going on in and around her apartment while she's supposedly alone.

Wait Until Dark started life as a play by Frederick Knott, and if you remove the hardly-necessary scenes in Montreal and the airport from the beginning, it becomes more clearly so, with almost all the action taking place within Susy's apartment or just outside, with director Terence Young and director of photography Charles Lang frequently choosing angles that don't necessarily put the entire apartment in the same shot as might be the case on the stage, but which let the audience see where everything is, both for later reference and to rub their noses in just what Susy is up against, as one side of the screen will often show her while the other has something sinister happening within her line of sight.

Full review at EFC.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1983)

* * (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Terror-Thon 2014, 35mm)

Believe it or not, I had never seen an entry in the big three 1980s horror franchises before this marathon - no Nightmares on Elm Street, no Fridays the 13th, no Halloweens. I'm not sure how that happened, aside from growing up in a small town and not really going to movies with folks who liked this sort of thing when we did head to the city; when I got to college, these series had more or less played themselves out.

Watching Dream Warriors, I kind of got the idea that I didn't miss much. Don't get me wrong, I kind of admire the ambition on display here; a lot of slashers are just about jumping out at kids with a knife, but the Elm Street movies come up with trippy, bizarre kills realized with some very cool practical effects. It is filled with cool-looking things. Unfortunately, it is also filled with some truly terrible acting, a plot that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and goofy jokes that escape being groaningly dated mostly because they were probably kitschy at the time (Dick Cavett and Zsa Zsa Gabor were never actually cool, ater all).

The funny thing is, I think I did about four or five double takes during the credits. Patricia Arquette is in this? "Larry" Fishburne? Some guy I've never heard of named Craig Wasson was apparently considered a big enough deal to get an "And" credit (to be fair, he did star in Body Double)? Frank Darabont contributed to the screenplay? Chuck Russell directed? As to that last, it's probably worth mentioning that all of the Elm Street movies bar #2 seem to have directors that would have careers - or at least stretches - worth noticing when so many horror helmers wind up anonymous.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Terror-Thon 2014, 35mm)

Is it really six years since I saw this at Fantasia and found myself bowled over? Wow, but time flies.

One thing that really amazes me about it is that, though I've seen it enough that it really doesn't scare me any more, it is still astonishingly engrossing. The cast is fantastic, the environment is still perfect, and there's still a palpable tension on display. When it first came out, everybody writing reviews said that it wasn't just a great horror movie, but a great movie period, but we kind of didn't know that until it's had the chance to age a bit.

Having done so - yeah, it's still great. I told the guy next to me who had seen everything on the schedule that he was in for a treat, and I certainly suspect that he agreed with me by the end.

Full review (from 2008) at EFC.

Happy New Year

Do other American moviegoers do the thing where you see someone you like in a foreign movie and immediately start wondering how good his or her English is, and if he or she will be coming to Hollywood soon? It's selfish and petty and I've been doing it with Deepika Padukone for the last couple years. That said, I'm also kind of enjoying being the only person I know who knows about her, and I kind of fear that Finding Fanny might indicate that some of her charisma might be lost doing something outside of her native language(s).

That said: She's awesome.

I was kind of surprised that they had a full 15-minute preview block ahead of Happy New Year, what with it being three hours long and all. As usual, the Indian movie previews are weird - big declarations of the producers but not really acknowledging the stars at all. Full animation on the studio and production company logos, compared to US previews which generally get a couple seconds as a still during previews. And, hey, wasn't Dr. Cabbie supposed to come out a month ago? Did it only come out in Canada but not have its US/India release yet? Are they waiting for Adrienne Palicki to get a higher profile with John Wick and Agents of SHIELD? And, man, what was that absolutely bizarre preview for something in the Tamil language? It's the strangest thing I've seen on a movie screen in months and I hope like heck there are English subtitles, because I have no idea what's going on with it.

Happy New Year

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2014 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

If you've read my reviews of Bollywood movies over the past couple of years, you'll find a couple of patterns: Just because I enjoy them as a change of pace from the usual Hollywood fare doesn't necessarily mean that I don't get extremely frustrated with their shortcomings, and I really like Deepika Padukone. Happy New Year does not exactly deviate from that - she's the best part of a heist movie that gets fairly seriously lost over the course of its three hours.

The mastermind is Chandramohan "Charlie" Sharma (Shah Rukh Khan), who has his eyes on a Christmas Eve caper in Dubai that will get him revenge on Charan Grover (Jacki Shroff), the man who framed Charlie's father Manohar for theft and built a lucrative security business on Sharma Senior's inventions. He puts together a team of well-motivated accomplices: Temhton "Tammy" Irani (Boman Irani), a safecracker with a tendency for fits; Jagmohan "Jag" Prakash (Sonu Sood), a demolitions expert deaf in one ear; Rohan Singh (Vivaan Shah), Jag's hacker nephew; and Nandu Bhide (Abishek Bachchan), a dead ringer for Charan's son Vikky. There's just one catch: The plan involves posing as Team India in the World Dance Championships, and Rohan's hacking the audience vote will only get them so far. Thus, they bring in Mohini Joshi (Deepika Padukone), a bar dancer, to lead their "troupe" without knowing what's really going on.

There are some fairly improbable bits in Charlie's plan, but that's not really the half of the movie that makes Happy New Year feel kind of off. The dance competition portion of the movie is relatively slow to develop in the first half, enough so that the audience can't quite invest in it as "real", but it winds up enough in the foreground that the guys' lack of ability makes for some eye-rolling. Writer/director Farah Khan gets a couple of good laughs out of "Team Diamond" cheating their way into the world championships, but once you do that, it's more than a bit disingenuous to try and stir patriotic feelings in the audience by having them root for Team India, no matter how catching "Indiawaale" may be as a song.

Full review at EFC.

Revenge of the Green Dragons

Very glad I got to see this in a theater - as I think I mentioned before, this was originally scheduled to play the Boston Film Festival about a month ago, but during a slot when I was flying back from Austin. So, when it got pulled at the last minute and later announced as the opening night film of the Boston Asian American Film Festival, I was a happy camper.

And, hey - guests!



(For as often as I'm forced to use the "horrible photography" tag, that is some accidentally awesome composition, no?)

From left to right, that's executive producer Alan Pao, co-stars Geoff Lee, Celia Au, and Carl Li, directors Andrew Loo & Andrew Lau, co-star Shing Ka, and Devon Diep, who performed the title song. Pretty good turn-out, probably in part because the film is getting a limited theatrical release starting this weekend (it's also available on demand via DirecTV).

It's a pretty great get for BAAFF, because it's probably one of the highest-profile movies made with a primarily Asian-American cast in some time, at least since the last Harold & Kumar entry. It's pulp, but it's pretty good as pulp goes. And as much of the cast attested, that's something they don't necessarily often get the chance to do, as opposed to playing a lot of restaurant workers or grad students.

They also all mentioned that director "Andrew" Lau Wai-keung worked fast, getting one or two takes and then moving on. Lau was kind of the big draw for me; he co-directed Infernal Affairs, which got remade as The Departed, making it only fair for Martin Scorsese to executive produce this movie. It's not his first American movie - he did something called The Flock a few years back, although the American version had reshoots directed by someone else - but what I like about it is how much it feels like something from both America and Hong Kong, which is as it should be.

Also cool: He seemed to dig the Brattle Theatre; apparently the tour has had them screening Dragons in a lot of slick new venues, and he really seemed to dig playing it in a theater that was actually around during the time when this film took place. He seemed to stumble on getting it out in just that way - he seemed to be telling Creative Director Ned Hinkle that he liked the place because it's kind of old and run-down, but we can see it as him being glad the Brattle isn't trying to be something it's not and losing its personality, right?

The other interesting thing that came up was that they did a lot of open auditions in New York, and a lot of the older immigrants they talked to said that if they had it to do over again, they probably wouldn't have come to America, what with the danger, near-slavery, and prejudice they face. Something you hate to hear, but given some of what you see in the movie and can learn about elsewhere, not exactly surprising. It ties in with the short film that played before the feature (and similar ones which played during Films at the Gate), which talk about a real feeling of isolation until people find specifically Asian-American groups to connect with.

Revenge of the Green Dragons

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Asian American Film Festival, DCP)

Don't let some of the pedigree that Revenge of the Green Dragons can whip out fool you - executive producer/"presenter" Martin Scorsese and co-director Andrew Lau have made some transcendent gangster movies, but this one is more or less the sort of lurid fare its name suggests. This is not an argument against it, mind you; what better way is there to tell the story of an Asian-American street gang than by bringing some Hong Kong style to old-school grindhouse?

The Green Dragons recruited Steven Wong and his foster brother Sonny early, when they were middle-schoolers fairly fresh off the boat in 1982. Seven years later, they've moved up; Sonny (Justin Chon) is handling collections, while the more fiery Steven (Kevin Wu) brandishes a knife. It roughly parallels the gang's leaders, clean-cut Paul Wrong (Harry Shum Jr.) and his right-hand-man Chen Chung (Leonard Wu), who know that if they keep things relatively clean, the NYPD will mostly assign rookie cops, even if one guy at the FBI (Ray Liotta) is starting to sniff around due to a general belief that immigration is a ticking time bomb.

The film is based upon actual people and events, but it doesn't really need to be; while it may not follow the gangster-movie template exactly, there is not a lot to the movie that audiences have not seen before. If anything, the screenplay by Michael Di Jiacomo and co-director Andrew Loo primarily distinguishes itself via exceptional cynicism: There is never much effort made to build the Green Dragons or other gangs up as social structures offering some sort of honor, unity, or camaraderie; they are assemblies of thugs from minute one, appealing mainly because the alternative seems to be exploitation that is tantamount to slavery.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 October - 30 October 2014

Ah, mid-October. The colors turn, the festival films start their platform releases in earnest, and various big movies come out for Halloween and Diwali. It's a weird week that's going to inspire weird tangents. You've been warned.

• For instance, there's actually a movie based upon the Ouija board coming out this weekend, because of course a PG-13 tie-in to a Hasbro toy gets an order of magnitude or two more theaters than any of the dozens of really good horror movies I saw at festivals this year. The ones in the Boston area include Apple, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, Revere, and the SuperLux. Still, I'm racking my brain to think of two other movies I saw this year that involved these things. They amused me because they were Asian, and the Japanese one had a hand-written kana grid like from my classes, while the Chinese one had dozens and dozens of symbols arranged in rings.
  
  Speaking of festivals, everyone at Fantastic Fest had great things to say about John Wick, with Keanu Reeves as the title character, a former assassin who goes full mayhem on the gangsters who killed his dog (it is, apparently, over the top in many, many ways). It's directed by stuntmen who know big action, and plays at Apple, Revere, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Jordan's. Imax at the last three (in fact, Imax-only at Assembly Row), and it seems like the things playing those particular screens have basically been because you have to use that proprietary set-up for something between Guardians of the Galaxy and Intersteller.
  
  Speaking of festival films, IFFBoston alum Dear White People opens at West Newton, the Kendall, Fenway, and Boston Common; it's a pretty darn funny story about race relations on campus, especially considering how no character is ever entirely what you might expect. And while it already opened last week at Kendall Square, St. Vincent expands to Somerville, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and the SuperLux.
  
  At Boston Common, the weekly classic is Psycho, playing Sunday and Wednesday. Fenway and Revere, meanwhile, celebrate Halloween with encores of the Danny Boyle-directed NT Live Frankenstein, with Jonny Lee Miller as Victor & Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature on Monday and the rolls reversed on Wednesday (the AMC in Braintree has them on opposite days, and the Coolidge plays one on Thursday, but it's already sold out). It's pretty nifty, although I've only seen Cumberbatch as Victor.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens two noteworthy movies on the big screens this weekend. Birdman is a black comedy from the normally very dour Alejandro González Iñárritu, and it also features some bang-on fantastic casting - Michael Keaton as an actor who has disappeared from the limelight since passing on doing a third superhero movie twenty years ago, now trying to make a comeback on Broadway. Had me at "Michael Keaton", but Edward Norton, Emma Watson, Naomi Watts, and a bunch of other great folks don't hurt. It's also at the Kendall and Boston Common.
  
  They also get Whiplash, featuring Miles Teller as a talented young drummer whose new teacher (J.K. Simmons) is monstrous in his determination to make the student the best. I'm kind of intrigued that it's directed by Damien Chazelle, because I did not like his first movie (Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench) much at all, but wonder what he can do with something that has an actual story to it. It also plays the Kendall, Embassy, and Boston Common.
  
  There's an enjoyably Halloween-y slant to the special programming. Friday night's midnight show is a 35mm print of The Monster Squad, while Saturday is the midnight-to-morning Halloween Horror Marathon, which starts with Boris Karloff as Frankenstein and then Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys, both in 35mm. Four more unannounced 35mm movies follow, with seances, costume contests, trailers, shorts, and other good stuff stretching things until noon. The scary vibe continues on Monday, as the Big Screen Classic presentation is American Werewolf in London, also in 35mm. Then, on Thursday, that NT Live Frankenstein, although it appears to be sold out.
• In addition to Birdman, Dear White People, and Whiplash, Kendall Square has a one-week booking of The Irish Pub, which is just what it sounds like, a celebration of that fine Celtic institution. Director Alex Fegan will be on-hand Friday night, doing a Q&A after the 7pm show and introducing the one at 9:15. Their Firday/Saturday midnight movie is David Fincher's Seven, and Tuesday's "Globe on Screen" presentation is The Tempest.
• I'm not quite sure on the specifics of Diwali, but I know that's when a lot of big Indian films get released, with this year's big release being Happy New Year, featuring Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, and Abishek Bachchan in a great big diamond heist caper; it's at both Apple Cinemas and Fenway. The iMovieCafe guys will also be showing two Tamil-language films there, Kathithi and Poojai, without subtitles.
  
  The cinema at Fresh Pond will also be screening Bitter Honey this week, a documentary seven years in the making examining the practice of polygamy in Bali. They'll also be doing a horror quadruple-feature on Sunday, with each part also running during the week: The Lost Boys (also Wednesday), Evil Dead 2 (also Thursday), The Cabin in the Woods (also Monday), and 28 Days Later (also Tuesday). The whole thing will repeat again on Halloween with Trick R Treat added to the end; I'm not sure if either the Sunday or Halloween shows are single admission or can be purchased as a single ticket.
• The Brattle ramps up to Halloween with The Master of Schlock: A Centennial Tribute to William Castle, filling their schedule with some of the theatrical hustler's most well-known films. Friday night is an unusual double feature of The Whistler (on 35mm) & The Lady from Shanghai (which he produced). Saturday starts with another one he wanted to direct but only produced, Rosemary's Baby (which also runs on Wednesday); that is followed by a double feature of The Old Dark House & The House on Haunted Hill (the 7:30pm screening in EMERGO!). Sunday offers a double feature of The Tingler (with Percepto!) and 13 Ghosts (in 35mm and Illusion-O!); the twin bill also plays Thursday. Monday's single feature is a 35mm print of Homicidal, and Strait-Jacket shows at 10pm on Tuesday, also in 35mm.
  
  Amidst all that, there are other screenings, some less scary than others. The Visitor wraps up the "Reel Weird Brattle" program at 11:30pm on Saturday, and that's on a vintage 35mm print, rather than the new digital restoration. Sunday afternoon features a special screening of recent Filipino thriller Rekorder with star Ronnie Quizon in person. The monthly free Elements of Cinema screening on Monday is Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, with discussion afterward, and Tuesday's IFFB Fall Focus presentation is the pretty darn excellent horror movie The Babadook.
• The Harvard Film Archive hosts Martin Parr this weekend, with "Think of England" on Friday night and the filmmaker himself in person for his new film Turkey and Tinsel on Saturday evening, following an afternoon discussion of his new photo book. They also continue their Hou Hsiao-hsien series with Millennium Mambo at 8:30pm on Friday and The Sandwich Man & Goodbye South, Goodbye on Sunday. They then cap the weekend with a fortieth anniversary screening of Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds on Monday, with director Peter Davis there in person.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has the closing portion of their Boston Palestine Film Festival this weekend, with screenings Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On Wednesday the 29th, they have the first screenings of two films that will show intermittently over the next few weeks: Listen Up Philip, which features Jason Schwartzman as an egocentric novelist, and Fifi Howls from Happiness, a documentary that pays tribute to "Persian Picasso" Bahman Mohassess.
• The Bright screening room at Emerson's Paramount Theater plays host to the Boston Asian-American Film Festival, which includes some 25 shorts and features on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I can vouch for Saturday's centerpiece showing, 9-Man, although I gather it's down to rush tickets. During the week, the Bright Lights series features two free screenings: Kisses to the Children, a documentary about hidden Greek-Jewish children during the German occupation, plays Tuesday night with the director and other special guests having a discussion afterwards. Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive has a special screening Thursday night.
• The Regent Theatre just has one film program this week, the 9th Annual Boston Bike Film Festival on Friday night.
• The UMass Boston Film Series has a screening on Thursday, Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, done up a little fancier than usual with a reception beforehand and a special panel discussion afterward.

My plans? Birdman, John Wick, Whiplash, Happy New Year, the Frankenstein I haven't seen yet, and maybe a few others.