This Week In Tickets: 4 October 2015 - 10 October 2015

Someday, things will line up so that I can go 1-2-3-4-5 at the Somerville Theatre. Or maybe not; it's rare for them to have five-screening days even in the summer. But Sunday was a pretty nice try:

Stubless: The Inhabitants, 9 October 2015 at 9:30pm in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema.

I probably could have slipped Black Mass or Goodnight Mommy in there, but I wanted to watch the last Red Sox game of the season, tributes to fired announcer Don Orsillo and all, on TV. Fortunately, the times lined up, especially since Tramp, Tramp, Tramp is very short. Also, the Somerville Theatre is about a block away from me now, so it was no big issue to head back there for the excellent Sicario and then stick around for the day's only 3D screening of The Martian. Yeah, it was half past midnight when I got out, but I wasn't messing with the t.

Monday... Not so great; I was the only person in the theater for Hell and Back, and it was not good at all. I was, however, temporarily excited to see it was in theater #3. If I saw something in a theater #4 sometime during the week, that'd be 40 points for a large strait or something.

Not to be, though, as the next movie on the week, Thursday's Peace Officer was in theater #9 at the Kendall, where things on their way out tend to be. Not a bad doc, though.

Friday doesn't show up as a double feature, but I wound up catching Goodbye Mr. Loser despite my plans to catch something else before coming back to Davis Square for The Inhabitants, as both of the "something elses" I figured on seeing instead of the Chinese movie were cancelled in order to give it more screens.

Saturday's plans got erased early and I wound up heading out to Fenway Park for the GlobeDocs presentation of Fastball, which wound up being a unique movie-watching experience but not a great one. Still, anything to keep heading out there.

Next week: A lotta noir.

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)

The word "Tramp" seems to have gone through half a dozen usages over the course of the twentieth century and would probably be completely out of use in the twenty-first if it didn't rhyme with "stamp" or wasn't so firmly attached to the persona of a certain silent film star. Not this film's star, Harry Langdon, although once you get stop being surprised that this particular silent film does not star Charlie Chaplin, it's quite entertaining.

Here, to "tramp" means to walk, and John Burton (Edwards Davis), chairman of Burton Shoes, aims to promote his brand by sponsoring a cross-country walk - presumably one that will pass the billboards featuring his lovely daughter Betty (Joan Crawford) at every chance. Across town, the one-man shoe shop of Amos Logan (Alec B. Francis) is threatening to lose its mortgage. Son Harry (Langdon) does odd jobs and is besotted with the image of Betty, and when he meets her in the flesh, he's instantly besotted and convinced to sign up for the race. He's already made an enemy out of Nick Kargas (Tom Murray), one of the country's pre-eminent walkers, so it might be even more difficult.

Oddly, the fact that Burton's business is likely what has destroyed the Logans' livelihood barely gets brought up - even in 1926, this would be pretty obvious and it would make sense, but there's not even a moment in the end where, ha-ha, Harry tells the newsreel people interviewing him that he has been wearing shoes his father made instead of Burtons the whole time. On the one hand, this is the exact sort of thing to which a Harry Langdon character would be utterly oblivious; on the other, would his father be so excited by the whole thing? It's really peculiar.

Full review on EFC.

Sicario

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)

Sicario looks and plays like a crime thriller, but at its heart is a question: Who should fight the War on Drugs? It's something that is traditionally the job of the police, but they have limited jurisdiction - and, if they're what we want cops to be, they'll have reservations about what they must do to keep pace with their enemy. So who? The army? Secret agents? Is there an answer that is both practical and moral?

That's potentially dry stuff, but director Denis Villeneuve and writer Taylor Sheridan keep things exciting. The larger crime story is only shown in bits and pieces, mimicing FBI agent Kate Macer's frustration that she can't see the whole situation, but the individual action sequences they lead to are thrilling. Heck, even the situations that just might erupt into violence are full of the same kind of tension as the big action scenes. That's due in no small part to Emily Blunt, who always seems extremely capable but nevertheless on edge as Macer, and is very well-complemented by the rest of the cast: Daniel Kaluuya as her cautious partner, Josh Brolin as the cowboy running the unit she's assigned to, and a steely Benicio Del Toro as the mysterious "consultant" working with the group.

The real star of the movie, though, may just be cinematographer Roger Deakins; he shoots a gorgeous movie, filled with forbiddnig skies and grays that seem just a bit heightened, but not so much as to make thinigs seem unreal. He'll often set the camera far back, giving Villeneuve free rein to shoot some terrific action from a good distance, showing what's going on with some complex set-ups.

I must admit, it's the sort of movie where the relentless grimness and pessimism that I wonder just how rigged the game is, although that despair is sort of the point - that playing fair, the way law enforcement is expected to do, isn't going to cut it in this case. Unsettling, but you wouldn't get the intensity without it - and this is a crazy-intense movie.

The Martian

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Yep, this is a movie made just for me - space travel, pretty good science, emphasis on problem-solving, great cast, excellent 3D photography. Pretty much everything guaranteed to make me happy if done well, and this crew does it very well indeed.

I like it so much that I almost feel little need to write about it; it not only gets so much right, but it does so in laid-back manner - though The Martian features some amazing catastrophes and incredible eye-popping sequences, it's one of those movies which succeeds in large part by creating a world that is seamless in being both futuristic and familiar. It's also got the sort of use of 3D that makes every scene a little more clear, but doesn't necessarily throw stuff in the audience's face.

It's intriguing throughout, and surprisingly funny - Matt Damon has a gem of a performance as botanist astronaut Mark Watney, as witty/capable as most of us would like to think we'd be in a similar situation, but not over-polished. He spends most of the film alone, but the rest of the group is terrific as the scientists trying to work out a way to keep him alive or the crew who left Mars without him.

Some would argue that they're a little too subdued; that's an issue with lot of movies about astronauts; they're selected for being able to handle stuff like this. It makes for a relative lack of conventional drama, but I appreciate the focus - rather than injecting excess conflict into the story, the filmmakers stick with keeping it something about cooperation and thinking their way out of a situation, rather than having the solution feel like it's about who has earned a reprieve.

That won't work for some, but it's a nice change of pace, and the right call for this movie about space exploration.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 16 October 2015 - 22 October 2015

This weekend gives us new movies directed by Steven Spielberg (written by the Coen Brothers), Danny Boyle (written by Aaron Sorkin), and Guillermo del Toro (co-written by himself). I am going to do my best to not fret about Hou Hsiao-hsien not also being on that list, because this is a really good slate.

• New Spielberg with a screenplay by Joel & Ethan Coen (among others) tops the list, with Bridge of Spies a Cold War tale featuring Tom Hanks as an American lawyer hired to do a job way above his usual, negotiating the release of a downed U-2 pilot - the sort of case that could exacerbate the already-massive tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union. It plays at the Somerville Theatre (screen #1), the Belmont Studio Cinema, Lexington Venue, The West Newton Cinema, Kendall Square, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Also getting a big release: Crimson Peak, a gorgeous-looking gothic romance and ghost story written and directed by Guillermo del Toro that likely wins the weekend on pure "just look at that!" level. Nice cast, too, with Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska. It's at the Somerville, Apple Fresh Pond, Jordan's (Imax), Fenway, Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  And yet, I wouldn't be surprised if the biggest crowds wound up being for Goosebumps, positing that the popular series of spooky books for kids was about real monsters who are escaping into the real world to wreak 3D mayhem. That's at the Arlington Capitol (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond (2D only), Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere (including both "XPlus" and "MX4D" screens).
  
  There's also a small opening for Woodlawn, a high-school football movie set in 1973 Birmingham, Alabama, where hopefully the blossoming of the school's first African-American star player helped ease racial tensions rather than inflamed them (they probably wouldn't have made a movie of it otherwise). It's at Boston Common and Revere. Boston Common also opens documentary Thao's Library, a documentary about an American woman (director Elizabeth Van Meter) who helps a Vietnamese woman crippled from birth because of Agent Orange build a village library. Revere will also have anniversary screenings of My Fair Lady on Sunday and Tuesday, with the SuperLux having one screening Sunday afternoon.
• Kendall Square appears to be giving three screens to Steve Jobs, which presents Michael Fassbender as the late Apple co-founder, with writer Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle telling the story as a three-act play, each taking place backstage at a product launch. Kendall and its sister cinema in Embassy Square, Waltham, will also be opening Beasts of No Nation despite its simultaneous premiere on Netflix; the latest from Cary Joji Fukunaga, which presents the life of an African child soldier; Idris Elba co-stars as the commandant.
  
  They'll also have a one-night presentation of Attack on Titan The Movie: Part 2 on Tuesday evening (Revere has them Tuesday and Thursday). The first was fun, but if they were both going to be right around 90 minutes, why not one big epic movie, maybe with an intermission?
  
  Oh, and for reasons that aren't immediately obvious, they will also be hosting the Arlington International Film Festival this week - maybe its previous home at the Regent couldn't commit to a surprisingly full eight-days slate running from the 15th to 22nd?
• The major Bollywood release at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond is Pyaar Punchnama 2, a sequel which apparently features three bachelors meeting the girls of their dreams, only to find that they come with demanding families. If you speak Tamil, I'd appreciate if you report back on what something called Bruce Lee: The Fighter is all about, since it doesn't look like it has anything to do with Bruce Lee. There's also Amar Akbar Anthony for those who speak Malayalam. Tamil action/adventures 10 Endrathukulla and Naanum Rowdy Dhaan start Tuesday, which I'm guessing is the start of Diwali.
  
  For English-speakers, they'll also be screening Once I Was a Beehive, in which a girl who lost her father not only gets a new step-father, but winds up shuffled off to a Mormon girls' camp while he and her mother go on their honeymoon. One 7pm screening per day.
• There has been lots of The Rocky Horror Picture Show over the last month or so, as it's the thing's 40th anniversary, and The Somerville Theatre busts out an archival 35mm print at midnight on Friday, with the pre-show with the Teseracte Players starting at 11:30. Boston Common has their regular Saturday night show with the Full Body Cast.
  
  The Somerville's sister cinema in Arlington, The Capitol, is one of many, many places screening the Back to the Future trilogy on Wednesday (the actual date Marty arrived in 2015 in Part II) - it's also at Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. The Capitol also pays tribute to the late Wes Craven on Thursday with a double feature of Scream and Scream 2.
• The Brattle Theatre has their own marathon this weekend, showing all four Mad Max movies: Friday has the original and The Road Warrior (given that they're using that title, I'm guessing the American dub), Saturday has Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road, and Sunday all four. The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome are 35mm; the others DCP.
  
  Saturday night also has Don Hertzfeldt's "It's Such a Beautiful Day" trilogy of animated shorts as part of "Reel Weird Brattle: Animated Weirdness", with his most recent short, "World of Tomorrow", filling it out. They are amazing films.
  
  Monday's DocYard presentation is Dreamcatcher, with former teenage prostitute turned activist Brenda Myers-Powell (the film's subject) and producer Lisa Stevens on had for introduction and Q&A, along with local activists. On Tuesday they team with the Boston Book Festival to present a preview of Room, with the original novel's author Emma Donoghue in person. This bumps Trash Night to Wednesday, while Seoul Searching kicks off the Boston Asian-American Film Festival on person with writer/director Benson Lee there to present his movie about Korean teens from around the world sent to a camp in Seoul for the summer.
• After that, The Boston Asian-American Film Festival heads for the Bright Screening Room in the Paramount Theater for the rest of the weekend, with a theme of "Home in America" and filmmakers at nearly every screening including Saturday's centerpiece The Killing Fields of Haing S. Ngor and Sunday's closing film, Miss India America
  
  After that, Bright Lights has their regular presentations on that screen. Tuesday's is This Is My Land, a co-presentation with the Boston Palestine Film Festival with director Tamara Erde calling in to discuss her film about how Israeli and Palestine schools teach recent history differently. Thursday is the monthly BOSCPUG meeting.
• The bulk of the Boston Palestine Film Festival takes place at its home, The Museum of Fine Arts, with screenings Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday; filmmakers will be present for Eyes of a Thief (Friday), Trip Along the Exodus (Saturday), and Love, Theft, and Other Entanglements (Thursday). Before that, they have one last "Dutch Paintings: A Cinematic Exploration" screening, Tim's Vermeer, on Friday afternoon.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre is down a (tiny) screen, with the GoldScreen closed for renovation and expansion, so they drop a couple films and squeeze the rest onto three. It's somewhat quiet for special engagements, with the midnight screening Friday and Saturday being Hocus Pocus (which, I gather, was a big hit the last time they had it). They also have a Science on Screen presentation of Erin Brockovich on Monday, introduced by BU professor and epidemiologist Daniel Brooks, and are part of the Back to the Future fun on Wednesday with a "Rewind!" screening of the first film (though theirs is already sold out).
• The Harvard Film Archive spreads their presentations out over a bunch of programs this weekend: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is the "A Matter of Life and Death" movies-about-movies screening at 7pm on Friday (35mm), with Guy Maddin represented by Cowards Bend the Knee (and short "Sissy Boy Slap Party") at 9pm (digital). a 16mm program of Paul Sharits shorts, "S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED" and "Color Sound Frames" plays at 7pm Saturday. The "Five O'Clock Shadow" noir screening on Sunday is Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady, while Singaporean filmmaker Daniel Hui visits at 7pm Sunday for to show his new film Snakeskin (DCP). Monday's "Furious & Furiouser" screening is W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, a Yugoslavian "experimental documentary" (35mm).
• The Regent Theatre has two film presentations next week: TAP World plays Sunday afternoon and includes footage of tap dancing from around the world. Producer Chloe Arnold will be on-hand, both for Q&A and performance. They've also got a rock-doc on Thursday, with Scorpions: Forever and a Day chronicling what was supposed to be the German band's farewell tour but instead winds up being part of a fiftieth anniversary celebration.

My plans include the obvious - Bridge of Spies, Crimson Peak - and maybe a look at Goosebumps and Beasts of No Nation. It's kind of quiet in some ways otherwise, but I don't necessarily mind that.

Documentaries: Peace Officer & Fastball

This wasn't quite both ends of the GlobeDocs Film Festival, although one of the first screenings of that event was going on at the Kendall Square theater as I caught one of the last screenings of Peace Officer. That ran as part of "HubWeek", which I've seen described as Boston attempting to build something like Austin, TX's South-by-Southwest festival, although it's much more slanted toward science and academics even if there is still a healthy dose of arts & entertainment as well. It's not close to that big yet, obviously, but that's quite okay; I suspect that it's not quite an easy sell with that focus.

Still, the closing night of the film component was fun, as they found an appropriate venue for Fastball:



You might say it has stadium seating, even.

That's the view from the State Street Pavilion, among the fancier seats with the best view of the field at Fenway Park. I've only been up there for a game once or twice, but it was amazing. As a spot to watch a movie - well, as gigantic as the center-field video screen is, it's still pretty far away, and with them running the same thing on the televisions around the area, you can't help but notice that it's a bit of an odd shape (maybe a 16:10 aspect ratio compared to the 16:9 of a standard HDTV), not enough to make things look stretched, but different.

Nice to have a trip to Fenway in mid-October despite the lack of playoff baseball, though.

Peace Officer

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

"Dub" Lawrence is a disconcertingly cheerful face with which to sell the idea that the militarization of American police forces is out of hand; it's a serious, life-and-death subject to which he has a highly personal connection, and yet he spends much of the movie with a big grin. Maybe the idea of being the center of a movie just tickled him, or maybe he's just glad to get his message heard. Or maybe he figures that the people who need to absorb this lesson are so used to being lectured and browbeaten that they need to be approached with a smile. Maybe that will actually help.

His particular story pivots around the events of 22 September 2008, when the former sheriff's son-in-law was killed during a standoff with dozens of police officers, including a full SWAT team, despite apparently only being a threat to himself. Lawrence begins an investigation of how things went so wrong, and eventually becomes involved in reconstructing two similar incidents in his home state of Utah. His work with the families of those involved appears to indicate a disturbing pattern of excessive force leading to tragedy followed by half-hearted official investigations, but only rarely leads to justice being done.

Of course, those on the other side of the case would beg to differ, and directors Bard Barber & Scott Christopherson give them enough chances to speak that, depending upon where a viewer stands going in, he or she will feel that they have been given enough rope with which to hang themselves, a fair chance to speak their peace, or a bad edit. I personally don't think there's a lot of doubt that the filmmakers have made sure to include the moments which highlight the growing belief that there's a growing and dangerous "us versus them" mentality in policing, and suspect that there will be some objections along the lines of how the civilians' own flaws are downplayed despite the filmmakers' spending a fair amount of time early on focusing on the faults of Lawrence's son-in-law.

Full review on EFC.

Fastball

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 October 2015 in Fenway Park (GlobeDocs Film Fetival, digital)

The professional sports industry churns out a tremendous amount of non-fiction films every year, and the number is probably only going up with the sheer number of cable sports channels with time to fill, especially during the off-season. It's not uncommon for greatness to come out of this factory - the larger-than-life personalities and strong passions can create terrific stories that reflect ideas beyond the games themselves - but more often you get something like Fastball: Competently-produced and an easy watch for fans, it will probably fill a lot of hours on the MLB Network during the winter but it doesn't transcend its title.

Heck, the viewer won't even learn the mechanics of supplying power to a fastball or controlling it via the release; This film is almost entirely a celebration of the let-'er-rip, blow-the-batter-away pitch and pitcher, with a particular emphasis on determining who, among major leaguers, was the hardest thrower ever. As a result, it's not exactly dry, but there is very little opportunity to learn here: You can spend a segment or two talking about Nolan Ryan's feats on a pitching mound, but director Jonathan Hock can't do much more than stand back and be amazed; there's no talk about what made him different from so many other hurlers, even to the point of acknowledging that, to throw as many pitches as hard as he did for as long as he did, he had to be a freak of nature.

Don't expect much mention that he walked enough people that his reputation is fairly inflated, either; Hock spends much of the film content to repeat familiar lore that much of his audience is likely very familiar with, even seeming to offer only token resistance to the claim that pitches can rise on the way to the plate. That makes things go down easier, for sure, but the film gets more interesting when Hock digs into things that are somewhat lesser-known - the story of Steve Dalkowski, a fireballer who could never control his pitches enough to make that speed useful, or how a good fastball can fool the brain because it's right at the edge of what the human eye can see and how the brain extrapolates motion. The mechanics of how pitch speeds have been measured are nifty and potentially new information for many viewers as well.

Full review on EFC.

The Inhabitants

Sometimes you really feel terrible about not liking a movie. The Rasmussen Brothers invited me to their screening personally, included talk about hanging out after the movie in their emails, and I appreciate the heck out of being included with the local genre film folks who either have a much bigger reach than me or are actively making stuff happen, either with festivals or films of their own. Getting that sort of invitation and then using it to say that the movie wasn't your thing kind of feels like you've been a poor guest.

Still, I like focus in my horror movies. Have your monsters represent something that should make the audience uneasy, frightened, or angry and never lose sight of that; always keep coming back to it. The Inhabitants never really finds that thing, especially once you take the video cameras into consideration. They've really got nothing to do with the curse of the midwife, ad the moments where they put some blurry skin on-screen feel more like distractions than titillations or violations.

SPOILERS!

There's also a real missed opportunity to connect the women in an interesting way - I wondered well after the film ended if Jessica had been a surrogate; like a midwife, an essential part of bringing a child into the world under certain conditions but cast aside after. Create this line of women that have sheltered, cared for, and fed the demon children of the title in order to satisfy the maternal connections that they aren't considered to have earned.

I kind of think that's what the filmmakers were going for, but with just the one glimpse of the ultrasound photo and all the time spent on the hidden cameras, there's just not enough meat to it.

!SRELIOPS

... and, finally, one venue-related note. I've wound up seeing a fair number of horror movies in the Somerville Theatre's Micro-cinema between this, All Things Horror, and a couple other things, but I think this is the first one where the house being old and having old-house noises was a big part of the plot. The seats in that room squeak a lot, and because you often have to lean forward to see the full screen over the next row with its very gentle slope, the audience winds up generating a lot of "false positives" in terms of creaking!

The Inhabitants

* * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2015 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-cinema (special screening, Blu-ray)

Michael & Shawn Rasmussen shot The Inhabitants inside a historic house that has genuine secret passages and stories of hauntings, and it sometimes seems like it provided a little too much inspiration. This film has a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and you wind up with a few scary moments but no one idea is ever strong enough to bury into the viewer's head and truly terrify.

That haunted house is, naturally, just outside Salem, Massachusetts, a bed & breakfast being purchased by young couple Dan (Michael Reed) & Jessica (Elise Couture), as the current owner, Rose (Judith Chaffee), is no longer capable of operating it as a business - or, really, living on her own. It apparently needs a fair amount of sprucing-up before re-opening, and when Dan is called away to Chicago for business, Jess finds herself beset by both the place's sordid history and some trouble-making local kids.

The Rasmussens seem to have started with a reasonably strong idea for a horror movie - a legend about a midwife persecuted for witchcraft whose beyond-the-grave revenge persists to this very day. It not only twists a position of trust into something dangerous, but it gives the filmmakers seventeenth-century medical tools with which to creep the audience out and a reasonable connection to a present-day woman's own fears. When they're building and digging into this mythology, The Inhabitants is genuinely creepy.

Full review on EFC.

Goodbye Mr. Loser

How popular are the first weekends of Chinese movies getting to be in Boston? Last night, I looked at the start/running time of Goodbye Mr. Loser, figured I wouldn't be able to get back before the 9:30pm screening in Davis I wanted to catch, and said, fine, I'll catch something earlier. Both The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials and 99 Homes were cancelled, though - apparently so that Goodbye Mr. Loser could show on three screens. Three! And though the 7pm one I had originally considered had sold out, there was one at 6:30, which wound up well-attended.

Crazy, isn't it? The promotion was talking about this dethroning Lost in Hong Kong at the box office in China, but it actually looks like it could have a bigger weekend than that one here.

It's pretty funny in general, too - I don't know how strongly I'd recommend it to folks who don't often hit foreign films, because you probably can find something similar that takes place in American and is in English and thus doesn't have the same language and cultural barriers to the jokes. Been a while since I've seen one done this well, though.

Xia Luo Te Fan Nao (Goodbye Mr. Loser)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2015 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)

As near as I can tell, no character is played by multiple actors in Goodbye Mr. Loser despite the bulk of the movie showing these middle-aged characters back in high school, and the fact that the filmmakers figure that this is a potential positive gives you a hint of what wavelength the movie is on. It's a screwy comic fantasy, and only falters when it starts to get sentimental.

It starts with Xia Luo (Shen Teng) coming to the wedding of his still-gorgeous high-school crush Qiu Ya (Wang Zhi) with the intent of looking so cool that she'll wonder what she missed out on before he disappears again, only for it to go quite differently, as his wife Ma Dongmei (Ma Li) winds up chasing him with a knife. He ducks into the bathroom, but when he comes back out, it's 1997 and he's in his old high school. And while he's still causing commotion, he's going to make sure things are different as he pursues Qiu Ya and records every hit Mando-pop song of the last eighteen years before the original artists.

This being a large plot point should serve as a reminder to any non-Chinese audiences watching the movie that this sort of "nostalgia comedy" can be a lot less funny without the proper frame of reference; I've got no idea whether the crowd was laughing with familiarity whenever a song came on the soundtrack or if filmmakers Yan Fei & Peng Da-mo were doing something particularly subversive by using those particular songs. The subtitles are pretty funny on some, though, making me wonder if they are original for the film. Fortunately, the film is not particularly close to reliant on knowledge of the pop culture of 1997 China; being back in high school and knowing the future is more important than the specifics of the past.

The stuff that Xia Luo gets up in the past, fortunately, are pretty damn funny. It's hilarious in large part because the filmmakers seem fairly indifferent to "good taste" as a concept; not only does Xia Luo act tremendously selfishly, but the entire cast of characters is kind of ridiculous, from broad slapstick to jokes about how dumb one guy is while another is effete. The jokes are often tacky as hell - folks get hit with bricks, for crying out loud! - but there are a lot of them, and they are executed with seeming abandon but excellent timing and great precision. They go for a larger-than-life sort of absurdity, and the fact that very few look like actual teenagers plays into the silliness.

That cast is pretty much unknown in terms of having appeared in movies that have crossed the Pacific, although Shen Teng and Ma Li are apparently popular comedians; I wouldn't be surprised if they were part of the original stage production. They are both tremendously funny, especially Ma, who is zany as the athletic, deluded Dongmei of 1997 but setting up the more sensible one of the present as well. Shen gets more screen time, and mugs shamelessly while also showing off some fine dry humor. The supporting cast is strong as well, with Allen Ai selling his dumb-guy character well enough to steal every scene he's in and Yin Zheng right up there as the brown-nosing current boyfriend of Qiu Ya. Wang Zhi doesn't get quite so much funny material as the school beauty, but she does a pretty good job of making the privileged, timid girl far less bland than she might be.

Almost too well, at times; Qiu Ya is such a shrinking violet at first that Xia Luo's aggressive attention becomes more uncomfortable than funny, and she doesn't get many chances to be entertainingly bitchy to offset it. More importantly, the film takes a somewhat unearned turn toward the sentimental later on, both in terms of a really dark turn and seeming to fast-forward to a situation where we've got to believe a status quo we've got no investment in is more than it was presented as. It winks a little bit afterward, hinting that the filmmakers know they're pushing cliches hard, but it's got to be better than the anything-goes comedy it's pushing aside to work.

There's a lot of good jokes in Goodbye Mr. Loser, though, even if it eventually does want Xia Luo to Learn A Valuable Lesson. On the way, though, it's very funny, even to those of us who must accept that we are going to have a significant number of the jokes just fly past us. For it's main Chinese audience, it must be a real blast.

(Formerly on EFC)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 October 2015 - 15 October 2015

Long runs where nothing's in 3D, then everything is. Although there's a bunch of other nifty stuff as well.

• Once again, The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens two movies that will also be hitting some mainstream theaters. First up is He Named Me Malala, a documentary on Malala Yousafzai, a teenager with a Nobel Peace Prize for speaking out for education for women even after being shot by the Taliban for trying to go to school. It's also at the Kendall, West Newton, and Boston Common.
  
  Their other wide-ish open is Freeheld, co-starring Ellen Page and Julianne Moore as a couple who must fight for partner benefits when the latter is diagnosed with cancer. It's in the screening room at the Coolidge, but also at the Kendall and Boston Common.
  
  As the countdown to Halloween continues, the Coolidge has plenty of midnight action: The main screen has a 35mm print of The Blair Witch Project on Friday and Saturday, while IFFBoston and Fantasia selection Deathgasm plays screen #2 on Friday and the Screening Room on Saturday. Another pretty spiffy Fantasia selection, Experimenter, plays Sunday morning as part of Talk Cinema series. There's also Open Screen on Tuesday, and an NT Live presentation of Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet that is already sold out, although there do appear to be dates in December.
• Over at the more mainstream places, giant-screen exclusivity ends for The Walk, which now plays in 2D & 3D at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's (Imax), Fenway, Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), and Revere. Another big 3D presentation by an interesting but erratic director is the other main attraction, with Joe Wright directing Pan - because Peter Pan really needed an origin story where he and Captain Hook were close friends. Looks beautiful, though. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere. The Martian also gets upgraded to the RPX screen at Fenway and the main screen at the Somerville (with screen #5 having 3D shows all day).
  
  With a ton of screens to fill, Boston Common also picks up In My Father's House, a documentary that follows Che "Rhymefest" Smith, a rapper who discovers that his father is still alive and homeless just a couple blocks away after buying the man's childhood home. They also give a couple screenings per day to A Faster Horse, a documentary on redesign of the Ford Mustang from the maker of Jiro Dreams of Sushi (and, admittedly, The Lazarus Effect).
  
  Revere chooses two different limited releases. Big Stone Gap seems to be coming from a the faith-oriented production company but seems like a pretty conventional romantic comedy featuring Ashley Judd as a small-town "spinster" who, apparently, discovers that she is from a famous family and suddenly attracts attention. Nifty cast, including Jenna Elfman, Patrick Wilson, Chris Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, and more. There's also Ladrones, an aciton-comedy from the Dominican Republic which stars Fernando Colunga and Eduardo Yáñez as heist artists who come out of retirement to thwart a less kind-spirited crew. Colunga & Yáñez are apparently big stars in Latin America.
• Along with Freeheld and He Named Me Malala, Kendall Square also opens Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon. Filmmaker Douglas Triola appears to have stuck around after showing his film as part of GlobeDocs to do Q&A after the 7:05pm shows on Friday and Saturday and introduce Friday's 9:50pm show. They also have a special screening on Thursday of Heart Like A Hand Grenade, which follows Green Day as they recorded their album American Idiot, which has apparently been sitting on the shelf for six years.
• The GlobeDocs Film Festival continues through the weekend, with the screenings on Friday and on Saturday afternoon taking place at the Paramount Theater downtown before moving to Fenway Park for closing night film Fastball. Not sure where they're showing it in the park, but the concession stands will be open. There will be one last show on Sunday, with the Audience Award winner playing the Paramount at 1pm.
• Lost in Hong Kong keeps going at Boston Common, which also opens another Chinese movie, Goodbye Mr. Loser, a comedy in which a middle-aged man winds up back in his high-school years, looking to fix his mistakes.
  
  Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond has a sort of good news/bad news situation with their main new relese: Jazbaa stars Aishwarya Rai and Irrfan Khan in a thriller about a defense attorney blackmailed into representing a monster, which is a nice cast, but it's Sanjay Gupta ripping off a South Korean movie again (Seven Days, this time), and I'm hoping that very few of you remember how Zinda turned out. There's also Aatagara if you speak Kannada, Ennu Ninte Moideen if you speak Malayalam, with Talvar also sticking around.
• More Proto-Noir at The Brattle Theatre this week, including plenty of double features: The Mummy & The Invisible Man on Friday, Underworld & Little Caesar Saturday, The Devil Is a Woman & Shanghai Express Sunday, The Thin Man & The Kennel Murder Case on Monday, Sabotage & You and Me on Tuesday, and a single feature of They Drive By Night on Wednesday. All except Shanghai Express and Friday's presentations are 35mm.
  
  For those who like animation, there are special screenings of Boruto: Naruto the movie on Saturday & Sunday afternoon (which may be pre-sold out, because that manga/anime is crazy popular). The "Real Weird Brattle: Animated Weirdness" screening at 11:30pm on Saturday is French classic Fantastic Planet,presented on 35mm. There's also the Kickstarter Film Festival on Thursday, which pairs What We Do in Shadows with shorts "Afronauts" at 7pm; and T-Rex with animated shorts "Submarine Sandwich" (by PES!) and "Don Hertzfeldt's "The World of Tomorrow" at 9:20pm.
• At The Harvard Film Archive, Ben Rivers appears in person with his entry in the "A Matter of Life and Death" Movies-About-Movies series, The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers. The series continues at 9:15pm on Saturday with Rapture (preceded by "The Black Tower" in 16mm). The Guy Maddin series continues on Saturday with Careful. The Five O'Clock Shadow comes a half-hour earlier on Sunday with The Lady in the Lake, which I don't contributes any of the five thousand or so clips that make up Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself. The weekend's programs finish up with The Conversation part of "Furious & Furiouser". All in 35mm.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has one last screening of Breathe, before they go all-in on "Dutch Paintings: A Cinematic Exploration", with The Mill and the Cross (Friday/Sunday/Thursday), Museum Hours (Saturday), Tim's Vermeer (Saturday/Wednesday), Rembrandt's "J'Accuse" (Sunday/Wednesday/Thursday)
• Bright Lights has two recent but memorable movies for their free screenings: Amy on Tuesday and Roar on Thursday, both with Emerson faculty leading discussion afterward.
• The Regent Theatre has two movie presentations next week: A fortieth-anniversary sing-along presentation of Monty Python and the Holy Grain on Wednesday and Reel Rock 10 on Thursday - which, contrary to what you might expect from this venue, is more about climbing than music.

I really want to get out to Reading to see The Walk on the gigantic screen, because otherwise, what's the point of it? Not looking forward to choosing between The Thin Man and The Conversation on Monday, but will be doing The Lady in the Lake and other noir things. Somewhere in there, I may try to get to Revere for Ladrones and Fenway for Fastball, and I'll probably fit Pan in somewhere too. Looks like another weekend of not unpacking.

This That Week In Tickets: 12 April 2015 - 18 April 2015

Busy week, between baseball season starting, the Somerville Theatre filling screens with special presentations before the festival start, and just going to see regular movies:

First up was The Tales of Hoffman, a Technicolor opera from Powell & Pressburger, and while the digital presentation is not quite so eye-popping as having film to run, it's still a gorgeous thing to watch. Kind of a dull movie, though.

Monday was Opening Day at Fenway Park, which the Red Sox won against the Nationals, handily. It wasn't quite so close for Tuesday's game, but at least that one was exciting. The team was in first place after those games, and although it was pretty clear that a fair chunk of those victories were at least partially the result of other teams really not playing defense well at all, the drop that followed would be pretty severe.

In between, Kill Me Three Times, which must have been pretty close to the end of its run for me to choose a nine-thirty show, although hitting a barbecue place with some friends after the ballgame also contributed.

Thursday night was another end-of runner, Ned Rifle at the Brattle. It's the close of a trilogy that started nearly twenty years earlier with Henry Fool and continued with Fay Grim, although Hal Hartley's less-universal story probably keeps it from getting the attention of other long-running independent series like the ones which started with 7 Up and Before Sunrise.

Saturday, I got up early to head out to Revere because that's where the latest quick Korean import, Twenty, was running (kind of glad those are playing in the city now, despite the impressive concession stand out there). After that, the MBTA must have just gotten me back to Somerville for their brief run of The King and the Mockingbird, an outright peculiar animated film with a long, strange history to go with its odd story and visuals.

That meant I started and ended the week doing the same thing - afternoon repertory presentations in Davis Square. Symmetry!

Ned Rifle

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run/Henry Fool trilogy, DCP (?))

Hal Hartley has just never stuck with me; he's the sort of independent voice that seems to enjoy that designation a bit much at times, preferring to bask in the peculiarity of whatever he has thought up over doing a sensible thing where that could really hold the story together. Take, for instance, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) deciding to do a comedy vlog despite having no aptitude for it; the mannered performance and hyper-seriousness that would make it very funny with just the tiniest bit of motivation raises skepticism instead. There's a fair chunk of that in Ned Rifle - Hartley's got interesting ideas, but kind of counts on being an auteur with a dedicated audience a bit much.

It's not really crippling, though, in part because the idea he did have - the son of the vain, urban likes of Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Fay Grim (Parker Posey) winding up adopted by humble churchgoing people in the country - winds up making for a fascinating contrast. The foster family of Ned Rifle (Liam Aiken) are the kind of people that New York-based independent filmmakers don't necessarily always get even when they're not trying to appear superior, and going that direction with Ned rather than have him take after his parents makes him the first protagonist of the series that the audience can really feel for from the start.

Because of that, the weird stuff around him - most notably Aubrey Plaza as a traveling companion and intended partner in crime who is simultaneously much more worldly and even more thoroughly damaged than the young man looking to kill his father for the way he has left his and his family's life a mess. Posey, Urbaniak, and Ryan, all reprising roles they've played since 1997, are all just as comfortable as you'd expect, but never complacent in bringing these odd, borderline absurd characters to life.

I'm still never really going to love Hal Hartley, I don't think, but I'll probably keep trying; he's at least eccentric in an interesting way.

This Week In Tickets: 27 September 2015 - 3 October 2015

You'd think my birthday week would just be packed with movies, but there's other stuff to do too.

Starting with baseball, specifically the Red Sox' last home game of the year. It was a weird day; my mother and her husband Bill won tickets in the bleachers, while I was up in the right field roof boxes, so we met up beforehand, got some curtains hung, went our separate ways at the game then met up back again afterward.

The Red Sox won, shutting out the Orioles for the entire weekend before going on to a sweep of the Yankees. It was Don Orsillo's last time doing play-by-play for the team at home (at least until the Padres visit next year and he's there for his new job), and the team did a nice tribute.

Gonna miss baseball; the playoffs just aren't the same, and I'm not just saying that because the Red Sox won't be a part of them.

The next night, I headed for Assembly Row to catch Everest on its last night on the Imax screens, because what's the point otherwise? Boston Common wasn't an option, either, since it was doing a preview of The Walk. Good looking, but not really built to be a movie.

Spent the next few evenings birthday shopping for my niece, because we share a birthday. I kind of wound up mostly getting her stuff I liked that I hoped nine-year-old girls might also go for - the first two Bandette graphic novels, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, what seemed like the only novel in the "Middle Readers" section of Porter Square Books that looked futuristic and had a young girl as a protagonist (comics seem to have it way over novels there), and the game Scotland Yard. While in Games People Play, I was pretty sure that I had purchased a copy at the SmarterKids warehouse when I worked there, and, yeah, I did. Moved twice without getting much chance to play it here since then. At least getting her a new copy meant I knew nothing was missing and it now apparently has beginner and two-player versions.

On the actual day of my birthday, I went to the new week's new Chinese movie, Saving Mr. Wu, which was pretty good. Then I tried to catch The Martian at the Somerville Theatre, but the 3D screening sold out. Saturday, I headed to Maine - my nieces are the cutest nieces - and then tried to catch the same movie after getting back. Nope.

But, when we get to next week...

Everest

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 September 2015 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax 3D)

Say this about about Everest - its "holy crap, look at that!" game is tremendously strong. Director Baltasar Kormákur and cinematographer Mick Audsley, probably along with a gaggle of FX guys, puts the audience right on the top of a mountain. I haven't seen enough pictures of Everest specifically to be able to tell just how well the crew has mimicked distinctive features, but it feels like an impressive recreation, The effects work blends seamlessly with the aerial photography, and large-format screen and 3D are used very well. I wish I'd been able to make it out to Reading to see it on the six-story screen there.

It's got a pretty nice ensemble, too - there are a lot of characters who may not have the strongest of arcs, but during the extended "getting to know you" phase, they make a good impression: Jason Clarke as the expedition leader, John Hawkes as the underdog postman, Josh Brolin as the Texan who may be a little too sure of himself, and then you dig into the supporting cast and find Keira Knightley, Emily Watson, Robin Wright, Jake Gyllenhaal... It's kind of ridiculous.

Why, then, does it become a little underwhelming? Perhaps because Kormákur and writers William Nicholson & Simon Beaufoy embrace the randomness of the true story more than most narrative films do: Terrible things happen on this expedition, and there is a very obvious lesson about not trying to commodify the extremes as these people have - not everybody can climb Everest, not even among the upper echelon of skilled and enthusiastic mountaineers, and trying to make a regular business out of it is hubris. It's a distributed one, tough, spread out among too many characters as disaster adds up, and when you combine that with the conditions it happens in, the last act has a lot of middle-aged white guys with mostly-covered faces. It's tough to connect to that emotionally, and once the camera is getting in tight enough to give you an expression that can later be seen in a living room, you lose a bit of the spectacle.

Hell and Back

There are a lot of people who really like writing negative reviews, but I'm not one of them, and I sometimes wonder if people look at my blog or my reviews on eFilmCritic and think I'm a soft touch rather than someone who just does a pretty good job at choosing what I want to see. Maybe I'm a little reluctant to give the lowest rating out because it's rare to find a film I can't say anything good about.

Yeah, this one's pretty bad.

And, for as much as I don't relish writing negative reviews, I must admit to being kind of curious if Nick Swarsdon is still touchy about critics and eFilmCritic in particular, because lots of folks reported getting harassed by the guy after panning his stuff. I don't want angry emails, but who wants to be left out?


On a positive note: Mila Kunis is in this, probably the biggest draw aside from the rarity of animated movies for adults in the United States, at least hitting theaters, and she's pretty much the best thing in it. Her voice acting is a lot of fun and it strikes me that her voice is always going to be a lot of fun, and while she is getting the sexy roles while she can, you can sort of tell that she'll probably be playing great sarcastic grandmas in forty years; she's got the persona and tone for it.


Hell and Back

* (out of four)
Seen 5 October 2015 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)

There's a running gag in Hell & Back, arguably the funniest thing in the movie, where a demon voiced by John Farley subjects souls to various mildly annoying situations (stopped escalators, a Pizza Hut/Taco Bell that has no pizza, etc.) and zings them with "welcome to Hell!" Naturally, I doubt that any of these "tortures" can come close to being the crew of stop-motion animators spending weeks on end moving plasticene models and changing their poses bit by bit to give this nearly witless film some illusion of life. Spending days moving a mouth up and down so that it syncs up with a bored-sounding Nick Swarsdon delivering a line that uses the word "fuck" like a comma must crush a soul like nothing else.

Swarsdon plays Remy, a barker at the extremely run-down amusement park where he spent much of his childhood, now working there along with lifelong friends Augie (voice of T.J. Miller), who is constantly kept busy fixing things, and Curt (voice of Rob Riggle), now the assistant manager. When the fortune teller's magic book and a trivial blood oath suck Curt into a portal to Hell, Augie and Remy follow, only to discover that the demons intend to sacrifice Curt. Hearing that Orpheus (voice of Danny McBride) is the guy you talk to when you want to bust someone out of Hell, they go looking for him along with sexy half-demon Deema (voice of Mila Kunis), while the Devil (voice of Bob Odenkirk) chases them in the hopes of impressing Barb (voice of Susan Sarandon), the angel he's had a crush on for centuries.

Trips to Hell have been used as a means to comedic and satiric ends for millennia, but in the hands of writers Tom Gianas, Zeb Wells, and Hugh Sterbakov, this fertile ground is used mainly for weak stand-up jokes, pounding away at minor irritants and shrugging off the truly dark material. Sometimes that inversion can work, especially if the writers have a point to make about the characters' priorities, but not here. Instead, it mostly comes across as mean-spirited and misplaced, crass without being lively. It tries to be self-deprecating at points, but if you can't pull back the curtain and reveal something clever behind your idiocy, that doesn't gain much.

Full review on EFC.

This That Week In Tickets: 5 April 2015 - 11 April 2015

Skipping another few weeks because it looks like another document that I need to catch up without rewriting a bunch of stuff is only on my tablet, and the part that the guy needs to fix it doesn't seem to have made it over from China/Korea yet. Folks, do not drop your tablet, and after that, don't dawdle in getting it repaired. I have a case waiting so that it will be protected in the future, but that's hardly ideal right now, is it?

This week got started early, as for some reason The Gunman was only playing at 10:10am for its last weekend in town. It got finished in plenty of time to get me over to Somerville for the monthly silent show, this time the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments.

If I remember correctly, I tried to get to Lexington on Monday, but catching the bus there from Alewife is a tricky thing. So, instead, I rushed to Apple Cinemas at Fresh Pond to catch Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!", a surprisingly entertaining Bollywood film that wound up playing much more as a WWII mystery than a pulpy action piece. The next day, I was abe to catch the bus and make it to the Venue for one of the last screenings of '71, a pretty strong thriller set in Belfast during the Troubles.

Last chances to see things were a big part of the week, as I think I caught Focus on the last day it was in town. Saturday, at least, I got to see something new, with the really terrific White God.

The Ten Commandments (1923)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 April 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please, 35mm)

Cecil B. DeMille did two versions of The Ten Commandments, one silent and one years later with sound, but who ever remembers that the Biblical part of the first was just the prologue, with the story of Moses giving way halfway through to the story of a mother distraught over how one of her two sons isn't being a good boy and following the Commandments, with the way of selfishness inevitably leading to a fall.

It is, frankly, kind of weird; it means that all the stunning spectacle will be before the intermission and the kitchen-sink drama afterward, which even back in 1923 must have been against the conventional wisdom of how to build a film. Yes, the "main" section does have a pretty impressive climax itself as a building constructed with shoddy materials falls apart, but I suspect that moviegoers might have been tempted to head home at the midway point. That second half is ironically more memorable that the first to me in part because I've seen a few different adaptations of Exodus, and slapping a present-day story onto it is thus different in a way that sticks in the head.

It's still not the better part, though, especially seen from ninety years later. Apparently old people have always been whining about how the young don't take their superstition seriously, with DeMille and writer Jeanie Macperson setting up a rigged game that equates being nonreligious with being jerks. It's also worth noting that while the Israelites in Egypt are noble, persecuted people, Sally Lung is described as "a Eurasian" and treated as a sinister foreigner tempting one of the McTavish boys away from all that is right and good.

DeMille always did spectacle well, and when he concentrates on that here, there's no denying he built something worth buying a ticket to see. His skills as a dramatist are sketchier, though, and that makes this version of The Ten Commandments sillier than perhaps it should have been.

'71

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 April 2015 in Lexington Venue #2 (second-run, DCP)

I suspect that '71 is one of this year's more unfairly-overlooked releases in America I don't know how many theaters it got into outside the big cities, it doesn't have the big names in the cast that might pop out at people, and The Troubles are this moral quagmire that Americans tend to avoid thinking of unless they strongly identify as Irish Catholic because neither side truly feels like an "other". It shouldn't fall between the cracks, though, because it's a nifty little thriller.

Of course, I suspect that Roadside Attractions was expecting star Jack O'Connell to be something of a bigger deal after starring in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, but that one came and went very quickly and quietly. This isn't necessarily a star-making performance, either, because his Gary Hook is meant to be sort of typical of young men sent off to fight in a war in the modern era - backed into the army more out of the lack of better options than patriotic zeal and tending to expect tension more than real danger. He's not exceptional, and he doesn't really drive the story except out of circumstance; often Gary is badly wounded or concussed enough that he's stumbling blindly. He winds up giving the sort of strong performance that's almost invisible, but one without which the film would fall apart.

The situation writer Gregory Burke and director Yann Damange have him stumble through is tense and fascinating in a similarly low-key way. Burke presents a situation full of characters who, despite mostly wanting something close to the same thing, have rivalries and differing agendas that make Gary an asset and a liability. That's presented very clearly, but the film also doesn't just become a game of strategy with human pieces, it's also a look at how people struggle with the conflict between the basic urge to be decent to a fellow human being and the well-earned fear (and nurtured hate) that might prevent them from doing so. There aren't any ruminations on the foolishness of war in general or this conflict in particular, but this concussed soldier means they've got to play it out with their actions.

As they do so, Demange builds a strong action thriller. Coincidence has me writing this the day after seeing Sicario, which also gets right into the muck by just showing it rather than talking, although the level of cynicism is different. Demange goes in for a little more clarity, presenting military objectives and letting the audience understand geography and goals more as the film goes along - the opening may get us turned around along with Gary, but the audience's fog is allowed to lift. From there the violence is properly ugly but exciting because the audience is invested in the outcome without necessarily rooting for a side.

It's a heck of a thriller, and I wish I'd been able to do a little more to help it get the audience it deserved.

Focus

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2015 in AMC Assembly Row #11 (first-run, DCP)

When Focus popped up on the schedule of movies getting an Imax release, I wasn't sure why; it didn't exactly look like the grand spectacle that usually rates such screens, and Will Smith hasn't been the draw that makes theaters salivate at an automatic extra five bucks per ticket in a while. After seeing it at the end of its run, I still didn't get it; even as a movie that takes place in some photogenic locations, it's got very little "wow" to offer.

That's true of the story, a con game that manages to feel bogged down despite not having that many moving pieces - it's a love triangle where there's no strong indication of any sort of genuine affection and a scam where a bunch of suspicious folks count on everybody being much more trustworthy than makes sense. It's focused on race car engine minutiae that won't make for an exciting race. There's an entertaining final twist, mainly because one of the supporting actors, Gerald McRaney, has become a surprisingly effective force considering the bland TV material his career started with.

And speaking of guys who aren't what they were at the start of their careers, consider Will Smith. The only time in the last ten years when he was the sort of effortlessly charming that guy that made him a star was Men in Black 3 (and I'm probably in the minority there), and you can see him trying here, when he really needs to be able to seduce the audience as easily as the other characters, but... well, you can see him trying. Margot Robbie is certainly pretty enough and gives great aw-shucks as the newbie, but isn't much of anything when she's supposed to be more of a veteran.

It goes down fairly smooth, but it's bland. I hope that Smith & Robbie are a lot more fun in Suicide Squad.

Saving Mr. Wu

After writing up a review of Lost in Hong Kong last week, I noticed a few tweets saying that the lack of reporting on its box office was a sign of how the movie business and those reporting on it were being blinded by certain prejudices, and it took a little digging to find that its success in China was huge - $100M for a comedy in September, which is more or less unheard of anywhere, with success at that order of magnitude generally only being found by Hollywood pictures in America. One thing noted by many of those articles, though, was that it might not have a long run as the sole juggernaut at the top of the charts because of some things arriving the next week, like Saving Mr. Wu.

If the turnout in China mirrors that in Boston, then it's not a huge threat; the crowd was decent, but not the "holy crap, this is selling theaters out like a massive Hollywood hit" of the previous week. Still, it's starting to feel weird copying the reviews of these movies to a mailing list about independent film; they may fit that group's definition of small releases, but they're big mainstream hits in a country with three times America's population.

I initially mentioned a certain inside joke within the review, but wound up removing that because I wasn't entirely sure it was as clever as I thought it might be and because speculating might give something away, though I can still do it here while warning of...

SPOILERS!

At one point, Zhang Hua says that they originally thought they had kidnapped Andy Lau. Not only is Lau playing Mr. Wu, but I believe the Mr. Wu in question is playing the cop - in the subtitles, Wu's given name is scrupulously avoided, although another review I read points out that the actor abducted in 2004 was one Wu Ruofu, who is listed in the cast as one of the cops. Interesting that Wu didn't play himself, although in some ways I can't blame him - why put yourself through multiple takes of replicating the worst day of your life?

Or it could just be someone with a very similar name. If it is him, though, I wonder if that's something the Chinese audience might have found too cute, best appreciated when recognized after-the-fact. Heck of a resource for Lau to have on the same set if it is, though.

!SRELIOPS

All in all, pretty good, and it's always nice to see the thrillers and action/adventure movies start to make it over here as fast as the romantic comedies and youth dramas are.

Jie jiu wu xian sheng (Saving Mr.Wu)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2015 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)

It's often said, by those longing for a past golden age, that the movies were better decades ago when filmmakers had to deal with restrictions, whether imposed by the industry or communities - from pressure, the argument goes, diamonds are formed. There's some merit to this line of thinking, but watching it being applied in China can be a bit disheartening, as the Hong Kong filmmakers with a great legacy of gritty, uncompromising crime stories must deal with a government edict that Crime Does Not Pay to get access to that billion-person mainland audience. If Saving Mr. Wu weren't based upon actual events, it would probably be frustrating to watch, because it often seems to be built around dealing with a foregone conclusion as much as telling the story in the most exciting way possible.

Mr. Wu (Andy Lau), in this case, is an actor from Hong Kong in Beijing to sign a contract to appear in a new movie. He's exiting a club when a man flashing a badge tells him that his car was involved in a hit-and-run, and would he please come down to the station to clear it up? Things get a little rough, and it's soon clear that this guy is no cop. Some days later, this Zhang Hua (Wang Qianyuan) is in a police station, restrained as investigators Xing (Liu Ye) and Cao (Wu Ruofu) interrogate him. They note that Hua is watching the clock, meaning his confederates probably have orders to kill Wu and another hostage, Xiao Dou (Cai Lu), if he has not contacted them by a certain time.

There are a number of reasons why writer/director Ding Sheng (an up-and-comer known for some of Jackie Chan's more notable recent films) might decide to present his story in non-linear fashion; for one thing, it keeps both Wu and the detectives in the film as constant presences, rather than having Xing and Cao push him to the background later on. Hua's capture by the police being inevitable, just part of the rules of the genre as far as Chinese cinema is concerned, probably figures into it at some level, though - if the audience knows something is going to happen, do it quick, so that the audience can spend some time wondering how things got from A to B and hopefully having the suspense from both tracks add up when one finally catches up with the other. Ding does okay by that, although what gets said in the interrogation room does make the road to it a bit less exciting on occasion, though the uncertainty about how things are lining up does give the finale a bit more pop.

Of course, the Chinese audience more in tune with their entertainment business and the stories that go with it will get the benefit of one of the more impressively self-referential jokes a film like this can have, as Hua tells one of the cops that they thought they'd grabbed Andy Lau at first. Nobody should have any complaints about the job Andy Lau does with the part. In his hands, Wu is an approachable celebrity rather than the egotist he might be in other movies; he can talk about rich-person issues like doing business in both Hong Kong and China without seeming disconnected. Lau spends most of the movie balancing this guy's natural terror with a brain that's constantly working - he is an army veteran who works at making a good impression as an actor, after all, so he's going to try and use those qualities to try and find a way out of this situation - but does some of his best work as things come to a head, showing a ton of raw emotion without many words.

For as great and well-known as Lau is, Wang Qianyuan may be the actual star of the show, though, if only for being the guy who is a constant as the film jumps back and forth in time early on. Zhang Hua is a monster, likely as dangerous to his fellow crooks as he is to his victims, and Wang builds the guy up as utterly amoral without actually having to act that way in an overt fashion. His weathered face and ready response to whatever happens marks him as working-class but too independent to take orders from anyone else, and while there's a bit of a sneer to how he speaks with anybody who might consider themselves above him, it's free enough from mustache-twirling that the casual way he carries a grenade or tosses guns around gives a little jolt each time - he's smart and meticulous enough that the moments where clearly doesn't give a damn are shocking.

With those two anchoring a very capable cast, Ding builds a pretty capable crime story. Saving Mr. Wu is procedural as opposed to being built around its action scenes - although those are very nicely executed when the time comes - instead focusing on people picking up on details, maybe playing out how things may go in their heads, and how simple uncompromising process is generally the most effective, even if it's not best in certain ways. Though subject to mainland constraints, it still retains a bit of Hong Kong flavor - Ding makes neither the kidnappers nor the cops appear slick or glamorous - even Wu's circle seems to have more rough edges than movie stars and their retinue often do - although I do wonder if Ding has slipped a bit of subversive ideas in there: The completely immobilizing chair where Zhang Hua is chained for much of his interrogation is a memorable image, welded together in a way that seems both crude and standard, the sort of overkill usually used for the Hannibal Lecter types as opposed to something in every interview room. And, could this have happened at all if the police weren't expected to be bullying and violent?

It may be a mistake to read too much into it; this just may have been the way things happened, with Ding Sheng and company telling the story faithfully, and anything a viewer finds under the surface likely being something he or she brought to the film.rather than what Ding put there. Even if that is the case, Saving Mr. Wu has a very nice surface, and may even prove more suspenseful outside of China where the incident that inspired it is not so well-known.

(Formerly at EFC)

This Those Week In Tickets: 1 March 2015 - 14 March 2015

Today in plans I had before falling waaay behind: A fair-sized post or two reviewing the silent movies I caught locally before heading to San Francisco for even more.

But, on the other hand, look at those pages - as much as I love silents, there is something to be said on a pure bread-buttering basis about getting reviews up for (relatively) wide releases of current movies and making sure eFilmCritic looks reasonably relevant. And, boy, was there a lot of that during these weeks.

It started on the first of the month, with the fairly great Song of the Sea, which has only escaped being a birthday present for my nieces because I try to go for stuff with little-girl protagonists, and Saoirse is fairly second-fiddle in this one. If Tomm Moore could give his next movie a female lead, that would be great.

Monday was the first of three different recurring silent series that wound up converging on the same week, with the Coolidge's "Sounds of Slients" featuring Charlie Chaplin's "The Adventurer" as an appetizer for John Ford's Upstream. Both were pretty good; the latter wasn't typical Ford material, but that just highlights what a great director he was.

Tuesday, I gave in to how apparently nobody else on the site was going to review The Lazarus Effect, because others apparently have better instincts than I. Waste of a good cast and potentially decent material, but short, and I haven't yet ruled out sequels involving a demonic Little Hobo or The Ray Wise Corporation. Thursday, I caught the early screening of Chappie, and though I liked it more than most, it had problems. Unfortunately, it was also interrupted by a fire alarm.

I'm not sure whether 12 Golden Ducks was one of the Chinese/Hong Kong movies that sold out like crazy, although I remember it having a pretty good crowd. And that I felt like an idiot afterward for not realizing that Sandra Ng was playing the lead male role despite that only making sense with her being top-billed and there being no really noteworthy female role to justify it. Got another chance to screw that sort of thing up the next day, when I saw Argentina's pretty great Wild Tales and forgot which actress was a friend on a co-worker. Not sure whether Emily ever got around to seeing that, actually.

From there, I went up the Red Line to the Somerville Theatre, where the Alloy Orchestra was making their annual visit to accompany Son of the Sheik, coming back for more silents the next day when the Somerville and Jeff Rapsis presented a W.C. Fields Double Feture of Sallly of the Sawdust and Running Wild. It's a funny thing, the folks at the theater noted, that they sold the place out for Alloy but not their own silent series, despite how the 35mm prints they show look much better than the disc-based media Alloy often brings.

After that, a short break from seeing movies every night, although I did catch the final night of what I believe was a two-day bookking of Hard to Be a God at the Brattle. Less overtly science-fictional than I might have really liked, but I did like it, and was surprised at the crowd. I'd catch another recent Russian movie on Saturday, dragging myself out to West Newton for Leviathan because I took too long seeing it in closer spots.

In between, I caught the opening night of Cinderella, which is well worth recommending to the nieces on the one hand - adventure without a great deal of violence and depicting the title character's kindness as a special kind of bravery - although on the other, there is a lot of parental death (and I kind of suspect that someone should find a way to modernize this fairy tale that finds a way to deal with step-folks in a more sympathetic way). Then, after getting back from West Newton on Saturday, I caught Run All Night, which isn't really a terrible action movie but is definitely the wrong thing to plug guys like Liam Neeson and Ed Harris into.

Next up: I've got to do some catch-up before doing this bit of catch-up. Don't fall behind on stuff, folks.

"The Adventurer"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2015 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sounds of Silents, digital (?))

The nifty thing about things old enough to be in the public domain - it's easy and legal to find them online to refresh your memory when you forget what a 20-minute short you saw seven months ago was like (although the soundtrack on InternetArchive.com is not nearly as good as the one Donald Sosin & Joanna Seaton provided in person). The verdict: It's a good one.

Though described as a "Tramp" short, this last Mutual has Chaplin as a jailbird who, after escaping, winds up rescuing and winning the heart of an heiress (Edna Purviance), though gaining the enmity of her suitor (Eric Campbell). This, naturally, involves a lot of slapstick and a party disrupted in cheerfully disreputable manner. It's a trouble-making Chaplin rather than the down-on-his-luck tramp with pathos, and he proves quite adept at that, as you might expect from him being a comedy genius.

Upstream

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2015 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sounds of Silents, digital (?))

Upstream is the sort of film that reminds you that no all films thought lost were classics, but they can still be pretty good and just as intriguing for the picture they paint as their narrative. It centers on a boarding house populated by theater people, mostly has-beens and never-will-bes, including the least talented member of a famous acting family. Naturally, he's the one who gets the call to play Hamlet in London, though he owes what talent he has to his housemates and forgets them when he's gone.

This is an unabashedly theatrical movie; though silent film was carving out an identity separate from the stage, Ford makes sure that these theatrical and vaudeville performers are big off the screen as well, and while it's a style that modern audiences may have some trouble with, it does give their personalities some pop, a little extra dignity or foolishness as the case may be. I don't believe it's a cast filled with stars (future or faded), but it is full of fine work.

The biggest issue, in some ways, is the size of the film. It clocks in at about sixty minutes, which is fine considering how thin the story is in most spots but doesn't really give Brashingham's return to the house the room it needs, either for enough time to pass that things have changed or for a potential change of heart in the last act. Thirty years later (with twice the running time), Ford would nail something like that with The Searchers, but though he'd been around Hollywood for over ten years at this point, it would take the talkies and a little breathing room for him to really hit his stride.

The Son of the Sheik

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Alloy Orchestra, digital)

Famous in large part because star Rudolph Valentino died young before the release of this sequel to the movie which solidified him as one of the first matinee idols (and started a string of him starring as "exotic" romantic heroes), The Son of the Sheik is still an entertaining movie, although one where one must make certain allowances for early-twentieth-century exoticism, where a fascination with a foreign culture is paired with a drastic oversimplification of it.

That still survives today, though less for Middle-Eastern cultures, as does the occasional romance-novel plot of a woman falling in love with a man who, let's be frank, rapes her on their first meeting. Obviously, it's meant to come across as Ahmed just being too masculine to resist, but there's also a weird "making her know her place" vibe to it, and ugh. It's a tribute to how Valentino and Vilma Banky, playing a dance-hall girl who is also the daughter of the French bandit robbing the sheik's people, have excellent chemistry that the film works as a romantic adventure after that.

It really does, too - for all that the plot runs on melodramatic misunderstandings, director George Fitzmaurice and the various writers build something that moves nicely (especially with good musical accompaniment) and has a good deal of swashbuckling adventure. When Valentino and his original The Sheik co-star Agnes Ayres reprise their roles from the first film later, it might work better for those who aren't starting with the sequel, but the visual effects to give the audience twice the Valentino are pretty fair for 1927.

Sally of the Sawdust

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)

That W.C. Fields made a number of silent movies seems rather strange in retrospect; he's a guy known more for his vocal delivery than anything else. And yet, here he is working in a medium that requires something else entirely. Show business is weird sometimes.

It's still entertaining, though, especially as he plays a sort of secondary part to Carol Dempster, a young woman raised in the circus after her high-society mother eloped with one of the performers. A downturn in the business has much of her troupe scattering and the man who has looked after her since her parents died, "Professor" Eustance McGargle (Fields), bringing her "home", although maybe holding back some information about her origins while (a) seeing if her grandparents are respectable in more than position and (b) working the local fair and maybe cooking up a scam.

D.W. Griffith directs, so while it's a fairly funny movie that has a healthy dollop of romance - of course Judge Foster's neighbor has a handsome son of about the right age! - there's no denying that he's most comfortable with melodrama, so while Fields certainly amuses as McGargle, the film often seems more committed when focusing on sorrow or injustice; that's Griffith's wheelhouse. Still, it's not going to be entirely dour with Dempster's Sally at the center; even if she does often wind up being one of those characters whom things wind up happening around rather than one whose decisions drive the action, despite her not actually being passive. Fields is well-used too; even through captions and body language, his faux-sophisticated bluster is a good match for a circus barker without making one doubt his genuine affection for Sally.

Griffith and Fields aren't a natural match, but the result isn't bad at all - that it's mostly forgotten isn't surprising, but it has its modest charms.

Running Wild

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)

Running Wild runs just over an hour, and you could probably pull what amounts to one reel out of it - writer/director Gregory La Cava has what amounts to one basic type of joke here, and spends enough time setting it up that the first half of the film becomes a bit wearing. Fortunately that joke - W.C. Fields's Elmer Finch - declaring "I'm a lion!" and recklessly attacking every situation after having previously being established as meek and bullied - is a good one.

Fields, after all, would later be known on film (and was probably already known on stage) for his ability to milk a line, or play up an exaggerated persona, and that's what he does in the movie's back end: Even if you can't hear his actual voice, the way he turns to the camera and declares his leonine state with gusto suggests it, and being under hypnosis gives him free reign to exaggerate rather than try and act natural. He's a comedian who is free to just be that, even if other actors might go with something more naturalistic.

That it takes a fair amount of set-up for La Cava to get him to the point where he can do his thing is a bit frustrating, but also probably natural; he's got to establish norms in a fair amount of situations so that they can later be upended and make sure that the loser form of Elmer sticks in the mind. It could probably be done a bit more elegantly, but at least the second half is funny to the point where a slow start isn't resented.