Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival Days #10-11: The Thon!

And so, the long road back to getting this blog current begins by looking back to February, and something just a bit under 24 hours worth of science fiction films with an unusually late start time after all the blizzard activity. Remember that? Boy it sucked!

I'll be better prepared to deal with it next year, if only because I'll be living I now live a block away from the Somerville and am able to use my own bathroom if I so choose, and not looking at a 45-minute walk should the state shut down public transit again. Which, if I recall correctly, was the case on Sunday, although by then the snow had mostly stopped coming down and folks were shoveling out. It wasn't actually terrible to sleep in on that day and then walk to Davis Square in the middle of the street because people were staying off the roads. I gather I was the exception, though, because it was a relatively sparse crowd, especially in terms of the old-timers. Which is a shame, because they're the ones with the strong emotional attachment to the event, whereas I'd mostly be grumbling about being out fifty bucks if I couldn't make it.

That's kind of why I've really had little trouble pushing this set of reviews out for months until it can't be much more than a set of quick hits; there just isn't that much for me to say about it anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like going every year, because it's seeing a lot of films from my favorite genre in a relatively short period of time, but it's not a time when I see friends whose paths I don't otherwise cross, I'm not likely to discover something new and exciting there, and even the rituals I like (and, guys, you have some stupid traditions) have become sort of old hat - the sort of thing where whoever is up on stage is asking for a reaction rather than provoking one. Now that I've done the running diaries and been there enough that there are no surprises left, there's just not much to say that I haven't said at some point in the past decade and a half.

That's no knock on those for whom this is one of the biggest film events on the calendar; a lot of the examples I might use for events that excite me a lot more involve traveling at least to New York (or Montréal, or Austin, or San Francisco...), and there aren't a lot of us who are going to do that for movies. Also, I started going at 26 or 27; it might have gotten a nostalgia lock-in had I moved to Boston earlier. It's no Fantasia for me, but I can see how it might be someone else's big deal.

Snowpiercer

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

If nothing else, Snowpiercer yielded the best tweet of the festival:

Snowpiercer is a damn lie. A train that runs in the snow? I can't suspend my disbelief that much. #sf40

— steve spezzano (@spezz) February 15, 2015

Four Nine months later, it's still making me chuckle.

The film itself remains pretty great as well, one of my favorites of 2013, a fantasy that is more continually inventive than almost all others sharing its grimy, dystopian aesthetic. I read complaints on the message board afterward about how it threw away good characters, but I tend to see that more as director Bong Joon-ho and the cast got the audience to care more about short-timers and cannon fodder than many do. It's a pretty terrific movie that, despite being in English, was probably both too Korean and too French to be a massive hit, but I wish it had been given more of a chance in America.

Full review on eFilmCritic, post about seeing it in France here

2001: A Space Odyssey

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 70mm)

I don't know if the Somerville Theatre will be getting this same print back in September when they show it again, but I'm going to be one heck of a lot closer to the front row than the balcony when I see it then. I've been fortunate enough to see this movie on film a number of times, and it has yet to be less than thoroughly engrossing. This time around, a good part of that was related to the previous night's presentation by Douglas Trumbull (who also did a brief Q&A after the feature), admiring how the film's effects work really holds up.

As truly great as 2001 is from a technical perspective, that's not why I find myself l liking it more every time I see it. Stanley Kubrick captures the highly practical, mission-focused nature of space exploration, but omits a great deal of the curiosity and passion that drives it, and while that leaves much of the film dry and procedural, it also means that the ultimate confrontation with the unknown is neither a triumph or a warning, but a reminder that this sort of encounter is beyond human understanding. It's Kubrick and Clarke looking at the mysteries of the universe and refusing to reduce them to a comprehensible scale.

It's kind of an interesting choice, given that directed evolution and the attempts by junior species to match their progenitors is a major part if the movie: While David Bowman is seeking the ancient astronauts who created and placed the monoliths, he is reliant on HAL, who is still rather akin to the proto-humans at the start off the film - capable of a great many things, but still needing shepherding (even if that takes the form of a hard reset). None of these steps are completely analogous, at least from our limited human perspective, and it's taken me a few viewings to start to grasp 2001 beyond the exceptionally executed hard science fiction which makes the finale not seem like hippie psychedelia with more apparent than actual depth.

I still kind of think that, admittedly, although I also suspect that might not be a bad way to approximate getting to a place that the human mind can only partially comprehend.

What I thought on seeing it in 2008, at SF/33

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

Some year, I'm going to see this on 35mm with live accompaniment and really have the time to write about it properly. This does not seem to be that occasion.

Then again, that may be saving me from writing something truly embarrassing. As with 2001, this is a movie that clearly benefits from being seen under the best circumstances with time for reflection, which the marathon doesn't exactly provide. And, who knows, maybe by the time I can write about it, I'll be in a spot where I genuinely like the last act, rather than worrying that is excusing the earlier inconsistencies in the crudest way possible.

The last time I saw this, a year and a half ago.

Fantasticherie di un passeggiatore solitario

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, digital)

This was the film scheduled to play on "sorry, we forgot the movie, and don't be so negative!" Tuesday, and it probably would have been a better fit there than the main marathon. The filmmakers' ambitions seem just a bit higher than what they can actually accomplish, which can be kind of rough for an audience that has just sat through the films that were masterful to accept. Writer/director Paolo Gaudio seems to have ideas about saying big things and creating a narrative that spans multiple time periods, but doesn't quite have the innate or learned skill to knit them together so that the trio feel like a unit.

Still, "not as good as the previous three movies" is a tough standard to hold any film by a fairly young director to, and I suspect that given a more fitting venue and slot, Fantasticherie would create a fairly decent impression. Gaudio and his crew make fairly good staging decisions within a limited budget, for instance, and the mythology being built up is just interesting enough to keep the audience curious. There is some nice work by the cast, though often more among the secondary characters than the leads.

I suspect that the audience probably would have responded better to Boy 7 in this slot, as may have been the original plan (but who really knows what was up with that mess). It's the sort of movie where my good feelings toward it are less an impulse to praise than to encourage - keep working at this and you'll eventually make a good movie! - but it is better than most movies in that category, even if it's hard to tell next to the classics.

Them!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

I think we passed midnight at some point during Them!, and I'm not sure that's entirely appropriate; it's more a matinee than late-night movie. I wonder if it might have played at around 2pm were the marathon on its usual schedule, and what the reaction might have been.

Them! is an interesting case in terms of how this sort of 1950s B-movie is perceived. It is, when you look at it, pretty goofy: It's got a an exclamation point in the title, and giant man-eating ants are a pretty ridiculous monster even if you've never heard of the square-cube law. That probably would have gotten it sneered at back in 1954, but later generations could look at its cast of characters - cops, scientists, and soldiers - and treat it as just another one of the dozens of similar, mockable movies that studios and independent producers made during the period, and maybe even assume that is among the worst, because giant ants.

But here's the thing: This movie was able to become well-known and emblematic of its era in part because it's executed better than most of its contemporaries. Allegedly-smart people doing stupid things is kept to minimum, and the writers seldom take their eyes off the prize for a silly and conventional subplot. The visual effects absolutely look sixty years old, but they seldom seem sloppy, with corners cut because the audience for this sort of movie isn't worthy of respect. That extends to director Gordon Douglas, who could stage fine action scenes and had no problem with going for genuine scares, doing a pretty fair job of attaining them.

In short, Them! is good enough to get booked, shown on TV, and remembered years later, good enough to be the one people remember when looking back. It will often get associated with the more typically poor work done at the same time, but deserves a bit better.

Moonraker

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

Moonraker, on the other hand, is roughly as bad as its reputation, close to the nadir of the James Bond franchise during the Roger Moore years: Making a stab toward pop-culture topicality with its Space Shuttle-centered plot, bringing back a one-off character from the previous film and realizing the same shtick doesn't usually work twice, and crossing the line between grandiosity and self-parody without being nearly funny enough to make it work.

Its worst sin, though, is probably being boring. The scenes of Moore blithely and blandly walking around and discovering the (uninteresting) villain's plot are even more leaden than usual, the ogling beautiful women feels more like just a thing these films are expected to do than something genuinely lascivious (where Bond being a bit of a creep is a sort of forbidden pleasure), and the finale... I just feel sorry for it and everyone involved. It's the Bond franchise trying to do Star Wars, but without the speed and energy that Lucas and his crew brought. I'm not sure how much James Bond was thought of as a gold standard in action/adventure versus something commercially successful, but it really should have been trying to top what was being done around it, rather than coming off as a pale imitation.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

I may have wound up nodding off at some point during this one - it was getting to be that time of night - because I honestly don't remember how Klaatu wound up at the boarding house befriending Helen. I suspect that may be for the best - I can't think of a way that leaving one's spaceship and insanely powerful robot unattended in the middle of Washington wouldn't come across as silly - but it's necessary in order to see Klaatu as human, or his planet's equivalent, rather than as just a patrician messenger.

That's something the movie needs desperately, because otherwise it seems to be either struggling with its own message or so keenly committed to it that it cannot step outside for a moment to really make the most important observation plain. Sure, the story is well-known - alien comes to Earth and warns that his people will sterilize the planet should we not disarm, and it's very anti-war and the metaphor that the Cold War will lead to the end of the world is right there - but the part that is often overlooked is that he does this with a threat of violence; in the 1950s, we recognized the danger we faced but could not think of any alternatives; even peaceful, advanced cultures could only function at the point of a sword. It seems Klaatu backs down just because he realizes that all of humanity does not to deserve to be destroyed, especially pretty single mothers and their curious sons, rather than recognizing that the whole system is crazy. Or maybe I'm missing what everyone else can see instinctively.

Still, that high-minded material which hints at thematic richness as well as a good moral for the end of the story is relatively rare for the genre on film, and having it married to the skillful execution that this movie features is rare. Part of that comes from Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal being more than a hair or two better in the main roles than you might expect from something that looks like a well-intentioned B-movie, but a large part is on director Robert Wise, a steady-handed workhorse who didn't necessarily put a stamp on his movies but was so good at everything that he rarely made one that wasn't worth watching, and occasionally ones that were great.

Big Trouble in Little China

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, DCP)

It was more early than late when this one started, so you can understand the crowd being a little more reserved, not even considering those who were grumbling about it having no place at a science fiction marathon. I have to admit, though, that I spent a lot of time wondering why the people in the crowd most prone to quote along weren't doing so. Didn't they have this whole thing memorized?

Apparently not; this is a highly-specialized genre audience. Whether they were into it or not, though, this is still a tremendously entertaining action/adventure, with director John Carpenter and the writers basically dropping a couple of Americans into the middle of a crazy Hong Kong-style fantasy and Kurt Russell thankfully realizing that he's playing a goofball who doesn't really belong and happily being the butt of every joke. Jack Burton would be an easy character to dislike under certain circumstances, but Russell really hits the spot where he can be skeptical and obtuse but still a likable lug. It may overshadow a bit how he is basically the sidekick to Dennis Dun's actual hero, but that's part of the fun. I do kind of wish we saw more of Dun in other movies later on, although some of the other Chinese-American character actors (James Hong, Victor Wong) did become more familiar.

I've always liked this movie, ever since first seeing promos for when it played on Fox, but I liked it even more this time, having seen a few more of the flat-out crazy Hong Kong flicks it resembles versus straight martial-arts action. Carpenter and the gang really seemed to get it here, so that even if it wasn't the audience's favorite genre, there's still no excuse for not saying "son of a bitch must pay" along with Jack Burton at the appropriate time.

The Iron Giant

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

This is still pretty fantastic, and in some ways the narrative that has built up around it has done the rare service of making sure that is reputation is neither over-inflated nor diminished: Its dedicated fanbase never really exploded in later years, certainly not to the point where one could misremember the film as a hit, and while director Brad Bird has made a number of films since, this was his only cel-animated feature, so it doesn't blur into a body of work. The Iron Giant is just its own still-wonderful thing.

And it really is still great. It was a singular movie for its time, as studios which had started feature animation divisions to try and replicate Disney's early-1990s success were shutting them down upon realizing a reputation and infrastructure built over decades would take time to equal, an environment that doesn't seem likely to spawn a movie that means something to its makers. Instead, this thing's heart is all over the screen, whether in terms of being nostalgic for old monster movies or boyhood itself, and the discovery that a person can be something other than what is expected of him, even if it's hard for fifty-foot alien robots.

It's getting received one of those theatrical single-night bookings this year that well-remembered movies occasionally get, with extra footage being advertised. That made me sort of curious, although not quite enough to see it again. Besides, it's awfully close to perfect as it is; how likely is it that new scenes will make it better?

This Island Earth

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

I recall there being some talk, when Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie came out, that This Island Earth either didn't deserve to be the subject of the characters' mockery because it was too good or was at least something that would look good on the big screen rather than being too rough to look at for that long. I must admit to leaning far more toward the latter point of view myself. It's got better production values than many of its brethren, but in terms of being a quality movie, it's no Them!.

This is mostly because it somehow manages to be both boring and nonsensical. What seems like a really unconscionable time is spent on getting the characters to the point where they finally realize that the secret project they're working on its sort of fishy, perhaps because they are so bland individually and as a group that they don't have any life before the film to compare it to. Then things turn, but before the audience has any time to really get into exploring the crazy new world the kidnapped Earth scientists find themselves in, they're escaping and turning around. It feels like 75% stalling, 10% good stuff, 15% an escape that really highlights the issue of why these guys with a faster-than-light spaceship need human scientists. Given that they're almost all giant brain, my only conclusion is that their various cognitive centers have grown too fast apart to be any good for thinking.

It does look pretty good for its period, there's not much denying that - even the special effects where you can see the strings at least display creativity and enthusiasm. There just isn't much time when the guys writing, shooting, and acting out seem nearly as invested in making something exciting to watch as the ones building it.

Edge of Tomorrow

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (SF/40, 35mm)

There is not much about this film that isn't a lot of fun. Tom Cruise, making use of both the parts of his screen persons that make one want to cheer and those that make one want to punch him in the face? Excellent. Emily Blunt being both great at action and the film's heart? Yep. Fun sidekicks and supporting ensemble? Got it. A script that both comes across as a fun, videogame-derived gimmick but still has emotional stakes and authenticity? Believe it or not. Well-done action, too.

Maybe the only weakness, if it has any, are the fairly generic aliens; they're busy and have the over-articulation you sometimes see from CGI beasties and never really feel like an intelligent race (a common issue with alien-invasion movies that want to use the aliens as a sort of background element). Given what a fun action/sci-fi movie it is otherwise, that's acceptable.

What I said last summer.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 November 2015 - 12 November 2015

I got to see a preview for one of the things I most anticipate this week, and I held off on another so I could see it in a different theater. Good week coming up.

• The expansion I was waiting on was having Spotlight open at The Coolidge Corner Theatre. It, you may recall from last week, is the film about a team of Boston Globe reporters looking into the long-running scandal of the Catholic Church covering up child molestation by local priests. It's also playing at Kendall Square, the Embassy, Boston Common (where it opened last week), and the SuperLux. That's mostly on the main screen; the Coolidge also re-opens their GoldScreen (apparently with greater capacity), which picks up Jafar Panahi's Taxi.
  
  Aside from that, their After Midnite group has such a busy weekend that they spill out of Brookline and into earlier hours. Since it's a Friday the 13th, they will be showing two of those movies - the original Friday the 13th & Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI - and for a special treat, they'll be doing it at the Rocky Woods Reservation in Medfield at 8:30pm on Friday (Saturday in the case of rain). Later on, they'll also be continuing their Lloyd Kaufman series with a 35mm print of Class of Nuke 'Em High while also presenting Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie, both on Friday and Saturday at 11:59pm (the latter will also show at Kendall Square on Monday evening). And, on top of that, Saturday night also includes Thousands of Miles Between Us, a feature-length concert film from the band Converge, members of which will be there beforehand.
  
  On top of all that, they'll have a special "Stage & Screen" presentation of Down By Law on 35mm as a tie-in to the Huntington Theater Company's production of A Confederacy of Dunces. There's also Open Screen on Wednesday (not, as in previous months, Tuesday), and a "Rewind!" screening of Rushmore on Thursday.
• In addition to Spotlight, Kendall Square also has Brooklyn on two screens (as does Boston Common); it's a pretty darn great story of a young Irish woman arriving in New York in the early 1950s with an excellent performance by Saoirse Ronan. They also give two screens to By the Sea, the new film written and directed by Angelina Jolie in which she and Brad Pitt play a husband and wife whose marriage is unraveling on vacation in the South of France.
  
  There's also a one-week booking (with a half-slate of shows per day) of The Pearl Button, another from Patricio Guzmán (who did the pretty nifty Nostalgia for the Light) about Chile's turbulent history, this one focusing on how water supplies play into it. In addition to that, there are single shows of Fantasia on Sunday morning and Wednesday night.
• Speaking of Chile, the multiplexes open The 99, a dramatization of the 2010 rescue of a group of Chilean miners trapped underground after a cave-in, with Antonio Banderas as one of the miners. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere. A similar group of theaters - the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere - has Love the Coopers, one of those ensemble holiday comedies with a great cast, although that title reads weirdly like a command.
  
  Boston Common and Revere also open My All-American, a college football underdog story. Boston Common also opened Last Woman Standing, a cute Chinese romance starring the gorgeous Shu Qi and the pretty good-looking Eddie Peng, on Wednesday. Their next Chinese opening is on Wednesday the 18th, A Journey Through Time with Anthony, a romance with what looks like plenty of flights of fancy. A lot of theaters will have a The Hunger Games: Mockingjay double feature on Wednesday, prior to the regular opening night on Thursday.
• Very fun weekend coming up at The Harvard Film Archive with two guests of note. Friday and Saturday, the visiting filmmaker is Guy Maddin, presenting My Winnipeg (on 35mm with two recent shorts) on Friday night and his new film, The Forbidden Room on Saturday, also with two shorts. After the Five O'Clock Shadow presentation of Angel Face on Sunday, they welcome Japanese cult film director Nobuhiko Obayashi with his 1986 film Bound for the Fields, the Mountain, and the Seacoast (along with short "Complexe") on 16mm, and his infamous House ("Hausu") on Monday (on 35mm, along with another short on 16mm), the latter also part of "Furious and Furiouser".
• The Brattle Theatre's continues their Reel Music Film Festival with a restored A Poem Is a Naked Person on Friday and Saturday, a number of music video programs, including an all-35mm program on Sunday. There's also a Neil Young double feature Sunday night with oddity Human Highway and a 35mm print of Rust Never Sleeps.
  
  Monday is DocYard night, with Toto and His Sisters, which follows three kids whose absent parents leave them at the mercy of their drug-dealing uncles. ; director Alexander Nanau will Skype in for a Q&A afterward. No word on Tuesday's Trash Night screening, but there will be plenty of athletes on-hand for a presentation of Fade to Winter, with giveaways as well. Thursday night is "Grrl Haus 2", a program of short films directed by women.
• The Somerville Theatre also does the ski/snowboarding-movie thing with Warren Miller's Chasing Shadows, playing Wednesday and Thursday.
• The Brattle has two films from the Boston Jewish Film Festival on Saturday night, and it also has screenings at the MFA (Saturday & Sunday), the ICA (Saturday), West Newton (Sunday), and Newbridge on the Charles (Sunday). In interesting scheduling, Once In a Lifetime will play at the MFA Sunday, and then simultaneously at Beverly's Cabot Performance Art Center and AMC Framingham (on two screens) on Monday. How to Win Enemies closes things out at the Regent Theatre on Monday.
• The Museum of Fine Arts also has The Boston Turkish Festival Documentary & Short Compeition programs on Friday and Saturday, and two documentaries on Wednesday: Another screening of Welcome to Leith in the afternoon and Frederick Wiseman's latest jumbo-sized effort, In Jackson Heights, in the evening.
• Bright Lights has three music-oriented programs this week as part of their 4th annual Silversonic Festival - this year's "Sound and Vision" package from the Boston Underground Film Festival on Tuesday, a program from Emerson alum "Jackson Adams" on Wednesday, and a student showcase on Thursday.
• The UMass Boston Film Series presents Tocando la Luz (Touch the Light), with director Jennifer Redfearn on-hand for the free screening of her documentary about three blind women in Havana.
• The Regent Theatre, in addition to closing out the BJFF, will have Moto 7 The Movie, which is an hour or two of crazy motorcycle stunts.

I figure on spending a ton of time at the HFA, checking out both The Forbidden Room and both Nobuhiko Obayashi films, presuming I can get tickets (this is one of those times I wish I'd purchased/renewed membership a month or two ago). On top of that, I figure on The 33 and Spotlight, while also catching up on Spotlight and Room, maybe also going for Ghost in the Shell.

The Last Woman Standing

There's an obvious joke to be made about how China Lion has been pushing The Last Women Standing on social media as a "Singles Day" release despite the fact that nearly every image used to advertise it shows star Shu Qi in a wedding dress, but it turns out that for a romantic comedy/drama, it actually has no trouble with letting Shu Qi's Sheng Ruxi be happily single while mostly avoiding portraying a lack of romance as a void in her life. In a lot of ways, that was a lot more than I could have hoped for.

On the other hand, "Singles Day" is apparently less an actual celebration in China than a canny retail promotion designed to capture the spending money of people who, not being in a relationship, are not buying roses, chocolates, jewelry, etc., by getting them to buy stuff for themselves, with it being at the other end of the year on a date filled with ones (11/11) making it seem amusing rather than desperate. It's also apparently huge, as in almost seven billion dollars spent in China yesterday, comparable to the "Black Friday" binges that are often held out as the worst examples of American consumerism.

Anyway, the thing I write about in the review about having "Shu Qi is beautiful" running through my head on a loop is absolutely true, and actually surprised me a bit. I've liked her in a lot of stuff, and remember when Millennium Mambo played at the Brattle as part of their Eye Opener series that her beauty was described as one of the directors' primary inspirations, but this was the first time she really made enough of an impression on me both in terms of looking good and having the right personality on screen to give it a real boost.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to find out what she's got streaming on Amazon right now...

Sheng Zhe Wei Wang (The Last Woman Standing)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 November 2015 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)

I am tempted, half as a joke and half dead serious, to write this review as six paragraphs of "Shu Qi is extremely pretty", maybe with a different adjective or adverb swapped in every once in a while for variety. I do not do so less because it sells the film short than it does the actress. She is, after all, more than just a pretty face, but it's getting to spend an hour and a half watching her that lifts this particular film from a barely-outlined romantic drama to a fairly pleasant experience.

She plays Sheng Ruxi, a thirty-year-old Shanghai businesswoman who is kind of sick of hearing her mother (Pan Hong) make comments about her not being married, to the extent of walking out of a Valentine's Day wedding reception to go back to the office, where her boss Wang Lan (Hao Lei) is making plans for her own wedding. Ruxi's mother's latest attempt to fix her up is Dr. Bai (Xing Jiadong), a nice but bland-seeming guy in his mid-forties. More interesting: Ma Sai (Eddie Peng Yuyan), the new guy at the office who is paired off with her a lot, though he is five years younger.

There's a refreshing lack of rationalization to why a woman with as much going for her as Ruxi - no makeover is necessary to show she's very attractive, she's not hung up on some former boyfriend, she's not work-obsessed or mean or weird or otherwise off-putting. No, she's just not out actively seeking romance or marriage, and while that's obviously an attitude that her mother can barely understand, it's one that the film commits to in a way that would seem anathema to most romances: Falling in love is just one potential part of Ruxi's life, and it will be great when it happens, but it is not going to be the driving priority behind her decisions until it deserves to be.

Full review on EFC.

Brooklyn

I kind of knew I was going to like this one from the first preview I saw, because it drops an actress I really l like inside a sort of film I often go for. So let's take them in that order.

First, Saoirse Ronan, who has seldom been less than great - I even liked her in that awful teen assassins movie she did with Alexis Bledel - but has seldom had as great a showcase as this. Sure, there's Atonement, but great kid performances should often be viewed with suspicion; how often are they the result of perfect casting and coaching versus really showing what the child can do when she becomes more active in shaping the performance. Consider Haley Joel Osment's and Dakota Fanning's late-teen and adult careers; there's still clearly talent there, but it's proving a bumpy transition.

Also, with as many fine performances as Ronan had turned in, I still find myself explaining to people why I'm excited when I see her name attached to a movie. Surprisingly few people have seen Hanna considering what a nifty little coming-of-age action movie it is. I think there's been a concerted effort to forget The Lovely Bones happened between Peter Jackson's visits to Middle-Earth, and I can't really blame people for that; it just did not adapt well to film well at all, despite Ronan's best efforts. Her various attempts at young adult film franchises all fizzled, whether unfairly (City of Ember was fun!), righteously (The Host was not her fault), or obscurely (How I Live Now pretty much missed theaters entirely on the way to VOD). Maybe that's for the best, as she didn't wind up like Shailene Woodley and swallowed by something that seems terrible for years on end.

If this does wind up being her breakout role, I like that she's doing it in a movie like this. I love immigration stories, even if I wish that the ones that play as hopeful as this one does weren't always about people who aren't just white, but pale, because I don't think a lot of the people ranting about immigration now tend to consider that the Irish were once given a similar level of crap to that which Mexicans receive today.

I do love the genre, though; it appeals to my love of America as a place where people can come and reach their potential (or at least my desire to believe in such) even while being honest about how there are a bunch of people who will make their lives difficult for foolish "I (that is, my ancestors) got here first and disdain outsiders" reasons. Seeing people triumph over that may be more of a fantasy than I'd like to admit, but it resonates with me. I'm apparently a lot more fond of Far and Away than others.

Indeed, my first impulse in terms of recommending this has been to say it's the best movie of its type since In America, reminding people if necessary that I liked In America a lot. It feels a bit dishonest to say so, because the two stories don't really have that much in common besides focusing on Irish arrivals in New York, but so what? I really like both movies, and less honest connections are made every day.

Brooklyn

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 November 2015 in the Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (preview, DCP)

Homesickness can be a tricky thing to put on screen. It's easy enough to have someone say that's how she feels, or make the other place look beautiful before quickly cutting back, but those techniques can be superficial, and filmmakers often want the audience invested enough in their settings to worry about undercutting them. Having the feeling of homesickness be the engine that drives Brooklyn is therefore perilous, but it also means that by nailing it, the filmmakers have made a terrific little movie.

The homesick immigrant in this case is Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), a bright Irish girl in her early twenties who nevertheless cannot find more than a couple hours of work per week in her home town. Fortunately, her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) and mother Mary (Jane Brennan) are able to make arrangements with a priest in Brooklyn, and Father Flood (Jim Broadbent) has further arrangements made - a visa, a job, a room in the boarding house run by Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters). Despite there being a sizable Irish community there, she still misses home, even after meeting nice Italian-American plumber Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen). But when tragedy leads her back to Ireland, she finds herself tempted to stay, especially given the attention of handsome Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson).

Eilis is the sort of part where people often discover a young actress, but in this instance it might be more a case of one finally getting her due after a long string of fine performances stretching back to her childhood. Here, she does an excellent job of making Eilis (pronounced "Aylish") come across as the demure and accommodating person in most groups while still being tart enough that, when Tony says he likes Irish girls, it's clear that she's got the sort of personality he's talking about along with the red hair. Ronan does an excellent job of showing Eilis getting by with a sort of vague dissatisfaction that neither she nor the audience fully realizes until she's given the opportunity to actually be smart or feel appreciated, and while there's beauty in how she can burst with joy and sadness, a lot of her best work comes during Eilis's return to Ireland in the second half, when the more mature and independent young woman is clearly well-aware of how she's being treated differently but still capable of being seduced by it anyway.

Full review on EFC.

These Weeks In Tickets: 25 October 2015 - 7 November 2015

Another busy couple of weeks where everything seemed to demand a full review. Good news, though - I finally got my tablet back and so I can now work on such things without lugging my laptop on the bus or other places.

As I mentioned at the time, The Last Witch Hunter was kind of a backup plan; I was planning to make it to Revere to check out Ladrones, but between my watch running slow and the buses actually running on time, I seem to have just missed it. Assembly Row wasn't much of a detour for something that turns out not to really be actively bad but not really good, either.

I think it was pretty direct from there to the Brattle, where the Independent Film Festival Boston folks started their five day "Fall Focus", which, coming pretty much exactly six months after the last one, could be called IFFBoston 2015½. (I promise, folks who have been reading this blog and my social media over the past month, that this is the last time I will use that joke unless they do another in 2016.) I went four of the five days, seeing Where to Invade Next, Entertainment, The Assassin, and Anomalisa. Pretty strong schedule.

I skipped Monday because I'd already seen that day's movie and wanted to check out Black Mass before the Somerville Theatre lost their 35mm print. This may make me the last person in the greater Boston area to see it, and I can't say I really loved it, but I'm not really a big gangster or Johnny Depp fan most of the time.

Once the Fall Focus was over, it was time to get into Halloween stuff. The night beforehand, I did a double feature at Boston Common with Freaks of Nature & Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, two indie-ish horror movies (in that they got moderate releases and don't have a lot of big stars, but they're released by Columbia & Paramount) that aren't great, although I at least kind of liked Freaks of Nature, even if I wish it had kept its original title ("The Kitchen Sink"). I do find it kind of weird that Scouts Guide got the bigger release despite Paramount planning to give it a quick VOD release and Freaks being much better.

Getting home after midnight meant sleeping and writing fast to get to the Somerville Theatre's Horror Marathon, a cool twelve hours of scary movies with West of Zanzibar, Dracula, The Monster That Challenged the World, Seconds, Aliens, and The Lost Boys. All 35mm, Jeff Rapsis on the organ for the first. Long day, but a lot of fun.

So I slept in on Sunday, but caught up to the weekend's Chinese release, The Witness, a thriller that I found myself enjoying a bunch more than expected. I couldn't get myself to another movie until Friday, when another Chinese remake of a Korean movie, Ex Files 2 (actually a remake of How to Use Guys with Secret Tips), which was okay, but not nearly as good as its source material.

Then, on Saturday, I did a 3D double feature that pretty much ran the gamut of what movies can be. First, The Peanuts Movie, a surprisingly charming translation of the classic strip into modern animated feature. Then Love, Gaspar Noé's extremely NC-17-rated menage a trois drama. I'll eventually wind up adding the former to that big Peanuts memorabilia collection and this will probably be the only time I watch Love, but it's neat to see someone doing something different with this technology.

Black Mass

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, 35mm)

Coming out of Black Mass, I thought that I just didn't like gangster movies, especially those based upon actual events; they just become events strung together, a list of violent deeds that don't necessarily add up to anything. And yet, I can't help but think back to how thrilling I found Battles without Honor or Humanity, and that's even more a list of bullet points. What's the difference?

Well, to start with, the latter drives to something as Shozo Hirono ultimately realizes that the organization he joined with ideals, while Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp) and company are mostly on a treadmill, doing more awful things but never creating the sense that he's gaining territory or power, even when the film specifically says that's what's going on. He doesn't sink morally, the webs between him and either his well-respected brother (Benedict Cumberbatch) or the FBI agent enabling him (Joel Edgerton) never grow more complicated. Stuff just happens until a new DA starts turning things around, then Bulger goes on the run, and then we don't even get into all the weird stories that floated when he was a fugitive.

It means that a decades-long pattern of violent crime that was scandalous on top of horrifying winds up becoming boring, especially since neither the screenwriters nor director Scott Cooper pares anything extraneous off, and they've got a real way of building up scenes like they're supposed to be horrifying (or cool, for those who find mob assassinations cool), but since the story is never really going anywhere, having it feel kind of pointless.

Great to look at in 35mm, though - I'll likely never see this in DCP to compare, but like Interstellar last year, it was a great reminder that film just looks better, even if a movie has been through DI and visual effects the way this has. I hope that this hanging around the Somerville for this long isn't just about it being a Boston thing but there being genuine interest in seeing things on film, because anything that gets more prints made and sent to Somerville (they mentioned being one out of roughly ten places to get 35mm) is a good thing.

Love (2015)

So on Saturday night, I pretty much watched The Peanuts Movie, took the Red Line up to Davis Square, and walked right into the theater showing Love. Since there was no glasses bin between the screen and the exit at Boston Common, I wound up using the same pair of glasses. In retrospect, that seems kind of inappropriate.

Very limited release on this one in the Boston area - just 10pm shows at the Somerville Theatre while the Boston Jewish Film Festival has the screen at 7, and just one mid-afternoon show a day in West Newton, that one in 2D. I was actually kind of surprised at that - I kind of thought this was along the lines of Farewell to Language, where you don't get it unless you play it in 3D. Odd that it plays Somerville instead of Kendall Square, but sometimes they're a little more adventurous.

I kind of wonder what the plus/minus for people seeing it because it's in 3D is. As much as I was kind of curious about seeing the new one from the guy who made Irreversible, I'd skipped Enter the Void because I'm not really that big on envelope-pushing stuff. But I dig 3D, even if I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who really likes movies who does sometimes. I especially love it when it shows up in something other than a big American action/animated movie, even if that sometimes means watching Goodbye to Language, which is what you might call boring if prone to understatement. Love does some nifty things with it, and I kind of hope other art-house filmmakers give it a try, even if it is a beast to shoot with.

Love (2015)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2015 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP/RealD)

It's almost a shame that Gaspar Noé apparently shot Love entirely in native 3D, because it might be fun to ask guys doing post-conversion work whether sex was a nice change of pace from the usual violence. That it was all shot this way, on the other hand, indicates that every action in this movie is done with purpose, which means that even when it's dragging a bit or shoving more in the audience's face than it might want, it's at least put together in an intriguing way.

It tells the story of Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American in Paris who came as a film student and is now raising a child with a lovely girl by name of Omi (Klara Kristin). Unfortunately, the true love of his life is probably Electra (Aomi Muyock), but she has been out of his life for some time - out of everyone's in fact, as her mother Nora has not heard from her in two months and is thus desperate enough to see if Murphy has been in contact with her.

There's not a whole lot of time spent on finding out what happened to Electra, or indeed in the film's present at all. Her disappearance mostly serves as a reason for Murphy to think back on the entire length of his tempestuous, intertwined relationships with her and Omi, and those familiar with Noé's work might find that framing work unnecessary, as his stepping back a bit further each time bears a certain amount of resemblance to Irreversible (he originally planned to make this film in the early 2000s with the cast he would use for Irreversible, but when they backed down from the unsimulated sex they changed plans and Noé filed Love away for later). It's a superficial similarity; both films move toward a happy beginning from a dark ending, but Love does so along a natural, well-marked path rather than the shocking context-shifting tragedy of its predecessor, and it's not nearly so straight a line back. Noé's goal here is less to surprise than examine, maybe unearthing how early the seeds for disaster were planted.

Full review on EFC.

The Peanuts Movie

This is the part of the blog post where, when reviewing a G-rated/animated movie meant for the whole family, I say that I really wish I'd had a niece or two with me so that I could see how it plays to the audience that it's meant for. But, in this case...



Kind of surprised that I don't have a Marcy of any sort. Anyway, I think I can be considered part of the target audience for this one, although I'm sure kids will enjoy it as well.

The Peanuts Movie

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2015 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP/RealD)

The first edition of the Peanuts comic strip appeared in late 1950, the last in early 2000, with creator Charles M. Schulz passing away at around the same time. While classic strips have continued to run in newspapers ever since, what's a newspaper to a kid born ...

Wait a minute, I just remembered that The Peanuts Movie actually has a "who reads newspapers?" joke. It's just done smoothly enough that, like the rest of the movie, it manages to come across as clever comedy for both kids and adults.

For those who don't know - I'm never certain how popular these characters are outside the United States and Canada - Peanuts is a comic strip following a group of kids in small-town America, with Charlie Brown, full of good intentions and sometimes well-earned self-doubt, at the center. His best friend Linus Van Pelt carries a security blanket around, and Linus's older sister Lucy is a loud-mouthed fussbudget seemingly intent on crushing Charlie Brown's self-esteem. He's got a younger sister himself, Sally, and a beagle, Snoopy, whose inner life is rich and full of fantasy. And now, a Little Red-Haired Girl has just moved in across the street, and Charlie Brown is smitten - but why would she even look at such a screw-up?

Meanwhile, in addition to helping his guy out, Snoopy and his little yellow bird friend Woodstock fantasize about being a World War I Flying Ace battling the Red Baron, and the filmmakers do something kind of neat with that: Though a staple of the strips practically from the time Schulz started portraying Snoopy as no ordinary dog, it's never had a proper origin, and while one isn't actually necessary, it's kind of a random thing for kids who don't know the characters. So the screenwriters (Schulz scions Bryan & Craig and Bryan's writing partner Cornelius Uliano) and director (Blue Sky Studio veteran Steve Martino) tie it into Charlie Brown's half of the story while also picking up on how Schulz created Snoopy's fantasy life as a way to show how dogs get by when their masters go off to school or work and leave them alone all day. There is a hint of loneliness and worry to it, just not an overwhelming one.

Full review at EFC.

Somerville Theatre Horror Marathon 2015: West of Zanzibar, Dracula (1931), The Monster That Challenged the World, Seconds, Aliens, and The Lost Boys

Since I had done the Freaks of Nature/Scouts Guide double feature the night before and then spent the wee hours getting a review of the first up, I was kind of fuzzy on the morning of Halloween, the sort of "I'm going to have to drag myself through the day" sensation that really does not bode well for a day of sitting in the dark watching movies. Our at least, it seems like it shouldn't, but it doesn't always work that way for me. Instead, if I can get through that initial lethargy, there's a chance I'll be good for the day, while days where I feel ready to go drop me hard.

Fortunately, I was in good shape for the first movie, West of Zanzibar, which was the one I really wanted to see. "Silent" is a bigger draw than "horror" for me, especially when it means fine lurid pulp that can serve as a legitimate guilty pleasure. After that, I could treat up satisfied that I had seen the thing I would have paid $15 for as part of the Sunday silents series, so another $15 for five more movies on 35mm was a pretty good deal.

Very nice prints, too. Had protectionist David Kornfeld gives a print report before events like this, and is seldom less than candid about anything, which meant that a couple of times during this introduction, theater manager Ian Judge was probably willing him not to tell the audience that one or two of the movies they had paid money for was crap, even if the print was nice.

Of course, Ian also mentioned wishing a few hundred more people had come - who knows if the theater would have done better screening Crimson Peak all day? - but I suspect this year was a tougher draw than usual. Even though you probably could do both this and the Coolidge Corner Theatre's twelve-hour marathon without missing much of each, that would be a stretch (I believe they were on separate weekends the last few years), the lineup was heavy on things that might be considered more sci-fi than horror by many, and noon to midnight on the 31st blocks out a lot of other activities.

I mean, heck, I was kind of surprised to see people running around Davis Square in costume when we took a longer between-films break to get some dinner at around 7pm, and Halloween was the excuse to do this thing, right? It's a weird disconnection. I didn't even bother to buy way more peanut butter cups than I could possibly give out because I knew I wouldn't be around during trick-our-trading hours.

Although, now that I think about it, the peanut butter pumpkins should be dirt-cheap while stores try to clear shelf space for peanut butter trees, so maybe I should hit the supermarket...

West of Zanzibar

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (horror marathon, 35mm)

I would normally start a review of a movie like this with "I don't believe in guilty pleasures, this is just entertaining", but this one lends itself more to "pulp fiction can sometimes reflect the less pleasant values of its time." The dirty little secret of movies like that, though, is that they can be nasty, melodramatic, and entertaining with an efficient ruthlessness that modern films would have to really work for.

Still, the owning act doesn't require any political incorrectness to blitz through a lot of setup. In almost no time, stage magician Phroso (Lon Chaney) has not only seen an adventurer by the name of Crane (Lionel Barrymore) steal his wife Anna (Jacqueline Gadsden) away and push Phroso himself off a ledge while crowing about how he's taking Anna to Africa, but he's been present, paralyzed from the waist down and reduced to begging in the streets, a year later when Asma returns with an infant daughter, expiring just in time for the former magician to see the leading evidence of Anna's adultery and vow revenge. It probably takes up a greater percentage of the film than it might in a contemporary thriller - about fifteen of the movie's sixty-five minutes - but it's admirably relentless in how it starts in a nice place but soon literally brings Phroso's life crashing down before giving it a good, hard twist.

Both as soon as that's done and eighteen years later, it's time for the really nasty stuff to start as a sleeker, meaner Phroso - now called "Dead-Legs" - tricks a primitive tribe of cannibals in the Congo into doing his bidding while blackmailing an alcoholic doctor (Warner Baxter) into looking after his health. While the Africans are stealing ivory from Crane's parties, Dead-Legs sends for Maizie (Mary Nolan), sweet and pure despite being raised in a hotel that is half brothel, so that the final stage of his revenge on them can be put into action.

Full review on EFC.

Dracula (1931)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (horror marathon, 35mm)

The classic, most-recognized film version of Dracula - and I think that, despite Hammer fans' enthusiasm, the 1931 version with Bela Lugosi as the Count is that - is one of a number of films (including several in this marathon) that I have no trouble watching, enjoying, and appreciating but fall short of genuinely loving. It's part and parcel of being first - Tod Browning's version has the right idea in so many places but still has room for refinement, and every fault is something that most viewers have seen refined.

The filmmakers get a heck of a lot right in their 75 minutes, though. The story is told with precision and clarity, from the economical script to the sets that exemplify what each location is for and what sort of atmosphere it's supposed to have. There are goofy bits like a bat that is obviously on strings and some very broadly-accented working-class characters, and some of the performances can get lumped in there unfairly. For all Lugosi's grand dramatics, they eventually work as sheer confidence, and Dwight Frye's unblinking, utterly insane Renfield is a scenery-chewing treasure.

As much as I don't love this the way I feel like I should, the only better version I've seen is the original Nosferatu, intentionally different enough to get a pass.

The Monster That Challenged the World

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (horror marathon, 35mm)

There's a tendency in 1950s monster movies toward trust in military and police authority, and while The Monster That Challenged the World is not exactly the most extreme case, it's one of the more anonymous. It's capable in most areas where these movies need to be, and the places where it stumbles are the ones where its best characters' charm can make up some ground. It's no classic, but deserves lighter mockery than many of ours genre and era.

In this film, the monster comes not from outer space but from under the water after an earthquake unseals a cave beneath California's Salton Sea. There's a Navy bar researching new parachute designs (among other things) nearby, and when both a paratrooper and the two-man retrieval team fail to check in, the base's chief investigator, John Twillinger (Tim Holt) goes looking. Finding bodies and a strange goop on the boat, he visits the lab, and the evidence suggests some sort of giant, semi-amphibious mollusk. Bad news, especially with it laying eggs and an underground river offering it a path to the canal system.

Fortunately, they are on a Navy research base, and between the sailors, scientists, and local constabulary, there are plenty of clean-shaven white men to get to the bottom of this. Okay, maybe broader representation would have made this movie about a prehistoric monster feel a bit less authentic in 1957, but it illustrates what kind of a bland cast of characters the film features. "Twill" is initially characterized as kind of impatient and implied to be more of a stickler than the previous officer to hold his position, but that doesn't really sick beyond Tim Holt giving him a crisp efficiency as the film goes on (not a complaint; even if this movie were inclined to have an official bottleneck character, Holt does a good guy who knows what he's doing). It's a film where the supporting cast is not actually interchangeable but can feel that way, with the exception of comic relief characters and people who just don't listen to the people in charge and this potentially screw things up.

Full review on EFC.

Seconds

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (horror marathon, 35mm)

I've seen Seconds once before, under similar circumstances - the sci-fi marathon, maybe even in the same theater - and had about the same reaction: It's a well-made film that must have seemed exceptionally strange when it first came out, but which seems a little less so after a few decades of science fiction where malleable identities are a big thing. It's very much a first go, where the basic idea the filmmakers want to get across is new enough is so relatively new that there's not a lot of time to flesh it out.

It's still a good movie, though. Screenwriter Lewis John Carlino and director John Frankenheimer work hard to build their shadow world in a way that makes it seem like it could plausibly exist alongside the actual 1966, but which also gives Frankenheimer the chance to spotlight angles that highlight the strangeness of the situation, albeit in a very clinical manner. They also come up with a few nifty images beyond the obvious, especially as Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) walks through a butcherie well before the procedures which make him into "Antiochus Wilson" (Rock Hudson), surrounded by animal corpses to be processed.

Rock Hudson is also pretty darn great in this. I may, sometimes, doubt the machinations that get Wilson to wherever he is at a given point, but Hudson's being invested in this role despite movie stars just not doing this sort of weird fantasy in 1966 is obvious. He gives the film a soul even if, by doing so, he's exposing how rickety its bones are, and that's impressive.

Aliens

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (horror marathon, 35mm)

What do Aliens and Terminator 2 have in common? Well, besides great female leads and writer/director James Cameron, they're both clear examples of sequels going bigger than their predecessors, and doing well in the execution, but also losing track of crucial elements that made the movies which originated their series so great.

For T2, it's the tight plotting and story that balances destiny and self-determination better than almost any other time-travel movie; for Aliens, it's a monster that not only had a genuinely alien biology and reproductive cycle, but was so dangerous that just one seemed unstoppable. Cameron reduces them to hive insects and gives humans the firepower to wipe them out with efficiency given a clear line of sight, at least until the boss-villain-sized Queen is brought in.

It's still a fair amount of fun, of course; Cameron knows how to grab an audience and hold it, and whatever we may decide we think later is not important at all while we're actually watching the movie. And while this is the movie that one might most easily say doesn't fit into a horror movie marathon, seeing it in this context makes the terraforming station feel like an enormous haunted house, even if filling it with Marines and a corporate weasel in addition to Ellen Ripley (still easy for the audience to connect to despite surviving the first encounter) and Newt does push that back a little.

The less charitable parts of this assessment didn't necessarily go through my head the first time I saw Aliens, although here at #5 or so, they're tough for me to miss. It's still never a bad watch.

The Lost Boys

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (horror marathon, 35mm)

Here's one I've somehow missed seeing until now, which is both kind of a bummer - I've probably specifically passed on what turns out to be a fun movie - but also cool, because the trail end of a six-movie marathon seems to be the ideal conditions for it. At that moment, I was in just about the perfect state of mind for something just precisely this straight-facedly goofy, especially since I didn't know that was what was coming.

After all, I don't think that's ever what had been played up about this movie; it was always advertised and given home video packaging featuring red-tinted photos of Jason patric, Kiefer Sutherland and other Brat Pack types in sunglasses as the vampires, and given that this is a Joel Schumacher film, that isn't far off the slick, glossy style to be found in the movie. And the "Lost Boys" parts of the movie deliver that, with a trashy-bit-cool vibe to the vampires' hideout in particular and the town of Santa Carla as a whole, a permanent seaside carnival that shows root and violence as soon as you look closely.

The thing that makes it genuinely entertaining, though, is that right next to that, it also plays like a romantic comedy with Dianne Wiest and Edward Herrmann, with her newly moved to the area, him her boss, and her weird son throwing up a bunch of obstacles, and then when you rotate it a little more, it's a weird story of misfit kids at the comic shop discovering that, in fact, their neighbors are the monsters they seem to be. Heck, the obvious vampire stuff is actually the messiest, least well-define bit of the movie even if it drives the rest. If it were just any one of those things, it's not that memorable, but by managing to pivot between them without really winking at the audience that much, it actually becomes something surprisingly entertaining. Today, it seems, a ton of horror-comedies try to hit this target and it seldom works, probably because the filmmakers are too much with the Sam and the Frog Brothers and too ready to mock David's gang. This movie lets hip be hip and geeks be geeks, and in doing so doesn't pander the way today's self-aware movies that are totally with the nerds do.

Ex Files 2: The Backup Strikes Back

Look at that title. It looks like the second in a long, long series of porno anthologies dedicated to a specific subject. Maybe even revenge porn. On the other hand, such a thing probably wouldn't be running at a mainstream theater.

Still, it was a weird experience, because while I was sort of expecting to be a bit lost at points because this was a sequel, but instead, the opposite happened - I found it really, really familiar. About five minutes after seeing a difficult star and an assistant commercial director with a difficult, credit-taking boss, I couldn't help but think that this was an awful lot like How to Use Guys with Secret Tips, a Korean romantic comedy with some fantasy elements I saw at Fantasia a couple years ago. And the more I saw, the more they seemed to match, right up until the end credits made the attribution.

So that means that both of the Chinese movies released in America over the past two weeks (The Witness and Ex Files 2) are both remakes of Korean films. On the one hand, I want to make a joke about whether Chinese movie buffs also complain about most people not wanting to read subtitles. On the other, I wonder if this is the only way for Korean producers to get a piece of the Chinese market at all. American studios have to hope for a shot at one spot in a limited number of slots that China allows for foreign films in multiplexes, and I wonder if their are tiers - do Hong Kong and Taiwan have to use the same pool? South Korea?

Whichever it is (and having seen many Indian remakes), it's time to retire the complaint that American audiences are uniquely incurious. Everybody, it seems, would rather watch movies in their native tongue, and it's probably the way that these things boomerang back to America in specialty theaters now that makes us aware of it.

Qian Ren 2 (Ex Files 2: The Backup Strikes Back)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2015 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)

As far as I can tell, the first "Qian Ren" ("Ex Files") didn't have any sort of official release in North America when it came out last year, but that probably doesn't much matter - though I would find this sequel familiar for other reasons, it appears to be a sequel in that it takes a supporting character from the first movie and drops him into a new situation and cast. It's a funny one, although I know for a fact that it could be funnier.

This time up, we follow Yi Ze (Amber Kuo Cai-jie), a longtime assistant director working for a company that makes television commercials, although seven years ago she was working as a production assistant on a singing competition who helped a goofy-looking contestant get his application in after the deadline when he showed her a little unexpected kindness. He won, and now, seven years later, after several hit albums and a transition to acting, Yu Fei (Ryan Zheng Kai) is starring in an ad for the company. He even remembers Yi Ze, pushing for her to have more authority during the shoot, to the point where she basically directs it herself, and they wind up spending the night together after. He's forgotten about her soon enough, though, and after she takes the fall for the necessity of reshoots, she meets up with "Master Tian" (Eric Wang Chuan-jun), who runs a noodle shop, tells fortunes, and gives her both a makeover and a playing-hard-to-get game plan to regain Yu Fei's interest.

Yu Fei is the character that carries over from the first, where I gather he was already some sort of celebrity, based upon the audience laughing at the geeky "seven-years-ago" version of the character (or maybe that's just a brief moment of Zheng playing well against type). Aside from him, most of this movie's screenplay comes from a Korean movie, How to Use Guys with Secret Tips, although writer/director Tian Yu-sheng has tossed out some of the funniest bits (the hilarious clips from the titular VHS tapes, the way its equivalent of Yu Fei blows way past envious to positively unhinged) and grafted on a subplot for the second half that highlights a weird sort of protagonist shift. It's not a bad screenplay, all told, but it makes the whole thing a more basic exercise in table-turning than something genuinely creative.

Full review on EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 November 2015 - 12 November 2015

Two movies based on properties with over sixty years of history this weekend, which is something, and some other interesting things besides.

• The biggest is opening is Spectre, the latest entry in the James Bond franchise, the fourth with Daniel Craig in the title role and the long-awaited return of the villainous organization of the title. It is all over the place, as you might expect, with plenty of screens at the Somerville Theatre, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Jordan's Furniture (in Imax), Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux.
  
  A certain comic strip first appeared a couple years before Casino Royale was published, with The Peanuts Movie its first theatrical outing in decades, as well as the first in 3D CGI. It looks to be about the little red-haired girl moving to town and Charlie Brown hoping to catch her eye in the right way. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere (including MX4D).
  
  Surprisingly, Spotlight is only opening at Boston Common this week, albeit on three screens there. It's Tom McCarthy's film about how the Boston Globe's Spotlight team of investigative reporters dug up the details on the systematic abuse of children by clergy and the Catholic Church's cover-up. It expands wider next week.
  
  Boston Common will also open up a second Chinese film, with Ex Files 2: The Back-Up Strikes Back joining The Witness. It looks more like a spin-off than a straight sequel, with a supporting character from the first movie having his own romantic adventure involving a woman who poses as a love guru to get revenge on him. Or so I gather; I haven't see the first. Revere also has afternoon showings of Home Alone on Sunday and Wednesday.
• Kendall Square has the other movie co-starring Monica Bellucci (aside from Spectre): The Wonders, a coming-of-age story about a family of beekeepers in Tuscany whose daughter has bigger ambitions, with a local reality show being the first step. It's scheduled for one week, and I wouldn't expect All Things Must Pass to last that much longer. This one, directed by Colin Hanks (generally a character actor notable for his resemblance to his famous father), looks at the rise and fall of Tower Records.
  
  They're also one of several places in the area playing Miss You Already, which features Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore as best friends who, from the title, are facing one one being stricken with a fatal illness. Catherine Hadwicke directs, and it also opens at West Newton and Revere.
  
  There are also a few one-night presentations: Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie, the latest spin-off of Masamune Shirow's manga, plays on Tuesday (with shows Tuesday through Thursday in Revere); an anniversary screening of Oklahoma! plays Wednesday; and PlantPure Nation, what looks like a documentary on organic farming, on Thursday.
• Gaspar Noe's Love looks to be getting just about the smallest two-theater release possible: It plays daily at West Newton in 2D at 3:15 (except for Sunday, when it plays at 8:15pm), and at The Somerville Theatre in 3D at 10pm.
• That leaves holes in their schedules, as does the opening of The Assassin at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, which only plays a couple shows a day other than on Friday. They also begin a month of Lloyd Kaufman films at midnight with a 35mm print of Tromeo & Juliet, which adapts the Bard in classic Troma fashion with a screenplay by James Gunn (who later graduated to such things as Slither and Guardians of the Galaxy), on Friday & Saturday. Sunday morning's Talk Cinema presentation is Theeb, a sort of Bedouin Western set in 1916. There's also a 75th Anniversary presentation of Fantasia on Monday (for those in the burbs, it plays Revere on Tuesday).
  
  The holes in those three theaters' schedules (plus many others, including the Belmont Studio, Brattle, the Capitol Theater, the ICA, Showcase Cinemas Foxboro, AMC Framingham, and the Marblehead Little Theatre) are for The Boston Jewish Film Festival. Among the notable ones playing the Coolidge are Israeli horror movie Jeruzalem at midnight Saturday and Yalom's Cure, which doubles as the theater's monthly "Off the Couch" presentation.
• The Brattle Theatre's BJFF day is Saturday, with Red Leaves and The Hebrew Superhero. Around that, they have a new restoration of Goodfellas playing Friday, Sunday, and Monday, and folks, I am not ready for movies that were in theaters when I was an usher twenty years ago to be undergoing restoration. On Tuesday, director Gerald Peary visits with his documentary Archie's Betty, which is neat, but stretched. Then on Wednesday, they start the Reel Music Film Festival, with Ramones documentary Danny Says playing as a double feature with a 35mm print of Rock 'n' Roll High School, following up Thursday with Hot Sugar's Cool World.
• Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond seems to be waiting to get new Indian movies until after the weekend, which seems to correspond with Diwali. Monday night is when Thoonga Vanam, a Tamil-language remake of pretty darn good French thriller Sleepless Night, opens up along with Tamil action movie Vedalam; both, unusual for Tamil movies, are being shown with English subtitles. The next subtitled Hindi movie is Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, a family drama with Salman Khan and Sonam Kapoor, which opens Thursday the 12th.
• The Harvard Film Archive welcomes Thom Andersen for three screening of his video essays: Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer on Friday (on 35mm with two 16mm shorts), The Thoughts That Once We Had (his most recent) on DCP Saturday, and Reconversão presented digitally on Sunday. Aside from that, it's the weekly programs: Act of Violence is the "Five O'Clock Shadow" film noir on Sunday afternoon, with George Romero's Martin as the "Furious and Furiouser" presentation Monday, both on 35mm.
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues A Small Good Thing (Friday) and Welcome to Leith (Saturday & Sunday). They also have several programs in the Boston Turkish Festival Documentary & Short Compeition, with screenings on Friday and Saturday
• Bright Lights has a 50th anniversary screening of Peter Whitehead's short documentary "Wholly Communion" on Tuesday, along with a live poetry reading by Janaka Stucky. Thursday's presentation is also a short doc, with Helgi Piccinin on-hand to introduce and discuss "Coureurs des Toits" ("Roof Runners"), following the guys who climb and de-ice the steep rooftops in Quebec City. Free admission, as always.
• The UMass Boston Film Series is also always free, with Sharon Shattuck on hand to discuss her film From This Day Forward, in which she, approaching her own wedding, returns home to find out how her parents' marriage survived, especially since her father came out as transgendered and transitioned when she was a pre-teen.

My plans are pretty clear - Spectre, Peanuts, Love, Ex Files 2, and Fantasia. After that, who knows?

Independent Film Festival Boston 2015½: Where to Invade Next, Entertainment, The Asssassin, Anomalisa

I said it in last week's "preview" post and it bears repeating here: This sort of mini-fest midway between two of a film festival's annual editions is a brilliant idea that more should pick up on. While I suspect that most of the films presented will play Boston (The Assassin opened two days after its screening), I'm not so sure about Entertainment or The Invitation (which I bailed on because, while everyone else seemed to really like it at Fantasia, I really wasn't fond enough to pay money to give it a second chance). There's just a lot that don't fit the schedule properly between a city's events and when things are on the festival circuit and release plans.

Thus, the "Fall Focus", which sounds much more serious than "2015 and a half", although I like the sound of the latter far too much to call it anything else.

Skipping Monday meant I missed a Skype'd-in Q&A, but there were guests on Sunday:



That's producer Carl Deal and editor Woody Richman of Where to Invade Next, who have worked with Michael Moore on several other projects. They talked about how Moore likes to see where the story takes him in making his docs, and likes to edit as close to release as possible, which is probably a privilege that not many documentary filmmakers get.

One thing I touch upon in the review that they mentioned was how to do more than preach to the converted. They talked about running advertising like a political campaign, with a number of the issues addressed in the movie crossing partisan lines. And, if worst comes to worst, they've found that in the past, young people bring their parents to Moore's films.

At the end, they also handed out some clever swag:



That is a pamphlet detailing how to go to college in Slovenia for free and a pencil made at the Faber-Castell factory they visit in the fillm. I have not used either yet - and probably won't feel the need to go back to university any time soon, although I'm sure that my brothers with daughters might hear the phrase "free college" and either start teaching their girls Slovenian or see what can be done about getting something like this happening here. The pencil feels great in my hand, though.

And, finally, this:



I love the Brattle and Boston's other independent theaters, but there are reasons I tend to sit up front. Part of it is that the independent places both run film whenever they can and often have a stage that puts the screen back a ways, part of it is having good peripheral vision, but sometimes it's just a matter of the places being built before stadium seating was the standard and being stuck behind a tall guy with exceptional posture. Leaning the appropriate way wasn't a big deal, but if I missed the nuances of some beautiful shot in Anomalisa, well, that's why.

Where to Invade Next

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)

Michael Moore is likely the world's best-known documentary filmmaker, and that is an obvious double-edged sword; while his first new film in years will certainly bring in one group of fans, the very fact that it's from him will have other people threatening boycotts and dismissing anything in it out of hand. Hopefully not too many; because this particular picture should be thought-provoking (and funny) to nearly anybody who buys a ticket, and fairly funny to boot.

His premise here is presented in a fashion that maybe blows past whimsy and into heavy-handedness - that the Pentagon, frustrated with sixty years of wars that have ended in stalemates at best and brought little back to the US, has charged Moore to find a new place for them to invade, with something useful as a return. Thus, the film follows him to nine countries, mostly European, with each segment ending on him planting an American flag in front of the bemused people he has been interviewing, claiming the idea for the United States. It's a goofy way to present the story that leads to a few funny moments but also occasionally requires Moore to be "in character", which is not exactly his forte, although he is not so committed to it that it ever gets in the way of the information he's trying to relate.

And what would he offer to the world as being worth emulating? Italian vacation time; French school lunches; Finnish & Slovenian education; German accountability; Portuguese drug decriminalization; the Norwegian prison system; the requirements for equal female representation in Tunisian and Icelandic politics. Each of these countries gets about ten or fifteen minutes, and that proves to be just enough time for Moore to introduce a concept, make some often corny but ice-breaking jokes, talk to a few people who seem reasonably sincere about why these ideas are good for a country beyond the obvious reasons, and move on. There are probably practical rebuttals to be made to some, but the presentation of the ideas is strong and clear. Clear enough to start a conversation, at least, and to a certain extent, frame that conversation in terms of what Moore has found in other countries being the path to a moral good end.

Does that make the movie a bit of a lecture? At times, but it's not like this filmmaker has ever been about making points with subtlety. Still, he's probably a bit cannier about the subjects he chooses and how he presents them than his reputation might suggest. There are two segments on crime and punishment, but he never brings up gun control, and he treads very lightly around access to abortion in Tunisia, and it can't be an accident that those are two subjects that can most easily flip a switch to get certain viewers to dismiss everything. He ends the film reminiscing about being in Germany for the fall of the Berlin Wall, and while the point is to defuse talk that implementation of these ideas in America would be all but impossible ("Hammer, Chisel, Down!" becomes the rallying cry), it's also a connection to an major change that Republicans feel some ownership of. He's also not shy about appealing to American pride and patriotism when things sound difficult or too foreign.

There's also something very likable about how he frequently seems genuinely surprised at some of what he discovers - he's almost in awe of the Finnish teenagers who speak half a dozen languages and taken aback by how passionately some of the people he interviews use the camera to plead with their American counterparts, like he was expecting to have his country called stupid and mocked only to come across people who want to help. He sometimes struggles with connecting messages - it's a bumpy road from how Germany empowers workers to have a say in their company's direction to how they drill the sins of World War II into the heads of their young to make sure it never happens again, for instance - but he seems inspired by the general good nature of the people he talks to, using the jokes as lubrication more than as pointed stingers.

That the people who could most benefit from seeing something are often the most dead-set against doing so is a kind of patronizing thing to say, but there's a kernel of truth in it. This likely won't hurt Where to Invade Next at the box office too much, but here's hoping that it at least inspires enough curiosity to get a broader audience than just those already on Moore's wavelength. There's ideas worth considering in it,and it's not like they haven't shown practical results. (Likely-dead link to the) review on EFC.

Entertainment

* * (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)

When people describe independent films as pretentious crap and those who like them as pretentious jerks, they're often referring to things like Entertainment, and I can't exactly blame them. Even when I don't enjoy a movie, I try not to begrudge the people who do, but this is the sort of movie that had me hating the guy behind me who was laughing hard at aggressively unfunny material because enjoying it seemed to be linked to feeling superior, which isn't quite so satisfying as actual, well, entertainment.

It starts with a pair of entertainers performing in a prison, the first a mime (Tye Sheridan) and the second a comedian (Gregg Turkington) with a slobby, abrasive on-stage persona. The pair are touring tiny, minor venues in the southwest, with the comedian visiting peculiar tourist attractions during the day making sad post-show telephone calls to his daughter, occasionally seeing his cousin John (John C. Reilly), meeting new people, and balancing on-stage meltdowns with potential career opportunities.

Not being familiar with Gregg Turkington's own stand-up work under the name Neil Hamburger, I can't say how much the character in the film matches his stage persona (though named "The Comedian" in the credits, he is referred to as "Neil" by other characters). He's an abrasive character on-stage, with his jokes based almost entirely on anger and disdain from a guy who has been constructed to not have a lot of room to mock others. It's a conceptual parody of a certain flavor of stand-up being played out in front of audiences that would probably rather see the actual thing without irony, and when people don't get it, he feels free to lash out on stage, because that's not actually him being a jerk, but improvising how this character would react.

Turkington (who is a co-writer along with Tim Heidecker and director Rick Alverson) certainly does a fine job of embodying this character, and not just in terms of showing him on stage, understanding the mechanics of comedy but not how to connect with the audience he has. No, he also does fine work in creating the nervous, barely-social man who creates such a character as a release valve, the guy who separates himself from the tour group to wander places that are already abandoned himself and seems paralyzed when he has to share a space with someone. The only real exception to that is when he calls his daughter and leaves a voice mail; those are uncomfortable scenes until you imagine how it would have gone had she answered.

His encounters with other people tend to highlight just how well he doesn't handle the rest of the world. The starkest example involves Michael Cera as a young man he encounters on a rainy night; Cera plays the guy as equally nervous (and perhaps a bit off himself) but wanting to engage compared to Neil's outright panic; it's a memorable couple of minutes. The most time is spent with John C. Reilly as Neil's cousin,and I suspect how one looks at his character is a litmus test for one's opinion of the film. Sure, at first he comes across as not too bright, calling Neil's sets weird and yammering on about his orange groves that don't interest his cousin at all, but after a while, he may start to grow on the viewer. Reilly does play John as sort of a rube who doesn't understand his cousin or what's important to him, and is thus funny for being confidently wrong, but the guy is putting what's important to him out there and trying to be helpful; he's probably healthier than Neil not because he's less intelligent and ignorance is bliss, but because he engages with the world around him. The tragedy of Entertainment is not that Neil is a tortured artist surrounded by doofuses like John who aren't on his level; it's that for all the effort that Neil puts into presenting himself to an audience, he can't interact.

Mulling the movie over a bit more with that in mind as I write, I'm a bit more impressed with it, if this is indeed what Alverson and company were going for (it certainly fits with the empty surroundings beautifully shot by cinematographer Lorenzo Hangrman and the occasional implication that an audience on his level scares him). I still kind of hate the guy behind me who either found the jokes funny or was ready to laugh at the character as pathetic three minutes into the movie. There's a difference between tragedy and black comedy, and I suspect I'd like "Entertainment" more if it didn't seem so willing to laugh at its protagonist rather than cry for him.

(Likely-dead link to the) review on EFC.

Nie Yin Niang (The Assassin)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)

Confession: Going into this movie, I thought it was going to be a bit different than it was, not because I expected an all-out action extravaganza, but because I had director Hou Hsiao-hsien mixed up with an even more deliberate art-house filmmaker. That doesn't make it seem like fast-paced Jackie Chan material; it's still a dense, boutique film. It just makes the prospect of multiple viewings to unpack all that's going on much more exciting than it might be.

It is a tale of 9th Century China, where Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) has been training as an assassin under the eye of Princess-Nun Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi), who has decided that the time is right to return her to her home province of Weibo, which has started to show more independence from the central authority, and kill Lord Tian Ji'an (Chang Chen). Given that the pair's history is why Yinniang was sent away in the first place, it is probably very fortunate that Tian and his wife (Zhou Yun) have already produced an heir or two.

This is not a complicated set of circumstances, even when one gives it a closer look, and there are many moments when the action seems to move like cinematographer Lee Ping-bin's camera - steadily, but slowly enough that it seems like someone must be holding it back, as it never quite seems to pick up the speed that it logically would given that there is clearly force behind it. Perhaps it's a stifling formality, or Yiniang's choosiness about when and when she'll kill, or maybe it's that, ultimately, their story is clearly just one of many things going on - there is regular mention, for instance, of a concubine who may be faking a period, and background on the characters fleshes out their situations more than it redirects their actions.

That relatively slow pace and formality charges the cast to do a lot without always seeming to accomplish very much, and they're up to it. Shu Qi has maybe half a dozen lines in the film, but she intrigues nonetheless, clearly both capable and reluctant in her role; she makes big decisions in a subdued but definitive way. Chang Chen gets the flashier role as the lord who has the air of power but chafes at the limits to what he can do. They don't interact directly very often, but those moments are perfectly understated and full of history. There is a similarly well-acted supportive cast, though a large-enough one doing fine enough work that it may take a couple of passes through the film to see how they all fit together, although it's impressively seamless work.

A second pass will be a delight, though, because this film is beautiful. Hou and Lee use an unusually tall/narrow frame and fill every quadrant with exquisite imagery, elegant but not excessively ornate. And not necessarily still (although many moments are); the brief sequences of martial-arts action are well-choreographed, sometimes quick, sometimes extended, strong without coming off as brutal and cruel. Most striking, I think, are some of the things they and the effects crew did with mist and fog - one shot reminded me of ghosts dancing, foreshadowing an intriguing turn of events whose use of such imagery surprises. And then, at the finale, there is a masterful use of fog to change a gorgeous wide-open vista into a shadowy private meeting - a breathtaking visual that sneaks up on the viewer.

Also sneaking up is the music by Lim Giong - it initially seems quite minimalistic, but soon one notices a drumbeat emphasizing the inevitability of the plans set in action before a shift to something more thrilling for the martial arts and something spritely for a dance scene. Lim does an exceptional job of staying out of the way and setting the scene when need be. It's one of dozens of little things that tie the movie together in a way that even the classiest movies of its genre seldom manage.

The film is Taiwan's submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and though it's early to handicap that race, it's not too early to get ahead of it. Or, heck, just watch beautiful movies that are more exciting than the director's art-house reputation and more artistic than its surface genre would suggest.

(Likely-dead link to the) review on EFC.

Anomalisa

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)

When I spent more time around various types of animation fandom, the use of actors for whom voice work was just a sideline was a big issue (and that was before DreamWorks had arrived on the scene!). I recalled those newsgroup rants because I'm not sure from watching Anomalisa whether it's an issue that filmmaker Charlie Kaufman overlooked or one he counted on in designing the film's central trick. Whichever the case may be, Kaufman and his co-director Duke Johnson have made an impressive film, possibly a great one if its technique hits one right.

Before what's going on is clear, things start simply enough - Michael Stone (voice of David Thewlis) is arriving in Cincinnati to present a seminar for telephone customer-support staff based on his book. He deals with chatty people on the plane, in the cab, and at the hotel, and has his first drinks of the night when meeting up with an old girlfriend. That goes poorly, but he winds up meeting two women in town for the seminar, Emily and Lisa, later on. They are surprised when he asks Lisa back to his room, as Emily is more conventionally attractive even without the scar Lisa styles her hair to hide - but there's something about Lisa's voice (provided by Jenifer Jason Leigh) that Michael finds so enticing that he may be willing to leave his family.

It's hard to describe why that might be the case - or much about the movie at all - without giving away something that the filmmakers intend for the audience to catch themselves, and that's where the voice work comes in. It's not so much a problem with David Thewlis and Jenifer Jason Leigh - they both fit their characters like gloves. Thewlis's stern, impatient British accent becomes desperate and plaintive as he becomes more intoxicated, perfect depiction of authority concealing a shambles. Leigh is well-cast as the humble, sweet, probably excessively accommodating Lisa, perfectly nice but unworldly and below Michael's capabilities in enough areas that it's clear she's being taken advantage of.

(People who have not yet seen the film may wish to skip the next paragraph)

It's in the the voicing of the rest of the characters by Tom Noonan (amusingly credited as "Everyone Else") where the film gets a bit uneven. Noonan's voice is not distinctive enough to make this immediately obvious, but he varies accents and cadences enough early on in such a way that the impression is more comedic types than uniformity. Heck, when he voiced the ex-girlfriend, my initial impression was that Michael had a thing for trans women. It's a vocal performance (or set thereof) that makes the film seem indecisive for a while, like Kaufman and Johnson are trying to do this thing which actually does an excellent job of getting across how other people are a demanding blur to Michael very well, but either doesn't want the audience to realize what's up right away or wants to include nuance so that Michael doesn't seem like a complete egotistical monster, and these two impulses are in direct opposition until such time as the filmmakers decide to make the issue clear and run with it.

(And now, back to trying not to give major elements of the film away)

Though this isn't Kaufman's most direct dive into troubled minds - he did write Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, after all - it's still right in his wheelhouse and one of his most successfully-executed takes on the idea. There's a level at which Michael Stone is profoundly unsympathetic - his issues are those of a thorough egotist who finds dealing with people lacking that which makes him special unbearable at times, and many films would probably spend their time scolding him for this or creating an arbitrary breakthrough. Instead, when Kaufman puts him in situations where the audience can empathize with his irritation, he seldom over-reacts, and there turns out to be something really clever going on during his seminar: The joke is that it lurches between what sound like platitudes and darkly comic outbursts of "truth", but what makes the scene brilliant is that it's the platitudes that are important - that they're probably what Michael uses to be a functional human being and, as other characters bring up at various times, they work, even in a business as dehumanizing as providing customer service over the phone.

This is all conveyed via stop-motion animation. I suspect the decision to animate the film was done as a way to make the unusual vocal choices less obvious, and as a result, the style is unusually realistic compared to many films using similar techniques. The one-sixth-scale sets, by and large, look like things that could have been built or found for a live-action film without an issue, with some exceptionally fine fabric work, which is where many stop-motion films literally show seams. The motion is painstakingly smooth. The design of the characters does a few very obvious things to remind viewers that these characters are felt over an armature but also gives said viewer a way to overlook this, with a horizontal line on a puppet's head also scanning as eyeglasses, for example.

It's an impressive precision that straddles the line between bitter comedy and desperate hope as well as any of Kaufman's films as writer or director, and indeed better than most. Folks quicker on the uptake than I am will probably find it brilliant, and I certainly won't argue with them. If nothing else, it's a daring and adult animated film that also happens to be very entertaining, and those don't come around all that often.

Full review on EFC.