Seaport Cinema: All the Money in the World (and Proud Mary)

I probably won't talk about the new Showcase Icon spot in the Seaport until I've been there a couple more times, seeing a few different movies there with different specs (a 3D one, one in "Icon-X"), but my first impression is that it feels like a place that will take a little getting used to; it's high-end but not right-to-your-seat delivery the way the likes of the Alamo Drafthouse or the SuperLux in Chestnut Hill is. It's gonna take a little more sussing out, although it's worth noting that the laser projection is pretty nice, and that's arguably the most important part.

Funny thing about going there this weekend: They didn't open Proud Mary, even though the clearly visible address for Mary's apartment is right in that very neighborhood, a couple blocks away. I joke about the movie's geography being terrible - there are at least two times when characters start at the public garden and wind up in completely unreasonable places, but someone probably would get on the T at Chinatown if they needed to get somewhere on the Orange Line, although I'm not sure that would necessarily take him any place they show him going.

The credits mentioned that it was partially shot in Chicago, so maybe I need my brother to watch this to tell me how many scenes of this set-in-Boston movie are obviously there if you know what to look for.

All the Money in the World

* * (out of four)
Seen on 13 January 2018 in Showcase Icon Boston #5 (first-run, DCP)

It's a harsh and horrible thing to say, but the various controversies that impacted All the Money in the World may have been the best things for it. Send this out into the world either with Christopher Plummer cast as J. Paul Getty from the start or with no frantic replacement of Kevin Spacey, and this is a pretty forgettable movie. Now, at least, it will be a footnote in an interesting story.

The film is based upon the story of how, in April 1973, Paul Getty (Charlie Plummer), the sixteen-year-old grandson and namesake of oil magnate J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer, no relation), was kidnapped off the streets of Rome by a crew led by Cinquanta (Romain Duris). The crew demands a seventeen million dollar ransom, an amount mother Abigail Harris Getty (Michelle Williams) is completely unable to pay, having relinquished any financial compensation in exchange for full custody in her divorce. She pleads her case with with her former father-in-law, but Getty senior refuses to pay any ransom, though he does assign former CIA agent Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg) to try find the kidnappers and get Paul back without paying.

As nightmarish a situation as that is, this particular kidnapping is not necessarily one that translates into a movie. It's a thriller built around a long-term waiting game, and the filmmakers never really figure out how to wring tension out of that. Maybe, perhaps, as a TV show, with room for subplots and the feeling that things are actually dragging out, it works (it will be interesting to see how well the upcoming miniseries Trust works), but the movie flattens that. The script by David Scarpa includes a number of flashbacks, but they seldom shed much extra light on any motivations or planting seeds that will germinate later, like Scarpa and director Ridley Scott know that there's a lot going on underneath this story, but can't find the pieces of information that would add insight rather than background.

Full review on EFC

Proud Mary

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 13 January 2018 in Regal Fenway #11 (first-run, DCP)

Proud Mary is not a terrific movie even by the blaxploitation throwback standards it's clearly striving for; though it sets the situation up with laudable efficiency on the way to a trim 85-minute running time, it still gets bogged down with boring gangster stuff and jettisons large chunks of that when it's not needed any more. It would be a bit of a drag if it didn't embrace being a pulpy B-movie both in size and willingness to dive straight into action; the sometimes-sluggish scenes where guns aren't being fired don't bury how well it works when it gets down to business.

The Mary of the title (Taraji P. Henson) is a killer working for Boston gangster Benny (Danny Glover) - like a daughter to him even though she and his son Tom (Billy Brown) are no longer together - and when she dispatched a Jamaica Plain bookie for him a year earlier, she made an orphan out of his son Danny (Jahi Di'Allo Winston). Danny's been running errands for an Eastern European creep who goes by "Uncle" (Xander Berkeley), and when a guilt-ridden Mary finally catches up with Danny and tries to get Uncle to back off… Well, it goes badly enough for Uncle's boss Luka (Rade Serbedzija) to feel retribution is called for unless Benny can deliver the one responsible - and Benny puts Mary in charge of finding that someone. Benny's money man Walter (Neal McDonough) looks like a good patsy, but there's no way it will be that easy.

It's not a bad plot, really, and given that the film is shorter than most that get a theatrical release, there's a good chance that it was cut to heck at some point - Mary framing Walter is basically one sentence of "who else?" and for someone really hell-bent on revenge, Luka pretty much vanishes when the movie has other fish to fry. What the three credited writers and director Babak Najafi are going for here is pretty clear, and maybe given a little more room to breathe and a more charismatic cast of characters, they'd be able wring a twisty crime story that really gets into Mary feeling disillusioned and recognizing how she's pushed Danny ointo the same path as her. Instead, the outline is clear but the details are drab.

Full review at EFC

The Florida Project (and Good Time)

Kodak put a listicle on their site last week describing the best cities to see movies on film, and Boston was #3 behind New York and L.A., which have the distinct advantages of being huge cities with large chunks of the entertainment industry to cater to. We will, however, come out for film and consider it valuable, which explains a big chunk of how Friday night's shows at the Brattle either sold out or came darn close - folks knew that seeing something recent like Good Time on 35mm was a big deal, even if they maybe hadn't been drawn to it during the regular engagement last year. The place was a little overwhelmed.

Of course, a lot of that had to do with The Florida Project, too - not a lot of people bailed after Good Time, and I gather the 5pm show was more people than they expected as well. I suspect it's getting a little more of a second wind than many films do during awards season, in no small part due to how its very young star is showing up at ceremonies and being an adorable seven-year-old. With so many things given out, with attendant distractions, and an ever-more-cynical group of people consuming entertainment news, Brooklynn Prince surely gets one to notice that this film is different than most everything else out there.

They make a good double feature, too - both films that draw the audience into a desperate situation without engendering too much sympathy, using a lot of folks who are either non-professionals or just getting their first jobs in front of the camera, and seeming to just let a story shake out. It can be a lot of that for one night, but both sets of filmmakers do it so well that it winds up very impressive indeed.

Good Time

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 12 January 2018 in the Brattle Theatre [(Some of) The Best of 2017, 35mm]

I'm not quite sure how much the the different circumstances of seeing Good Time affected my enjoyment of it - Fantasia surprised me with a twistier, more grind-house-y movie than I expected, and also followed it up with a terrific Q&A from the directors. Here, I knew what I was getting and didn't have the same sort of decompression and discussion afterward, it became a thing I did to kill time before The Florida Project to an extent. It's a tough thing to experience a second time with the same excitement as that first viewing.

Still… It's pretty darn good, and seeing a nice 35mm print up close rather than a DCP from way the heck up in seats that feel like the back of the balcony certainly improves part of the experience. The Safdies made a movie that oozes desperation and bad decision-making, and maybe seeing that as leading to inevitable downfalls makes one less enthused even if it's still chock full of good bits.

Original review on EFC (from August)

The Florida Project

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen on 12 January 2018 in the Brattle Theatre [(Some of) The Best of 2017, DCP]

The last few scenes of The Florida Project aren't quite completely different from the rest of the movie, but writer/director/editor Sean Baker bookends what is arguably the film's most simply devastating moment with shots that feel show the filmmakers' hands in a way the rest of the movie doesn't. It's an odd choice, but an understandable one - how do you end a movie that buries its structure so far under its surface? - and certainly not one that undercuts what an unusual experience this movie is.

It's told from the perspective of Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), a six-year-old girl who lives with her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) in a Kissimmee motel, spending most of her time running around the area getting into mischief with her friends Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Dicky, making a new one in Jancey (Valeria Cotto) while being punished for their last bit of troublemaking. It's not quite idyllic even if Moonee can't really see how Halley's position is getting more precarious by the week, but the motel's manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) looks out for them as much as he can without being an actual babysitter.

It must be somewhat terrifying for a filmmaker to place so much of a film in the hands of someone as young as Brooklynn Prince, and equally as easy for outsiders to second-guess it, speculating that as a result the film must be all improvisation, or that it's a case of perfect casting rather than actual talent. Whatever the case may be here, though, Prince is a joy to watch, contributing a boisterous energy level that certainly comes off as authentic from how Moonee doesn't quite know which words she's going to emphasize until they're out of her mouth or how she runs like she's throwing herself at something. Moonee blurts things out without ever sounding like she's doing it for effect - Prince is probably not so potty-mouthed in real life, but she certainly makes one believe that she's Halley's daughter.

Full review at EFC

Paddington 2

So, which is more peculiar as a childless adult in one's mid-forties - seeing Paddington at a preview show with a mostly-empty theater, or showing up to a show full of families without any of your own? As much as you might get side-eye at the latter, the one I went to was oddly quiet and I really would have liked to be able to read the room and see if American kids enjoyed this nearly as much as I.

It was not my original plan, actually - I'd been planning to make The Commuter the Thursday preview I caught last night, and check out the new theater in the Seaport on top of that, but the Red Line was all kinds of awful; I got on the second of two packed trains out of Alewife, and it had to sit around and stop every time it nearly caught up with the first one, and by the time I got to Park Street, it was clear I wasn't getting to South Station, switching to the Silver Line, going another stop, and re-orienting myself and finding the place in time for the 7:30 show. Might as well go for the 7:45 at Boston Common then.
Only a couple folks in the theater, and it was a funny arrangement - me in the front section, a couple way in the back. Hopefully, a ton of folks bring their kids this weekend; it's really delightful and there's a ton of not-good stuff coming up for kids; let 'em see something good here.

Anyway, be glad that I can't really do the thing I came up with as I wrote the review, where I compare the way the Kingsman films use their exaggerated Britishness with the way that the Paddington ones do. I think they've both got a certain pride in their identity, although I seem to remember Matthew Vaughn using it more as an affectation and disguise while Paul King seems to find it true on top of being useful.

Paddington 2

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 11 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

Paddington 2 couldn't quite sneak up on me the way the first did - its American trailer spent most of its time on the closest thing the movie has to a gross-out gag, only for the film to later reveal itself as witty and big-hearted - especially since the folks in the UK have been much more vocal about what a lovely film Paul King has made the second time around. That's okay. Knowing to expect its very British brilliance actually makes it no less delightful.

After the previous film's origin story, this one picks up with Paddington (voice of Ben Whishaw), a small orphaned bear who came to London from Peru and was named for the train station where he was found, quite settled in with the Brown family, although each of them is experiencing some of their own growing pains. He still writes to his Aunt Lucy (voice of Imelda Staunton), and wishes to send her an extra-special present for her upcoming hundredth birthday. He lays eyes on a vintage pop-up book of London in a local antique shop, but it's terribly expensive, leading him to work various odd jobs to try to raise the money. He has almost managed it when he sees someone burgling the shop, but he winds up sent to jail for the crime. While the Brown family (Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Madeleine Harris, Samuel Joslin & Julie Walters) follow the trail of clues leading to out-of-work actor - and master of disguise - Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant), the irrepressible bear makes friends in the jail, including quick-tempered cook Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson).

There is really no end to the utter delight found in these films, which co-writer and director King fills with joyous, gentle slapstick and absurdity. It is far too British and polite to actually wink at the audience, but King knows just exactly how to create a tone that plays to kids and also lets adults have fun with how knowingly silly the movie is. And it's wonderfully silly and traditional, with a pop-up book that becomes a treasure map, kids with charmingly analog (and useful) hobbies, a sense that being polite and kind can do wonders. It's a film full of layers, with jokes just hidden enough that kids will be delighted to find them (pay attention to every headline in McGinty's newspaper), colorful adventure, and more well-earned emotion than one would think could possibly come from an animated bear. It is utterly earnest and aware that this can be a rare thing, and never so serious about that as it could be. It will get a joke or two out of how broadly adults can see it being played, but King and co-writer Simon Farnaby never look down or make fun.

It's no small thing to handle this so well; there are dozens of little sight gags throughout the movie that take the exact right amount of time to be simply funny to a four-year-old and clever to their parents. Paddington himself is a good enough effect to be be basically invisible, which is a testament both to the folks rendering the digital images and the folks on set who find the funniest, most natural ways for him to interact with the environment. Everybody involved seems to get this little bear extremely well, whether he's wordlessly fretting over the idea that the Browns may have forgotten him or Ben Whishaw putting just the right sort of gracious politeness, joy of discovery, and curiosity at some of the peculiar ways humans act into every line.

Whishaw's voice work is far from the only very enjoyable performance in the film; the Paddington children's books are beloved, and it seems like nearly every actor in the UK both wanted to be part of these movies and felt an obligation to do right by them. The entire Brown family returns, and they're still impeccably cast, from Hugh Bonneville's skittish but loyal father and Sally Hawkins as the free-spirited but protective mom to Samuel Joslin and Madeleine Harris carving out kids having growing pains without making Jonathan and Judy abrasive at all (Joslin gets one of the movie's funniest moments as he shows that owning one's nerdiness makes it cool). There are fun spots by Peter Capaldi, Richard Ayoade, Jim Broadbent and a host of others, with the great Brendan Gleeson a perfect Knuckles. Hugh Grant, though, is the one who steals every scene he's in with extraordinarily well-mannered, silky insanity. He's a glorious villain, less sinister than Nicole Kidman was in the first but still finding a way to make Buchanan theatrical and far-out even in a movie that's already putting the audience within a children's book without actually skewering the deliberately level tone.

Indeed, as much as the Brits making this movie clearly love Paddington, one gets the sense that Paddington-the-film-series loves them right back. Where Kidman's taxidermist was an impressively subversive villain (she invited the audience to look at British history and acknowledge that there were things in it that they had outgrown); Grant's Buchanan is simpler, a character lays out what makes him troublesome in one or two sentences and it's something kids can apply to the rest of the characters and take to heart for themselves. But that simplicity is not a bad thing, nor is the clear affection shown for the London setting and the British politeness that is far more often the butt of jokes or an obstacle than what it is here - a way for people to connect and get along in spite of any differences they may have.

Yes, Paddington 2 is a very British family movie, which may be why those of us in America had to wait a couple extra months and then breathe a sigh of relief when it was liberated from a scandal-ridden distributor; its rambunctiousness is a bit more restrained and precise. But it's also utterly genuine, simple enough to play to kids and witty enough for their parents - or, indeed, for adults who don't have kids - and able to be both without particularly finding them in conflict.

(Formerly at EFC)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 January 2018 - 18 January 2018

Hey, welcome back, Hollywood studios! Glad to see you releasing stuff and opening other things wider this weekend. It's letting Kerasotes Showplace Icon get up to full capacity, and also letting everybody else shuffle things around.

• In the middle of all this, The Coolidge Corner Theatre gets to break out the big projector and film to show Phantom Thread, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson and allegedly star Daniel Day Lewis's final film, on a 70mm print. Day-Lewis plays a dressmaker who becomes obsessed and controlling with his muse and lover, and it also plays Kendall Square and Boston Common, with the Somerville Theatre expecting a 35mm print in the next week or two. Note the Coolidge's Monday afternoon shows will use a DCP instead of film, and Tuesday's 7pm show is an "Off the Couch" presentation with an introduction/discussion from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. They also start a month-long series celebrating Day-Lewis's career with a 35mm screening of his breakthrough film, My Beautiful Laundrette, on Tuesday evening.
  
  The Coolidge also continues cold-weather midnights this week, with John Carpenter's frigid classic The Thing at midnight Friday while the weekly screening of The Shining plays midnight Saturday, both on 35mm. There are also two Sunday morning presentations: "Shine On!: Animated Shorts from the Children's Film Festival Seattle" in the big room downstairs and Goethe-Institut presentation of German indie drama Western in the still-respectably-sized room upstairs.
• Among the wide releases, the most prestigious opening is, obviously, Paddington 2, with the entire delightful cast of the first returning in a plot that sees a master of disguise played by Hugh Grant framing the little Peruvian bear for a theft and getting him sent to jail with colorful inmates including Brendan Gleeson. I am dead serious about how this is likely the best wide release, by the way; it is as wonderful as the first and it was something of a relief to see the new one rescued from being part of any boycott against the Weinstein Company. It is at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  For those that can't quite bring themselves to a movie made with kids in mind, there's a couple more action-oriented presentations that, fair warning, likely got delayed to January for not being that great. The Commuter is the latest collaboration of star Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, with Neeson playing an ordinary man (or is he?) blackmailed into some sort of train-bound murder plot. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (in Imax only), Fenway, South Bay, the Seaport, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. Proud Mary, on the other hand, features Taraji P. Henson in a blaxploitation-style flick about a hitwoman who finds a kid at one of her jobs and has to protect him from the employers who don't want any loose ends. It's at Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay (including Dolby), Assembly Row, and Revere (including XPlus).
  
  After opening at Kendall Square and Boston Common last week, The Post expands to the Somerville, West Newton, Fenway, South Bay, the Seaport (including Icon-X), Assembly Row, and Revere. In other reshufflings, theaters which booked The Last Jedi can now use their big screens for other things, so Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle gets the RPX screen at Fenway and the MX3D screen at Revere. Boston Common also brings back Marshall for matinees.
  
  In one-offs, Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere have documentary The Opera House on Saturday and Wednesday. TCM's classic for the month is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, playing Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Sunday and Tuesday. There's a screening of Goodfellas at Revere on Sunday. Finally, there's the "Premiere Event" of Mary and the Witch's Flower, the first animated film from a pair of Ghibli vets, on Thursday, with the dubbed version at 7 and the subtitled at 8, at Boston Common (possibly dubbed only), Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere (possibly subtitled only). That's probably more places than will open it on the 19th (if anybody does in the Boston area).
• Apple Fresh Pond keeps Telugu-language action flick Jai Simha, Telugu (with subtitles) thriller Prince in Exile, and Tamil-language heist movie Thaanaa. They also open Hindi horror movie 1921, which doesn't look to be a direct sequel to 1920 but comes from the same director, and Tamil thriller Sketch, with Telugu romance Rangula Ratnam starting Saturday.
• The Brattle Theatre spends most of the week on (Some of) The Best of 2017, the the weekend featuring 35mm prints of stuff that was mostly digital when it came out: Good Time on Friday (playing as a double feature with The Florida Project on DCP), Wonder Woman on Saturday, and Dunkirk on Sunday. It's DCPs the rest of the week, with a twin bill of The Beguiled & Lady MacBeth on Monday, Logan Noir on Wednesday, and single features of A Quiet Passion and The Villainess on Thursday. That gap on Tuesday is filled with Trash Night.
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues The Boston Festival of Films from Iran with Tehran Taboo (Friday), When God Sleeps (Saturday), Negar (Saturday/Sunday), and 24 Frames (Sunday/Wednesday). There's also another Friday matinee of Canaletto and the Art of Venice and screenings of The Square on Friday and Wednesday. Come Thursday, they start the UCLA Festival of Preservation, with a 35mm print of The Murder of Fred Hamptom co-presented by Roxbury International Film Festival and a DCP of Desert Hearts.
• Belmont World Film has their annual family film festival this weekend, split between three venues: Opening night film Master Spy and Sunday's "Animal Kingdom" events will be at The Regent Theatre; Saturday's "Water, Water, Everywhere" program at Studio Cinema Belmont; and Monday's "Heroes in Our Midst" screenings are at the Brattle Theatre.
• The Harvard Film Archive comes back from winter break with a weekend of member screenings, so if you're a member, you probably know what those are already. There's also a regular screening on Monday, with a DCP restoration of All That Jazz serving as a holdover from 2017's Bob Fosse program.
• CinemaSalem has two movies sharing the tiny room this week - horror flick Devil's Gate and true-crime documentary Killing for Love.

I already caught Paddington 2, and recommend it. I'll almost be looking at the Good Time/Florida Project double feature, Phantom Thread, The Commuter, Proud Mary, Mary and the Witch's Flower, and some catch-up.

Japanese Cinema on Special Order: Confessions & The Bullet Train

Well, I don't know that either disc was really a special order, technically - you can find both on Amazon, mostly through resellers, although it's probably cheaper to go straight to the source.

Confessions I picked up at DDDHouse, an online retailer out of Hong Kong whose website can sometimes be a bit challenging to get through, but which offers pretty good prices (and the US$/HK$ exchange rate is currently pretty favorable on the American side) and reasonable shipping. I've made a couple orders from there since, mostly for stuff that hasn't been released in North America at all - and a couple cases, like The Mermaid, where we only get 2D versions of a 3D movie - but been hesitant to actually pop a disc in, just as a matter of not having a lot of time and a little fear of there not being good subtitles. Like, as long as I haven't watched one and been disappointed it's still potentially a good idea. So I haven't actually watched the thing I built the first order around (10 Years), but I will soon; the Confessions disc looked pretty good, and the subtitles were okay.

Tons of logos at the front before even getting to the menu, though, even more than when you see a foreign film in theaters and way more than the typical amount at the front of an American disc. If you ever need any demonstration that Hollywood is fundamentally different than most other movie industries, the fact that only a couple of production companies and distributors have enough skin in the game to merit an animated title card.

The Bullet Train came from Twilight Time Movies, again as part of an order for something else, but it was on sale and you might as well stack things up to save on shipping. They're a company I kind of wish I'd known about earlier; they press 3,000 copies of four or five titles each month, mostly available through their own site, and given that the numbers are relatively small, the special features are (1) this thing is available in HD at all and (2) an isolated soundtrack option. It's a nice disc, though - clean copy of the film, fine subtitles, and what may have been a decent supplement, although it was past midnight when I started it and it seemed too heavy on clips for me to finish.

I'll be ordering at least one film from them this month (Dragonwyck with Vincent Price and Gene Tierney), maybe more. I kind of wish I'd known about the company earlier; I get the feeling I may have missed a few things.

(Fun note: I bumped this to the top of my pile and decided to pair Confessions with it because they offered $2 off my next order for a review. After ten-plus years of doing these things, this is awful close to being the first actual remuneration!)

Coincidentally, both of my first orders from these sources included 3D movies named Inferno, which seems like as good a double feature review as any.

Kokuhaku (Confessions)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 29 December 2017 in Jay's Living Room (The Shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions is a movie just good enough to fall through the cracks: After the director's films Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko got raves on the genre and Asian film festival circuits, the producers of this somewhat more mainstream film targeted more prestigious audiences, opting for festivals like TIFF instead of those like Fantasia, and when it didn't sell at those, it wound up never officially making its way American audiences. It is, however, worth seeking out an import disc - the one from Hong Kong is Region A and has decent English subtitles - as it's absolutely good enough to see why the producers might have seen it as a possible breakout.

It's got a bit of a rough start, in part because the first of the film's confessions seems like the set-up for a certain type of movie. In a junior high homeroom, teacher Yuko Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) announces - in a voice that barely penetrates the din from the rowdy students - that she is leaving at the end of the term, and she expects most of the students will be pleased. Their initial cheering tapers off when it becomes increasingly clear that she's got zero damns left to give, not only mocking a student who came to her for emotional support but implicating two - brilliant but cruel Shuya Watanabe (Yukito Nishii) and angry but timid Naoki Shimomura (Kaoru Fujiwara) - in the death of her four-year-old daughter Manami. She says she won't go to the police to have them reopen the case, though; she's just tainted two of the the individual cartons of milk handed out that morning with the HIV-positive blood of Manami's father.

As this plays out, Confessions has the feel of a movie that's not going to leave that room, playing out as a battle of wills between the teacher and her students, maybe with her exposing that they are all, in some way, complicit, or the the trouble-making kids showing that most of them actually have decent hearts. The film never quite finds a rhythm during this opening act, though; the students' quick reversion to rowdiness doesn't quite ring true and Nakashima is good at a lot of things, stillness and restraint are not his best tools. By the time Ms. Moriguchi has finished her story, it's clear that this confrontation can't be stretched much further.

Full review at EFC

Shinkansen daibakuha (The Bullet Train)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 8 January 2018 in Jay's Living Room (The Shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

When even the essay that accompanies the limited edition blu-ray disc of a movie repeatedly mentions that the 152-minute cut presented is really just too long, there's probably something to it - they may not need to sell anybody reading the booklet on the movie anymore, but it still seems like the writer would have to feel very strongly on the subject to repeatedly make that point to people presumably excited to have a copy of the film. He's not wrong - some releases were able to cut an hour out of The Bullet Train to get what I imagine is just as intense a thriller - but there's a certain appeal to its thoroughness and that at least makes an argument for keeping every scene.

The plot, at the time of the film's 1975 release, was devilishly clever: Tetsuo Okita (Ken Takakura) has placed a bomb on the 109 train from Tokyo to Hanaka. When the train accelerates above 80 kph (about 50 mph), the bomb will arm, and it will detonate should the train drop below that speed. Four five million dollars, he will tell the railway how to find and disarm the bomb. One accomplice (Kei Yamamoto) has rigged another train to explode as a demonstration, while another (Akira Oda) will help collect the ransom for the 1500 people on board. While the police try to hunt the bomber, it's up to Kuramochi in the control station (Ken Utsui) and engineer Aoki (Shin'ichi "Sonny" Chiba) to keep the train running long enough for a resolution.

The basic plot would serve as the (uncredited) inspiration for Speed nearly twenty years later, and it's instructive to see how Graham Yost's later script would streamline it for the better, most notably by getting the passengers down to a manageable number and actually giving them something to do; the potential body count of The Bullet Train may be enormous, but after the filmmakers introduce a number of passengers in the opening - including a celebrity and his entourage, a documentary film crew, and a captured fugitive who supplied Okita with his explosives - only to never do much with anyone but pregnant Kikuchi (Raita Ryu), who will inevitably go into labor (whether this is a direct result of someone slapping her to get her to stop panicking is not clear, but it's either the worst or most hilariously ironic use of that ugly trope). The interview with director Jun'ya Sato on the disc has him saying that he wrote the first half of the script and Ryunosuke Ono the second; perhaps Ono simply couldn't find anything to do with the subplots Sato set up and abandoned them. Instead, the film offers up a lot of generically frazzled salarymen causing a few near-riots because they can't get off the train and to their business meetings, and those moments are good and genuine-feeling, but it can be hard to get a sense of the threat's scale or a feeling of immediate danger with the action on the train so relatively unimportant.

Full review at EFC

This Week In Tickets: 1 January 2018 - 7 January 2018

First of the new year with movies from the new year, keeping up the one-per-day pace.



Kind of liking the layout of this year's planner, too. It's smallish, but the layout works pretty well if I keep to one stub a day, with some extra room around the weekends. Considering how most of these calendars are made to organize work rather than play, there aren't a whole lot that cater to my desires.

As for actually getting full reviews done for the lot of 'em... Well, blame the cold (apparently a warm computer on your lap makes a dent in the chill) and a wasted day at work on the 8th as I waited for tech support to fix something and writing on my Chromebook was a good way of looking busy.

It would have been nice to open the year as well as I ended 2017, but even if Molly's Game had been as good as I'd hoped, the holiday/winter/Red-Line-generally-sucking-lately got me into Park Street too late for that, so I flipped the day's planned order an saw Ex Files 3 first. It was not good, and Molly's Game sagged in my head as I left the theater.

Work didn't line up with showtimes for the next couple of days, and I just wan't setting foot outside during the "bomb cyclone" on Thursday. Indeed, it probably wasn't a great idea on Friday, but a couple days indoors will get you stir crazy and there was new Spielberg/Streep/Hanks, so The Post it was.

Saturday wound up being a split-admission double feature of similar films, with Goldbuster & Hanson & the Beast not only both being goofy supernatural-tinged comedy/adventures from China, but they were splitting the same theater at the Common, meaning, yeah, I saw one, went downstairs, bought a ticket for the other, and came right back.

The next day's double feature was split across the river, with Hostiles at Boston Common and Dawson City: Frozen Time at the Brattle. They paired surprisingly well, though, from overlapping time periods to audiences maybe not being as patient with them as they could be.

So, there's week one down. As always, quicker updates on my Letterboxd page and a busy week ahead.

Go...North?: Hostiles & Dawson City: Frozen Time

Not exactly a planned double feature, but a pretty good one as it turns out, with both having a fair amount of focus on the 1890s and having folks go north, as Hostiles follows a trail from New Mexico to Montana and Dawson City goes much further. Happily, by the time I was actually out and about for this movie, Boston was no longer featuring Dawson-like temperatures, although it was a pretty cold weekend.

They're also both movies that at least some in the audience lost a little patience with; though I was taking my usual seats in the front section for Hostiles, a cold day means that you can hear boots stomp on the way out, and I was seated far enough back at the Brattle to see and hear folks get up and hit the restroom. Both of them are kind of lengthy movies - 2:15 is long for a western that actually doesn't have that much action after making the audience very uncomfortable in the first ten minutes, and two hours is a pretty long sit for a mostly-silent documentary. I'm kind of curious how much of the getting up and heading out of the theater in both cases was people not expecting to need to hold a drink in that long, people just being kind of fidgety, or people who genuinely weren't enjoying it.

(Fair amount of people whispering around me for Dawson City, too, although not constantly. Surprised it wasn't worse, to be honest - no dialogue and the desire to show your seatmate that you know what a documentary is getting at could prove much more irresistible for some movie-talkers!)

It was a bit disappointing that there were a fair number of people joining me in only requesting tickets for the one movie at the box office rather than the double feature. Wonderstruck is a pretty great little movie, and makes a more logical pairing with Dawson City as both rely on being modern silent films for much of the runtime. I suppose I wasn't the only one who needed to get groceries afterward and ws consoling myself with how it would soon be available as a 4K stream on Amazon Prime, although I surely hope it's on the high-res Blu-rays as well.

Hostiles

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 7 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)

Scott Cooper's new film is the latest film to de-mythologize the Western, shining a light on the ugly underpinnings of a genre once synonymous with simply morality and violence that provides a definitive resolution. This period and format has been so thoroughly deconstructed that one can watch Hostiles and not be entirely sure whether it is mean enough, despite it being quite brutal when it decides to dispatch a character or three, leaving little doubt that is not particularly interested in heroes from its beginning. It's the kind of movie where "going soft" is probably the best thing that could happen, and the big question is whether the movie earns it.

It's going to have a long way to get there, though it starts with the simple premise of a gunslinger escorting a party through hostile territory. The party being escorted is Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), who has been a prisoner in a New Mexico fort for the past seven years, and though once a fierce warrior, is now dying of cancer and has been granted clemency to return home to Montana with his family to die. The man chosen to lead the escort party is Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale), who knows the territory and speaks the language, but he and Yellow Hawk are old, bitter enemies. All involved know the route is dangerous, a fact underscored when they find Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike) in a homestead burnt out after a brutal attack by the Comanche.

That, of course, is just the shell of the movie; it doesn't get into how the group chosen to make up Blocker's party forms an intriguing cross-section of the U.S. Army, circa 1892, or how one must spend much of the movie turning the kindness Yellow Hawk's family shows Rosalie over in one's head, wondering if it's defensive or if it's messed up to question it. Or how Scott Cooper's screenplay (based upon a manuscript by the late Donald E. Stewart) in many ways seems to invert the way movies work, with its sharpest moments toward the beginning, particularly the scene where Blocker gets his assignment: It would be something very familiar, with Christian Bale playing the burnt-out veteran resisting being pushed aside (he will be mustered out after this mission) and Stephen Lang as the more moderate commanding officer, but Cooper sticks Bill Camp in there as a writer from back east, seemingly just to needle Blocker and bring out the worst in him, making the scene downright uncomfortable.

Full review at EFC

Dawson City: Frozen Time

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 7 January 2018 in the Brattle Theatre [(Some of) The Best of 2017, digital]

There are times when Dawson City: Frozen Time feels like a baited trap, a way for the filmmakers to are trying to use the fact that people who watch documentaries are, by and large, passionate about film as a medium, taking advantage of the fact that they've got a movie-history hook to talk about the long-term life of a boomtown. And if that's the goal, good job of it - many in the audience might not have sought out a more conventional film more directly focused on that topic, and it's not like filmmaker Bill Morrison doesn't give the audience a heaping helping of what they want as well.

The hook, as one may or may not know, is that because Dawson City was the end of a "circuit" early in the twentieth century (rather than thousands of prints or hard drives being produced so that a film could debut on the same day, the same prints would move from theaters in large cities to smaller towns in sequence), many prints wound up there and be warehoused - and eventually buried as landfill - because they were too expensive to ship back. These volatile nitrate prints would be forgotten until they were accidentally uncovered in the 1970s, by which time many of the films found were considered lost.

Many films about these events might see this story and wheel out Leonard Maltin, or film scholars who specialized in American cinema of the 1910s, talking about the careers of the people involved, and the painstaking process that goes into restoring the movies. Morrison, however, often finds himself more fascinated not by the films that got to this northern outpost but by how that outpost came to be and how its rapid growth and nearly-as-quick contraction created a place that would have a voracious appetite for film but also the circumstances where things could be easily lost. Morrison gives what often seems like more detail than necessary, a sometime bewildering flurry of names and indications of how often gambling halls and other institutions change hands, barely stopping to mention the frightening fact that the city's downtown business district burned down nine years in a row as a symbol of what sort of churn the place saw. As the timeline extends toward and past the period in which the films were buried, there's time to look at other parts of the life-cycle of this sort of town, from the corporatized, mechanized end of one way of life to the attempts to revive the image of it for tourists.

Full review at EFC

Silly & Supernatural from China: Goldbuster & Hanson and the Beast

I take notes in foreign movies so I remember character names later, and, brother, was I happy to see Goldbuster just lay everything right out in the first five minutes. Extra star for that, although docked half a star for not having any sort of English-language end credits whatsoever.

(Kidding. But both of those things can make things easier.)

Pretty good weekend for Chinese movies, although I'm kind of curious about the way Namiya seems to have just vanished from the theater - listings showed up Thursday night, but I don't see it on the marquee Saturday and Sunday, and Boston's not listed on the China Lion website. It looked like there just might be busted projectors, because it didn't seem likely The Shape of Water was sold out all day, but I dunno. Weird.

Maybe it will reappear next week, as the only preview for Asian movies right now is Monster Hunt 2. Heck, they put a 12 Strong preview in front of Hanson, and I'm not exactly sure audiences with a big expatriate Chinese population are the ones excited for a bit of rah-rah American patriotism.

Yao ling ling (Goldbuster)

* * * (out of four)
Seen on 6 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)

Theaters that show Chinese movies in North America have been running a preview for Goldbuster that called it the most anticipated comedy of the year, and I can't rightly say whether that's a riff on it hitting American theaters on the first weekend of 2018, a riff on it hitting Chinese theaters the last weekend of 2017, or some sincere display of excitement at comedienne Sandra Ng Kwun-yu making her directorial debut. It doesn't much matter, I suppose; it's a funny enough movie to justify whatever amount of anticipation is actually being thrown at it.

It opens with a delivery man bringing someone at the Prestige Gardens apartment complex their dinner, kind of sure he's being pranked - though in the middle of the city, there's excavation all around it, as a local developer (Shen Teng) aims to build something much more profitable, and his son (Yue Yun-peng) has hired a pair of screw-ups (Pan Bing-long & Xu Jun-cong) to scare the last dug-in tenants out. Trouble is, widower acupuncturist Wang Baojin (Zhang Yi) is actually hoping for his late wife to haunt him and his non-verbal son "Chicken Little" (Li Yihang), and webcam girl Ping (Papi Jiang) actually sees her hits go up when something spooky happens. The four other residents - "inventors" Benjamin (Pan Bin-long) & Angelina (Jian Jun-yan) and fugitive gangsters Ming (Alex Fong Chung-sun) & Ren (Francis Ng Chun-yu) - could do without, so they hire spiritualist Golden Ling (Sandra Ng) to get to the bottom of this. Of course, it's not like 400 yuan gets you a real exorcist...

Much of this plot is spelled out by the guys doing the haunting in the first few minutes, complete with visual aids, that is a pretty good indication of how Ng's moxie doesn't have time for anything but nonsense. Five minutes in, you know everything you need, and from that point on, it's slapstick, silliness, and some tiny scares (if you scare really easily). Goldbuster may be a Mandarin-language film made in Mainland China, but it's freewheeling Hong Kong lunacy, almost always ready to go for the gag even if it pushes the limits of how ridiculous a character might seem. At under ninety minutes, it probably could have put some of the unused scenes glimpsed in the end credits in, but Ng and her team choose to keep things moving rather than slow things down with kind-of-funny.

Full review at EFC

Er Dai Yao Jing (Hanson and the Beast)

* * * (out of four)
Seen on 6 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)

World-building and character-based fantasy can be a trap, and Hanson and the Beast accidentally shows how this can be: For much of its running time, it's an enjoyably goofy "mythological creatures/were-people live in our midst" thing more likely to go full screwball than make one worry too much about how it all works, and that's when is at its best. Start worrying too much about how all the piece fit together, and it threatens to become no fun at all, though the filmmakers put up a good fight when that danger rears its ugly head.

Before jumping back a day or so, the movie kicks off with a terrified "Hanson" Yuan Shuai (Feng Shaofeng) running through Shanghai in his underwear after what you'd think was an epically-terrible blind date. Hanson's been on a lot of those lately, trying to find a rich wife; as an aspiring actor he wound up deep in debt due to a predatory production scam that has gangsters trying to collect nearly three million yuan, and his father's room at the mental hospital won't pay for itself. The girl he meets at a bar is different, though - Bai Xianchu (Liu Yifei) is young, cute, and determined to marry him as she has apparently been nursing a crush on him for twenty years, since they were about nine. He doesn't remember her, but that's understandable - she's a yaojing, in her case an Arctic Silver Fox, and was in her animal form at the time. Unfortunately, yaojing aren't even supposed to be friends with humans, let alone lovers, and her every change in form sets off an alarm at the local Bureau of Transfiguration. Shanghai's lead agent, Hong Sicong (Guo Jingfei), does what he can to let Bai slide, but Commissioner Yun Zhonghe (Li Guangjie) is the type that would use Bai as an example to turn yaojing-kind more against humanity.

The movie spends its first half moving way too fast to be a semi-serious romantic comedy - as much as Bai is a sweet, seemingly-uninhibited knockout in her human form, things move way too fast to really seem like the foundation for true love. But that's fine; she's clearly sincere and isn't reacting to anything that's not in Hanson, even if it is buried under some annoying practicalities right now. It's a fun set-up for madcap adventures, which co-writer/director Xiao Yang supplies, and when it's just asking the audience to roll with its fantastical nuttiness, the movie is a ton of fun. That's especially true when the visual effects and fantasy premise suit each other; Hong Sicong and his team of sexy, fashionable yaojing could have leaped right out of the pages of an over-the-top manga and Xiao owns that rather than trying to make it serious or respectable.

Full review at EFC

The Post

I readily admit - I never really knew a whole lot about the Pentagon Papers - Watergate usurped it in the public eye fairly quickly, and though I believe the actual content of the papers outraged people, it's easier to maintain that sort of anger for something like Watergate: An obvious crime committed by individuals, uncovered through something like conventional police work. It doesn't speak of institutional rot or make law-and-order types uncomfortable. Look at today - as much as we're seeing a lot of people get agitated about Trump-Russia collusion, the "Panama Papers" never really broke through as a story, and there's not a whole lot of sympathy for whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. People want them to work within the system, even if the whole point of what they're leaking is that the regular order is systemically corrupt. You could transplant the arguments Jesse Plemons's character makes before the Supreme Court in this movie to the present very easily, although I suspect the filmmakers would rather the whole idea burrow into one's head rather than be given an obvious link.

Here's hoping that our brains aren't too frozen by this ridiculous winter to make that connection!

The Post

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 5 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #17 (first-run, DCP)

Traditional narratives can be undervalued because it's easy to get more obviously excited about the thing that does something one has never seen or does something familiar in a new way, and it can make one undervalue movies like Steven Spielberg's latest. The Post doesn't break new ground, and it doesn't necessarily reveal a hidden story, although its real-life plot would in many ways be usurped by events that happened later. It hits certain things with a heavier touch than it might, although that directness is arguably both part of the setting and part of the point. But execution is nearly flawless, and a good story well told is always welcome.

That it is a good story well told is to be expected - this is a Steven Spielberg film starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, with Spielberg's usual core group of composer John Williams, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and editor Michael Kahn in tow. It's a group of people who are very good at their jobs, and who know how to make movies that entertain an audience but have the sort of experience that the end result doesn't feel like it's reducing a complex situation to a simple one. This movie is focused, covering about a week where the leadership of The Washington Post, not yet considered a journalistic powerhouse, must choose whether or not to report on a massive leak about the past twenty-five years of American involvement in Vietnam, with the twin factors of the Nixon White House insisting the New York Times cease and desist publishing the same Pentagon Papers and the paper being in the middle of an initial public offering making it especially perilous. It's decorated with enjoyable details that never distract, communicating its ideas of how crucial transparency and freedom of the press are clearly while giving the audience easy entry.

It's got a few very nice performances. Streep could have easily pushed publisher Kay Graham toward being an ignorant dilettante, but she's much more interesting as a socialite who has principles but can be fuzzy on specifics at first. It's a performance of incredible warmth, and Streep does a tremendously impressive job of showing Kay creeping out of her comfort zone without making her look foolish, and confronting hard questions without losing her congenial, maternal air. There could be more friction between her and Hanks's editor Ben Bradlee, but there's a familiarity that makes them only so adversarial but ultimately closer in attitude than they may think. Bradlee himself is a role that fits Hanks like a glove; quick-witted, personable, and just prone enough to exasperation that he can occasionally break out the voice-cracking sarcasm. There's a terrific cadre of supporting cast members that almost invisibly bolster the film - the likes of Bob Odenkirk, Bruce Greenwood, Bradley Whitford, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Sarah Paulson (among several others) create a solidly believably world for Graham and Bradlee to inhabit, playing against them without opposing them.

Full review at EFC

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 5 January 2018 - 11 January 2018

Another post-Christmas week where not much is opening, but there's another theater opening too, this one the Kerasotes Showplace Icon in the Seaport District, near the Courthouse stop on the Silver Line. It's a fancy place, with the now-expected recliners, a full kitchen with in-seat ordering, 4K laser projection and Dolby 7.1 sound, and at least one "Icon-X" screen with Dolby Atmos. It's pricey and pitched to a picky clientele, discouraging kids and not allowing seating after the movie starts. I think it will eventually have ten screens, but six are open now, with The Shape of Water, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Pitch Perfect 3, All the Money in the World, and Molly's Game.

• There are a few new movies opening - or expanding - this week, with the most notable being The Post making it's first stops in the Boston area at Kendall Square and Boston Common. It's got a bit of a pedigree, with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks leading an all-star cast for director Steven Spielberg's story of how publishing the Pentagon Papers nearly destroyed The Washington Post. It will likely expand next weekend.
  
  With the burlesque cleared out, The Somerville Theatre picks up I, Tonya, while the Embassy adds Molly's Game and South Bay gets Lady Bird.
• It can't be a great sign that fourth film in a popular series is coming out in one of those weeks where studios dump less popular stuff, but that's what's happening with Insidious: The Last Key, once again sending me to IMDB to check that I've seen the Sinister movies but not the Insidious ones; this one has Lin Shaye's paranormal investigator dealing with a haunting in her own home. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  Boston Common also gets Hostiles, which opened elsewhere in December and expands further in a couple weeks. It's the latest from Crazy Heart and Black Mass director Scott Cooper, a western featuring Christian Bale as an Army captain escorting a party (including Wes Studi and Rosamund Pike) through Comanche territory.
  
  In one-or-two-offs, The Room is playing Fenway and Revere on Wednesday with UFO documentary Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a Deception at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Thursday. Revere also has the first of a couple screenings of Goodfellas on Thursday.
• Boston Common also has a lot of Chinese stuff playing, with Ex Files 3 and Youth hanging around for one matinee a day, and three other films opening, though none getting a full slate. Goldbuster is a Hong Kong comedy starring and directed by Sandra Ng, with holdouts in a building meant to be demolished now dealing with apparent hauntings on top of everything else. Hanson and the Beast is a Mandarin-language comic fantasy with Liu Yifei as a fox demon hiding out among humanity, with Feng Shaofeng also in the cast. There's also Namiya, a sentimental-looking tale whose previews showcase Karry Wang, Dilraba, and Dong Zijan but not the guy playing the owner of the general store where they gather, Jackie Chan.
  
  Apple Fresh Pond continues Tiger Zinda Hai, and also shows Kannada-language romantic comedy Chamak from Friday to Sunday. Starting on Tuesday, they give a lot of screen-time to Agnyaathavaasi (Prince in Exile), a subtitled Telugu-language film in which a billionaire's heir goes undercover in the family business to solve his father's murder. There may not be subtitles for Telugu-language action flick Jai Simha and Tamil-language heist movie Thaanaa (both opening Thursday).
• The Brattle Theatre finishes the Refreshed, Renewed, Restored series with two days of new DCPs: Separate shows of "No Maps on My Taps" & "About Tap" and Hallelujah the Hills on Friday, a special matinee of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad on Saturday, and then a double feature of Maigret Sets a Trap & Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case.
  
  After that, they switch to more recent fare with first few days of (Some of) The Best of 2017, kicking off with a double feature of Wonderstruck & Dawson City: Frozen Time on Sunday. Monday is a single feature of Get Out, and then an appropriate pairing of Columbus & After the Storm on Tuesday. Wednesday has The Ornithologist in the evening and a late-ish show of Girls' Trip. The first leg finishes with mother! on Thursday, but there's still another week after that.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre starts a month of cold-weather midnights this weekend a 35mm print of The Abominable Snowman on Friday night, and the first of four weekly screenings of The Shining (also on 35mm) on Saturday.
  
  They also have two Science On Screen shows this week: A Junior presentation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with children's book author Melissa Stewart talking about chocolate on Saturday morning and BU actuarial scientists Lois K. Horwitz & Hal Tepfer introducing a 35mm print of Double Indemnity on Monday evening. Open Screen is Tuesday, and the 70mm run of Phantom Thread starts on Thursday.
• The Museum of Fine Arts gives most of their schedule over to the Boston Festival of Films from Iran, with screenings of Blockage (Friday/Saturday), Simulation (Saturday), Disappearance (Sunday/Wednesday), Oscar submission Breath (Sunday/Thursday), Negar (Wednesday), and roto-animated Tehran Taboo (Thursday).
  
  There's also a Friday matinee ofCanaletto and the Art of Venice, and that day ends with their first monthly "On the Fringe" show of 2018 (this year's series focusing on indie films of the 1990s), Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.
• BPM (Beats per Minute) hits CinemaSalem about a month before the Brattle, so if that's your local place or you can't wait to see this history of the early days of ACT UP, hie thee to their 18-person room.

New Spielberg? Yep, down for that, and Hostiles, some Chinese stuff, finally catching All the Money in the World, Lady Bird, Dawson City and Girls Trip.

Same Studio, Believe It or Not: Ex Files 3: Return of the Exes & Molly's Game

It's not exactly news these days that Chinese companies are looking to enter the American movie industry (and vice versa), but seeing the "H. Brothers" logos before both of these movies back to back was kind of amusing, especially since the one before Ex Files was the full-on Chinese version, with bright colors and dragon patterns and lots of big gear-turning motion, while the one before Molly's Game was pretty much a black screen with Chinese characters below the English. Which makes me wonder why they went simple - if you're not pretending the H stands for "Howard" or something other than "Huayi", why aren't you going with the cool one?

I meant to have the order on these flipped, starting with Molly and then doing Ex Files just so that I could say I started 2018 off with a movie I really looked forward to rather than just being cheap and fitting the cheap pre-noon movie at an AMC in before using MoviePass at another one. Unfortunately, the T is running pretty slow and with longer times between Red Line trains right now, so it was pretty clear I wasn't getting to the 11:30am at Fenway and thus had to go with the 11:45 at Boston Common. Felt kind of bad about not starting the year off on the expected high note, so I guess it's fortunate that the second faded in my esteem a bit as I thought about it.

Ah, well. Back to hiding out in the apartment because it's cold.

Qian Ren 3: Yan Zhi Da Zuo Zhan (Ex Files 3: The Return of the Exes)

* * (out of four)
Seen on 1 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)

Maybe, if I had been able to stream the first Ex Files movie before seeing the second a couple years ago (a thing I usually at least try to do before a sequel pops up in local theaters), I would have enjoyed this more, and not just for the sake of familiarity. Quite the opposite, in fact - it was the presumption of any sort of connection between the films beyond the people involved and some character names that led to my disappointment. I don't know that looking at this as an anthology series makes the third entry a whole lot better, but it does make it just a sort of bland break-up movie, not something which breaks previous entries to no positive end.

As it opens, entrepreneur Meng Yun (Han Geng) and Lu Jia ("Kelly" Yu Wen-wen), his girlfriend of five years, are fighting, for what's not exactly the first time. Lu Jia means it, though, leaving the apartment to crash with her friend Ding Dian (Xeng Mengxue). Dian has been with Meng Yun's business partner and best friend Yu Fei ("Ryan" Zheng Kai) for a couple of years, and their relationship winds up getting dragged down with their friends'. Initially, the ladies mope while the guys go out to enjoy their new bachelorhood, but while Yu Fei and Ding Dian keep finding excuses to meet for "closure", Meng Yun and Lu Jia each seem to be waiting for the other to make the first move toward reconciliation.

"Waiting" isn't exactly the most exciting thing to build a movie around, especially since this one is already kind of on shaky ground from it's opening where both Meng Yun and Lu Jia are making claims about how much harder men or women have it. The filmmakers edit it nicely to make it play out like an argument even though they're eventually shown to just be complaining to Yu Fei and Ding Dian, but it winds up playing as the most generic griping imaginable. The steps they wind up going through are also not terribly exciting - the guys start hitting the clubs, Lu Jia goes on the beach vacation Meng Yun promised but never delivered on by herself - to the point where, when another character points out that these are the known stages of how men and women deal with the aftermath of a breakup, a viewer may be inclined to nod and ask when the less-predictable bits are coming.

Full review at EFC

Molly's Game

* * * (out of four)
Seen on 1 January 2018 in Regal Fenway #11 (first-run, DCP)

Aaron Sorkin is a guy known for using a lot of words as a writer, and watching Molly's Game, his first film as a director, I think there are two separate reasons. He likes process and stories, and when he comes upon ones that interest him, he can't stop talking; he's fascinated. But try to get into what his characters feel, and he's roundabout, pecking at the borders until he finally gets inside. It's worked for him - it gives directors and actors a lot to work with and as much to fall back on - but that assumes good collaborators, and he's not a great partner for himself yet.

Here, he's telling the story of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), an Olympic-class skier who suffered a (second) horrific injury during trials, who opted to take a year off before starting law school, landing in Los Angeles, landing a gig as the personal assistant to a scuzzy producer (Dean Keith), which includes helping him run his weekly high-stakes poker game. A quick study, she's soon able to make it her poker game with the help of a high-rolling movie star (Michael Cera), but even though she tries to keep things above board, that much money flowing through something only half-legal, it's no surprise that she's eventually the target of an FBI investigation, her assets seized and lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) wondering if she's as honest as she seems - and if she is, it's unlikely she can pay her bill.

There is certainly plenty of talent in front of the camera in this movie; Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba take those big mouthfuls Sorkin gives them and spit out smart, driven characters who have solid, decent centers without seeming plain or sanctimonious. Chastain in particular is fun to watch as the title character's flashbacks inch forward; Molly's inherent smarts become more worldly and applied, even as her wardrobe choices tend to distract from that. It's a tricky performance, a bunch of amorality and ego that's just got to be just friendly enough to push the audience away. Elba makes a nice complement to her, good at being hesitant without looking indecisive, carrying a sort of paternal attitude over from scenes with his on-screen daughter but not ever making Jaffey seem to talk down to his client. Kevin Costner leads a cast of quality work in smaller roles, his late-career snarl a fine fit for Molly's demanding father.

Full review at EFC

This Week In Tickets: 25 December 2017 - 31 December 2017

If I make the New Year's Resolution to try and maintain this weekly round-up of what I've seen again this year, should I technically start today (1 January), or after that first week? It'd probably look cleaner if I went for next week, but more committed this way. Soooo...



Merry Christmas! As usual, mine involved traveling to Maine because that's where the brothers with the cute little girls live, and the brothers with the adorable nieces control where holiday gatherings happen. I made my way back to Boston on Tuesday morning, and then once I'd put by Christmas loot away, it was time to finally check out the new multiplex in South Bay with The Greatest Showman and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The verdicts: Acceptable theater, disappointing musical, sci-fi action that holds up to repeated viewings.

After that, it was too darn cold to leave the house once I'd already arrived home from work (I put doing laundry off until I could do it in sweet 20-degree-Fahrenheit daylight temperatures on Saturday), which made Friday a good night to start drilling into a pile of unwatched discs with Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions. Pretty good, although it won't be getting a blog post until that other Japanese movie I'd been intending to watch can be paired with it.

I did venture out on Saturday evening to catch The Liquidator, one of the weekend's two not-very-good Chinese releases, although it's certainly got a fair amount of potential. Sunday gave me the opportunity to end the week and year on a high note, as the Brattle closed out their Edith Head tribute with three of the movies she worked on with Alfred Hitchock. I saw the last two - Notorious and To Catch a Thief. Both are near-perfect.

And then, I came home and rang in the new year taping all those ticket stubs into the planner. I suppose I could work backwards and assemble these for the whole year, but, honestly, I've got a whole bunch of other projects like that. Instead, let me point you to my Letterboxd profile which has basically functioned as this part of the blog in real-time since March 2017, probably the longest I've kept it updating regularly. Indeed, you'll notice the reviews below are copied, pasted, and edited from there, although here is where you get them in a form that's not just raw "swiping around on the phone on the subway afterward" form.

Notorious

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Edith Head: Queen of Seam, 35mm)

This may not quite the "in too deep" movie from which all others are descended - there have been stories about people going undercover and over their heads forever - but it certainly feels like Hitchcock and Ben Hecht created a blueprint that other filmmakers couldn't help but follow because of its perfection, even when they weren't irretrievably lifting the plot. It's a perfect machine of a movie, not a piece out of place. Even though its story may seem simple and unadorned in the aftermath of seventy years of films that have filled the details out and added twists and layers onto the story, it doesn't feel primitive so much as primal.

More than many spy movies to come after it, Notorious perfectly captures the casual cruelty and blinkered pragmatism of the field, with the perfect central irony being that the person who cares about Ingrid Bergman's Alicia is much more cruel than the ones who don't. The people actually running the mission seem almost unaware of what they're asking, detached in a way that Cary Grant's Devlin finds impossible, and his lashing out is thus all the more hurtful. The sharp inhumanity of it makes the eventual confession of love even more tender and powerful, a scene Hitchcock, Bergman, and Cary Grant handle masterfully. It makes the lean efficiency all the more useful come the end, as there's no gear-shifting in a finale that moves from horrific cold-bloodedness to guileless romance to cold fury.

To Catch a Thief

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Edith Head: Queen of Seam, 35mm)

Every time I see this, I'm reminded anew just what a wonderfully odd and unique part of both Alfred Hitchcock's and Grace Kelly's filmographies it is. Not only is it about as laid-back as you can imagine Hitchcock being - the story is kind of a lot of spinning in place to get to the final rooftop chase - but it's really the only time Kelly has really seemed sexy on screen, someone who understands her attractiveness and doesn't mind using it as an asset, rather than this goddess to be admired in hopes of finding favor. She's a delight, and it's a shame she didn't do it more often in her short career.

The lack of plot doesn't really bother in part because it's an exceptionally enjoyable Technicolor trip to France, a joyous delight to look at, especially in 35mm. Not a perfect print, but when it's good, it's a reminder of why so many people prefer film to digital (even if I could probably be convinced to splurge on remastered 4K discs if Universal went there). Really, probably the only thing that keeps it from perfection is a scene of Cary Grant apparently slapping a panicking woman unconscious. What the heck, old movies?

Full review (from a Hitchcock series) on EFC.

The Liquidator

Fair warning: I may be judging this film too harshly in part because I missed a lot of dialogue in roughly the first twenty minutes. For all that I see a lot of complaints that AMC Boston Common doesn't matte their screens properly, they did here, both on the projector and by putting curtains up in front of the screen. The trouble was, the subtitles were apparently formatted for a 1.85:1 film rather than a 2.39:1, which meant that while the Chinese-language titles were readable, the English-language ones were cut off so you could only see the top few pixels, which can make the dialogue hard to extrapolate. I ran out to tell the usher during the opening credits, got back in time for the film proper to start, but it took another ten minutes or so for the projector to reset and the curtain to drop.

So, uh, sorry everybody about that - I normally support having films properly matted as much as any of you, but I gotta be able to follow the story. Also, I know this was only the third show, and maybe the first where it was a problem since it's sharing a screen, but, c'mon, am I really the only non-Chinese person in the Boston area seeing these movies? No-one else felt the need to bring it up? I know this one isn't very good, but c'mon!

On top of that, I kind of wonder if I would have seen this differently if Guilty of Mind had played Boston back in August. Different actors playing all the parts, but at least when this one mentioned Fang Mu, I would have been ready for what was coming.

Xin Li Zui Zhi Cheng Shi Zhi Guang (The Liquidator)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen on 30 December 2017 in AMC Boston Common #5 (first-run, DCP)

I suspect that most of us outside China will start The Liquidator with a little bit of a misapprehension - not being familiar with novelist Lei Mi's "Evil Minds" novels (this film is based on City of Light), we'll see the opening bits, presume that the two Jiangbin City cops introduced are going to be roughly equal partners, and then be disappointed when it turns out not to be the case - the focus shifts to one character rather drastically. Maybe knowing that Fang Mu is the main character of the series shifts expectations somewhat, although it still gets kind of rough taking that into account.

It opens with detective Mi Nan (Ceclia Liu Shishi) chasing one suspect down and then investigating a bizarre crime scene, one which appears to fit into the pattern of a serial killer murdering some of the city's most despised people. That sort of pathology gets her referred to Fang Mu (Deng Chao), a former cop now employed as a criminal psychologist. He soon discovers that the killer, who calls himself "Light of the City" and has begun soliciting public opinion on message boards, is signing his crime scenes in ways that point directly at Fang Mu. And it's got to be more than a coincidence that, when he starts looking up old classmates, Jiang Ya (Ethan Juan Ching-tien) has already formed a connection with Fang's foster daughter Liao Yafan ("Vicky" Chen Wen Qi)?

That screenwriter/director Xu Jizhou introduces Mi Nan first and then spends the rest of the movie aggressively sidelining her is not just a peculiar choice, it's one that is executed in such a way as to make a viewer wonder why she was even in the movie in the first place. Introduced as the sort of sleek, determined lady cop who can run down a fleeing suspect every bit as well as her male peers that one expects to see in Hong Kong action movies more than mainland thrillers, she is also supposedly a forensics expert, but it's not long before Fang Mu is not just complementing her skill set but doing all of her jobs better than she does. It's frustrating to watch; Liu Shishi delivers a charismatic performance and the former dancer makes action work at least as well as anybody else in the film, but she's reduced from an active participant to the Watson that the resident genius explains things (with a bit of implied opposites-attract romantic chemistry) to barely present.

Full review at EFC

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 29 December 2017 - 4 January 2018

If you've already seen everything you want to and are waiting for some new releases… Well, I hope you like Chinese and/or are up for rep stuff instead. The mainstream multiplexes are shuffling screens a little, but mostly letting the big Christmas openers ride.

• So, aside from Molly's Game opening at Fenway, Darkest Hour and The Shape of Water expanding to the Capitol, I, Tonya playing The West Newton Cinema, and the Somerville (mostly) getting back up to full-capacity now that the burlesque only has a New Year's Eve show left, the new stuff is Boston Common opening The Liquidator, an action film starring Deng Chao and Cecilia Liu Shishi as cops hunting a serial killer (Ethan Juan Jing-tien) who targets those acquitted of a crime, though that only for evening shows. China Lion also claims that Ex Files 3: Return of the Exes will open there, although it's not showing up on the theater's website. That's in addition to Youth continuing for a third week.
• The Brattle Theatre concludes their The Queen of Seam: Edith Head in Hollywood this weekend, with a double feature of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance & The Sting on Friday (both 35mm) and one of Roman Holiday and Sabrina on Saturday. The series also includes Head's last film, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, before winding up in grand style with a 35mm Head & Hitchcock triple feature on Sunday, featuring Vertigo, Notorious, and To Catch a Thief.
  
  Monday is New Year's Day, and that means it's time for the annual Marx Brothers Marathon, with A Day at the Races, Go West, Room Service (featuring a young Lucille Ball!), and A Night at the Opera lined up back to back on 35mm film. After that, they've got a Refreshed, Renewed, Restored series of films that got new, cleaned-up DCP files recently, with double features of The Awful Truth & Twentieth Century (Tuesday) and the odd pairing of James Whale's The Old Dark House & George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (Wednesday & Thursday), with the series continuing into next weekend.
• The end of the December calendar means the end of The Museum of Fine Arts's Harry Dean Stanton: Say Something True, but it concludes with a nice weekend of One From the Heart (Friday on 35mm), Alien (Friday/Sunday on 35mm), Christine (Saturday on 35mm), Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction (Saturday), Lucky (Saturday), and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Sunday).
  
  They start their January 2018 program on Wednesday with Ruben Ostlund's art-world satire The Square, as well as the first of several "Exhibition on Screen" shows of Canaletto and the Art of Venice (which also plays Thursday). Thursday is also the first night of their Festival of Films From Iran, which opens with Abed Abest's art-house thriller Simulation.
• The Boston Underground Film Festival has their monthly "Dispatches from the Underground" show in the The Somerville Theatre's micro-cinema on Thursday the 4th, when they'll welcome Guaranteed Video for a night of their short films (including a new one) and other surprises.
• The Regent Theatre has their final vacation sing-along-shows of Mary Poppins Friday morning and White Christmas that afternoon, and also has encore screenings of two "Kid Flix" short packages from the New York Children's Film Festival on Saturday morning.
• CinemaSalem is getting good stuff in their screening room even before it hits metro Boston, with Thelma, Joachim Trier's pretty darn good coming-of-age horror film playing there from Friday the 29th to Thursday the 4th.
  
  
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre not only sticks with last week's schedule, they're not even having midnights this weekend. The only special presentation is a preview of Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread on 70mm film Saturday night, and that may already be sold out.

So, The Liquidators, catching up with Lady Bird, Molly's Game, and All the Money in the World, and probably at least two Hitchcock/Heads.