That construction in front of the Kendall Square theater is just never going to be done, is it? I feel like I've been going there via the parking garage for a full year now.
I was mildly surprised while writing up the "Next Week" entry on Thursday night to see that this was the new one from the director of Bullhead; that seemed like it was a big enough deal when it came out to be something that would get this more attention, although maybe that was just my perspective: It came out of nowhere at Fantasia, got picked up by Drafthouse Films at a point where a lot of the online film community was paying attention to them and boosting anything connected to the Drafthouse empire without a whole lot of question, getting nominated for Best Foreign Language Film when a lot of the conventional wisdom was that Belgium would submit the latest from the Dardenne Brothers. It's easy for a director to fade from consciousness, though, when it takes a few years to get a movie made and there was a Hollywood movie that didn't set the world on fire in-between.
Which is a bummer; even if Racer isn't the movie Bullhead is, it's interesting, and worth an evening or afternoon now that the Kenmore and other Landmark theaters are on board with MoviePass. It's interesting to see how director Michael Roksam and star Matthias Schoenaerts are playing with images of masculinity - Jacky was a steroid-fueled beast who was effectively gelded by what he became in their first movie, while Gigi seems more virile and attractive for how he is decent and occasionally afraid here. At the very least, it's worth seeing what they come up with the next time they work together.
Le Fidèle (Racer and the Jailbird)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2018 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Director Michaël R. Roskam and actor Matthias Schoenaerts made a heck of an impression with Bullhead, enough that the pair returning to Belgium after making the pretty-good The Drop in America is at least worthy of some attention. Racer and the Jailbird is not the gritty-but-exciting seventies throwback that its English-language title might suggest; French title "Le Fidèle" is closer to what Roskam and his collaborators are going for. Either way, it's not quite the movie it could have been, though the cast makes it worth a look.
The jailbird is Gino "Gigi" Vanoirbeek (Schoenaerts), who made his best friends in juvie and is still robbing banks with them decades later. Bénédicte "Bibi" Delhany (Adèle Exarchopoulos) works for the family's construction business, but her true passion is auto racing. They meet at one of Bibi's races, Gigi claiming to be in automobile imports, and hit it off right away. They soon go close enough that Gigi is starting to think in terms of getting out after the next job, but those always have something go disastrously wrong.
They don't go disastrously wrong in a way that involves Bibi having to drive the getaway car, which would be a bit disappointing even if "drives a car well" wasn't the first thing the audience learned about Bibi. Roskam and co-writers Thomas Bidegain & Noé Debré build what would be a nifty straight crime movie if that was the angle they were going, in that even though the two main jobs in the movie are kind of brute force attacks without much prep-work shown, there's still a thrill to watching them, even with some of the more important events happening off-screen. Roksam stages this material well enough so that the audience doesn't have doubts when Gigi says that what he does is exciting and that he's good at it, even if that's not really the thrust of the movie.
Full review on EFC
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Thursday, May 10, 2018
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 11 May 2018 - 17 May 2018
It's Mother's Day this weekend, and since distributors probably figure Mom isn't terribly interested in The Avengers, they'll be offering the animated films of Masaaki Yuasa as counterprogramming.
I'm looking at Racer and the Jailbird, Breaking In, some catch-up, and maybe checking the Yuasa films out on the big screen again. Bummer they weren't scheduled in a way that's really conducive to a cross-town double feature.
- I kid - both films opening in the multiplexes (and more besides) are focused on moms and being advertised as such. In Breaking In, the mother in question is played by Gabrielle Union, who has been locked outside the house she inherited while her kids are taken hostage and that will not stand. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. Those looking for something more comedic might opt for Life of the Party, with Melissa McCarthy playing a mother who goes back to college to finish her degree - naturally, the same one her daughter attends. That plays the Capitol, Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
There are TCM classic screenings of Sunset Boulevard at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Sunday and Wednesday, with Revere also screening Titanic Sunday afternoon. Fenway and Revere have documentary American Dream: Detroit on Tuesday (presented by Michael Bolton, which is surely a draw). A Wrinkle in Time returns to a number of screens this weekend, and come Thursday, many of the places opening Deadpool 2 will have a double feature of both it and its predecessor. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre and Kendall Square will be opening Let the Sunshine In, a new romantic comedy featuring Juliette Binoche as a divorcee looking for love but finding few men up to her fairly reasonable standards.
Mother's Day is cheekily celebrated with the weekend's midnights - a 35mm print of Larry Cohen's It's Alive on Friday night and one of Rosemary's Baby on Saturday. They also warm up the 35mm projector for Tuesday's "Off the Couch" screening of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which is doubly neat - that series is usually tied to a new release, but going with a repertory film means it can be free for Coolidge members. - Kendall Square also has a one-week booking of Racer and the Jailbird, which reunites Matthias Schoenaerts with his Bullhead director Michael R. Roskam for a romance between a gangster and a driver which apparently features some great automotive action.
Also opening is one of the two Masaaki Yuasa films that played Fantasia last year, the family-friendly but still kind of trippy Lu Over the Wall, in which a mermaid joins the new kid's band after their music gives her feet with which to dance. In a break from the usual practice, the subtitled shows get the good early-afternoon and evening slots, with dubbed shows at 4:15pm and 9:40pm. Those that like their music heavy metal and played in a war zone may instead opt to catch Scream for Me Sarajevo, which plays one show Tuesday night. - The Brattle Theatre mixes a little bit of all those things together this weekend, with the main attraction being Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, which runs through Monday and presents Sainte Jeanne's story as a rock & roll musical that starts when she is eight years old. It doesn't get 9:30pm shows, though, as Masaaki Yuasa's breakout film, Mind Game, returns to their screen for late shows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Sunday also features the theater's traditional Mother's Day screening of Psycho (on 35mm), and the rest of the week features some different one-offs: Trash Night on Tuesday, Abbas Kiarostami's final film 24 Frames on Wednesday, and Saint Snow Presents LoveLive! Sunshine!! Hakodate Unit Carnival - which I'm sure means something to the anime fans, on Thursday. - It's a busy weekend for Indian film at Apple Fresh Pond, which continues Hindi comedy 102 Not Out and biography Mahanathi while opening a couple more: Irumbu Thirai is a computer-crime film from the Tamil-speaking region, while Hindi-language thriller Raazi (which also opens at Fenway) features Alia Bhatt as an Indian spy married to a Pakistani man during the Indo-Pakistan war.
Over at Boston Common, Chinese film fans can celebrate Mother's Day with I Am Your Mom, which features Yan Ni as the eccentric mother whose daughter (Zou Yuanqing) soon misses her after going off to art college. - The Harvard Film Archive wraps their spring program with some one-offs, although Friday night's La Terra Trema - presented as part of their ongoing "Cinema of Resistance" program with an introduction by Hugh Mayo - seems to also function as a preview of a summer Luchino Visconti retrospective, as does the Sunday and Monday evening screenings of Sandra. In between, there's a free screening of Wim Wenders's 5-hour Until the End of the World to wrap up his retrospective on Saturday afternoon and an encore screening of Japanese musical The Eagle and the Hawk at 4pm on Sunday.
- The Museum of Fine Arts is the last stop for National Center for Jewish Film's Annual Film Festival, with Friday's screenings already sold out but tickets still available for Sunday's "Mother's Day Event Grand Slam" with filmmaker Seth Kramer there to support Heading Home, a documentary about Israel's World Baseball Classic team.
Saturday features a screening of Partners, a documentary by Henry Horenstein that complements his "(un)expected families" exhibit at the museum. Documentary Circle Up plays Saturday and Sunday, with Saturday's show featuring a post-film panel discussion including the filmmaker and two of the films subjects. Another documentary, In the Intense Now, plays Wednesday and Thursday, and is cut together from amateur footage of tumultuous moments around the globe in the late 1960s. Wednesday also marks the start of a Christopher Nolan series, with a 35mm print of his debut Following. - Little Pink House slides from the Kendall to The Somerville Theatre this weekend, but they also kick off their 2018 "Silents, Please!" schedule on Sunday with a 35mm print of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., with Jeff Rapsis on the organ. Jeff then brings his keyboard up Mass Ave to accompany The Black Pirate, a silent Technicolor adventure starring Douglas Fairbanks, at The Capitol on Thursday. In between, the Somerville has four presentations of films made during the recent 48 Hour Film Project on Monday and Tuesday.
- Belmont World Film wraps their spring series at Studio Cinema on Monday evening with Djam, in which a pair of young women, one French and one Greek, must follow a refugee trail through Turkey. Like the first film of the series, the finale has a dinner attached (featuring Greek cuisine), although reservations must be made by the end of the day Friday.
- I figured Nothing to Lose would be done after a one-off show at Fresh Pond, but that was apparently just a preview. The self-financed biography of a Brazilian evangelist opens at Fresh Pond, The West Newton Cinema, and Revere this weekend.
- CinemaSalem has the new one by L'Auberge Espagnole trilogy director Cedric Klapisch, Back to Burgundy; it features a scattered set of siblings trying to save the family vineyard after their father dies and leaves them with major inheritance tax to pay.
I'm looking at Racer and the Jailbird, Breaking In, some catch-up, and maybe checking the Yuasa films out on the big screen again. Bummer they weren't scheduled in a way that's really conducive to a cross-town double feature.
Boston Underground Film Festival 2018.05: "The Ghost in You", MexMan, Tigers Are Not Afraid, and Good Manners
BUFF can fill a weekend up, and staying up for the midnight secret screening, so I was just not making it to the noon presentation of "Something Wicked This Way Comes", which in the couple years since Wicked Bird Media showed a promo reel at the 2015 Etheria Film Night has apparently transformed from a documentary feature to a web series, probably a better format for it. I woke up early enough to make a decision between the animated shorts and the feature Daha, and went with the shorts.
The four filmmakers there this year were Kristin Pearson ("Sugar"), Eric Ko ("Divided by Blue"), Cameron Stetz ("4th House"), and Natalie Vinciguerra ("The Shepherd"). I'd like to talk about their films more, but it's been a month, and to tell the truth, it was not necessarily the group I expected, more the experimental and meditative side of underground than the over-the-top and wacky one. Interesting direction to go, but I only wound up having strong feelings about one, "The Burden".
Next up was Josh Polon (left) to talk about his film MexMan, a neat documentary about a filmmaker who got some interest in making a feature from his student film but… Well, he wasn't ready, and I wonder a bit if not being ready then has hurt his chances on other projects since then. It's a nice, well-balanced film, with Polon talking about how there was a lot of consideration of presenting certain people as antagonists versus villains.
Last guest of the festival is Issa Lopez (left), here carrying Estrella's stuffed animal, saying that she never figured to be the lady who brought something like that to festivals and appearances, but people soon started asking about it, so…
She also had one of the more amusing stories of how circumstances can change independent or low-budget films, because the script initially specified that the drug lord in the movie had a zebra, but the producers could not find one near where they were shooting. They could find a hippopotamus, but that was not going to be something she could easily work into the movie - hippos are huge and their jaw can absolutely destroy you, but they're not exactly mobile and cinematic outside the water. That's when they found out they could get a tiger, at which point Lopez goes oooooh, of course…
Nifty Q&A all around; she seemed much more interested in talking about the movie and what it was saying rather than just relating funny on-set stories than is typical. Not to the point of dictating what she thought and therefore you should think to, but not pretending that everything came out of her head fully-formed but completely open to interpretation the way so many filmmakers do.
Nobody came to Boston from Brazil for Good Manners, and I was ready to drop rather than go to any sort of awards party (keeping a 50-odd-festival streak of not doing so alive!). So my friends and I headed home, went to work the next day, and told everybody who asked what we were up to that this remains one of the best film events to hit the Boston area on a yearly basis.
"Min börda" ("The Burden")
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: The Ghost in You; digital)
A month's worth of distance before actually writing these reviews makes "The Burden" stand out from the rest of the package even more, not so much because it differs from the rest of the shorts in tone (it was a surprisingly melancholy, detached-feeling program), but because stills from it would soon be used to advertise a kid-friendly shorts program that played a couple spots in the area over the next couple weeks. It seems like it would be unconventional in both spots.
It's kind of a fascinating kind of weird, though, a stop-motion picture set in the various parts of a suburban sprawl, with gigantic supermarkets, cafeterias, call-centers, and residential hotels, populated by anthropomorphic animals who sing Swedish songs of longing. It's beautiful, though, reveling in how some things don't fit - the fish in the hotel, the rats cleaning the tables - and sneaking bits of hope and dreams in where you might not expect it. The songs are simple and create a mood that holds up for the length of the short but still has room for variation.
Are the kids who see it in that other program really going to pick up on the sense of isolation and lack of identity that those spaces create, separated from the rest of the world? Probably not. But they can enjoy the singing fish, dancing rats, and frustrated orangutans while maybe grasping that animation can be used for something more than slapstick and adventure.
MexMan
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
There's an obvious comment to be made about how you see the producers in MexMan as antagonists or villains based on your own age and experience, but it's probably an important part of how people are going to approach this documentary about a man trying to make a feature version of his student film. It's equal parts being changed by his enthusiasm and alarmed by the mania, to an even greater degree than is usual with scrappy young artists. Documentary director Josh Polon finds a nice balance, fortunately, and even if you can easily see where it's going to wind up, it's at least an entertaining trip.
The young man in question is one Germán Alonso, a young Mexican man who has been doing stop-motion animation since he was a kid before attending film school at the University of California, where he made an eye-catching comedic superhero short, "MexMan", as his graduation thesis project. It caught the eye of producer Moctezuma Esparza, who was interested in developing it as a feature, but who wanted Alonso to pass some smaller tests before handing him the reins to a feature: Film an action-oriented sequence within three months, have a completed script in six. In the meantime, he's got an ambitious side project - a graphic novel made from his stop-motion marionettes meant to declare his love for the girl he's had a crush on since they were teenagers.
The audience doesn't see this woman during the film despite the fact that a number of folks with whom Germán has likely burned bridges with but good were willing to sign a release, and a savvy documentary watcher is likely to pick up on that early. Polon recognizes this and makes interesting use of that absence - as much as watching Germán work on this project almost certainly makes for a more visually interesting movie than the less dynamic processes of screenwriting and pre-production, it gets to the heart of both Germán's best and worst properties: You see the passion and the creativity, but also the extent to which he'll completely discount other voices or have severe issues with prioritization.
That's a trade-off that gets thrown around with artists a lot, often to the point of toxicity, but Polon does what appears to be a fair job of cutting the film to put Germán in a particular light. It's often been traditional to draw a straight line between creative genius and irresponsibility, but this film seldom gets close to that argument; the filmmakers are far more likely to frame things in terms of being worried that Germán will spin out of control. There's a strong feeling that what the audience is seeing of the guy is genuine rather than spun, with even the moments of him addressing the camera directly are seldom staged interviews so much as asides while Polon films him working or doing other things.
Germán is also a talented filmmaker in his own right, as becomes clear once the documentary gets to shooting the "Shock and Awe" action short; that leg of the film would be a neat look at making something that looks big and slick without a lot of resources even without the other drama going on, but it's also a turning point in one of the other main threads of the movie, as the classmates who came aboard as producers of the feature early attempt to assert more control. There's a version of this movie to be made where the Soper Brothers get presented more as villains - they are well-off white guys trying to take ownership of the Mexican superhero by a Mexican creator - but the cut Polon and co-writer/editor Alex MacKenzie assemble can't help but find them, if not sympathetic, but in a position one can understand, as seeing a return on their time and effort is dependent on a guy who, while quite likable, seems like kind of a flake.
That's why, of the three MexMan projects undertaken, only the student film made it to the finish line as intended. Then again, it's entirely possible that this documentary is a better film than the conventional behind-the-scenes materials it started as and what Germán Alonso could have made at the time combined. It's at least one of the more complete documents of one of the hundreds of projects that don't quite come together for every one that does.
(Formerly at EFC)
"Petul"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
I feel a bit like I'm missing the point every time I watch something at BUFF or a similar event and think that it could probably use, say, 30% less violence, but that's where I wind up finding myself with "Petul": It's got style, quality visual effects work/animation, excellent combination of fantasy and reality so that one enhances the other, and, yes, the sort of shocking violence that leaves an impact on the viewer. It just kind of keeps going with the last bit, getting some serious diminishing returns.
It's still a heck of a nifty little short, though, with a T-rex-legged rodent standing out from among the box of mice that a cruel family is going to us for bizarre drug testing or the like the same way that a sad, kind-hearted girl (Lola Alvarez) stands out from her family. Filmmaker Charles Cheval does something a little unusual with this arrangement, not necessarily giving the animals human intelligence or personality so much as simplifying his human characters to bring them closer to the animals from the other direction, with François Marin-Ricci's head of the family a roaring monster and Quentin Herlemont's brother-figure engaging in some behavior that may be nonsensical but is pretty clearly not good. The mice, at least, seem like they may have a desperate chance of escape, and Cheval stages their attempts impressively, even if many are gruesomely thwarted. There's just enough going on with the humans to keep it from being abstract.
Cheval and his team do neat things here, and the point where nasty violence being effective and it being something that makes one turn away (or, worse, get bored) is different for everyone. Writing about it later, I'm inclined to praise how well "Petul" was put together even if I felt some relief at it being over at the time.
Vuelven (Tigers Are Not Afraid)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
Movies like Tigers Are Not Afraid have a tendency to start deconstructing themselves before the very first scene, and this one is no different, with narration about fairy tales and magic, hints that Estrella (Paola Lara) may be embellishing the tale as she tells it and tries to understand it. This is maybe not literal, filmmaker Issa López seems to be saying, but it's certainly how things feel to someone like Estrella, so let's try to both avoid picking nits while also thinking about why she'll approach it this this way. It can be a transparent gambit, though López's film rises well above that.
Estrella is writing a fairy tale when a gunfight between narco gangs spills over into her school, and it seems like she's been somewhat sheltered from her city's violence until then. This day, though, she goes home to find her mother not there, and soon goes out looking. She falls in with a group of orphaned boys with "El Shine" (Juan Ramón López) as their de facto leader. The group has a target on their back, in part because Estrella doesn't really know how to survive on the street, and in part because Shine has picked the pocket of gangster Savando "El Chino" (Tenoch Huerta), leaving with not just a gun, but Savando's phone.
A surprising amount of these circumstances tie together, even though there's not necessarily any reason for them to, and storytellers will often use the climax of a film like this to drive home the point that there's not a greater connection, and that a lot of the world's cruelty goes hand-in-hand with its randomness. López finds something of a sweet spot where there's just enough plot to hold things together but not enough that solving a puzzle ever becomes more important than just observing these kids and worrying about how they handle the present moment. López will occasionally take a detour to the gangsters and push things forward a little, solidifying that while much of what's going on seems arbitrary, it makes a sort of sense and isn't all just magic.
That's necessary because there is magic of a sort going on, or things that play that way. Estrella's teacher, seeing her student frightened during the shooting, has handed her three pieces of chalk saying that they each contain a wish, although it soon becomes clear that, at least from Estrella's perspective, they're the type of wishes that come with a cost. There may not be anything supernatural actually happening in the film, but López certainly underlines how the thought that there might be bounces around the minds of the kids; the picture and soundtrack rumble, and afterward, everyone both feels that they may have some control over their situation and that they are buffeted by forces too powerful to imagine. Other pieces are more obviously symbolic, like the trail of blood that literally follows Estrella around, but they're all powerful, easily-absorbed ways to show what's happening without having either kids or thugs wax philosophical.
López and her team do that well throughout, with clear storytelling that is nevertheless expressive. The kids' city is gray and perpetually overcast, run-down in ways that can seem both dangerous and magical. A segment in an abandoned hotel has danger, but also excitement as kids get to explore and imagine what it was. There's an almost mythic sense of the setting when it's looked at vertically, from the rooftops where Shine and his friends build little communities with room to run down to a street level that often feels like an underworld where dark gods hold sway. It's never pretentious and seldom drawn out, and López stages violent confrontations that are clear and send a thrill through the viewer without ever seeming inappropriately cool.
She's also got a fine group of actors, you and old. Paola Lara is at the center of the story as Estrella, and though she can sometimes play as a passive observer, she gets a lot of little things right, like her body language when she knows she needs to insert herself into this group of boys and shouldn't be afraid because she's a year or two older and smart, but they are wild boys. Juan Ramón López gets a showier role as Shine, with yelling and puffing his chest because he's got experience, but he's good enough to stick the right amount of genuine concern into it, and make the respect he occasionally shows count. The other kids hit their characters' less dynamic notes well, and while the adults are mostly in and out quickly, Tenoch Huerta certainly makes for capable villain, seeming like he'd be threatening to most even if he's occasionally being dressed down for letting a kid steal his stuff.
While the magic realism elements are certainly a big part of how people will describe this film to those who haven't seen it - the story may not be something you see every week without it, but "three wishes" gets one's attention - it's only part of why Tigers winds up being kind of terrific. It's a great little movie, with or without magic behind it.
(Formerly at EFC)
As Boas Maneiras (Good Manners)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
Good Manners is one of those movies that is split close to right down the middle and thus sets itself up for a fall, because the odds that it's going to do two unusual things really well are slim. It's also possible that one just works better, making the other look bad. That's the case here; the first half works in a way that the second doesn't, even though it's not hard to imagine that part working well on its own or even if handled differently here.
It opens with Clara Marcedo (Isabél Zuaa), an unemployed woman behind on her rent to the point where her landlady (Cida Moreira) is starting to just walk into her apartment to take things to sell, arriving at a Sao Paolo high-rise for a job interview. Ana (Marjorie Estiano) is pregnant and needs some help around the apartment - she comes from a well-off family and has never really done much for herself - and a nanny after her baby is born. As the pair grow closer, it soon becomes clear that Ana is having an unusual pregnancy, with sleepwalking and alarming cravings reaching their peak during the full moon, and if what Ana reveals about the father is true… Well, it certainly explains what is going on with son Joel (Miguel Lobo) ten years later.
Both halves of the movie come at their material from different angles, using the idea of lycanthropy to tell stories of isolation and shame. It's less supernatural and more human in the first half, where Isabél Zuaa and Marjorie Estiano don't have to spend a lot of time playing horror tropes with a straight face. Instead, they just play lonely people feeling each other out, with Estiano's Ana especially interesting as she becomes more fully aware of how she's been exiled and shunned as the film goes on. She doesn't outwardly change that much, but it's enough for Zuaa's Clara and the audience to start seeing her as more than just a semi-clueless wealthy employer, but someone with the same sort of loneliness as her. As the fantastical elements become more important, it's easy to see the truth in how Clara's alarm quickly transmutes to protection.
After that, the second half is not necessarily less personal and emotional, but it feels like it comes from a different direction, like it started with the fine points of werewolf mythology as its starting point and then looked for the human story after that. What filmmakers Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra are doing in this part of the film has a lot of a potential and "werewolf kid who has been hidden and restrained his whole life starts rebelling against his parents" is a heck of a hook, and not necessarily even much of a shift in theme from what came before. The execution is weaker in this case, as it turns out - more turns on specific events that can be tough to swallow whether they involve ignorant kids doing something impulsive or not. Nothing ever really surprises the audience very much, and the film falls short on the effects side to boot, needing a much scarier monster.
It doesn't help that Joel can sometimes be hard to like; between them, Rojas & Dutra and child actor Miguel Lobo are able to get the sad Joel down, but when Joel is bitter and reckless, they can't quite find the point where the audience can easily empathize with his anger despite the carnage that springs from his rebellion. There's a nice sort of warm tension between Joel and his mother, a two-way street paved with affection and fear, and tricky relationships with her friends. And though Isabél Zuaa and Marjorie Estiano are at their best in the first half, the good work carries through to the end.
And to give the Rojas & Dutra their due, there's something genuinely impressive about how many different things they're willing to try over the course of the movie. Ana's sleepwalking episodes feel properly surreal, for instance, and the reveal of Joel's "small bedroom" has a quick moment of "hey, neat!" before the proper reaction of it being messed up settles in. The segment where they're trying to set up a more nervy version of kids having an adventure out on their own never quite works, but the musical interludes wind up audacious enough to make Good Manners memorable.
The musical numbers remind me a bit of Bollywood movies, which often seem like they contain their own sequel. In this case, part II is different enough from part I that even if one prefers it, the whole thing is going to seem like a weird assembly. It's nevertheless ambitious enough to be interesting, and likely contains something to catch the interest of many potential viewers - maybe enough to work as a whole for some, too.
(Formerly at EFC)
The four filmmakers there this year were Kristin Pearson ("Sugar"), Eric Ko ("Divided by Blue"), Cameron Stetz ("4th House"), and Natalie Vinciguerra ("The Shepherd"). I'd like to talk about their films more, but it's been a month, and to tell the truth, it was not necessarily the group I expected, more the experimental and meditative side of underground than the over-the-top and wacky one. Interesting direction to go, but I only wound up having strong feelings about one, "The Burden".
Next up was Josh Polon (left) to talk about his film MexMan, a neat documentary about a filmmaker who got some interest in making a feature from his student film but… Well, he wasn't ready, and I wonder a bit if not being ready then has hurt his chances on other projects since then. It's a nice, well-balanced film, with Polon talking about how there was a lot of consideration of presenting certain people as antagonists versus villains.
Last guest of the festival is Issa Lopez (left), here carrying Estrella's stuffed animal, saying that she never figured to be the lady who brought something like that to festivals and appearances, but people soon started asking about it, so…
She also had one of the more amusing stories of how circumstances can change independent or low-budget films, because the script initially specified that the drug lord in the movie had a zebra, but the producers could not find one near where they were shooting. They could find a hippopotamus, but that was not going to be something she could easily work into the movie - hippos are huge and their jaw can absolutely destroy you, but they're not exactly mobile and cinematic outside the water. That's when they found out they could get a tiger, at which point Lopez goes oooooh, of course…
Nifty Q&A all around; she seemed much more interested in talking about the movie and what it was saying rather than just relating funny on-set stories than is typical. Not to the point of dictating what she thought and therefore you should think to, but not pretending that everything came out of her head fully-formed but completely open to interpretation the way so many filmmakers do.
Nobody came to Boston from Brazil for Good Manners, and I was ready to drop rather than go to any sort of awards party (keeping a 50-odd-festival streak of not doing so alive!). So my friends and I headed home, went to work the next day, and told everybody who asked what we were up to that this remains one of the best film events to hit the Boston area on a yearly basis.
"Min börda" ("The Burden")
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: The Ghost in You; digital)
A month's worth of distance before actually writing these reviews makes "The Burden" stand out from the rest of the package even more, not so much because it differs from the rest of the shorts in tone (it was a surprisingly melancholy, detached-feeling program), but because stills from it would soon be used to advertise a kid-friendly shorts program that played a couple spots in the area over the next couple weeks. It seems like it would be unconventional in both spots.
It's kind of a fascinating kind of weird, though, a stop-motion picture set in the various parts of a suburban sprawl, with gigantic supermarkets, cafeterias, call-centers, and residential hotels, populated by anthropomorphic animals who sing Swedish songs of longing. It's beautiful, though, reveling in how some things don't fit - the fish in the hotel, the rats cleaning the tables - and sneaking bits of hope and dreams in where you might not expect it. The songs are simple and create a mood that holds up for the length of the short but still has room for variation.
Are the kids who see it in that other program really going to pick up on the sense of isolation and lack of identity that those spaces create, separated from the rest of the world? Probably not. But they can enjoy the singing fish, dancing rats, and frustrated orangutans while maybe grasping that animation can be used for something more than slapstick and adventure.
MexMan
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
There's an obvious comment to be made about how you see the producers in MexMan as antagonists or villains based on your own age and experience, but it's probably an important part of how people are going to approach this documentary about a man trying to make a feature version of his student film. It's equal parts being changed by his enthusiasm and alarmed by the mania, to an even greater degree than is usual with scrappy young artists. Documentary director Josh Polon finds a nice balance, fortunately, and even if you can easily see where it's going to wind up, it's at least an entertaining trip.
The young man in question is one Germán Alonso, a young Mexican man who has been doing stop-motion animation since he was a kid before attending film school at the University of California, where he made an eye-catching comedic superhero short, "MexMan", as his graduation thesis project. It caught the eye of producer Moctezuma Esparza, who was interested in developing it as a feature, but who wanted Alonso to pass some smaller tests before handing him the reins to a feature: Film an action-oriented sequence within three months, have a completed script in six. In the meantime, he's got an ambitious side project - a graphic novel made from his stop-motion marionettes meant to declare his love for the girl he's had a crush on since they were teenagers.
The audience doesn't see this woman during the film despite the fact that a number of folks with whom Germán has likely burned bridges with but good were willing to sign a release, and a savvy documentary watcher is likely to pick up on that early. Polon recognizes this and makes interesting use of that absence - as much as watching Germán work on this project almost certainly makes for a more visually interesting movie than the less dynamic processes of screenwriting and pre-production, it gets to the heart of both Germán's best and worst properties: You see the passion and the creativity, but also the extent to which he'll completely discount other voices or have severe issues with prioritization.
That's a trade-off that gets thrown around with artists a lot, often to the point of toxicity, but Polon does what appears to be a fair job of cutting the film to put Germán in a particular light. It's often been traditional to draw a straight line between creative genius and irresponsibility, but this film seldom gets close to that argument; the filmmakers are far more likely to frame things in terms of being worried that Germán will spin out of control. There's a strong feeling that what the audience is seeing of the guy is genuine rather than spun, with even the moments of him addressing the camera directly are seldom staged interviews so much as asides while Polon films him working or doing other things.
Germán is also a talented filmmaker in his own right, as becomes clear once the documentary gets to shooting the "Shock and Awe" action short; that leg of the film would be a neat look at making something that looks big and slick without a lot of resources even without the other drama going on, but it's also a turning point in one of the other main threads of the movie, as the classmates who came aboard as producers of the feature early attempt to assert more control. There's a version of this movie to be made where the Soper Brothers get presented more as villains - they are well-off white guys trying to take ownership of the Mexican superhero by a Mexican creator - but the cut Polon and co-writer/editor Alex MacKenzie assemble can't help but find them, if not sympathetic, but in a position one can understand, as seeing a return on their time and effort is dependent on a guy who, while quite likable, seems like kind of a flake.
That's why, of the three MexMan projects undertaken, only the student film made it to the finish line as intended. Then again, it's entirely possible that this documentary is a better film than the conventional behind-the-scenes materials it started as and what Germán Alonso could have made at the time combined. It's at least one of the more complete documents of one of the hundreds of projects that don't quite come together for every one that does.
(Formerly at EFC)
"Petul"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
I feel a bit like I'm missing the point every time I watch something at BUFF or a similar event and think that it could probably use, say, 30% less violence, but that's where I wind up finding myself with "Petul": It's got style, quality visual effects work/animation, excellent combination of fantasy and reality so that one enhances the other, and, yes, the sort of shocking violence that leaves an impact on the viewer. It just kind of keeps going with the last bit, getting some serious diminishing returns.
It's still a heck of a nifty little short, though, with a T-rex-legged rodent standing out from among the box of mice that a cruel family is going to us for bizarre drug testing or the like the same way that a sad, kind-hearted girl (Lola Alvarez) stands out from her family. Filmmaker Charles Cheval does something a little unusual with this arrangement, not necessarily giving the animals human intelligence or personality so much as simplifying his human characters to bring them closer to the animals from the other direction, with François Marin-Ricci's head of the family a roaring monster and Quentin Herlemont's brother-figure engaging in some behavior that may be nonsensical but is pretty clearly not good. The mice, at least, seem like they may have a desperate chance of escape, and Cheval stages their attempts impressively, even if many are gruesomely thwarted. There's just enough going on with the humans to keep it from being abstract.
Cheval and his team do neat things here, and the point where nasty violence being effective and it being something that makes one turn away (or, worse, get bored) is different for everyone. Writing about it later, I'm inclined to praise how well "Petul" was put together even if I felt some relief at it being over at the time.
Vuelven (Tigers Are Not Afraid)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
Movies like Tigers Are Not Afraid have a tendency to start deconstructing themselves before the very first scene, and this one is no different, with narration about fairy tales and magic, hints that Estrella (Paola Lara) may be embellishing the tale as she tells it and tries to understand it. This is maybe not literal, filmmaker Issa López seems to be saying, but it's certainly how things feel to someone like Estrella, so let's try to both avoid picking nits while also thinking about why she'll approach it this this way. It can be a transparent gambit, though López's film rises well above that.
Estrella is writing a fairy tale when a gunfight between narco gangs spills over into her school, and it seems like she's been somewhat sheltered from her city's violence until then. This day, though, she goes home to find her mother not there, and soon goes out looking. She falls in with a group of orphaned boys with "El Shine" (Juan Ramón López) as their de facto leader. The group has a target on their back, in part because Estrella doesn't really know how to survive on the street, and in part because Shine has picked the pocket of gangster Savando "El Chino" (Tenoch Huerta), leaving with not just a gun, but Savando's phone.
A surprising amount of these circumstances tie together, even though there's not necessarily any reason for them to, and storytellers will often use the climax of a film like this to drive home the point that there's not a greater connection, and that a lot of the world's cruelty goes hand-in-hand with its randomness. López finds something of a sweet spot where there's just enough plot to hold things together but not enough that solving a puzzle ever becomes more important than just observing these kids and worrying about how they handle the present moment. López will occasionally take a detour to the gangsters and push things forward a little, solidifying that while much of what's going on seems arbitrary, it makes a sort of sense and isn't all just magic.
That's necessary because there is magic of a sort going on, or things that play that way. Estrella's teacher, seeing her student frightened during the shooting, has handed her three pieces of chalk saying that they each contain a wish, although it soon becomes clear that, at least from Estrella's perspective, they're the type of wishes that come with a cost. There may not be anything supernatural actually happening in the film, but López certainly underlines how the thought that there might be bounces around the minds of the kids; the picture and soundtrack rumble, and afterward, everyone both feels that they may have some control over their situation and that they are buffeted by forces too powerful to imagine. Other pieces are more obviously symbolic, like the trail of blood that literally follows Estrella around, but they're all powerful, easily-absorbed ways to show what's happening without having either kids or thugs wax philosophical.
López and her team do that well throughout, with clear storytelling that is nevertheless expressive. The kids' city is gray and perpetually overcast, run-down in ways that can seem both dangerous and magical. A segment in an abandoned hotel has danger, but also excitement as kids get to explore and imagine what it was. There's an almost mythic sense of the setting when it's looked at vertically, from the rooftops where Shine and his friends build little communities with room to run down to a street level that often feels like an underworld where dark gods hold sway. It's never pretentious and seldom drawn out, and López stages violent confrontations that are clear and send a thrill through the viewer without ever seeming inappropriately cool.
She's also got a fine group of actors, you and old. Paola Lara is at the center of the story as Estrella, and though she can sometimes play as a passive observer, she gets a lot of little things right, like her body language when she knows she needs to insert herself into this group of boys and shouldn't be afraid because she's a year or two older and smart, but they are wild boys. Juan Ramón López gets a showier role as Shine, with yelling and puffing his chest because he's got experience, but he's good enough to stick the right amount of genuine concern into it, and make the respect he occasionally shows count. The other kids hit their characters' less dynamic notes well, and while the adults are mostly in and out quickly, Tenoch Huerta certainly makes for capable villain, seeming like he'd be threatening to most even if he's occasionally being dressed down for letting a kid steal his stuff.
While the magic realism elements are certainly a big part of how people will describe this film to those who haven't seen it - the story may not be something you see every week without it, but "three wishes" gets one's attention - it's only part of why Tigers winds up being kind of terrific. It's a great little movie, with or without magic behind it.
(Formerly at EFC)
As Boas Maneiras (Good Manners)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
Good Manners is one of those movies that is split close to right down the middle and thus sets itself up for a fall, because the odds that it's going to do two unusual things really well are slim. It's also possible that one just works better, making the other look bad. That's the case here; the first half works in a way that the second doesn't, even though it's not hard to imagine that part working well on its own or even if handled differently here.
It opens with Clara Marcedo (Isabél Zuaa), an unemployed woman behind on her rent to the point where her landlady (Cida Moreira) is starting to just walk into her apartment to take things to sell, arriving at a Sao Paolo high-rise for a job interview. Ana (Marjorie Estiano) is pregnant and needs some help around the apartment - she comes from a well-off family and has never really done much for herself - and a nanny after her baby is born. As the pair grow closer, it soon becomes clear that Ana is having an unusual pregnancy, with sleepwalking and alarming cravings reaching their peak during the full moon, and if what Ana reveals about the father is true… Well, it certainly explains what is going on with son Joel (Miguel Lobo) ten years later.
Both halves of the movie come at their material from different angles, using the idea of lycanthropy to tell stories of isolation and shame. It's less supernatural and more human in the first half, where Isabél Zuaa and Marjorie Estiano don't have to spend a lot of time playing horror tropes with a straight face. Instead, they just play lonely people feeling each other out, with Estiano's Ana especially interesting as she becomes more fully aware of how she's been exiled and shunned as the film goes on. She doesn't outwardly change that much, but it's enough for Zuaa's Clara and the audience to start seeing her as more than just a semi-clueless wealthy employer, but someone with the same sort of loneliness as her. As the fantastical elements become more important, it's easy to see the truth in how Clara's alarm quickly transmutes to protection.
After that, the second half is not necessarily less personal and emotional, but it feels like it comes from a different direction, like it started with the fine points of werewolf mythology as its starting point and then looked for the human story after that. What filmmakers Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra are doing in this part of the film has a lot of a potential and "werewolf kid who has been hidden and restrained his whole life starts rebelling against his parents" is a heck of a hook, and not necessarily even much of a shift in theme from what came before. The execution is weaker in this case, as it turns out - more turns on specific events that can be tough to swallow whether they involve ignorant kids doing something impulsive or not. Nothing ever really surprises the audience very much, and the film falls short on the effects side to boot, needing a much scarier monster.
It doesn't help that Joel can sometimes be hard to like; between them, Rojas & Dutra and child actor Miguel Lobo are able to get the sad Joel down, but when Joel is bitter and reckless, they can't quite find the point where the audience can easily empathize with his anger despite the carnage that springs from his rebellion. There's a nice sort of warm tension between Joel and his mother, a two-way street paved with affection and fear, and tricky relationships with her friends. And though Isabél Zuaa and Marjorie Estiano are at their best in the first half, the good work carries through to the end.
And to give the Rojas & Dutra their due, there's something genuinely impressive about how many different things they're willing to try over the course of the movie. Ana's sleepwalking episodes feel properly surreal, for instance, and the reveal of Joel's "small bedroom" has a quick moment of "hey, neat!" before the proper reaction of it being messed up settles in. The segment where they're trying to set up a more nervy version of kids having an adventure out on their own never quite works, but the musical interludes wind up audacious enough to make Good Manners memorable.
The musical numbers remind me a bit of Bollywood movies, which often seem like they contain their own sequel. In this case, part II is different enough from part I that even if one prefers it, the whole thing is going to seem like a weird assembly. It's nevertheless ambitious enough to be interesting, and likely contains something to catch the interest of many potential viewers - maybe enough to work as a whole for some, too.
(Formerly at EFC)
Sunday, May 06, 2018
This Week's Chinese Crime: The Trough & A or B
I was prioritizing The Trough over A or B to start with on Friday night - Hong Kong crime & action over anything else, right - but it wound up being out of my hands, as every showing of A or B was listed as "sold out" that day. Possible, I suppose, but when I saw it at noon on Sunday, I was one of two people in the theater (neither of us Asian). Leaves me just a little skeptical that it was actually sold out two days earlier; I'm guessing the theater either didn't receive the DCP drive on time or figured they'd be better off with another screen's worth of Avengers.
The movies kind of had opposite effects on me - I wasn't sure about The Trough at first, but it grew on me as what filmmaker Nick Cheung was up to became more clear, but A or B managed to lose the momentum of its strong start. I wonder if the other guy in the theater had had much experience with how particular the Chinese censor board could be about crime not paying, or if his comments as three or four mid-credit scenes played out with an oddly-placed bit of catch-up text were just about the excess of it.
If I didn't have a ton of film festival writing to catch up on, I'd probably be doing a sort of shadow double feature, because this pair seems to match up well with a couple of things I imported from Hong Kong but haven't yet gotten around to watching: John Woo's Manhunt sounds like the same sort of classic Hong Kong action as The Trough and like A or B, The Tenant Downstairs features Simon Yam and a bunch of surveillance video. Maybe I'll be close to ready this coming weekend.
Di ya cao (The Trough)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2018 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)
The Trough starts out looking like it's going to be a throwback to old-school Hong Kong triad films, what with its cops so far undercover they can't get out and elaborate shoot-outs and professional but ineffectual police, but not necessarily a great one. Plus, it's following that through an over-cool desaturated digital aesthetic, so it doesn't have the grit that made them sing. But here's the thing: Somewhere around the second over-the-top action sequence, it starts to get weird, and kind of delightfully so.
After a bizarre opening scene, the film drops the audience into the fictional city of Solo Park, so crime-ridden that the triads can't help but run into each other mid-crime. Undercover detective Yu Qiu (Nick Cheung Ka-fai) has infiltrated the gang of Cheng Yun (Michael Miu Kiu-wai) at the behest of Chief Inspector "Jim" Jing War-man (Hie Jong), leading the cops to a deal between Cheng and "Nine Long Fingers" (Lam Suet). Jim soon grasps that all the crime in the city is running through one mysterious Boss, and when Qiu is part of a crew sent to kidnap a non-verbal little girl (Kiera Wang Shi-ya), the begin to grasp that not only are a ton of cops on this Boss's payroll, but what's going on may have a purpose they can't imagine.
It's probably a bit unfair to say that The Trough starts out like just another triad movie - it does, after all, open with Qiu in Namibia, fighting a hyena with his bare hands (no, this doesn't go anywhere), and there is at least a little bit of self-awareness to a scene where Cheng Yun starts waxing philosophical about being a gangster who used to be a cop to a group including Qiu. That bit plays as a little heavy-handed at the time, but in retrospect seems a bit more winkingly self-referential. It probably becomes clear to the film's native audience that writer/director/star Nick Cheung is going for something heightened (I initially thought "Solo Park" was some specific district of Hong Kong I hadn't heard of before), but by the second time an action scene is a more clearly choreographed than usual, it clicks. The whole thing starts to feel like it's going for distillation rather than imitation, like a Sin City pushed a bit in the future and using HK imagery rather than American pulp for inspiration. It becomes genuinely fun at that point, like Cheung is making the movie he wants to see and is happy that someone gave him the money to go nuts.
Full review on EFC
Muhou wanjia (A or B)
* * (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2018 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)
A or B starts out as a slick-looking thriller based upon a decent enough concept, but it's not long before the filmmakers run up against the limits on what you can do with a guy locked in a room, tormented by an unseen abductor. It's a classic place to start even if it probably can't be where a movie ends, so a filmmaker has to find a better place for things to lead than Perry Ren Pengyuan does here.
He opens with three men in a sauna, where a folk tale soon leads to talk of an investment firm led by Zhong Xiaonian (Xu Zheng) and Tan Wanyuan (Wang Yanhui) inflating the value of a tech company that a government-owned pharma company run by LIu Wenshi (Yu Hewei) will later purchase, with the group splitting the proceeds - and then another businessman, Zeng Guangwen (Simon Yam), walking off the side of a building. Months later, as their plan is coming to fruition, Zhong's wife Wei Simeng (Wang Likun) seems fed up with his underhanded ways and says she plans to ask for a divorce. Zhong may be carrying on an affair with gold trader Zhuang Yi (Zhu Zhu), but he's still upset at the attention paid Simeng by his old friend and colleague Zhu Nan (Zhao Da). He'll have bigger problems the next day, though, when he wakes up sealed in his bedroom, with a voice over a walkie-talkie saying that he'll be given a simple "A or B" choice as the market opens for the next five days - for instance, "A) announce your divorce from Simeng or B) confess to tax evasion" - and if he refuses to choose, both will happen. And you'd better believe every enemy he's made is going to try and take advantage of these choices.
So long as Ren keeps things relatively tangible, with extramarital affairs, a rival realizing that the mastermind behind all this is getting the other guy in the room to betray him live on the phone, and Xioanian proving more resourceful than you might expect for a white-collar criminal, A or B works as a solid little thriller. Heck, it seems like he lets the audience know that Zhuang Yi invests in gold for the specific aim of giving everybody something physical to move around rather than the boring scenes of people intercepting Swiss bank account numbers. There's a ton of fun to be had watching Xiaonian trying to MacGyver his way out of the room, or noting who is in the room when the mysterious scrambled voice is talking to. It's not a bad shell game, at least to start.
Full review on EFC
The movies kind of had opposite effects on me - I wasn't sure about The Trough at first, but it grew on me as what filmmaker Nick Cheung was up to became more clear, but A or B managed to lose the momentum of its strong start. I wonder if the other guy in the theater had had much experience with how particular the Chinese censor board could be about crime not paying, or if his comments as three or four mid-credit scenes played out with an oddly-placed bit of catch-up text were just about the excess of it.
If I didn't have a ton of film festival writing to catch up on, I'd probably be doing a sort of shadow double feature, because this pair seems to match up well with a couple of things I imported from Hong Kong but haven't yet gotten around to watching: John Woo's Manhunt sounds like the same sort of classic Hong Kong action as The Trough and like A or B, The Tenant Downstairs features Simon Yam and a bunch of surveillance video. Maybe I'll be close to ready this coming weekend.
Di ya cao (The Trough)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2018 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)
The Trough starts out looking like it's going to be a throwback to old-school Hong Kong triad films, what with its cops so far undercover they can't get out and elaborate shoot-outs and professional but ineffectual police, but not necessarily a great one. Plus, it's following that through an over-cool desaturated digital aesthetic, so it doesn't have the grit that made them sing. But here's the thing: Somewhere around the second over-the-top action sequence, it starts to get weird, and kind of delightfully so.
After a bizarre opening scene, the film drops the audience into the fictional city of Solo Park, so crime-ridden that the triads can't help but run into each other mid-crime. Undercover detective Yu Qiu (Nick Cheung Ka-fai) has infiltrated the gang of Cheng Yun (Michael Miu Kiu-wai) at the behest of Chief Inspector "Jim" Jing War-man (Hie Jong), leading the cops to a deal between Cheng and "Nine Long Fingers" (Lam Suet). Jim soon grasps that all the crime in the city is running through one mysterious Boss, and when Qiu is part of a crew sent to kidnap a non-verbal little girl (Kiera Wang Shi-ya), the begin to grasp that not only are a ton of cops on this Boss's payroll, but what's going on may have a purpose they can't imagine.
It's probably a bit unfair to say that The Trough starts out like just another triad movie - it does, after all, open with Qiu in Namibia, fighting a hyena with his bare hands (no, this doesn't go anywhere), and there is at least a little bit of self-awareness to a scene where Cheng Yun starts waxing philosophical about being a gangster who used to be a cop to a group including Qiu. That bit plays as a little heavy-handed at the time, but in retrospect seems a bit more winkingly self-referential. It probably becomes clear to the film's native audience that writer/director/star Nick Cheung is going for something heightened (I initially thought "Solo Park" was some specific district of Hong Kong I hadn't heard of before), but by the second time an action scene is a more clearly choreographed than usual, it clicks. The whole thing starts to feel like it's going for distillation rather than imitation, like a Sin City pushed a bit in the future and using HK imagery rather than American pulp for inspiration. It becomes genuinely fun at that point, like Cheung is making the movie he wants to see and is happy that someone gave him the money to go nuts.
Full review on EFC
Muhou wanjia (A or B)
* * (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2018 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)
A or B starts out as a slick-looking thriller based upon a decent enough concept, but it's not long before the filmmakers run up against the limits on what you can do with a guy locked in a room, tormented by an unseen abductor. It's a classic place to start even if it probably can't be where a movie ends, so a filmmaker has to find a better place for things to lead than Perry Ren Pengyuan does here.
He opens with three men in a sauna, where a folk tale soon leads to talk of an investment firm led by Zhong Xiaonian (Xu Zheng) and Tan Wanyuan (Wang Yanhui) inflating the value of a tech company that a government-owned pharma company run by LIu Wenshi (Yu Hewei) will later purchase, with the group splitting the proceeds - and then another businessman, Zeng Guangwen (Simon Yam), walking off the side of a building. Months later, as their plan is coming to fruition, Zhong's wife Wei Simeng (Wang Likun) seems fed up with his underhanded ways and says she plans to ask for a divorce. Zhong may be carrying on an affair with gold trader Zhuang Yi (Zhu Zhu), but he's still upset at the attention paid Simeng by his old friend and colleague Zhu Nan (Zhao Da). He'll have bigger problems the next day, though, when he wakes up sealed in his bedroom, with a voice over a walkie-talkie saying that he'll be given a simple "A or B" choice as the market opens for the next five days - for instance, "A) announce your divorce from Simeng or B) confess to tax evasion" - and if he refuses to choose, both will happen. And you'd better believe every enemy he's made is going to try and take advantage of these choices.
So long as Ren keeps things relatively tangible, with extramarital affairs, a rival realizing that the mastermind behind all this is getting the other guy in the room to betray him live on the phone, and Xioanian proving more resourceful than you might expect for a white-collar criminal, A or B works as a solid little thriller. Heck, it seems like he lets the audience know that Zhuang Yi invests in gold for the specific aim of giving everybody something physical to move around rather than the boring scenes of people intercepting Swiss bank account numbers. There's a ton of fun to be had watching Xiaonian trying to MacGyver his way out of the room, or noting who is in the room when the mysterious scrambled voice is talking to. It's not a bad shell game, at least to start.
Full review on EFC
Friday, May 04, 2018
Boston Underground Film Festival 2018.04: Top Knot Detective, "Comedy? Maybe!", The Ranger, Revenge, and Ghost Stories
I've been pretty fortunate that, as BUFF has expanded enough to have a few weekend matinees at the Harvard Film Archive over the last couple of years, it hasn't presented me with a lot of really difficult choices. I'm generally cool with skipping the music videos and sleeping in long enough to miss the Saturday morning cartoons, so it was pretty easy to choose Top Knot Detective for the first show of the day, with a little room to eat and poke around Harvard Square before catching the comedy shorts block for the second. I could do that because I saw Spoor at Fantasia last summer, and it was fantastic.
That gave me a chance to see shorts by all these lovely people: J.B. Sapienza & Jim McDonough, nearly the entire cast and crew of of "Tiny Clones"; "Mailman"'s Eric Levy; Brian Petillo of "I Remember My First Beer, Man"; Devi Snively, who directed "Bride of Frankie"; Nicholas Santos, director of "Mother Fucker"; and Neil Cicierega & Kevin James, of "Year of the Snake", with Ryan Murphy sadly cut off because my phone doesn't take quite as wide a shot as I'd thought. It was a 14-film program and Kevin pointed out with some surprise that there were folks who left in disgust during #4, and if they couldn't make it that far, it's probably for the best. There's no way that they were up for all the menstrual blood coming later.
It was a fairly entertaining QA, although sometimes short by the nature of the comedy shorts block, because there's a point where the answer to pretty much any question is going to be "we did what we thought would be funny and I guess the programmers thought it was". One of the most memorable bits was Devi Snively saying it was a bit of an odd experience because it was the first time that her short had been part of a comedy program. She also mentioned that "Bride of Frankie" actually served as a sort of prequel for an upcoming feature, and I don't know about that; it sounded like more of a steampunk adventure than the relatively contained thing the short was.
The Ranger director Jenn Wexler was there for her movie, which was a pretty good time. She opened her Q&A with a bit of a rant against cell phones making horror movies hard, which I generally don't have a lot of sympathy for; if your horror story can't work in the face of modern technology, then there's a good chance that it's not about what really frightens a contemporary audience. It worked for hers, though - setting it in the 1980s fits for a lot of other reasons.
Amusingly, she also mentioned that the movie wasn't really her idea; it came from a horror script that a friend had written back in their film school days, a hook that she kept thinking about until the opportunity to make a feature came along. Then she ran with it, putting together a pretty strong film, one of my favorites of the festival.
Finally, we wrapped up with a secret screening, which is something I tend not to like at film festivals unless it's an open "we technically can't advertise it but we're not going to create a situation where you pass up something that interests you for something you may hate" situation. Both this year and last, BUFF avoided that by having it play unopposed, although the not-fun some friends had at last year's Buster's Mal Heart had them deciding to skip a mystery midnight. Unfortunately for them, Ghost Stories was really good, though the good news is it soon came out on both VOD and a week in local theaters. The bummer is that my guess for the movie, The Endless, didn't play, which is a shame, because ithasn't made it to Boston yet won't play Boston until late June (the Brattle just announced a "late show" booking).
"Viola Vs. The Vampire King"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)
The BUFF guys are good enough at matching shorts to features that I briefly thought that "Viola vs the Vampire King" was a clip of the fake TV show in Top Knot Detective, which had me worried, because while it's kind of cute and funny, 80-odd minutes of it might have been a little much. It's kind of right on the border of where making do with relatively little goes from being impressive to ostentatious, with the crayon-drawn map and spider-web forest that seems pretty open and title character who seems like she should be a kid but clearly isn't. Like, you could have made it fit what you had, but chose incongruity.
Still, it's a fun and energetic short film that goes all in on its action, fast and frantic but, though over-the-top, not ever bad-looking the way other bits of the movie are. It's big, often-bloody action - vampires being nearly-indestructible and blood-based gives the filmmakers room for a lot of gore and mayhem to back up both combatants' trash-talk. And while it's got one of those endings that is expected less because the story leads there than because some twists are de rigueur by now, the filmmakers milk it for all it's worth, playing it out long enough to be more than just a cheap gotcha moment.
Top Knot Detective
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)
Top Knot Detective is a whole heck of a lot better than the typical "fake pop-culture spoof", for a lot of little reasons. That is generally the way these things work: It's not necessarily easy to come up with a fun idea for a mock-documentary, but it's also not exactly hard, and the gap between the obviously dumb and obviously brilliant ones is thin; enthusiastic improv can spin that into enough material that the filmmakers will need to cut down rather than pad out most of the time. It's the folks who consistently make the silly bits engaging or show that there is an actual plan without seeming to rein themselves in that create something worth a look.
The fun idea here is "Ronin Suri Tantai", a short-lived Japanese television series in the 1990s that developed a cult following in Australia despite running just once under the name "Top Knot Detective", with VHS tapes passed around since. It was created by and starred Takashi Takamoto (Toshi Okuzaki) as Sheimasu Tantai, a masterless samurai looking to avenge his master and defeat his former best friend Kurosaki Itto. Ostensibly a mystery show, it soon had Tantai having ever-more bizarre adventures, as the self-destructive Takamoto feuded with his employers at Sutaffu Corporation - with Chairman Moritaro Koike's son Haruto (Masa Yamaguchi) playing Itto. The early recasting of the show's female lead turns out to be just the start of the chaos involved.
It's not a real show, of course, but filmmakers Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce put some care into making it feel just genuine enough, and not just by getting Des Mangan and folks at an anime convention to play along. They create just enough in the way of Top Knot Detective artifacts to sprinkle in the background of interview sequences to make it seem like part of the culture but not overwhelming enough to give the game away. There's the usual loving attention to cheap/tacky detail in how they stage the fake clips, but also the sort of restraint that isn't always there; there's little (if anything) here that crosses the border between "stuff that looks authentically 1990s" and "goofy things they might have done in the 1990s with modern CGI". The behind the scenes details feel right; it's kind of generally insightful about the entertainment industry without seeming to hit anything too specific.
Full review on EFC
"I Remember My First Beer, Man"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Ah, the escalating-unfortunate-voicemail gag, the very similar-looking brother to the escalating-bad-message-on-the-answering-machine gag, and apparently not quite so endangered despite people hating voicemail. It just doesn't work as well with texts, though, so it's quite possible that Brian Petillo's take on it could be something close to the format's last hurrah.
If it is, it works in large part because it's even more off-kilter than usual, with a weird sort of desperation from caller Richard (Richard Chiu), drinking to excess to try and find some common ground with the guy he dropped off a few nights earlier. It's not just the usual bad decisions which will be soon regretted, but more basic uncertainty; Richard isn't really sure he wants to drink, and there's a certain question of whether his new friend is into other guys. It's a fun play on how weird it is that society has built this whole system on behavior that impairs good judgment, but played loose enough that it's the awkward jokes that show up, not any looking down on it.
"The Break-Up"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
It's kind of easy to overdo talking about why goofy shorts like this work, because it almost seems like a paradox: It hits something square on the head amid a lot of good lines, and while those good lines are what make it work as comedy, the idea is what holds it together, and gives you something to talk about rather than just rattling off jokes.
In this case, that means hopefully not minimizing what is actually a fun set-up well-executed, as a nervous guy tries to break up with his lady-friend who has clearly instigated every bit of trouble he's ever been in in his life. They play it as a fun role-reversal and banter about the escalating insanity well, well enough for that to be the entire joke. The short is simple visually - two people on a park bench - but filmmaker Tim Butcher knows when to get both characters in the same shot and when to jump between. But ultimately it's the punchline, which is kind of funny but not a great joke in and of itself, that winds up working in large part because it does provoke something in the audience like, yeah, this might be tougher than what's typically associated with the title. Which is pretty nifty, but it's pretty easy to get carried away and give it more importance than how this short movie has a lot of funny jokes.
"Mother Fucker"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
I'm not saying that reviewing this is pointless - it's a funny little short that does a nice slow burn, turning the awkwardness up before springing the end on the audience quickly - but the title is pretty much the punchline, and talking about it even this much has probably ruined it.
It makes for a kind of weird existence for this movie - it works perfectly well as something kind of anonymously buried in the middle of a shorts block, but go looking for it on its own, or stick it on the front of a feature where everyone has seen what short is attached from the program, and it's maybe 50% as effective. I wonder if the filmmakers were thinking of that when they were making it.
"Year of the Snake", "Third Wheel", "Gene Lover"
* * ¾-ish (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
It's been a month and I've pretty much got just the vaguest memories of these three shorts from the middle of the festival. They weren't bad at all, though they all kind of played like YouTube shorts with a couple good absurdist images and trouble with sticking the landing.
"Tiny Clones"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
This one is kind of in that bucket in terms of being a wacky idea without a whole lot to brace it, but it at least sticks out because near-one-man-band Jim McDonough makes it striking, playing multiple roles, setting it in a weird, memorable location, and hitting the proper deadpan attitude toward its fantastical premise head-on in a way a lot of shorts don't.
It's mean, though, in a casual way that doesn't make me laugh the way a lot of other dark comedy does. Combine it with the look that seems as much intentionally cheap as scrappy, and I have a hard time digging the dark whimsy that went into it.
"Robo Greaser"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
"Robo Greaser" appears to be the official title of this short, but I'm pretty sure it appeared on-screen as "Robo Greaser Fag" - which is what the title character is called through much of the movie - and that kind of puts a different spin on it, highlighting the cruelty visited upon the guy as much as the goofy mash-up nature of the title character. And I kind of don't get it - sure, I know that there are a ton of people out there that indicate their disdain for anyone around them with that particular three-letter-word, and I guess there's something to making a short about people treating the weirdo like crap even when he's kind of a miracle of engineering, but it seems like a carefully considered way to do this in the least funny way possible. It's blunt and cruel but not twisted into something clever.
Which is a bummer, because Eli Gottfried plays the earnest but occasionally inappropriate android in broad, entertaining fashion, and co-writer/director Dakota Arsenault is good at creating a vibe of eccentric innocence about him, even if she is frequently going to puncture it. There's not a lot of story, but there's just enough to sew the plentiful physical comedy together.
"Flow"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
It's not sophisticated humor, but "people arguing over bathroom stuff when there is arguably much more serious stuff going down" is one of the most solidly reliably comedy tropes there is. It can be messed up by getting too scatalogical too fast, or getting too cutesy, but there is something undeniably delightful about the embarrassingly mundane making its way into the melodramatic.
So, yeah, I laughed pretty hard at this short about two guerrilla fighters grumbling about how impossible it is to remain supplied with tampons in the middle of a revolution. It's got a neat bantering/bickering pair in Jamie Birkett and Lucy Clements, and writer/director Shelagh Rowan-Legg has it paced nicely, making the comedy dark without bringing the audience down and finishing up before the joke stops being funny.
"BFF Girls"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Coming right after "Flow", "BFF Girls" feels like a lot of menstruation humor, but we're probably kind of due until they catch up with the number of random erection jokes that have been a staple of raunchy comedy for the past forty years. It stretches a bit further to make them, a bit more into the range of "hey, we're sticking something gross into something cute, isn't that edgy?" territory, but there's broad wackiness to it for that to work. Director Brian Lonano and co-writer Victoria Cook go from the goofy starting points of magical girl anime/manga and the foreign fandom thereof and do a nice job of escalating the gags in both big and little steps, and the cast and crew hit the target with just the right blend of wide-eyed innocence up front and self-awareness behind the camera.
This does kind of leave the satire in the movie feeling about a mile wide and an inch deep: Every bit of the way they put it together seems to be saying that when you look at this stuff, even the most charming gets kind of pervy, from the obviously adult actresses playing pre-teens, to how these North Americans actually become Japanese when they transform, to the creepy older dudes paying a lot of attention to them coming of age. It's actually good material, but it does kind of play like the filmmakers are saying "hey, we noticed this!" and then stopping there.
Which is fine, they've got the jokes and the energy to make it work. I've still got to wonder what "BFF Girls" would have been like if the claws were out.
"Bride of Frankie"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Somebody is going to watch "Bride of Frankie" and describe it like "what if Frankenstein had been written by a woman, and that's an invitation to a well-deserved roasting, but it's also a fair way to describe the film's feel if not its intent, as it tweaks Bride of Frankenstein by positing that Baroness von Frankenstein is just as sharp a scientific mind as the Baron, and there will be no simply creating the Bride just to please the Monster, spending a lot of time on how both the Monster and his creator take their brides for granted, mulling relationships rather than spreading carnage.
But that's by no means a bad thing, and writer/director Devi Snively gets a lot of solid laughs out of the premise despite, as she points out, never really looking at the movie as a comedy when she was making it. She winds up investing the short with an impressive melancholy without allowing that sort of material to make a movie where most of the main characters are sewn-together corpses and the most reliable comic relief is a ⅙-scale homonculus ballerina (a loving reference to the most off-handedly bizarre part of James Whale's Bride) mundane. It's a nifty take on the material that works better as it becomes clearer that Snively isn't going to steer it hard in either the spoofy or horrific directions.
"Freelancer", "Postman", "End Times"
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Another set of three short films that didn't make enough of an impression on me that I can honestly give them a true review a month later. "Freelancer", at least, had a memorable concept, in which a videographer believes he is being hired for some sort of boring rich-person event and winds up in the middle of the summoning of an elder demon, with all hell literally breaking loose. It's probably the one that I'd most enjoy seeing expanded to a full feature, as it feels like it could hit a real sweet spot between high-concept adventure and nasty farce.
The Ranger
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
The Ranger is a damn fine 1980s throwback slasher that does every facet of the genre just a little better than you might expect. That's not necessarily enough to earn a recommendation - enough movies are made about folks getting cut up with an axe every year that even with a 95% failure rate, that's a fair amount of "pretty decent" - but Jenn Wexler hits the sweet spot here, making a movie that's got something on its mind aside from the genre itself but still manages to be bloody and entertaining before everything else.
It's sometime in the 1980s, Chelsea (Chloe Levine) is in her early twenties and into punk rock, in one of those situations where the line between a band and its hangers-on is kind of fluid. That's how she ends up in a van with boyfriend Garth (Granit Lahu), "Jerk" (Jeremy Pope), Abe (Bubba Weiler), and Amber (Amanda Grace Benitez), running from the cops after a whole drug-gun-car situation gets messy. She's told them that she inherited a cabin upstate, and they immediately figure that would be a great place to hide out. It soon seem like a less-than-great idea - her friends don't know the first thing about the outdoors, even without a ranger (Jeremy Holm) warning them that the area around the national park isn't same. Kind of unnervingly, he's the same ranger that was there the last time she was up, finding her after her Uncle Pete (Larry Fessenden) died suddenly.
Director Jenn Wexler and her co-writer Giaco Furino give the audience and the punks some getting-to-know-you time before the carnage starts, but when it does, the filmmakers have an enjoyably traditional take on it: They're (mostly) in the woods, the weapons are basic rather than supernatural, and they leave ugly, bloody wounds that give the kids obstacles and let the killer hit people twice. It's not winkingly self-referential, and it's not terribly subversive; it's a maniac hunting young people down, executed by folks who know their gore, working better because Wexler and her crew edit in a way that continuously tightens the noose after giving the audience just enough lay of the land to figure out just how dangerous a situation can be. It's sharp filmmaking that knows how these movies work.
Full review on EFC
Revenge (2017)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
Revenge does what it says on the package - it's a gory, effective rape-revenge picture with moments that are not for the squeamish. It's a lot of violence, maybe more than some are going to be up for, but it's well-staged and good-looking as well as blood-soaked.
It opens with Richard (Kevin Janssens) and his mistress Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) arriving at a fancy vacation house isolated enough that they have to arrive by helicopter. It's fun for a day or two, at least until the other guests - Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive a bt early. Richard, it seems, was planning two vacations, a romp with his girlfriend and then a hunting trip with the guys, and while they seem to get on well enough, Jen is attacked almost as soon as Richard steps out for a bit - and he does not respond as his girlfriend would hope at all. Lucky for them, she seems to have been pretty definitively dealt with.
Or not; the film is not a ten-minute short named "Rich Men Get Away with Everything". Taking that as a given, writer/director Coralie Fargeat creates an impressive amount of uncertainty as things kick off with a jaw-dropper of a big moment that puts the audience on its back foot and then leads to a bunch of sympathetic groans through much of the film. It's a gruesomely symbolic way of showing the audience how Jen has been violated, one that she carries around for as long as the movie can justify it. It lets Fargeat work her way back up, and she doesn't back off handing the audience another few strong visual cues - not only does Jen soon emerge from a cave as if reborn, but the camera goes up and down her body in the same way it did when she sashayed off the helicopter, this time highlighting tense muscle instead of soft curves.
Full review on EFC
Ghost Stories
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Secret Screening; DCP)
Ghost Stories is an effective anthology of sorts, the cinematic equivalent of variations on a theme that certainly has room to play. It perhaps puts a little too much effort into giving itself a clever twist in the last stretch so that it can be a feature rather than a set of short stories, but the three episodes that make up the bulk of the film are impressive on their own, combining classic supernatural situations with humans' willingness to scare themselves.
That's the explanation offered by Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman), introduced shooting a documentary meant to debunk "psychic star" Mark van Rhys (Nicholas Burns). Goodman was inspired by another paranormal investigator, Charles Cameron, who faded from public view decades ago. A mysterious message summons Goodman to meet his mentor, and he's handed three cases that the old man wasn't able to completely debunk: Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse), a former security guard who saw something at a shuttered mental hospital; Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther), a teenager who hasn't been the same since his parents' car broke down on the way back from a party; and Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman), whose unused nursery has allegedly been haunted by a poltergeist since the loss of his wife (Emily Carding).
These are all elemental, well-worn tales of the supernatural; there's nothing in the main three or the initial framing sequence of skeptics wrestling with their own expectations that horror fans haven't seen before, and even those that don't consume large amounts of spooky stuff can recall a tale or two around those general themes. Filmmakers Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman don't necessarily break new ground with the specific stories, but they've built themselves situations where they don't need to: With each getting twenty-five minutes or so, they've got just enough room to stick to the basics, add in a few memorable details, and then get out before things start to collapse. It's the right amount of detail to keep things ambiguous, too, with nothing that would necessarily convince a skeptic but plenty to freak a person out.
Full review on EFC
That gave me a chance to see shorts by all these lovely people: J.B. Sapienza & Jim McDonough, nearly the entire cast and crew of of "Tiny Clones"; "Mailman"'s Eric Levy; Brian Petillo of "I Remember My First Beer, Man"; Devi Snively, who directed "Bride of Frankie"; Nicholas Santos, director of "Mother Fucker"; and Neil Cicierega & Kevin James, of "Year of the Snake", with Ryan Murphy sadly cut off because my phone doesn't take quite as wide a shot as I'd thought. It was a 14-film program and Kevin pointed out with some surprise that there were folks who left in disgust during #4, and if they couldn't make it that far, it's probably for the best. There's no way that they were up for all the menstrual blood coming later.
It was a fairly entertaining QA, although sometimes short by the nature of the comedy shorts block, because there's a point where the answer to pretty much any question is going to be "we did what we thought would be funny and I guess the programmers thought it was". One of the most memorable bits was Devi Snively saying it was a bit of an odd experience because it was the first time that her short had been part of a comedy program. She also mentioned that "Bride of Frankie" actually served as a sort of prequel for an upcoming feature, and I don't know about that; it sounded like more of a steampunk adventure than the relatively contained thing the short was.
The Ranger director Jenn Wexler was there for her movie, which was a pretty good time. She opened her Q&A with a bit of a rant against cell phones making horror movies hard, which I generally don't have a lot of sympathy for; if your horror story can't work in the face of modern technology, then there's a good chance that it's not about what really frightens a contemporary audience. It worked for hers, though - setting it in the 1980s fits for a lot of other reasons.
Amusingly, she also mentioned that the movie wasn't really her idea; it came from a horror script that a friend had written back in their film school days, a hook that she kept thinking about until the opportunity to make a feature came along. Then she ran with it, putting together a pretty strong film, one of my favorites of the festival.
Finally, we wrapped up with a secret screening, which is something I tend not to like at film festivals unless it's an open "we technically can't advertise it but we're not going to create a situation where you pass up something that interests you for something you may hate" situation. Both this year and last, BUFF avoided that by having it play unopposed, although the not-fun some friends had at last year's Buster's Mal Heart had them deciding to skip a mystery midnight. Unfortunately for them, Ghost Stories was really good, though the good news is it soon came out on both VOD and a week in local theaters. The bummer is that my guess for the movie, The Endless, didn't play, which is a shame, because it
"Viola Vs. The Vampire King"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)
The BUFF guys are good enough at matching shorts to features that I briefly thought that "Viola vs the Vampire King" was a clip of the fake TV show in Top Knot Detective, which had me worried, because while it's kind of cute and funny, 80-odd minutes of it might have been a little much. It's kind of right on the border of where making do with relatively little goes from being impressive to ostentatious, with the crayon-drawn map and spider-web forest that seems pretty open and title character who seems like she should be a kid but clearly isn't. Like, you could have made it fit what you had, but chose incongruity.
Still, it's a fun and energetic short film that goes all in on its action, fast and frantic but, though over-the-top, not ever bad-looking the way other bits of the movie are. It's big, often-bloody action - vampires being nearly-indestructible and blood-based gives the filmmakers room for a lot of gore and mayhem to back up both combatants' trash-talk. And while it's got one of those endings that is expected less because the story leads there than because some twists are de rigueur by now, the filmmakers milk it for all it's worth, playing it out long enough to be more than just a cheap gotcha moment.
Top Knot Detective
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)
Top Knot Detective is a whole heck of a lot better than the typical "fake pop-culture spoof", for a lot of little reasons. That is generally the way these things work: It's not necessarily easy to come up with a fun idea for a mock-documentary, but it's also not exactly hard, and the gap between the obviously dumb and obviously brilliant ones is thin; enthusiastic improv can spin that into enough material that the filmmakers will need to cut down rather than pad out most of the time. It's the folks who consistently make the silly bits engaging or show that there is an actual plan without seeming to rein themselves in that create something worth a look.
The fun idea here is "Ronin Suri Tantai", a short-lived Japanese television series in the 1990s that developed a cult following in Australia despite running just once under the name "Top Knot Detective", with VHS tapes passed around since. It was created by and starred Takashi Takamoto (Toshi Okuzaki) as Sheimasu Tantai, a masterless samurai looking to avenge his master and defeat his former best friend Kurosaki Itto. Ostensibly a mystery show, it soon had Tantai having ever-more bizarre adventures, as the self-destructive Takamoto feuded with his employers at Sutaffu Corporation - with Chairman Moritaro Koike's son Haruto (Masa Yamaguchi) playing Itto. The early recasting of the show's female lead turns out to be just the start of the chaos involved.
It's not a real show, of course, but filmmakers Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce put some care into making it feel just genuine enough, and not just by getting Des Mangan and folks at an anime convention to play along. They create just enough in the way of Top Knot Detective artifacts to sprinkle in the background of interview sequences to make it seem like part of the culture but not overwhelming enough to give the game away. There's the usual loving attention to cheap/tacky detail in how they stage the fake clips, but also the sort of restraint that isn't always there; there's little (if anything) here that crosses the border between "stuff that looks authentically 1990s" and "goofy things they might have done in the 1990s with modern CGI". The behind the scenes details feel right; it's kind of generally insightful about the entertainment industry without seeming to hit anything too specific.
Full review on EFC
"I Remember My First Beer, Man"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Ah, the escalating-unfortunate-voicemail gag, the very similar-looking brother to the escalating-bad-message-on-the-answering-machine gag, and apparently not quite so endangered despite people hating voicemail. It just doesn't work as well with texts, though, so it's quite possible that Brian Petillo's take on it could be something close to the format's last hurrah.
If it is, it works in large part because it's even more off-kilter than usual, with a weird sort of desperation from caller Richard (Richard Chiu), drinking to excess to try and find some common ground with the guy he dropped off a few nights earlier. It's not just the usual bad decisions which will be soon regretted, but more basic uncertainty; Richard isn't really sure he wants to drink, and there's a certain question of whether his new friend is into other guys. It's a fun play on how weird it is that society has built this whole system on behavior that impairs good judgment, but played loose enough that it's the awkward jokes that show up, not any looking down on it.
"The Break-Up"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
It's kind of easy to overdo talking about why goofy shorts like this work, because it almost seems like a paradox: It hits something square on the head amid a lot of good lines, and while those good lines are what make it work as comedy, the idea is what holds it together, and gives you something to talk about rather than just rattling off jokes.
In this case, that means hopefully not minimizing what is actually a fun set-up well-executed, as a nervous guy tries to break up with his lady-friend who has clearly instigated every bit of trouble he's ever been in in his life. They play it as a fun role-reversal and banter about the escalating insanity well, well enough for that to be the entire joke. The short is simple visually - two people on a park bench - but filmmaker Tim Butcher knows when to get both characters in the same shot and when to jump between. But ultimately it's the punchline, which is kind of funny but not a great joke in and of itself, that winds up working in large part because it does provoke something in the audience like, yeah, this might be tougher than what's typically associated with the title. Which is pretty nifty, but it's pretty easy to get carried away and give it more importance than how this short movie has a lot of funny jokes.
"Mother Fucker"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
I'm not saying that reviewing this is pointless - it's a funny little short that does a nice slow burn, turning the awkwardness up before springing the end on the audience quickly - but the title is pretty much the punchline, and talking about it even this much has probably ruined it.
It makes for a kind of weird existence for this movie - it works perfectly well as something kind of anonymously buried in the middle of a shorts block, but go looking for it on its own, or stick it on the front of a feature where everyone has seen what short is attached from the program, and it's maybe 50% as effective. I wonder if the filmmakers were thinking of that when they were making it.
"Year of the Snake", "Third Wheel", "Gene Lover"
* * ¾-ish (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
It's been a month and I've pretty much got just the vaguest memories of these three shorts from the middle of the festival. They weren't bad at all, though they all kind of played like YouTube shorts with a couple good absurdist images and trouble with sticking the landing.
"Tiny Clones"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
This one is kind of in that bucket in terms of being a wacky idea without a whole lot to brace it, but it at least sticks out because near-one-man-band Jim McDonough makes it striking, playing multiple roles, setting it in a weird, memorable location, and hitting the proper deadpan attitude toward its fantastical premise head-on in a way a lot of shorts don't.
It's mean, though, in a casual way that doesn't make me laugh the way a lot of other dark comedy does. Combine it with the look that seems as much intentionally cheap as scrappy, and I have a hard time digging the dark whimsy that went into it.
"Robo Greaser"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
"Robo Greaser" appears to be the official title of this short, but I'm pretty sure it appeared on-screen as "Robo Greaser Fag" - which is what the title character is called through much of the movie - and that kind of puts a different spin on it, highlighting the cruelty visited upon the guy as much as the goofy mash-up nature of the title character. And I kind of don't get it - sure, I know that there are a ton of people out there that indicate their disdain for anyone around them with that particular three-letter-word, and I guess there's something to making a short about people treating the weirdo like crap even when he's kind of a miracle of engineering, but it seems like a carefully considered way to do this in the least funny way possible. It's blunt and cruel but not twisted into something clever.
Which is a bummer, because Eli Gottfried plays the earnest but occasionally inappropriate android in broad, entertaining fashion, and co-writer/director Dakota Arsenault is good at creating a vibe of eccentric innocence about him, even if she is frequently going to puncture it. There's not a lot of story, but there's just enough to sew the plentiful physical comedy together.
"Flow"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
It's not sophisticated humor, but "people arguing over bathroom stuff when there is arguably much more serious stuff going down" is one of the most solidly reliably comedy tropes there is. It can be messed up by getting too scatalogical too fast, or getting too cutesy, but there is something undeniably delightful about the embarrassingly mundane making its way into the melodramatic.
So, yeah, I laughed pretty hard at this short about two guerrilla fighters grumbling about how impossible it is to remain supplied with tampons in the middle of a revolution. It's got a neat bantering/bickering pair in Jamie Birkett and Lucy Clements, and writer/director Shelagh Rowan-Legg has it paced nicely, making the comedy dark without bringing the audience down and finishing up before the joke stops being funny.
"BFF Girls"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Coming right after "Flow", "BFF Girls" feels like a lot of menstruation humor, but we're probably kind of due until they catch up with the number of random erection jokes that have been a staple of raunchy comedy for the past forty years. It stretches a bit further to make them, a bit more into the range of "hey, we're sticking something gross into something cute, isn't that edgy?" territory, but there's broad wackiness to it for that to work. Director Brian Lonano and co-writer Victoria Cook go from the goofy starting points of magical girl anime/manga and the foreign fandom thereof and do a nice job of escalating the gags in both big and little steps, and the cast and crew hit the target with just the right blend of wide-eyed innocence up front and self-awareness behind the camera.
This does kind of leave the satire in the movie feeling about a mile wide and an inch deep: Every bit of the way they put it together seems to be saying that when you look at this stuff, even the most charming gets kind of pervy, from the obviously adult actresses playing pre-teens, to how these North Americans actually become Japanese when they transform, to the creepy older dudes paying a lot of attention to them coming of age. It's actually good material, but it does kind of play like the filmmakers are saying "hey, we noticed this!" and then stopping there.
Which is fine, they've got the jokes and the energy to make it work. I've still got to wonder what "BFF Girls" would have been like if the claws were out.
"Bride of Frankie"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Somebody is going to watch "Bride of Frankie" and describe it like "what if Frankenstein had been written by a woman, and that's an invitation to a well-deserved roasting, but it's also a fair way to describe the film's feel if not its intent, as it tweaks Bride of Frankenstein by positing that Baroness von Frankenstein is just as sharp a scientific mind as the Baron, and there will be no simply creating the Bride just to please the Monster, spending a lot of time on how both the Monster and his creator take their brides for granted, mulling relationships rather than spreading carnage.
But that's by no means a bad thing, and writer/director Devi Snively gets a lot of solid laughs out of the premise despite, as she points out, never really looking at the movie as a comedy when she was making it. She winds up investing the short with an impressive melancholy without allowing that sort of material to make a movie where most of the main characters are sewn-together corpses and the most reliable comic relief is a ⅙-scale homonculus ballerina (a loving reference to the most off-handedly bizarre part of James Whale's Bride) mundane. It's a nifty take on the material that works better as it becomes clearer that Snively isn't going to steer it hard in either the spoofy or horrific directions.
"Freelancer", "Postman", "End Times"
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)
Another set of three short films that didn't make enough of an impression on me that I can honestly give them a true review a month later. "Freelancer", at least, had a memorable concept, in which a videographer believes he is being hired for some sort of boring rich-person event and winds up in the middle of the summoning of an elder demon, with all hell literally breaking loose. It's probably the one that I'd most enjoy seeing expanded to a full feature, as it feels like it could hit a real sweet spot between high-concept adventure and nasty farce.
The Ranger
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
The Ranger is a damn fine 1980s throwback slasher that does every facet of the genre just a little better than you might expect. That's not necessarily enough to earn a recommendation - enough movies are made about folks getting cut up with an axe every year that even with a 95% failure rate, that's a fair amount of "pretty decent" - but Jenn Wexler hits the sweet spot here, making a movie that's got something on its mind aside from the genre itself but still manages to be bloody and entertaining before everything else.
It's sometime in the 1980s, Chelsea (Chloe Levine) is in her early twenties and into punk rock, in one of those situations where the line between a band and its hangers-on is kind of fluid. That's how she ends up in a van with boyfriend Garth (Granit Lahu), "Jerk" (Jeremy Pope), Abe (Bubba Weiler), and Amber (Amanda Grace Benitez), running from the cops after a whole drug-gun-car situation gets messy. She's told them that she inherited a cabin upstate, and they immediately figure that would be a great place to hide out. It soon seem like a less-than-great idea - her friends don't know the first thing about the outdoors, even without a ranger (Jeremy Holm) warning them that the area around the national park isn't same. Kind of unnervingly, he's the same ranger that was there the last time she was up, finding her after her Uncle Pete (Larry Fessenden) died suddenly.
Director Jenn Wexler and her co-writer Giaco Furino give the audience and the punks some getting-to-know-you time before the carnage starts, but when it does, the filmmakers have an enjoyably traditional take on it: They're (mostly) in the woods, the weapons are basic rather than supernatural, and they leave ugly, bloody wounds that give the kids obstacles and let the killer hit people twice. It's not winkingly self-referential, and it's not terribly subversive; it's a maniac hunting young people down, executed by folks who know their gore, working better because Wexler and her crew edit in a way that continuously tightens the noose after giving the audience just enough lay of the land to figure out just how dangerous a situation can be. It's sharp filmmaking that knows how these movies work.
Full review on EFC
Revenge (2017)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)
Revenge does what it says on the package - it's a gory, effective rape-revenge picture with moments that are not for the squeamish. It's a lot of violence, maybe more than some are going to be up for, but it's well-staged and good-looking as well as blood-soaked.
It opens with Richard (Kevin Janssens) and his mistress Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) arriving at a fancy vacation house isolated enough that they have to arrive by helicopter. It's fun for a day or two, at least until the other guests - Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive a bt early. Richard, it seems, was planning two vacations, a romp with his girlfriend and then a hunting trip with the guys, and while they seem to get on well enough, Jen is attacked almost as soon as Richard steps out for a bit - and he does not respond as his girlfriend would hope at all. Lucky for them, she seems to have been pretty definitively dealt with.
Or not; the film is not a ten-minute short named "Rich Men Get Away with Everything". Taking that as a given, writer/director Coralie Fargeat creates an impressive amount of uncertainty as things kick off with a jaw-dropper of a big moment that puts the audience on its back foot and then leads to a bunch of sympathetic groans through much of the film. It's a gruesomely symbolic way of showing the audience how Jen has been violated, one that she carries around for as long as the movie can justify it. It lets Fargeat work her way back up, and she doesn't back off handing the audience another few strong visual cues - not only does Jen soon emerge from a cave as if reborn, but the camera goes up and down her body in the same way it did when she sashayed off the helicopter, this time highlighting tense muscle instead of soft curves.
Full review on EFC
Ghost Stories
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Secret Screening; DCP)
Ghost Stories is an effective anthology of sorts, the cinematic equivalent of variations on a theme that certainly has room to play. It perhaps puts a little too much effort into giving itself a clever twist in the last stretch so that it can be a feature rather than a set of short stories, but the three episodes that make up the bulk of the film are impressive on their own, combining classic supernatural situations with humans' willingness to scare themselves.
That's the explanation offered by Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman), introduced shooting a documentary meant to debunk "psychic star" Mark van Rhys (Nicholas Burns). Goodman was inspired by another paranormal investigator, Charles Cameron, who faded from public view decades ago. A mysterious message summons Goodman to meet his mentor, and he's handed three cases that the old man wasn't able to completely debunk: Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse), a former security guard who saw something at a shuttered mental hospital; Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther), a teenager who hasn't been the same since his parents' car broke down on the way back from a party; and Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman), whose unused nursery has allegedly been haunted by a poltergeist since the loss of his wife (Emily Carding).
These are all elemental, well-worn tales of the supernatural; there's nothing in the main three or the initial framing sequence of skeptics wrestling with their own expectations that horror fans haven't seen before, and even those that don't consume large amounts of spooky stuff can recall a tale or two around those general themes. Filmmakers Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman don't necessarily break new ground with the specific stories, but they've built themselves situations where they don't need to: With each getting twenty-five minutes or so, they've got just enough room to stick to the basics, add in a few memorable details, and then get out before things start to collapse. It's the right amount of detail to keep things ambiguous, too, with nothing that would necessarily convince a skeptic but plenty to freak a person out.
Full review on EFC
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 May 2018 - 10 May 2018
Okay, IFFBoston in the books, Avengers 3 seen… what does this weekend hold?
Hong Kong Triad action in theaters? Heck, yeah! I'll probably give serious thought to checking out Tully and RBG, but I'm more likely to slum it in Bad Samaritan and catch up on other stuff, to be honest. Curious about the Japanese musicals, Russian comedy, and Hindi cranky-old-guy movies.
- Well, it's a bit odd, as the big Marvel thing moving up a week means that the "counterprogramming" that had been scheduled to open at spots like
The Coolidge Corner Theatre winds up actually being the major releases this week. So you get Tully, the latest from the team of director Jason Reitman & writer Diablo Cody, starring Charlize Theron as an overwhelmed mother who forms a bond with her new nanny, playing the Coolidge, the Somerville, the Kendall, the Embassy, Boston Common, the Seaport, Assembly Row, and Revere. There's also a maybe wider-than-expected opening for RBG, a documentary on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with it playing the Coolidge, Kendall Square, and Boston Common.
At midnight, the Coolidge is offering up literal cult films, with a 35mm print of Race with the Devil on Friday featuring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates on the run from satanists, while Saturday pairs classic The Wicker Man with new short "Death Has No Season". Saturday morning offers a "Science on Screen Jr." show of Ponyo (dubbed) with Dr. Lisa Lobel talking about trash polluting the sea, while Sunday morning's Goethe-Institut film The Invisibles is the first of the Coolidge's screenings as part of the National Center for Jewish Film's 2018 program (more on that later). Sunday afternoon features a screening of The Judge with director Erika Cohn discussing her look at Palestine's first female jurist. There's 35mm print of Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown filling the "Big Screen Classic" slot on Monday, and Open Screen on Tuesday. - Disobedience is the first IFFBoston alum to hit theaters in the area post-festival this year, opening at Kendall Square, The West Newton Cinema, and Boston Common. It's pretty good, featuring Rachel Weisz as the prodigal daughter returning home to her Orthodox Jewish community upon the death of her father, only to find that the woman she was spurned for loving has married her father's most devoted student. It's pretty good. They also open Little Pink House, about a woman who fought to keep her home after a corporation tried to get rid of it via eminent domain abuse, and the real-life woman who inspired the story, Susette Kelo, will be there to answer questions after the 7:20pm show on Friday.
- The multiplexes mostly go with lots of Avengers: Infinity War, but they do refresh a couple of screens as well. There's the remake of Overboard, for instance, which inverts the sexes of the main characters by having Anna Faris playing the woman who finds the amnesiac lout who fired her (Eugenio Derbez) and convinces him that he is her husband. It's at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere. There's also Bad Samaritan, with Robert Sheehan as a burglar who finds a woman being held captive while casing a joint owned by David Tennant's nut case. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Revere.
Fenway has Bungo Stray Dogs: Bad Apple for anime fans on Saturday and Sunday, while younger anime fans (or those who have been into a certain series for a long time) can catch Digimon Adventure Tri.: Coexistence on Thursday at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere. Russian comedy I'm Losing It plays Sunday and Monday at Fenway, while Revere has an animated The Boxcar Children: Surprise Island on Tuesday and Titanic on Thursday - Apple Fresh Pond has Hindi-language comedy 102 Not Out, with Amitabh Bachchan playing India's oldest man aiming to be the world's oldest, with Rishi Kapoor as his grumpy 79-year-old son. Friday also brings them Telugu thriller Naa Peru Surya, while Mahanathi, a biography of mid-20th-century actress Savitri which may be in either Telugu or Tamil opens on Tuesday.
Chinese film fans get two choices at Boston Common. A or B comes from the Mainland, and stars Xu Zheng as a former money launderer trapped in a room where he must answer a series of two-choice questions in order to earn his way out. The Trough, meanwhile, comes from Hong Kong and features writer/director/star Nick Cheung Ka-fai in a triad crime story. - The Brattle Theatre brings back Phantom Thread for a weekend of shows, although Sunday afternoon their doors will be open for a free MayFair Cartoon Program. Monday's DocYard season finale is Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, with filmmaker Travis Wilkerson visiting to discuss his film - in which he digs up the ugly part of his family history - with the audience. The rest of the week is A Tribute to Takahata, featuring Isao Takahata's swan song The Tale of the Princess Kaguya on Tuesday, Studio Ghibli documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness on Wednesday, and a double feature of My Neighbors the Yamadas & Only Yesterday on Thursday, all subtitled.
- It's the first weekend of a new month, so The Museum of Fine Arts has an "On the Fringe" show on Friday, this week presenting a 35mm print of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. That day and Wednesday both feature screenings of Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing. Wednesday also features the museum's first screening of local documentary Circle Up.
They also serve as the main hub of the National Center for Jewish Film's Annual Film Festival, with screenings Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday, with the Coolidge also showing films on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Directors Judy Kreith & Robin Truesdale will be at the Coolidge on Wednesday with Cuba's Forgotten Jewels, and many other films will have guests as well. - The Harvard Film Archive spends the weekend with Umetsugu Inoue, Japan's Music Man, with screenings of musicals The Stormy Man (Friday/Sunday 7pm), The Winner (Friday 9pm/Sunday 4pm), a $5 family matinee (on 35mm) of The Green Music Box (Saturday 3pm), The Eagle and the Hawk (Saturday 7pm), and Hong Kong Nocturne (Saturday 9:15pm), from his period with the Shaw Brothers studio. On Monday, they welcome Phillip Warnell to show and discuss two of his shorts made with French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, "Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies" and "The Flying Proletarian", the latter of which is an "augmented cinema" presentation with scents pumped into the room.
- The Somerville Theatre has the Slaughterhouse Movie Club on Friday, with a vampire-themed "Fang Bang" burlesque pre-show at 8pm provides the introduction for The Lost Boys on 35mm film.
- Belmont World Film brings IFFBoston selection Under the Tree back for a screening at Studio Cinema on Monday evening.
- CinemaSalem uses its screening room for Ismael's Ghosts, starring Mathieu Amalric as a filmmaker who flees from his set and second wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) when his first (Marion Cotillard) appears to return from the dead.
Hong Kong Triad action in theaters? Heck, yeah! I'll probably give serious thought to checking out Tully and RBG, but I'm more likely to slum it in Bad Samaritan and catch up on other stuff, to be honest. Curious about the Japanese musicals, Russian comedy, and Hindi cranky-old-guy movies.
Friday, April 27, 2018
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 27 April 2018 - 3 May 2018
On the one hand, Marvel moving the big thing up so it opens the same week as IFFBoston means I've got to be extra-vigilant about avoiding spoilers and such. On the other, it means that not much else is opening that I've got to worry about missing.
I'll basically be at IFFBoston all week, but will probably end up seeing Infinity War on Thursday because, honestly, I'm not sure how I'll have made it that long. I mean, I wouldn't rule out a 10am show on Sunday, or calling in sick to work, to be completely honest.
- So let's give first priority to Independent Film Festival Boston 2018, which opened on Wednesday and will be settling in at the Somerville and Brattle through Monday before spending Tuesday and Wednesday at the Coolidge. It is, as usual, a pretty terrific line-up, from Debra Granik's long-anticipated (fiction) follow-up to Winter's Bone, Leave No Trace, to Andrew Bujalski's Support the Girls, to a Sunday packed with the likes of On Chesil Beach, First Reformed, The Third Murder, and Blindspotting, to When Jeff Tried to Save the World (a feature version of a short that played last year), to the Zellners' Damsel, with a closing night screening of Won't You Be My Neighbor. There will also be a student showcase, open screen, panels, and more.
- So, it's agreed, we're all waiting for Thursday night to see Avengers: Infinity War, part one of the big payoff to ten years of Marvel superhero films, sending everyone from Iron Man to Spidey to Thor to the Guardians of the Galaxy against Thanos, who has probably been given a less ridiculous reason for wanting all the Infinity Stones than to impress Death Herself. So far, the word sounds pretty good. It gets basically every large/3D/premium screen out there, playing the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax 2D/3D), the Belmont Studio (2D only), the Embassy, Boston Common (including Imax 3D), Fenway (including RPX 2D/3D), the Seaport (including Icon-X), South Bay (including Imax 2D/3D and Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D/3D), Revere (including XPlus/MX4D), and the SuperLux.
The only other thing really attempting any sort of wide release is Kings, a drama set during the Rodney King Verdict Riots featuring Halle Berry as a protective foster mother and Daniel Craig as… Well, I don't remember what he was doing there in the movie from the trailer. Not a great sign from the director of the pretty well-regarded Mustang. It finds screens at Boston Common and South Bay.
If you missed Labyrinth during the Brattle's Muppet Marathon, it plays Sunday at Fenway and Tuesday & Wednesday at Fenway and Boston Common. Fenway and Assembly Row have Like Arrows Tuesday and Thursday, and Fenway has something called "All For One" on Wednesday. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre and Kendall Square open The Rider, in which a rodeo cowboy tries to carve out a new identity after a career-ending injury. It's based upon true events, and if star Brady Jandreau and his family aren't quite playing themselves, they're not far off. Seems like a natural double feature with Lean on Pete.
The Coolidge has Lowlife at midnight on Friday and Saturday, and since IFFBoston doesn't have an official midnight section, I don't see why this shouldn't be treated as an unofficial part of the festival. The other screen will have 35mm prints of the original Westworld (Friday) and The Terminator Saturday, for your killer robot needs. They'll be hosting a kids' podcast festival on Saturday and Sunday mornings, with special episodes performed live, and a Science on Screen show of Inception on Monday, with BU professor Steve Ramirez discussing the malleability of memory. - Kendall Square not only opens The Rider, but picks up Ghost Stories, which was BUFF's secret screening last month and a pretty darn fine spooky movie with Andy Nyman and Martin Freeman. It's scheduled for one week (kind of surprising itself, but I guess when a place starts accepting MoviePass, playing stuff that's also on VOD becomes more acceptable). They also open Godard Mon Amour, in which director Michel Hazanavicius dramatizes the romance between Jean-Luc Godard (Louis Garrel) and wife Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin).
- The Brattle Theatre is booked solid by IFFBoston through Monday, but have a varied program after that. Crows & Sparrows presents a free screening of the king-sized (230 minutes!) An Elephant Sitting Still on Tuesday, and then the decidedly less niche Star Wars: The Last Jedi on Wednesday. On Thursday, they have the first two a few screenings in tribute to the late Isao Takahata, with Pom Poko at 6pm and Grave of the Fireflies, the saddest movie ever animated, at 8:30.
- The West Newton Cinema does their own thing, so instead of Avengers they open Love After Love, which features Andie MacDowell as a widow looking for a new beginning, much to the consternation of her two sons.
- The Regent Theatre has live theater upstairs all week, but the "Regent Underground Theatre" space will be screening Modern Life Is Rubbish daily from Friday to Thursday; it's a romantic comedy about a young couple breaking up and trying to divide the record collection they've built during ten years together.
- Apple Fresh Pond has a genuine oddity in Nothing to Lose, a self-financed biography of Brazilian evangelist Edir Macedo. It has apparently already landed in IMDB's listings of the worst ever.
- The Museum of Fine Arts wraps their April calendar on Friday with their final screenings of 24 Frames and Cezanne: Portrait of a Life. The May program kicks of on Wednesday, with afternoon screenings of Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing on both that day and Thursday, and the start of the National Center for Jewish Film's annual film festival. A sold-out screening of RBG serves as a preview on Wednesday, and then The Museum serving as the official opening night on Thursday, with both director Ran Tal and former Israel Museum director James Snyder on-hand.
- The Harvard Film Archive is being used by VES for student film screenings on Friday and Saturday, but return Sunday with Wim Wenders's A Trick of the Light. Monday is the monthly "Cinema of Resistance" show, with Jill Lepore introducing a 35mm print of Sacco and Vanzetti.
- The Belmont World Film presentation at Studio Cinema this Monday is Disappearance, which hails from Iran and Qatar and has a teenage couple racing to find a doctor, only to find many requiring the permission of the young lady's father.
- CinemaSalem has the interesting but flawed Gemini in their small room.
I'll basically be at IFFBoston all week, but will probably end up seeing Infinity War on Thursday because, honestly, I'm not sure how I'll have made it that long. I mean, I wouldn't rule out a 10am show on Sunday, or calling in sick to work, to be completely honest.
Friday, April 20, 2018
Beirut
Not that Beirut is a bad movie, but there was a point during it when I wondered if I might rather see Brad Anderson direct Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike in a romantic comedy, if only because it's been nearly twenty years since he's made one. And I've got to wonder if the reason that Anderson never really seems to have made the leap from capable B-movies and TV to being a can't-miss filmmaker is that he hasn't done one.
Consider: His first feature to grab attention was Next Stop Wonderland, followed by Happy Accidents, and then after that, he did two genuinely harrowing movies in Session 9 and The Machinist. I don't know Anderson's process or approach, but it sure seems like shifting gears allowed him to focus on the contrast and really do something elemental on those. He's made good movies since then and done good TV (he was a big part of why Fringe was as strong as it was), but never anything to approach that 1998-2004 run. Since then, he's more or less done thrillers, and he's good at them - this one, for instance, shifts into a higher gear after a slow start - but none of them have been truly exceptional. It might be worth switching things up to see if doing so would produce a more memorable movie.
Beirut
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 April 2018 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
A movie's name just being its location doesn't always mean that the filmmakers had a sense of that but not the story, but it's not a bad way to bet. Certainly, it's not a theory that Beirut seems keen to debunk; much of the film's first half is explaining to the audience that Lebanon in general and its capital in particular were nervously cosmopolitan melting pots before the civil war, and then touring the blasted remains afterward. It takes a while for the specific story to really kick into gear.
The initial explanation comes during a prelude, as American diplomat Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm) describes the history of the place to a visiting Congressional delegation when he receives a visitor - his co-worker Cal (Mark Pellegrino), warning him that Karim Abou Rajal, the Palestinian boy Mason and wife Nadia (Leila Bekhti) have taken in, has a terrorist big brother, and they want to question him now, since brother Raffik is suspected to be in town. It goes badly, and ten years later, in 1982, Mason is now mediating small labor disputes in Boston, but is recruited to give a lecture at American University in Beirut. He knows that's cover for something else, and it is: Cal is now head the CIA's head of station and has been abducted, with the kidnapper (Idir Chender) only willing to negotiate with Mason, demanding Raffik's release. The team on station - Donald Gaines (Dean Norris), Sandy Crowder (Rosamund Pike), and Gary Ruzak (Shea Whigham) - are reluctant to work with this burnout, but the pieces that don't add up soon threaten to snowball into a much bigger problem… Though that might suit some of the people involved just fine.
When all of this does start to come together, it's not really because the pieces are particularly fascinating or well-established; the opening establishes a setting, but not the relationships that are going to drive the movie. The opening lays a bit of groundwork for what would happen later, but not necessarily the bits that would wind up being most important; you'd think that Cal and Mason were more rivals than close friends from the prologue. Still, the economy to Tony Gilroy's script that can lead to not initially seeing that pair in full turns out to be fairly useful once it shifts from atmosphere to thriller; the plot may not be terribly complex, but there's enough to it for a couple of surprises and satisfying moments that are not exactly surprises. It also threads a needle that many period thrillers don't, creating a story that has high stakes without inserting too much into the actual history.
Full review on EFC
Consider: His first feature to grab attention was Next Stop Wonderland, followed by Happy Accidents, and then after that, he did two genuinely harrowing movies in Session 9 and The Machinist. I don't know Anderson's process or approach, but it sure seems like shifting gears allowed him to focus on the contrast and really do something elemental on those. He's made good movies since then and done good TV (he was a big part of why Fringe was as strong as it was), but never anything to approach that 1998-2004 run. Since then, he's more or less done thrillers, and he's good at them - this one, for instance, shifts into a higher gear after a slow start - but none of them have been truly exceptional. It might be worth switching things up to see if doing so would produce a more memorable movie.
Beirut
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 April 2018 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
A movie's name just being its location doesn't always mean that the filmmakers had a sense of that but not the story, but it's not a bad way to bet. Certainly, it's not a theory that Beirut seems keen to debunk; much of the film's first half is explaining to the audience that Lebanon in general and its capital in particular were nervously cosmopolitan melting pots before the civil war, and then touring the blasted remains afterward. It takes a while for the specific story to really kick into gear.
The initial explanation comes during a prelude, as American diplomat Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm) describes the history of the place to a visiting Congressional delegation when he receives a visitor - his co-worker Cal (Mark Pellegrino), warning him that Karim Abou Rajal, the Palestinian boy Mason and wife Nadia (Leila Bekhti) have taken in, has a terrorist big brother, and they want to question him now, since brother Raffik is suspected to be in town. It goes badly, and ten years later, in 1982, Mason is now mediating small labor disputes in Boston, but is recruited to give a lecture at American University in Beirut. He knows that's cover for something else, and it is: Cal is now head the CIA's head of station and has been abducted, with the kidnapper (Idir Chender) only willing to negotiate with Mason, demanding Raffik's release. The team on station - Donald Gaines (Dean Norris), Sandy Crowder (Rosamund Pike), and Gary Ruzak (Shea Whigham) - are reluctant to work with this burnout, but the pieces that don't add up soon threaten to snowball into a much bigger problem… Though that might suit some of the people involved just fine.
When all of this does start to come together, it's not really because the pieces are particularly fascinating or well-established; the opening establishes a setting, but not the relationships that are going to drive the movie. The opening lays a bit of groundwork for what would happen later, but not necessarily the bits that would wind up being most important; you'd think that Cal and Mason were more rivals than close friends from the prologue. Still, the economy to Tony Gilroy's script that can lead to not initially seeing that pair in full turns out to be fairly useful once it shifts from atmosphere to thriller; the plot may not be terribly complex, but there's enough to it for a couple of surprises and satisfying moments that are not exactly surprises. It also threads a needle that many period thrillers don't, creating a story that has high stakes without inserting too much into the actual history.
Full review on EFC
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 20 April 2018 - 26 April 2018
It's not that there's nothing notable this weekend, but if you've got stuff you want to see and have been putting off, better get it in before stuff both massive and local eats up a lot of screens.
I'll probably catch Kodachrome and A Quiet Place before the festival, and even if I can't get to Lowlife and November, the rest of you should, because they're pretty fantastic.
- The big local event is Independent Film Festival Boston 2018, which starts up on Wednesday and continues for the next week. The opening night film in the Somerville Theatre's big room is Eighth Grade, with director Bo Burnham and actress Elsie Fisher; on Thursday, they expand to the other four screens and the Brattle, with a bunch of short films, American Animals, A Kid Like Jake, This One's for the Ladies, and more.
The Somerville Theatre has a couple of live events in the big room before that, plus a special "Aisle of Dogs" screening of Isle of Dogs where you can bring your dog and also raise money for a good cause. Their sister cinema in Arlington, The Capitol, has a "Throwback Thursday" show on the 26th, screening Flashdance. - Before that, the multiplexes get some things that could serve as counterprogramming to the big stuff hitting every screen next week. I Feel Pretty stars Amy Schumer as a woman who, after a bonk on the head, believes herself to be the most attractive and capable woman in the world, although, it's not like Schumer is unattractive already, except maybe by exaggerated movie-star standards. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. There's also Super Troopers 2, which I think might be Broken Lizard's first production as a group in over a decade, but I guess folks liked the first. This one has the group manning a border area after hostilities erupt between the U.S. and Canada, and plays Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
There's a slightly smaller release for Traffik, a thriller featuring Paula Patton and Omar Epps as a couple vacationing in an isolated cabin only to find themselves surrounded by by bikers. It's at Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
This year's monthly Studio Ghibli series kicks off this week with The Cat Returns, playing Fenway and Revere in an English dub on Sunday and Wednesday, and Japanese subtitles on Monday. Wednesday at those spots also features a special premiere of the "Cobra Kai" YouTube series, which follows up on the original The Karate Kid thirty-odd years later; the event includes the original film before the first half-hour episode. And while it looks like there won't be any Marvel Marathons leading up to Avengers: Infinity War opening Thursday night, it'll probably be very difficult to see anything else at the multiplexes after 6pm or so. - Kendall Square gets Kodachrome, which stars Ed Harris and Jason Sudeikis as a father and son on a road trip to the last lab developing the film of the title lest certain memories be locked away forever. There's also A Bag of Marbles; that story of two Jewish brothers fleeing the Nazis in rural France is slated for a week.
- After an initial "Cinema Jukebox" presentation on Thursday, The Coolidge Corner Theatre starts a run of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, a documentary on the pop-punk icon that, by all accounts, she more or less took over, because nobody makes Grace Jones a passive subject. They also pick up equine family adventure Lean on Pete, though it's mostly in the smaller rooms aside from a Friday "Box Office Babies" screening.
They've got a special midnight screening of Best F(r)iends on Friday, with star Greg Sestero in person for the Room fans. That's not their "4/20" movie, and I don't know if Friday qualifies, though Saturday's Half-Baked fills that slot. Both of those are on 35mm film. Saturday also has a midnight screening of Lowlife, a loopy crime flick (one of the characters is a disgraced luchador) which is genuinely terrific, one of the best finds at Fantasia last summer (it plays next weekend, too). There's also a "Stage & Screen" presentation of Working Girl on Monday (promoting the Huntington Theater Company's production of Top Girls). There's also a "Wide Lens" presentation of Richard Jenkins in The Visitor, followed by a discussion of undocumented immigration. Thursday night is a live show, "Talk/Play" with Kenny Werner. - The Brattle Theatre plays host to the Women In Comedy Festival for much of the weekend, and then a number of one-nighters before IFFBoston moves in on Thursday. There's a free "Elements of Cinema" screening of People on Sunday on… well, Sunday, including a short and discussion with BU professor Peter J. Schwartz, while director Jason Kohn is the guest for Monday's DocYard screening of tennis documentary Love Means Zero. Tuesday is Trash Night, and then on Wednesday they decide that they're going to taunt those of us who like both independent and big franchise films by playing Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, with The Last Jedi on the schedule for a week later.
- Apple Fresh Pond continues Hindi feature October (as does Fenway), and Telugu film Bharat Ane Nenu, also opening Hindi/Iranian film Beyond the Clouds, in which a family's black sheep drags his sister into trouble while on the run.
If you like Chinese films, Boston Common has Dude's Manual, a college romantic comedy. Revere still has Dominican film Veneno. - The Harvard Film Archive and Goethe-Institut program a new retrospective, The Management of Shattered Identity: German Films, 1945-1957, looking at the postwar entries in what had been one of Europe's most vibrant national cinemas. The weekend's selections are Under the Bridges (Friday 7pm on 16mm), Film Without a Title (Friday 9pm on 35mm), Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (Saturday 7pm), Peter Lorre's The Lost One (Saturday 9:15pm on 35mm), and Jonas (Monday 7pm on 35mm). The gaps in that schedule include a special $5 Saturday screening of The Sound of Music, and two documentaries in their Wim Wenders series on Sunday: Buena Vista Social Club at 4pm and The Salt of the Earth at 7pm.
- The Museum of Fine Arts continues the three films they have been running for the last week, with scattered screenings of November (Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday), 24 Frames (Friday/Thursday), and Cezanne: Portrait of a Life (Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday).
- The Boston Jewish Film Festival has a special retrospective at The West Newton Cinema over the next week, showing some of the most popular presentations from their 30-year-history: Paper Clips plays Sunday afternoon with one of the documentary's subjects on hand, Live and Become with special guest on Monday, Above & Beyond on Tuesday, and Walk on Water on Wednesday.
- Monday's Belmont World Film show at Studio Cinema is What Will People Say, in which a second-generation immigrant in Norway is sent to Pakistand for having a local boyfriend, only to get shipped back north for a scandal there.
- CinemaSalem has the latest from IFFBoston alum Lynn Shelton, Outside In, starring Jay Duplass as an ex-con drawn to the former teacher who was one of the biggest advocates for his release..
I'll probably catch Kodachrome and A Quiet Place before the festival, and even if I can't get to Lowlife and November, the rest of you should, because they're pretty fantastic.
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