For some reason on Saturday, I started looking to see if The Crossing was available somewhere, even though I was pretty sure that it hadn't mysteriously gotten a new Region A release since the last time I checked, but maybe some streaming service had picked it up; things had quietly shown up on Amazon for rental before. Not today, but it did remind me that I had John Woo's latest on disc, briefly feeling clever about ordering it before any word of it being picked up for American distribution had appeared, but not watching it before it showed up on Netflix, or for a year and a half after that. But, hey, some free time, and I'd just gotten another John Woo movie in the mail, so there was no need to let them pile up. Then Sunday night, I had some time to kill before Watchmen, and Invincible Dragon was the thing closest to the front of an unwatched movie shelf that wasn't a two and a half hours long.
It's not good, but it kicked me back nine months to this year's Hong-Kong-a-Thon where a couple of the movies were thrown into the schedule precisely because they were batshit insane, and this has the same sort of energy. Connecting with a story I read the other day about how the Danish entertainment industry is just not big enough to keep up with demand for moody detective series, I wondered if at some point the Hong Kong film industry was just not big enough to keep up with the crazy amount of movies they made - like, everyone was cranking out four movies a year so nobody had time to give the script one more pass or do reshoots before the next production had the stage or location, so not only was there a lot of crap, but it sometimes got downright weird. The Invincible Dragon wasn't made under those circumstances, as film production has slowed down and the big money is in co-productions with China. Instead, it's got strong "auteur doing something mainstream to raise money for his weird boat prostitute movie but not totally turning his back on being strange" vibes, which can get you to the same place.
Anway, it was kind of fun to actually watch some of the Blu-rays I ordered a while ago. In most weeks, I'd actually be breaking even there, except that this was also the week that things from various holiday sales came in, and now I'm even more behind in watching these things I bought.
Zhui bu (Manhunt '17)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14-15 December 2019 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Blu-ray)
Whatever happened to John Woo? He rose to prominence in Hong Kong, arguably becoming the best action filmmaker in the world, made some pretty darn good movies in Hollywood, returned to China to make Red Cliff and then, around some health problems, did a co-directing job, the two-part feature The Crossing (which has yet to make it to North America), and then this film, shot in Japan with a mostly Japanese cast and dumped on Netflix with almost no fanfare. Surprisingly, it seems to belong there, feeling like a VOD production inspired by the master's work as much as him getting back to basics after a high-profile bomb.
It follows Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu), a lawyer looking to return to China after several years representing an Osaka pharmaceutical company whose president Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura) is beginning to cede more responsibility to his son Hiroshi (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi). He encounters two women at a company party - Mayumi Tohnami (Stephy Qi Wei), who has reason to blame him for the death of her financé three years ago, and Kiko Tanaka (Tao Okamoto), who will turn up dead in his bed. A corrupt cop's attempt to kill him during his detention as a suspect puts him on the run, Mayumi his only alibi, pursued not just by Detective Satoshi Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) and his cheerful new partner Rika Hyakuta (Nanami Sakuraba), but by assassins Rain (Ha Ji-Won) and Dawn (Angeles Woo).
A prologue in which Du Qiu meets the assassins undercover has him and Rain talking about old movies, and it's not hard to infer that Woo and the half-dozen writers adapting a novel by Juko Nishimura mean his old movies (the phrase "A Better Tomorrow" shows up in dialogue at the end in a way that doesn't feel like coincidence). The elaborate, melodramatic bullet ballets associated with Woo's name haven't entirely disappeared since he left for America after Hard Boiled, but the Hong Kong film industry has changed and they are less common as a result, and there's something off about this one. It is, notably, the first film to arrive in America that Woo has shot digitally rather than on film, and the switch in locations from crowded Hong Kong to Osaka takes a bit of edge off. It's slicker, not quite so hardscrabble as Woo's most famous Hong Kong films.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Jiu long bu bai (The Invincible Dragon)
* * (out of four)
Seen 15 December 2019 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Blu-ray)
Every once in a while, I'm reminded how many films were produced in Hong Kong before the handover, and the sheer volume (four or five new movies a week for a population of 7.5 million packed into 415 square miles, roughly the size of New York City) beggars belief. It resulted in a fair number that were kind of half-baked, like the industry literally did not have the time and manpower to make all of that good, but the messiness that resulted had its own kind of charm. The Invincible Dragon arrives at the same sort of place via a different route, and while that means it's not exactly good, it's weird and messy in the same ways as those other oddities.
It's the story of Kowloon (Max Zhang Jin) - family name Kow, given name Loon, not necessarily named after the city - a detective who starts the film undercover only to have that end in impressively messy fashion, ruining some poor couple's wedding. He's assigned to a tiny precinct on the outskirts of the territory where nothing ever happens and referred to Dr. Kay Wong (Annie Liu Xin-You), whose traditional Chinese medicine may help with his OCD. Of course, once he and fiancée Fong Ning (Stephy Tang Lai-Yan) transfer there, a serial killer starts attacking policewomen, eventually resurfacing in Macau, where the latest victim was last seen in a yoga class Lady Lam Tik-Fong (JuJu Chan Yuk-Wan) runs in a casino resort where her Brazilian-American husband, MMA fighter Alexander Sinclair (Anderson Silva), is a major investor, meaning he must work with Macanese detective Tso Chi-Ta (Kevin Cheng Ka-Wing), who wisely wants nothing to do with this train wreck.
This compresses things a bit - a narrator has helpfully informed us that a few months have passed twice before the film is half-over - and glosses over how Kowloon's impressive dragon tattoo is inspired by a nine-headed dragon he claims to have seen while swimming when he was three. The narration is often a strange choice, waving the audience past what would often be the boring parts but still making Kowloon feel like a passive part of the story. Director Fruit Chan is best known for art-house films, and it would not be surprising if he and writer Lam Kee-To did this to pay the bills for Three Husbands; they spend a lot of time noodling around the edges of things. There's not really a whole lot of story here and the filmmakers aren't terribly interested in either going into details or using the genre framework as background for something else.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Jumanji: The Next Level
So, how the heck was I looking forward to this movie when I didn't much like the first (or second, or third, depending on how you count them)? Is it just the really good cast, or is familiarity just that powerful a force to be reckoned with when it comes to the movies? I mean, it's better and it looked better in the trailers, and I suppose I smiled a few times when I would look up and see bits of Welcome to the Jungle playing on the bus between Boston and Portland, ME when going home for Thanksgiving and returning, so there's that.
(Aside: I was arguing with a person who said modern movies didn't have room for some of the things that were in old movies, and I pointed out that new films tend to be longer. As evidence, I offer up how Welcome to the Jungle was too long for the two-hour bus ride from Boston to Portland, something that has been happening more frequently of late, and almost never did ten years ago. Similarly, I was kind of shocked when the 7pm movie plus AMC's trailer show had me next looking at a clock at 9:30pm.)
Smallish crowd for this one in one, but I kind of consider myself lucky that we're getting 3D shows during "prime time" at all these days. And though some may call this blasphemy, I was weirdly disappointed that parents were shushing their kids during the previews. They're kids, let them react. If the movie's good, they won't need to ask questions or read off the screen because they're into it.
Jumanji: The Next Level
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
I was probably a little harsh on the last film in this series when it came out, considering that I found myself looking forward to the sequel as it's trailers appeared (although I didn't exactly feel a need to re-watch it before seeing the new one). The Next Level is a better movie in part because, while Welcome to the Jungle wasn't great, it got all the explanation and set-up out of the way. This time around, the filmmakers know their strengths and weaknesses, and even if they're not taking chances, they know what they're doing.
It starts with the four kids from the last movie - Spencer (Alex Wolff), Martha (Morgan Turner), Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain), and Bethany (Madison Iseman) - graduated from high school and in their freshman year of college (or a gap year for Bethany), getting back together on Christmas break. Spencer's grandfather Eddie (Danny DeVito) is also staying at his house, recuperating from hip surgery, grumpily avoiding his old friend Milo (Danny Glover), who he hasn't talked to for twenty years. That's why, when Spencer apparently recovers and repairs the game system that sucked them into an adventure game last time, Milo and Eddie are sucked in along with Martha and Fridge, while Bethany has to find Alex (Colin Hanks), the man they rescued last time, for help getting back in, where almost all the identities are scrambled: Martha is still the kick-ass fighter Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), but Fridge became schlubby professor Sherry Oberon (Jack Black), while Eddie is the muscular Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), and Milo the equipment-toting Mouse Finbar (Kevin Hart), with new player character Ming Fleetfoot (Awkwafina) and pilot Seaplane (Nick Jonas) showing up later.
The biggest strength of the previous film was the cast, and that's still the case here, perhaps even more so: The way the script swaps them around and gives them new things to do turns out to be a hoot, with Dwayne Johnson playing out Eddie's pugnaciousness (he continues to recognize that he's at his funniest playing as far against type as possible), Kevin Hart doing the opposite, Jack Black continuing to be a good sport, and Karen Gillan managing to hold everything together as the put-upon rock of the group. It's kind of a bummer that the film isn't set up to give the audience more of actual Danny Devito and Danny Glover, because it is a ton of fun to watch those two pros work. It's no surprise that Awkwafina turns out to be a great addition, but considering that she's got roughly one minute to sell the audience on her playing someone familiar, she manages exceptionally well - and she's got to do it twice!
Full review on EFilmCritic
(Aside: I was arguing with a person who said modern movies didn't have room for some of the things that were in old movies, and I pointed out that new films tend to be longer. As evidence, I offer up how Welcome to the Jungle was too long for the two-hour bus ride from Boston to Portland, something that has been happening more frequently of late, and almost never did ten years ago. Similarly, I was kind of shocked when the 7pm movie plus AMC's trailer show had me next looking at a clock at 9:30pm.)
Smallish crowd for this one in one, but I kind of consider myself lucky that we're getting 3D shows during "prime time" at all these days. And though some may call this blasphemy, I was weirdly disappointed that parents were shushing their kids during the previews. They're kids, let them react. If the movie's good, they won't need to ask questions or read off the screen because they're into it.
Jumanji: The Next Level
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
I was probably a little harsh on the last film in this series when it came out, considering that I found myself looking forward to the sequel as it's trailers appeared (although I didn't exactly feel a need to re-watch it before seeing the new one). The Next Level is a better movie in part because, while Welcome to the Jungle wasn't great, it got all the explanation and set-up out of the way. This time around, the filmmakers know their strengths and weaknesses, and even if they're not taking chances, they know what they're doing.
It starts with the four kids from the last movie - Spencer (Alex Wolff), Martha (Morgan Turner), Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain), and Bethany (Madison Iseman) - graduated from high school and in their freshman year of college (or a gap year for Bethany), getting back together on Christmas break. Spencer's grandfather Eddie (Danny DeVito) is also staying at his house, recuperating from hip surgery, grumpily avoiding his old friend Milo (Danny Glover), who he hasn't talked to for twenty years. That's why, when Spencer apparently recovers and repairs the game system that sucked them into an adventure game last time, Milo and Eddie are sucked in along with Martha and Fridge, while Bethany has to find Alex (Colin Hanks), the man they rescued last time, for help getting back in, where almost all the identities are scrambled: Martha is still the kick-ass fighter Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), but Fridge became schlubby professor Sherry Oberon (Jack Black), while Eddie is the muscular Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), and Milo the equipment-toting Mouse Finbar (Kevin Hart), with new player character Ming Fleetfoot (Awkwafina) and pilot Seaplane (Nick Jonas) showing up later.
The biggest strength of the previous film was the cast, and that's still the case here, perhaps even more so: The way the script swaps them around and gives them new things to do turns out to be a hoot, with Dwayne Johnson playing out Eddie's pugnaciousness (he continues to recognize that he's at his funniest playing as far against type as possible), Kevin Hart doing the opposite, Jack Black continuing to be a good sport, and Karen Gillan managing to hold everything together as the put-upon rock of the group. It's kind of a bummer that the film isn't set up to give the audience more of actual Danny Devito and Danny Glover, because it is a ton of fun to watch those two pros work. It's no surprise that Awkwafina turns out to be a great addition, but considering that she's got roughly one minute to sell the audience on her playing someone familiar, she manages exceptionally well - and she's got to do it twice!
Full review on EFilmCritic
Friday, December 13, 2019
Fantasia 2019.20: And Your Bird Can Sing, Dare to Stop Us, Jessica Forever, Tokyo Ghoul S, and Dachra
Look, folks, I got the review for Tokyo Ghoul S up on eFilmCritic (under whose auspices I was awarded a pass to this festival) before its two-night run, and I've been covering a lot of other movies while they're in theaters, and somehow it means that these just kept getting pushed forward to the point where I'm trying to see if I can watch these things online now because it's been so long since the specific festival and the circuit in general. So a couple of these are basically going to be me saying I saw them.
Kimi no tori wa utaeru (And Your Bird Can Sing)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It would be nice to say that this film make enough of an impression on me that some part of my brain flashes to it when I read its English-language title, but that's not really the case; I just get a loud rendition of the Beatles tune (and, for that matter, just that line of the song). It's okay enough as a movie, but feels like a lot of the Japanese indies that have been playing Fantasia of late - a main character in his early twenties who doesn't betray much ambition, the pretty girl who seems to have a little more going on in the same orbit, and a fair amount of drinking, karaoke, and hook-ups that lead to the potential relationship sputtering or flaming out. There are a couple of funny moments and the sort of clear, disappointed take on the world as it is today that might make this group of films be recognizable as a movement in ten or fifteen years, but not a moment that makes it a must-see.
It's good enough, though. Director/screenwriter Sho Miyake has probably inherited the narrator (Emoto Tasuku) just being credited as "me" from the source novel, which had me confusing him with his roommate Shizuo (Sometani Shota) a lot in the early going, as Shizuo seems more the focus, with Sometani delivering what you might call a dull-knife's-edge performance - there's not necessarily a lot about Shizuo to be impressed with - his lazy passivity probably invites more disdain - but there's just enough spark to him, especially his powerful crush on co-worker Sachiko (Ishibashi Shizuka) to make the audience want more from him. Ishibashi is thankfully given just enough material to make Sachko more than just an idealized girl who's more than the guys deserve, even if the film is not going to stretch its focus far enough to compare how young women are handling this seemingly dead-end life to their male contemporaries.
That's probably in part because they're seeing the manager and there's this perception that sleeping with older guys is a path to mobility that young men don't have (which may have the tiniest grain of truth but is also a sign of other problems), which is too bad, because it camouflages how the movie also has some solid ideas about generational issues. Even when they haven't vanished down a self-destructive hole like the narrator's mother, the're people like humorless, petty assistant manager Moriguchi or manager Shizon, who aside from sleeping with his young female employees always looks at least a little drunk. If the previous generation is so impressive, how does the next find the inspiration to "mature"?
Lots of Japanese movies seem to be asking that question lately, and this one does too, even if it doesn't exactly have that memorable an answer.
Tomerareru ka, oretachi o (Dare to Stop Us)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I have probably, over the course of attending this genre festival and other events like it, gotten myself a pretty warped perspective on what filmmakers are a big deal. When it comes to Japanese filmmakers, for instance, I know very little Ozu, but a movie about fringe icon Koji Wakamatsu? Let me clear my festival schedule for that! Truth be told, there's probably more drama to be found in that anarchist maniac's orbit than that of a respected genius, although some may be a bit disappointed that Dare to Stop Us takes place more within that orbit rather than focusing on Wakamatsu himself.
Instead, it's told from the perspective of Megumi Yoshizumi (Mugi Kadowaki), a young woman who seems to be on the fringes of the art world when she meets a friend Michio "Spook" Akiyama (Soran Tamoto) in a cafe, asking if she knows any girls that could pass for 15 for a pink film he's working on (the producers of these short skin flicks didn't care what sort of messages the filmmakers put in so long as they had the requisite number of sex scenes). She will wind up before the camera in films with names like "Female Student Guerilla" for Wakamatsu (Arata Iura), whose anti-establishment cinema is rooted having been arrested when authorities thought he was a yakuza. He attracts a varied group of writers from Atsushi Yamatoya (Shima Ohnishi) to critic-turned screenwriter Haruhiko Arai (Kisetsu Fujiwara) to Megumi's crush Kenji Takama (Ku Ijima), and Megumi eventually becomes a good assistant director, but as Wakamatsu's fame grows and stabilizing force Spook leaves, the situation at his studio becomes more unpredictable as he's emboldened to take on more radical projects.
Wakamatsu is the leader of this cohort and the one whose name is best known nearly fifty years after the events of these movies, but the film does not spend much time demonstrating his genius; the filmmakers show fleeting glimpses and recreations of his work from this period or spend much time demonstrating any particular genius in his methods. Arata Iura doesn't go the full "abrasive, abusive genius" route, instead recreating the sort of charisma that has a person floating just far enough above the rest to seem extraordinary while still being close enough to grasp onto. He's magnetic, but just certain enough of his own genius that he can shrug off turmoil underneath him.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Jessica Forever
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
At some point during Jessica Forever, I started wondering if maybe this whole thing was a fantasy of some character or other, because that's the only way it starts to make some sort of sense, but absent some more concrete indication from the film itself, it's hard to justify that interpretation, even if it does leave the movie a weird mess of uncertain wish fulfillment badly masquerading as world-building. At best, you can say it's a fable, but it's a dull one, unsatisfying as entertainment.
The film opens with a group of lost boys conducting a sort of raid/rescue; Michael (Sebastian Urzendowsky) is about to be captured or put down by a bunch of drones, but other orphans like himself, led by the beautiful Jessica (Aomi Muyock) save him, and whisk him away to a sort of camp in a large house where they stay together, hunting for food and supplies in disciplined units. When the authorities track them down, they relocate, this time to an island, where Michael meets Camille (Maya Coline) while he and one of the other boys are bathing at the beach, and she seems to like him. The thing about tight-knit groups like Jessica's teenage orphans, though, is that things start to unravel once you add a new element to it.
So, just what is this thing that filmmakers Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (with script collaboration from Mariette Désert) have made? It feels dystopian for a while, but that falls away as Michael and a few of the other boys start coming into contact with outsiders on the island. There's maybe something to say about how life goes on otherwise even if an oppressive regime is cracking down on vulnerable people like these orphans, but it's not something people talk about. So maybe it's a fantasy, either of Michael's or of these dozen boys collectively, where they're still basically children even if their bodies have passed adolescence, the only girl they have to deal with a crush-worthy babysitter who never scolds and showers them with toys, leading them on adventures of the sort that boys like this find thrilling. It makes as much sense as anything.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Tôkyô gûru 'S' (Tokyo Ghoul S)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Tokyo Ghoul S is a "more of that" sequel; it doesn't particularly expand the mythology or have its characters grow and change that much, but delivers audiences another serving of what they enjoyed about the first. Folks who liked the live-action Tokyo Ghoul movie that came out a couple of years ago will likely have fun with this one, and those who missed it won't be overwhelmed. It's not the most ambitious franchise entry, but it doesn't send the series off the rails.
As established last time, "ghouls" live hidden among humanity, unable to eat much other than human flesh and able to fight with extra limbs. Ken Kaneki (Msataka Kubota) is unusual in that he started out human but was given transplant organs from a ghoul; he now works at the "Antieku" coffee shop that caters to ghouls, alongside Toka Kirishima (Maika Yamamoto). Most of the ghoul community understandably keeps out of sight, but Shu Tsukiyama (Shota Matsuda) is not most ghouls - known as "The Gourmet", this trouble-making idle riche type lives to dine on the finest and most unusual human specimens, like the model with different colored eyes he hunts in the opening. A chance encounter with Ken sends his cravings into overdrive - a human with the flavor of a ghoul? How delicious and transgressive!
You would think that some of the ghouls that Ken met in the first movie would have noticed that he smelled incredibly delicious, but to be fair, most of them are trying to live quiet, minimally-murderous lives, and have thus made a habit of repressing their predatory instincts. Not that the screenplay by Chuji Mikasano shows any particular need to explain that in such a way, and it's actually rather striking in its relative lack of ambition: After the first film introduced a whole semi-hidden world, the people making this one banish the Commision of Counter-Ghoul Operations to the sidelines despite the exceptionally high-profile murder that opens the movie, and tend to tread water with Ken and Toka keeping their secret from their human classmates/best friends. The supporting characters from the first are, at best, used as potential hostages and victims here, as the scope narrows to focus on Ken and his immediate problems, making it personal.
Full review at EFilmCritic
"Limbo"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I saw this, but can't say that any particular details are coming back to me four months later. But this here's a log so I'm logging it.
Dachra
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Dachra is being described as the first horror film from Tunisia, and that alone makes it worth seeing for some - aside from it being fun to have one's cinematic passport stamped by as many countries as possible, this sort of genre film often says a lot about how people see themselves in general and by what frightens them. And if that's not something one is particularly curious about, it's also a pretty darn decent scary movie, even if it does occasionally show some rough edges.
It follows a group of three journalism students, Yasmine (Yassmine Dimassi), Bilel (Bilel Slatnia), and Walid (Aziz Jbali) who, looking for a story that will really excite their professor, decide to investigate a girl in a mental hospital (Hela Ayed) who emerged from the woods twenty years ago and seems almost feral. They learn just enough to find where she was found, and it leads them through a path to a hidden town, where they meet a friendly host in Saber, though a pregnant goat-herder tells them to run. Alas, their car is broken, it's about to get dark, and Saber can't help them get to town until the next morning. But there's an empty house or two, and maybe this dairy from a couple decades ago will make interesting reading for Yasmine.
Writer/director/editor Abdelhamid Bouchnak doesn't stray far from the basics here; there are definitely moments when it feels like he dropped a cult compound in the middle of The Blair Witch Project, and seasoned horror movie fans are going to have immediate suspicions about what all the meat drying between on the outsides of the various buildings really is. He never goes about it in half-hearted manner, though, making the path the team follows to this Dachra area enjoyably lurid, with the other end matching it with every attempted step out of this place seeming to put the characters into a bigger hole (at least, those that don't meet impressively bloody ends).
Full review on EFilmCritic
Kimi no tori wa utaeru (And Your Bird Can Sing)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It would be nice to say that this film make enough of an impression on me that some part of my brain flashes to it when I read its English-language title, but that's not really the case; I just get a loud rendition of the Beatles tune (and, for that matter, just that line of the song). It's okay enough as a movie, but feels like a lot of the Japanese indies that have been playing Fantasia of late - a main character in his early twenties who doesn't betray much ambition, the pretty girl who seems to have a little more going on in the same orbit, and a fair amount of drinking, karaoke, and hook-ups that lead to the potential relationship sputtering or flaming out. There are a couple of funny moments and the sort of clear, disappointed take on the world as it is today that might make this group of films be recognizable as a movement in ten or fifteen years, but not a moment that makes it a must-see.
It's good enough, though. Director/screenwriter Sho Miyake has probably inherited the narrator (Emoto Tasuku) just being credited as "me" from the source novel, which had me confusing him with his roommate Shizuo (Sometani Shota) a lot in the early going, as Shizuo seems more the focus, with Sometani delivering what you might call a dull-knife's-edge performance - there's not necessarily a lot about Shizuo to be impressed with - his lazy passivity probably invites more disdain - but there's just enough spark to him, especially his powerful crush on co-worker Sachiko (Ishibashi Shizuka) to make the audience want more from him. Ishibashi is thankfully given just enough material to make Sachko more than just an idealized girl who's more than the guys deserve, even if the film is not going to stretch its focus far enough to compare how young women are handling this seemingly dead-end life to their male contemporaries.
That's probably in part because they're seeing the manager and there's this perception that sleeping with older guys is a path to mobility that young men don't have (which may have the tiniest grain of truth but is also a sign of other problems), which is too bad, because it camouflages how the movie also has some solid ideas about generational issues. Even when they haven't vanished down a self-destructive hole like the narrator's mother, the're people like humorless, petty assistant manager Moriguchi or manager Shizon, who aside from sleeping with his young female employees always looks at least a little drunk. If the previous generation is so impressive, how does the next find the inspiration to "mature"?
Lots of Japanese movies seem to be asking that question lately, and this one does too, even if it doesn't exactly have that memorable an answer.
Tomerareru ka, oretachi o (Dare to Stop Us)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I have probably, over the course of attending this genre festival and other events like it, gotten myself a pretty warped perspective on what filmmakers are a big deal. When it comes to Japanese filmmakers, for instance, I know very little Ozu, but a movie about fringe icon Koji Wakamatsu? Let me clear my festival schedule for that! Truth be told, there's probably more drama to be found in that anarchist maniac's orbit than that of a respected genius, although some may be a bit disappointed that Dare to Stop Us takes place more within that orbit rather than focusing on Wakamatsu himself.
Instead, it's told from the perspective of Megumi Yoshizumi (Mugi Kadowaki), a young woman who seems to be on the fringes of the art world when she meets a friend Michio "Spook" Akiyama (Soran Tamoto) in a cafe, asking if she knows any girls that could pass for 15 for a pink film he's working on (the producers of these short skin flicks didn't care what sort of messages the filmmakers put in so long as they had the requisite number of sex scenes). She will wind up before the camera in films with names like "Female Student Guerilla" for Wakamatsu (Arata Iura), whose anti-establishment cinema is rooted having been arrested when authorities thought he was a yakuza. He attracts a varied group of writers from Atsushi Yamatoya (Shima Ohnishi) to critic-turned screenwriter Haruhiko Arai (Kisetsu Fujiwara) to Megumi's crush Kenji Takama (Ku Ijima), and Megumi eventually becomes a good assistant director, but as Wakamatsu's fame grows and stabilizing force Spook leaves, the situation at his studio becomes more unpredictable as he's emboldened to take on more radical projects.
Wakamatsu is the leader of this cohort and the one whose name is best known nearly fifty years after the events of these movies, but the film does not spend much time demonstrating his genius; the filmmakers show fleeting glimpses and recreations of his work from this period or spend much time demonstrating any particular genius in his methods. Arata Iura doesn't go the full "abrasive, abusive genius" route, instead recreating the sort of charisma that has a person floating just far enough above the rest to seem extraordinary while still being close enough to grasp onto. He's magnetic, but just certain enough of his own genius that he can shrug off turmoil underneath him.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Jessica Forever
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
At some point during Jessica Forever, I started wondering if maybe this whole thing was a fantasy of some character or other, because that's the only way it starts to make some sort of sense, but absent some more concrete indication from the film itself, it's hard to justify that interpretation, even if it does leave the movie a weird mess of uncertain wish fulfillment badly masquerading as world-building. At best, you can say it's a fable, but it's a dull one, unsatisfying as entertainment.
The film opens with a group of lost boys conducting a sort of raid/rescue; Michael (Sebastian Urzendowsky) is about to be captured or put down by a bunch of drones, but other orphans like himself, led by the beautiful Jessica (Aomi Muyock) save him, and whisk him away to a sort of camp in a large house where they stay together, hunting for food and supplies in disciplined units. When the authorities track them down, they relocate, this time to an island, where Michael meets Camille (Maya Coline) while he and one of the other boys are bathing at the beach, and she seems to like him. The thing about tight-knit groups like Jessica's teenage orphans, though, is that things start to unravel once you add a new element to it.
So, just what is this thing that filmmakers Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (with script collaboration from Mariette Désert) have made? It feels dystopian for a while, but that falls away as Michael and a few of the other boys start coming into contact with outsiders on the island. There's maybe something to say about how life goes on otherwise even if an oppressive regime is cracking down on vulnerable people like these orphans, but it's not something people talk about. So maybe it's a fantasy, either of Michael's or of these dozen boys collectively, where they're still basically children even if their bodies have passed adolescence, the only girl they have to deal with a crush-worthy babysitter who never scolds and showers them with toys, leading them on adventures of the sort that boys like this find thrilling. It makes as much sense as anything.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Tôkyô gûru 'S' (Tokyo Ghoul S)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Tokyo Ghoul S is a "more of that" sequel; it doesn't particularly expand the mythology or have its characters grow and change that much, but delivers audiences another serving of what they enjoyed about the first. Folks who liked the live-action Tokyo Ghoul movie that came out a couple of years ago will likely have fun with this one, and those who missed it won't be overwhelmed. It's not the most ambitious franchise entry, but it doesn't send the series off the rails.
As established last time, "ghouls" live hidden among humanity, unable to eat much other than human flesh and able to fight with extra limbs. Ken Kaneki (Msataka Kubota) is unusual in that he started out human but was given transplant organs from a ghoul; he now works at the "Antieku" coffee shop that caters to ghouls, alongside Toka Kirishima (Maika Yamamoto). Most of the ghoul community understandably keeps out of sight, but Shu Tsukiyama (Shota Matsuda) is not most ghouls - known as "The Gourmet", this trouble-making idle riche type lives to dine on the finest and most unusual human specimens, like the model with different colored eyes he hunts in the opening. A chance encounter with Ken sends his cravings into overdrive - a human with the flavor of a ghoul? How delicious and transgressive!
You would think that some of the ghouls that Ken met in the first movie would have noticed that he smelled incredibly delicious, but to be fair, most of them are trying to live quiet, minimally-murderous lives, and have thus made a habit of repressing their predatory instincts. Not that the screenplay by Chuji Mikasano shows any particular need to explain that in such a way, and it's actually rather striking in its relative lack of ambition: After the first film introduced a whole semi-hidden world, the people making this one banish the Commision of Counter-Ghoul Operations to the sidelines despite the exceptionally high-profile murder that opens the movie, and tend to tread water with Ken and Toka keeping their secret from their human classmates/best friends. The supporting characters from the first are, at best, used as potential hostages and victims here, as the scope narrows to focus on Ken and his immediate problems, making it personal.
Full review at EFilmCritic
"Limbo"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I saw this, but can't say that any particular details are coming back to me four months later. But this here's a log so I'm logging it.
Dachra
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Dachra is being described as the first horror film from Tunisia, and that alone makes it worth seeing for some - aside from it being fun to have one's cinematic passport stamped by as many countries as possible, this sort of genre film often says a lot about how people see themselves in general and by what frightens them. And if that's not something one is particularly curious about, it's also a pretty darn decent scary movie, even if it does occasionally show some rough edges.
It follows a group of three journalism students, Yasmine (Yassmine Dimassi), Bilel (Bilel Slatnia), and Walid (Aziz Jbali) who, looking for a story that will really excite their professor, decide to investigate a girl in a mental hospital (Hela Ayed) who emerged from the woods twenty years ago and seems almost feral. They learn just enough to find where she was found, and it leads them through a path to a hidden town, where they meet a friendly host in Saber, though a pregnant goat-herder tells them to run. Alas, their car is broken, it's about to get dark, and Saber can't help them get to town until the next morning. But there's an empty house or two, and maybe this dairy from a couple decades ago will make interesting reading for Yasmine.
Writer/director/editor Abdelhamid Bouchnak doesn't stray far from the basics here; there are definitely moments when it feels like he dropped a cult compound in the middle of The Blair Witch Project, and seasoned horror movie fans are going to have immediate suspicions about what all the meat drying between on the outsides of the various buildings really is. He never goes about it in half-hearted manner, though, making the path the team follows to this Dachra area enjoyably lurid, with the other end matching it with every attempted step out of this place seeming to put the characters into a bigger hole (at least, those that don't meet impressively bloody ends).
Full review on EFilmCritic
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 13 December 2019 - 19 December 2019
After tons of nothing last week, it's apparently time to dive all the way into the holiday movie season.
I've already done Black Christmas and have my ticket for Jumanji 4 (ish), which leaves time to finally catch stuff like Jojo Rabbit and Pain and Glory. Not a lot, but year four of The Expanse also drops this weekend, and that could take up a lot of time!
- The first big release is Jumanji: The Next Level, bringing back the cast and premise of the previous Jumanji sequel but using its videogame avatar gimmick to mix up who the cast members are playing, and apparently adding Awkwafina as a player character (maybe). It's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (Imax 2D), Boston Common (including 3D/Imax 2D), Causeway Street (2D only including their newly-opened "Wide Screen"), Fenway (including 3D/RPX/RPX 3D), the Seaport (including 3D/Icon-X), South Bay (including 3D/Imax 2D/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including 3D/Imax 2D/Dolby Cinema), the Embassy (2D only), Revere (including XPlus/MX4D), and the SuperLux (2D only).
The first big release that really has the shape of an awards contender is Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell, retelling the story of the security guard who found a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics and was initially the prime suspect, and is at the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, the Embassy, and Revere. There's also a new remake of Black Christmas, and on the one hand it's Sophia Takal making a movie that plays multiplexes and which a lot of people get to see, and on the other, it's not really that great. It plays Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
Regal's Saturday Christmas matinee at Fenway is The Polar Express (presumably 2D), while Causeway Street has Love Actually on Monday and It's a Wonderful Life on Tuesday . This year's Ghibli series ends, naturally enough, with The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, with Sunday's shows at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Revere in English, and the same places on Tuesday in Japanese. Music documentation Gorillaz: Reject False Icons plays Boston Common and Fenway on Monday. The re-release of They Shall Not Grow Old finishes up with 3D shows at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row on Tuesday and Wednesday. Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere have special opening night fan events for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on Thursday afternoon. - In addition to Richard Jewell, Kendall Square gets 63 Up, the latest in the 56-years-running series of documentaries checking in on a number of Brits who were seven when the first was produced in 1963. Director Michael Apted will be doing a Q&A on Sunday afternoon, although as you might imagine, that's already sold out.
- The Coolidge Corner Theatre refreshes their schedule by picking up screenings of Honey Boy and The Two Popes (which also expands to The West Newton Cinema). Friday is the 13th, which means a 35mm print from that franchise at midnight, in this case Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, while Home Alone plays that time on Saturday. Sunday's Science on Screen Jr. show is an encore showing of Sherlock Jr., with Museum of Science educator Jeannine Madrid talking about optical illusions. Monday's Big Screen Classic is a digital restoration of The Apartment. They also show The Nightmare Before Christmas on 35mm on Thursday, a "Rewind!" show with an after-party at Osaka.
- The Brattle Theatre has their annual 35mm shows of It's a Wonderful Life this weekend, with some time being sold out online but with a few walk-up tickets at the door. After that, there's a DocYard show of Present.Perfect with director Shengze Zhu on hand to talk about how she stitched together a bunch of Chinese live-streaming footage into a feature. Tuesday is Trash Night, and then Wednesday and Thursday have a double feature of Wings of Desire & The Umbrella of Cherbourg.
- Man, the poster for The Final Level: Escaping Rancala at Apple Fresh Pond just openly admits that its ripping off the Jumanji on the next screen over. They also have the new one from indie favorite Xavier Dolan, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan with Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jacob Tremblay, Thandie Newton, and more. Their Indian films include Mardaani 2, with Rani Mukerji reprising her role as Shivani Shivaji Roy in a Bollywood police-action sequel, and Telugu action comedy Venky Mama.
For those more interested in Chinese films, Boston Common has The Whistleblower for a second week. - The Harvard Film Archive has the last two shows in their mini-run of Duet for Cannibals on Friday. There's a one-off show of a 35mm print of Amadeus on Saturday, and then two special holiday shows on Sunday: The $5 matinee is Three Wishes for Cinderella, apparently known as the Czech It's a Wonderful Life, and then there's a free 35mm screening of Edward Scissorhands in the evening. After that, school's out, and they're dark until mid-January, barring a member's weekend.
- This week's Coen Brothers movies at The Museum of Fine Arts include The Hudsucker Proxy (Friday/Saturday), Fargo (Saturday), The Man Who Wasn't There (Thursday), and No Country for Old Men (Thursday). Say Amen, Somebody has two more shows on Friday and Sunday, with Sunday also having a 35mm show of Soviet classic The Cranes Are Flying, including a Q&A with UMass Professor David Patterson and Ballet Russes Art Initiative director Anna Winestein.
- The Lexington Venue not only picks up Ford v Ferrari, but will be running anime hit Promare over the weekend.
- The Regent Theatre will be showing documentary The Golden Dream as part of a "Gift of Solidarity" fundraiser for the Association for Leadership in Guatemala on Tuesday evening.
- The Luna Theater has The Lighthouse on Friday evening, the original 1974 Black Christmas all day Saturday and Tuesday evening, and A Christmas Story on Sunday. On top of that, there are Saturday Morning Cartoons, Sunday "Magic Mystery Movie Club", and Weirdo Wednesday if you like surprises.
Cinema Salem seems to have their screening room back open, with Francois Ozon's By the Grace of God there this week.
I've already done Black Christmas and have my ticket for Jumanji 4 (ish), which leaves time to finally catch stuff like Jojo Rabbit and Pain and Glory. Not a lot, but year four of The Expanse also drops this weekend, and that could take up a lot of time!
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Little Joe
Yes, I do a "Movie A is like Move B plus Movie C" below. I'm not proud.
I do really dig this one, though, even if it caught my eye in large part because it stars Emily Beecham, who was a standout on Into the Badlands and whom I kind of assume would wind up doing more action-oriented stuff as a result (because she is really good and game for anything they asked on that). This isn't that, but that just makes me more interested in seeing what she can do. She's really good here, including one of my favorite moments at the end (which I'll get to at the bottom of the post).
So, very nice, and I'm sorry not to get a review done earlier because it's just got a day or two left at Kendall Square. After that, it's streamable, and I'm just putting it out there that it would make a nifty double-feature with Aniara if the Brattle wants to do an indie sci-fi double feature as part of their "Best of 2019" series next month.
Little Joe
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2019 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Little Joe approaches Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of Gattaca, and while that may not exactly be a description that excites those who like their science fiction with a lot of action, it is all kinds of my thing. It's got the sort of unsettling ideas that get examined later, all the more so because the filmmakers are willing to look at things from angles where the alarm (and lack thereof) can come from unexpected directions.
The title refers to a new breed of flower from Planthouse Biotechnologies, which is doing something unusual in the bioengineering space - while most plants are built for hardiness and ease of care, this tends to sacrifice color and aroma. Little Joe requires a lot of care, but its colors and scent are brilliant, and its pollen, while engineered to be sterile, contains an oxytocin precursor; it chemically makes those who smell it happy. It's the work of Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) and her partner Chris, sure to be the hit at an upcoming flower show, and she's brought one home for her son Joe (Kit Connor), though that's technically against all sorts of rules. It's just that this flower produces a lot of pollen - maybe enough to asphyxiate the other flowers in the same hothouse room - and their co-worker Bella (Kerry Fox) says her dog is acting different. But Bella's got a history of mental illness, and had to accept a demotion to come back to work, so why worry too much?
If the film has a flaw, it's that Bella sometimes seems a little too close to the mark with her hippie rantings about how making flowers sterile is unnatural and the excess pollen is the flowers fighting that, making and making people serve them. It's useful, at points - director Jessica Hausner and co-writer Géraldine Bajard can keep the audience in a skeptical place long after they would normally become impatient with people discounting the weird stuff going on - but because the movie needs that to keep things pushing forward, it doesn't have time to grapple directly with all of the other ways a flower that makes people happy could be unsettling, from the capitalist impulse to link happiness with work to how some tests seem to dissociate. Hausner and Bajard's script has everything line up, but bits like how Bella decides her dog is no longer her dog or how Little Joe compares to Alice's psychotherapy are mostly left for discussion afterward.
Full review on EFilmCritic
SPOILERS!
Just a couple of small "Body Snatchers" type things that I really liked in this movie: First, Jessie Mae Alonzo seemingly overdoing it after Joe's girlfriend Selma inhales a bunch of spores and creeping Alice out, although it's not hard to recast that as Selma also being intimidated by Joe's kind of brilliant, weird mother. Second, Beecham's cheery "I've got work to do" as she drops her son off with his father for the last time - it really underlines how much Little Joe creates happiness instead of just content obedience, how an underlying theme is that she sometimes felt bad about occasionally enjoying her work more than being a mother, and how everyone under Little Joe's influence is probably okay with the chemicals clarifying that for her. It's not conventionally chilling like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it probably gets at how we're going to use science to create that sort of apocalypse more directly.
!SRELIOPS
I do really dig this one, though, even if it caught my eye in large part because it stars Emily Beecham, who was a standout on Into the Badlands and whom I kind of assume would wind up doing more action-oriented stuff as a result (because she is really good and game for anything they asked on that). This isn't that, but that just makes me more interested in seeing what she can do. She's really good here, including one of my favorite moments at the end (which I'll get to at the bottom of the post).
So, very nice, and I'm sorry not to get a review done earlier because it's just got a day or two left at Kendall Square. After that, it's streamable, and I'm just putting it out there that it would make a nifty double-feature with Aniara if the Brattle wants to do an indie sci-fi double feature as part of their "Best of 2019" series next month.
Little Joe
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2019 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Little Joe approaches Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of Gattaca, and while that may not exactly be a description that excites those who like their science fiction with a lot of action, it is all kinds of my thing. It's got the sort of unsettling ideas that get examined later, all the more so because the filmmakers are willing to look at things from angles where the alarm (and lack thereof) can come from unexpected directions.
The title refers to a new breed of flower from Planthouse Biotechnologies, which is doing something unusual in the bioengineering space - while most plants are built for hardiness and ease of care, this tends to sacrifice color and aroma. Little Joe requires a lot of care, but its colors and scent are brilliant, and its pollen, while engineered to be sterile, contains an oxytocin precursor; it chemically makes those who smell it happy. It's the work of Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) and her partner Chris, sure to be the hit at an upcoming flower show, and she's brought one home for her son Joe (Kit Connor), though that's technically against all sorts of rules. It's just that this flower produces a lot of pollen - maybe enough to asphyxiate the other flowers in the same hothouse room - and their co-worker Bella (Kerry Fox) says her dog is acting different. But Bella's got a history of mental illness, and had to accept a demotion to come back to work, so why worry too much?
If the film has a flaw, it's that Bella sometimes seems a little too close to the mark with her hippie rantings about how making flowers sterile is unnatural and the excess pollen is the flowers fighting that, making and making people serve them. It's useful, at points - director Jessica Hausner and co-writer Géraldine Bajard can keep the audience in a skeptical place long after they would normally become impatient with people discounting the weird stuff going on - but because the movie needs that to keep things pushing forward, it doesn't have time to grapple directly with all of the other ways a flower that makes people happy could be unsettling, from the capitalist impulse to link happiness with work to how some tests seem to dissociate. Hausner and Bajard's script has everything line up, but bits like how Bella decides her dog is no longer her dog or how Little Joe compares to Alice's psychotherapy are mostly left for discussion afterward.
Full review on EFilmCritic
SPOILERS!
Just a couple of small "Body Snatchers" type things that I really liked in this movie: First, Jessie Mae Alonzo seemingly overdoing it after Joe's girlfriend Selma inhales a bunch of spores and creeping Alice out, although it's not hard to recast that as Selma also being intimidated by Joe's kind of brilliant, weird mother. Second, Beecham's cheery "I've got work to do" as she drops her son off with his father for the last time - it really underlines how much Little Joe creates happiness instead of just content obedience, how an underlying theme is that she sometimes felt bad about occasionally enjoying her work more than being a mother, and how everyone under Little Joe's influence is probably okay with the chemicals clarifying that for her. It's not conventionally chilling like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it probably gets at how we're going to use science to create that sort of apocalypse more directly.
!SRELIOPS
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
This Week in Tickets: 2 December 2019 - 8 December 2019
Two different bits of "catching up" this week!
To start with, I finally saw Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite, which I feel like I should have caught earlier, but it's one of those that is just long enough to get scheduled at weird times. It is, perhaps, not the masterpiece many people have treated it as being, but Bong is sure good at building something that pulls you in and makes you want to see more. I think that as much as anything else is why he has become the Korean director who crosses over internationally when it looked for the longest time like it would be Park Chan-Wook, who can dazzle visually but is just a bit more removed.
The next night, I decided to complete the back end of a silly pairing with that 3-D Blu-ray of 1982's Parasite. The movie is, well, not as good, but the restoration is nice after a shaky start (I wonder if there were issues with the first reel).
Working a bit late and the bus running a bit slow as winter approaches meant I missed what I was planning Friday night, but I was able to build a nice double feature Saturday out of The Aeronauts and The Whistleblower. The first is easily the better movie and one which I hope the Somerville Theatre eventually plays as part of its 70mm festival; it's a nice sort of throwback to that sort of eye-popper. The second is a capable enough thriller from China and Australia, and serves two masters as well as this sort of movie can.
I was originally going to try for a quad that day, but was kind of worn by then, settling for another double Sunday that went much better than it usually does when you choose movies by starting time: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is really surprisingly good considering how my brain just wasn't going for Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers in the trailer, and it gave me just enough time to get down the Red Line to Knives and Skin at the Brattle. I really liked that one at Fantasia and thought I'd reviewed it in time for the Boston Women's Film Festival, but apparently not, and after five months, I needed a bit of a refresher to get it written up while it's still playing there.
If you're following me on my Letterboxd page, you can see that I've managed to stretch my unplanned run of seeing films directed by women to four. Hurrah for 50/50 weeks!
Gisaengchung (Parasite '19)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2019 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, DCP)
The film has had a pretty decent run, so I feel like it's okay to talk a little about some of the reasons why people have been saying to go in cold, at least in a somewhat abstract way. There is a twist, and like a lot of movie twists, the thing that happens in the middle of Parasite is thrilling and exciting when director Bong Joon-Ho springs it upon us but also dilutes things a bit. It leads to Bong orchestrating the second-most brilliantly chaotic climax of the year (the exorcism at the end of It Comes is tough to beat), and the choreography is good enough that it's okay that he's introduced a wild card to a situation seemingly built to collapse in on itself.
It's still a wild, well-executed ride, with no individual member of the fine cast quite given as much to do as they deserve but none feeling underused, either. Three distinct settings become terrific, fitting playgrounds, each the scene of its own kind of chaos when things start to spin out of control. There's something intriguing about how father and son are the ones planning the family's scheme but mother and daughter seize on it with a true ruthlessness, although there's not quite enough room to handle all of it by the end.
This may not be Bong's masterpiece, but it leaves plenty to chew on and talk about afterward, and I suspect I'll like it more as I see it again and can connect details rather than just look at the big picture.
Parasite '82
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2019 in Jay's Living Room (Parasites, 3D Blu-ray)
This is not as good as the other film named "Parasite" that I watched this week, to put it mildly. I suspect Kino and the 3-D Film Archive planned their video release to sync up with that film out of sheer cheek, and I kind of respect that.
But for all that it's a bad movie with some good people doing creature effects - the script is dumb and the cast is rough (though Demi Moore would get a decent career out of being this kind of very pretty) - it gives us as good a dystopia of the type imagined in the 1980s as well as any movie that is not actually Mad Max, building patiently and feeling more hollow and lonely as the film goes on, rather than not just being able to afford extras. There's just enough memory of how things were combined with the powerful having nice things to feel like things are going to hell but the world as it was isn't forgotten.
That doesn't make the movie good, but makes it more than just an artifact of the 80s 3D revival that has been nicely restored.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 December 2019 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, DCP)
There's something really beautiful about how thoroughly the filmmakers commit to the idea of placing the whole thing inside an episode of Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood, shooting the film like pre-HD television, on 16mm film with tight close-ups and flat lighting, not quite over-stylizing things but putting the audience back in that time and mindset. It makes the moments that they do something a filmmaker could have done in that time and medium but probably wouldn't have stand out more, without really breaking things.
There's an impressive simplicity to the whole film which is fitting; it's not afraid to be earnest or look directly at situations people will often complicate out of fright and just let its main cast of Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Chris Cooper play it straight. And while there's no way Tom Hanks can quite completely disappear into the role of Fred Rogers, there's something fearless about how he's deployed - for all his great work with children, he doesn't always seem to know how to transfer that to someone like Rhys' Lloyd Vogel, and he can be uncertain. Little things like how he occasionally clutches his back remind one of his age in 1998, and a project of a different time, so you can understand that his advice may not be completely current (today we might be less inclined to tell people to let toxic family back into our lives).
I'm also kind of fascinated by how the last scene emphasizes that this hasn't been his story - Hanks is a supporting actor, not a lead - and we haven't gotten into his head, as he bangs on the piano in one of the ways that he has previously mentioned as being a way he deals with anger. There's a great documentary from last year to cover that, so people who came to this looking for the Fred Rogers story at least have somewhere to go.
Knives and Skin
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Seen 8 December 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
There are brief moments when Knives and Skin seems to be pushing itself to become a little more mysterious and fantastical than it is, lest it seem too simple, but writer/director Jennifer Reeder has a good handle on how to use that surrealism to perk up audience interest and make the quirk go down a little easier without having it be the movie's whole thing. It's a tricky bit of alchemy, but one she manages.
It opens with a hook-up gone wrong, as Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) leads Andy Kitzmiller (Ty Olwin) to a secluded spot only to have a change of heart, angering Andy. That's the last time anyone sees her alive, although her body doesn't exactly stay in one place. Carolyn's mother Lisa (Marika Engelhardt), also the school's chorus teacher, immediately becomes a wreck, although her band-mates think it's kind of par for the course, while several students assumed to be Carolyn's friends say they haven't been close in a while. Meanwhile, preparations start for homecoming, a substitute teacher catches the fancy of Andy's sister Joanna (Grace Smith), and the kids' parents are generally not in great shape themselves.
Carolyn's disappearance is where the audience first starts watching these people, but it's not exactly the focus of the movie; though the various families have connections to it, this is mainly a way for Reeder to tie a number of small, but compelling storylines together without having too many of them become overwrought and off-putting. One never forgets Carolyn, but there's a moment early on where the cute substitute teacher mentions that a girl disappeared in high school, but can't remember her name when pressed. The Kitzmillers and Darlingtons have their own drama going on, her bandmate Colleen (Emma Ladji) is more concerned with the football player who likes her even though she's very much, in her mind, not someone who dates jocks and so on. That secrets come out now is somewhat incidental.
Full review on EFilmCritic
To start with, I finally saw Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite, which I feel like I should have caught earlier, but it's one of those that is just long enough to get scheduled at weird times. It is, perhaps, not the masterpiece many people have treated it as being, but Bong is sure good at building something that pulls you in and makes you want to see more. I think that as much as anything else is why he has become the Korean director who crosses over internationally when it looked for the longest time like it would be Park Chan-Wook, who can dazzle visually but is just a bit more removed.
The next night, I decided to complete the back end of a silly pairing with that 3-D Blu-ray of 1982's Parasite. The movie is, well, not as good, but the restoration is nice after a shaky start (I wonder if there were issues with the first reel).
Working a bit late and the bus running a bit slow as winter approaches meant I missed what I was planning Friday night, but I was able to build a nice double feature Saturday out of The Aeronauts and The Whistleblower. The first is easily the better movie and one which I hope the Somerville Theatre eventually plays as part of its 70mm festival; it's a nice sort of throwback to that sort of eye-popper. The second is a capable enough thriller from China and Australia, and serves two masters as well as this sort of movie can.
I was originally going to try for a quad that day, but was kind of worn by then, settling for another double Sunday that went much better than it usually does when you choose movies by starting time: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is really surprisingly good considering how my brain just wasn't going for Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers in the trailer, and it gave me just enough time to get down the Red Line to Knives and Skin at the Brattle. I really liked that one at Fantasia and thought I'd reviewed it in time for the Boston Women's Film Festival, but apparently not, and after five months, I needed a bit of a refresher to get it written up while it's still playing there.
If you're following me on my Letterboxd page, you can see that I've managed to stretch my unplanned run of seeing films directed by women to four. Hurrah for 50/50 weeks!
Gisaengchung (Parasite '19)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2019 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, DCP)
The film has had a pretty decent run, so I feel like it's okay to talk a little about some of the reasons why people have been saying to go in cold, at least in a somewhat abstract way. There is a twist, and like a lot of movie twists, the thing that happens in the middle of Parasite is thrilling and exciting when director Bong Joon-Ho springs it upon us but also dilutes things a bit. It leads to Bong orchestrating the second-most brilliantly chaotic climax of the year (the exorcism at the end of It Comes is tough to beat), and the choreography is good enough that it's okay that he's introduced a wild card to a situation seemingly built to collapse in on itself.
It's still a wild, well-executed ride, with no individual member of the fine cast quite given as much to do as they deserve but none feeling underused, either. Three distinct settings become terrific, fitting playgrounds, each the scene of its own kind of chaos when things start to spin out of control. There's something intriguing about how father and son are the ones planning the family's scheme but mother and daughter seize on it with a true ruthlessness, although there's not quite enough room to handle all of it by the end.
This may not be Bong's masterpiece, but it leaves plenty to chew on and talk about afterward, and I suspect I'll like it more as I see it again and can connect details rather than just look at the big picture.
Parasite '82
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2019 in Jay's Living Room (Parasites, 3D Blu-ray)
This is not as good as the other film named "Parasite" that I watched this week, to put it mildly. I suspect Kino and the 3-D Film Archive planned their video release to sync up with that film out of sheer cheek, and I kind of respect that.
But for all that it's a bad movie with some good people doing creature effects - the script is dumb and the cast is rough (though Demi Moore would get a decent career out of being this kind of very pretty) - it gives us as good a dystopia of the type imagined in the 1980s as well as any movie that is not actually Mad Max, building patiently and feeling more hollow and lonely as the film goes on, rather than not just being able to afford extras. There's just enough memory of how things were combined with the powerful having nice things to feel like things are going to hell but the world as it was isn't forgotten.
That doesn't make the movie good, but makes it more than just an artifact of the 80s 3D revival that has been nicely restored.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 December 2019 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, DCP)
There's something really beautiful about how thoroughly the filmmakers commit to the idea of placing the whole thing inside an episode of Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood, shooting the film like pre-HD television, on 16mm film with tight close-ups and flat lighting, not quite over-stylizing things but putting the audience back in that time and mindset. It makes the moments that they do something a filmmaker could have done in that time and medium but probably wouldn't have stand out more, without really breaking things.
There's an impressive simplicity to the whole film which is fitting; it's not afraid to be earnest or look directly at situations people will often complicate out of fright and just let its main cast of Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Chris Cooper play it straight. And while there's no way Tom Hanks can quite completely disappear into the role of Fred Rogers, there's something fearless about how he's deployed - for all his great work with children, he doesn't always seem to know how to transfer that to someone like Rhys' Lloyd Vogel, and he can be uncertain. Little things like how he occasionally clutches his back remind one of his age in 1998, and a project of a different time, so you can understand that his advice may not be completely current (today we might be less inclined to tell people to let toxic family back into our lives).
I'm also kind of fascinated by how the last scene emphasizes that this hasn't been his story - Hanks is a supporting actor, not a lead - and we haven't gotten into his head, as he bangs on the piano in one of the ways that he has previously mentioned as being a way he deals with anger. There's a great documentary from last year to cover that, so people who came to this looking for the Fred Rogers story at least have somewhere to go.
Knives and Skin
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Seen 8 December 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
There are brief moments when Knives and Skin seems to be pushing itself to become a little more mysterious and fantastical than it is, lest it seem too simple, but writer/director Jennifer Reeder has a good handle on how to use that surrealism to perk up audience interest and make the quirk go down a little easier without having it be the movie's whole thing. It's a tricky bit of alchemy, but one she manages.
It opens with a hook-up gone wrong, as Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) leads Andy Kitzmiller (Ty Olwin) to a secluded spot only to have a change of heart, angering Andy. That's the last time anyone sees her alive, although her body doesn't exactly stay in one place. Carolyn's mother Lisa (Marika Engelhardt), also the school's chorus teacher, immediately becomes a wreck, although her band-mates think it's kind of par for the course, while several students assumed to be Carolyn's friends say they haven't been close in a while. Meanwhile, preparations start for homecoming, a substitute teacher catches the fancy of Andy's sister Joanna (Grace Smith), and the kids' parents are generally not in great shape themselves.
Carolyn's disappearance is where the audience first starts watching these people, but it's not exactly the focus of the movie; though the various families have connections to it, this is mainly a way for Reeder to tie a number of small, but compelling storylines together without having too many of them become overwrought and off-putting. One never forgets Carolyn, but there's a moment early on where the cute substitute teacher mentions that a girl disappeared in high school, but can't remember her name when pressed. The Kitzmillers and Darlingtons have their own drama going on, her bandmate Colleen (Emma Ladji) is more concerned with the football player who likes her even though she's very much, in her mind, not someone who dates jocks and so on. That secrets come out now is somewhat incidental.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Monday, December 09, 2019
The Whistleblower
Weird trailer for this one - on the one hand, all the dialogue in it was in English, but all the graphics were Chinese, so I'm not sure which audience it was aimed at, which is kind of a hazard with this sort of Chinese-Australian co-production. I think it's probably better than most of these Chinese movies made for "the world market", with the stuff a thriller has to compromise on to get past the Chinese censor board less obvious than usual, the trip to Africa not as cringe-worthy as it often is, and the Aussie cast better than they usually get. That's a lot of "well, it could be worse" but it's a genre film that's got to please several different audiences. It's tough.
I must admit, I really liked seeing it set specifically in Melbourne; I visited there a few years ago and had a good time with "hey, I've been there!" I was kind of weirdly disappointed to see that the gorgeous place they visited toward the start, the 12 Apostles, was closer to Melbourne than any other city; I'm kind of plotting another visit for cold-weather months, but was planning to go to another city, so it will be a while before I get to see that spot in person.
One kind of interesting thing if you stay through the end credits is that the fancy resort they visit there is all CGI in the long shots, and the credits mention that there is no plan for developing that area of natural beauty in such a manner. Which is nice, but it's kind of a weird thing to make up - if it's important enough to note, why not put them at a spot that does have rich-person resorts with that kind of view (and which would likely be happy for some product placement)? Did they just assume any place like that would be built up and not realize it wouldn't be until they started looking for locations?
And for one last silly thing, there's a character named "Tom Baker" in the movie, and when Mark does an internet search on him, the first five pages of results are not all about Doctor Who. That messes with my suspension of disbelief!
Chui shao ren (The Whistleblower)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #5 (first-run, DCP)
The Whistleblower is a competent enough little thriller that loses a bit of goodwill in the last act when it just won't end, setting up a finale that feels tacked on. It's not bad so much as it's a lot of work the movie doesn't need to do just when one's bladder is about to complain. The film's globe-trotting justifies the scale somewhat, but there's probably a great 95-minute movie in here somewhere.
It does quickly have one pondering a vacation to Australia to visit the 12 Apostles on the southern coast, where Mark Ma Ke (Lei Jiayin) of Grand Power Energy Corporation is hosting a delegation from the Han Mei group in Lvhan, China. Executive James Harrison has pulled Mark in because the company's other Chinese senior manager, Peter Hu (Wang Ce) is in Africa, managing humanitarian aid after a massive earthquake near a GPEC facility. Mark is surprised to see that one of the executives is his old girlfriend Zhou Siliang (Tang Wei), and shocked when the plane carrying the delegation the next morning crashes into the ocean with no apparent survivors. Except, Siliang does show up alive, and Peter dead, and it soon becomes clear that there's more to this than Siliang seizing a chance to leave her husband or Peter mis-administering his insulin.
At its best, The Whistleblower is fairly simple and efficient. Once things start going wrong for Mark and Siliang, filmmaker Xue Xiaolu doesn't tend to let a lot of grass grow under their feet, with goons popping up to try and knock Siliang off just about as soon as she shows her face in Melbourne and seldom enough of a lull after that to feel like either Xue or her film's villains are wasting any time. The opening has set the stakes high enough that what they're investigating never feels like small potatoes, and Xue has a fondness for flipping cars into the air in slow motion that shows that name-dropping characters from (I think) A Better Tomorrow is not the end of the director's John Woo influence. Xue is not particularly known for action - her debut feature starred Jet Li but was a small domestic drama - but she sets it up well and doesn't take it for granted, with Melburnians looking more alarmed at people suddenly opening fire in the middle of a train station than is the norm.
Full review at EFilmCritic
I must admit, I really liked seeing it set specifically in Melbourne; I visited there a few years ago and had a good time with "hey, I've been there!" I was kind of weirdly disappointed to see that the gorgeous place they visited toward the start, the 12 Apostles, was closer to Melbourne than any other city; I'm kind of plotting another visit for cold-weather months, but was planning to go to another city, so it will be a while before I get to see that spot in person.
One kind of interesting thing if you stay through the end credits is that the fancy resort they visit there is all CGI in the long shots, and the credits mention that there is no plan for developing that area of natural beauty in such a manner. Which is nice, but it's kind of a weird thing to make up - if it's important enough to note, why not put them at a spot that does have rich-person resorts with that kind of view (and which would likely be happy for some product placement)? Did they just assume any place like that would be built up and not realize it wouldn't be until they started looking for locations?
And for one last silly thing, there's a character named "Tom Baker" in the movie, and when Mark does an internet search on him, the first five pages of results are not all about Doctor Who. That messes with my suspension of disbelief!
Chui shao ren (The Whistleblower)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #5 (first-run, DCP)
The Whistleblower is a competent enough little thriller that loses a bit of goodwill in the last act when it just won't end, setting up a finale that feels tacked on. It's not bad so much as it's a lot of work the movie doesn't need to do just when one's bladder is about to complain. The film's globe-trotting justifies the scale somewhat, but there's probably a great 95-minute movie in here somewhere.
It does quickly have one pondering a vacation to Australia to visit the 12 Apostles on the southern coast, where Mark Ma Ke (Lei Jiayin) of Grand Power Energy Corporation is hosting a delegation from the Han Mei group in Lvhan, China. Executive James Harrison has pulled Mark in because the company's other Chinese senior manager, Peter Hu (Wang Ce) is in Africa, managing humanitarian aid after a massive earthquake near a GPEC facility. Mark is surprised to see that one of the executives is his old girlfriend Zhou Siliang (Tang Wei), and shocked when the plane carrying the delegation the next morning crashes into the ocean with no apparent survivors. Except, Siliang does show up alive, and Peter dead, and it soon becomes clear that there's more to this than Siliang seizing a chance to leave her husband or Peter mis-administering his insulin.
At its best, The Whistleblower is fairly simple and efficient. Once things start going wrong for Mark and Siliang, filmmaker Xue Xiaolu doesn't tend to let a lot of grass grow under their feet, with goons popping up to try and knock Siliang off just about as soon as she shows her face in Melbourne and seldom enough of a lull after that to feel like either Xue or her film's villains are wasting any time. The opening has set the stakes high enough that what they're investigating never feels like small potatoes, and Xue has a fondness for flipping cars into the air in slow motion that shows that name-dropping characters from (I think) A Better Tomorrow is not the end of the director's John Woo influence. Xue is not particularly known for action - her debut feature starred Jet Li but was a small domestic drama - but she sets it up well and doesn't take it for granted, with Melburnians looking more alarmed at people suddenly opening fire in the middle of a train station than is the norm.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Sunday, December 08, 2019
The Aeronauts
First things first - The Aeronauts isn't perfect, but it's kind of my thing in a way that a certain movie last week wasn't, and with the Coolidge only having so many 70mm showtimes, with a few being preempted to show something else in the big room, I'd recommend trying to catch it there (or at your local place with 70mm projection) this week if possible. It's a throwback to the kind of movies that are often the most fun at the Somerville's 70mm festival - the type meant to impress you on the big screen first and foremost - and pretty family-friendly to boot (I'm not sure, how exactly, it got a PG-13 despite being chaste, non-violent, and having fairly mild language used).
It won't be in theaters long, since Amazon at some point looked at it (and their general strategy of playing nice with theater chains' demands for a three-month window) and decided they'd be better off with a small release and quick move to Prime. I can't necessarily blame them; a lot of people probably look at a trailer with the Amazon or Netflix logo and think "no need to bother, I'll stream it soon enough", and while shipping DCP drives to theaters isn't as costly as shipping reels of 35mm film, it's not nothing, either. So while I lament this big-screen movie not getting the sort of exposure it deserves, I get it. Amazon/Netflix/Hulu/etc. productions are undeniable gambles for exhibitors.
Something else I read on social media got me interested, though, that we're all having conversations of The Irishman and Marriage Story because they were able to hit the country at mostly the same time. In truth, I think it's kind of the next evolution of the platform release - they play bigger cities for a month, and then drop on the service - but it got me thinking: What's the ideal roll-out strategy in this age, to both make it easy for everyone to see something without being left behind and not necessarily hurt cinemas? So I made this:
It covers the Boston area, and it's kind of a weird graph. You can really drop everything to the left of the zero line because it's a preview of Uncut Gems messing things up, for starters, and the first weekend of December is a weird outlier in many cases because studios just don't do anything here; in most cases you would probably see zero be the high point. That spike at two weeks represents Frozen II being a monster with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood boosting it further. That bump around eight weeks is driven by Korean movie Parasite, of all things, with Jojo Rabbit at seven and The Joker (which got a few extra times this week on Imax) at nine, and I wonder to what extent their being indies and maybe offering theaters better terms than major studio productions has them hanging around.
That zero at six weeks is telling, though - you can pretty much expect a movie to run its course in a month and a half. We can lament the loss of multi-month runs, but they're not coming back. Still, it seems like six weeks is about when things are just gone from theaters and there shouldn't be any harm in putting them on streaming services then, especially if the goal is cultural relevance. Of course, that would effectively shorten the window more, as people decide that it's really easy to wait. No big deal for the likes of Amazon and Netflix, who probably see the theatrical screenings as just advertising and prestige-building, but rough for other studios and exhibitors.
I wonder, though, if it might make sense to realign some things as other studios become more like the streamers, though, with Disney+ already here, Peacock and HBO Max coming next year (although, don't get me started on them being named after the TV side rather than the film side), and Hulu and CBS All Access probably effectively becoming Fox+ and Paramount+. I could very easily see the windows change so that corporate-cousin streaming happens at six weeks and other streaming/home video happens much further down the road than the current three months (six? twelve?). Probably not great for theaters unless studios start taking a smaller percentage of ticket sales, or make peace with theaters dropping ticket prices so they can get more people in to buy popcorn and soda.
The trouble there is that's really a model only the huge studios can afford, and probably locks us into not having new studios arise unless they can get their hands on some sort of library. Which feels a lot like "there is no good answer" to actually getting these movies seen on the big screen and how they'll be handled in the future.
The Aeronauts
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 70mm)
The Aeronauts is not going to be quite so impressive when you see it on a small screen (which most will, given Amazon will have it streaming two weeks after its North American theatrical release), and there are bits that don't totally fit together, but this is such a treat visually that I'll cut out some slack. On top of that, it's the exact sort of thing I'm always looking to find for my nieces, full of discovery and adventure but not violence.
It's framed by an ascent in a hot-air balloon in 1862, which will incidentally attempt to break the altitude record of the time - which is how it has been sold to the assembled crowd - but whose true purpose is for scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) to record air pressure, temperature, and the like at various altitudes. The pilot is Amelia Rennes (Felicity Jones), and they both consider the path that led them there as they fly to the clouds: For him, it's fighting the scientific establishment's belief that Glaisher's dreams of predicting the weather is folly; for her, it involves the memory of her aeronaut husband Pierre (Vincent Perez) plunging to earth while she was in the basket during their last ascent.
Neither of those flashback threads is terribly interesting, even if we hadn't already seen that they were in the balloon five minutes into the movie, and they seem to be interspersed throughout from sheer structural necessity, because otherwise the audience would just be the flight in real time, and an hour of meticulous note-taking will probably not be to all tastes. I'd be curious to see if there's a more chronological cut of the film that does a better job of using all of these things to build to the final flight, or missing scenes that make the lead-up less choppy, because there is a fair amount that seems to be missing, from how they got financing to how there's just one scene in the massive hangar where they build the balloon to the fact that there's a missing space between Amelia saying she can't go up in a balloon again to her embracing the showmanship of her first scene.
Full review at EFilmCritic
It won't be in theaters long, since Amazon at some point looked at it (and their general strategy of playing nice with theater chains' demands for a three-month window) and decided they'd be better off with a small release and quick move to Prime. I can't necessarily blame them; a lot of people probably look at a trailer with the Amazon or Netflix logo and think "no need to bother, I'll stream it soon enough", and while shipping DCP drives to theaters isn't as costly as shipping reels of 35mm film, it's not nothing, either. So while I lament this big-screen movie not getting the sort of exposure it deserves, I get it. Amazon/Netflix/Hulu/etc. productions are undeniable gambles for exhibitors.
Something else I read on social media got me interested, though, that we're all having conversations of The Irishman and Marriage Story because they were able to hit the country at mostly the same time. In truth, I think it's kind of the next evolution of the platform release - they play bigger cities for a month, and then drop on the service - but it got me thinking: What's the ideal roll-out strategy in this age, to both make it easy for everyone to see something without being left behind and not necessarily hurt cinemas? So I made this:
It covers the Boston area, and it's kind of a weird graph. You can really drop everything to the left of the zero line because it's a preview of Uncut Gems messing things up, for starters, and the first weekend of December is a weird outlier in many cases because studios just don't do anything here; in most cases you would probably see zero be the high point. That spike at two weeks represents Frozen II being a monster with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood boosting it further. That bump around eight weeks is driven by Korean movie Parasite, of all things, with Jojo Rabbit at seven and The Joker (which got a few extra times this week on Imax) at nine, and I wonder to what extent their being indies and maybe offering theaters better terms than major studio productions has them hanging around.
That zero at six weeks is telling, though - you can pretty much expect a movie to run its course in a month and a half. We can lament the loss of multi-month runs, but they're not coming back. Still, it seems like six weeks is about when things are just gone from theaters and there shouldn't be any harm in putting them on streaming services then, especially if the goal is cultural relevance. Of course, that would effectively shorten the window more, as people decide that it's really easy to wait. No big deal for the likes of Amazon and Netflix, who probably see the theatrical screenings as just advertising and prestige-building, but rough for other studios and exhibitors.
I wonder, though, if it might make sense to realign some things as other studios become more like the streamers, though, with Disney+ already here, Peacock and HBO Max coming next year (although, don't get me started on them being named after the TV side rather than the film side), and Hulu and CBS All Access probably effectively becoming Fox+ and Paramount+. I could very easily see the windows change so that corporate-cousin streaming happens at six weeks and other streaming/home video happens much further down the road than the current three months (six? twelve?). Probably not great for theaters unless studios start taking a smaller percentage of ticket sales, or make peace with theaters dropping ticket prices so they can get more people in to buy popcorn and soda.
The trouble there is that's really a model only the huge studios can afford, and probably locks us into not having new studios arise unless they can get their hands on some sort of library. Which feels a lot like "there is no good answer" to actually getting these movies seen on the big screen and how they'll be handled in the future.
The Aeronauts
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 70mm)
The Aeronauts is not going to be quite so impressive when you see it on a small screen (which most will, given Amazon will have it streaming two weeks after its North American theatrical release), and there are bits that don't totally fit together, but this is such a treat visually that I'll cut out some slack. On top of that, it's the exact sort of thing I'm always looking to find for my nieces, full of discovery and adventure but not violence.
It's framed by an ascent in a hot-air balloon in 1862, which will incidentally attempt to break the altitude record of the time - which is how it has been sold to the assembled crowd - but whose true purpose is for scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) to record air pressure, temperature, and the like at various altitudes. The pilot is Amelia Rennes (Felicity Jones), and they both consider the path that led them there as they fly to the clouds: For him, it's fighting the scientific establishment's belief that Glaisher's dreams of predicting the weather is folly; for her, it involves the memory of her aeronaut husband Pierre (Vincent Perez) plunging to earth while she was in the basket during their last ascent.
Neither of those flashback threads is terribly interesting, even if we hadn't already seen that they were in the balloon five minutes into the movie, and they seem to be interspersed throughout from sheer structural necessity, because otherwise the audience would just be the flight in real time, and an hour of meticulous note-taking will probably not be to all tastes. I'd be curious to see if there's a more chronological cut of the film that does a better job of using all of these things to build to the final flight, or missing scenes that make the lead-up less choppy, because there is a fair amount that seems to be missing, from how they got financing to how there's just one scene in the massive hangar where they build the balloon to the fact that there's a missing space between Amelia saying she can't go up in a balloon again to her embracing the showmanship of her first scene.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Friday, December 06, 2019
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 December 2019 - 12 December 2019
Weekend after Thanksgiving, so there's not much coming out, so let's catch up and find something unusual.
I'm seeing The Aeronauts on the big film, Little Joe, and The Whistleblower, and probably (finally) catching up on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Queen and Slim, and Jojo Rabbit. Very tempted by Apollo 11 and They Shall Not Grow Old, because those are just different on the big screen.
- The biggest new release is Playmobil: The Movie, which sounds like a lame knockoff of The Lego Movie, but my nieces love those toys, so who knows. It's got Anya Taylor-Joy (making some interesting detours outside of horror these days) following her little brother into the world of Playmobil. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
Dark Waters expands to West Newton, Fenway, the Seaport, Assembly Row, and Revere after opening at Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Causeway Street last week, while Waves adds South Bay, the Embassy and Revere to the Coolidge, Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Causeway Street. Boston Common also picks up No Safe Spaces, a documentary by and for people who confuse the First Amendment with being able to say whatever you want without consequence.
A few recent favorites are coming back this weekend, too: They Shall Not Grow Old comes back to Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row for 3D shows on Saturday (with more next week). Sneaky, seeing as Warner hasn't released a 3D Blu-ray anywhere. Meanwhile, Apollo 11 has a couple shows a day on Assembly Row's Imax screen. GKids brings back Promare for "redux" shows at Boston Common, Fenway, and South Bay on Sunday (subtitled) and Tuesday (subbed, at least at Fenway).
Fenway also continues their weekend holiday matinees on Saturday, with Gremlins, while Assembly Row andRevere haVe animated first-Christmas story The Star on Saturday and Sunday. There are also 75th Anniversary shows of Meet Me in St. Louis at Fenway and Assembly Row on Sunday and Wednesday. INXS: Live Baby Live plays Fenway and Revere on Monday. There is one last screening of Faustina: Love and Mercy at Fenway and South Bay on Tuesday. Revere also has GoodFellas on Thursday. There are special preview shows of Uncut Gems at Causeway Street on Sunday (although they look to be sold out), and their "ArcLight Presents" show on Monday is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. - The Aeronauts, starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as pioneering baloonists doing revolutionary 19th-Century weather research, will be on Amazon Prime in a couple of weeks, but its limited theatrical run will be big, with most of the showtimes at The Coolidge Corner Theatre playing in 70mm, with a few on DCP (as well as all the shows at Kendall Square).
After midnight, the Coolidge also starts a month full of (mostly) holiday genre movies, with a 35mm print of Silent Night, Deadly Night on Friday and the original Suspiria with a Haus of Oni drag preshow on Saturday. Their are special presentation throughout the week as well: Sunday's Goethe-Institut show is The Most Beautiful Couple, Jeff Rapsis will be in town to accompany a Buster Keaton double feature of The Cameraman & Sherlock Jr. for "Sound of Silents", there's Open Screen on Tuesday, a Panomara show of documentary Parkland Rising with director Cheryl Horner McDonough and several of the subjects in person on Wednesday, and another documentary screening on Thursday, with the world premiere of Women of Earth in partnership with Rise Up & Care. - Kendall Square also picks up Little Joe, which features Emily Beecham as a plant breeder whose new creation is a perfect flower - beautiful, sweet-smelling, and able to actually make people happy - obviously, it is sinister. And with the Amazon movie on one screen, they have Netflix's The Two Popes on another, with Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce as Popes Benedict and Francis in a dramatization of the day when they passed the torch, something usually only done upon death.
- The Brattle Theatre opens the final film from Agnès Varda, the self-examining Varda by Agnès, which runs through Thursday and plays as a double feature with Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't on Saturday & Sunday afternoon. The late show from Friday to Wednesday is Knives and Skin, a nifty, surreal small-town murder story that I really liked at Fantasia.
- The weekend's new Chinese movie is The Whistleblower, with Tang Wei investigating a new and apparently dangerous piece of mining technology in this Australian co-production. Two Tigers is also sticking around.
The new Bollywood epic at Apple Fresh Pond is Panipat, based upon the 1761 battle of the same name. There are also scattered shows of other Indian movies: The Kannada-language Babru is a thriller about a road trip across the United States plays Friday and Saturday, a special digitally remastered show of Bashaa with Superstar Rajinikanth on Saturday, and something called "Mismatch" on Sunday, with Bala still going.
They also pick up a couple American indies: A Million Little Pieces stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson (whose wife Sam directs) as an aspiring writer with addiction issues, with Billy Bob Thornton, Juliette Lewis, Odessa Young, and Giovanni Ribisi co-starring; while A New Christmas stars Pranshantt Guptha and Grace Wacuka as two strangers in New York who meet during the holiday season. - The West Newton Cinema has one late-afternoon show of day of Skin, which is by the people who made the inexplicably-Oscar-winning short of the same name and attacks similar themes but is a different story entirely
- The Harvard Film Archive starts a short run of Susan Sontag's recently restored (for its 50th anniversary) Duet for Cannibals, with two shows Friday night and one on Monday. On Sunday, they pay tribute to their longtime projectionist Steve Livernash, with a reception in the afternoon and a free 35mm of his favorite film, The Rules of the Game, at 7pm.
- It's not quite All Coen Brothers All The Time at The Museum of Fine Arts, but they continue their retrospective with Miller's Crossing (Friday/Sunday), Raising Arizona (Friday/Saturday), Blood Simple (Saturday), Barton Fink (Sunday/Wednesday), and Fargo (Thursday). They also start a run of George T. Nierenberg's 1983 documentary on gospel music, Say Amen, Somebody, with shows on Wednesday and Thursday.
- The ICA screens Kusama: Infinity on Saturday afternoon, free with museum admission (tickets can be reserved ahead of time); note that it is separate from their Yayoi Kusama exhibition.
- The Boston Underground Film Festival has their monthly Dispatches from the Underground at The Somerville Theatre on Wednesday with "A Very Duke Mitchell XMas", a collection of trailers, found footage, ads, and other oddities from London's Duke Mitchell Film Club. Note that the Somerville is going to be down a screen for much of December, with "The Slutcracker" taking up residence in the big room for shows on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday.
- BUFF's friends at the Weird Local Film Festival have their 11th program at Warehouse XI in Somerville on Thursday night.
- The Luna Theater has The Lighthouse on Friday and Saturday evening, Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace on Saturday afternoon, WBCN and the American Revolution at twilight on Saturday and Tuesday evening, and a full day of Gremlins on Sunday, as well as the usual free surprise packages of Saturday Morning Cartoons, Sunday "Magic Mystery Movie Club", and Weirdo Wednesday
I'm seeing The Aeronauts on the big film, Little Joe, and The Whistleblower, and probably (finally) catching up on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Queen and Slim, and Jojo Rabbit. Very tempted by Apollo 11 and They Shall Not Grow Old, because those are just different on the big screen.
Thursday, December 05, 2019
This Week in Tickets: 25 November 2019 - 1 December 2019
Working from home is no fun and I'm glad I'm done with it for a while, barring snow.
It does lead to some interesting scheduling like we saw at the start of the last few weeks, where I headed to the Brattle for the very nifty The Last of Sheila and was then able to convince myself that heading out to Boston Common for Harriet wouldn't keep me out too late because it wasn't like I had to catch the bus the next morning. Similarly, even though I wound up plugging away at stuff until late on Tuesday, it was easy enough to do the 9:45pm night-before screening of Knives Out just in case people were eager to spoil the murder mystery (which it is hard not to do without just writing "it's good, go see it!" in more words).
After that it was Thanksgiving, which meant a trip up to Maine, turkey and pie at various houses, and both enjoying seeing family and being kind of glad to get back to quiet the next day. I started playing around with a non-movie-related project after that, but made it to Last Christmas that evening, since the Icon at the Seaport seemed to be having unusually low member prices all weekend. Not great, but due a bit of grudging respect.
Saturday afternoon was spent at Boston Common for the one show a day that Charlie's Angels has been quickly reduced to, before hanging around a bit for Two Tigers. Not the greatest import from China, but not the worst.
Sunday was spent writing before heading into the teeth of the first snow of the year for three at the Brattle - giving thanks for Bogie in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon in the afternoon - and idly wondering if Thanksgiving-weekend shows of the first indicate that Warner is going to yank it around Valentine's Day next year - before catching Greener Grass for the nightcap.
That gets us pretty current on my Letterboxd page, and here's hoping that the snow being predicted doesn't keep me from adding more in the next few days.
The Last of Sheila
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Hollywood Whodunits, 35mm)
Come for a delightfully nasty James Coburn, stay for "little child molester" being considered a merely embarrassing secret. Hollywood in the 1970s was apparently something else, both in terms of producing this movie and the showbiz-adjacent characters within it!
That mean-spirited nature does make this murder mystery filled with a bit of inside baseball a lot of fun. It's got the meticulous but rickety structure of a flick that's as much puzzle as story, broadly comic bits with a nasty sting, and one mystery story built on top of another. It sets something fun up then abandons it to get everyone in a room, then almost goes on too long before resolving things in enjoyably abrupt fashion, because as much as the audience will have their thoughts on this group twisted up nicely by the time they're through, simple justice would not do. It's a nifty little movie that gets to be more than nifty by the time it's done.
Harriet
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2019 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, 3D DCP)
Harriet often feels a bit like the trailers for faith-based movies, so built around the power of prayer and/or visions that they don't actually show their characters doing anything of consequence and making them feel less proactive when they do. Harriet Tubman did astonishing things, but this telling of her story focuses enough on her "spells" and visions that it's like her own biography doesn't give her enough credit.
As it starts, "Minty" (Cynthia Erivo) is owned by the Brodess family, though married to free man John Tubman (Zackary Momoh) and looking to start a family as a free woman. Even taking when and where she lives into account, she's got an argument - provisions had been made in the will of Gideon Brodess's grandfather to free Minty's mother and her family, but slaveowners tend to ignore such agreements. Punished for talking back and threatened with sale to a faraway plantation, Minty escapes, with surprising help from Reverend Green (Vondie Curtis-Hall), who normally pleases the masters by emphasizing the parts of the Bible that stress obedience and good behavior. She evades capture and makes her way to Philadelphia, where William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Marie Buchanon (Janelle Monáe) welcome her and encourage her to reject her slave name, but initially try to dissuade her from attempting to rescue her husband and family.
She does, of course, despite her small stature and having just recently learned how to read, and it lays the importance of Tubman's story beyond the basic good of freeing slaves out clearly: You may first do something out of desperation to save yourself, but the true test is being willing to do it again to save others, getting smarter and more ambitious about it, even as your personal connection to those you would help decreases. That Tubman has visions which seem to occasionally steer her right doesn't invalidate her story, but director Kasi Lemmons and her co-writer Gregory Allen Howard could maybe interrogate it a little more. After all, part of her escape is possible because Reverend Green says God's word is one thing but secretly acts contrary to his preaching, and her making the choice to act despite not obviously being suited for it, and building herself into the woman she became, could perhaps get a little more time and the things that worked out a little less.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Knives Out
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 November 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
There are a lot of delightful things about Knives Out starting from the very beginning, but the first moment when Rian Johnson and company reveal what they are really up to here is when audiences should smile big, because sometimes there's genuine delight in being baited and switched on a grander scale than you were expecting. Murder mysteries are fun but they can often stall or require excessive amounts of twists to stretch past the length of a short story; revealing his hand early lets him have a lot of fun for the rest of the movie.
And there is a lot of fun to be had here, as Johnson and Daniel Craig make private detective Benoit Blanc a clever but not invincible sleuth, something he half-confesses to in saying that his method is to figure out where something is going and then wait for the guilty party to arrive. That gives the cast room to play on the one hand and sets up a great game of cat and mouse on the other. Parts of the script are downright joyously silly, from how one character can't lie while another is misheard in a fashion that would be groan-worthy as the only solution to the case but is worth a chuckle with everything else Johnson's got going on.
Knives Out may not be the best movie of the year - the route to its terrific last shot is ultimately kind of a side path that can't quite be as important as Johnson wants with all the crime in the foreground - but it will certainly be among my favorites, and I'm already looking forward to a second go.
Last Christmas
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2019 in ShowPlace Icon the Seaport #10 (first-run, DCP)
At the end of this movie, I was pretty sure Emma Thompson wrote it on a dare to extrapolate an entire screenplay from one line of one song, or maybe just did so to keep in practice, and somehow it was just good enough to make its way through the development and attract some talent after she accidentally forwarded it to her agent. Eventually, you get this decent-enough movie whose resolution has been staring you in the face since the start. And, honestly, I kind of respect the professionalism and craft of that. Both the idea of making a jukebox musical from George Michael's songs and the plot of the movie are silly, but she and director Paul Feig get a watchable movie out of it.
It goes down a lot easier when you've got this cast. Emilia Clarke honestly makes Kate a little too cute from the word go, keeping her from really seeming like the walking disaster she is supposed to be as opposed to just comedically unlucky. She bounces nicely off Henry Golding, who is not quite too charming to sell off being adorably dorky, and then you've got Thompson and Michelle Yeoh in parts that they can do at something like one-quarter effort, and since they're dialed up to 50%, they can steal scenes. It makes for a movie that is really almost impossibly nice to the point where you can almost feel the filmmakers giving an embarrassed grin as they stick another George Michael song in. This was the pitch, we've gotta do it, but are you going to complain about a little more of this talented, upbeat singer or cast?
It will be on video next year, ready for an exhausted family to watch after trimming the tree or doing as much baking as they'd done in the previous four months, and probably just the right thing to watch at that point. It's not made for intensity, but doesn't seem like it would be bad in a relaxed setting at all.
Charlie's Angels '19
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2019 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
I try not to think of the calculations that go on in studio executives' heads too much, because it's frightening and tends to put one at a distance from the actual merits of the films themselves, but it gets kind of interest in a movie like this. I suspect that most studios would like to have an action/adventure series along the general lines of this movie, and if you own the name "Charlie's Angels", why not make it part of that franchise? Maybe nobody is really looking for a new Charlie's Angels - fans of the first iteration are around retirement age, the second was sold on its cast, and the third bombed - but does the association help or hurt a relatively unremarkable action/adventure film at the box office?
The "Angels" work for The Townsend Agency, which was once a relatively small Los Angeles concern but has in recent years expanded to a worldwide troubleshooting network of female operatives, thanks to retiring co-founder John Bosley (Patrick Stewart), whose name has become synonymous with the agents' handlers. Their latest case comes from Elena Houghlin (Naomi Scott), an engineer in Hamburg alarmed that a clean-energy system which can be weaponized to create lethal electromagnetic pulses is being rushed into production. Sabina Wilson (Kristen Stewart) and Jane Kano (Ella Balinska) are assigned to the case, which soon becomes more complicated than just aiding and protecting a whistleblower, even with a new Bosley (Elizabeth Banks) who is the first former Angel in the job.
Along the way, there are supervisors who try to take credit for their employees' work, especially that of the women like Helena, turncoats, a tattooed assassin who is a notch more intense than the other thugs, a fabulous party to infiltrate, and the seemingly inevitable trip to Istanbul, which must have a fabulous tax-incentive-for-spy-movies program. It's fun stuff, especially since the Angels are more likely to be outfitted their whimsical James Bond tech than 007 is these days, but the film can't help but feel like a remix of familiar elements that never gets beyond the surface cool and is sometimes a bit too self-referential for its own good.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Casablanca
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Giving Thanks for Bogie, 35mm)
Casablanca is an odd sort of classic, in that for a certain type of viewer, myself included, it can be easier to remember the silly bits that feel like they should sink it than the ways in which it is genuinely brilliant. It hits its emotional targets so perfectly that those of us who are analytically inclined can't quite describe what's so terrific about it when the letters of transit make no sense and other bits are just as silly.
But it is great, and I think it's the central flashback that does it. In a movie which spends a lot of time explaining its characters' feelings and how they make things happen, this is when you get to see Rick and Ilsa as different from what they are now and make your own connections about how they evolved. It's just a notch better than the rest of a movie that's already witty and big-hearted despite the cynicism everyone is trying to sell, and it makes one more willing to trust the rest.
Full review at EFilmCritic
The Maltese Falcon
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Giving Thanks for Bogie, 35mm)
The Maltese Falcon gets a little more bottom-heavy for me with each viewing, as all the running around in the first half and easily dismissable material with Gladys George's Iva Archer has a bit less weight each time, weird screwball energy that doesn't quite fit with the rest, and I'm a little bit less convinced that there's any actual chemistry between Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade and Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy each time. Spade is so apparently amoral that pairing him with anyone requires a little more time than the movie's got to give, especially when there are so many characters that are colorful on their own.
Still, the style is still there and the end is among the best even if you choose to read what Sam is telling Brigid as telling her that he's effectively done with her rather than actual affection. It's maybe not the scene that Bogie will best be known for because Casablanca exists, but it's a bracing moment where a hint of idealism breaks through even though it's at times hard to separate from the cynicism around it.
Full review at EFilmCritic
It does lead to some interesting scheduling like we saw at the start of the last few weeks, where I headed to the Brattle for the very nifty The Last of Sheila and was then able to convince myself that heading out to Boston Common for Harriet wouldn't keep me out too late because it wasn't like I had to catch the bus the next morning. Similarly, even though I wound up plugging away at stuff until late on Tuesday, it was easy enough to do the 9:45pm night-before screening of Knives Out just in case people were eager to spoil the murder mystery (which it is hard not to do without just writing "it's good, go see it!" in more words).
After that it was Thanksgiving, which meant a trip up to Maine, turkey and pie at various houses, and both enjoying seeing family and being kind of glad to get back to quiet the next day. I started playing around with a non-movie-related project after that, but made it to Last Christmas that evening, since the Icon at the Seaport seemed to be having unusually low member prices all weekend. Not great, but due a bit of grudging respect.
Saturday afternoon was spent at Boston Common for the one show a day that Charlie's Angels has been quickly reduced to, before hanging around a bit for Two Tigers. Not the greatest import from China, but not the worst.
Sunday was spent writing before heading into the teeth of the first snow of the year for three at the Brattle - giving thanks for Bogie in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon in the afternoon - and idly wondering if Thanksgiving-weekend shows of the first indicate that Warner is going to yank it around Valentine's Day next year - before catching Greener Grass for the nightcap.
That gets us pretty current on my Letterboxd page, and here's hoping that the snow being predicted doesn't keep me from adding more in the next few days.
The Last of Sheila
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Hollywood Whodunits, 35mm)
Come for a delightfully nasty James Coburn, stay for "little child molester" being considered a merely embarrassing secret. Hollywood in the 1970s was apparently something else, both in terms of producing this movie and the showbiz-adjacent characters within it!
That mean-spirited nature does make this murder mystery filled with a bit of inside baseball a lot of fun. It's got the meticulous but rickety structure of a flick that's as much puzzle as story, broadly comic bits with a nasty sting, and one mystery story built on top of another. It sets something fun up then abandons it to get everyone in a room, then almost goes on too long before resolving things in enjoyably abrupt fashion, because as much as the audience will have their thoughts on this group twisted up nicely by the time they're through, simple justice would not do. It's a nifty little movie that gets to be more than nifty by the time it's done.
Harriet
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2019 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, 3D DCP)
Harriet often feels a bit like the trailers for faith-based movies, so built around the power of prayer and/or visions that they don't actually show their characters doing anything of consequence and making them feel less proactive when they do. Harriet Tubman did astonishing things, but this telling of her story focuses enough on her "spells" and visions that it's like her own biography doesn't give her enough credit.
As it starts, "Minty" (Cynthia Erivo) is owned by the Brodess family, though married to free man John Tubman (Zackary Momoh) and looking to start a family as a free woman. Even taking when and where she lives into account, she's got an argument - provisions had been made in the will of Gideon Brodess's grandfather to free Minty's mother and her family, but slaveowners tend to ignore such agreements. Punished for talking back and threatened with sale to a faraway plantation, Minty escapes, with surprising help from Reverend Green (Vondie Curtis-Hall), who normally pleases the masters by emphasizing the parts of the Bible that stress obedience and good behavior. She evades capture and makes her way to Philadelphia, where William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Marie Buchanon (Janelle Monáe) welcome her and encourage her to reject her slave name, but initially try to dissuade her from attempting to rescue her husband and family.
She does, of course, despite her small stature and having just recently learned how to read, and it lays the importance of Tubman's story beyond the basic good of freeing slaves out clearly: You may first do something out of desperation to save yourself, but the true test is being willing to do it again to save others, getting smarter and more ambitious about it, even as your personal connection to those you would help decreases. That Tubman has visions which seem to occasionally steer her right doesn't invalidate her story, but director Kasi Lemmons and her co-writer Gregory Allen Howard could maybe interrogate it a little more. After all, part of her escape is possible because Reverend Green says God's word is one thing but secretly acts contrary to his preaching, and her making the choice to act despite not obviously being suited for it, and building herself into the woman she became, could perhaps get a little more time and the things that worked out a little less.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Knives Out
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 November 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
There are a lot of delightful things about Knives Out starting from the very beginning, but the first moment when Rian Johnson and company reveal what they are really up to here is when audiences should smile big, because sometimes there's genuine delight in being baited and switched on a grander scale than you were expecting. Murder mysteries are fun but they can often stall or require excessive amounts of twists to stretch past the length of a short story; revealing his hand early lets him have a lot of fun for the rest of the movie.
And there is a lot of fun to be had here, as Johnson and Daniel Craig make private detective Benoit Blanc a clever but not invincible sleuth, something he half-confesses to in saying that his method is to figure out where something is going and then wait for the guilty party to arrive. That gives the cast room to play on the one hand and sets up a great game of cat and mouse on the other. Parts of the script are downright joyously silly, from how one character can't lie while another is misheard in a fashion that would be groan-worthy as the only solution to the case but is worth a chuckle with everything else Johnson's got going on.
Knives Out may not be the best movie of the year - the route to its terrific last shot is ultimately kind of a side path that can't quite be as important as Johnson wants with all the crime in the foreground - but it will certainly be among my favorites, and I'm already looking forward to a second go.
Last Christmas
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2019 in ShowPlace Icon the Seaport #10 (first-run, DCP)
At the end of this movie, I was pretty sure Emma Thompson wrote it on a dare to extrapolate an entire screenplay from one line of one song, or maybe just did so to keep in practice, and somehow it was just good enough to make its way through the development and attract some talent after she accidentally forwarded it to her agent. Eventually, you get this decent-enough movie whose resolution has been staring you in the face since the start. And, honestly, I kind of respect the professionalism and craft of that. Both the idea of making a jukebox musical from George Michael's songs and the plot of the movie are silly, but she and director Paul Feig get a watchable movie out of it.
It goes down a lot easier when you've got this cast. Emilia Clarke honestly makes Kate a little too cute from the word go, keeping her from really seeming like the walking disaster she is supposed to be as opposed to just comedically unlucky. She bounces nicely off Henry Golding, who is not quite too charming to sell off being adorably dorky, and then you've got Thompson and Michelle Yeoh in parts that they can do at something like one-quarter effort, and since they're dialed up to 50%, they can steal scenes. It makes for a movie that is really almost impossibly nice to the point where you can almost feel the filmmakers giving an embarrassed grin as they stick another George Michael song in. This was the pitch, we've gotta do it, but are you going to complain about a little more of this talented, upbeat singer or cast?
It will be on video next year, ready for an exhausted family to watch after trimming the tree or doing as much baking as they'd done in the previous four months, and probably just the right thing to watch at that point. It's not made for intensity, but doesn't seem like it would be bad in a relaxed setting at all.
Charlie's Angels '19
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2019 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
I try not to think of the calculations that go on in studio executives' heads too much, because it's frightening and tends to put one at a distance from the actual merits of the films themselves, but it gets kind of interest in a movie like this. I suspect that most studios would like to have an action/adventure series along the general lines of this movie, and if you own the name "Charlie's Angels", why not make it part of that franchise? Maybe nobody is really looking for a new Charlie's Angels - fans of the first iteration are around retirement age, the second was sold on its cast, and the third bombed - but does the association help or hurt a relatively unremarkable action/adventure film at the box office?
The "Angels" work for The Townsend Agency, which was once a relatively small Los Angeles concern but has in recent years expanded to a worldwide troubleshooting network of female operatives, thanks to retiring co-founder John Bosley (Patrick Stewart), whose name has become synonymous with the agents' handlers. Their latest case comes from Elena Houghlin (Naomi Scott), an engineer in Hamburg alarmed that a clean-energy system which can be weaponized to create lethal electromagnetic pulses is being rushed into production. Sabina Wilson (Kristen Stewart) and Jane Kano (Ella Balinska) are assigned to the case, which soon becomes more complicated than just aiding and protecting a whistleblower, even with a new Bosley (Elizabeth Banks) who is the first former Angel in the job.
Along the way, there are supervisors who try to take credit for their employees' work, especially that of the women like Helena, turncoats, a tattooed assassin who is a notch more intense than the other thugs, a fabulous party to infiltrate, and the seemingly inevitable trip to Istanbul, which must have a fabulous tax-incentive-for-spy-movies program. It's fun stuff, especially since the Angels are more likely to be outfitted their whimsical James Bond tech than 007 is these days, but the film can't help but feel like a remix of familiar elements that never gets beyond the surface cool and is sometimes a bit too self-referential for its own good.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Casablanca
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Giving Thanks for Bogie, 35mm)
Casablanca is an odd sort of classic, in that for a certain type of viewer, myself included, it can be easier to remember the silly bits that feel like they should sink it than the ways in which it is genuinely brilliant. It hits its emotional targets so perfectly that those of us who are analytically inclined can't quite describe what's so terrific about it when the letters of transit make no sense and other bits are just as silly.
But it is great, and I think it's the central flashback that does it. In a movie which spends a lot of time explaining its characters' feelings and how they make things happen, this is when you get to see Rick and Ilsa as different from what they are now and make your own connections about how they evolved. It's just a notch better than the rest of a movie that's already witty and big-hearted despite the cynicism everyone is trying to sell, and it makes one more willing to trust the rest.
Full review at EFilmCritic
The Maltese Falcon
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Giving Thanks for Bogie, 35mm)
The Maltese Falcon gets a little more bottom-heavy for me with each viewing, as all the running around in the first half and easily dismissable material with Gladys George's Iva Archer has a bit less weight each time, weird screwball energy that doesn't quite fit with the rest, and I'm a little bit less convinced that there's any actual chemistry between Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade and Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy each time. Spade is so apparently amoral that pairing him with anyone requires a little more time than the movie's got to give, especially when there are so many characters that are colorful on their own.
Still, the style is still there and the end is among the best even if you choose to read what Sam is telling Brigid as telling her that he's effectively done with her rather than actual affection. It's maybe not the scene that Bogie will best be known for because Casablanca exists, but it's a bracing moment where a hint of idealism breaks through even though it's at times hard to separate from the cynicism around it.
Full review at EFilmCritic
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