Do I like the new Makoto Shinkai film? Of course I do. You can search this blog or eFilmCritic and find fifteen years of me gushing over his most recent works, to the point where I'm not sure whether to cringe a little at the fanboying or sincerely hope for another filmmaker to come along whose work inspires this level of enthusiasm in me. More of the latter, I think. Shinkai is really good.
It's cool to see I'm not the only one that thinks so, with a pretty darn full house on Friday night. I actually pulled up the app to reserve a seat on Tuesday and immediately thought, well, it's a good thing I like sitting in the front section, because that's all that's left three days out. Boston Common has done well enough with some of these big anime releases that I'm a little surprised they haven't booked things more often, but I suppose that there's a fine line between the hits and the things that leave theaters empty.
I might even wind up there again. It looks like it just might be the sort of thing that reveals a bit more on the second time through, or at least makes everything else fit together a little bit better.
Tenki no ko (Weathering with You)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, DCP)
Weathering with You was quite possibly the most anticipated film to come out of Japan in 2019, director Makoto Shinkai's first film after Your Name was a somewhat unexpected (and deserved) smash. It's tricky to talk about what comes next after such a result, especially if the effusive praise you've given to Shinkai's previous films is a click away and your verdict is that Weathering with You is "only" almost as good as what it follows. Even if he can't quite surprise audiences with greatness any more, he's still made a heck of a fine movie.
As things start, it's been raining in Tokyo for months straight, though for 16-year-old runaway Hodaka Morishima (voice of Kotaro Daigo), that's as much a thing to be marveled at as a disaster. It's hard for someone in that position to get by in the city, but a fast-food counter worker gives him an extra burger when he looks especially hungry and a man he met on the ferry, Keisuke Suga (voice of Shun Oguri), offers him work and a place to stay, helping him and his sexy assistant Natsumi (voice of Tsubasa Honda) write stories of unexplained phenomena. One is the "sunshine girl", who seemingly can summon bit of nice weather at will. That turns out that the girl he'd met earlier, almost-18-year-old Hina Amano (voice of Nana Mori), who gained that power after happening upon a shrine while visiting her mother in the hospital and has been looking after her kid brother Nagisa (voice of Sakura Kiryu) since she died. Hodaka suggests she sell her services, and they start a website to do so, but while they're making days brighter one at a time, Keisuke and Natsumi are learning things about "weather maidens" that should make the teenagers nervous, with the more earthly issues that come with Hodaka being a runaway who crossed paths with gangsters while living on the street also hanging over him.
One knows what to expect from Shinkai at this point - earnest teenage characters, a smart fantasy premise, some thrills, and a knack for making his simply-drawn characters feel like they belong in an almost photo-realistic world. The latter is something that he's been building up since he started by rendering short films on his home computer, and having made the big time, it's something where he's currently maintaining a high level rather than topping himself. Still, it's amazing just how good his and his team's craft is at this point - compare the busy, modern Tokyo of this film to that of many other traditionally-styled animations: The detail is incredible without clashing with the foreground characters, and moments that throw Hina into the sky can create a dizzying sensation of vertigo despite her being rendered in a fairly two-dimensional style without a detailed background. And though it seems strange to talk about such things with regard to an animated movie where the cinematography is virtual, the lighting and coloring here is tremendous; the film would arguably fall apart if Shinkai, cinematographer Ryosuke Tsuda, and their team couldn't make the change from a cloudy, overcast day not just believable, but something miraculous.
The filmmaking is impressively solid throughout - Shinkai does a great job of telling much of the story visually, sometimes pushing a lot of information before slowing down to watch the kids do something small (the subtitles sometimes have their work cut out for them in terms of labeling things that might be significant later for those who can't read Japanese while also not giving the game away by only labeling the important stuff or overwhelming with text while dialogue and song lyrics are being translated on other parts of the screen). He gets a nifty soundtrack from Radwimps, letting it become sort of unconventional as situations on screen demand, with a bit of a tremor where other movies might shift entirely into exciting chase material. Characters get to have lives outside of the needs of the story, whether it's Natsumi looking for a job or a gangster who barely remembers Hodaka when the cops show up.
There is, at times, a bit of friction between the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the things which have become a sort of shorthand in this medium and genre as they intermingle here. The character with the most exaggerated design appears in a scene alongside a mural that impresses for its detail and realistic wear, for instance, and Hodaka's particular naïveté and deference to little ladies' man Nagi. There are things about Hodaka's situation that sometimes seem like they should be examined a little more closely, as well - he's introduced as a runaway with multiple bandages on his face, but all he ever talks about in terms of reason is that he felt suffocated in his rural hometown, and while the specific details aren't necessary for much of the movie, it might be worth addressing when well-meaning people are encouraging him to go home near the end.
That ending is in some ways the most interesting part of the movie; I find myself genuinely curious how it plays for others, though I think I'm going to like it the more I think about it. Shinkai seemed a bit timid with his story at some points, but chose not to back down when it counted, recognizing the vulnerability and desperation of his young characters when many manga and anime would be all too happy to make these teens an idealized combination of independent and innocent. After spending most of the movie on getting the audience to identify with Hodaka, he's willing to alarm them in a couple of different ways and shift the focus to Hina with one pointed but hugely relevant line, not backing down on what that means in a larger sense.
It's a smart and pointed way to bring everything together, which is no less than one should expect from Shinkai at this point. He may not have discovered quite the same amount of gold as he did with Your Name, but he's still created something that hit enough of a nerve to become the biggest movie in Japan for 2019 and one that had already traveled pretty well even before packing the screen where I saw it on opening night.
(Previously at EFC)
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Friday, January 17, 2020
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 17 January 2020 - 23 January 2020
So, for all of that talk about how ArcLight would bring more art-house films to Boston, it seems to be by taking a screen or two's worth of pressure off the AMC at Boston Common so that they can program some interesting stuff.
Nothing listed for Fenway's RPX screen, so maybe that's getting an upgrade as well. Not sure to what if so - 4DX or laser projection?
Obviously, I'm there for Weathering With You, but also the silent Hitchcocks, Les Misérables, and using the day off (first time I can remember the company has given us MLK Day!) to catch up on some of what I've missed. Kind of torn between Color out of Space and Queen & Slim on Tuesday, so will probably check to see if the former is going to actually get a regular run.
- For instance, who's got Makoto Shinkai's new film, Weathering with You? The Common. The most popular film in Japan last year, it takes place in a Tokyo where it has been raining for six months straight, but there's a girl who brings sunshine with her. Said to be brilliant, a metaphor for both climate change and depression as well as a love story and an adventure. Shinkai has not let us down yet, and if it's as good as Your Name, well, let's just say it's really strange that it apparently didn't get an Academy-qualifying run during the fall.
- Also looking pretty good is France's Oscar submission, Les Misérables, which is not particularly related to the famous musical, but instead follows a straight-arrow police officer who finds himself in the middle of a corrupt squad. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre (on the GoldScreen), the Kendall, and Boston Common.
Another opening, The Wave, plays in the screening room at midnight on Friday and Saturday, featuring Justin Long as a lawyer who has quite a few misadventures after getting dosed with hallucinogens. Screen one's midnights are more alien invasions, with Slither on Friday and Carpenter's The Thing on Friday, both on 35mm. There's also a kid's show of the 1982 adaptation of Annie on Saturday morning. - Clemency expands after having opened in New York and L.A. (and playing IFFBoston's Fall Focus), with Alfre Woodard as a prison warden overseeing death row, facing another stressful day as a prisoner (Aldis Hodge) faces execution. It plays Kendall Square and Boston Common.
- The two new releases are mostly sharing the premium screens. Doolittle tends to have them during the day, with Robert Downey Jr. as the man who can talk to animals on an epic adventure. It is, by all accounts, an ill-fated disaster, and not necessarily the fun kind. It's at Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture Natick (Imax), Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax), and Revere (including MX4D). Bad Boys for Life, on the other hand, gets the night shift, with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence - and Joe Pantoliano! - reuniting sans Michael Bay for another over-the-top case which is getting surprisingly good reviews for an eighteen-years-later sequel being released in mid-January. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture Reading (Imax), Boston Common (including Imax/Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street (including Wide Screen), Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax/Dolby Cinema), Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux.
If your daughters have only seen Frozen 2 a couple times but memorized the soundtrack, Disney is offering sing-along matinees at Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere. Also getting a screen-boost after Oscar nominations are Parasite (returning to Fenway and the Embassy) and Jojo Rabbit (returning to the Somerville, Kendall Square, Fenway, and the Embassy).
The TCM big-screen classic for the month is An American in Paris, playing Fenway & Assembly Row on Sunday and Wednesday, with Revere also showing it for the second day. Documentary Force of Nature Natalia, following renowned dancer Natalia Makarova, plays Fenway on Tuesday. There's a preview/one-time show of Color Out of Space, Richard Stanley's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's novel starring Nicolas Cage (which should, with those names lined up, be absolutely insane) at Kendall Square, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, and Assembly Row on Wednesday. - The Brattle Theatre continues (Some of) the Best of 2019 with separate-admission shows of Burning Cane and Takashi Miike's First Love on Saturday, Us on Saturday and Sunday, a Robert Pattinson double feature of High Life & The Lighthouse Sunday, The Last Black Man in San Francisco on Monday, Queen & Slim on Wednesday, and a twin-bill of Pain and Glory & Varda by Agnès on Thursday. If you spot a hole in that schedule, it's because Tuesday night is Trash Night.
- After initially advertising it for last week, The West Newton Cinema has Three Christs twice a day this week, with Richard Gere as a doctor treating three patients (Walton Goggins, Peter Dinklage, and Bradley Whitford) who all believe they are Jesus. For something with that cast and a director (Jon Avnet) whose done some noteworthy things, it's taken two years for it to actually get into theaters.
- The Harvard Film Archive starts regular programming again, beginning with the first entries in "Find Without Seeking: The Films of Angela Schanelec" - Marseille (Friday 7pm/Saturday 9pm), My Sister's Good Fortune (Friday 9pm), and Passing Summer (Sunday 7pm). They also start showing the new Silent Hitchcock restorations, with The Manxman (Saturday 7pm) and Champagne (Sunday 4:30pm) both being shown with live accompaniment. They also have a special presentation of Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou at 7pm Monday. All programs this weekend are on 35mm film.
- The Museum of Fine Arts has more of their Festival of Films from Iran, including When the Moon Was Full (Friday/Saturday), Filmfarsi (Friday/Saturday), Cold Sweat (Sunday), The Warden (Sunday), Old Men Never Die (Thursday), and Just 6.5 (Thursday).
- Belmont World Film has their annual Family Film Festival this weekend, with Danish adventure Hacker opening things up at the Regent on Friday evening. There's a slate of movies featuring animals at the Belmont Studio on Saturday - including a screening of Abominable with a post-film talk with the film's storyboard artist, who will also call in when her short is one of the ones screened back at the Regent on Sunday. The festival concludes at the Brattle for Martin Luther King Day on Monday with a program of "Making Peace and Friends". Though many films are subtitled, there will be headsets with simultaneous English translation for kids who aren't yet strong enough reades.
- I'm not sure exactly what relationship The Regent Theatre has with Ed Asner - he's done a couple of plays there - but it continues as they play The Gliksmans, in which he and Cloris Leachman play a married couple whose routine is thrown off by a tailgater on their drive to the bank, once a day from Friday to Thursday. It's late on Friday and matinees during the weekend, with Sunday's show being in the Underground space.
- The Lexington Venue has one last screening of Willie on Saturday morning, with producer Bryant McBride on-hand for a Q&A about the documentary about the NHL's first black player, with proceeds going to S.C.O.R.E. Boston, which sponsors hockey leagues for inner city youth.
- The ICA is offering free admission on Martin Luther King Day, including the 92-minute short film program "A Wall Is a Wall" playing on a loop from 11am to 4pm.
- The Luna Theater show Uncut Gems on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday evenings, The Lighthouse for probably its last Saturday afternoon show, In Fabric later Saturday afternoon, and 2001: A Space Odyssey on Sunday, as I guess they're doing Kubrick this month. There are also free surprises at the Magical Mystery Movie Club Sunday morning and Weirdo Wednesday.
Nothing listed for Fenway's RPX screen, so maybe that's getting an upgrade as well. Not sure to what if so - 4DX or laser projection?
Obviously, I'm there for Weathering With You, but also the silent Hitchcocks, Les Misérables, and using the day off (first time I can remember the company has given us MLK Day!) to catch up on some of what I've missed. Kind of torn between Color out of Space and Queen & Slim on Tuesday, so will probably check to see if the former is going to actually get a regular run.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
This Week in Tickets: 6 January 2020 - 12 January 2020
You know what seems like it would be a pretty good idea, sometime? Choosing a day, not setting an alarm, and just getting to work when I get there, working until 7pm if that's what what gets me on a good schedule. Might get me back to Davis at a time when I'm not hanging around waiting for a showtime in the cold.
Kind of a busy week, even down to taking a little more off the shelf than I put up. It got started with Adoring which is exactly the cute comedy about the intersecting lives of people with adorable pets in a pretty nice Beijing neighborhood. Or at least, I think it's Beijing; I'm not yet at the point where I can tell Beijing from Shanghai from the other large mainland cities. It's pretty disposable, like those Garry Marshall holiday movies, but I was kind of in the mood for cute doggies and kitties and piggies.
I was in the mood for some people getting punched in the face the next night, which my copy of Undercover Punch and Gun technically delivered, but it's a lackluster-enough movie that you can see why it's apparently been sitting on a server for a couple years. Good fighters in Philip Ng, Van Ness Wu, and Andy On, a cameo-filled cast, and an occasionally weird sensibility, but somehow it never becomes fun in the way it should.
A few days of weird work schedules later and I was at the Brattle on Friday for the first night of "(Some of the) Best of 2019", which began with the really quite good Atlantics. Not only did I see the Netflix movie without paying for Netflix, I didn't even have to shell out cash for a ticket because of my theater membership. Hardly a genuine bit of rebellion, but I enjoy it.
The next day had some errands including doing laundry at a different, closer, less-fancy-but-about-the-same-price place than usual, and man, no-one was there, there was a soft couch, and no TVs were blaring Spanish Lifetime or the like. Just blissful quiet. After that, I found a way to avoid the Red Line Shuttle to get to Boston Common to check out a couple of war movies: 1917 on the fancy new Dolby Cinema screen and Liberation on the screen physically closest to Chinatown. The first was better for not being flagrant propaganda, but the generally have complementary issues.
Sunday was a long one, but it was an absurdly nice day to walk around. Things started off at the Kendall, where the 3D screenings of Cunningham were down to one matinee a day, and I'm kind of curious about the kid toward the back and what his story was. Was a parent or a sister really into dance and it was decided that there was no need for a sitter what with the movie (probably) rated PG? He wasn't really disruptive, but you could absolutely tell that a 3D portrait of a titan of modern dance was not really his thing.
After that, there was plenty of time to get back to Harvard Square, use a coupon on the wrong sort of USB cable to replace the frayed on on my phone before something went badly awry, and visit Charlie's Kitchen for the first time, despite the fact that one would think that I would have eaten at a place billing itself as "The Double Cheeseburger King" at some point in the last twenty years. I had not, and it was a good, o mussing-around bacon cheeseburger. After that, on to a double feature at the Brattle, where I was happy to finally see Fast Color after it didn't have a regular theatrical run in Boston and its other special screenings didn't work with my schedule. It's good, I continue to love Gugu Mbatha-Raw and David Strathairn, and I'm looking forward to the series.
And then I hung around for Captain Marvel, and didn't realize that I'd never posted my review of it on the blog - but did on my Letterboxd page - because I was kind of busy elsewhere during that time.
Captain Marvel
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
I think the Brattle had some issues with projection, because the picture looked kind of dim compared to when I saw it in Imax over in Hong Kong. Kind of a shame.
Second time around, it gives off the same feel - absolutely Yet Another Marvel Origin Story, but an example of it being done very well indeed, and, seen eight months after Avengers: Endgame, it doesn't play as if it's just setup.
Kind of a busy week, even down to taking a little more off the shelf than I put up. It got started with Adoring which is exactly the cute comedy about the intersecting lives of people with adorable pets in a pretty nice Beijing neighborhood. Or at least, I think it's Beijing; I'm not yet at the point where I can tell Beijing from Shanghai from the other large mainland cities. It's pretty disposable, like those Garry Marshall holiday movies, but I was kind of in the mood for cute doggies and kitties and piggies.
I was in the mood for some people getting punched in the face the next night, which my copy of Undercover Punch and Gun technically delivered, but it's a lackluster-enough movie that you can see why it's apparently been sitting on a server for a couple years. Good fighters in Philip Ng, Van Ness Wu, and Andy On, a cameo-filled cast, and an occasionally weird sensibility, but somehow it never becomes fun in the way it should.
A few days of weird work schedules later and I was at the Brattle on Friday for the first night of "(Some of the) Best of 2019", which began with the really quite good Atlantics. Not only did I see the Netflix movie without paying for Netflix, I didn't even have to shell out cash for a ticket because of my theater membership. Hardly a genuine bit of rebellion, but I enjoy it.
The next day had some errands including doing laundry at a different, closer, less-fancy-but-about-the-same-price place than usual, and man, no-one was there, there was a soft couch, and no TVs were blaring Spanish Lifetime or the like. Just blissful quiet. After that, I found a way to avoid the Red Line Shuttle to get to Boston Common to check out a couple of war movies: 1917 on the fancy new Dolby Cinema screen and Liberation on the screen physically closest to Chinatown. The first was better for not being flagrant propaganda, but the generally have complementary issues.
Sunday was a long one, but it was an absurdly nice day to walk around. Things started off at the Kendall, where the 3D screenings of Cunningham were down to one matinee a day, and I'm kind of curious about the kid toward the back and what his story was. Was a parent or a sister really into dance and it was decided that there was no need for a sitter what with the movie (probably) rated PG? He wasn't really disruptive, but you could absolutely tell that a 3D portrait of a titan of modern dance was not really his thing.
After that, there was plenty of time to get back to Harvard Square, use a coupon on the wrong sort of USB cable to replace the frayed on on my phone before something went badly awry, and visit Charlie's Kitchen for the first time, despite the fact that one would think that I would have eaten at a place billing itself as "The Double Cheeseburger King" at some point in the last twenty years. I had not, and it was a good, o mussing-around bacon cheeseburger. After that, on to a double feature at the Brattle, where I was happy to finally see Fast Color after it didn't have a regular theatrical run in Boston and its other special screenings didn't work with my schedule. It's good, I continue to love Gugu Mbatha-Raw and David Strathairn, and I'm looking forward to the series.
And then I hung around for Captain Marvel, and didn't realize that I'd never posted my review of it on the blog - but did on my Letterboxd page - because I was kind of busy elsewhere during that time.
Captain Marvel
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
I think the Brattle had some issues with projection, because the picture looked kind of dim compared to when I saw it in Imax over in Hong Kong. Kind of a shame.
Second time around, it gives off the same feel - absolutely Yet Another Marvel Origin Story, but an example of it being done very well indeed, and, seen eight months after Avengers: Endgame, it doesn't play as if it's just setup.
Cunningham
That's two movies about modern dance and choreography, a subject I know remarkably little about but was drawn to because I do really like 3D movies and want to encourage theaters to play unconventional movies in 3D and continue to release them on 3D Blu-ray, even if those of us with compatible players and displays are dwindling in North America and, as far as I can tell, internationally. Stuff that used to show up in the UK and South Korea and Hong Kong in that format just doesn't any more (note to self: grab 3D Star Wars movies from the UK while you can). It's a shame that studios and exhibitors have, by and large, abandoned 3D outside of a way to add a surcharge to some tickets, because between this, the continued good work of the 3-D Film Archive, Long Day's Journey into Night, Alita: Battle Angel, and Gemini Man (and even the nifty conversion for Star Wars IX), there's been some really nifty use of the format over the past year, and it's by and large going to vanish once these films leave theaters
.
Hopefully this will come out on a 3D disc - and if it does, the folks who made Found Footage 3D should ask Magnolia what's up with them not getting one.
Chuningham
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
I wonder what sort of a minority I am in coming to see Cunningham for the 3D photography as much as the dance, and how many people who came for the dance were hoping for something a little more in-depth. It's the sort of documentary about an artist and his career that relies heavily on demonstration, and as such seems like a good introduction with an intriguing hook, albeit one whose gimmick will only be briefly available.
Filmmaker Alla Kovgan covers Merce Cunningham's career from 1942 to 1972, when he created some of his most famous pieces as a choreographer and dancer, often in collaboration with composer John Cage and designer Robert Rauschenberg. Rather than simply presenting period footage of varying quality, they often recreate the performances, sometimes on a stage and sometimes on location. More context is given with archival interviews, not necessarily contemporaneous with the black-and-white photos and footage shown. It's a clear demarcation - the vital material is in vivid, colorful motion, while the rest is supplementary, filling in the gaps.
Letting the dance and Cunningham's own words speak for themselves is a nifty choice, although I suspect that it doesn't present a whole lot of new information or special insight for those who already know something about dance in general and Cunningham in particular. What Kovgan chooses to include as writer/director/editor makes for an intriguing lesson plan, providing just enough information for even us laymen to start to examine the dance ourselves. From the very start, she's redirecting how viewers think of dance by including comments from Cunningham about divorcing the movements from storytelling and music, focusing on the technical more than the biographical. There is some of that, certainly, but as asides and jumping-off points. For better or worse, Kovgan builds the film around Cunningham's position that his dance is almost entirely about movement.
Full review on eFilmCritic
.
Hopefully this will come out on a 3D disc - and if it does, the folks who made Found Footage 3D should ask Magnolia what's up with them not getting one.
Chuningham
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
I wonder what sort of a minority I am in coming to see Cunningham for the 3D photography as much as the dance, and how many people who came for the dance were hoping for something a little more in-depth. It's the sort of documentary about an artist and his career that relies heavily on demonstration, and as such seems like a good introduction with an intriguing hook, albeit one whose gimmick will only be briefly available.
Filmmaker Alla Kovgan covers Merce Cunningham's career from 1942 to 1972, when he created some of his most famous pieces as a choreographer and dancer, often in collaboration with composer John Cage and designer Robert Rauschenberg. Rather than simply presenting period footage of varying quality, they often recreate the performances, sometimes on a stage and sometimes on location. More context is given with archival interviews, not necessarily contemporaneous with the black-and-white photos and footage shown. It's a clear demarcation - the vital material is in vivid, colorful motion, while the rest is supplementary, filling in the gaps.
Letting the dance and Cunningham's own words speak for themselves is a nifty choice, although I suspect that it doesn't present a whole lot of new information or special insight for those who already know something about dance in general and Cunningham in particular. What Kovgan chooses to include as writer/director/editor makes for an intriguing lesson plan, providing just enough information for even us laymen to start to examine the dance ourselves. From the very start, she's redirecting how viewers think of dance by including comments from Cunningham about divorcing the movements from storytelling and music, focusing on the technical more than the biographical. There is some of that, certainly, but as asides and jumping-off points. For better or worse, Kovgan builds the film around Cunningham's position that his dance is almost entirely about movement.
Full review on eFilmCritic
Monday, January 13, 2020
Fast Color
I was pretty disappointed when Boston wasn't on the list of cities where Fast Color played this spring - or maybe it was and I just wasn't checking times at the Liberty Tree Mall yet, but when you go out that far, is it still playing Boston? I have liked Gugu Mbatha-Raw in pretty much everything I've seen her in from Undercovers forward, and this sort of superheroes-meet-indie-film thing is my thing. Then I missed it at other times it played the area (as part of the Boston Women's Film Festival and Bright Lights) and more or less resigned myself to watching it on disc. I smiled big-time when I saw that the Brattle had not only included it in the "some of the best of 2019" program, but paired it with Captain Marvel. That's a potentially fun double feature!
So, yes, this worked out pretty well. It's always funny when I can move a disc from the "recent arrivals" shelf to the "stuff I've seen" ones, and while some might say it's a waste of money, it just makes it easier to push the disc into others' hands, especially if the movie vanishes from streaming services when the TV series version comes out, as movies are wont to do.
Fast Color
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in The Brattle Theatre ([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
Their work is just one of the elements that go into making Fast Color a nifty little movie, but I'll bet that the visual effects crew had fun with this one. What they do is simple to describe, but great-looking, with detail and room for imagination. That goes for the movie, too, which marries B-movie sci-fi to personal drama in immensely satisfying fashion.
Meet Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw); she's been on the run across a near-future (or alternate-present) America which hasn't seen rain in years, capable of getting into trouble on her own but also hunted because her shaking fits correlate to earthquakes, and that's the sort of thing that gets sinister government types on your trail. For better or worse, her path has brought her back home to where her estranged mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) is raising Ruth's daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney). They've got gifts, too, though not nearly as powerful or out-of-control as Ruth's, and Bo is all too aware that Ruth coming home doesn't just mean the possibility of government agents more dangerous than Sheriff Ellis (David Strathairn), but the sort of upheaval that a mother with Ruth's troubled history might bring to nine-year-old LIla.
On a certain surface level, Fast Color is a ton of sci-fi pieces that viewers have seen before but put together just right; the synth-heavy music and the slow apocalypse in the background recall a time when independent genre filmmakers didn't have a ton of money to fill every frame and would let the emptiness or dirty little details like signs referencing the water shortage put the audience in that other place. The filmmakers use the sense of doom hanging over the world to enhance not just the personal stakes for the rest of the film but the paranormal ones surrounding Ruth; even if the audience is at a point where it takes government scientists hunting people with strange powers for granted, the world teetering adds a bit of extra urgency, even as its familiarity keeps it from blotting out the more personal stories.
Full review on eFilmCritic
So, yes, this worked out pretty well. It's always funny when I can move a disc from the "recent arrivals" shelf to the "stuff I've seen" ones, and while some might say it's a waste of money, it just makes it easier to push the disc into others' hands, especially if the movie vanishes from streaming services when the TV series version comes out, as movies are wont to do.
Fast Color
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in The Brattle Theatre ([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
Their work is just one of the elements that go into making Fast Color a nifty little movie, but I'll bet that the visual effects crew had fun with this one. What they do is simple to describe, but great-looking, with detail and room for imagination. That goes for the movie, too, which marries B-movie sci-fi to personal drama in immensely satisfying fashion.
Meet Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw); she's been on the run across a near-future (or alternate-present) America which hasn't seen rain in years, capable of getting into trouble on her own but also hunted because her shaking fits correlate to earthquakes, and that's the sort of thing that gets sinister government types on your trail. For better or worse, her path has brought her back home to where her estranged mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) is raising Ruth's daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney). They've got gifts, too, though not nearly as powerful or out-of-control as Ruth's, and Bo is all too aware that Ruth coming home doesn't just mean the possibility of government agents more dangerous than Sheriff Ellis (David Strathairn), but the sort of upheaval that a mother with Ruth's troubled history might bring to nine-year-old LIla.
On a certain surface level, Fast Color is a ton of sci-fi pieces that viewers have seen before but put together just right; the synth-heavy music and the slow apocalypse in the background recall a time when independent genre filmmakers didn't have a ton of money to fill every frame and would let the emptiness or dirty little details like signs referencing the water shortage put the audience in that other place. The filmmakers use the sense of doom hanging over the world to enhance not just the personal stakes for the rest of the film but the paranormal ones surrounding Ruth; even if the audience is at a point where it takes government scientists hunting people with strange powers for granted, the world teetering adds a bit of extra urgency, even as its familiarity keeps it from blotting out the more personal stories.
Full review on eFilmCritic
War!: 1917 and Liberation
Will wonders never cease - AMC accidentally set the times for a couple of movies in such a way that you could build a thematic double feature without having to kill an hour in between!
It also gave me a nice chance to check out the new Dolby Cinema screen at Boston Common, which is basically the same as the ones at Assembly Row and South Bay, except maybe smaller - the screen's a good size, but it doesn't seem particularly deep, with just fifty or sixty seats. Not bad, considering they're recliners and all, and even the first row isn't right up under the screen, but kind of a shock when it pops up in the app, compared to the old-school auditoria next to it which seat a couple hundred.
After that, it was downstairs to screen 1, where I was apparently the only person catching the 10pm show of Liberation despite being right next to Chinatown. Not necessarily surprising, considering it's only playing three cities in the U.S. (New York, Los Angeles, and Boston); a good chunk of exhibitors must have taken a look and figured the audience would say "nah", even without a good number of movies hitting screen this week after the post-Christmas lull. I don't know how much it being obvious propaganda played into it, but it was kind of strange to be reading social media about the Taiwanese elections (a rejection of closer ties with the Mainland) and then seeing what would become the Taiwanese flag used for this movie's villains, even if most are played as misguided more than evil.
The previews were an odd batch, too; usually, when there aren't enough Chinese-language trailers on the hard drive, it's just big action movies, but this was mostly a reel of foreign-language films with award hopes. Most look pretty neat, especially Les Miserables, which I am surprised and delighted to see has more or less nothing to do with the musical. On the other hand, the last was for Dante Lam's new one, The Rescue, which looks like it's as big as Operation Mekong and Operation Red Sea, but which also had its trailer pretty badly dubbed into English. I wonder if the studio is going to try to push this particular Chinese New Year picture onto more screens around the world, even if I'm pretty sure that this particular theater will be showing it in Mandarin.
1917
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)
It occurred to me, when I first heard this was put together a certain way, that I would have liked to go in without knowing, even though that's kind of an odd, meta way to approach watching and thinking about a movie. Still, it's very difficult to just get caught up in things the way one is meant to in these cases, rather than watching what the camera does and guessing how many objects in the foreground are effects meant to hide seams. Rather than drawing me in and not giving my mind time to jump elsewhere, it had me thinking about a lot of things that weren't on screen.
Maybe it improves on a second view, once that's out of one's system. I suspect that once you get past that and the often stunning cinematography/lighting/design, 1917 is a capable-enough war movie of the new school, careful to foreground the horrors lest the audience get too excited by the ticking clock. Sam Mendes wants the audience invested but not excited, and that's a very fine line for him to walk. The film often feels calculatedly random, like everything happens in such a way as to reinforce the idea of chaos, and outright cheats in others, such as how sound design is very important for much of the film but a whole division in trucks can just suddenly be right there.
It's still too good to dismiss, of course - Roger Deakins and company do amazing work, Mendes's decisions may be cynical but they're effective, and the cast is terrific up and down. There's something about the tendency to cast great, recognizable character actors as the officers in this, like we're expected to trust Colin Firth or Mark Strong rather than question things, although, again, it works; it's one of the best little roles Strong has had recently (he is so much more interesting when not playing villains).
Liberation
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)
Coincidentally arriving in a few American cities the same weekend that 1917 opens wide, Liberation suffers from opposing faults. It's busy to the point of frenzy rather than meticulous, rushing through every cheap play for audience sympathy it can with bigger firefights and explosions coming at a rapid pace just in case that's not enough. It's lurid but made to please crowds, even though the filmmakers aren't that great at making the action effective. It's one of the tackier bits of recent myth-making to come from the Chinese movie industry, which is saying something.
Starting out in January 1949, days before the Tianjin campaign that would serve as a turning point in the Chinese Civil War, it initially introduces the audience to a team of Communist soldiers aiming to infiltrate the city to help get artillery sightings, because the revolutionaries aim to take the city with relatively little damage. Cai Xingfu (Zhou Yiwei) has other reasons to lead this mission - wife Xiuping (Yang Mi) is still in the city. Among the Nationalists, Director Qian Zhuoqun (Philip Keung Ho-man) is especially cruel, lording his power over entertainer Yan Mei (Elane Zhong Chuxi) and locking up quartermaster Yao Zhe (Wallace Chung Han-Liang) for a ferry accident, though he is using the aftermath to attempt to push that Nationalists into a harder line. Zhe attempts to escape with six-year-old daughter Junlan (Audrey Duo Ulan-Toya) only to run headlong into Cai's mission, and the two would be at odds even if it weren't likely that Cai's son Jifeng was on the sunken ferry.
There's a lot going on and the filmmakers spew it at the audience in rapid-fire manner to start, efficiently and earnestly talking about firing solutions that will not in fact be a major part of the film, finding the hackiest possible way to reveal Yan's hatred for Qian, and letting major parts of the story just hang there uncommented upon. It puts Yao Zhe directly at the center of the action but doesn't particularly do much to establish his interests and loyalties beyond his daughter, to the extent that it's easy to initially peg him as a spy rather than someone pushed up against the wall. Things start to shake out later on, but initially viewers are likely to have their attention on the wrong things, and when characters show up later so that there can be action in more places, it's hard to be sure whether they've been introduced but offscreen until needed or if they're new.
Full review on eFilmCritic
It also gave me a nice chance to check out the new Dolby Cinema screen at Boston Common, which is basically the same as the ones at Assembly Row and South Bay, except maybe smaller - the screen's a good size, but it doesn't seem particularly deep, with just fifty or sixty seats. Not bad, considering they're recliners and all, and even the first row isn't right up under the screen, but kind of a shock when it pops up in the app, compared to the old-school auditoria next to it which seat a couple hundred.
After that, it was downstairs to screen 1, where I was apparently the only person catching the 10pm show of Liberation despite being right next to Chinatown. Not necessarily surprising, considering it's only playing three cities in the U.S. (New York, Los Angeles, and Boston); a good chunk of exhibitors must have taken a look and figured the audience would say "nah", even without a good number of movies hitting screen this week after the post-Christmas lull. I don't know how much it being obvious propaganda played into it, but it was kind of strange to be reading social media about the Taiwanese elections (a rejection of closer ties with the Mainland) and then seeing what would become the Taiwanese flag used for this movie's villains, even if most are played as misguided more than evil.
The previews were an odd batch, too; usually, when there aren't enough Chinese-language trailers on the hard drive, it's just big action movies, but this was mostly a reel of foreign-language films with award hopes. Most look pretty neat, especially Les Miserables, which I am surprised and delighted to see has more or less nothing to do with the musical. On the other hand, the last was for Dante Lam's new one, The Rescue, which looks like it's as big as Operation Mekong and Operation Red Sea, but which also had its trailer pretty badly dubbed into English. I wonder if the studio is going to try to push this particular Chinese New Year picture onto more screens around the world, even if I'm pretty sure that this particular theater will be showing it in Mandarin.
1917
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)
It occurred to me, when I first heard this was put together a certain way, that I would have liked to go in without knowing, even though that's kind of an odd, meta way to approach watching and thinking about a movie. Still, it's very difficult to just get caught up in things the way one is meant to in these cases, rather than watching what the camera does and guessing how many objects in the foreground are effects meant to hide seams. Rather than drawing me in and not giving my mind time to jump elsewhere, it had me thinking about a lot of things that weren't on screen.
Maybe it improves on a second view, once that's out of one's system. I suspect that once you get past that and the often stunning cinematography/lighting/design, 1917 is a capable-enough war movie of the new school, careful to foreground the horrors lest the audience get too excited by the ticking clock. Sam Mendes wants the audience invested but not excited, and that's a very fine line for him to walk. The film often feels calculatedly random, like everything happens in such a way as to reinforce the idea of chaos, and outright cheats in others, such as how sound design is very important for much of the film but a whole division in trucks can just suddenly be right there.
It's still too good to dismiss, of course - Roger Deakins and company do amazing work, Mendes's decisions may be cynical but they're effective, and the cast is terrific up and down. There's something about the tendency to cast great, recognizable character actors as the officers in this, like we're expected to trust Colin Firth or Mark Strong rather than question things, although, again, it works; it's one of the best little roles Strong has had recently (he is so much more interesting when not playing villains).
Liberation
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)
Coincidentally arriving in a few American cities the same weekend that 1917 opens wide, Liberation suffers from opposing faults. It's busy to the point of frenzy rather than meticulous, rushing through every cheap play for audience sympathy it can with bigger firefights and explosions coming at a rapid pace just in case that's not enough. It's lurid but made to please crowds, even though the filmmakers aren't that great at making the action effective. It's one of the tackier bits of recent myth-making to come from the Chinese movie industry, which is saying something.
Starting out in January 1949, days before the Tianjin campaign that would serve as a turning point in the Chinese Civil War, it initially introduces the audience to a team of Communist soldiers aiming to infiltrate the city to help get artillery sightings, because the revolutionaries aim to take the city with relatively little damage. Cai Xingfu (Zhou Yiwei) has other reasons to lead this mission - wife Xiuping (Yang Mi) is still in the city. Among the Nationalists, Director Qian Zhuoqun (Philip Keung Ho-man) is especially cruel, lording his power over entertainer Yan Mei (Elane Zhong Chuxi) and locking up quartermaster Yao Zhe (Wallace Chung Han-Liang) for a ferry accident, though he is using the aftermath to attempt to push that Nationalists into a harder line. Zhe attempts to escape with six-year-old daughter Junlan (Audrey Duo Ulan-Toya) only to run headlong into Cai's mission, and the two would be at odds even if it weren't likely that Cai's son Jifeng was on the sunken ferry.
There's a lot going on and the filmmakers spew it at the audience in rapid-fire manner to start, efficiently and earnestly talking about firing solutions that will not in fact be a major part of the film, finding the hackiest possible way to reveal Yan's hatred for Qian, and letting major parts of the story just hang there uncommented upon. It puts Yao Zhe directly at the center of the action but doesn't particularly do much to establish his interests and loyalties beyond his daughter, to the extent that it's easy to initially peg him as a spy rather than someone pushed up against the wall. Things start to shake out later on, but initially viewers are likely to have their attention on the wrong things, and when characters show up later so that there can be action in more places, it's hard to be sure whether they've been introduced but offscreen until needed or if they're new.
Full review on eFilmCritic
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Atlantics
I've mentioned before that I feel weirdly victorious when I see a movie or TV show produced by a streaming service without being subscribed. It's silly - I absolutely know that I've spent more on certain things than just watching it the expected way - but maybe it sends a bit of a message to both them and the theaters to work together a little more.
Interestingly, this feature doesn't particularly look like an expansion of the director's short film of the same name from ten years ago. That one's a documentary about four young men who try to cross the sea to find better work, something which plays into this film but which also happens off-screen without any sort of flashback when what happened becomes less of a mystery. I'm curious as to whether it was a conscious decision to focus on the people left behind, if that story just didn't fit once the film started developing, or if it seemed strange to put something real into something so fictional.
Anyway, welcome to the blog, "Senegal" tag! I wasn't tagging countries when I saw Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love at SXSW ten or eleven years ago, but this seems less of an outsider view of the country than that.
Atlantique (Atlantics)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre ([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
It's a truism that small films like Atlantics focus on characters and performances more than their larger brethren, but that's almost literally the case in the early going, as every establishing shot of the town is a foggy gray while close-ups of the actors are suddenly bright and sharp. It's a level of focus that the cast earns, making things work even when it sometimes seems like filmmaker Mati Diop could do more with her ghost stories.
It starts at a construction site outside Dakar; Muejiza Tower is slated to be luxurious and full of amenities, but the workers haven't been paid in months, and leader Cheikh (Abdou Balde) is starting to make demands. Dejected, worker Souleiman Fall (Ibrahima Traoré) makes his way home, although his spirit lifts when he sees girlfriend Ada Niang (Mama Sane). They spend the afternoon together, but somewhat furtively, as she is meant to be married to well-to-do Omar Liang (Babacar Sylla) in ten days, and all of her friends from religious Mariama (Ndeye Fama Dia) to fun-loving Fanta (Amina Kane) tell her she shouldn't ruin a good thing - though, surprisingly, practical Dior (Nicole Sougou) isn't quite so sure. It may be moot, though, as Cheikh, Souleiman, and the rest of the guys take a boat to Spain to seek their fortune. The boat disappears, but on the night of Ada's wedding, Mariama claims to see Souleiman before a strange fire destroys the wedding bed, leading to an arson investigation led by Inspector Issa Diop (Amadou Mbow) - and the developer of the tower, Mr. N'Diaye (Diankou Sembene) finds himself with unusual visitors.
Ghosts make great metaphors, but Diop and her co-writer Olivier Demangel know that life is not a perfect series of one-to-one matches, so there's something enjoyably messy about the way they set this ghost story up. There's something oddly traditional about the spirits possessing the bodies of the town's young women to haunt N'Diaye; it can read as both the men atoning for their failure to provide for their wives and daughters (a specific complaint Cheikh makes to the site manager at the start) or them taking matters into their own hands when the men are wiped out. Diop stages these scenes with simple but spooky methods, the white contacts to indicate possession communicating the situation quickly while other things are more subtle: Silent women cutting across streets with purpose or occupying N'Diye's house with the sort of stillness that indicates quivering rage, like they're past human niceties but haven't forgotten their old lives.
Full review on eFilmCritic
Interestingly, this feature doesn't particularly look like an expansion of the director's short film of the same name from ten years ago. That one's a documentary about four young men who try to cross the sea to find better work, something which plays into this film but which also happens off-screen without any sort of flashback when what happened becomes less of a mystery. I'm curious as to whether it was a conscious decision to focus on the people left behind, if that story just didn't fit once the film started developing, or if it seemed strange to put something real into something so fictional.
Anyway, welcome to the blog, "Senegal" tag! I wasn't tagging countries when I saw Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love at SXSW ten or eleven years ago, but this seems less of an outsider view of the country than that.
Atlantique (Atlantics)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre ([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
It's a truism that small films like Atlantics focus on characters and performances more than their larger brethren, but that's almost literally the case in the early going, as every establishing shot of the town is a foggy gray while close-ups of the actors are suddenly bright and sharp. It's a level of focus that the cast earns, making things work even when it sometimes seems like filmmaker Mati Diop could do more with her ghost stories.
It starts at a construction site outside Dakar; Muejiza Tower is slated to be luxurious and full of amenities, but the workers haven't been paid in months, and leader Cheikh (Abdou Balde) is starting to make demands. Dejected, worker Souleiman Fall (Ibrahima Traoré) makes his way home, although his spirit lifts when he sees girlfriend Ada Niang (Mama Sane). They spend the afternoon together, but somewhat furtively, as she is meant to be married to well-to-do Omar Liang (Babacar Sylla) in ten days, and all of her friends from religious Mariama (Ndeye Fama Dia) to fun-loving Fanta (Amina Kane) tell her she shouldn't ruin a good thing - though, surprisingly, practical Dior (Nicole Sougou) isn't quite so sure. It may be moot, though, as Cheikh, Souleiman, and the rest of the guys take a boat to Spain to seek their fortune. The boat disappears, but on the night of Ada's wedding, Mariama claims to see Souleiman before a strange fire destroys the wedding bed, leading to an arson investigation led by Inspector Issa Diop (Amadou Mbow) - and the developer of the tower, Mr. N'Diaye (Diankou Sembene) finds himself with unusual visitors.
Ghosts make great metaphors, but Diop and her co-writer Olivier Demangel know that life is not a perfect series of one-to-one matches, so there's something enjoyably messy about the way they set this ghost story up. There's something oddly traditional about the spirits possessing the bodies of the town's young women to haunt N'Diaye; it can read as both the men atoning for their failure to provide for their wives and daughters (a specific complaint Cheikh makes to the site manager at the start) or them taking matters into their own hands when the men are wiped out. Diop stages these scenes with simple but spooky methods, the white contacts to indicate possession communicating the situation quickly while other things are more subtle: Silent women cutting across streets with purpose or occupying N'Diye's house with the sort of stillness that indicates quivering rage, like they're past human niceties but haven't forgotten their old lives.
Full review on eFilmCritic
Friday, January 10, 2020
Undercover Punch and Gun
How's it feel to have this disc on the way and have someone share an article ranking the 37 Hong Kong movies released in 2019 where this comes in at #35 or #36? Not great. And there's probably not a whole lot of room to argue, either; it's bad in a way that doesn't really let one's jaw drop at how misguided it is. It's just a bad movie that doesn't have a whole lot of inspiration.
I was kind of mildly surprised to see a lot of credits for what looked like stereo work in it - not only was there no 3D disc available, but it didn't have a lot of scenes that look like they'd benefit. Since the movie seems to sat on servers for three years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if the studio did a quick conversion job to try and squeeze a few more bucks out of the almost-certainly short run.
Also worth noting: Two of the stars of this movie are actually Chinese-American, which is kind of odd/sad to me - there really should be room in Hollywood for Vanness Wu and Andy On, and should have been back when they first started making movies in Hong Kong twenty years ago. We're so used to people coming to America to be international stars that we kind of missed that some are going in the other direction, in part because there aren't enough roles for Asian-American actors and there sometimes seems to be a limit on how high they can go.
Wo hu qian long (Undercover Punch and Gun aka Undercover vs. Undercover)
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Undercover Punch and Gun - or Undercover vs. Undercover, if you prefer generic direct-to-video titles to ones where something seems to have been lost in a too-literal translation - is the sort of movie you get when the people whose job it is to grind out crime movies just have no inspiration but a looming deadline, so they take bits that have worked before and some of the ideas they haven't quite figured out and half-heartedly arrange them into a story. It's not very good even when the people involved are going about their work like professionals, and when it works, it almost seems to be by accident.
Two days ago, undercover detective King Wu (Philip Ng Wan-Lung) feared his cover was about to be blown as boss Brother Bob (Lam Suet) talked about there being a traitor in their midst just before a big deal, but he instead suspected Tiger (Wanness Wu Chien-Hao), because Bob has a bad tendency to sample the meth he sells. The buy is interrupted by an interloper and becomes a real mess, and while Wu's handlers want to pull him out, he feels like he's close to something, as he's dating Bob's daughter Dawnie (Aka Zhao Hui-Shan) and his designated successor. That's before he's contacted by both Magnum (Chui Shuai) and Eva (Joyce Feng Wen-Juan) of maritime law enforcement agency "Trident" and their target Ha (Andy On Chi-Kit), a former Trident agent who now works on the other side of the law and wants Wu to deliver Bob's drug cook.
First-time directors Philip Lui Koon-Nam and Frankie Tam Gong-Yuen have writing credits on a lot of better movies and have at least five other credited writers helping with the script, and it absolutely feels like a mix-and-match affair, where characters have a function but no real opinions or motivation outside of the single scene where one writer or another had the idea to do something with them. People and things are introduced and tossed away to create little circles that are self-contained but which never give the movie a feeling of moving in some direction, or any sort of point once it's done. It's an undercover cop movie that exists because these movies cost a certain amount and tend to make a little more, keeping a fair amount of Hong Kong actors employed.
Full review on eFilmCritic
I was kind of mildly surprised to see a lot of credits for what looked like stereo work in it - not only was there no 3D disc available, but it didn't have a lot of scenes that look like they'd benefit. Since the movie seems to sat on servers for three years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if the studio did a quick conversion job to try and squeeze a few more bucks out of the almost-certainly short run.
Also worth noting: Two of the stars of this movie are actually Chinese-American, which is kind of odd/sad to me - there really should be room in Hollywood for Vanness Wu and Andy On, and should have been back when they first started making movies in Hong Kong twenty years ago. We're so used to people coming to America to be international stars that we kind of missed that some are going in the other direction, in part because there aren't enough roles for Asian-American actors and there sometimes seems to be a limit on how high they can go.
Wo hu qian long (Undercover Punch and Gun aka Undercover vs. Undercover)
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Undercover Punch and Gun - or Undercover vs. Undercover, if you prefer generic direct-to-video titles to ones where something seems to have been lost in a too-literal translation - is the sort of movie you get when the people whose job it is to grind out crime movies just have no inspiration but a looming deadline, so they take bits that have worked before and some of the ideas they haven't quite figured out and half-heartedly arrange them into a story. It's not very good even when the people involved are going about their work like professionals, and when it works, it almost seems to be by accident.
Two days ago, undercover detective King Wu (Philip Ng Wan-Lung) feared his cover was about to be blown as boss Brother Bob (Lam Suet) talked about there being a traitor in their midst just before a big deal, but he instead suspected Tiger (Wanness Wu Chien-Hao), because Bob has a bad tendency to sample the meth he sells. The buy is interrupted by an interloper and becomes a real mess, and while Wu's handlers want to pull him out, he feels like he's close to something, as he's dating Bob's daughter Dawnie (Aka Zhao Hui-Shan) and his designated successor. That's before he's contacted by both Magnum (Chui Shuai) and Eva (Joyce Feng Wen-Juan) of maritime law enforcement agency "Trident" and their target Ha (Andy On Chi-Kit), a former Trident agent who now works on the other side of the law and wants Wu to deliver Bob's drug cook.
First-time directors Philip Lui Koon-Nam and Frankie Tam Gong-Yuen have writing credits on a lot of better movies and have at least five other credited writers helping with the script, and it absolutely feels like a mix-and-match affair, where characters have a function but no real opinions or motivation outside of the single scene where one writer or another had the idea to do something with them. People and things are introduced and tossed away to create little circles that are self-contained but which never give the movie a feeling of moving in some direction, or any sort of point once it's done. It's an undercover cop movie that exists because these movies cost a certain amount and tend to make a little more, keeping a fair amount of Hong Kong actors employed.
Full review on eFilmCritic
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 January 2020 - 16 January 2020
I'm not sure whether Disney has backed off their demands that Star Wars get the premium screens for four full weeks or if they're getting around it by having two premium screens and SW gets the biggest.
The Boston Museum of Science joins the list of theaters undergoing renovation, promising the Omnimax screen is being "upgraded" to a digital laser system. Hopefully they'll still be able to play the big film as well.
I am down for 1917, Just Mercy, Atlantics, Fast Color, Weathering with You, and, yeah, I'll probably get to Underwater before some of the stuff I've been putting off.
- So, 1917 gets to be on the second-biggest in a lot of cases as it expands to Boston this weekend, with the real-time thriller following a couple of soldiers as they make their way through the front lines of World War I to deliver an important message. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Capitol, Fresh Pond, the The Lexington Venue, West Newton, the Kendall, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street (including "Wide Screen"), Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), the Embassy, Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux.
The Coolidge has a pair of 35mm alien invasions late this weekend, with The Faculty on Friday and the first of three weekly screenings of John Carpenter's take on The Thing on Saturday. Sunday morning, the Goethe-Institut presents The Components of Love, about a couple whose breakup is complicated by the fact that he has raised her child as his own. A digital restoration of The Incredible Shrinking Man has a "Science on Screen" show on Monday, with BU professor Tyrone Porter connecting it with nanotechnology, with Open Screen on Wednesday. - Also expanding is Just Mercy, featuring Michael B. Jordan as a young attorney attempting to overturn a death penalty conviction, with Jamie Foxx as the accused and Brie Larson as a colleague. Larson and director Destin Daniel Cretton's worked together on Short Term 12, which was pretty darn great. It's at the Capitol, Kendall Square, Boston Common, Causeway Street (including shows with pre-recorded Q&As), Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, the Embassy, Revere, and the SuperLux.
- The material playing the multiplexes doesn't look quite so impressive, the sort of thing that gets dumped in January. Underwater looks like a pretty lousy monster movie, but it's interesting for being the first movie William Eubank has directed from someone else's script, and I think I said he should do that after both his previous films. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere. There's also Like a Boss, with Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne as friends who start a cosmetic company and get financed by a businesswoman played by Salma Hayek and looks awful in the exact way a movie about women written and directed by men does. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
Much more promisingly, Weathering with You, the new film by Makoto Shinkai, has "fan screenings" on Wednesday and Thursday, both dubbed and subtitled, at Boston Common, Fenway, and the Seaport, and Revere, and I expect it to hang around at least Boston Common next week. - Boston Common appears to be one of three theaters in the country to get Liberation, which looks like a big Chinese "main melody" action flick. The trailer is kind of screwy in it's "imagine a world without war" after a couple solid minutes of violence. They also continue cute-animal comedy-drama Adoring and Ip Man 4: The Finale.
Darbar, the new action movie with Rajinikanth, continues in both Tamil and Telugu at Apple Fresh Pond, while another big star, Deepika Padukone, plays against type in Chhapaak, as an acid attack survivor. It's in Hindi, as is historical action epic Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior. Telugu-language action movie Sarileru Neekevvaru opens there and at Revere. Oddly, Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo, about a wealthy man and his driver who accidentally switch children when they're born at the same time, opens at Fresh Pond on Saturday. They also keep Good Newwz around. Interestingly, their websites shows nothing playing on Wednesday. - The Brattle Theatre has their annual (Some of) the Best of 2019 series, which includes some that didn't play here much if at all. Atlantics on Friday, for instance, went straight to Netflix. There are matinee screenings of Laika's Missing Link during the weekend, before double features of The Farewell & Booksmart on Saturday and Fast Color & Captain Marvel on Sunday. The locally-based screenwriters behind Crawl are there for the 7pm show Monday, with the lesser Ready or Not paired with it as a double feature. The Chambermaid plays Tuesday, while Midsommar (the original cut) is paired with The Souvenir on Wednesday. Transit plays on Thursday, with Hustlers as a separate-admission show at 9:15pm
- The Museum of Fine Arts continues their run of Celebration with shows on Friday, Saturday, twice on Sunday (one a "Jump Cut" screening), and Wednesday. They also show Waves on Friday and Sunday, Matthew Barney's Redoubt on Saturday, and The Lighthouse on Wednesday. On Thursday, they start their annual Festival of Films from Iran (which is either great or terrible timing) with Cold Sweat, about a woman who becomes Captain of the country's women's soccer team only to have her jealous estranged husband forbid her from leaving the country.
- The ICA continues the program of short films from the Ottawa International Animation Festival with two shows each on Saturday and Sunday.
- The Boston Underground Film Festival has their annual "Dispatches from the Underground" in The Somerville Theatre's microcinema on Wednesday, showing five of the best shorts from last year's Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival.
- The Regent Theatre has something called The End of Quantum Reality On Tuesday, which purports to be about how physics has reached a dead end.
- The West Newton Cinema has daily 1pm shows of Reality Queen!, apparently once titled "A Week in London" after its title character London Logo, spending a few days being interviewed. Their "Coming Soon" page shows Three Christs opening, but no showtimes.
- It's members' weekend at The Harvard Film Archive - if you're a member, you've probably already gotten the email about what's playing.
- The Luna Theater has screenings of Uncut Gems on Friday and Saturday evening, The Lighthouse on Saturday afternoon, In Fabric later Saturday afternoon and Tuesday evening, and The Shining on Sunday. There are also free surprises at the Magical Mystery Movie Club Sunday morning and Weirdo Wednesday.
Cinema Salem brings Temblores to their screening room.
The Boston Museum of Science joins the list of theaters undergoing renovation, promising the Omnimax screen is being "upgraded" to a digital laser system. Hopefully they'll still be able to play the big film as well.
I am down for 1917, Just Mercy, Atlantics, Fast Color, Weathering with You, and, yeah, I'll probably get to Underwater before some of the stuff I've been putting off.
This Week in Tickets: 30 December 2019 - 5 January 2020
Seven discs of unwatched movies arrived from Hong Kong, four movies from Hong Kong watched. This closely resembles progress in the Seaver apartment. There was also one disc of a movie I've already seen, Karaoke Terror, purchased under the "try and kick some money to movies you liked at a festival" plan, although that was a weird one - I saw that South Korean movie at BUFF two years ago and it's apparently now just starting to hit disc. Film distribution is a strange thing.
New year, new day planner, and though it looked like the same model I had last year, this one is perfect-bound/glued rather than having a spiral spine and I'm guessing that this stuff is going to look weird for a few weeks as a result. I pre-ordered a book scanner on Indiegogo because assembling these things has been a nuisance for a while, but it looks like a really prescient move now!
Anyway, I was going to end the year with Jackie Chan, only to wind up zonking out midway through, so apparently my last movie of 2019 was The Maze. That made Armor of God the first movie of the year, and it's not great. It's got some fun action, but some bad screwball comedy, and a few bits of really bad taste.
First time at the theater for the year came Thursday night when I went for The Grudge, which turns out to be more of a sequel/spin-off than a reboot, but which is surprisingly not bad at all. Sam Raimi et al hired an interesting director in Nicolas Pesce and he did all right.
Friday night wound up being another "movies at home" night - there is never a whole lot in the way of new releases the first weekend of the new year - so I got more Hong Kong discs off the shelf. I'd hemmed and hawed a couple months ago about ordering the two Shaw Brothers horror pieces that got released on Blu-ray but figured they were prime material for not being available to stream when I wanted them, so why not? It turned out they make a good double feature, as both Mighty Peking Man and Oily Maniac share a director and star. They're good cheese, as 1970s Hong Kong exploitation goes, with Mighty Peking Man in particular being a much better King Kong knockoff than I expected.
Saturday was spent at AMC Boston Common for Shortlisted Documentary Features, and though I didn't see as much of the program as I wanted to, what I saw - Honeyland, Aquarela, The Great Hack, and Apollo 11, was a pretty good group. Odds that I've seen the five out of fifteen (between them and One Child Nation) that wind up being nominated are slim, but I'm still a bit ahead of the game.
After a day of errands and other entertainment on Sunday, I didn't make it to the Somerville in time for what I wanted to see, so I figured I'd make this post a little tidier by finishing the week with Jackie Chan's sequel to Armor of God, Operation Condor. Better than its predecessor, but it must be said that Sammo Hung made a much better movie with "Condor" in the English title that climaxes on the destruction of a secret underground base.
More to come. My Letterboxd page is still here, and I recommend springing for Pro so you get stats on your own page. They're fun!
ung hing foo dai (Armor of God)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I'm not sure how this became a big enough hit for Jackie Chan to spawn sequels (including one decades later); maybe the European locations and individual moments that looked like they could be pulled from higher-quality pulp were a big draw. Maybe everyone just loved Raiders of the Lost Ark so much during the 1980s that they'd go for whatever gave them a bit of that rush again. It's quite stupid and spends a lot of time that seems like it should be filled with intrigue with really terrible farce, which is probably the easiest thing to stretch out and fill time of the three or four things the movie tries to do.
(I also wouldn't be shocked if the whole opening gambit was cut for its dubbed U.S. release, because, yikes, how are you still doing "savage African tribes" material in 1986?)
The cast is bland, with Alan Tam just annoying, and Jackie being in "supposedly cocky and charming but actually just kind of a jackass" mode doesn't give them much room to work, and that's when the writers have any idea what to do with their characters. The action is more car chases than anything else, fun for how they throw motorcycles and Jackie's flimsy-looking sports car in the air but not a whole lot else.
He at least ends things on a high note, with a couple big melees and a fairly insane final stunt. Overall, though, it falls far short of what one would hope for from a movie where Jackie Chan is Indiana Jones and also James Bond.
Xing xing wang (Mighty Peking Man)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I kind of love the way that the first half of Mighty Peking Man is the kind of B-movie that walks a crazy high wire between being tremendously impressive and kind of laughable. It's the sort of thing where they'll shoot one thing in a well-dressed back lot and another on location, have them both look good individually, and then just have a disaster occur when they are matted together. It's impressive and quaint and sometimes kind of off-putting, like when they do a closeup of the giant gorilla and you can see the human mouth underneath the mask, but it's fast-paced and pulp and exciting.
That'd make it a fun, campy little movie, but the second half kind of embraces the ugly side of that sort of pulp. Evelyn Kraft's work here won't go down as one of cinema's great performances - it's tough to get that when the part involves running around in a tiny leather bikini and speaking in broken Cantonese - but she seems legitimately traumatized at seeing her giant ape buddy chained and brought to Hong Kong for a second half that really doesn't spare the cruelty and sleaze. It never crosses the line where it wants the viewer to feel bad for having enjoyed it, but for a dumb bit of pulp adventure, it kind of wrestles with its issues much more than you'd expect from a 70s Shaw Brothers flick.
You gui zi (The Oily Maniac)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
The Oily Maniac is a Corman-esque bit of exploitation from the Shaw Brothers (and many of the same folks who would make Mighty Peking Man the next year) that probably inspired or influenced a lot of later "dark avenger" pictures. For the most part, it's not very good; it blows right past male-gaze to male-leering-stare and never does much to make its villains more than just another creep to be dispatched because he's oily in a different sense of the word. The plot is thin as heck even if it feels like the sort of made up as they went along that at least has some sense of how stories should work.
Still, there's something here; Danny Lee Hsiu-Hsien isn't subtle as the disabled legal secretary delighted by his newfound ability to wreak physical havoc (by dousing himself in coconut oil and having it cling to him as a sort of exoskeleton that also allows him to ooze like a puddle), and the big fights at the end are both good Shaw Brothers melees and examples of the filmmakers doing a better job of realizing all the comic-book potential of their anti-hero with the budget and resources available at the time that a lot of movies that came afterward. Once it gets into the superpowers and other insanity, there's a surprisingly good blend of mad inspiration and knowing what they can do as filmmakers.
Part of me would be curious what a modern big-budget adaptation would look like, even though I know it would probably lose all of the disreputable bits - and this particular character kind of needs to be in a fairly scuzzy movie. Dial any of it back to a PG-13 rating and it would just feel uncommitted.
Fei ying gai wak (Armor of God 2: Operation Condor)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Probably the best of the three Armor of God movies, which isn't necessarily a terrifically high bar to clear - they're the sort of Jackie Chan movies where his supposedly-charming character is sort of a jerk and he's really only got the vaguest notion of how to connect one bit of action to another. It at least jettisons the bad buddy-comedy stuff from the first for a pretty constant string of action for the first half. There may not be more than the tiniest bit of a story, but Jackie's moving and tossing people around and that's fun.
Eventually, though, he acquires more sidekicks who are pretty and likable but not really as bright as they should be than the movie can really support, adversaries whose aims are unclear start showing up, and the film starts wandering around the desert as aimlessly as its supporting characters. Eventually, Jackie and company are stumbling around a forgotten Nazi base, and for a while the movie picks up a good pulpy atmosphere even if it never actually committed to the themes that make pulp tick because Jackie is too much the entertainer in these movies to actually give his characters a genuine dark side that he must overcome. And it's not just him; the last big stunt sees a woman frantically trying to grab as much gold as she can even though she's never seemed particularly greedy.
It's a mess, but it's a mess where Jackie Chan jumps around and often takes on half a dozen people at once. There's worse ways to spend that time.
New year, new day planner, and though it looked like the same model I had last year, this one is perfect-bound/glued rather than having a spiral spine and I'm guessing that this stuff is going to look weird for a few weeks as a result. I pre-ordered a book scanner on Indiegogo because assembling these things has been a nuisance for a while, but it looks like a really prescient move now!
Anyway, I was going to end the year with Jackie Chan, only to wind up zonking out midway through, so apparently my last movie of 2019 was The Maze. That made Armor of God the first movie of the year, and it's not great. It's got some fun action, but some bad screwball comedy, and a few bits of really bad taste.
First time at the theater for the year came Thursday night when I went for The Grudge, which turns out to be more of a sequel/spin-off than a reboot, but which is surprisingly not bad at all. Sam Raimi et al hired an interesting director in Nicolas Pesce and he did all right.
Friday night wound up being another "movies at home" night - there is never a whole lot in the way of new releases the first weekend of the new year - so I got more Hong Kong discs off the shelf. I'd hemmed and hawed a couple months ago about ordering the two Shaw Brothers horror pieces that got released on Blu-ray but figured they were prime material for not being available to stream when I wanted them, so why not? It turned out they make a good double feature, as both Mighty Peking Man and Oily Maniac share a director and star. They're good cheese, as 1970s Hong Kong exploitation goes, with Mighty Peking Man in particular being a much better King Kong knockoff than I expected.
Saturday was spent at AMC Boston Common for Shortlisted Documentary Features, and though I didn't see as much of the program as I wanted to, what I saw - Honeyland, Aquarela, The Great Hack, and Apollo 11, was a pretty good group. Odds that I've seen the five out of fifteen (between them and One Child Nation) that wind up being nominated are slim, but I'm still a bit ahead of the game.
After a day of errands and other entertainment on Sunday, I didn't make it to the Somerville in time for what I wanted to see, so I figured I'd make this post a little tidier by finishing the week with Jackie Chan's sequel to Armor of God, Operation Condor. Better than its predecessor, but it must be said that Sammo Hung made a much better movie with "Condor" in the English title that climaxes on the destruction of a secret underground base.
More to come. My Letterboxd page is still here, and I recommend springing for Pro so you get stats on your own page. They're fun!
ung hing foo dai (Armor of God)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I'm not sure how this became a big enough hit for Jackie Chan to spawn sequels (including one decades later); maybe the European locations and individual moments that looked like they could be pulled from higher-quality pulp were a big draw. Maybe everyone just loved Raiders of the Lost Ark so much during the 1980s that they'd go for whatever gave them a bit of that rush again. It's quite stupid and spends a lot of time that seems like it should be filled with intrigue with really terrible farce, which is probably the easiest thing to stretch out and fill time of the three or four things the movie tries to do.
(I also wouldn't be shocked if the whole opening gambit was cut for its dubbed U.S. release, because, yikes, how are you still doing "savage African tribes" material in 1986?)
The cast is bland, with Alan Tam just annoying, and Jackie being in "supposedly cocky and charming but actually just kind of a jackass" mode doesn't give them much room to work, and that's when the writers have any idea what to do with their characters. The action is more car chases than anything else, fun for how they throw motorcycles and Jackie's flimsy-looking sports car in the air but not a whole lot else.
He at least ends things on a high note, with a couple big melees and a fairly insane final stunt. Overall, though, it falls far short of what one would hope for from a movie where Jackie Chan is Indiana Jones and also James Bond.
Xing xing wang (Mighty Peking Man)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I kind of love the way that the first half of Mighty Peking Man is the kind of B-movie that walks a crazy high wire between being tremendously impressive and kind of laughable. It's the sort of thing where they'll shoot one thing in a well-dressed back lot and another on location, have them both look good individually, and then just have a disaster occur when they are matted together. It's impressive and quaint and sometimes kind of off-putting, like when they do a closeup of the giant gorilla and you can see the human mouth underneath the mask, but it's fast-paced and pulp and exciting.
That'd make it a fun, campy little movie, but the second half kind of embraces the ugly side of that sort of pulp. Evelyn Kraft's work here won't go down as one of cinema's great performances - it's tough to get that when the part involves running around in a tiny leather bikini and speaking in broken Cantonese - but she seems legitimately traumatized at seeing her giant ape buddy chained and brought to Hong Kong for a second half that really doesn't spare the cruelty and sleaze. It never crosses the line where it wants the viewer to feel bad for having enjoyed it, but for a dumb bit of pulp adventure, it kind of wrestles with its issues much more than you'd expect from a 70s Shaw Brothers flick.
You gui zi (The Oily Maniac)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
The Oily Maniac is a Corman-esque bit of exploitation from the Shaw Brothers (and many of the same folks who would make Mighty Peking Man the next year) that probably inspired or influenced a lot of later "dark avenger" pictures. For the most part, it's not very good; it blows right past male-gaze to male-leering-stare and never does much to make its villains more than just another creep to be dispatched because he's oily in a different sense of the word. The plot is thin as heck even if it feels like the sort of made up as they went along that at least has some sense of how stories should work.
Still, there's something here; Danny Lee Hsiu-Hsien isn't subtle as the disabled legal secretary delighted by his newfound ability to wreak physical havoc (by dousing himself in coconut oil and having it cling to him as a sort of exoskeleton that also allows him to ooze like a puddle), and the big fights at the end are both good Shaw Brothers melees and examples of the filmmakers doing a better job of realizing all the comic-book potential of their anti-hero with the budget and resources available at the time that a lot of movies that came afterward. Once it gets into the superpowers and other insanity, there's a surprisingly good blend of mad inspiration and knowing what they can do as filmmakers.
Part of me would be curious what a modern big-budget adaptation would look like, even though I know it would probably lose all of the disreputable bits - and this particular character kind of needs to be in a fairly scuzzy movie. Dial any of it back to a PG-13 rating and it would just feel uncommitted.
Fei ying gai wak (Armor of God 2: Operation Condor)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Probably the best of the three Armor of God movies, which isn't necessarily a terrifically high bar to clear - they're the sort of Jackie Chan movies where his supposedly-charming character is sort of a jerk and he's really only got the vaguest notion of how to connect one bit of action to another. It at least jettisons the bad buddy-comedy stuff from the first for a pretty constant string of action for the first half. There may not be more than the tiniest bit of a story, but Jackie's moving and tossing people around and that's fun.
Eventually, though, he acquires more sidekicks who are pretty and likable but not really as bright as they should be than the movie can really support, adversaries whose aims are unclear start showing up, and the film starts wandering around the desert as aimlessly as its supporting characters. Eventually, Jackie and company are stumbling around a forgotten Nazi base, and for a while the movie picks up a good pulpy atmosphere even if it never actually committed to the themes that make pulp tick because Jackie is too much the entertainer in these movies to actually give his characters a genuine dark side that he must overcome. And it's not just him; the last big stunt sees a woman frantically trying to grab as much gold as she can even though she's never seemed particularly greedy.
It's a mess, but it's a mess where Jackie Chan jumps around and often takes on half a dozen people at once. There's worse ways to spend that time.
Thursday, January 09, 2020
Shortlisted Oscar Docs: Honeyland, Aquarela, The Great Hack, and Apollo 11
For the second year in a row, the Oscar-shortlisted documentary features sneaked their way into AMC Boston Common for five bucks a show, which means you can do this without much pinch, even saving Stubs A-List spots for other things later in the week:
Not a bad day to spend a rainy day, and while I was initially considering tapping out after three, it doesn't take a whole lot of convincing to get me to stick around for Apollo 11 on the big screen when it's right there.
Taken all together, these movies are a fascinating examination of documentary filmmaking as storytelling. Honeyland and Apollo 11 are examples of it at its most pure - almost all captured footage, no narration, just watching a story play out in real time - but it's the way the other two work that's kind of fascinating. As I mention in the review, Aquarela looks abstract, but when you step back it's showing you a cycle of how climate change is affecting the world, one thing leading to another. The Great Hack, meanwhile, is chained down by its focus on narrative; by focusing on the personal stories of the people involved, the filmmakers miss the chance to examine the hack itself more closely, and can't finish strong when their stories start petering out.
I wish I'd been able to claw out more time to catch some of the other ten films that I haven't seen elsewhere, although I suspect most are pretty easy to find on the various streaming services, though several are probably hidden in various walled gardens (you need Netflix to see The Great Hack or Amazon Prime for One Child Nation). With the insanely short period between nominations being announced and awards being given this year, there won't necessarily be a lot of time to see the nominees, and this is a nice head start.
Honeyland
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Honeyland is a terrific little documentary that works as both great fly-on-the-wall filmmaking and an easily digested parable about sustainable farming. It almost makes one marvel at the filmmakers' good fortune, because it seems like they started with an idea for a good short and had an even better feature appear, and they shaped it to near-perfection.
The short would have been just following Hatidze Muratova, a fifty-something woman who lives in a Macedonian village that seems to be just her and her bedridden mother. She's a beekeeper who uses traditional methods, and does well enough to get by, getting ten to twenty euros per kilo for her artisanal honey in nearby Skopje. The solitude is broken when the nomadic Sam family arrives next door, with dozens of cattle and six noisy children, but she seems to enjoy the company, and when father Hussein decides to start keeping bees himself, she's helpful. Soon, he has committed himself to selling a lot of honey, and it starts to affect Hatidze's work as well.
If the Sams family had never shown up, Honeyland might have been a different but still fascinating movie, one about a dying way of life and how family commitments can tie a person to a place beyond what seems otherwise reasonable. One can see the outline of that movie here, in the opening shots of Hatidze walking across an otherwise empty landscape to check on a hidden hive, the candle-lit scenes of her bickering with mother Nazife in a very small house, and how a camera having to find her in a city scene doesn't seem to dent Hatidze's self-confidence. Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov show Hatidze going about her business in such a way that they don't often need her voice to explain beekeeping to the audience. Her village is presented in a specific, meaningful way - old enough to be made of stone and showing some wear, but nevertheless tidy, in a way. The air is clear, the bees have space enough to work. It is not a lecture about some pastoral ideal, but it presents Hatidze's life in such a way as to get one thinking along those lines, despite the solitude.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Aquarela
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Aquarela serves as your semi-regular reminder that water is metal as heck and will mess you up if you think you can take it for granted. It occasionally seems to have been built as a sort of subversive parody of white noise/relaxation videos, resembling them at first glance but offering up raw power, a caution about what we may unleash.
Director Viktor Kossakovskiy breaks the film into four clear acts: In the first, we see a team examining the ice on a frozen river near St. Petersberg that has started to thaw with spring, locating and retrieving a car that has fallen through. Eventually the camera moves to what I believe to be Greenland, a sailing ship in the foreground giving scale to the glaciers as pieces cleave off and fall into the sea. The camera follows that ship to sea, where a pod of dolphins soon gives way to choppy waters with massive swells. Eventually the camera sinks under the water and emerges in a flooded city.
Kosakovskiy gives the audience characters at the start, but mostly pushes people to the side thereafter to focus more on the raw power at work, and at first glance this reads as man's meagerness in the face of nature. Look closer, though, and Kossakovskiy establishes how the film is talking about climate change with one darkly funny but potentially tragic exchange ("Why are you driving here?" / "Usually, the ice melts three weeks later!"), and then tracks it. The first segment not only features cars, but general combustion, as a building burns in the background despite the apparent indifference of those on the ice, which is followed by glaciers melting, an unpredictable sea, and finally coastal cities becoming uninhabitable. For an extra bit of apocalyptic emphasis, the audience gets to see survivors huddling in caves before the film ends on a more conventionally beautiful bit of nature photography. Humanity may destroy itself by not recognizing how much raw power nature has bottled up, but the world itself will keep turning.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Great Hack
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
The Great Hack is one of the more glaring recent cases of "important topic that deserves a better documentary", a not-quite-so-long-as-it-seems slog that gives the audience very few details of how the process described by the title works but a great deal of sitting through testimony and talking with the same few people many times over to establish the same information. Maybe, as a Netflix production/acquisition, it's designed to be watched with a finger on the fast-forward button, but that doesn't seem like a great idea when the home-screen button is just millimeters away.
The hack in question is how Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based data-mining company whose clients have increasingly included political campaigns (favoring right-of-center candidates), used data scraped from Facebook to model the entire United States electorate in the 2016 election, allowing the Trump campaign to precisely target "persuadable" voters with large amounts of personalized advertising. Hearing this, an associate professor of digital media in New York, David Carroll, files suit in a British court to find out what personal information of his are on the company's servers. Meanwhile, a more official investigation is launched when former CA employee Christopher Wylie comes across as a whistleblower and points the investigating Parliamentary committee toward Brittany Kaiser, a former Obama campaign intern who would become a key employee at the company and knows where all the bodies are buried.
For as much as issues of digital privacy and personal information can often seem like they have become background noise because it's so pervasive and hard to practically restrict, The Great Hack is probably at its most interesting when filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim track down and illustrate the details, whether that's the simple but effective visualization of data generated with each online interaction or laying out how an innocuous-seeming personality test provided the company with useful data. Case studies like how the company leveraged youth apathy during an earlier election in Trinidad and Tobago are insightful and horrifying, and while some of the reporting on how this works could probably come across as dry and mathematical, it's useful, even if harder to obtain.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Apollo 11
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
I kind of said everything I needed to about this one back when it first played theaters back in March - it's a pretty terrific assembly of footage from the Apollo mission that puts the audience right into that time and place, both for how it attends little everyday details and presents them as high-quality film rather than the blurry TV on which most people experienced it at the time. It's never not going to be thrilling.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Not a bad day to spend a rainy day, and while I was initially considering tapping out after three, it doesn't take a whole lot of convincing to get me to stick around for Apollo 11 on the big screen when it's right there.
Taken all together, these movies are a fascinating examination of documentary filmmaking as storytelling. Honeyland and Apollo 11 are examples of it at its most pure - almost all captured footage, no narration, just watching a story play out in real time - but it's the way the other two work that's kind of fascinating. As I mention in the review, Aquarela looks abstract, but when you step back it's showing you a cycle of how climate change is affecting the world, one thing leading to another. The Great Hack, meanwhile, is chained down by its focus on narrative; by focusing on the personal stories of the people involved, the filmmakers miss the chance to examine the hack itself more closely, and can't finish strong when their stories start petering out.
I wish I'd been able to claw out more time to catch some of the other ten films that I haven't seen elsewhere, although I suspect most are pretty easy to find on the various streaming services, though several are probably hidden in various walled gardens (you need Netflix to see The Great Hack or Amazon Prime for One Child Nation). With the insanely short period between nominations being announced and awards being given this year, there won't necessarily be a lot of time to see the nominees, and this is a nice head start.
Honeyland
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Honeyland is a terrific little documentary that works as both great fly-on-the-wall filmmaking and an easily digested parable about sustainable farming. It almost makes one marvel at the filmmakers' good fortune, because it seems like they started with an idea for a good short and had an even better feature appear, and they shaped it to near-perfection.
The short would have been just following Hatidze Muratova, a fifty-something woman who lives in a Macedonian village that seems to be just her and her bedridden mother. She's a beekeeper who uses traditional methods, and does well enough to get by, getting ten to twenty euros per kilo for her artisanal honey in nearby Skopje. The solitude is broken when the nomadic Sam family arrives next door, with dozens of cattle and six noisy children, but she seems to enjoy the company, and when father Hussein decides to start keeping bees himself, she's helpful. Soon, he has committed himself to selling a lot of honey, and it starts to affect Hatidze's work as well.
If the Sams family had never shown up, Honeyland might have been a different but still fascinating movie, one about a dying way of life and how family commitments can tie a person to a place beyond what seems otherwise reasonable. One can see the outline of that movie here, in the opening shots of Hatidze walking across an otherwise empty landscape to check on a hidden hive, the candle-lit scenes of her bickering with mother Nazife in a very small house, and how a camera having to find her in a city scene doesn't seem to dent Hatidze's self-confidence. Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov show Hatidze going about her business in such a way that they don't often need her voice to explain beekeeping to the audience. Her village is presented in a specific, meaningful way - old enough to be made of stone and showing some wear, but nevertheless tidy, in a way. The air is clear, the bees have space enough to work. It is not a lecture about some pastoral ideal, but it presents Hatidze's life in such a way as to get one thinking along those lines, despite the solitude.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Aquarela
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Aquarela serves as your semi-regular reminder that water is metal as heck and will mess you up if you think you can take it for granted. It occasionally seems to have been built as a sort of subversive parody of white noise/relaxation videos, resembling them at first glance but offering up raw power, a caution about what we may unleash.
Director Viktor Kossakovskiy breaks the film into four clear acts: In the first, we see a team examining the ice on a frozen river near St. Petersberg that has started to thaw with spring, locating and retrieving a car that has fallen through. Eventually the camera moves to what I believe to be Greenland, a sailing ship in the foreground giving scale to the glaciers as pieces cleave off and fall into the sea. The camera follows that ship to sea, where a pod of dolphins soon gives way to choppy waters with massive swells. Eventually the camera sinks under the water and emerges in a flooded city.
Kosakovskiy gives the audience characters at the start, but mostly pushes people to the side thereafter to focus more on the raw power at work, and at first glance this reads as man's meagerness in the face of nature. Look closer, though, and Kossakovskiy establishes how the film is talking about climate change with one darkly funny but potentially tragic exchange ("Why are you driving here?" / "Usually, the ice melts three weeks later!"), and then tracks it. The first segment not only features cars, but general combustion, as a building burns in the background despite the apparent indifference of those on the ice, which is followed by glaciers melting, an unpredictable sea, and finally coastal cities becoming uninhabitable. For an extra bit of apocalyptic emphasis, the audience gets to see survivors huddling in caves before the film ends on a more conventionally beautiful bit of nature photography. Humanity may destroy itself by not recognizing how much raw power nature has bottled up, but the world itself will keep turning.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Great Hack
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
The Great Hack is one of the more glaring recent cases of "important topic that deserves a better documentary", a not-quite-so-long-as-it-seems slog that gives the audience very few details of how the process described by the title works but a great deal of sitting through testimony and talking with the same few people many times over to establish the same information. Maybe, as a Netflix production/acquisition, it's designed to be watched with a finger on the fast-forward button, but that doesn't seem like a great idea when the home-screen button is just millimeters away.
The hack in question is how Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based data-mining company whose clients have increasingly included political campaigns (favoring right-of-center candidates), used data scraped from Facebook to model the entire United States electorate in the 2016 election, allowing the Trump campaign to precisely target "persuadable" voters with large amounts of personalized advertising. Hearing this, an associate professor of digital media in New York, David Carroll, files suit in a British court to find out what personal information of his are on the company's servers. Meanwhile, a more official investigation is launched when former CA employee Christopher Wylie comes across as a whistleblower and points the investigating Parliamentary committee toward Brittany Kaiser, a former Obama campaign intern who would become a key employee at the company and knows where all the bodies are buried.
For as much as issues of digital privacy and personal information can often seem like they have become background noise because it's so pervasive and hard to practically restrict, The Great Hack is probably at its most interesting when filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim track down and illustrate the details, whether that's the simple but effective visualization of data generated with each online interaction or laying out how an innocuous-seeming personality test provided the company with useful data. Case studies like how the company leveraged youth apathy during an earlier election in Trinidad and Tobago are insightful and horrifying, and while some of the reporting on how this works could probably come across as dry and mathematical, it's useful, even if harder to obtain.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Apollo 11
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
I kind of said everything I needed to about this one back when it first played theaters back in March - it's a pretty terrific assembly of footage from the Apollo mission that puts the audience right into that time and place, both for how it attends little everyday details and presents them as high-quality film rather than the blurry TV on which most people experienced it at the time. It's never not going to be thrilling.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Tuesday, January 07, 2020
Adoring
Now, look, I'm not going to say for sure that China went for the absolute safest movie choice possible this New Year's Eve after last year, when many bought tickets to A Long Day's Journey Into Night based on a promised "midnight kiss" and got a moody art-house noir rather than the romance that they were expecting, but it certainly would explain the movie with all the cute doggies and kitties and piggy doing really well there last week. It is, if nothing else, exactly what it promises.
Which is fine; I feel no shame whatsoever in choosing the lovable animal movie over stressing myself out with Uncut Gems last night, although I'll get there eventually. One thing I will say is that, of the roughly fifty times I've seen the trailer for Call of the Wild (including four on Saturday!), this is probably the most appropriate pairing, although it also highlighted just how odd that trailer is, in how its dog is clearly at least digitally enhanced in most of its shots: It is too humanly expressive, which seems like a really bad fit for Jack London's novels (although, boy, would I buy some London audiobooks with Harrison Ford reading). Compare it to how the animal team in Adoring gets a whole lot of pathos out of the terrier while pointedly leaving him as a dog.
On top of that, it was kind of odd to follow director Larry Yang's credits and find one of those movies where an athlete plays himself about Stephon Marbury, whom I had completely lost track on when he left the NBA (not that I've been following basketball that closely in a while). Apparently he's become a superstar and tremendously beloved in China, going straight from star player to head coach as he retired, and this movie about this whole thing actually has a neat cast.
Chong Ai (Adoring)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, DCP)
Adoring is pretty much exactly the carefully-manufactured crowd-pleaser it looks like, a couple hours of very loyal and smart pets and their owners who dote on each other nearly as much as on them. It is built to have something for everybody and leans hard on its animal co-stars, and is easy enough to dismiss for all that. It's also pretty darn earnest and sometimes just odd enough to catch one by surprise.
The first good boy we meet is Zha, a golden retriever belonging to teenager Jiang Nan (Zhang Zifeng), whose best friend since kindergarten Chen Yeyun (Leo Wu) has recently gone blind. Nearby, Luo Hua (Tan Jianci) asks for his mysophobic neighbor An Ying (Kan Qingzi) to help him rescue a kitten from underneath a car before roping her into looking after it while he's on a business trip. "Fay" Qu Feifei (Yang Zishan) is paranoid about why boyfriend Li Xiang (Wallace Chung Han-Liang) hasn't invited her home yet, until she discovers that his pet Bell is a spoiled pig; her friend Fang Xin (Zhong Chuxi) has just married Zhao Le (William Chan Wai-Ting), although Xin's rottweiler Seven has not exactly accepted the new member of the family. Divorced dad Gao Ming (Yu Hewei) looks after his daughter's cat Angela while Mengmeng (Li Landi) is living with her mother in America, while restaurant delivery man Ade (Kevin Guo Qilin) finds himself relying on a clever terrier to get his deliveries to the right location, only to discover that strays are being rounded up in this fairly posh new neighborhood..
This dog introduces himself to Ade by dragging an actual banana peel from the garbage so that Ade will slip on it and drop some teriyaki chicken, one of several scenes that probably marks him as the smartest of several extremely bright animals. It's actually kind of impressive how well director Larry Yang Zi and animal coordinator David Allsberry's team of handlers build gags around these guys being extraordinary even by movie standards without quite tilting into things being too exaggerated - a few scenes, from this dog avoiding a trap to the kitten adorably laying waste to Ying's shelves full of Lego constructs and tchotchkes are something like half a step away from being cartoons but for really impeccable staging.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Which is fine; I feel no shame whatsoever in choosing the lovable animal movie over stressing myself out with Uncut Gems last night, although I'll get there eventually. One thing I will say is that, of the roughly fifty times I've seen the trailer for Call of the Wild (including four on Saturday!), this is probably the most appropriate pairing, although it also highlighted just how odd that trailer is, in how its dog is clearly at least digitally enhanced in most of its shots: It is too humanly expressive, which seems like a really bad fit for Jack London's novels (although, boy, would I buy some London audiobooks with Harrison Ford reading). Compare it to how the animal team in Adoring gets a whole lot of pathos out of the terrier while pointedly leaving him as a dog.
On top of that, it was kind of odd to follow director Larry Yang's credits and find one of those movies where an athlete plays himself about Stephon Marbury, whom I had completely lost track on when he left the NBA (not that I've been following basketball that closely in a while). Apparently he's become a superstar and tremendously beloved in China, going straight from star player to head coach as he retired, and this movie about this whole thing actually has a neat cast.
Chong Ai (Adoring)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, DCP)
Adoring is pretty much exactly the carefully-manufactured crowd-pleaser it looks like, a couple hours of very loyal and smart pets and their owners who dote on each other nearly as much as on them. It is built to have something for everybody and leans hard on its animal co-stars, and is easy enough to dismiss for all that. It's also pretty darn earnest and sometimes just odd enough to catch one by surprise.
The first good boy we meet is Zha, a golden retriever belonging to teenager Jiang Nan (Zhang Zifeng), whose best friend since kindergarten Chen Yeyun (Leo Wu) has recently gone blind. Nearby, Luo Hua (Tan Jianci) asks for his mysophobic neighbor An Ying (Kan Qingzi) to help him rescue a kitten from underneath a car before roping her into looking after it while he's on a business trip. "Fay" Qu Feifei (Yang Zishan) is paranoid about why boyfriend Li Xiang (Wallace Chung Han-Liang) hasn't invited her home yet, until she discovers that his pet Bell is a spoiled pig; her friend Fang Xin (Zhong Chuxi) has just married Zhao Le (William Chan Wai-Ting), although Xin's rottweiler Seven has not exactly accepted the new member of the family. Divorced dad Gao Ming (Yu Hewei) looks after his daughter's cat Angela while Mengmeng (Li Landi) is living with her mother in America, while restaurant delivery man Ade (Kevin Guo Qilin) finds himself relying on a clever terrier to get his deliveries to the right location, only to discover that strays are being rounded up in this fairly posh new neighborhood..
This dog introduces himself to Ade by dragging an actual banana peel from the garbage so that Ade will slip on it and drop some teriyaki chicken, one of several scenes that probably marks him as the smartest of several extremely bright animals. It's actually kind of impressive how well director Larry Yang Zi and animal coordinator David Allsberry's team of handlers build gags around these guys being extraordinary even by movie standards without quite tilting into things being too exaggerated - a few scenes, from this dog avoiding a trap to the kitten adorably laying waste to Ying's shelves full of Lego constructs and tchotchkes are something like half a step away from being cartoons but for really impeccable staging.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Friday, January 03, 2020
The Grudge (2020)
Okay, who expected the latest version of The Grudge to be good? I'm not going to lie, I thought the idea was pointless, especially since the revival attempts in Japan seemed to demonstrate more that the well is dry than any actual point in reviving the franchise (maybe The Final Curse pulled something off, but The Beginning of the End was bad enough that I didn't bother). My eyes went up when I noticed Nicolas Pesce's name on it, but a quick look at my reviews for The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing showed I had at the time been more impressed with the ideas of his movies than what he actually managed.
And yet… It mostly works. He may not quite have the skill to match his most ambitious ideas yet, but he's still got more than enough to crank out a new entry in a series that has a pretty well-defined template, especially since he's clearly fond of the material and doesn't quite see this as just a paycheck or a way to get an in with the studios. There's a non-zero chance that in ten or twenty years, we'll be nodding at the obviousness of his career path - show raw talent in a couple of interesting independent films, hone it on studio work (where you've got a few more resources and, hey, maybe Sam Raimi occasionally gives you a useful pointer or two), emerge as someone who can marry big ideas to impressive execution.
At any rate - for a movie released on one of Sony's less prestigious labels during a period where they usually dump junk, this is an impressively solid film that the audience was mostly into. Go figure.
The Grudge (2020)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)
As exciting as Ju-On: The Grudge was when it first appeared alongside Ringu and introduced a particular strand of Japanese horror to the wider world, it is now long past the time when one can reasonably expect anything new from this franchise - heck, creator Takashi Shimizu was getting self-referential with the second Japanese feature back in 2003 because there's just not that much there. Fortunately, up-and-coming director Nicolas Pesce is good enough to make an entry in the series that is, if nothing else, effective. In its better moments, the film manages to do a bit more than just getting the job done.
The film starts at a familiar house in the Tokyo suburbs, where the Saeki family died but the rage behind it became a sort of infection. American visitor Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood) is creeped out enough to go home to husband Sam (David Lawrence Brown) and daughter Melinda (Zoe Fish) early, but takes some of that curse with her. Two years later, two detectives - veteran Goodman (Demián Bichir) and newly-transferred Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) - are called to the scene when a corpse is found in a car that drove off the road months ago. She turns out to be Lorna Moody (Jacki Weaver), an assisted-suicide activist who had gone missing after visiting William Matheson (Frankie Fiason) and his terminally-ill wife Faith (Lin Shaye) in the house previously occupied by the Landers family and once listed by married realtors Peter (John Cho) and Nina Spencer (Betty Gilpin). Goodman had worked the Landers case, but some instinct had kept him from actually entering the house and being as thoroughly shaken as his then-partner Wilson (William Sadler) became.
That's a lot, but it's spread out over a couple of years, 2004-2006, making it a sort of spin-off or sequel to Shimizu's American remake as a full reset. Pesce retains important elements of Shimizu's original films but does a good job of adapting them to small-town America, letting the escalating crimes happen unseen because there are empty spaces rather than hidden corners, working with cinematographer Zack Galler to evoke a false warmth rather than the clinical digital video of the original Japanese films. He makes the signature creaking on the soundtrack count, although his ghosts aren't quite such iconic images. He also retains the fractured timeline and does a much better job of making it work than the folks behind the most recent Japanese reboot, in part because there's a reason for it beyond withholding information from the audience or "these movies have always done that"; he's letting the case pull Muldoon in as she discovers it.
Full review on EFilmCritic
And yet… It mostly works. He may not quite have the skill to match his most ambitious ideas yet, but he's still got more than enough to crank out a new entry in a series that has a pretty well-defined template, especially since he's clearly fond of the material and doesn't quite see this as just a paycheck or a way to get an in with the studios. There's a non-zero chance that in ten or twenty years, we'll be nodding at the obviousness of his career path - show raw talent in a couple of interesting independent films, hone it on studio work (where you've got a few more resources and, hey, maybe Sam Raimi occasionally gives you a useful pointer or two), emerge as someone who can marry big ideas to impressive execution.
At any rate - for a movie released on one of Sony's less prestigious labels during a period where they usually dump junk, this is an impressively solid film that the audience was mostly into. Go figure.
The Grudge (2020)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)
As exciting as Ju-On: The Grudge was when it first appeared alongside Ringu and introduced a particular strand of Japanese horror to the wider world, it is now long past the time when one can reasonably expect anything new from this franchise - heck, creator Takashi Shimizu was getting self-referential with the second Japanese feature back in 2003 because there's just not that much there. Fortunately, up-and-coming director Nicolas Pesce is good enough to make an entry in the series that is, if nothing else, effective. In its better moments, the film manages to do a bit more than just getting the job done.
The film starts at a familiar house in the Tokyo suburbs, where the Saeki family died but the rage behind it became a sort of infection. American visitor Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood) is creeped out enough to go home to husband Sam (David Lawrence Brown) and daughter Melinda (Zoe Fish) early, but takes some of that curse with her. Two years later, two detectives - veteran Goodman (Demián Bichir) and newly-transferred Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) - are called to the scene when a corpse is found in a car that drove off the road months ago. She turns out to be Lorna Moody (Jacki Weaver), an assisted-suicide activist who had gone missing after visiting William Matheson (Frankie Fiason) and his terminally-ill wife Faith (Lin Shaye) in the house previously occupied by the Landers family and once listed by married realtors Peter (John Cho) and Nina Spencer (Betty Gilpin). Goodman had worked the Landers case, but some instinct had kept him from actually entering the house and being as thoroughly shaken as his then-partner Wilson (William Sadler) became.
That's a lot, but it's spread out over a couple of years, 2004-2006, making it a sort of spin-off or sequel to Shimizu's American remake as a full reset. Pesce retains important elements of Shimizu's original films but does a good job of adapting them to small-town America, letting the escalating crimes happen unseen because there are empty spaces rather than hidden corners, working with cinematographer Zack Galler to evoke a false warmth rather than the clinical digital video of the original Japanese films. He makes the signature creaking on the soundtrack count, although his ghosts aren't quite such iconic images. He also retains the fractured timeline and does a much better job of making it work than the folks behind the most recent Japanese reboot, in part because there's a reason for it beyond withholding information from the audience or "these movies have always done that"; he's letting the case pull Muldoon in as she discovers it.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 3 January 2020 - 9 January 2020
This may be the slowest movie release weekend of the year - we're not even seeing platform expansions yet. And yet, the weekend could be quite busy!
In news about the screens themselves, the New England Aquarium's site has their Imax theater closed until mid-February for "renovation", which sounds like it means a digital downgrade. Going the other direction, Boston Common has added a Dolby Cinema screen, with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker sitting there for its first couple of weeks.
Having already seen The Grudge, I'll try and see how many documentaries I can fit in (including Cunningham) as well as finally catching up with Jojo Rabbit, Little Women, and Uncut Gems, though I've been saying that for a while.
- The only major release is the new version of The Grudge, which is… not bad? The franchise may have been played out three years into the twenty-first century, but putting Nicolas Pesce in charge seems to be delivering a functional horror movie, at the very least. Enjoy those low expectations at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere!
AMC Boston Common once again is showing all 15 movies that the Academy has shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature, so if you want to pre-cram for the awards - or just see some quality non-fiction filmmaking - you could do worse for yourself that sitting down there all weekend. The films are For Sama (Friday/Monday), Midnight Family (Friday/Wednesday), Knock Down the House (Friday/Monday), Maiden (Friday/Tuesday), American Factory (Friday/Tuesday), Honeyland (Saturday/Tuesday), Aquarela (Saturday/Thursday), The Great Hack (Saturday/Wednesday), Apollo 11 (Saturday/Monday), One Child Nation (Saturday/Monday), Advocate (Sunday/Wednesday), The Apollo (Sunday/Tuesday), The Biggest Little Farm (Sunday/Thursday), The Cave (Sunday/Wednesday), The Edge of Democracy (Sunday/Thursday)
Theaters also start having one-offs again, with the first two episodes of the new series of Doctor Who playing Fenway Sunday afternoon. Music doc Mystify: Michael Hutchence is at Fenway Tuesday night, and the Russian movies must be doing well at Fenway, because they have animated comedy Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf 4 on Wednesday evening. Like A Boss gets "Girls' Night Out" preview screenings at Causeway Street, South Bay, and Revere on Wednesday. - Kendall Square locates their 3D lenses for the second time in a year to show Cunningham in the format for half of its shows, demonstrating 30 years of increasingly revolutionary dance choreography. Director Alla Kovgan will be on had for Q&As after Friday evening and Saturday afternoon screenings (the latter already marked as sold out), with both of those shows in 3D.
The also open Invisible Life (not to be confused with A Hidden Life at the same theater), Brazil's Oscar submission. Directed by Karim Aïnouz, it tells the tale of two adult sisters forced to live apart. - Two first-run features share the screen atThe Brattle Theatre this week: Errol Morris's documentary American Dharma, a feature-length interview with Steve Bannon, has most shows, while Peter Strickland's peculiar, darkly funny fashion-horror film In Fabric plays the 9pm hour. Morris is on-hand for a Q&A session on Friday evening (already showing as sold out), and the theater is closed for a private event on Monday.
- The Chinese film opening at Boston Common this week is Adoring, which looks like a series of interconnected romances featuring pet owners, and likely cute as all heck. Ip Man 4: The Finale also continues.
Apple Fresh Pond gets a whole slate of Indian movies in, with Good Newwz the big Bollywood opening, featuring Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Diljit Dosanjh, and Kiara Advani as two couples doing in vitro fertilization who have their sperm samples mixed up because they all have the same last name. Prati Roju Pandaage is a Telugu film about a grandson fulfilling the wishes of his dying grandfather (playing through Tuesday), with Mathu Vadalara looking like a caper movie in the same language, built around a character with hypersomnia (playing through Sunday). Malayalam action-comedy Driving Licence, featuring chaos when a famous actor tries to renew his licence, plays Saturday, while Gujarati film Hellaro also plays Saturday and Sunday. The big release comes Wednesday night and Thursday, as the new action film from Superstar Rajinikanth, Darbar, opens for Deepavavli. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre mostly keeps the same schedule other than bringing the surprisingly resilient Parasite back for a couple daily shows in the smaller rooms, but they also get back into repertory programming. A month of The Thing at midnight kicks off with the original Howard Hawks The Thing from Another World on 35mm Friday, while Saturday's midnight is Tarsem Singh's The Cell with a Haus of Oni horror-drag pre-show. There's a Science On Screen Jr. showing of The Pirates! An Adventure with Scientists (as the film was called in the UK), with pre-show discussion that will likely counter some of how the otherwise charming movie is less than impressed with Charles Darwin. There's also a Panorama screening of work-in-progress short "Facing Civil Rights", with post-film discussion and all ticket sales going to the Brookline Food Pantry.
- The monthly "On the Fringe" screening at The Museum of Fine Arts is Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. They start a run of Celebration, which premiered in Berlin in 2007 but was by and large blocked by the partner of subject Yves Saint Laurent for the better part of a decade, on Wednesday. They show The Lighthouse later that evening, with the first of a couple screenings of Matthew Barney's Redoubt on Thursday.
- The documentary Willie plays Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon at The Lexington Venue, telling the story of Willie O'Ree, the first black player in the NHL. Producer Bryant McBride will be on hand for Q&As.
- The ICA will be showing a program of short films from the Ottawa International Animation Festival on Thursday evening, with more shows the weekend after.
- The Luna Theater shows In Fabric Friday & Saturday evenings, Waves Saturday afternoon, The Lighthouse later Saturday afternoon and Tuesday evening, and a full day of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Sunday. There are free surprises at the Magical Mystery Movie Club Sunday morning and Weirdo Wednesday.
Cinema Salem has Knives and Skin in their smaller screening room.
In news about the screens themselves, the New England Aquarium's site has their Imax theater closed until mid-February for "renovation", which sounds like it means a digital downgrade. Going the other direction, Boston Common has added a Dolby Cinema screen, with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker sitting there for its first couple of weeks.
Having already seen The Grudge, I'll try and see how many documentaries I can fit in (including Cunningham) as well as finally catching up with Jojo Rabbit, Little Women, and Uncut Gems, though I've been saying that for a while.
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