This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 4 May 2020 - 10 May 2020

A lot of "other stuff going on" this week



I believe I actually started the week early, watching "Das Foto-Shoot" and "Being Flat" in the morning before "commuting" to work at the other end of the apartment, probably figuring on actually getting the Deerskin review they were attached to written while waiting for queries to run or meetings to end, but even in sane times, everything takes longer and I miss writing on the bus and, yeah, I just sort of suggested that I missed taking the bus to work but, hey, it was a good environment for me!

And then, in the evenings… Not much movie-watching, because NESN was re-running the 2004 Red Sox postseason, and, hey, that was pretty great, although watching it fifteen years later in a more sane fashion - that is, not DVRing it, going to the Brattle for their first stab at a Boston Fantastic Film Festival, and then starting it when I got back to the apartment at 11pm only to discover that these games were five hours long - obviously wasn't the same.

One thing I found myself considering as I watched them was that the only editing they did was cutting out some ad breaks and skipping innings to get down to two hours, to the extent that they still had on-screen advertising for channel 25's newscast at points, which makes sense in one sense but in another, why do it this way? Sure, a lot of people want to re-experience it the way they did the first time, or the way their father did, but I found myself wondering what a good post-production staff could do with everything that Fox and MLB shot during the game, the best upscaling algorithms available, and maybe a scripted play-by-play that's not Joe Buck and Tim McCarver doling out generic patter, conventional wisdom, and incomplete analysis. The people who direct and produce the telecasts live events like these do downright amazing work, but it's obviously not the best possible version of it. Maybe letting top editors loose on the production would create something that feels fake, and I suppose that in normal times, there's little market for the "World Series Director's Cut" that it would be a money-loser, but I'd still kind of like to see it.

Which makes for an contrast with the night I didn't watch old baseball but instead caught The National Theatre's presentation of Frankenstein, which they were streaming on their YouTube channel for a week, with different productions taking the spot every seven days for the duration of the pandemic. I intended to watch both versions, but messed up dates and time-zone issues, so only caught the one with Johnny Lee Miller as the Creature and Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor. It's still a pretty great production, although you kind of need both to get the total experience.

Saturday, I caught Thousand Pieces of Gold, the first "virtual screening room" engagement that really made me regret that I wasn't seeing it on the place's actual screen. It's a fine restoration of a movie that seems to have been badly overlooked the first time around, one that I'm happily ordering on Blu-ray in addition to having kicked the price of a ticket the Brattle's way.

Sunday wound up being errand day, with laundry needing to be done and groceries needing to be fetched, and I was all excited to try out my pizza oven, but I had a comical time actually starting a fire using "firestarters" in this metal box designed to contain burning wood. Literally ran out of matches trying to light it and had to make a third trip out of the house of the day to get a lighter from CVS and I felt guilty by the time I was at Davis Square for having been out of the house so much. By the time the additional "conditioning" burn was done, there really wasn't time to make a pizza, so that would be a challenge for later in the week, and I just opted to try and get some stuff off the DVR that night instead.

Stuff's appearing here before my Letterboxd page these days, because as I said earlier, I miss the bus and the subway, which is where I would write up first impressions, but it's still fun to follow that and like stuff and put it on your to-watch list, if that is what you use the platform for!

NT Live: Frankenstein (Miller as the Creature, Cumberbatch as Victor)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (NT Live, YouTube via Roku)

As much as I've grumbled about wanting this on disc since first seeing this version in 2011, finally getting to watch it in similar fashion, though by streaming rather than physical media (2011 was a while ago; Netflix Watch Instant was kind of a new thing at the time), instead made me realize that it's kind of out of place in the living room. You're supposed to be in an audience for this, so that it can be larger than life or human-sized or…

Well, maybe we just have a tendency to calibrate "right" for these things to the scale at which we first experience it, even if we later see it in a different light at a different scale.

Either way, this is still a terrific production and one that I hope to catch in theaters again sometime. It's a pair of great performances and a nifty staging, and it cuts right to the heart of the themes that make Mary Shelley's work so memorable in all iterations.

What I thought seeing this version in 2011
What I thought seeing the version with the cast reversed in 2014

Thousand Pieces of Gold

Dang, am I disappointed that we're all locked down and the Brattle is showing this virtually rather than giving it a weekend on the big screen, because this film is beautiful and terrific and I wish I'd been able to see it from their front row rather than my recliner. They're hosting a virtual Q&A with director Nancy Kelly and screenwriter Anne Makepeace on Tuesday evening, which sounds quite worthwhile.

It's also one where the cast kind of surprised me in the best ways. I mostly know Rosalind Chao from Star Trek, and it gets me thinking about how strange show business can be, that she could do something this good as the star and just never have that sort of part again. She's worked steadily, but it's a heck of a thing. This also feels like the only thing I've seen Dennis Dun in aside from Big Trouble in Little China, which seems kind of crazy, since he's kind of critical to both. Meanwhile, I think this is the only time I've ever seen Michael Paul Chan with hair, and my brain had a hard time accepting Chris Cooper as ever having been this young.

Thousand Pieces of Gold

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, KinoNow via Roku)

It is sadly not surprising that Thousand Pieces of Gold is Nancy Kelly's only narrative feature, with just a few documentaries following in the thirty years since; it's a fine movie but women didn't always get a lot of second chances for anything other than immediate hits, and this wasn't one. It is, nevertheless, a terrific little movie whose honesty is often heartbreaking without ever being cynical.

It opens in 1880, with three years of drought devastating villages in northern China ultimately leading to one shepherd to sell his oldest daughter, telling Lalu (Rosalid Chao) to "serve your master or your husband" as she's loaded into a cart with three other women. That will be in a far off place - a boat takes her to San Francisco where "Jim" Li Pa (Dennis Dun) purchases her, only to tell her that he is only acting as an agent for another, and the boat to Oregon leaves in the morning. They bond on trail to Idaho, only for Jim to turn her over to Hong King (Michael Paul Chan), who means to have her work in the saloon he leases from Charlie Bemis (Chris Cooper), a heavy-drinking gambler who nevertheless can be particular about what is and isn't legal when it suits him.

Though the cycle of Lalu (or "Polly", as the white and assimilated folks call her) discovering some sort of bright side to her situation only to be crushed again will continue through much of the film, the first half-hour or so has it in concentrated form, with Kelly and screenwriter Anne Makepeace (working from the novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn) nevertheless showing great care in how they build Lalu up before the disappointment. They'll take a moment to show that she made friends during the journey, or let her show some excitement at how fancy her room for the night is. It's a technique that could simply be cruel, but is a little more; though for all that beauty and opportunity in the West is real rather than just bait for a trap, the filmmakers are able to break Lalu's heart again and again and have it hit the audience anew every time.

It's a testament that Rosalind Chao is able to make it hit home and feel new each time, capturing Lalu as initially young and inexperienced in this place's ways, especially surrounded by people who seem completely alien to her. She's really good at trying to understand rather than just letting English bounce off her, and portraying the relief that comes from the moments when you can feel like an intelligent adult amid a background of only being able to express raw emotion and broken English. Lalu develops nicely, and it's something of a joy to watch her not just mature, but how she becomes Chinese-American, and how her version of it is different from but related to that of the other immigrants .

The use of the men in the movie is in some ways just as important as what is being done with Lalu, and how in many ways it stands out from other films that would have the protagonist find love in a hostile territory: It makes them earn it, not just by proving themselves to Lalu but by collectively examining their expectations in a way that is remarkably non-transactional for this sort of movie. Lalu may be sold to start the movie but she can't be bought to finish it with either money or deed, and it's interesting to watch Chris Cooper and Dennis Dun roll all that around, sometimes briefly and sometimes over time, not saying anything directly but showing how hard but necessary it is for men to get out of their own heads. There's good work among the rest of the supporting cast too, with even Michael Paul Chan given a chance to make something out of the film's least sympathetic character.

On top of that, Thousand Pieces of Gold is an impressively produced film from the opening, where a dead sheep blending into the landscape encapsulates the world Lalu is coming from, to the finish. The production crew creates a small, dense western town whose every detail seems authentic, while Bobby Bukowski's cinematography captures the beauty of the unspoiled West without it often seeming showy - with a few exceptions, it's something that can be taken for granted but also something that keeps people from giving up. Kenji Yamamoto does similarly basic but effective work as editor, something perhaps enhanced by just how well Kelly and Makepeace do at slipping little bits of dialogue and use of the changing seasons to make it clear that Lalu and the rest have time to grow.

A new restoration is sort-of-kind-of playing theaters (most shut down as of this writing but a selection in the virtual screening rooms of several), and it looks and sounds excellent, good enough to be a revelation for a film that never got a proper DVD release. For better or worse, the ensuing decades have only brought its themes into sharper relief, making this film's return a welcome second chance that it should have had years ago.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 8 May 2020 - 14 May 2020

Got a notification on my phone this week from the Hong Kong theater app I while there last year and, folks, it's listing movie showtimes.

-- sigh --

• The Coolidge Corner Theatre continues to keep as busy as a theater can during this period, adding indie romantic comedy Straight Up and documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael to their virtual screening room, keeping Deerskin, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint, and The Booksellers around. They also complete the "Documentary Films of Lee Grant" series with a second double feature, "When Women Kill" & "The Wilmar 8" joining the pairing of "Down and Out in America" & "What Sex Am I"? and standalone feature A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's probably wise not to dawdle too much; I learned this week that they're starting to turn these over more quickly, with some of last week's selections already gone.
  
  On the other hand, Geothe-Institut selection Lara is unexpectedly held over for another three-day run through Sunday, and the New York International Children's Film Festival has two programs of Kid Flicks (one for those 3 and up, one for 8 and up) supporting the Coolidge through the 17th. For special events, they are notably the local location of RZA's live commentary on Shaolin vs Wu Tang at 9:15pm Friday evening. The After Midnight crew hosts a Q&A with projectionist Nick Lazzaro on Saturday night, and will have a live YouTube broadcast with What She Said director Rob Garver on Tuesday. The week's Coolidge Education film is Johnny Guitar, with UMass Boston professor Sarah Keller recording an intro and hosting a Zoom discussion on Thursday
• The Brattle Theatre adds two new features to their own virtual screening room: Vitalina Varela from Pedro Costa had a premiere at the HFA earlier and follows its title character (who shares a name with her character) as she travels from Cape Verde to Portugal too late for her ex-husband's funeral; Thousand Pieces of Gold is a restoration of a film from 1990 that appears to have been minimized (despite a great cast including Rosalind Chao, Chris Cooper, and Michael Paul Chan) with director Nancy Kelly only able to make documentaries since Kelly and screenwriter Anne Makepeace will join the Brattle for a Q&A session on Tuesday evening, though RSVPs are necessary. Deerskin and The Cordillera of Dreams also continue in the virtual screening room, which also has a special one-time screening & Q&A of Spaceship Earth on Sunday evening.
  
  They haven't posted a new "Y'Know, For the Kids!" recommendation in a couple of weeks, but the list of things there is still worth checking out. #BreakYourAlgorithm is being rescheduled to Monday and Thursday, with the latest recommendation Sammo Hung playing his former teacher in Painted Faces. They also plan to team with "Strictly Brohibited" for a Women of Sci-Fi series starting on Wednesday, but details for that aren't up yet.
• The Capitol adds Spaceship Earth to its virtual cinema offerings alongside Dying for Gold, The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and Slay the Dragon. Their friends at The Somerville Theatre won't open up Sunday for a 35mm Harold Lloyd double feature of For Heaven's Sake & Hot Water (doubly a shame as they are hard to stream), and have had to cancel their 70mm fest for later in the month, but they've got a pop-corn pop-up on Sunday, good for picking up snacks to eat with their virtual cinema offerings of Pahokee, The Whistlers, and Once Were Brothers
• The Regent Theatre has extended their virtual screening room runs of The Mindfulness Movement and Fantastic Fungi through at least Sunday.
• West Newton Cinema continue their virtual screening room programs of Earth, Best of CatVideoFest, Once Were Brothers, Slay the Dragon, and The Whistlers. Their GoFundMe campaign is still active, as is the "Local Hero" advance ticket sales with a matching ticket going to staff at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.
• GlobeDocs is offering a free documentary feature this weekend - RSVP for Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools at the link, and they'll send a link to watch that and another for discussing the film a noon on Monday.

Hopefully I'll get to Thousand Pieces of Gold, Straight Up, Capital, and a couple others this week, along with clearing some more shelf space.

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 27 April 2020 - 3 May 2020

I've got to find something to do to make these pages a little more interesting, just for myself looking at them. Maybe screenshot the theaters' virtual cinema pages or cut up the little advertising cards in some of the discs.



I kept a little busier this week, kicking things off on Monday with Pahokee from the Somerville's virtual screening room. It's the sort of documentary that may have you a little fidgety during the film but is pretty good stuff once you settle in and let it turn over a bit. It's a 2019 IFFBoston selection that I watched during the week we should have been at the 2020 edition, and the specific sort of film that makes one miss festivals like that.

On Wednesday, I hit up the Brattle's selections for Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which sticks a fun idea for a supernatural sex comedy at the end of a lot of stuff that's not that entertaining, especially 40 years later. That makes it kind of an interesting double-feature with A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from the Coolidge's Lee Grant series, though: You kind of have to wrestle with what constitutes an acceptable sort of scoundrel now versus decades earlier to watch both.

I received a new Blu-ray in the mail during the week, and part of getting stuff off the too-watch shelf means not letting other things get there, so I did a double feature of Shatter & Call of Heroes (for two bits of Hong Kong action), and while the first not being a great Hammer/Shaw collaboration was a bit of a bummer, the second being more fun that I anticipated was a great surprise.

No more movies until Saturday, when I was back in the Brattle's virtual screening room for Deerskin, the latest from Quentin Dupieux and probably his most grounded, in that you can sort of track what's making its weirdo do weird things from real things rather than just being an artifact of being in a world slightly off-kilter. I also hit the grocery story to try and get good pizza-making stuff for my new pizza oven (it actually arrived in February, but who is setting a pizza oven up in the tiny backyard then?). Sunday afternoon, I discovered that I apparently can't start a fire in a metal container designed to hold burning wood chips that were marketed for the sole purpose of being set on fire, which is probably good for safety but leaves me with a lot stuff to make pizza in the fridge. Dejected, I went back in to watch the L.A. 3-D Space 3-D Movie Fest (and Ape). Some of that was rough, technically, but interesting, and, circling back around to missing festivals, it was surprisingly exciting to have to be at something other than a work call at a certain time.

Mostly quiet since then, but hoping for activity on my Letterboxd page this weekend.

A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (20th Century Woman: The Documentary Films of Lee Grant, Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room/internet)

Lee Grant's documentary from 2005 gets misty toward the end, figuring the end is likely near for 88-year-old Kirk Douglas, unaware that he's got another 15 years in him. Those are some hardy genes, especially considering how well Michael has aged in the meantime.

I can't recall any specific instance of Grant working with either Douglas as an actress, although I suspect it happened at some point. There's clearly enough familiarity there to get very relaxed interviews, and while one probably does have to be wary of whether documentaries about performers contain performance, there's a lot of enjoyable back and forth between the pair. I suspect that Kirk still not entirely being over Michael casting Jack Nicholson when producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had become a bit they go through on a regular basis, but even if it is, there's something genuine to it. I similarly wonder about them mentioning Lonely Are the Brave and Falling Down as respective favorite roles - it makes sense, as they're both striking movies with meeting parts, but they rhyme so well that it's almost too good, right?

There's also a bit of an issue in how to give the pair equal weight. For as much as both talk about how in many ways Michael might have had a harder time of it, trying to live up to how people saw Kirk, he almost comes across as too nice, too thoroughly adapted to his time and place to give half the movie a spark at points while the father can't help but hold on to some problematic aspects of his personality. The allegations that he assaulted a co-star were not well-known at the time of filming (though someone in Grant's position might well have been aware), but listening to him talk about women, it sounds uncomfortably plausible even as he seems to be quite a decent man in other respects. Even without that context readily available, it gives the audience something to unpack even in a doc that wears its fondness for its subjects on its sleeve.

L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online and Ape

The Center for Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema, and Education is an exhibition space/collection in Los Angeles which I'll have to visit if I make it out that way any time soon, most recently noted for crowdfunding the restoration of El Coranzon y la Espada (on the 3-D Rarities II Disc I reviewed a few weeks back. They've got monthly screenings, although that's obviously off right now. So, for Sunday's show, they had planned to show a selection of recent productions, and chose to do it online. There were options to stream it in anaglyph (red/blue) or side-by-side format, with the TV or projector un-compression the pictures so that they could be alternated, projected through polarized lenses, or the like (at one point, this was a way to distribute 3-D films theatrically, using a special polarized lens to project the two images atop each other).

You lose a bit of image quality that way, but it's not so bad, although with some of the selections being rough themselves, the effect can pile up. It's neat, though, and it's good to see that there are folks who enjoy 3-D enough to make new material. Is it better than the feature I popped in later, Ape? Well, some are, though I don't know if that's clearly a high bar (although upon hitting IMDB, I'm not sure what the knowledge that Joanna Kerns had a B-movie babe phase of her career before playing the wife of "Jason Seaver" on Growing Pains means to me).

The next one is set for the 21st of June, though I don't know whether that will wind up another livestream yet. One thing I found myself anticipating was the fact that it was a livestream - starting at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT, running for an hour, and then being more or less immediately set to private. With no sports, and no movies in theaters with ticketed times, everything can sort of be put off or piled up to pick up when one chooses, but this was a screening. Sure, it's not the only thing like that right now, but, honestly, it added more structure than the daily "stand-up" calls at work.

Yes, I've gotten to the point of missing almost being late for something. It's a weird time.

Fun discovery made while looking for Amazon links to break up the wall of text and maybe, someday, have someone click: The "best short soundtracks" album, which is a cool thing to have exist, although I'm not sure who would be buying a whole album as opposed to just the individual ones which impressed them.

"The Whole Picture"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

This one looks too new to have an entry on IMDB (or, heck, any sort of internet footprint), but it's a nifty little thing that changes aspect ratios and color and depth in its three minutes before it goes a different route. Looking at IMDB, it feels like it might be a sort of calling card for director Zsolt Magyar, showing what he can do as a cinematographer and director when much of his career has been working in sound.

"Ghosts of the Pastures"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Another one whose internet footprint is awfully small, and three days later, I can't remember a thing about it.

"Stimulation"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Uh… OK? A minute of home-movie footage which is nice for the folks involved and interesting as a time capsule later but which makes me feel like I'm intruding a bit when watching it.

"Zerynthia Expedition 2"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Kind of a 3-D screen saver in a lot of ways, fun as a tech demo or as the rough draft for a bit of world-building in a sci-fi movie. Nine minutes is kind of a lot, though, especially when you're waiting to get to the next.

"Feline Paradox"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

One of only a couple things in this program that feels like a real movie, but also one that shows what a toll doing good 3D can take on your production - would there have been more resources available for animation if filmmaker Benjamin Reicher wasn't rendering every frame twice? It looks a bit rough throughout, although part of it is that the models for the humanoid cat-people just don't ever feel quite right compared to the humans and the actual cat.

It's kind of fun, though - Reicher has a lot of fun with time travel paradoxes and looping around to the point where it gets a bit out of hand, especially with all the different versions of the main character that keep popping up. It stretches out a bit too long and doesn't necessarily land on the most clever possible ending. But it's goofy and inventive and willing to get weird on occasion, enough that I'll probably grin if I come across something else of Reicher's later and follow the links back here.

"LIttle Planet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Another fun little thing that plays like filmmaker Takashi Sekitani is kind of fooling around with some tech and seeing what he can get out of it. Here, that seems to be walking around with a 360-degree VR camera overhead and flattening it out in such a way as to make it look like he's on a fisheye-lens planet.

No particular story, and I don't know Tokyo enough to really get a sense of the different perspective this offers, although I kind of like the effect of how people getting closer to the person at the center become stretched out and more important as the number of pixels increases. It feels like a cool visualization of something, even if the filmmakers have only wound up at the "looks cool" stage.

Ape

* * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

You think weird things watching a random B-movie like Ape, like how many of the giant-ape movies to come after it used CGI models based on real apes while the ones before used guys in suits or stop-motion and thus had human gaits, and this one often has its ape hunched over but not actually able to get its knuckles to the ground, like they kind of wanted to do better but, oh well, whatever. It's lazy and cheap, but sometimes just bizarre enough in how that pans out to kind of be fun.

It's flagrant in being a King Kong rip-off, although it basically starts with its 36-foot-tall ape chained up in the hold of a ship, being brought across the Pacific to be shown off at Disneyland. It wakes up early and angry, though, capsizing the ship and making its way to the coast of South Korea. Meanwhile, in Seoul, reporter Tom Rose (Rod Arrants) is surprising his actress girlfriend Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) at the airport, having wangled the assignment to report on her first international role. It's not his first time here, which is fortunate, because it means he knows Captain Kim (Lee Nak-Hun) of the local police and can ride along as he and U.S. Army Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol) try and figure out what the heck you do in this situation.

Writer/director Paul Leder gets right to the movie's main draw first, as the nameless giant ape wrestles with a rubber shark and then stomps on some miniatures, and while it never looks close to real - and to make things worse, it's shot in 3D in such a way that one's depth perception immediately reveals the proper scale when viewed that way. This stuff is, nevertheless, still kind of a blast, the kind of kaiju destruction that the audience can enjoy just a bit more because it's fake enough to reassure one that nobody gets hurt even as the first glance makes it feel real. It's lazy and sloppy enough to be frustrating, but there's also a peculiar meta joy to it, where one snickers at the ape flailing at helicopters that just aren't there and thus feeling like it's a victory when one gets in range and he smashes the hell out of that toy.

The whole movie is that sort of mess, not just cheap but stupidly so, like when Tom is pointing things out to Marilyn without getting an B-roll, or the way none of the ape bits seem to be connected, or how nothing anybody does ever makes a lick of sense. It's so comfortable being a King Kong rip-off that it often doesn't need much reason to do something other than "they did it in that other movie", and the ape's fights with giant sharks and snakes make one wonder whether such super-sized mutations are common in the film's world or if the filmmakers just didn't think this through. The laziness is much more apparent with the miniature city demolished at the end, with all the signage in Chinese despite the film taking place in South Korea.

Luckily, there are enough people having fun with the thing that it doesn't become completely insulting, which is kind of impressive, because most of the time when people try to get clever despite messing up the basics just make them look worse. Leder at least makes a few amusing detours as he inserts himself as the director of Marilyn's film - I have no doubt that he has had to sincerely ask actors to be gentle while filming a rape scene - and the cast is in large part just good enough: Rod Arrants and Lee Nak-Hoon are are pleasant without being bland, Alex Nicol does a bit better than mailing it in, and Joanna Kerns (using maiiden name "Joanna DeVarona") does okay for the sort of B-movie most actresses will eventually try to ignore.

There are enough movies with giant apes wreaking havoc out there that this one is mostly of interest for 3D enthusiasts; it's just not good enough at anything else to really stand out. Ape occasionally gets cock-eyed enough to be entertaining, but not enough to be a major part of the kaiju canon.

Also on EFilmCritic

Deerskin (and some shorts)

This movie didn't really land quite so well as I'd hoped, and one of the things I initially wondered is if it was because it was the first of Dupieux's films that I've seen at home, rather than in a theater, be it festival, midnight, or "regular" show. This one isn't quite of a piece with them, but with those other movies, there was a definite sense that having other people around asking what they heck they were seeing made them more fun. Everybody saying "what the heck?" together is an important form of having a shared experience!

I don't know if that's necessarily missing, though; if I saw this one with an audience, I might be just as focused on what he's trying to say as enjoying the ride and trying to fit it all together as some sort of collected commentary on mid-life crisis and impostor syndrome and overconfident mediocre men. There's a bit of a disconnect between the specific targets of the satire and the general feeling of strangeness, and I think that's where the difference lies.

After all, I watched the two Dupieux shorts I could find on line at home (a couple days later) and laughed just fine, although when I started writing afterwards, I saw a bit of a thread of how he seems to really dislike pretension in show business and art, and it's worth remembering that Rubber also opens with a comment on how this is all very silly and nothing happens for a reason. It seems, at times, like it must be tricky to be an absurdist (or, for that matter, in making EDM); there's a lot of crazy detail work in getting everything optimized right down to the fraction of a second so that it hits perfectly that I suspect makes one really distrust the people who stay in the abstract realm, especially since it's so easy to be conflated with them.

Le Daim (Deerskin)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

About six years and three features ago, when reviewing Quentin Dupieux's Wrong Cops, I joked that the director of some of the decade's most entertaining bits of cinematic nonsense was "only a few films away from doing something eccentric but basically sensible". Deerskin doesn't have him quite there, but it's grounded in a way Dupieux's other films are not, for better or worse. It's maybe more mature, but less zany fun.

He introduces the audience to Georges (Jean Dujardin), who has taken to the road to buy a fancy Italian deerskin jacket that the previous owner (Albert Delpy) hasn't worn in some time, paying well enough that the man throws a video recorder in. After that, Georges checks into a hotel, making apologies for being short of cash, putting on airs and passing himself off as a filmmaker. He soon finds himself having conversations with his beloved jacket, which apparently wants to be the only jacket in the world, dovetailing nicely with how he would like to be the only person wearing a jacket. Meanwhile, the server at the hotel bar (Adèle Haenel) mentions that she enjoys video editing as a hobby, so he hires her to work on the film. She's not exactly sure what to make of the seemingly random footage Georges is shooting - or maybe she's got a better instinct for it than he does.

It's not long before the audience learns that Georges's marriage has reached its end in what appears to be tremendously acrimonious fashion, and him being a regular guy in the throes of some sort of breakdown rather than an inhabitant of an inherently bizarre world is a different approach for Dupieux. The way that Georges reacts - a desperate but befuddled need to be seen as cool although only half-heartedly willing to work for it - is a clever take on a man completely adrift after being rejected, and Jean Dujardin slips into the part perfectly, amiably befuddled and kind of sad as he talks to himself, but just with the right whiff of arrogance to it. He's one of those characters where his blank-ness is part of the point, and while Dujardin captures that, it doesn't necessarily draw the audience in.

Instead, Dupieux seems more interested in poking at "emperor has no clothes" situations, with Georges in his deerskin jacket and other accessories eventually succeeding in part because he looks the part of an artist, a testament to how far somebody who doesn't know what he's doing can get, even accidentally, so long as he looks the part to the point where he seemingly starts to believe it. Adèle Haenel's Denise is an interesting complement in that she buys into Georges's bullshit, but she also knows what she's doing, and between her taking money out of the ATM, seeing something in the footage that isn't initially there (at least consciously), and trying to shape it into something that makes sense. The artist, in this case, is not so important as the person who corrals him.

Does that necessarily apply to Dupieux himself? Maybe, although he does serve as his own editor and cinematographer (although he no longer scores his films despite being initially known as a musician). While there's not really enough story to his script for even a 77-minute movie, he does a few nifty things, such as the scenes where he talks with his jacket and Dupieux never moves or cuts but changes focus so that when the jacket "speaks", one can see it's also Georges, but it's just blurry enough or at the margins that the viewer sees it as an in-between thing, both the reality and delusion visible. He does a neat job of shooting Georges's encounters with people on the street so that they feel real and improvised. A lot of that seems to be just saying, screw it, we shoot through the snow, but it works.

All of this makes Deerskin feel a lot more specific than most of Dupieux's other features, although it is still random and eccentric in many ways. It is, I suppose, fitting that this more focused fim integrates someone trying to make sense out of a would-be filmmaker's nonsense into the story, even if I don't necessarily want to see this as the first film of a new, more grounded phase of his career.

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"Das Photo-Shoot"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (more Dupieux, Vimeo via Roku)

Hey, the model in this short is the lady from Rubber! Cool!

(And I guess the other guy is Marilyn Manson.)

This is kind of a one-joke film and the odds are good that you've heard that joke a few times before, but it's told pretty well - Quentin Dupieux may be poking fun at the idea of how a pretentious artiste gets a specific sort of idea in his head but can't truly communicate it, but he both gets the phenomenon well enough and how to get comedy out of repetition and sudden divergence well enough that it works. Manson plays the weirdo well enough and Roxane Mesquida nails the frustrated nonsense to this idiocy well enough to carry the short. The "hey, I have an idea, let's shoot this out back" vibe works but it never seems sloppy.

Simple bit, but it works.

"Being Flat"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (more Dupieux, YouTube via Roku)

One of the fun things about finding and watching this short via YouTube is having other videos featuring "Mr. Oizo" (Quentin Dupieux's nom de musique) and Flat Eric, who I think is the puppet that is sitting in the audience, pop up as recommendations, and getting the feeling that it works just as well with and without that other context. I don't even know that I want to seek that other context out; I just like knowing that it's there.

It is, as such, Dupieux compressed into seven minutes: Non-sequitur humor that still kind of holds together because there's this general strangeness, objects becoming characters, slow-burn lunacy broken by genuinely funny punchlines, and a nifty soundtrack that, even as things are careening completely out of control and maybe getting kind of dark, keeps it fun.

Okay, maybe I'll look for the other Flat Eric stuff.

Made in Hong Kong: Shatter & Call of Heroes

This week's entry in "don't even let the new arrivals make it to the new arrivals shelf" is Shatter, which I didn't even know existed until I was writing up Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires a couple weeks ago and saw that not only did Hammer & Shaw Brothers make a second film together, but Shout! Factory would be releasing it on Blu-ray in a couple weeks. Had to pre-order it at that point.

Maybe not quite worth the money, but how else am I seeing that oddity?

It's blessedly short, so I had time for another one off the shelf, and picked up Call of Heroes, which has been waiting to be watched for a couple of years, one of several discs I've ordered over that time trying to both grab bargains to pad out an order from Hong Kong and get 3D stuff before it went out of print. It's a freaking delight, and I really wish I'd had a chance to see it in a theater. It looks like it came out like a month too late to play Fantasia, didn't get US bookings because a couple other Chinese films were coming out at the time, and then wound up on the festival circuit before a home video release. I kind of get it - Wu Jing was just starting to break out as a superstar and Eddie Peng was in something like the same position if at a lower wattage, Lau Ching-Wan is a Hong Kong guy, and the mainland movies do better than Hong Kong ones.

Maybe not my favorite find during lockdown, but it goes on my list of things I'd like to program a 3D film festival with. Sure, a 3D martial-arts spaghetti western with Lau, Wu, Peng, and action direction by Sammo Hung is very specifically my thing, but I'm kind of suspicious of folks for whom it is not their thing.

Shatter (aka Call Him Mr. Shatter)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

The second and final film in the brief collaboration between the Hammer and Shaw Brothers studios is easily overlooked; it doesn't quite so immediately announce itself as the fusion of their two styles as The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. The behind-the-scenes turmoil had Hammer eventually dumping the film, while Shaw seems to have provided production support without much attempt to put their stamp on it. It's not a bad bit of grindhouse fare, as such things go; although still most noteworthy for the odd place it occupies in genre film history.

It opens with American freelance assassin Shatter (Stuart Whitman) knocking off an African dictator and making off with the contents of his aide's suitcase. He arrives in Hong Kong to pick up the money he's owed, only to have banker Hans Leber (Antron Diffring) refuse to pay, British spy Paul Rattwood (Peter Cushing) informs him that his mission was not, as he believed, sanctioned by the CIA. Leber (or someone) tries to have him killed and Rattwood tells him to leave on the next flight, having some goons deliver a beatdown just to drive the point home. Fortunately, it's behind a bar and massage parlor that employs Tai Pah (Ti Lung) and Mai Mee (Lily Li Li-Li); not only are they willing to give Shatter a place to lie low, but Tai Pah has tremendous kung fu skills

It's worth noting that where 7 Golden Vampires was produced by both studios, Shaw Brothers apparently took a much less active role in Shatter, and one way this manifests is in nobody being credited as action director or fight choreographer. It's not crippling - between original director Monte Hellman and producer Michael Carreras (who took over about two-thirds of the way through), they are generally smart enough to stand back and watch Ti Lung go when it's time for that, and while the results aren't as strong as a real Shaw Brothers movie, there's never any doubt about why Ti was one of the studio's biggest stars. There's some quality martial arts, and while it's choppier than it could be, Ti's still a blast to watch.

The rest of the movie is kind of a mess, though, with a script that is not necessarily terribly convoluted but still on the dumb side far more often than necessary, all too frequently taking the laziest route from one plot development or fight to the next, with plenty of moment-to-moment sloppiness and people who maybe wouldn't be great actors even if they were working in their first language. The last act is kind of egregiously sloppy, and on the other end, there's something genuinely bizarre about how casually the people of Hong Kong shrug off violence, a bit of black comedy that's entertaining in moments but undercuts the ones where the audience is supposed to take Shatter's PTSD seriously.

Stuart Whitman may not have a lot of time to really play with that as Shatter, or anything else, but he's got the right sort of run-down energy for the part; the audience can see every questionable moral choice etched into him. He's a good hitman who is tired of this life but doesn't know how to do anything other than keep going, a useful contrast with Tia Pah's cocky clarity. Peter Cushing, in his last role for Hammer, gets billed as a guest star and adds just the right amount of sneering officiousness to every scene he's in.

This would be Cushing's last film for Hammer, and the studio itself would not last long afterward. In some ways, it's not surprising that Shatter sank; it's the result of a British studio trying to make an American B-movie in Hong Kong style, and only fitfully puts it all together. When it does get all of these personalities working together, it's kind of fun, and it happens often enough that the spots where the influences don't gel and start working against each other aren't the problems they could be.

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Ngai sing (Call of Heroes)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)

It took me a shamefully long time to recognize what filmmaker Benny Chan Muk-Sing was up to with Call of Heroes, because while samurai movies and westerns tend to cross-pollinate in one way, kung fu usually mixes with westerns by having Chinese people show up in the American West. A movie like this - more or less a spaghetti western that has been picked up and dropped straight into Guangdong - is something else and a whole ton of fun.

It's 1914, and China is the scene of fighting between warlords, with Cao Ying the worst of them. Teacher Bai Ling (Maggie Jiang Shu-Ying) is leading a half-dozen orphans away to the capital of Guangzhou, but after being caught in a robbery at a roadside restaurant, they arrive at Pucheng, where Sheriff Yang Kenan (Sean Lau Ching-Wan) prevails on the villagers to let the refugees stay. Also arriving: Wang Meihu (Xing Yu) and his team of mercenaries hired by Boss Liu (Xie Ning), as well as wanderer Ma Feng (Eddie Peng Yu-Yen), who foiled the robbery - and, later, the warlord's sociopathic son, Cao Shaolun (Louis Koo Tin-Lok). Yang and the rest of his guardians arrest Shaolun for murder, but are delivered an ultimatum to release Shaolun or have Colonel Zhang Yi (Wu Jing) attack.

So you've got your sheriff, taunted by a lunatic languishing in a jail as the more competent member of his gang lays siege, the wandering fighter who rides in to serve as a wildcard, the pretty schoolteacher, a bar fight, something that can reasonably pass as a stagecoach, all that good stuff. It's the Chinese equivalent, by and large - nobody's wearing cowboy hats and only Shaolun favors the gun rather than martial arts - but there are no Shaolin monks wearing long queues or hidden martial arts schools. Director of photography Pakie Chan Chor-Keung (apparently working in native 3D) frequently goes to widescreen shots of Pucheng nestled in a green valley, and the score by Wong Kin-Wai shows more and more like Morricone influence as the film goes on.

The roles fit the all-star cast very well indeed. Louis Koo, for instance, is often at his best when he gets to be a bit nasty rather than an upright leading man, and he goes full psycho here, not just nuts but aware enough of his cruelty to twist the knife. He matches up well with Lau Ching-Wan, who gives Yang an unforced rectitude and handles the self-deprecating humor well. Eddie Peng is more there for martial-arts, but he's got an enjoyable, laid-back charm, and Wu Jing brings a great combination of menace and honor to Zhang. The film is also filled with fun work by actors in smaller roles - the film implies enough backstory for Yang's wife Zhou Susu (Yolanda Yuan Quan) for another movie, for instance, and gives everybody just enough individuality that the audience isn't waiting for things to get to the obvious groups to square off.

They will, of course, with action choreographed by Sammo Hung and his stunt team filling out the bigger battle scenes. Chan and Hung do a great job of making the fights creative and occasionally off-the-wall without quite leaving the bounds of reality - the immediate lead-in to a fight on a bridge savors the moment the audience spends asking why someone would ever build this thing that way before just jumping into it. It's fast-paced and clear in a way that really pops when watching this after a lesser action movie, striking a sweet-spot between larger-than-life and crazy wire-fu shenanigans. The movie gets mean on occasion, just enough to shock, but it seldom stops being fun.

And it's a lot of fun, the best parts of both freewheeling westerns and martial-arts action movies, with a pretty great cast and slick production. For some reason, it didn't get the sort of simultaneous North American release many big Chinese movies have received in recent years, and that's really too bad - it's a fun mash-up that feels like it would have been a real kick on the big screen.

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Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 1 May 2020 - 7 May 2020

Normally, we'd be kicking off the summer movie season with something from Marvel on Free Comic Book Day Weekend, but… Well, you know.

• The Brattle Theatre opens the latest from two noteworthy filmmakers in their virtual screening room: Deerskin comes from French nonsense auteur Quentin Dupieux, with a cast that includes Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haene, in a story of a most bizarre midlife crises. Patricio Guzman's The Cordillera of Dreams is his third documentary about his native Chile, this one telling its story via the Andes mountains.
  
  Though there is not a repertory series of recommendations this week, the theater is partnering with the Cambridge City Council for "Dinner and a Movie Night" tonight (Friday), with Ned & Ivy offering an introduction to the event at 6pm, with donations to the theater and take-out from local restaurants encouraged. Recommendations do continue, with "Y'Know, For the Kids!" most recently suggesting Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and #BreakYourAlgorithm having recommended The Wrong Arm of the Law and Double Happiness in its most recent Wednesday & Thursday picks.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre also opens Deerskin in its virtual screening room, the first After Midnight selection there since Bacurau. Also opening virtually are documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Brian Cox & Rosanna Arquette in The Etruscan Smile, with Corpus Christi, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint, Beanpole, The Booksellers, and Fantastic Fungi sticking around. Their "Documentary Films of Lee Grant" series also continues, adding a twin-bill of "Down and Out in America" & "What Sex Am I"? to A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
  
  Previous Geothe-Institut selection Lara returns for a three-day run, benefitting the Coolidge through Sunday, while there's a special premiere with MUBI of Ema on Friday only. This weekend's After Midnite instagram chat is with Mister Reusch, who has been designing the series artwork for twenty years, while series programmer Mark Anastasio leads this week's Coolidge Education seminar on Night of the Living Dead.
• The Capitol has a Popcorn Pop-Up on Sunday, with popcorn, candy, and ice cream available for those who call ahead, ideally for snacking on while watching their virtual cinema offerings of Dying for Gold, The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and Slay the Dragon. Their friends at The Somerville Theatre will almost certainly not be running Mars Attacks on 35mm with a burlesque pre-show tonight despite what their website still says, but their virtual cinema still offers Pahokee, The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and The Roads Not Taken.
• The virtual room at The Regent Theatre continues The Mindfulness Movement playing through 5 May.
• West Newton Cinema has their own curbside popcorn pickup on Saturday - call or email ahead and they will have a large popcorn waiting for you at from noon to 2pm, with a box in which to deposit your five bucks. They also continue their virtual screening room programs of Earth, The Roads Not Taken, Best of CatVideoFest, Once Were Brothers, Slay the Dragon, and The Whistlers; their GoFundMe campaign; and their offer to buy an advance ticket for when they open with a second going to staff at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.

I'm planning on checking out Deerskin, Capital, and The Etruscan Smile, but plans don't necessarily mean much. I will also be looking to try out the shorts program that LA 3-D Space will be streaming on their YouTube channel at 5pm EDT on Sunday.

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands

Last day for this in the Brattle's virtual screening room, although I wouldn't be surprised if West Newton or someone else picked it up, even if nobody still has Bacurau to let you do a Sonia Braga double-feature. I'm not sure how the negotiations for regional exclusivity and the like work in this weird new situation. We'll see! Maybe it will be on regular Film Movement Plus come Friday, and they'll probably be happy to sell you a disc of some sort later this year.

Not yet, though. Still, one of the first things that popped up doing an Amazon search for a link is Kim Ki-Duk's 3-Iron, and… huh. I kind of see that, but I am also kind of terrified of what sort of AI algorithm is going on for Amazon to make the recommendation. Is it something as relatively simple as "seeing" that the posters for both have a woman in bed between two men, or is there a lot more data being correlated?

It's also nice to see that the new restoration still has a distinctive film-like look to it, giving the movie a warm but rough appearance that digital restorations, or even digital presentations of older films, don't necessarily have. It wasn't quite like actually being at the Brattle and seeing film projected, but it certainly looks more like it than a lot of the other movies of similar vintage that I've watched on Blu-ray in recent months. It's a pleasant surprise if you didn't realize that was an itch you wanted to scratch.

Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Film Movement Plus via Roku)

The recently restored and re-released Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is billed as a sex comedy, but it really doesn't get into that material until fairly late in its second half, and the forty-odd years since its original release have not been kind to its first half. It's just good enough and interesting enough that viewers will spend time figuring out how to make it work for them, maybe coming to a different conclusion in the twenty-first century than they would have at the time.

It kicks off with Valdomiro "Vadinho" Santos Guimarães (José Wilker), the first of the two husbands, dropping dead of some sort of heart attack or stroke during Carnival in 1943, right in the middle of getting in the face of some lady dancing her way down the streets of Bahia. They've been married for seven years, and Vadinho was ducking out to the casinos and the brothels right on their wedding night, and during which time he's not contributed much aside from good sex. Afterward, a friend sets Flor (Sonia Braga) up with sweet middle-aged pharmacist Dr. Teodoro Madureira (Mauro Mendonça), and he's nice, but when Vadinho's naked ghost returns, it's clear that she's been missing something.

That's awful close to the whole movie, and while getting to the midway point before introducing Teodoro may be how Jorge Amado's original novel is structured for all I know, it is an awful lot of Vadinho being just an unrepentant piece of garbage to get through before the audience gets to see Flor weighing him against Teodoro. It's not time that is completely wasted; director Bruno Barreto uses it to establish Flor as a sensible and respectable young woman who likes the sex enough to stick with Vadinho despite his less admirable qualities, even if a good middle-class woman can't just say that, and it probably doesn't hurt to take some time to establish Vadinho as pretty gifted in that area. The amount of it is aggravating, though, perhaps more so 43 years after its initial release, when the line between which men are lovable ne'er-do-wells and which ones are abusive parasites has likely shifted somewhat. One may not necessarily judge Flor too harshly for her choices, but Barreto may be presenting Vadinho as more entertaining than he now appears.

So what to make of his return? Oddly, that part works well enough that one might like to trade a bit of the living Vadniho for more time with his ghost. There are entire movies to be made around Flor struggling with the fact that she still wants her old husband in bed even as her new one is a better man and closer to what society says she is supposed to want, both reflective and farcical, but Barreto seems to short-change the film here, with detours into the ghost helping his friend in the casino and Teodoro seldom doing more than passing through scenes with Flor and Vadinho. Those moments are funny, and Sonia Braga does nice work in letting the guilt Flor feels for still wanting Vadinho pass across her face, but a film with this premise isn't necessarily the time to be subtle about Flor deciding what to retain and what to jettison from her first marriage.

Braga is generally quite impressive enough in the movie that served as her international breakthrough; it's easy to initially read Flor as a "good girl" with a secret, shameful sexuality, but she never actually seems to be switching faces: The way she doesn't shrink from what she gets out of her relationship lines right up with how she calmly talks about making good food. She's sensual and even if she doesn't flaunt it or giggle about it like the other women in the film, she knows herself. José Wilker gives what's often a genuinely funny performance as Vadinho, a confidence that is just larger enough than his present circumstances to make for a good gag. He's got a genuinely nasty vibe in Vadinho's worst moments, too, bringing just enough of that out in the last act when he knows that even if he can't actually hit Flor, she's all but powerless to do anything about his unwanted presence.

And for all the film's faults, it's still kind of remarkable to see that Barreto was something like twenty-one when he made it. It may be wrong-headedly confident in certain ways, but it does have the nice quality of looking better on a closer examination even if it originally rubs one the wrong way. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is an interesting thing to rediscover with its new restoration, undoubtedly a bit dated but still worth chewing on a bit.

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This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 20 April 2020 - 26 April 2020

Spent a little time catching up on Fantasia reviews from last year, and I try not to write and watch at the same time, so...



Anyway, really short movie-watching week - nothing until Masquerade Hotel on Wednesday, although that one is quite a bit of fun. It is, naturally, not readily available in the United States, which is a shame, because I think that people would dig it right now. But, alas, even translations of the original author's books are spotty here.

No more movies until Saturday, when I planned to do a double feature out of the Somerville's virtual cinema but just watched The Roads Not Taken, which feels like it could get a whole lot more out of a nifty idea and a good cast. Nice final shot, and it wouldn't land the same way without what came before, but it feels like there should have been more here.

Sunday, I turned on the TV to get stuff off the DVR while writing and, since the last thing I watched live was a Red Sox spring training game, the cable box was still tuned to NESN, which was showing a bunch of compressed-to-two-hours games from the Clemens years. Some interesting take-aways:

• Roger Clemens was really good at throwing a baseball.
• That outfield with Mike Greenwell, Ellis Burks, and Dwight Evans? Also really good, and I kind of wonder if the Red Sox killer-B outfield of the last few years - Benitendi, Bradley, and Betts - was so easy for me to get attached to in part because it reminds me of my first few years as a serious fan.
• Jerry Remy was the color commentator all the way back in the games from 1988, and he sounds very different. To what extent it's aging and to what extent it's cigarettes, I don't know.
• It's kind of fascinating how NESN (and the various UHF stations broadcasting Red Sox games back when that was more of a thing) tended to give us the illusion of stability in terms of play-by-play voices: Ned Martin and Sean McDonough kind of sound alike. Don Orsillo kind of sounds like McDonogh. Dave O'Brien kind of sounds like Orsillo. O'Brien doesn't really sound like Martin, but that change has happened very slowly, and while many have been displeased with various changes in the PBP voices when they happened, those who haven't paid quite so much attention have had something that feels kind of like stability, and that's probably good for a baseball team as an institution.
• All of these were pre-HDTV, even though NESN was one of the first local sports networks to go high-definition. Between the algorithms at the network and in my TV, shots of a player at bat or about to throw from the waist up looked pretty good, but zoom out a bit, and it gets less impressive really fast. I have no idea if NESN is trying to do this in real-time or if they're paying a post-production house to upscale, but it's interesting to see just where you get to "enough pixels to work with".

More coming on my Letterboxd page and regular posts before the next one of these..

Pahokee

Normally I'd do an "IFFBoston 2019.370"-ish title, but it's a bit too much of a bummer to see the festival in limbo right now even as it's good to see one of last year's titles getting a release. This wasn't particularly high on my priorities last year, but I'm glad to buy a virtual ticket and help support the Somerville via their virtual cinema.

I actually rented it Saturday night but didn't actually get around to watching it until Monday, having kind of planned it as part of a double feature with The Roads Not Taken only to find it was 112 minutes rather than the 90-ish I'd anticipated, and I pretty much knew that I wasn't going to make it to the end that night. I've got to start doing this earlier in the evening!

Pahokee

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Somerville Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Vimeo)

There's a lot of high-school football in the middle of Pahokee, enough to make one wonder if that was sort of the plan or if it just sort of evolved that way because that's what this sort of small town is like. It doesn't truly feel like a plan, but this isn't the sort of documentary you necessarily make with a plan. You take what you get and put it together as well as this.

It follows four seniors in Pahokee High School, with Pahokee being a rural town in Florida's Palm Beach County. Curvy and confident Na'Kerria is focused on the "Miss PHS" contest tied to the upcoming Homecoming ceremonies, starting to campaign as soon as she's technically allowed. Jocabed frets over college essays while working in her parents' taco stand, while B.J. is aiming for a football scholarship while also making sure the schools he applies to have good sports medicine programs. Junior's focus is a bit more immediate; he's in the drum corps, but also focused on his year-old baby girl.

Plug "Pahokee" into a search engine (or even look for the film on IMDB), and you will soon see that the town is at or near the bottom of certain lists, and it would not be surprising for directors Patrick Bresnan & Ivete Lucas were to point that out at some point, especially early on, but they opt not to. They don't hide this, but instead play up how this place feels normal for someone who grew up there, and how those kids aren't necessarily missing any part of growing up in America, just getting the most bare-bones version of it. There's a comment about not having the budget for the much decoration early and a confessional bit about "getting out of this town" toward the end, but in between, the audience just has to absorb how many large families they're seeing in small houses, or how there's not many cuts to anything but the fields. It's a small world.

So, when all the football starts, it's initially easy to just look at it and say that this is more of that one thing than one signed up for as a viewer, but as they play in the homecoming "Muck Bowl" game against a local rival and the playoffs, the viewer gets an idea of just how concentrated the town's identity is concentrated in the team and where they sometimes stand as the opposing teams get whiter, the fields get nicer, and the physical toll on the players, notably B.J., makes one a bit more worried. The aftermath is one of the film's most striking sections, as so much plays out in audio recordings that indicate just how much things are out of the locals' hands, and while the scenes of the fields undergoing controlled burns that play out behind it aren't necessarily indications of bad things themselves, it is nifty filmmaking, getting across the feeling of the world sometimes just won't let people have something.

The focus on that does mean that Jocabed kind of disappears for that stretch - the others are on the team, in the band, or on the cheer squad - but she feels less missing than one might expect since the other threads don't cross much during those pieces, and she'll get more time later when football moves to the past. It's a small town, and everybody's experience is similar, but Bresnan and Lucas (the latter of whom edited the film) make each teen's story their own. They're a likable group, and the filmmakers do a very nice job of capturing where they are at that moment in time, with one foot in childhood even as they're starting to make decisions that are going to affect the rest of their lives.

It makes for a somewhat odd movie, never finding the moment of high drama or sudden change that people tend to remember from this genre of documentary, and never particularly angling for the audience's pity. That's its value - it sees these kids as kids rather than victims or potential saviors, letting the audience become fond of them while still offering a clear view of their lives.

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The Roads Not Taken

Even just limiting things to movies, there's more pressing things to gripe about than how studios are making films available, but, really, folks, why are you using vhx.tv rather than straight Vimeo, which owns them? Vimeo has an app on Roku, so we don't have to dink around with casting or putting the laptop somewhere that the HDMI cable can reach, let alone having to create a new account for every single movie we rent this way. This could have been easy, but instead I'm getting frustrated, which probably doesn't put me in the most receptive of moods for the movie.

Also kind of petty, but also kind of funny: This film starts with titles over a blank screen and someone buzzing at the door and a phone ringing, putting the viewer in a weird "is the movie starting or should I be checking the door or something. I wonder, idly, to what extent the fact that movies like this are mostly going to be seen in living rooms rather than theaters plays into making choices like that. I suppose it could be something that director Sally Potter just didn't consider at all, although maybe it could be a gambit to make the viewer feel more part of what's going on.

The Roads Not Taken

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Somerville Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

For a movie about a (presumably) talented writer imagining the different ways his life could have gone, The Roads Not Taken shows an almost stunning lack of creativity. Everyone seems to be doing their job well enough that one can get through its 85 minutes easy enough, but it eventually feels like a whole lot of set-up for an ending that feels like the film's first truly clever moment, but not enough.

The writer in question is Leo (Javier Bardem) who may have been great once but who is in severe and early cognitive decline for a man in his 50s, though still living on his own in a New York apartment and reliant on nurse Xenia (Branka Katic). When he doesn't answer his door or the phone in the morning, his daughter (Elle Fanning) rushes to see if he's okay before a planned day of appointments at the dentist and optometrist. His mind is seemingly even further afield than usual, drifting not so much to his past but to alternate histories - one in which he married first love Delores (Salma Hayek), and another where he went off to Greece to write and never returned.

Or, perhaps, Leo was not actually great, and he's keenly aware of this, which is why even the version of his life where he is a successful writer has him spending all day at a picturesque seaside bar, blocked, unable to think of an ending, and chasing after a girl young enough to be his daughter. That's the best reason for him to imagine himself not just a cliché but a miserable one, while his other alternate history is also defined by tragedy and failure. There are moments when one can see the various threads informing each other, with the various Leos seemingly grappling with the issues of the other timelines and how to apply them to the present circumstances, but it's difficult to get invested; Leo is so completely a blank slate that it's hard to give much thought on his history diverging, especially into such stock scenarios.

Those situations don't ask much of the cast. Elle Fanning gets the most time to do decent work - her daughter is able to exist independently of Leo in a way other characters can't - and there's never a moment when she's not believable even if she's also sometimes apparently trying to compensate for how simple her story is by being very emphatic. Laura Linney shows up as an ex-wife who is on the bad side of the line of being a caricature, with Salma Hayek just on the other side. Milena Tscharntke sometimes seems to play into how Anni is half a conversation Leo is having with himself a bit, which is interesting, and Waleed Akhtar has a nice scene or two toward the end. Nobody slacks off, but nobody has much to work with, either.

As for Javier Bardem, he spends much of the movie giving the sort of performance that looks good because one knows he's a charismatic, intelligent person and countering that seems like it should be such an effort, but it may just be doing the same tics and generally holding one's face slack so that it seems heroic to get a few words out late. He's good enough in the other timelines, but they're probably characters he could do in his sleep, and there's never really a sense of the Leos being the same guy in different circumstances. It's capable work, but deliberately non-engrossing at some points and too-familiar at others.

It's not bad to look at, at least - director Sally Potter and cinematographer Robbie Ryan do a nice job of contrasting the open, warm vistas in Spain and Greece with the cramped and unwelcoming locations in New York City, with a sequence inside a warehouse store framed to emphasize the horror of being pulled through a world that one is no longer equipped to process, with a sequence of Leo lost in the city at night seeming different - still confused, but less frightened. Potter is also one of the film's editors, and they do a fair job of jumping between timelines in a way that makes the film move smoothly. They tend to only put the most basic building blocks of the story out there for both father and daughter, but it leads to a final scene that hints at much more potential and heft, enough that one wonders if Potter came up with it and built backwards.

A good finish means that The Roads Not Taken is not a waste of time; there's too much talent there for it to completely flame out. There is just not much that can be done when a film has an interesting idea but no interesting details, and this is just bland as can be in that regard.

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Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 24 April 2020 - 30 April 2020

We're supposed to be knee-deep in IFFBoston right now (not a bad time to join/renew your membership so that they can put on a great festival when theaters reopen), and probably picking up the Brattle's Late Spring calendar while we're there. As I was saying on social media the other day, the good thing about the absolute chilly dreary sameness of the days running together is that at least each event missed or indefinitely postponed doesn't feel like an individual attack.

But, given that we should be seeing all that good independent film content, maybe it's an especially good week to hit the venues' virtual screening rooms as often as possible.

• The Coolidge Corner Theatre is having a busy week in that regard, virtually opening three new films - Polish Oscar nominee Corpus Christi, documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint, and a return for Beanpole, which was at the Kendall before, well, everything. They hold over The Booksellers, Balloon, The Times of Bill Cunningham, and Fantastic Fungi. They also announced a series of documentaries by director Lee Grant, but the links for that do not seem to have gone live yet
  
  The After Midnight Crew has another instagram Q&A tonight (Friday) at 9pm, this time with Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman, and their friends from Haus of Oni aren't letting a lockdown prevent them from doing a drag-show introduction to a cult movie, streaming a Hellraiser-inspired performance at 9pm Saturday (you're on your own afterward). The week's Coolidge Education seminar focuses on Powell & Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going! - register, get sent a link to a pre-show lecture by The Boston Globe's Ty Burr, watch the film, and then come back Thursday for an online Q&A session.
• The Brattle Theatre has two new restorations in a virtual screening room, with Luchino Visconti's L'Innocente and Brazilian sex comedy Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands both available to rent and support the Brattle through Thursday. Their partners at The DocYard will also be running a virtual screening room for selection Crestone through Monday, with director Marnie Ellen Hertzler answering questions on her documentary about a hip-hop commune via Zoom on Monday evening.
  
  On top of that, they're keeping up the streaming/rental recommendations, with this week's program devoted to Screwball Comedy, with a list of outright classics to choose from whether you want to follow along or graze. That includes The Hudsucker Proxy, the movie that gave their "Y'Know, For the Kids!" its name. Those recommendations come (roughly) on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, with the most recent A Hard Day's Night. They also attempt #BreakYourAlgorithm on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, most recently highlighting Harold Lloyd in The Milky Way and Shelly Duvall in "Bernice Bobs Her Hair".
• The Somerville Theatre would be IFFBoston central if the fest were on, and their virtual cinema adds an option to rent documentary Pahokee, which played the festival last year, to a selection that includes The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and The Roads Not Taken. They've also got another Popcorn Pop-Up on Saturday, so maybe call in and stop by for snacks to complete the experience. The folks at The Capitol have a virtual cinema of their own and add documentary Dying for Gold, telling the tale of South African miners who bring the country's largest class-action suit against their employers, to a lineup that already includes The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and Slay the Dragon.
• The Regent Theatre has also set up a virtual screening room, with Fantastic Fungi running at least through Tuesday the 28th and The Mindfulness Movement playing through 5 May.
• Emerson's Bright Lights at Home makes the jump from Netflix to Hulu for this week's selections, with director Alla Kovgan and faculty discussing dance documentary Cunningham on Tuesday while director Janice Engel, her producers, and faculty talk Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins on Thursday. That's the last of the programs they've got listed, right around when the term would be ending; hopefully they'll be back in the Bright come fall.
  
  (I've got no idea if Hulu streams in 3D, or how many have the capacity to watch it that way, but it's the best way to see Cunningham if you can.)
• In addition to their virtual screening room programs - Earth, The Roads Not Taken, Best of CatVideoFest, Once Were Brothers, Slay the Dragon, and The Whistlers - and their GoFundMe campaign, West Newton Cinema is also offering a program where you can buy an advance ticket for when they open and they'll match it with one going to staff at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.
• This weekend's GlobeDocs short documentary is "After Migration"; RSVP at their site and they will send you links to the film on Vimeo and a Zoom meeting at noon on Monday.

As much as I've let some of these things pass because it's hard to transition from work to after-work when your commute is just the other side of the house, I figure we might as well try and do something as festival-like as we can this week, so I'm planning to at least queue up The Roads Not Taken, Pahokee, Corpus Christi, Beanpole, and Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands, in addition to getting more discs moved between the "not seen" and "seen" shelves.

Masquerade Hotel

This is another movie that was either playing in Hong Kong when I visited last year or was being advertised, so I included it in a DDDHouse order when it came out there and kind of left it there on the shelf until I had a night where it slotted in well. It is, it turns out, a pretty nice quarantine movie - orderly and light, giving you a couple of hours in a luxury hotel without actually making you feel bitter that you can't go there for real.

I'm mildly surprised to see that it is based on a novel by the same author as The Devotion of Suspect X. Both, in their way, are mysteries that avoid the typical whodunit structure, although perhaps in opposite ways, with Devotion putting the solution right up front while Masquerade pushes the actual crime off as far as possible. Keigo Higashino appears to be hugely popular in his native Japan and much of the rest of East Asia - there are Chinese and Korean adaptations of Suspect X - but his work has only made it to the U.S. in piecemeal fashion. He's not limited to mysteries, either; I kind of suspect that I was able to get a copy of a recent Takashi Miike film that played Fantasia but didn't land here otherwise because it was based on a sci-fi/fantasy novel of his, Higashino is popular in Hong Kong, and therefore they made a Blu-ray of Laplace's Witch which just happens to be Region A and have English subtitles. Same with this one, which doesn't seem to have any American distribution either.

It's fun, though, especially for those that enjoy the sort of mystery which steps back from the life-and-death stakes a bit. It's worth noting that the Blu-ray on DDDHouse is roughly the same price as the DVD on Amazon, with shipping the major difference (and the fact that DDDHouse may not yet be shipping to the USA again, what with Covid-19 making international trade tricky). I advise buying a lot movies so that you've got plenty on your shelf to work through while you stay at home and so that the shipping cost per disc isn't too extreme.

Masukarêdo hoteru (Masquerade Hotel)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Masquerade Hotel is not, technically speaking, a murder mystery so cozy that there's no actual murder, but it's not far off. It's a whodunit built around a posh location, sleuths so focused on the business at hand that they are really only almost flirting, and a healthy dose of clues, codes, and red herrings, one which is all-in on the way mysteries can be puzzles and not terribly concerned with them being thrillers. It's not a route many films go these days, and it makes Masquerade Hotel a light, entertaining treat.

In it, a serial killer has been at work in Japan, their method varied and victims unconnected except for the cards featuring encoded coordinates for where the next killing will take place, with the fourth pointing at the Hotel Cortesia Tokyo. The police contact management and manage to place a number of officers undercover, most prominently Kosuke Nitta (Takuya Kimura), whose language skills and observational acumen place him at the front desk with concierge Naomi Yamagishi (Masami Nagasawa). Her instincts to accommodate customers immediately clash with his suspicious nature, and there are a lot of people coming in and out of the hotel who could be either the next victim or the killer: Demanding guests Takahiko Ayabe (Gaku Hamada), Ono (Takashi Sasano), Kurihara (Katsuhara Namase); red-flagged potential thief Furuhachi (Masahiro Takashima); blind Yoko Katagiri (Takako Matsu); bride-to-be Keiko Takayama (Atsuko Maeda); and Eriko Anno (Nanao), who may be fleeing a stalker. And then there's Nohse (Fumiyo Kohinata), Nitta's former partner who may not officially be part of the investigation but is going to check in anyway.

There are more people checking into and out of the hotel, and as a result in and out of the story, and given how screenwriter Michitaka Okuda and director Masayuki Suzuki take pains to keep the focus on the hotel rather than the previous three murders, there are times when those who approach a mystery by trying to solve a puzzle might get frustrated. It is the job of those telling a mystery story to keep which bits are important and which are not obscure, of course, but the set-up here almost looks a little too random, like the storytellers don't intend to use sleight-of-hand to keep the audience focused on the wrong thing but by giving viewers no reason to think anything specific could be particularly important. Eventually, they do manage to push things forward in ways that are more fair than not - a clever shift in perspective makes the larger mystery less random while still keeping the focus on the hotel, and bits of unrelated stories reflect each other in ways that work beyond putting an idea into one's head, since they kind of get at the idea of why people come to hotels at odd moments.

That's a fair direction of attack, in large part because Masquerade Hotel is as much a demonstration of there being value in work and business that can seem entirely commercial as it is a mystery. It is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon to have this sort of pride in one's job that even guests' services at a fancy hotel can come across as a calling, but from this side of the Pacific it's a level of earnestness that can easily tip over into mockery. It's impressive just how well Masami Nagasawa plays Yamagishi as genuinely devoted to making sure that guests have a peaceful stay and that the hotel runs smoothly; she is never just her job but she and the filmmakers are very careful that her moments of being funny or incisive or frustrated with Nitta never run counter to that attitude. She's in a technically-subservient position but never seems to put herself below anybody.

It means Takuya Kimura can't be too abrasive in serving as a complement; his (initially) opposing attitude shouldn't often be seen as mean. He handles the opposing bits of the character well - Nitta is the kind of smart that's both well-rounded and susceptible to blind spots, and as a result Kimura has to swing back and forth between being pushily confident and caught flat-footed without becoming a joke. He and Yamagishi have fun chemistry that is not pushed to be romantic when it doesn't need to be, and they've got a nice ensemble behind them, from Fumiyo Kohinata grinning just enough to make the audience wonder what he's really up to as Nohse to Nanao's believable tension as Anno.

Some are a little broader than ideal, and it's not just the performances; Suzuki has a tendency to let things sprawl. There are a lot of characters, and more than a few scenes that maybe go on a bit too long, right down to an epilogue that feels both unnecessary and obligatory, including a sequence that feels like it could be a title sequence but isn't quite stylized enough, and it adds up to a movie that's a bit flabby. It's a great-looking movie - the lobby set is a multi-level beauty and a neat contrast to the behind-the-scenes, areas, right down to the police setting up card tables and folding chairs in the basement. There's a tendency to lovingly examine a room which, when paired with Naoki Sato's chamber-music score, doesn't feel tacky, but maybe a little obvious, the very first thing that came to mind when someone in the production described the Cortesia as "classy".

That's not exactly a fault in this sort of film, of course; part of the appeal of this sort of mystery is that there is an order to things and that said order is good. It's an appealing, comfortable mystery to sink into for a couple of hours, and I certainly would not mind seeing the Higashino's second "Masquerade" novel adapted by this group as well.

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