Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 21 July 2023 - 27 July 2023

A couple weeks ago, I was looking at the Facebook page for the still-not-open Alamo Drafthouse Boston, and someone in the comments was saying "can't you just have a one day sneak preview opening for Oppenheimer?" and I wanted to jump in like "what? You're in Boston! The Drafthouse is not going to do that movie better than the Somerville or the Coolidge!"

I mean, if it was open, there might be a screen freed up at Boston Common for The White Storm 3, but, c'mon, have some pride in your great local scene rather than wistfully wishing for something from Texas!

• So let's get to Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's star-studded, three-hour film about the man who led the team to build an atomic bomb during World War II, played by Cillian Murphy. Shot on genuine Imax film and likely finished on film as well, it should look fantastic, especially since many of the local places playing it have been preparing their projectors for months, eager to give the best presentation. It's at the Somerville (70mm film), the Coolidge (70mm film), Fresh Pond, the Museum of Science (Omnimax), Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton (35mm film), CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema/70mm film), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenall Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The like box office champion is Barbie, with Margot Robbie as the titular doll who suddenly finds herself gripped by thoughts that don't fit into her fantasy world and going to the real one to learn what's up with that, with Ken (Ryan Gosling) along for the ride. Greta Gerwig writes and directs (with husband Noah Baumbach teaming with her on the script). It's at the Capitol, the Coolidge, Fresh Pond, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Horror movie Cobweb grabs a few stray showtimes at Boston Common; it's about an elementary school kid who hears strange noises from his bedroom that his parents say is nothing.
  
  The week's "Disney 100" re-release at Boston Common is Toy Story.
  
  The original Terrifier feature (as there's also an earlier short) plays Boston Common Saturday through Monday nights. The Secret Lives of Pets has matinees at Boston Common on Saturday and Wednesday. Wednesday also has two movies getting early shows before the Thursday early shows: Talk to Me at Boston Common and Assembly Row and Haunted Mansion at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema) and Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema).
• Theatre Camp, a "save the camp from its new owner" deal with theater kids, opens at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, and Boston Common. Just the screening room at the Coolidge, though, as the big releases get the big screens.
  
  The Coolidge has some Barbie late shows too, along with the more conventional variety - Joe Dante's Piranha on Friday and Drew Godard's The Cabin in the Woods on Saturday.
• Apple Fresh Pond finds room for two Indian films starting on Friday: Ajmer 92 is a Hindi-language crime drama about a wave of rape and subsequent blackmail of young women, while Hidimbha is a Telugu-language action movie which also follows the attack of a number of girls. Padmini, a Malayalam-language comedy about a college instructor/poet who has to live down an embarrassing situation, plays Saturday and Sunday.
  
  Mainland Chinese hit Lost In the Stars still has showtimes at Boston Common. If you can make it out to the Liberty Tree Mall, they're showing The White Storm 3, Herman Yau's latest drug-war action movie, starring Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok, and Lau Ching-Wan, not actually connected to the other two.
• The Brattle Theatre plays Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis from Friday to Sunday, a documentary about a design studio known in large part for their iconic record covers. Those days also feature 50th Anniversary shows of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a Peter Yates crime thriller starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle that is often considered the iconic Boston movie. There's also a special Saturday presentation of short "Game Hawker" on Saturday night, with subject Shawn Hayes there for a Q&A.
  
  Monday's Warner Brothers Centennial double feature is a pair of pre-code Barbara Stanwyck movies, Baby Face & Night Nurse, both on film; Tuesday has a Busby Berkley music, 42nd Street, also on 35mm. Later, there's a special IFFBoston preview screening of Problemista. The Dede Allen' double feature on Wednesday is The Missouri Breaks (35mm) & Bonnie and Clyde, and then Thursday is a Thrill Ride Horror pairing of Cloverfield (35mm) & Slither.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has documentary Close to Vermeer on Friday evening.
• The "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro" selections at The Harvard Film Archive, all on 35mm film, are Tokyo Twilight (Friday & Sunday), The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Saturday), The Lady and the Beard (Sunday), and I Flunked, But… (Monday) with the ten existing minutes of I Graduated, But… playing beforehand. Lady and Flunked are silence, with Robert Humphreville providing accompaniment.
• In addition to Oppenheimer, The Somerville Theatre keeps the 70mm projector going after midnight on Saturday for Flatliners. They and The Capitol are also doing a cross-theater "Barbenheimer" promotion, where if you show your ticket stub from Barbie at the Capitol when seeing Oppenheimer at the Somerville, or vice versa, there's a free popcorn in it for you.
• Landmark Kendall Square has original-recipe Top Gun for Tuesday's Retro Replay show.
• The West Newton Cinema gets Barbie and a 35mm print of Oppenheimer to go with holdovers Mission: Impossible, Past Lives, Indiana Jones, Asteroid City (Friday-Sunday & Wednesday), and Super Mario Brothers (Friday matinee). Open all week!
  
  The Lexington Venue has Mission: Impossible and The Miracle Club all week (except Monday and Tuesday when the theater is closed).
  
  The Luna Theater has Past Lives from Friday to Sunday, as well asa Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Barbie, Oppenheimer, Mission: Impossible, and Indiana Jones through Monday. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb plays Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening, plus Rocky Horror Saturday night (it also plays Boston Common on Saturday as per usual). Twister plays on Thursday.
• The New England Aquarium is showing Jaws on the Imax screen from Monday to Saturday the 29th.
  
  And, wow, The Museum of Science apparently sold out all three weekends of Oppenheimer on the dome!
• Outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films include Ferris Bueller's Day Off at the Hatch Shell Friday, Minions: The Rise of Gru at the Prudential Saturday, Talladega Nights at Christopher Columbus Park on Sunday, The Secret Lives of Pets & Top Gun: Maverick at Cambridge Crossing Thursday, and Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory at Somerville's Seven Hills Park, also Thursday. There are supposedly two Alamo Cinema events at other bars - Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade at Dorchester Brewing on Friday (rescheduled), and Jaws at the Sam Adams Downtown Tap Room on Wednesday, but we'll see.

I am in lovely Montreal for Fantasia (look for the blog to become unusually busy!), so the only one of those movies that I will be checking out right away is The White Storm 3, which actually played the festival last night but which I passed over because it would be at the Forum while I had some free time. Still, I need all of you to go see Oppenheimer in 70mm over the next few weeks, maybe two or three times, so that it's still on the main screen of the Somerville when I get back. Deal?

Almost Certainly Short-Timers: Shadows and They Cloned Tyrone

There have been a couple Hong Kong movies like this released over the past few months that have been sitting on shelves for years - Shadows has a 2020 copyright and played the 2021 virtual New York Asian Film Festival (I'm mildly surprised I didn't watch it), while One More Chance (which didn't play Boston during its US release a couple weeks ago) has apparently been waiting around since 2019. I've got no idea when Shadows would have shot - it's entirely possible that it was pre-covid - and, whoa, is it kind of nuts that some of this stuff is just rolling out now. I wonder if it's some really Hong Kong/China-specific stuff, between not wanting to have your release torpedoed by Covid or protest-related lockdowns, or if maybe there's some "we are going hard into an ambiguous ending, and no, we won't tack something else on, because that's the whole point" stuff going on.

That played Hong Kong almost five months ago, and just showed up here this weekend, probably because everything was underperforming, so there were a few screening times to fill, and, hey, Lost in the Stars packed 'em in, so why not bring in another Chinese movie? Well, it wasn't quite just me, but I'm also not entirely sure that the other folks behind me weren't theater-hopping.

Meanwhile, In Kendall Square, Landmark picked up They Cloned Tyrone, which got a week of theatrical release before hitting Netflix, and Landmark is the place used for that these days. I've kind of got no idea how much Netflix is promoting this one - I feel like I've seen a little more about it than the usual Netflix movie but not a whole lot more - but it feels kind of odd that this played Boston but Nimona didn't. I saw a ton of advertising for the latter, and it looks like it would have been a great big-screen release, but I'm guessing that it's kind of like the Chinese movies at Boston Common: There wasn't a spare screen for Nimona because its theatrical release week was when Asteroid City came out, but there is one this week.

Both are almost certainly out of here after Wednesday or Thursday, given that Oppenheimer and Barbie will be getting a bunch of early shows before officially opening on Friday. They're both kind of acquired tastes, lucky to have a moment in front of audiences, but won't necessarily be in theaters long enough to be acquired that way.


Shadows

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)

Screenwriters and critics both probably have a tendency to pay more attention to structure and fair play than the general audience does, which can lead to movies like Shadows with a sort of timidity and defensiveness to the final film: You can't really say that the unsatisfying ending didn't get seeded throughout the previous hour and a half, but just because that criticism can be deflected doesn't mean the whole thing actually works.

At the other end of the film, the audience is initially introduced to Chu Chung-Yung, a social worker who murders his family, calls the police, and then jumps out a window, before meeting Tsui Hiu-Ching (Stephy Tang Lai-Yan), a psychiatrist with a paranormal ability to enter another person's memory and interact with their subconscious, although that doesn't necessarily guarantee she'll get through to someone like abused wife Kloudia (Jennifer Yu Heung-Ying). She also occasionally consults with the police, such as Ho Shun-Fatt (Philip Keung Hiu-Man), who has her examine Chu, who only jumped from a second story window. What she sees disturbs her, though, and leads her to push Fatt to investigate fellow therapist Yan Chung-Kuan (Tse Kwan-Ho), who seems to be encouraging his patients to commit violent acts.

A brief line later on offers a possible source of Ching's ability, but as with other parts of the film, it's just enough that you can't say writer Mani Man Pui-Hing and director Glenn Chan dropped this unreal element into the film without explanation, but also seems to keep it at arm's length that the film is still more crime than fantasy/horror while still enjoying some of those genres' tropes. It never actually goes down the road of suggesting that Dr. Yan may be some sort of demon, for instance, although his apparent puppet-master abilities seem rather extreme if he's just a skilled but sociopathic psychiatrist. If he's just a guy, though, what is gained by Ching having a superpower, as opposed to just being unusually insightful?

The answer is kind of obvious, of course; from the moment that the framed Rorschach blots in Ching's office start to move, it's an opportunity to tell the story with striking visuals rather than just having her explain what's going on with distancing psychobabble. Chan and his crew don't necessarily break a lot of new ground in how they depict the characters' subconsciouses - those scenes tend to be dark, sort of fading out of existence at the margins, and fairly monochromatic with even the colors of Ching's outfits muted - but it gets the job done. There are some interesting bits in the real world, but it often seems as though those scenes are why the movie exists, and the rest is mostly about getting from one to the other.

That's most evident in the police-centered scenes: Philip Keung knows the assignment - he is there to be the grounded, hands-on contrast to the egghead psychiatrists and supernatural material - and he handles that adroitly. Fatt is kind of a stock character but Keung is undeniably good at playing him. Tse Kwan-Ho plays his villain with a bit of relish, which unfortunately often puts Stephy Tang in the unlucky position of being sincere and well-meaning but too pragmatic to really be either man's polar opposite. She's quite decent, but this isn't the sort of movie that is going to make her as bright and optimistic as Yan is dark.

She might have had more to do if the filmmakers committed to it being her story earlier on, but so much of her story is things they touch upon just enough that they can't be accused of having things come out of nowhere without actually ever feeling important. There's a formal interview meant to contrast the way Drs. Tsui & Yan look at their patients, and hints that there is something dark in her past (dark enough for the police to have a file, at least), so it's there. On the other hand, so much time is spent on the sequences with her inside someone else's mind and the various serial and spree killers that Yan is connected to that, when the last act starts raising the question of whether Ching is capable the same sort of manipulation as Yan, it seems smaller than the rest of the movie and just not what it was about.

It means that the final scenes, which offer what should be a thrilling conclusion (and one that seems utterly unconcerned with passing through Mainland censorship), doesn't actually feel like the culmination of what has happened before. I could see how it fits together, in terms of screenwriting structure and checking off the boxes, but didn't feel it.


They Cloned Tyrone

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

They Cloned Tyrone has a weird rhythm and a weird vibe, but I'm not entirely sure that its eccentricity works. Not that it necessarily has to work for me, as I am probably not its target audience, but it leaves me wondering if some of the things I found kind of interesting may play as a direct hit for others; the film is just ambitious and eccentric enough to be intriguing.

It opens with Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer in The Glen who is soft-spoken but doesn't mess around with folks moving in on his territory. Seeing that pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) didn't pay up, he goes to collect just as Charles's top earner Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) is storming out, really intending to leave for Memphis this time. His competitors are waiting to ambush him as he leaves, and put roughly a dozen bullets in him. The next morning, he wakes up with no memory of this happening and sees once again that Charles is short, though a dead man coming to collect is understandably alarming to the pimp. Together with Yo-Yo, they follow a trail to a trap house - and then down a hidden elevator, which is when things get really weird.

Not ever having been part of a community like The Glen, I can't really speak to how well-targeted specific satirical gags might be; I sort of get the general thrust of a gag that posits boisterous church-going, spicy fried chicken, or an afternoon getting one's hair straightened at the salon as being actually a means of keeping Black people pacified, but it plays more as a darkly comic general concept as opposed to each example feeling specifically clever. As an outsider, director Juel Taylor and co-writer Tony Rettenmaier often seem to not really have a single metaphor in mind, but that's fair enough, in a way; actual places like this have a mess of exterior interference, two-way assimilation, and self-sabotage to deal with. It would dull the blade a bit even if the individual pieces were more clever than they seem.

On the other hand, the world Taylor and his team build is impressive in how they often seem to be heightened just enough to pull a number of things in: The Glen is a place where everyone still seems to be driving thirty-year-old cars and watching tube televisions but Yo-Yo can also talk about blockchain. The art department seems to have zeroed in on just how far forward a 1970s blaxploitation movie can be pulled forward and a modern sci-fi thriller can be pulled back and still seem like a real setting, rather than one outside of space and time. The secret world underneath The Glen is absurd and makes no sense, but it's also something that feels like it could be there regardless, its seeming-impossibility part of the camouflage. Taylor moves the audience through the world well, whether it's time for jokes or action.

(It is, however, awfully dark at times. I'm not usually one to complain about how dimly-lit a film is or how a theater is trying to lengthen a bulb's life, in part because I don't feel I have the knowledge to know where one ends and the other begins, but there were more than a few moments, like when the trio first enters the trap house, where I struggled to see what was going on, exacerbated by a lot of the film taking place at night. On top of that, Taylor is going for a specific style, processing the image to resemble a grainy B movie, and as nifty as that looks, I'm not sure if it helps or hurts.)

Nice cast, though, with John Boyega and Teyonah Parris especially playing to their strengths. Boyega's first big role in Attack the Block was the same sort of street tough discovering a nagging conscience and a knack for leadership and he still does that very well a decade later, especially fine in the home stretch where he's got to contend with big ideas while still not breaking free of his limited perspective. Tyeonah Parris, similarly, is really excellent at keeping how smart and ambitious her character is just under a brash, stupid-sounding exterior, and it's not surprising that she easily moves Yo-Yo from a broad comic-relief sexpot to an eccentric heroine. Jamie Foxx still feels enough like a movie star that Slick Charles doesn't necessarily need to be played as an aging pimp but he gets just enough wear underneath the clichés to make him interesting. Keifer Sutherland isn't around from the start, but hits the charismatic-piece-of-work villain sweet spot that the movie needs.

There's a whole lot to like about They Cloned Tyrone, even if it does stretch a bit past the ending and kind of key on a sloppy conspiracy. But what it does well, it does quite well indeed, enough to make me wonder if is as much a case of the film stumbling as much as the film not being made with me primarily in mind.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 July 2023 - 20 July 2023

This week's big release actually opened back on Tuesday/Wednesday, but there's still some interesting stuff coming out for the weekend.

• That would be Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1, which continues at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), the Lexington Venue, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Boston Common fills a screen with Black Ice, a documentary that looks at the racism and resistance that Black players have often faced in hockey.
  
  Mummies, which I don't think actually got a regular release around here, is the Saturday/Wednesday kids' matinee at Boston Common this week. National Lampoon's Vacation plays a 40th Anniversary show at South Bay and Assembly Row on Sunday and Wednesday. The first Terrifier plays Boston Common on Wednesday and Thursday after the sequel did surprisingly well last fall. Barbie has "Blowout Party" preview screenings at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards on Wednesday, with Theater Camp also having an early screening at Boston Common on Wednesday.
• Landmark Kendall Square has their first Netflix preview in a while with They Cloned Tyrone which features John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris chasing down a bizarre conspiracy.
  
  Also opening is The Miracle Club, in which three Dubliners hoping to travel to Lourdes 1967 find their plans upended by the return of a former friend who has spent the past 40 years in America. It plays Kendall Square, the Lexington Venue, West Newton, Boston Common.
  
  Tuesday's Retro Replay summer movie at the Kendall is Ghostbusters, with Tenet playing Wednesday as the last Nolan film leading up to Oppenheimer.
• Two new Indian films at Apple Fresh Pond on Friday. Baby is a Telugu-language romance starring Anand Deverakonda & Vaishnavi Chaitanya as neighbors who go to college and meet new potential partners, while Maaveeran is a Telugu-language action-comedy. Marathi comedy Baipan Bhari Deva has a second weekend on-screen Saturday and Sunday. Satyaprem Ki Katha also continues at Boston Common.
  
  Hong Kong thriller Shadows stars Stephy Tang as a forensic psychiatrist with psychic abilities who finds herself under suspicion while investigating a murder-suicide. It appears to have sat on a shelf for a couple years after playing festivals during 2021, but plays Boston Common this week, just a few months after finally opening in its native territory. Mainland Chinese hit Lost In the Stars also continues at Boston Common.
  
  After a couple preview screenings, anime Psycho-Pass: Providence, which slots in between a two seasons of the popular series, plays Boston Common and South Bay with both dubbed & subtitled showtimes.
• The Brattle Theatre plays De Humani Corporis Fabrica from Friday to Monday, an unusual documentary that "opens the human body to the cinema", attempting to demystify its anatomy but also find a sort of poetry in it. They also have a 35mm print of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend through Sunday, as a Bastille Day celebration.
  
  Monday's Warner Brothers Centennial double feature is two silents, with Ernst Lubitsch directing So This Is Paris and Clash of the Wolves featuring their first star, Rin-Tin-Tin; it doesn't look like there's live accompaniment scheduled. Tuesday features two with James Cagney - The Public Enemy on 35mm film and Blonde Crazy, both also co-starring Joan Blondell. On Wednesday, they celebrate Dede Allen's centennial with a double feature of two films she edited, The Hustler & Odds Against Tomorrow (the latter on 35mm), while Thursday has a (passes-required) free preview of Talk to Me.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre keeps the restoration of Midnight Cowboy around even if the documentary is gone.
  
  The weekend's midnights include the pretty fun The Final Girls on Friday and a 35mm print of the 2006 version of The Hills Have Eyes on Saturday. Monday evening has both a 35mm "Big Screen Classic" show of Heat with Emerson's Andre Puca doing a pre-film seminar and a "Panorama" presentation of 20 Days in Mariupol with filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov on hand for a Q&A, though the latter is apparently already sold out. And, wow, the Thursday "Rewind!" screening of Bad Boys II is up in the screening room (with after party at Parlour) to make room for night-before shows of next week's two big openings.
• The Somerville Theatre has a 35mm Midnight Special of WarGames on Saturday and an "Attack of the B-Movies" double feature of Frankenstein's Daughter & Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter on Tuesday (fun fact - the director of the latter also directed the back half of last week's silent double feature!). There are also two free Doc.Boston programs this weekend, presumably in the Micro, so only reserve seats if you're sure you can make it (though they also have several films streaming through next weekend).
  
  Their sister cinema in Arlington, The Capitol, has Canadian Chinese-language drama Silver Screen Dreams on Sunday evening, with the cast on-hand for a Q&A afterward.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has the last weekend of their French Film Festival (yeah, I missed the start; this is what happens when you don't program film every week!), with Scarlet and Night of the 12th on Friday, Masquerade on Saturday, and then Pacifiction and Tori and Lokita on Sunday - the latter being the latest from Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne.
• The "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro" selections at The Harvard Film Archive, all on 35mm film, are silent featurette "Woman of Tokyo" (Friday w/ Martin Marks on piano), Tokyo Chorus (Friday w/ Marks), The Only Son (Saturday), There Was a Father (Saturday), Floating Weeds (Sunday), An Inn in Tokyo (Sunday w/ Robert Humphreville on piano), and Late Autumn (Monday).
• The West Newton Cinema adds Mission: Impossible and The Miracle Club (no show Thursday) to Past LIves, Indiana Jones,Asteroid City, You Hurt My Feelings (Friday/Saturday/Tuesday), Super Mario Brothers (Sunday matinee), and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (no show Friday). Closed Monday.
  
  The Lexington Venue has Mission: Impossible and The Miracle Club all week (except Monday, when the theater is closed).
  
  The Luna Theater has Lynch/Oz on Friday and Saturday, The League on Saturday, The Wicker Man on Saturday and Sunday, Midsommar on Sunday, and a Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem opens Mission: Impossible and the restored The Wicker Man alongside Indiana Jones, Past Lives, and Joy Ride through Monday. The Warriors plays a late show Friday, and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Thursday.
• The Museum of Science is already having shows sell out for their three weekends of Oppenheimer on the dome. Similarly, The New England Aquarium is advertising a week of Jaws screenings on the giant screen the last week of July.
• It's the first really full week of outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films, including some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at Boynton Yards in Somerville Friday, Minions: The Rise of Gru at the Hatch Shell Friday, Matilda (non-musical, I presume) at the Prudential on Saturday, Midnight in Paris at Christopher Columbus Park on Sunday, and Vivo at Lincoln Park in Somerville on Thursday.

Might (finally) check out the place in Watertown for Mission: Impossible this weekend, though I'll see it somewhere; will also see Shadows and They Cloned Tyrone, and am penciling in the Cagney/Blondell double feature on Tuesday. Maybe something else, but Thursday is time to fly north for Fantasia, when this blog really gets hopping and I run myself ragged for three weeks of vacation!

Film Rolls, Round 20: Once a Thief and Romancing in Thin Air

The legitimacy of both these rolls is kind of stretched. I'll admit that. Sometimes you've got to make weird calls on the gameboard.

Like, right here, Mookie rolls a 2, which lands him on Once a Thief. I have seen Once a Thief, although at various points I tell myself that maybe I fell asleep while it played at the Brattle, or I saw the American series pilot that Woo also directed, but, c'mon, I just put it in with all the unwatched Woos I imported and now Mookie's kind of got a ringer.

Then Bruce rolls an 8, and how far should that get him into the Johnnie To section? I ordered all the PTU: Police Tactical Unit movies during one spree, but it would be weird to not watch them in order, and if someone lands in the middle, do I just watch up to that one? I'm opting to treat them as a box set, which means that 8 is more like a 13 or something and gets Bruce to Romancing in Thin Air.

My game, my rules. Where's it get us?

Chung hang sei hoi (Once a Thief '91)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Go long enough between viewings for Once a Thief and you may suspect that you've never watched it before, because there are almost guaranteed to be moments when it is, quite simply, nothing like the movie you think you remember. And yet, while it's not unusual for a Hong Kong movie to have stylistic shifts, especially coming from John Woo, it seldom works quite as well as here. By the end of the movie, Woo has made this into a completely different sort of movie, but it doesn't really seem screwy until the very end.

It starts as a light caper, with Joe (Chow Yun-Fat), Jim (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing), and Cherie (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung) a crew of art thieves in Europe, pulling impressive heists ever since they were found as orphans in the streets of Hong Kong. Joe and Cherie are a couple, though Jim obviously carries a torch for the lovely Cherie. But when a heist goes wrong, Jim and Cherie return to Asia and draw closer, with things taking a turn for the melodramatic when a wheelchair-using Jim reappears, and it becomes clear that the fun "gentleman thieves" portion of their lives may soon come to an end, and not in the retirement Cherie desires.

Dang, but Leslie Cheung was a movie star, wasn't he? Chow Yun-Fat is billed first, and at this point in their careers Woo and Chow know that that they'll be mentioned together in the history of Hong Kong cinema, so they kind of play how the audience knows that up; Woo sets Chow up to shine in a way that's almost blinding, such that when he gets taken off the board for a while, the audience can feel his absence. But never fear, Cheung is an A-list romantic lead himself, and he charms the audience just as much as his Jim does Cherie. In hindsight (or even at-the-time-sight), his character is just about as believably straight as the actor is, but it doesn't particularly matter, because you still believe his leading lady has this pure romantic love for him and vice versa.

It holds the movie in place for a bit in the middle, between the joyful adventure of the European beginning - which features a mobile heist that reminds one that Woo and his team, including action choreographer Philip Kwok Chung-Fung and stunt driver Remy Julienne, are just as adroit with sleek staging as with bullet-ballet overkill - and a finale where enough bullets are flying to make it clear that this crew is not to be betrayed. The action is fantastic, of course, but there were a lot of people in Hong Kong who could work with the world's top technicians and use a lot of squibs; what makes this film great is that the exceptionally-staged violence tracks the emotion and mood so well. It's all fun, but by the end, it's a lot to the point where one maybe looks a bit askance.

Which isn't to say John Woo is making a film about how, eventually, the underworld consumes and corrupts even this sort of noble criminal; even in the last act, the film is often too goofy and the filmmakers to fond of their familiar tropes to become more than relatively lightweight entertainment. But there's something there, even if Woo decides not to bring all of it to the foreground, and the central core of Chow, Cheung, and Chung are folks who know how to keep a film like this floating.

Gao hai ba zhi lian II (Romancing in Thin Air)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

There's a "II" in the Chinese title for Romancing in Thin Air, and the film opens with what feels like a quick recap of a previous film about the movie stars played by Louis Koo and Gao Yuan-Yuan, but I'll be damned if I can find any sign of such a thing existing. Are Johnny To, Wai Ka-Fai, and company doing something meta here, maybe as a tie-in with the film-within-a-film stuff? Did it cause folks in Hong Kong some confusion during its initial release? I should look that up, but I kind of don't want to know until I'm finished here.

Not that it really matters, I suppose, aside from serving as a signal that there's a lot of "wait, what?" to a movie that otherwise plays as a nice, low-key romance. That's kind of how Johnnie To & Wai Ka-Fai collaborations work sometimes, I guess: To is as good at turning a script into a movie as anybody, while Wai comes up with bold stories, and they seldom work against each other but don't always achieve synergy, either.

So here, Louis Koo Tin-Lok is Michael Liu Baiqian, a much beloved actor about to tie the knot with frequent co-star Ding Yuanyuan (Gao), right up until her first love resurfaces on the day of their wedding. Michael seems to vanish into, as they say, thin air, somewhat literally: He surfaces, drunk, at a mountain hotel run by Sue (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man) in the absence of her missing husband Tian (Li Guangjie). It should be closed for the season, if not completely, but Sue is certain her husband will return and will need everything in place when he does, despite it being almost certain that he has died of exposure years ago.

I have mentioned before that it's kind of intimidating just how good To, someone best known in the West for his gangster pictures and action, is at romance. Romancing in Thin Air is kind of standard fare in its way - Sue is going to help Michael dry out, he will prove more than just some callow celebrity, and odds are good that Michael's management will track him down and Tian's fate will be revealed just at the moment when it will most test the bond that the pair have found. This may be formulaic, but that's fine; it's a formula that folks can relate to despite the heightened circumstances, and To's got Louis Koo and Sammi Cheng. Koo being cast as a movie star is obvious but works due in part to its obviousness; Louis Koo with two day's growth of beard and shaggy hair still looks like a "disheveled" movie star. Cheng, even before we see flashbacks, does nice work making sure that the audience has some idea of how Sue has adopted this place, as opposed to being a local to be either awed or unimpressed by Michael.

The thing about Michael being a movie star is not just that there are higher stakes, though - fame and art has a specific way of twisting the story, and it makes the last stretch of the film kind of fascinating in how it connects to the start: Being with someone like Michael means that Sue's story is no longer her own - not just because there are now fans who are going to be all up in their business, but because, for an artist, everything is fodder for their art. Michael may intend to respect that, but, inevitably, not only will the world at large have an investment in Sue and Michael, but Sue and Tian's love story will become something else as well. Indeed, though the film seems to reference another film from the viewer's world that does not exist, it is also, in a way, a sequel to its own film within a film, an ouroborus of narrative that, while it never finishes devouring itself, perhaps hints at the danger of the arts always looking inward.

Or, perhaps, it's just a charming romantic drama from playful filmmakers. Either way, it's a reminder that To is more than crime and simple stories can be satisfying and have room for ornamentation.


A strong pairing of favorite filmmakers, leading to things getting a little tighter:

Mookie: 69 ½ stars
Bruce: 70 stars

Ah, looking at my camera roll, I see this was the night the building's pipes burst. Good times! (Not actually good times)

Monday Double Feature: The League and Lost in the Stars

An odd case where I worked backward in building a double feature because, initially, Lost in the Stars was only playing shows 9:30pm and later with the last show on Monday as Mission: Impossible grabs all the screens on Tuesday, and as you might expect considering that this is apparently the biggest movie of the summer in China, the folks next door in Chinatown bought up tickets even before i knew it was playing, so that last show on Monday was my best shot at a decent seat.

After I did that, AMC put on more shows (and it's playing for a second week), but I wound up sticking with my reservation, although that meant finding something earlier because it can be a pain to pull myself out of the apartment at 9pm. Factor in AMC's 20 minutes of trailers and how a lot of movies are well over two hours these days, and it can be tough to make a twin bill work.

Maybe not surprisingly, it was looking like I was going to be on my own for The League, in part because of its weird booking strategy: Magnolia Pictures apparently booked with AMC directly for three weekdays, which is a Fathom-like booking but doesn't get it into the Fathom block of previews, and I don't think I saw a trailer before any films. The most advertising I saw online was tweets about it playing AMCs in Chicago. Some other folks did show up, all of us, I think, at least middle aged, and I don't know that I saw any folks of color either, though I wasn't looking behind me from my third-row seat.

On the other hand, Lost in the Stars was fairly busy, already pretty packed when I arrived and then filling up behind me.

And, after that, a good twenty-minute wait for the Green Line Extension heading home, arriving there at 1am with a 9am conference call scheduled the next day, which is a big part of why I don't do a lot of double features that aren't built as such. Who goes to those 10:45pm shows at an AMC with how early the T stops running?


The League '23

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #5 (special engagement, DCP)

As documentaries that probably don't tell their intended audience a whole lot that they weren't already aware of, The League at least had the benefit of being about something fun and only having to compact thirty or so years into a feature length presentation. It is, as I tend to say about a lot of these docs, Negro Leagues 101, but as someone who could use that, I certainly found my curiosity piqued.

Those 30 years are roughly the length of time between World War I and Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Director Sam Pollard doesn't exactly present it as the story of Black businessmen who owned the teams and shaped the leagues, from "Rube" Foster, whose Chicago Giants were the lynchpin of the original Black National League, to rival owners in Pittsburgh, to Effa Manley in New Jersey, who saw clearly that the white leagues signing their players without compensation would lead to the Negro Leagues' collapse. There's plenty of time spent on the famous players - one will hear the stories of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson - but as the story of the leagues, the film focuses on the people who made things happen, directly.

The timing of it was lucky for me, arriving during the MLB All-Star break when there's relatively little actual baseball, leaving the major papers ceasing their daily sports coverage as one of the bigger stories in sports, because a major theme is that sports are important to a community, in both tangible and emotional ways. There's sentimentality here, but also nuts and bolts of how sports teams can be a central part of a community, even when they are not one of the most visible, accessible pictures of Black excellence. The filmmakers are good at recognizing how they're intertwined without diminishing either.

It's well put together, too, making good use of the names the audience is likely to know but also giving plenty of time to those they might not, and doing a fair job of mixing recreation, animation, and plenty of archival material together so that it's seldom overdone, or static (there's a danger of feeling like you're rehashing Ken Burns in substance and style here that is mostly avoided) Maybe a little too smooth at times; the transition from grainy home movies to something sharper can supply a bit of excitement at the filmmakers perhaps finding some great archival material that is probably actually a recreation, with the same happening on voice-overs one may presume are from audio interviews but are actually actors narrating, especially when there are on-screen titles for the speaker. It's not exactly fraudulent, but it does raise the question of whether one is seeing the thing raw or someone's interpretation. That comes right down to one of the central threads; the film is largely based upon the writings of former umpire Bob Motley, but it's not clear when one is hearing his voice, or if one ever is.

A bit of a shame, that, as there's something especially apt about having one of the League's umpires being a primary point of view - an ump is by nature both an insider and expected to call a fair game, compared to players or executives who may have agendas. It's the same story, in many ways, but told well and down the middle.


Xiao shi de ta (Lost in the Stars)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)

Chen Sicheng of Detective Chinatown fame knows his mysteries, so it's not exactly surprising that he would be part of adapting a 50-year-old French stage thriller into a modern Chinese movie, though others direct and contribute to the script. His name being attached to the story's solid hook certainly got my attention, and it has been a massive summer hit in China; if you're looking for a nifty little thriller as a massive blockbuster, you could do a lot worse while it's playing North America for a couple weeks.

The film opens with He Fei (Zhu Yilong) bursting into a police station on Bankal Island (a resort implied but never stated to be in Thailand), in a panic because his wife Li Muzi (Kay Huang Ziqi) has been missing for 15 days, but with no evidence of foul play, the police can't help him, though an ethnically Chinese officer, Zheng Cheng (Du Jiang), offers to help. But when He Fei wakes up the next morning, there's a woman in his bed (Janice Man Wing-San) who claims to be Li Muzi, and she's got the passport, photos, etc. to support the assertion. With just days before his visa expires, He Fei hires lawyer Chen Mai (Ni Ni) to help him get to the bottom of this.

Based on a play by Robert Thomas, "Trap for a Lonely Man", that has been adapted for television and film at least ten times in nearly as many languages, and I'm tempted to dig up one of the English-language versions to see if it was a more leisurely, chatty thing than this occasionally frantic production with room for a chase or two, although one way to make it work as a movie is to have He Fei and Chen Man literally running down every bit of evidence. I'm not sure that the film ever entirely recovers from introducing itself with a great premise for a psychological thriller and then bounding ahead at full speed rather than giving the ambiguities time to fester in the audience's collective mind, though; it's the sort of mystery where mentioning a potential twist seems to eliminate it as a possibility, and folks in the audience are probably already wondering whether this is more like Gaslight, The Game, or something else well before the filmmakers are ready to spring a surprise.

I suspect that, even as the Chinese filmmakers modernized and made the story their own, the core of it is something that could easily attract actors, with Zhu Yilong and Ni Ni having a pair of fun opposites to play, especially since Zhu has a chance to play the gaslit husband as an everyman rightfully panicked by all these things happening to him that make no sense, with Ni countering as the cool lawyer who is believably good at everything the story needs her to do, trusting that this sort of chemistry doesn't require a sexual or romantic component. Still, Janice Man's "impostor" probably channels the film's exact gonzo energy best; whether she's the con artist He Fei thinks she is or is having her actions twisted by his delusions, she unbalances every scene she's in, in precisely the right way (right down to how just a little sexiness can feel quite dangerous to someone concerned with reasoning out a puzzle).

Chen, co-writers Gu Shuyi & Yin Yixiong, and directors Cui Rui & Liu Xiang could maybe stand to find more ways to use Ni Ni, both to add a little tension to having to operate in plain sight and to make a movie that doesn't really spend much time questioning He Fei's point of view a bit more ambiguous. Still, you can see why this has been a massive hit in China, and thus one of the biggest movies of the summer worldwide. It's slick and fast-paced, and if the finale may seem like a lot to swallow, making one believe that this is possible is only half of what a thriller has to do along with making it click emotionally, and the pieces fall into place nicely, right down to a scene that has me think that made me smile at how properly cowardly it was. It's also beautiful in spots, with Cui, Liu, and company teasing the audience with mirrors and lighthouses, and eventually coming up with a nifty demonstration of how how to take transformative inspiration from something like "Starry Night", compared to the "immersive Van Gogh" exhibits.

I'm tempted to give it a second look sometime when I know to expect magic rather than moody, on top of seeing how else it has been adapted. It's a mystery just good enough to be worth seeing how many clues were planted that one missed without becoming too ponderous.

Film Rolls, Round 19: Plain Jane to the Rescue and Heroes Shed No Tears

Do I take notice when some older John Woo movie has been reissued in Hong Kong (or elsewhere) and pick up a copy? Yes, obviously, enough that I carved out a small section for him on the game board.

Mookie gets in there by rolling a three and lands on Plain Jane to the Rescue, which feels like a genuine oddity when looked at from the other end of John Woo's career but was not particularly unusual for the start.

Bruce rolls a ten, which would also have landed him on Plane Jane, except that you have to pull the case off of the shelf in order to watch the movie inside, so that puts him on the next John Woo film, Heroes Shed No Tears, which sounds like a much more typically John Woo title, doesn't it?

So, that gets them at the same spot on the board for the first time since they started - how close will their scores get?

Ba cai Lin Ya Zhen (Plain Jane to the Rescue)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24-25 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I had no idea what to expect going into this, and was semi-shocked to see that the first chunk was broad slapstick, and I chuckled to myself that even though it's pretty logical that a guy as good at action as Woo would also do that sort of thing, this must be the closest thing Woo has done to silent comedy. Then, while opening IMDB to write this, I would discover Laughing Times. Now I'm really curious about Woo's wacky slapstick comedy period!

"Plain Jane", in this case, is Jenny Lam Ah-Chun (Josephine Siao Fong-Gong), who bounces through jobs in highway repair, film sets, and factories before somehow landing one teaching the uncouth father of corporate raider type Mr. Sha (Charlie Cho Cha-Lee) how to behave properly in public. She enlists the help of her boyfriend Tseng Fei Fang (Ricky Hui Koon-Ying), although they sort of like the disreputable old man a lot more. It also allows them to discover that Sha is looking to trick his father (Michael Lee Ming-Yeung) into signing over some property he needs for the sort of mass-displacing real estate development that sort of guy is always working on.

It's an odd duck of a film, the third "Plain Jane"/"Lin Ya Zhen"/"Lam Ah Chun" (depending what language you're speaking) film that star Josephine Siao Fong-Fong did, all with different writers and directors, and I'm genuinely curious just how much the tone varies between them. It's funny stuff that lands right between Hong Kong-specific and something that applies more broadly. It occasionally feels like Siao had a notebook full of Plain Jane gags and Woo's job was to build a movie around them,which is fine. It's what the silent comics did, after all, and Woo and co-writer Lau Chun-wah manage to build it from a collection of random-seeming gags to a finale that is no less chaotic but does sort of seem like the finish of a thing.

Hong Kong comedy - particularly from this period - can be tremendously broad even when not riffing on silent slapstick, but Josephine Siao finds the right note to make Jenny both a likable everywoman and a chaos magnet, the glue that keeps the episodic movie going and grounds it through the weirdness. She's got fun chemistry with Ricky Hui despite the fact that Woo sets them up as decidedly not lovey-dovey or bantering; they're a comfortable pair who work as a good team. Michael Lee Ming-Yeung and Charlie Cho Cha-Lee are both bigger-than-life as father-and-son Sha while still able to fit into a story, while a bunch of others nail their smaller rolls, with, Roman Tam, Maggie Li Lin-Lin, and Chan Sing doing the nifty trick of playing themselves and having it work even if you'd never heard of them.

Siao, by the way, seems pretty fascinating, a child star who worked at an insane clip until she was 23 (though many were two-or-three-part movies), went to college in America, came back to have a more reasonably-paced career until she was about 50, then retired to work as a child psychologist, though she is apparently still well-respected and liked within the entertainment industry. For all that this is something of a signature role, it's likely not representative of her career, but I hope more of her work winds up on my shelf - and the same goes for more John Woo slapstick comedies.

Ying xiong wu lei (Heroes Shed No Tears)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

This is the next film John Woo made after Plain Jane to the Rescue, and it sure feels a lot more like a John Woo movie than that - operatic action punctuating a story built to move to the next bit with a relative minimum of fuss. It's also raw and such a frequently nasty mess that it stayed on one of Golden Harvest's shelves for a number of years until Woo's star had ascended to the point where having an extra film of his to release was an asset.

It follows a pack of mercenaries led by Chan Chung (Eddy Ko Hung), operating out of Thailand with their eyes on drug dealers and others operating out of the golden triangle, and they're but one mission away from obtaining American green cards. But, of course, everything goes completely sideways, as they wind up on the wrong side of a corrupt colonel in the Vietnamese army (Lam Ching-Ying) and saddled with both a European journalist (Cecile Le Bailly), while Chan's family is fleeing with them.

Woo had been directing movies for ten years by the time he made this, but this was the first that was full of the kind of gunplay and grandiose violence he would become known for, and as such it still feels like something of a learning experience. The action is staged well and comes at a rapid pace, with a wildness to it that keeps the movie exciting - anything can happen and small things will frequently explode into something enormous. Woo brings the staging chops he'd developed over a decade of martial-arts movies and slapstick comedy, and even if he's not quite marrying the action to emotional beats yet, he knows how to build an action scene.

That's fun for a while, but soon he's thrown so much at the audience that, even with the film only being about an hour and a half long, he's got nowhere to go. There's some flab in the center as the crew stops in a village to rest and get into mischief and fights, and a point where the edgy excitement of nobody being safe tips into sadism because, once you've started killing characters off but aren't going to stop to react to that, you've got to kill them in crueler, gorier ways, and more at a time.

And on top of that, the film has a kid who winds up kind of obnoxious in two equal and opposite ways, and when a film has one wondering with some frustration how, with all those bullets flying, one hasn't caught the pre-teen, it can quickly cease being entertaining or exciting violence.


Mookie makes up a little ground, and I almost want to fiddle with the ratings a bit to have him close a little more:

Mookie: 66 ¼ stars
Bruce: 67 stars

So tied in terms of distance from the end that I temporarily had to move the Funko thing separating the John Woo and Jonnie To sections so that they could both stand in the same place!

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 July 2023 - 13 July 2023

I note, amused, that an event sponsored by the still-not-open Alamo Drafthouse off their site has been postponed because of "building issues". Which is just a riot, because, as I've mentioned before, we could really use those extra screens right now, because AMC was really squeezing a Chinese import until it nearly sold out..

• Joy Ride, in which a group of Chinese-American friends go to China to find one's birth mother and get into hijinks, opens at Fresh Pond, CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  There's also Insidious: The Red Door, with star Patrick Wilson directing the latest entry in the franchise, in which bad things happen because his character has hypnotically suppressed the events of previous films but those memories are starting to return. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  A number of Disney hits will be returning to theaters to celebrate the company's 100th anniversary, with the first - Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl at Boston Common this week.
  
  Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 opens on Wednesday (with early shows Tuesday) at The Capitol, Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), the Lexington Venue, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), South Bay (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill. There are also "See It First" screenings on Sunday (Boston Common, Assembly Row).and "Early Access" screenings on Monday (Jordan's in Imax, South Bay in Dolby Cinema, Assembly Row in Dolby Cinema).
  
  Trolls: World Tour plays matinees at Boston Common on Saturday. Concert film Odesza: The Last Goodbye Cinematic Experience plays Boston Common, Kendall Square Friday night. There are 50th Anniversary shows of another concert film, David Bowie in Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders from Mars, at Boston Common and Kendall Square on Sunday and Boston Common on Monday. Negro Leauge documentary The League plays at Boston Common on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, which is apparently not so much a "making-of" documentary as one that examines the time, place, people, and film itself more than the process. Director Nancy Buirski will be on hand for a Q&A for the 4pm show on Sunday, and the theater will also have late-evening shows of the new restoration of Midnight Cowboy all week.
  
  Also opening at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, West Newton, and Boston Common is The Lesson, featuring Richard E. Grant as a legendary author, Julie Delpy as his wife, and Daryl McCormack as a new assistant who is in for more than he bargained for.
  
  Midnights at the Coolidge feature I Know What You Did Last Summer on Friday and the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Saturday, both on 35mm. Samurai Summer continues with a marathon of "The Samurai Trilogy" (Musashi Miyamoto, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, and Duel at Ganryu Island, all directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Toshiro Mifune) in the screening room, plus 35mm prints of Kwaidan on Tuesday and Kill! on Wednesday. Monday's BIg Screen Classic is The Birdcage, and Thursday's is The Muppet Movie, the latter on 35mm film and with a seminar from Boston Globe film critic Odie Henderson.
• Holocaust drama Persian Lessons, in which a concentration camp prisoner who owns a Persian book attempts to survive by teaching his jailor Farsi despite not actually knowing the language, opens at Landmark Kendall Square. It was Belarus's Oscar submission back in 2021, but disqualified because there weren't enough Belarussians in the cast & crew, and has just made its way to North American theaters.
  
  Tuesday Retro Replays at the Kendall during July is a series of summer movie classics, starting with Jaws this week. Wednesday's Christopher Nolan film is Interstellar.
• Plenty of new Indian films at Apple Fresh Pond on Friday. Neeyat stars Vidya Balan as a sleuth called upon to solve a murder on the estate of an exiled billionaire (Ram Kapoor) and plays in Hindi. 7:11pm is a Telugu sci-fi flick where present-day skullduggery and time travelers from the future collide, 18+ (aka "Journey of Love") is a Malayalam-language romantic comedy, and Rangabali a Telugu-language one. Baipan Bhari Deva, a Marathi comedy about six estranged sisters coming together for a competition, plays Saturday and Sunday. All but Neeyat and held-over Telugu comedy Samajavaragamana clear out on Tuesday to make room for Mission: Impossible. Satyaprem Ki Katha also continues at Boston Common.
  
  The top movie in China so far this summer, Lost In the Stars, a thriller in which Zhu Yilong plays a man whose wife disappears on vacation only to have an apparent impostor claim her identity. It also stars Ni Ni, Janice Man Wing-San, and Du Jiang. It opens at Boston Common with what was originally limited showtimes, although they have added more when the others more or less sold out by Thursday night. If you can make it to the Liberty Tree Mall, they also have matinees of Chinese film Love Never Ends through Monday (shame it's such a tiny release; I've liked a couple of filmmaker Han Yan's previous movies).
  
  There are two Ghibli films showing at Boston Common this week - Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Sunday (dubbed) & Tuesday (subtitled) and Castle in the Sky on Monday (dubbed) & Wednesday. Sci-fi anime Psycho-Pass: Providence plays Boston Common and South Bay Tuesday (dubbed) & Thursday (subtitled).
• With the Fourth coming, The Brattle Theatre has Lynch/Oz, the latest movie-nerd deep dive from Alexandre O. Philippe, through Monday, this one, as you might guess from the title, exploring the influence that The Wizard of Oz has had on David Lynch. If you want examples, the Brattle will also be showing Wild at Heart (Friday/Saturday), The Wizard of Oz (35mm Saturday/Sunday/Monday), and Mulholland Drive (35mm Sunday/Monday).
  
  On Tuesday, they start the "vertical" summer calendar with the first "Warner Brothers Centennial: The Golden Years" show, a 35mm print of The Adventures of Robin Hood. One Wednesday they team with IFFBoston & The Roxbury International Film Festival for a free-with-pass preview of Earth Mama, while Thursday is the 20th annual Trailer Treats program, almost two hours of trailers, shorts, and music videos on 35mm film from the Brattle's collection.
• The Somerville Theatre has a new 4K restoration of Godard's Contempt playing (mostly) in the big room with the fancy projector.
  
  They also have a (late) Canada Day "Silents, Please!" double feature on Sunday, with Jeff Rapsis accompanying Mantrap & The Canadian, both on 35mm film.
• The Museum of Science brings "Serengeti" back into the Omnimax rotation along with "Jane Goodall - Reasons for Hope" and "Everest". Tickets are also on sale for Oppenheimer on the dome for the Fridays & Saturdays of its first three weekends of release.
• The Harvard Film Archive has plenty more "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro"; this week's presentations are Floating Weeds (Friday, preceded by 16mm short "The Lion Dance"), Good Morning (Saturday/Monday), Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Saturday), Equinox Flower (Sunday), and That Night's Wife (Sunday). All are on 35mm film; Thet Night's Wife, a silent, has Martin Marks accompanying on piano. They also have several ceramics made for Ozu's movies on display in the office, with small groups allowed to take a closer look before and after the films upon request.
• The West Newton Cinema opens Tiger Within, a story of connection between a homeless teen and a Holocaust survivor (Ed Asner), The Lesson, and Past LIves. They also hold over Hannah Ha Ha (no show Wednesday), Indiana Jones, Ruby Gillman, Asteroid City, You Hurt My Feelings (Friday/Saturday/Tuesday), Super Mario Brothers (Saturday matinee), and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (no show Friday). Closed Monday.
  
  The Lexington Venue hasAsteroid City through Sunday, with Past Lives playing those days plus Wednesday and Thursday, Mission: Impossible opens Wednesday.
  
  The Luna Theater has Sanctuary on Friday and Saturday, Grease Saturday and Sunday, a Weirdo Wednesday show, and Night of the Living Dead on Thursday.
  
  Cinema Salem has Indiana Jones, Past Lives, Asteroid City, and Joy Ride through Monday. There are "Summer Rewind" shows of Dazed and Confused on Saturday & Sunday afternoons.
• Outdoor screenings per Joe's Free Films include Dirty Dancing at Boston Landing on Friday & Wednesday, Top Gun: Maverick at the Prudential on Sunday, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (on 35mm film) on the Greenway in association with the Coolidge's "Science on Screen" program Wednesday, and Minions: The Rise of Gru in Somerville's Lincoln Park on Thursday.

Planning on Joy Ride, The Lesson, and Lost in the Stars; possibly The League, Mission: Impossible, and/or Robin Hood. Neeyat looks like it might be my sort of thing, but I'm not sure I can expect English subtitles even on Bollywood movies these days.

Film Rolls, Round 18: Coffin Homes and Husband Killers

As mentioned in the last update, we're getting into the last of the general Hong Kong/China sections here, and it's a bit rickety - no more to pull in at the end, but not quite to the point where I can put a spacer in to keep it steady.

Which is sort of the point of the whole exercise - creating empty space by watching a bunch of movies without agonizing over choices- but it's kind of inconvenient in some short-term situations!

Mookie starts this round off with a 9, meaning he heads almost all the way to the end of Hong Kong #3 and lands on Coffin Homes, one of the most recent arrivals/releases! I was kind of excited to see the new Fruit Chan picture and the latest Hong Kong horror about real estate prices.

Bruce gets a 4, so he rolls a little behind, landing on Husband Killers, which may have been purchased in the same DDDHouse order, though it's recent enough that I may have gotten it as a new release as opposed to a "sure, I'll add a disc that's basically the price of a movie ticket if I'm already having stuff shipped from Hong Kong" purchase. After all, I do like Chrissy Chau and Stephy Tang.

So, how'd it go?

Gwai tung nei jyu (Coffin Homes)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

It's odd that my first encounter with Fruit Chan was the sleek, star-packed "Dumplings" short in Three… Extreme, a genuinely unnerving bit of horror, because he seems most at home when he's not just indie but nearly underground, and he doesn't quite get close enough to that vibe here. It's mainstream-oriented even if there's an intended sharp bite, and even that is softened by Chan poking at too many related things at once.

The film at least opens with a banger of an opening sequence, as a 98-year-old woman ("Susan Shaw" Siu Yam-Yam) is propped up at a family dinner but, just as she seemingly expires, she goes out with a bang, apparently demon-possessed and attacking most of the family planning how to profit from the house sitting on prime Hong Kong real estate. A step or two down the economic ladder, broker Jimmy Lam (Wong Yau-Nam) and his colleague Lily (Chelffy Yau Mei-Mei) use an apartment that hasn't sold for the price they want because a tenant died there for trysts, which suits the place's ghost (Paul Che Biu-Law) just fine. Further down the list, Jimmy's father Cheung (Tai Bo) continues to subdivide his apartment into smaller and smaller units, barely large enough to hold a bed, which means everybody gets to be haunted by the four-year-old ghost who still resides there.

The high price of real estate and the way it and other economic factors but the squeeze on Hong Kongers has long been a motivating force in local films from comedy to crime to horror (I am honestly kind of shocked that nobody has tried to relocate Pang Ho-Cheung's Dream Home to San Francisco or London but also wonder if westerners are willing to confront its themes), and at its best, Coffin Homes has the ability to target certain absurdities precisely, especially when Jimmy's boss (Cheung Tat-Ming) proposes paying the poor people crammed into apartments like Cheung's to stay overnight in empty luxury units so that the buildings will look lit and occupied, as long as they're out by morning. When he has the chance to focus on this aspect of the project, Coffin Homes is kind of brilliant, reminiscent of his grimy, funny, and observant indies.

He seems to have a harder time finding the vibe where satire is absurd and the horror is also unsettling, let alone where these things can reinforce each other. Ghosts and fear of haunting just don't seem like the right metaphor for the way modern economics make it hard to own a home, and the end result is often that, aside from how he's got these three types of properties sharing Jimmy's presence, each of them seems to have supernatural and satirical situations happening in parallel, not particularly tying themselves together.It may work better for locals, but from the outside it feels like a lot of ideas struggling to connect.

If the big picture is often fuzzy, the details are often cannily done: Chan seems to observe the working class and the poor as well as any filmmaker, for example, and he's able to use the supernatural both for blood and guts that reaches absurd levels of excess and unnerving, unexplained situations. Little bits like how people are left hanging in their lives because nobody is really working to identify a body, or the way Fourth Sister Wai Shan (Rachel Lee Lai-Chun) is shaken by a paranormal situation she can't understand while Cheung's kids often find "L'il Keung" to be just another playmate.

Coffin Homes may not necessarily be among Fruit Chan's best, but it's paradoxically one that I might have an easier time recommending to people unfamiliar with his work than some of his other films - it's imperfect but accessible, a good jumping-on spot if nothing else.

Lui si fuk sau (Husband Killers)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I feel like I've seen and liked Stephy Tang and Chrissie Chau in more movies than I actually have, and it appears that I rather liked Fire Lee's previous film Robbery, but I'm.not enough of a fan of any of them to readily describe Husband Killers as "disappointing" in any sort of context rather than just "bad". It's just a mess of an action movie that seems like it shouldn't be that hard to mess up.

David Chow, it would appear, has a type: Wife Chanel Tsui (Stephy Tang Lai-Yan) and girlfriend Dior Mok (Chrissie Chau Sau-Na) are both freelance assassins, good enough at the sort of research their job entails that when he leaves each alone on his birthday, they are each able to quickly discover the other through images on social media, and arrange to meet with the intention of putting a rifle bullet through the other's head when she arrives at the meeting first. That's when they realize that if David wasn't with either of them, he must have been with someone else - and, in fact, has an appointment with Hermes Tong (Gaile Lok Kei-Yi) at the out-of-the-way Lung Wah Hotel coming up, and decide to head there to take out the one he's cheating on both with. Hermes, of course, is a SWAT team captain and no pushover herself, although none of them really seem the type for trysts at a seedy place run by Ling (Pauline Suen Kai-Kwan) and her two adult sons, one skeevy (Kevin Li Kin-Wang) and one apparently developmentally disabled (Lai Man-Wang).

Writer/director Fire Lee has two good ideas for enjoyable genre movies here in "three lady killers in love with the same man decide to eliminate the competition and/or real problem" and "three women who would like to see each other dead can only survive if they work together", and they're not necessarily even at cross-purposes if handled well. Unfortunately, Lee stumbles the execution of it pretty badly - the movie is more than half-over before David's three lovers really start to go at it with each other, much less get themselves into the other tight spot, and he doesn't do close to enough to square the fact that these women who have been dropped into a fairly standard slasher situation are really good at violence. It's not insurmountable - you could say that Hermes is much better with guns than knives, that Dior mostly works undercover, or that Chanel plans better than she improvises, for instance, and have them fill each other's blind spots, or even state that being drugged had them sluggish - but Lee doesn't do much of any of that. He also doesn't do so great in terms of differentiating Chanel and Dior personality-wise even when the movie is just the two of them sparring verbally.

He seems to have a fairly tight budget, which explains a fair chunk of running in place and somewhat bland action set-ups, but he's able to lean into a knowingly tacky 80s/90s exploitation aesthetic to blunt the feelings that it looks cheap, and the bits that feel like live-action cartoons often work even when combined with awful dialog. I'm not quite sure where I land on blocking most of David's face so the audience only sees his smirk - the audience doesn't really need to see what the women saw in him or feel like they might feel a single iota of sympathy, but it's so obvious that Lee is Doing A Thing that one expects it to lead to a payoff of some sort, but it doesn't.

The cast could maybe do a little more with what Lee gives them, even if the script is actively making it more difficult to give a good performance. They do a bit more than fill their tight costumes nicely, and sell what jokes are worth selling. Some of that may be Cantonese wordplay not translating well; I certainly got a better individual read on the personality of Hermes, who mostly speaks English (with the others finding that annoying), than I got from Chrissy Chau and Stephy Tang.

It's the sort of Girl Power! movie that was clearly written and directed by a man (although that's maybe it's own kind of stereotype), from how there's really not a whole lot of difference between how the camera ogles its stars and how the characters who get shot for it do to the cast full of Strong Women primarily concerned about their relationship to a man. I wonder what this same plot and cast would look like with, say, Jody Luk Yi-Sam writing and directing rather than Lee, who makes it exceptionally clear that his heart is in the right place, but may not necessarily have a great ear for women's voices.


Giving both of these a quick re-watch because I was behind shifted the ratings a bit so things tighten up:

Mookie: 63 ½ stars
Bruce: 64 ½ stars

Next up: John Woo!

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 30 June 2023 - 6 July 2023

I know that roughly nobody reading this likes 3D as much as I do, but it's kind of nuts DreamWorks's new animated movie is apparently not coming out in the format, as Katzenberg was a huge proponent and they always used depth extremely well, and I swear I saw a preview for Indiana Jones in 3D, but no sign of that either.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the big weekend opening, an odd duck in that neither Steven Spielberg nor George Lucas are particularly involved, with James Mangold directing Harrison Ford as the globetrotting adventurer archaeologist roped into one last adventure circa 1970 as a group of neo-Nazis seek an artifact that Jones denied them during the war. It's at the Somerville (presumably-4K laser projection), Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, South Bay (Imax & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  For the younger set, there's Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, which amusingly flips the Little Mermaid script to say krakens are heroic and mermaids are villains, with Ruby a secret princess who just wants a normal life. It's at The Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards.
  
  Sound of Freedom is a based-on-a-true-story action flick that stars Jim Claviezel as a vigilante looking to rescue kids from human traffickers (is this really the best Mira Sorvino can do?), opens Monday at Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row.
  
  Kung Fu Panda has matinees at Boston Common Saturday and Wednesday. There are previews of Joy Ride at Boston Common South Bay, and Assembly Row on Saturday (except South Bay) and Wednesday nights before it opens next week.
• Documentary Every Body, which follows three intersex people how have decided to live outside the closet and pressure to conform to a gender binary, plays Landmark Kendall Square, the Capitol, and Boston Common.
  
  The Kendall also plays Dunkirk as part of their Christopher Nolan series on Wednesday.
• Telugu-language action flick Spy, which opened Wednesday, continues at Apple Fresh Pond. They also get Hindi romantic comedy Satyaprem Ki Katha (also at Boston Common), Tamil thriller Maamannan, Telugu comedy Samajavaragamana, and Punjabi comedy Carry on Jatta 3.
• With the Fourth coming, The Brattle Theatre has their annual vacation series - "Vacation Nightmares" this year, with the uncut Infinity Pool playing Friday to Monday, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday Saturday & Sunday afternoon, Nobuhiko Obayashi's House on 35mm Saturday & Sunday, An American Werewolf in London on Saturday, Jaws (the reason for the season) Monday afternoon and Tuesday the 4th, Hitchcock's second The Man Who Knew Too Much on 35mm Monday, a Jordan Peele double feature of Get Out & Us on Wednesday, and a pairing of The Lost Daughter & Swimming Pool on Thursday .
• The Museum of Science adds "Jane Goodall - Reasons for Hope" to its Omnimax rotation starting Saturday, alternating showtimes with "Everest". They've also announced that Oppenheimer will be playing Fridays & Saturdays for its first three weekends of release (shame they don't have their old film projectors).
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre keeps the same schedule, more or less. They wrap Pride month with a midnight show of Rocky Horror on Friday (apparently no shadow cast, though Full Body is at Boston Common as usual earlier). Atomic Blonde also plays midnight on Friday, and then at 11pm on Saturday you can strap in for the full four-film John Wick Marathon, which is one way to not have to worry about getting back home after the late show. Monday's BIg Screen Classic is Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Samurai Summer continues with Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha on 35mm film Wednesday, and there's a Cinema Jukebox show of A Hard Day's Night on Thursday.
• Indiana Jones has the big screen with the laser projector at The Somerville Theatre most of the week, but yields to Dirty Dancing - with a post-film dance party upstairs at the Crystal Ballroom - on Thursday.
• Just a bit of "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro" for the holiday weekend at The Harvard Film Archive, with The Munekata Sisters (Friday), Walk Cheerfully (Saturday), and The Only Son (Sunday), all on 35mm film and Walk Cheerfully featuring live accompaniment by Martin Marks, because it's silent.
• The ICA will be playing "In Their Own Words", a short film program presented in conjunction with their Simone Leigh exhibition, for museum visitors on Monday.
• The in-person portion of The Roxbury International Film Festival is finished, but opening night film The Honeymoon and six short packages can be streamed through Sunday as "RoxFilm@Home" presentations.
• The Regent Theatre has sing-along presentations of 1776 playing Friday evening and matinees on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. On Sunday, they've got D.O.A., a remake (the third!) of the classic film noir starring John Doe, with Doe, director Kurt St. Thomas, co-star Tony V, and special effects guy Jimi Simmons doing a post-film Q&A.
• The West Newton Cinema has Hannah Ha Ha, a locally-shot independent drama about a woman living a quiet life in a small town, with filmmakers present for the shows on Friday and Saturday. They also pick up Indiana Jones and Ruby Gillman to join Asteroid City, Elemental, Spider-Verse, You Hurt My Feelings (no show Thursday), Super Mario Brothers (Sunday to Tuesday matinees), and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (no show Friday). Open all week!
  
  The Lexington Venue is open through Monday plus Thursday with Asteroid City and Past Lives.
  
  The Luna Theater looks to be taking the holiday weekend off until Weirdo Wednesday and Sanctuary on Thursday.
  
  Cinema Salem has Indiana Jones, Past Lives, Asteroid City, and Elemental through Monday. There's also a "Summer Rewind" show of Dazed and Confused on Thursday.
  
  If you can make it out to the Liberty Tree Mall, they've got Prisoner's Daughter, directed by Catherine Hardwicke and starring Kate Beckinsale & Brian Cox
• Outdoor screenings per Joe's Free Films include Encanto at City on the Hill Church on Saturday and Footloose at Lincoln Park in Somerville. I guess the Boston Harbor Hotel isn't doing their series this year.

Indiana Jones, obviously, on the Somerville's spiffy screen. No sleep Saturday for 8+ hours of John Wick. I'll also catch up on No Hard Feelings and The Blackening, maybe catch a goodie or two at the Brattle, and I've also got a ticket for a Red Sox game.