This Week In Tickets: 28 June 2010 to 4 July 2010

A week where I don't see many movies and where TWIT will be going on a bit of a hiatus anyway (in favor of daily Fantasia updates) offers a good opportunity to break the previews into a separate post. So lets get right to the tickets!



It was a pretty nice couple of days to go to the ballpark; I had nice seats for each game, though from opposite ends of the field. Not to give the Sox any ideas, but it's absolutely crazy that bleachers cost something like half of what the boxes out in right field cost; it's a much better view, although one less likely to net you a home run or foul ball. The seat on Friday was also pretty sweet, and it even turned out that the walkway warning turned out to be more or less bogus - there was a fence in front of it, it was a three-seat row, and there was another exit on the other side. No-one climbing over me to get their dozen beers per game!

Both were wins, too - Tuesday's actually felt like a clobbering for a good chunk of it, although some terrible relief in the final two innings made it much closer. Friday's was one of those games which old-timers wax nostalgic about, where pitchers work quickly and the game finishes in just over two hours. Nicely paced, but it felt downright weird to hear Papelbon's music played right around 9pm, and when you pay that much for a ticket, you maybe expect a little more baseball!

Saturday was spent finding a shady spot and reading, and then Sunday was spent at a couple of 3-D movies. First up was Toy Story 3 with my brother and his finacée, a surprisingly cost-effective outing, actually, as we had two $8.50 ticket vouchers (cutting their tickets down to a mere $4 each from my $12.50) and $1 fourth-of-July specials for large popcorn and soda. It strikes me that AMC Boston Common may want to adjust the signage at the box office, which states that digital 3-D, not-really-IMAX, and 3-D not-really-IMAX add $5, $6, and $7, respectively, to the ticket price. Based on a $9.50 matinee ticket (both my friends living in Maine and my ten-years-younger self freaked out a bit reading that), that overstates the cost by a couple bucks.

Spoilers for Toy Story 3

Seeing it a second time, with folks I could talk about it afterward and on a different screen, didn't change my opinion of the movie that much; I still think it's pretty brilliant, although covering a lot of the same territory as Toy Story 2. Matt even leaned over to ask me if Kelsey Grammer was doing the voice of Lotso Huggin' Bear; I wish I'd remembered to ask him whether he was associating him that closely with Prospector Pete, or if he even remembered that bit of casting.

Morgan asked if there was anything to what she'd heard about the ending, to which I said, yes, there will be crying. She didn't believe it until it got close to the end, and everyone was holding hands, waiting for the end. Matt wound up giving the claw a bigger laugh than it maybe deserved, just from being so relieved. And then the scene in Bonnie's front yard made some very glad that they were wearing 3-D glasses, and the audience at large couldn't see their eyes.

I have to admit, though, as wonderful as that ending is... A part of me would have liked it to be sadder, in a way. I think I really would have liked it if Andy had taken Woody to college. I can see why they didn't go that route, but if the movies are looked at as metaphors for growing up, it's the logical next step: In Toy Story, Woody has to learn how to deal with the arrival of a younger sibling in Buzz; in Toy Story 2, he learns to handle peer pressure and being pulled in two different directions by family and new friends; Toy Story 3 could have been about leaving the home, forming one's own family even though still connected to the old one. And I think it is, although Jodi Benson's Barbie is the one that really gets that storyline in its purest form.

I don't imagine I would have had the heart to break that group up either, for what it's worth, and the toys' lives shouldn't necessarily be perfect metaphors for those of their owners, anyway. In a way, Woody does graduate to adulthood in this story, going from the older brother of the first two movies to a father figure by the end of this one, although it's not an easy journey, at times recalling what a complete prick the cowboy could be in the first.

On a more light-hearted note: I totally missed the Return of the Jedi reference Matt spotted more or less instantly (although I was all over the nods to The Great Escape, and kind of surprised they didn't have Jessie bouncing a ball against the wall at some point). Given that there's a pretty big Empire Strikes Back moment in Toy Story 2, I now must watch the first again to see if there's an obvious Star Wars reference.

Also, if you have little kids your considering bringing to this movie: The monkey will freak them the heck out. It's not scarring or anything, but be prepared!

/ Spoilers for Toy Story 3

After that, I killed a little time in the Aquarium and then the bookstore before heading back across the river to find a spot on the Cambridge side to watch the fireworks. They were, as usual, spectacular, but I wouldn't mind at all if WBZ got out of the fireworks-presentation business; aside from snickering at how the show was being presented in HD (not quite so impressive to those of us there in person; also, the presenting sponsor's slogan got on my nerves: I don't want an insurance company that's "as responsible as you are", but one that's a great deal more responsible - that's why I'm buying insurance!), it seemed like there were was more time spent on commercial breaks and inane banter between the hosts than actual music being played.

Still, it's always great to be in Boston on the 4th - two years ago, I was out of the country; last year, I was in Portland, and being with one's family is nice, but the Fourth of July is a prime "you guys should be coming here" holiday.

Sea Rex 3-D

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2010 at the New England Aquarium (first-run)

It's easy to forget, with all the IMAX-branded theaters sprouting up around the country, that most of the screens that people would consider "real" IMAX are in museums of various types, especially science museums and spots like the New England Aquarium, which is why a steady stream of educational but hopefully still awe-inspiring films are created in the large format. Sea Rex is the latest to show up at the Aquarium, and it's fine, if not quite so impressive as some of its cousins.

That's not even comparing it to the Hollywood event films occupying many giant screens; it comes up somewhat short even in comparison to Sea Monsters 3-D, another large-format featurette on the same subject that started making its way through the science-museum circuit just a few years ago. Sea Rex, like many IMAX documentaries, is pitched to elementary-school children visiting the museum or aquarium on a field trip, and it often feels like an institutional film blown up large: It has a framing sequence that is meant to be friendly, although it could come across as really freaky if looked at literally - is museum visitor Julie (Chloe Hollings) actually speaking to a hallucination or ghost or spirit of pioneering paleontologist George Cuvier (Richard Rider)? Scientists deliver lectures, rather than naturally demonstrating their work; animated sequences try to explain things with strained metaphors. It teaches well enough, but is just stilted enough that those older than young children may make fun.

The CGI budget is also just low enough to be a bit of an issue. Creatures are rendered competently, but it's also clear that the filmmakers don't exactly have the budget of a major production: There's a uniformity to the lighting and textures, and the movements are slightly mechanical; we don't always see the musculature under the skin working. It's a little more noticeable because it is composited on top of beautiful IMAX 3-D phototography.

Sea Rex is not a bad movie; it's a fairly enjoyable presentation of interesting information; if it's playing when you take your kids to the science museum or aquarium, it's worth a look. It's just not in the top tier of IMAX documentaries, the ones worth going out of one's way to see.

Last Week In Tickets: 21 June 2010 to 27 June 2010

This is me practicing chaining myself to the computer to not fall too far behind a self-imposed deadline before trying to make daily posts in Montreal:

• That's annoying: The Brattle continues its tribute to Dennis Hopper, but the film that gave the series its name, The American Dreamer, is canceled. They make up for it with extra screenings of The Trip and The Glory Stompers (double features with Easy Rider, and shall inflict Super Mario Brothers on those who dare to come tonight at 9:30pm. Tuesday brings Mad Dog Morgan (though it is still marked "tentative"), and Wednesday at Thursday is a late-career, scenery-chewing double feature of Speed and Waterworld.
  
  They take a break on Monday for P-star Rising, the latest in a bi-weekly documentary presentations. This one's about a girl rapper who starts out at nine years old.



• The Coolidge and Kendall Square both open I Am Love, which I saw at IFFBoston and kind of hated, although many seem much more forgiving of its interminable and ridiculous second half than I.
  
  The Coolidge also celebrates the holiday weekend with Independence Day a fitting and timely start to their "The End is Nigh" series of July midnights. The most interesting thing there this week (presuming you haven't already seen Winter's Bone, which you should), looks to be a Thursday night screening of Off and Running presented by both the Roxbury International and Boston Jewish Film Festivals with the documentary's subject Avery Klein-Cloud doing a Q&A afterward. Wish I could go.



• The one-week warning at Kendall Square is for The Killer Inside Me, which in contrast to I Am Love, I seem to like while everybody else could go without. They also opened Love Ranch and Afghan war documentary Restrepo.
  
  They're also making the somewhat surprising (to me) decision have a Lisbeth Salander-free week before opening The Girl Who Played With Fire on the 9th; I figured they might want to keep The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo around long enough for double features. (And, BTW, if anybody knows of a preview screening in Boston before Thursday, drop me a line; I'd like to see this before heading north for Fantasia, though if it has even half of the first's longevity, it'll still be there when I get back)



• New mainstream openings are The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which has probably gotten me a lot more hits on my review of Irish ghost story The Eclipse than the latter coming out on DVD on the 29th, and The Last Airbender, which has gotten vicious reviews. Not just negative, vicious, being as it is the intersection between half-assed price-gouging 3-D and another apparent disappointment from M. Night Shamalayan, whom critics just seem to not like personally. Myself, I quite liked everything he's done from The Sixth Sense to The Village, and don't think Lady in the Water and The Happening are quite so bad as their reputations, so I may check it out.
  
  On flat 35mm film, if I do; that's what it was shot for, and reports indicate that it's not worth the $5 fee theaters are charging now.

Yikes, that's a lot of movies crammed into a short about of time. Good prep work for Fantasia, I guess, but as I mentioned in the SF-1970 blog entry, I was pooped the next day.

Now, quick reviews, because it is way too nice to sit here typing this stuff much longer:

Harry Brown

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square (first-run)

The positive here, obviously, is that you get to watch Michael Caine and to a lesser extent Emily Mortimer act. They're pretty darn terrific in this story of Brown (Caine), a pensioner driven to clean up his neighborhood after the murder of his best friend by the punks who hang out around their council flats. Naturally, he's pretty successful, since he was special forces in Northern Ireland before his wife of forty-odd years domesticated him. Mortimer plays the detective who sees that the common thread in the kids being executed is not a gang war.

I've long held to the principle of not messing with old men. Forget that you don't know their history, and he may have fought in a war or something. The simple fact of the matter is that they are the people that natural selection hasn't been able to do anything with yet, while the jury is still out on people half their age. Naturally, nobody else in the movie has come to that realization.

That's about the only lesson the movie has for us, though - as good as Caine is, we never really see a man whose soul is being eaten away by what he chooses to do, even though it's something he rejected explicitly. There's an icky, pro-vigilantism feel toward the end of the movie, along with a plot twist that adds to the violence but seems out of place in a film that, up until then, had been very straightforward.

Knight and Day

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 June 2010 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)

What a frustrating movie. On the one hand, director James Mangold gives it a fun, breezy tone, making it a spy movie that's light-hearted without ever quite dropping down to the level of parody. It's also a clever use of Tom Cruise, allowing his twin images of being a charismatic movie star and also being kind of nuts to work for the character. It's not transformational acting, but it's a good use of what movie stars bring to the table.

On the other hand, it seldom manages more than just "pretty decent" in terms of execution. There's a car chase in the first act that frustrated the heck out of me because it seemed inconsistent from one point to another (going from a crowded street to one where the characters have room to maneuver and back without any rhyme or reason), and neither the action nor the jokes ever makes the leap to become a moment that the audience will remember after the movie ends.

(As an aside, they establish Cameron Diaz's character early on as having the very non-girly business of restoring classic cars, and I'm kind of shocked that at no point did the action require her to fix a car. While that would be formulaic, it would also give her a bit more to do than scream like a madwoman.)

SF-1970

I won't say much about the Harvard Film Archive's SF-1970 series, because I didn't get to nearly as much of it as I'd like. Last week I had Red Sox tickets, my friend Justin was in town to hang out and play a gig with Girls, Guns, and Glory; this week I had plans to spend a day at NYAFF 2010, and the scant amount of sleep that night combined with a full day of work left me skeptical on my ability to stay awake through Quintet, so I stayed home and crashed.

The 1970s are an interesting decade for sci-fi; much like the rest of Hollywood was doing a lot of experimenting, the people making science fiction during that decade were telling stories with a more adult sensibility. Cronenberg's body horror started in that period, and films became more overtly satirical. And then, just as with the rest of the industry, George Lucas changed everything with Star Wars. I say "changed", while others would say "ruined"; after Star Wars, visual effects started pushing forward by leaps and bounds in a continuous cycle that hasn't stopped yet, but by popularizing fantasy, the studios started pitching it to a more mainstream audience. Filmmakers would become able create anything that they could imagine, but funding was only available for the most conventional fantasies, and the quirky 1970s-style sci-fi stories now looked cheap and tacky in comparison, at least at a superficial glance.

I don't necessarily think of the 1970s as a golden age, although it always gets a strong argument when the folks at the Boston Sci-Fi Marathon are hashing out what's playing this year and what should. I'm wary as a rule about putting golden ages in the past, and I like the visuals and world-building that the technology of today and tomorrow allows. A lot of neat stuff was made, though, and I regret that I didn't even get to see a quarter of what I hoped to during this program.

Death Race 2000

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2010 at the Harvard Film Archive (SF-1970)

Death Race 2000 was remade a couple years ago, and the end result was slick, but bland, almost completely unmemorable (aside from a line you wouldn't expect to come out of Joan Allen's mouth). The 1975 original, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: Tacky, with production quality straddling the border between B- and C-grade, but so utterly loopy as to be unforgettable.

It is twenty-five years in the future, in the year two thousand. The "United Provinces of America" have a President for Life, who keeps the masses amused with a cross-country road race where the participants not only score points for making it to checkpoints quickly, but for any pedestrians they run down on the way. This year's five participants are wild girl Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), swastika-sporting Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), classically-themed but dumb Nero the Hero (Martin Kove), would-be thirties gangster Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone), and the object of Joe's envy, the cybernetically enhanced and scarred Frankenstein (David Carradine). Of course, some in the land find this spectacle horrifying, and led by Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin), they have arranged for one of their own, Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), to be Frankenstein's navigator.

Death Race 2000 is a Roger Corman production, with all that implies. The budget is minuscule. It's filled with automotive mayhem, gratuitous nudity, guys looking for a fresh start - David Carradine had just walked off the set of Kung Fu - and people who would become a big deal later. Not just Sylvester Stallone (in one of his earliest roles), but cinematographer Tak Fujimoto would go on to a steady career shooting some pretty notable movies. You can't necessarily see the talent in a Roger Corman picture as you're watching it, but it's clear that he has always had the knack for putting enough quality people together that his movies are more entertaining than they should be.

And that's the way it is with Death Race 2000. Corman doesn't deserve all the credit/blame for this one - writers Charles Griffith and Robert Thorn give director Paul Bartel some legitimately demented material, and he executes it with panache. This is a movie whose main running joke is vehicular homicide, and the filmmakers make it work in a way that's genuinely funny. And while the satire may at times be ham-fisted (broad Nazi jokes? really?), it is executed with vicious relish, and sharp enough to still feel relevant thirty-five years later.

And the cast can sell it. David Carradine, for instance, is just what a picture like this needs, laid-back enough to flow with the insanity around him but still able to put unexpected nuance into his performance. Simone Griffeth brings more to Annie than just being easy on the eyes; there's enough intelligence to her character that their scenes together are dealings between equals worthy of our attention. Stallone, who would become the most famous later on, is fairly raw, but does show some of the charisma that would make him a major star in a few years. Like him,the rest of the cast does a pretty good job moving between broad stereotypes and intense, fearsome competitors.

They need to, because that's what makes Death Race 2000 work as well as it does: Bartel does an excellent job of maintaining the air of black comedy while often charging the film with legitimate suspense, giving us a stake in these characters even though most are monsters of one sort or another (heck, the notional heroes are pretty hard to like). And while the budget is low, what there is is put to good use, creating a future world that is surreal rather than detailed enough for the audience to find fault.

Just look at the cars and the people who drive them - Death Race 2000 is a live-action cartoon with nasty teeth, the sort that better filmmakers with more resources have great trouble doing well. It's got its flaws - spots where the low budget stops being charming and a bizarre coda - but for the most part, it's B-movie entertainment done unusually well.

(Dead link to) Full review at EFC.

Phase IV

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2010 at the Harvard Film Archive (SF-1970)

Here's an interesting question: If Phase IV were not a curiosity for being the only feature-length film directed by someone deservedly renowned for other contributions to the industry (assume that Saul Bass used a pseudonym that nobody caught on to the next thirty-five years, so it was the exact same film), would anybody remember it today? I say yes; it stands on its own as a genuinely creepy bit of sci-fi horror.

There's been a blast of radiation from space. Its effects aren't obvious, but in the Arizona desert, the ants are acting peculiarly - different species are not fighting each other over territory, and their natural predators are disappearing. Dr. Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) thinks that they are evolving, and he gets his government employers to assign him a mathematician, James Lesko (Michael Murphy), to help decode what appears to be communication among the ants. His suspicions appear to be well-founded - the local ants have developed a much more powerful hive mind than they had before. And they're on the outside of Hubbs's research station, while the scientists and Kendra Eldridge (Lynne Frederick), a local girl whose farm home has been overrun, are trapped within.

Ants can be unnerving enough as it is - they are already more organized than many groups of people, they've got weird angular shapes, and we don't have enough of an instinctive grasp of the square-cube law to look at one carrying a stick many times its size and understand that such strength wouldn't scale up. Bass and writer Mayo Simon are therefore pretty clever in that they don't do a whole lot to exaggerate what these mutant ants are capable of. They don't grow enormous, or suddenly start talking in a language we can easily understand. Bass and Simon refuse to humanize them, which makes them a more implacable foe.

He also does well to bring in a specialist to shoot the ants, much the way other filmmakers would bring Bass in to create a slick set of opening titles. Ken Middleham, a specialist in shooting the very small for the likes of National Geographic, gets us right down at the ants' level, and those sequences are amazing: Excellent documentary footage integrated seamlessly into the narrative, manipulated in a way to advance the plot. The special effects by John Richardson are excellent as well, and its a tribute to both that it's hard to tell where one man's work stops and the other's starts.

As well as the filmmakers present the ants, the human characters might be problematic for some. Traditionally, this sort of movie has a group of ordinary people with whom the audience can easily identify (or at least a reporter whose job it is to translate the scientists' cryptic utterances into something we understand). Phase IV really doesn't have that. Davenport's Hubbs is close to the edge to start with, a sort of mad-scientist in waiting. Kendra spends most of the movie in a state of shock, which Lynne Frederick presents quite believably (though her accent tends to waver between English and American). Lesko is our narrator and the movie's hero, but even he can sometimes seem very detached. Especially in the beginning of the movie, he makes the sort of jokes scientists make, in that the rest of us aren't sure whether or not he's serious.

Put it all together, and it makes for a difficult movie that doesn't necessarily age well. If you're able to get sucked into its world, Phase IV is relentlessly creepy and quite suspenseful; the ants prove quite resourceful in ways that are all the more threatening because they don't have a human face that takes pride in its cleverness. Of course, that concept can sometimes seem close to absurdity, and what looked high-tech and futuristic in 1974 is, well, quaint in the twenty-first century.

For all that, Phase IV holds up, and not just as an interesting footnote. It's definitely a weird movie, but more weird in that it sends shivers up the spine rather than causes one to wonder what this otherwise well-regarded guy was thinking.

Full review at EFC.

New York Asian Film Festival 2010: The Storm Warriors, Bodyguards and Assassins, Echoes of the Rainbow, and Ip Man 2

I had a bit of an aggravating start to Sunday - I had been smart and made plans a couple weeks in advance, getting a good price for the 6:30am Boston/NY trip on Megabus and reserving my tickets. I left plenty of time to find my way to Lincoln Center. I figured I was cutting things a little close when I got to Central Square in Cambridge at only five of six, but I figured that since there were plenty of other people there, a train must be coming soon.

"Soon" turned out to be twenty-five minutes. It made pretty good time getting to South Station - abut ten minutes - but it almost takes longer to get from the subway stop to the bus (up to the train station, across the tracks to the bus station, up two flights of stairs, and then to the far terminal for the discount buses to NYC). I tried to exchange my ticket for one on the 7:30, but they had just sold the last one. I could be put on standby, but I figured that if that didn't work out, there would be no way I was getting to New York by noon for The Storm Warriors. So I moved to the Fung Wah desk next door, dropped $15 for the 7am bus, and took that, grumbling that someone at the T owes me money.

It did at least set up a kind of an amusing situation in that the bus took me into Chinatown, but I would have to take the subway uptown a ways to spend the day watching Chinese movies. Not quite ironic, but amusing. Then I got myself kind of turned around getting from the 59th street D-train stop to the actual building, including a moment when I could see it but not see the way to reach it, prompting a Mainerly "you can't get there from here" to escape my lips.

I did make it, though. Spiffy building, nice stage and screen. They turn the air conditioning up pretty high, so I probably shouldn't have been wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but overall it was a nice way to spend an afternoon at the movies. I got pretty good seats, too, which meant I was right there for Simon Yam's entertaining introductions and Q&A's:



Honestly, Mr. Yam was a stitch; the movie he was genuinely excited about was Echoes of the Rainbow, and no wonder - he won a Best Actor award for it, and though he was in all four movies, that was the only one where he really had a substantial role. It made for some amusing moments, though, as his answers to the questions festival organizer Grady Hendrix would ask often seemed only tangentially related, swiftly switching over to a plea to the audience to come see Echoes when it played at 6pm. Not a whole lot did (or most of the group had gone to the Saturday show), but it meant that I was able to camp out in a good seat for Ip Man 2, which I watched with some of the crew that runs IFFBoston. I managed not to ask about why, in the dozen years I've been going to Boston area fests, nobody has managed to get Donnie Yen to come to town. There are a bunch of obvious explanations - he's a big star in Asia who works constantly (after a brief sojourn in L.A. that produced nothing but Highlander: Endgame and Blade II, he has done two or three movies a year this decade); the Boston event which would play his films (Films at the Gate) has zero money to do much in the way of guest relations; despite the fact that he spent a good chunk of his youth here, he may not have much affinity for the Boston area.

Unfortunately, the charge ran out on my phone sometime during Echoes - I suspect because I didn't properly quit the maps app after getting to the theater and the GPS drains like crazy. So no pictures of Sammo Hung.

After that... Supper at 11pm, falling asleep just about as soon as I got into the 1:30am bus, and arriving in Boston four hours or so later, just in time to get home and go to work. I think I'm just now back on a reasonable sleep schedule.

(So, no, I won't be doing the same thing this Sunday, no matter how badly I want to see Confessions despite it not being on Fantasia's schedule...)

The Storm Warriors (Fun Wan II)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)

My monthly pull at the comic shop is pretty international: North American, British, French, Korean, Japanese. No Chinese, though; not much of that has made it to America in translation. Which means I can't say for sure whether or not The Storm Warriors is the closest thing to a faithful translation to the screen, in story and style, that China's martial-arts comics have received. On the other hand, it is pretty much what you'd expect to come of giving Danny & Oxide Pang a bunch of money to make a martial-arts fantasy epic.

In true comic-book fashion, though, we open on a cliffhanger - invading villain Lord Godless (Simon Yam) has captured the legendary hero Nameless (Kenny Ho) and many of his men. A rescue operation is mounted, but Nameless is poisoned and weak; he sends three of his group - Cloud (Aaron Kwok), Wind (Ekin Cheng), and Chu Chu (Yan Tang) to call upon reclusive Lord Wicked (Wong Tak-bun) for help. Given that Godless's son Heart (Nicholas Tse) is rampaging across China, Wicked opts to use a short-cut, teaching Wind to tap into "the evil way" while Nameless transfers his remaining power to Cloud. Wicked opted to teach Wind because he displays more self-control, but his training is interrupted. As Godless and Heart approach the Dragon's Tomb, will Wind's self-control hold, or will Cloud have to stop his comrade?

At first glance, The Storm Warriors doesn't necessarily feel like the place where an uninitiated audience would feel comfortable jumping in; it's not just an adaptation of a story from a long-running comic book serial, but also a sequel to 1998's The Storm Riders (Kowk and Cheng return from the first film). It is, however, fairly easy to get into. Despite having a vast mythology to pull from, the story in Storm Warriors is fairly self-contained and easy to grasp. And as complicated as these mystical fighting universes can be - at least, based upon their Korean and Japanese cousins - the Pangs and their co-writers don't ask the audience to remember a lot of detail: If you can understand that Wind tapping into an evil force is going to have an effect on him - your basic "power corrupts" scenario - you're about 75% of the way there.

Full review at EFC.

Shi yue wei cheng (Bodyguards and Assassins)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)

Before Bodyguards and Assassins, the festival presented Development Hell, a documentary not about the making of this film, but of the collapse of multiple attempts to shoot it under multiple titles over decades. Unlike many cursed productions, this one made it to screens in impressive fashion, with an all-star cast and extraordinary production values, at least providing the filmmakers with a happy ending.

In 1906, the Qing Dynasty still ruled China. Would-be revolutionaries were routinely assassinated, and the man who would later become known as the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, lived in exile in Japan. But in October, he would come to Hong Kong ot meet with other revolutionaries, a golden opportunity for Mainland assassins. Empress Cixi sends her top general, Yan Xiao-guo (Jun Hu), to spearhead the attempt. Security is meant to be handled by former general Fang Tian (Simon Yam), but Yan strikes first, leaving matters in the hands of a ragtag group: Li Yu-tang (Wang Xueqi), a businessman who had been satisfied to merely donate money to the cause; Chen Xiao-bai (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who edits the newspaper Li owns and also tutors Li's son Chung-guang (Wang Bo-Chieh); A-si(Nicholas Tse), Li's rickshaw boy; "Master Liu" (Leon Lai), a once-proud man reduced to vagrancy; Fang Hong (Li Yuchun), General Fang's 16-year-old daughter; and "Stinky Tofu" (Mengke Bateer), a giant of a street vendor who was once a Shaolin monk. The English have told the police to stay back, but one corrupt cop, Sum Chang-yan (Donnie Yen) is spying for Yan, less for ideology than because he still carries a torch for Li's young wife (Fan Bingbing).

Bodyguards and Assassins is a lot of movie; it runs 139 minutes and in that time gives all of its characters time to define themselves to the audience. They don't necessarily grown and change very much over the course of the film - the bulk of the action takes place over a period of less than a week - but director Teddy Chan, the editors, and the four credited writers do an excellent job of balancing the various characters. We learn just enough about each to grow fond of or interested in each one, but we're not smothered in unnecessary soap that unduly distracts us from or delays the action we paid to see.

Full review at EFC.

Sui yuet san tau (Echoes of the Rainbow)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)

Many filmmakers produce a movie like Echoes of the Rainbow at some point in their careers. It's an autobiographical story set in the place and time of the writer/director's youth, and though I'm not sure whether it's actually better than most or just less familiar (I can go a long time before seeing another New York teenager grow up with the mafia on the periphery), I liked this one. It's a love letter to Alex Law's youth, but a clear-eyed and well-made one.

The Laws live above their shop at one end of a quiet Hong Kong street. Mr. Law (Simon Yam) makes the shoes; his wife (Sandra Ng Kwan Yue) sells them. They have two sons. The younger, "Big Ears" (Buzz Chung), is about seven or eight years old and our narrator; he's a troublemaker in school and likes to nick things out of it. Older brother Desmond (Lee Chi-ting) is an excellent student and athlete at a private English-language school. He's seeing a nice girl, Flora (Evelyn Choi). Money-wise, the Laws don't have much, but they have a roof over their heads. A typhoon threatens that, but it's what they discover afterward that shakes them more.

The street that the Laws live on in Echoes of the Rainbow is a real place; it was actually marked for preservation rather than demolition after the film's success at the box office. What we're seeing in the movie, of course, is a bit of a fairy-tale version of the place, but Law isn't hiding that; he occasionally edits in snippets of home movies that show it as much more crowded and somewhat dingier. It's actually a nice effect, acknowledging that we're seeing the story nostalgically, from the perspective of young Big Ears, but also showing that the reality does not actually contradict his experiences.

Full review at EFC.

Ip Man 2

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)

When I reviewed Ip Man last year, I was enthusiastic, comparing it to classic Shaw Brothers and Once Upon a Time in China. As I said then, that's pretty good company for a martial arts epic to be in, and Ip Man 2 doesn't stray far from it. Indeed, that turns out to be a bit of a weakness this time around; rather than being reminiscent of those great action films, Ip Man 2 feels more like an imitation of them.

The year is now 1950 (although none of the characters seem to have aged since the first movie, which took place in the mid-thirties). Wing chun master Ip Man (Donnie Yen) has left Fo Shan for Hong Kong, where an old friend allows him to use empty rooftop space for a martial arts school. Students are few and far between, though, until Wong Leung (Huang Xiaoming) shows up; impressed by master Ip, he soon brings his friends. The kids run afoul of the students of another master, Hung Jan Nam (Sammo Hung), who also runs the cartel of local martial arts clubs, demanding fees. And while Ip is trying to establish himself in Hong Kong, Hung is working on a deal to provide security and exhibit Chinese boxing alongside an exhibition by the Western champion, "The Twister" (Darren Shahlavi).

Let's start with the good: Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung fight, in a set-piece that Hung choreographs and directs. It's a situation meant to test Ip Man's skills, so kind of artificial, but fun to watch. Huang Xiaoming and the other younger actors in the movie are pretty decent as well. Hung, main director Wilson Yip, and company rely a little more heavily on wire work than the first movie did, especially during the centerpiece duel between Ip and Hung (and all of Hong Kong's other martial arts masters), but almost never to the point of people seeming to defy gravity. The fighting is fun to watch, and though the contrast in styles between Wing Chun and Hung Keut it not quite so obvious as in the first film, we are shown some of how it works - the lack of posturing, the simultaneous attack and defense. Toward the end of the movie, when the action moves from sparring to serious business, we're once again treated to Yen doing some amazingly quick, rapid-fire combinations.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 14 June 2010 to 20 June 2010

Normally my previews stick to the Boston area, but let's define that very liberally because...

• The New York Asian Film Festival begins today! Someday, when I find an employer who will pay me to travel from film festival to film festival and write about what I see, I'll be able to spend more than a day there on any given year. As usual, NYAFF focuses on popular asian entertainment, although it's not all action. The big three award winners in town this weekend, though, all hail from China/Hong Kong - up-and-comer Huang Bo (a stitch in Crazy Racer), ubiquitous Johnnie To favorite Simon Yam, and legendary martial arts star Sammo Hung.
  
  I'll be heading into NYC Sunday for Storm Warriors, Bodyguards and Assassins, Echoes of the Rainbow, and Ip Man 2. Certainly, many of these will play Fantasia (for me, NYAFF is partly a dry run in seeing multiple films in a day and handling a long bus ride), but since I'll be working some while there, this will give me flexibility. And it's a great show on its own, spearheaded by Grady Hendrix, a New York writer whose Kaiju Shakedown blog for Variety is sadly defunct, but whose weekly previews of Asian films in New York (Subway Cinema News) is hugely enjoyable even for those of us who only get to NYC once or twice a year.



• The Brattle kicks off a two-week tribute to the late, great Dennis Hopper with Blue Velvet and River's Edge tonight and tomorrow (25-26 June 2010); also playing are Giant and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Sunday the 27th), True Romance (Monday the 28th), a double-feature of Hoosiers and Rumble Fish (Tuesday the 29th), and a double feature of Night Tide and Witch Hunt (Wednesday the 30th and Thursday the 1st).



• More SF-1970 at the Harvard Film Archive. I'm actually planning on getting to most of this weekend. The MFA continues with Fellini and Videocracy, and if that's not enough Italian cinema for you, a run of Antonioni's The Girlfriends begins Wednesday.



• The Coolidge opens Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky on the big screen, with midnight screenings of Troll 2 Friday and Saturday night. Shockingly, George Hardy will not be on-hand... as far as I know.



• Kendall Square also opens the Chanel/Stravinsky movie, as well as Colin Farrell in Neil Jordan's Ondine. The Cremaster Cycle pops up for the first time in a while, with the notation that it will never be released on DVD. I'm always tempted to see it, because the stills look gorgeous, but it's a big commitment for something that only runs a week and whose publicity talks about it being art about art and creating art, which makes me wonder how far up his own rear end Matthew Barney really is.
  
  The three programs will be bouncing around the Kendall's schedule, which should also be watched carefully because Love Ranch with Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci (apparently, neither dead nor retired) opens Wednesday the 30th, compressing Solitary Man and Please Give to half-screens for a couple days. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is now down to two shows a day, as well, which is still amazing staying power for a movie that opened back in March and whose sequel comes out in two weeks.



• Cyrus, Grown Ups, and Knight and Day open at the mainstream theaters. Well, the Harvard Square Cinema for Cyrus, but the IFFBoston alum is on two screens there. Speaking of IFFBoston, Micmacs migrates to the Somerville Theatre, which also has Wattstax on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of its rock film series, and an indie comedy by the name of Wah Do Dem opening in the digital screening room (American, despite the odd name; I suspect it will be explained as something from Jamaica, where the movie is set).

Awesome ballgame; it was Manny Ramirez's first visit to Fenway Park since his trade to the Dodgers (and all the soap opera that led up to it, and although I could have done with fewer people booing the man - I tend to think that someone who can boo the MVP of the 2004 World Series has no business being a Red Sox fan - the Dodgers fans made up for some of it. (Tangentially, I suspect that even with the down economy, the Fenway sellout streak isn't going to be in any danger anytime soon; it's too much a destination on its own, so that even when the locals aren't buying, the visitors and tourists are) A highly-touted prospect made his big-league debut, the Dodgers' bullpen got taken to the woodshed in a crazy inning, and the whole thing ended with Josh Bard striking Manny out to seal the win.

I picked up a couple "free" tickets for Toy Story 3 for buying the previous films on Blu-ray (quote because even for kids, $8.50 isn't going to get you a whole movie ticket for something released in 3-D/IMAX), but didn't check to see if they offered them for the furniture stores. It probably wouldn't have mattered, as it would have been tough to use them when ordering online, and that was a necessity - when I arrived at Jordan's for the 1:20 show at 12:30-ish, there were signs saying that they were sold out all day, with maybe an 8:30pm show available. And to think they're only showing it for 12 days, so that The Twilight Saga: Eclipse can take over the screen. I half-expect it will be showing up at the Aquarium after that; this movie is just too good (and popular) to stay off the gigantic screens.

Toy Story 3)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2010 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (The IMAX Experience)

Toy Story 3 is Toy Story 2 redux, but that's setting sights high rather than cashing in - after all, they did wait over ten years to go back to that well. And while there is something a little disappointing about treading the same territory twice, it sets up a finale that pays off the questions raised in the second film.

As Pete the Prospector said back then, kids grow up. Andy (voice of John Morris) is seventeen and heading to college, and his toys haven't been played with in a long time. Andy selects cowboy doll woody (voice of Tom Hanks) to come to school with him, but puts his remaining toys - Buzz Lightyear (voice of Tim Allen), Slinky Dog (voice of Blake Clark), Bullseye, Jesse (voice of Joan Cusack), Rex (voice of Wallace Shawn), Hamm (voice of John Ratzenberger), and Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head (voices of Don Rickles and Estelle Harris) into the attic. A mix-up has them at the curb on trash day, and though they escape, they decide they're better off joining the toys Andy's sister is donating to a local day care center). The senior toys there, Lotso Huggin Bear (voice of Ned Beatty) and Ken (voice of Michael Keaton) seem welcoming, but... Well, what follows is a madcap delight as Pixar spends the bulk of the movie doing the two things that Pixar does best, before getting to their more recent skill.

The first is to introduce a whole raft of new characters - not only at Sunnyside Day Care, but in the bedroom of a little girl who goes there. It's a riot of creativity to rival the first film, every new toy with a fully-realized personality and voice that fits their design perfectly - and not always by being exactly what you expect! One thing that is nice to see this time around is that there are more women and girls in the cast; the previous two films in the series were by and large boy-toy stories, and this really feels like a broader, more varied cast.

Full review at EFC

Revenge of the Grindhouse!

I'm not totally immune to enjoying schlock and camp, although I'm not nearly as fond of it as some of the folks in attendance at the Brattle's Grindhouse series, especially guest programmer/host Lars Nilsen, who delivered long, enthusiastic introductions for everything that played that weekend. The man seems sincere about his love for this stuff, although there were times when he seemed too forgiving; Black Cobra got a long spiel on how maybe these movies don't do things like "telling a story" well, but make up for it with unusual cinematography or the like.

I'm not sure I agree with that; I think that's making excuses to a certain degree, like the talk on how we're getting added authenticity by screening them on scratched-up 35mm prints that are in full yellow-layer decay. And I suppose that creates an atmosphere of sorts, but I'm not sure about fetishizing sub-par work, whether in direction or the quality of the film. I presume these movies looked nice at one point, and they should be appreciated for what they are, not as targets of derision.

That's also part of why I didn't see nearly as much this year as I did in the last Grindhouse series the Brattle held; that one had things like Truck Turner, Rolling Thunder and Darker than Amber which were maybe not mainstream or polished, but which could be appreciated on their own merits. It seems like the entire line-up for "Revenge" was about tacky stuff where the idea is to point at them and laugh.

Black Cobra (Eva Nera)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 June 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Revenge of the Grindhouse)

Leading lady Laura Gemser is very pretty and gets undressed quite a bit. There are snakes, and a weird rivalry between two brothers, with one played by a slumming Jack Palance. And... It's kind of boring. Host Lars Nilsen wasn't kidding when he said that sometimes a kind of "sex fatigue" sets in with these movies; as good looking as Gemser and the ladies who share her bed are, it's a contrived and hollow exhibition.

Loaded Guns (Colpo in canna)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 June 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Revenge of the Grindhouse)

Ursula Andress had a short peak as a movie star, if she ever was one: A memorable entrance in Dr. No and an adaptation of She that occasionally claws its way out of the vaults and onto home video. Of course, that's not her entire career - as much as Hollywood has always chewed young beauties up and spit them out, she kept working in Europe. Loaded Guns isn't a great addition to her filmography, but it's much better for having her in it.

She plays Nora Green, a flight attendant with a two-day layover in Naples. A passenger asks her to deliver a note, which turns out to be a threat to gangster Silvera (Woody Strode) from shadowy criminal mastermind "Americano". He doesn't kill the messenger, but roughs her up a bit. She's found and taken in by acrobat and former boxer Manuel (Marc Porel), and though she seemed to go down easy at first, Silvera doesn't know what he's gotten himself into.

It's a very silly movie, with chase scenes straight out of the Keystone Kops, a silent comedic sidekick who gives a much better impression of being a clown than the actual clowns who attempt to chase Nora down (Silvera's home base appears to be circus), and Manuel's bed conveniently turns into a trampoline when a fight breaks out in his remarkably spacious apartment. The music is something out of the circus, too. The really strange thing, though, is that for as ridiculous as its details are, the story is played rather straight; Silvera is no joke and nothing in the set-up winks at what goes on in the crime story.

Full review at EFC.

Teen Lust

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 June 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Revenge of the Grindhouse)

Believe it or not, when you type "Teen Lust" in the IMDB's search box, it brings you directly to this movie. Apparently there's no fifties/sixties cautionary tale by that name, no foreign film with a title that translates to that, nothing with that as an alternate title. Maybe that would change if I said to include porn. The really funny thing, though, is that James Hong's 1979 exploitation piece focuses on the picture's "good girl".

That girl is Carol Hill (Kirsten Baker). Her mother (Dolly Carolla) is a lush; her father (Stand Kamber) is uncomfortably affectionate. Her boyfriend Terry (Perry Lang) doesn't complain too loudly when his ex DeDe (Lee Ann Barnes) tries to hook up. Carol and her best friend Neeley (Leslie Cederquist) are participating in an after-school program with the local police department, which promptly puts them to work as bait for the vice squad. She's also got a mentally retarded neighbor, Dustin (Michael Sloane), with a trust fund that her mother wants to fix her up with.

There is no credited writer on this movie, with director James Hong generally given the blame. However, this is absolutely a movie that I could see being produced with no detailed screenplay; it's a series of episodes that each have the germ of a funny idea but without much in the way of funny dialogue or a solid zing at the end of the scene. In fact, some of these bits seem to directly contradict each other, even though one wouldn't be taking place without what happened in the other!


Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 7 June 2010 to 13 June 2010This Week In Tickets: 7 June 2010 to 13 June 2010

What I saw last week, below the page. Finally, the major studios are releasing things worth going out for, but it's the local bookings that have really been fun this summer

• I am extremely excited about the Harvard Film Archive's SF-1970 series, which plays like a greatest hits of one of science fiction's most exciting decades on film. With one exception, they all were made between 2001 and Star Wars, and there's plenty of classics and curiosities over the next couple weekends



• Toy Story 3 grabs darn near every digital 3-D and IMAX screen this weekend, as it likely should. Sure, it looks like we're going to see a clueless Buzz again, but I'm curious to see what sort of metaphor for growing up Pixar sneaks in there. It will certainly keep Jonah Hex on the back-burner, which is probably just, as it looks like it does a terrible disservice to a classic character who has a great comic on the stands right now.



• The MFA offers The Films of Federico Fellini,and stays in Italia for Videocracy, a documentary on how an Italian TV magnate influences his nations politics to a degree that Fox News can apparently only dream of.



• The one-week warning at Kendall Square applies to Stonewall Uprising, a documentary on a gay bar that stood up to police persecution back when closets were very, very deep. Filmmakers will be present at the Friday evening show. Also opening are another pair of IFFBoston films: Winter's Bone, which is fantastic, and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which was coincidentally moved to a smaller screen at IFFBoston because of the high demand for Winter's Bone.



• Winter's Bone also opens at the Coolidge, which also opens another pair of IFFB films on top of that: 8: The Mormon Proposition, and Micmacs. Midnights are familiar bookings: The Room and "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" on Friday, The Human Centipede and Serenity on Friday. The Whedon screenings are expensive, but for charity. Special screenings include the Goethe-Institut presenting Berlin 36 and Big-Screen Classic The Girl Can't Help It.



• The Brattle offers organic-food documentary Fresh, late shows of Harmony Korine's new thing, Trash Humpers, and a Monday evening presentation from The DocYard, 45365.

Nice to see that somewhat full up again, isn't it? It would probably be even more full, but I came home from Air Doll to find my gas shut off due to some clerical error, and I wound up waiting around until 8pm or so on both Wednesday and Thursday to get it turned back on, as all the technicians who could do that were busy with emergencies, or so they say. If I'd known that was going to happen, I absolutely would have braved the crowds converging on the Coolidge for a Robyn Hitchcock show!

I am extremely glad I saw Splice, and I hope some of my friends see it soon, and it falls squarely into the category of "film I want to talk about but can't without giving the good stuff away". If I had really been thinking when I started writing this week's reviews, I probably would have paired it with Air Doll for a little compare-and-contrast action, as they both are, in broad strokes, movies about things brought to life and... Yeah, can't go farther. Both also kind of falter in the last act, but I think Splice holds together better because it's got a more interesting story to tell. Admittedly, my preference for hard science fiction over "magical realism" kicks in, but I do think that it is, on the whole, a much more solidly put-together movie.

Black Cobra (Eva Nera)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 June 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Revenge of the Grindhouse)

The Brattle's recent "grindhouse" series will get their own posting in a few days, so I'll be fairly quick with this one: Leading lady Laura Gemser is very pretty and gets undressed quite a bit. There are snakes, and a weird rivalry between two brothers, with one played by a slumming Jack Palance. And... It's kind of boring. Host Lars Nilsen wasn't kidding when he said that sometimes a kind of "sex fatigue" sets in with these movies; as good looking as Gemser and the ladies who share her bed are, it's a contrived and hollow exhibition.

The A-Team

* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 June 2010 at AMC Boston Common #17 (first-run)

People have been trying to make a movie from The A-Team for a long time. You can tell just from the opening credits, which has a long list of producers and production companies that worked on the picture at one point,and though the movie wasn't made on their watch, they still maintain some small interest that merits a courtesy credit. What's surprising is that it doesn't feel like a cobbled-together mess, in part because Joe Carnahan and company follow the relaunch playbook.

That playbook was written with Batman Begins, applied to James Bond in Casino Royale, and tested with Star Trek. It's pretty simple: Put together a good cast, keep the good stuff, jettison the stuff that makes for easy parody, and give the audience a previously untold first chapter. The first part: Check. They come close to going overboard on the last one. It's the middle two that are tricky, because a large part of the appeal of the original TV show was arguably its campiness. How do you reconcile that?

Here, it's by substituting movie-crazy for TV-crazy. As Jessica Biel's character tells us, "they are the best, and they specialize in the ridiculous"; so we get set pieces way beyond the budget of a 1980s television show but with the same insane abandon, including a couple of bits of insane aerial action (to go with the team's insane pilot) that Stephen J. Cannell couldn't have dreamed of dreaming of. The end result is a movie that, despite its sometimes convoluted plotline, is almost never grim. Impossible, oh, absolutely, but it's a different kind of absurdity, one to be marveled at rather than scoffed at.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Splice

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 June 2010 at Regal Fenway #1 (first-run)

Splice is an independent film that has been cleverly disguised as a big-studio summer movie, so a fair portion of the audience may feel uneasy as they watch it. More uneasy, that is; writer-director Vincenzo Natali isn't just throwing the popcorn-movie rhythms off, but finding ways to creep out even a jaded audience.

The near-future potential of genetic engineering will do that. Genius team Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) have strung together a number of breakthroughs to create "Fred" and "Ginger", a pair of synthetic organisms whose genes may contain a bounty of easy-to-isolate (and patentable) DNA sequences. They're ready for the next big challenge, but their employers (Simona Maicanescu and David Hewlett) opt to scale the program back, so they carry their work out in secret, working with human DNA. Though only meaning to see if such splicing is possible, they don't account for the embryo's accelerated growth, and soon have a small tailed biped on their hands.

Though the science in Splice is likely better than the typical Hollywood sci-fi/horror flick in that it's probably only 75% bull, Natali and company are able to make it seem authentic by not obviously overreaching early, and they do seem to at least know enough about the process and people involved to make Clive, Elsa, and "Dren" (the name they give to their creature) fascinating to watch. These guys seem like real hotshot science nerds as opposed to the usual socially-inept pop-culture obsessives we usually get. More than that, Natali recognizes and presents the process of incremental discovery as fascinating, enough that the movie doesn't need jumps or constant peril.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Air Doll

Though it was only scheduled for a one-week run, I suspect the people responsible for booking movies at Landmark Kendall Square expected a bit more from Air Doll. It's weird, sure, but Kore-eda's films have done well in the area before (I think both Nobody Knows and Still Walking stuck around for a wile), Bae Doo-na is a bit of a known name, and its combination of whimsy and kink might cross over between audiences. It was booked on screen #2, rather than one of the smaller ones (screens #6-9), so they seemed to have some confidence in it. It went quietly after a week, though, and the show I went to was pretty sparsely attended.

That's probably fair. It's easy to see why a certain segment of critics and audiences will like it; it's artsy but not hard-edged, and it is pretty clearly saying something. For me, though, it didn't quite work. It reminded me of last year's Tokyo Sonata, which got pretty weird in the end, threatening to go completely off the rails. I wound up being pretty cool with it, but I could feel it losing other people in the theater.

Interestingly, bits of it reminded me of a book I read during vacation, Hiroshi Yamamoto's The Stories of Ibis. Not necessarily in big ways, but small ones, like how the translators for both use the word "heart" rather than "soul" when talking about inanimate things gaining self-awareness, even though it sounds a bit odd in both cases. Both have threads in their stories about how humans can love inhuman things, and whether this sort of one-sided affection is actually a bad thing.

Ibis, however, is a much better story, and not just because it fits my genre preferences more closely (hard science fiction versus "magic realism"); Yamamoto has put much more thought into how these nonhuman beings would think, and though the future of humanity in Ibis is arguably downright pessimistic, it is at its core much less cynical than Air Doll, which only seems to half-heartedly believe that modern human life can be more than hollow.

Kûki ningyô (Air Doll)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 June 2010 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run)

Air Doll is mostly sweet, as well as a little strange, and has a charming lead performance courtesy of Bae Doo-na. There's a clear metaphor for modern life lurking behind its fantasy premise, but once that's out in the open, there's not much else to it.

Hideo (Itsuji Itao) is middle-aged and single, and based on in his home life, it's not hard to see why: When he comes home at the end of the night full of complaints, they are made to his inflatable love doll "Nozomi", which he dresses, sits at the table, and moves around the apartment. One morning, as he leaves for work, the doll sits up on its own, eventually walking out of the apartment and into the city. Although her movements are initially jerky and awkward, she (Bae Doo-na) soon learns to imitate the people around her (and cover her seams with make-up!). Eventually, she gets a job in a video store, where she catches the eye of Junichi (Arata), a young clerk.

Filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (working from a manga by Yoshiie Goda) doesn't disguise the point he's trying to make, that many of us are as hollow figuratively as Nozomi is literally. There are multiple cases of the dialog running "I'm empty inside"/"me too", with varying degrees of solemnity. Once that's out of the way, though, Kore-eda and company seem to struggle to elaborate on it. Indeed, the filmmakers seem very uneasy about where to go next; they don't have much of a story about what it takes to fill the void inside, and they probably don't want Air Doll to be about the specifics of how Nozomi came to life or what that life implies, lest that overshadow the point they're making about modern life leaving people feeling empty.

Instead, they wind up unspooling a bizarre and unpleasant sequence of events. I can grasp the idea Kore-eda is going for here; it's a mirror image of the cutesy scenes of Nozomi being just adorably ignorant in the first act. Most of the bits work and have a point; unfortunately, the ones that don't flop so spectacularly as to blot the rest out. Kore-eda is already working on a potentially tricky high-wire with the film's mix of innocence and kink, so the last act winds up being a step farther than I'm willing to go.

The movie faltering is not the fault of the cast. Bae Doo-na is game for whatever Kore-eda throws at her, doing a very nice job of building a personality for Nozomi after the too-cutesy first act. She's not quite able to overcome the movie's sillier moments, but when she's given a moment to show Nozomi becoming a more complete person, she always nails it. Itsuji Itao and Arata are quite good as the men in her life, complementary cases of isolation who seem straightforward enough, although they have plenty of human complexity. There's also a larger cast of characters that Nozomi encounters repeatedly who do a nice job of fleshing out her world.

They're all lonely, of course, many just existing as more examples of the concept of being empty inside. After a while, that drains the life from the movie as surely as a puncture will release the air from Nozomi, and the cute inflatable woman gags can't quite pump it back up fast enough.

(Formerly posted at EFC)

This Week In Tickets: 31 May 2010 to 6 June 2010

If you're here for movies, you might as well stay above the calendar page, because I didn't see any movies last week while on vacation. Read a ton, rode a bunch of trains, checked out a lot of museums. Moviegoing is being saved for this and next week.

• The Brattle teams with Alamo Drafthouse programmer Lars Nilsen for Revenge of the Grindhouse. The vast majority look terrible, of course, but in the very best way.
  
  Speaking of the Alamo Drafthouse, which I know firsthand is a sweet place to see a movie or a dozen, the news about original owner Tim League returning as CEO mentions the potential for expansion across the country. I believe I speak for a number of people in the Greater Boston Area when I say they'd be welcomed with open arms. I don't know if the Circle Cinema is still movie-theater shaped enough to be easy to move into, although my idea tends to be the old Polaroid buildings in downtown Cambridge. But, anyway, it's clear the Alamo folks have friends up here, so... c'mon up!



• The Somerville and Arlington Capitol theaters are something I often call "1.5-run", so they often don't get a lot of individual attention, but this week a couple interesting things are opening there: The Capitol picks up Metropolis, so if (like me, dammit!) you missed it at the Coolidge, you've got a second chance. Somerville opens an intriguing true-crime documentary by the name of Cropsey (I believe in the digital screening room downstairs), as well as a pair of music-related features: Elvis:That's the Way It Is on Monday, and the director's cut of Woodstock on Tuesday and Wednesday.



• The Coolidge opens The Oath on Friday, with midnight shows of Dazed and Confused. Oddly, Micmacs looks to be delayed.



• The Kendall's one-week warning is for Belgium's Academy Award submission, The Misfortunates. Other openings there include a couple from April's local film festivals: Harry Brown opened the Boston International Film Festival; Solitary Man played IFFBoston.



• Speaking of former festival films and Austin, the MFA runs Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo from tonight to Sunday afternoon- one show a day, jumping around. I saw it at SXSW last year, and quite liked it. They've also got a preview of I Am Love which I saw at IFFBoston and liked much less.



• The Harvard Film Archive continues with a second week of Vittorio De Sica – Neo-Realism, Melodrama, Fantasy.



• The mainstream theaters open the new versions of The Karate Kid and The A-Team. Strangely, I'm looking forward to both of them.

Stubless: The Smithsonian, Sunday's ballgame.

The tickets on that page cover a week spent in three cities, without spending a whole day in one until Friday - I started Monday in Annapolis, checked out of one hotel, caught a bus to Baltimore, and checked into another. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were spent almost like a commuter, spending an hour each way on a train to Washington, DC. And while it's pretty darn cool that you can do that, I think I'd like to just do Washington the next time I'm there, if only so that I'm not looking at the time toward the end of the day. My cousin Laura told me I had to see them light the monuments up at night, but all three days I got nervous about sticking around until the last train back at 9pm. I also had a bit of a cold those days, the kind that just gets worse as the day goes on, never bad enough to make you really feel awful but kind of noticeable.

I spent the bulk of my time in Washington at the various Smithsonian museums, because the Smithsonian is, when you get right down to it, amazing. It's close to a dozen museums in close proximity to each other around the National Mall. Great big buildings, packed with treasures ("artifacts" seems too subdued for the amazing things you'll find in there), open to the public every day without charging admission. That's quite frankly mind-boggling; if you've got broad enough interests, you could build a full and economical vacation out of those buildings alone.

Heck, when I was planning my trip, I jokingly told my friends and family that I could probably spend a whole day in the Air & Space Museum alone. I entered at around 10:30, finished poking around what was in the lobby something like forty-five minutes later. The next time I checked the time, it was something like 5:30, and there weren't many trains on the Camden line left. It was exhausting at times, and a lot of the displays seemed to focus on early-twentieth century aviation - there's a Wright Brothers exhibition, a World War I gallery, and another section modeled on a 1910s air show. Very cool, and although there was a part of me that thought it was a bit repetitive, it probably did a good job of reinforcement.

(Some exhibits seemed to be a bit behind the times, though - a gallery on the planets varied between saying there were eight or nine, for instance, and the first thing you see when entering the gift shop is a wall filled with Fuji film, which I'm sure all the kids with their camera phones and digital cameras must have been very curious about!)

Tuesday was spent in the American History Museum and Natural History Museum. Both are filled with flat-out nifty things: I especially liked the Apollo Theater exhibition in American History, and probably had a big, stupid smile on my face when I saw Kermit The Frog there. Natural History, though... That place has dinosaur skeletons, a gorgeous display of gems and minerals, and many other fascinating things. I feel a little embarrassed that I can't remember which of the two had the display on Korea; even though it was a small one, there are lots of bits of it that I'll remember when I'm watching movies at NYAFF and Fantasia this summer, not the least of which is that the Korean alphabet doesn't have hundreds of letters, but around 22; I'd never realized that the complicated symbols were actually just two or three simple ones stacked one on top of the other.

Wednesday started out elsewhere, at the International Spy Museum. I was kind of curious about it because my brother Matt's employers were at one point going to be building an interactive attraction for it; I opted for the regular museum path, so I didn't see what the interactive portion was like. What I did see was pretty nifty, though - it's nifty seeing how much of the miniaturized spy equipment of fiction was real and how much was greatly exaggerated. Once I got out, it started to rain, and the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and Portait Gallery were right across the street, so I ducked in there. I mostly avoided the portrait gallery portions, but was more engrossed in the art museum than I expected. And that's not just because it's the building where relatively absent or restrained!

For the weekend, I stuck around Baltimore, really not going far from the Inner Harbor. Friday afternoon, I found a nice spot to sit and readbefore getting hungry enough for some fish & chips, then spent the rest of the afternoon on the four ships of the Maritime Museum. Even if you're not as methodical about checking out every square inch as I can be, it's still standing on the decks of a ship that took out slave ships during the Civil War, the last surviving ship from Pearl Harbor, a Coast Guard Lightship, and a submarine. That's cool.

Saturday was spent first at the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum, followed by its sister facility, the Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards, and then the National Aquarium. The Babe's childhood home was pretty neat,as was the Aquarium, which had plentiful rays and sharks and a traveling jellyfish display, though didn't seem quite so cool as the New England Aquarium in Boston (in fairness, I passed on the dolphin and "4-D" shows).

Of course, Friday and Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon, were spent spending watching the Red Sox visiting Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which was just a fantastic experience. I'm probably never going to love another ballpark like I love Fenway - I've been going there since Yaz's last season and sort of love that it was built almost a hundred years ago for playing and watching baseball, and has remained stubbornly ill-suited to anything else - but Camden Yards is a nice one. What I like most about it is that it is very much a part of its city (no mean feat, considering how parking tends to form a moat around places like this), to the point where the two blend into each other. It's also not ostentatiously quirky in its dimensions. And, even day of game, you can find good seats for less than you'd pay at Fenway, even considering that the O's jack the prices 50% when the Sox and Yankees come to town. Of course, the Orioles getting good might cut down on that.

The first two games were highly-enjoyable butt-kickings, with Friday featuring an especially fine performance by pitcher Clay Buchholz. Sunday was a tight game that went to extra innings, and also lasted long enough for me to miss the 6pm train north and have to settle for the 10:45pm one. Yes, that gets me into Boston at roughly 8am on Monday, which meant immediately turning around and heading for work. And after that... Well, that's next week.

This Week In Tickets: 24 May 2010 to 30 May 2010

If I were on any sort of official schedule, this would be late. It's late in part because I spent the three days at the tail end of the depicted week traveling to Annapolis, Maryland for a cousin's wedding and hanging out with that branch of my family tree through Monday. And though I didn't say it much or forcefully at the time - partly because it takes me days to figure out just what I mean, and partly because a chunk of the event involved drinking and noisy, crowded rooms (two things that make me excuse myself) - it was great. I have a large and fantastic family, not just because of my three brothers, but because of a ton of cousins, and every new marriage and new baby has just resulted in me knowing more people that I don't just love, but really, really like and enjoy being around. This is currently driving my youngest brother nuts in planning his own wedding, but the degree to which we are fortunate on this count is pretty darn remarkable.

I don't say this enough, in part because I don't see all these people enough, but I know enough people who don't have an easy time with their families that it's worth mentioning: I don't take this for granted.

Anyway, I'm in Baltimore right now, having planned to stick around an extra week, see some sights here and in Washington, and watch the Red Sox play the Orioles at Camden Yards. If I were in Boston, my priority would be...

• Metrpolis at the Coolidge! If you see nothing else this week, see this!
  
  I mean it. I bought tickets before realizing that I'd planned to be elsewhere. I kicked around the idea of coming back north for an evening because I wanted to see the Alloy Orchestra accompany this restored version with nearly a half-hour of footage not seen in 80 years an only recently found in Argentina. The Alloy Orchestra screening is sold out, but there are a dozen more after that in the one-week booking at the Coolidge (which is cramming a lot onto their screens this week - check the schedule



• An interesting group at the Brattle: Orson Welles Weekend, featuring a double feature of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons Friday and Saturday and The Lady From Shanghaiand Touch of Evil on Sunday. Also on the weekend, late shows of an apparently nutting lousy horror movie (Birdemic). The Red Riding trilogy pops up again Tuesday - Thursday. It's good.



• One-week warning at Kendall Square: Air Doll. I'm pretty sure some friends of mine must have seen it at Toronto, because it stars Bae Doo-na in a film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, and those are names in Asian cinema that tend to catch their eye. Also opening are Living in Emergency (with a Doctors Without Borders aid worker at tonight's 7:05 show), Holy Rollers, and IFFBoston Closing Night Film Micmacs



• At the HFA, one last night of John Ford at War, Saturday starts a couple weeks of Vittorio De Sica - Neo-Realism, Melodrama, Fantasy.



• The MFA continues the Boston Jewish Film Festival Encores and has just started a retrospective of Rialto's Best of British Noir. I may try to get in there for some of the lesser-known films, but you can't go wrong with Peeping Tom, The Third Man, and a lesser-known classic, The Fallen Idol.



• This week's major openers are Splice, Killers, Marmaduke, and Get Him to the Greek. I'm heard good things about the last, and interestingly mixed things about the first, but, man, is this the least exciting summer in recent movie memory or what?

Stubless: Slip & Fall (Liberty Hotel, 24 May 2010, 8pm-ish)

Both of the movies I saw last week were things I really wasn't sure of, and went to in part out of a sense of obligation. For Slip & Fall, I was asked, and while this was a busy week and I wasn't sure about the movie, I try not to miss movies where someone asks me to come to the screening. I sometimes don't know why people would come to me, but I also don't figure that turning screenings down will get me invited to more. For Robin Hood, I had one of those AMC rewards program free tickets that expired on the 28th, and, good lord, the options were limited: Iron Man 2, Letters to Juliet, and Robin Hood. I'd seen the first and hated every preview I saw for the second, so Robin Hoodit was.

(Also needing to be used: A restaurants.com gift certificate to Tommy Doyle's in Kendall Square, as I have three that expire at the end of July and you can only use one per month. When I bought them, the Chlotrudis group was going to Tommy's every other week before a movie, so I figured I had plenty of opportunity to use them, but since then, it's been all The Friendly Toast, all the time!)

Slip & Fall

* * (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2010 at the Liberty Hotel (Movie Mondays)

There's nothing less fun to write than that a locally-produced independent comedy isn't very good. You can skewer pretension with dramas, accept unambitious horror movies as just trying to get something made, but a comedy is just trying to entertain you, and when it doesn't, it's and uncomfortable, unfortunate thing.

Slip & Fall has a pleasant enough leading man in Sam Cohan, and Andrew Divoff is amusing as the piece's villain, but it's got a story that always seems forced when it should be rolling from one crazy situation to another. It never really feels right; throughout the whole movie, there's always this lingering question of why these likable characters are involved with these guys who are really just vile. William DeCoff at least pulls being humorously nasty off as a shyster lawyer, but Zofia Gozynska is given so little as the gold-digging Russian girlfriend that she just doesn't make sense. And while I get an appreciate what writer Jason W. Loomis and director Marc Colucci are trying to do at the end, legalistic arguments aren't a great finale for a comedy, especially since, in order to not have the movie be about Cohan's Danny succeeding by pulling a slip & fall scam on his college, they've twisted the lawsuit around into something unrecognizable.

Slip & Fall has some flashes of raucous crudity and surprising sweetness, but too many long stretches between them where things just don't make sense and aren't funny. There's a germ of something good in it, but the skill to get it out just isn't there.

Robin Hood (2010)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 May 2010 at AMC Harvard Square #4 (first-run)

Somewhere along the line, I'm sure, there's someone for whom Ridley Scott's Robin Hood is exactly what they want it to be. Likely not the original writers, who posited a story about the Sheriff of Nottingham tracking down a thieving terrorist, or most of the critics, who seem to feel that the Robin Hood story reached its platonic ideal in 1938 and a different telling is almost sacrilege. This movie has been twisted in a dozen different directions over the course of its production, and in some ways only works because enough talent is thrown its way to prevent any rough edges.

But, the thing is, it does work. Maybe not in the way one initially hoped, and in fact Robin Hood becomes a bit of a side story, compared to the political manouverings of Oscar Isaac's Prince John consolidating his power while his closest ally, Godfrey (Mark Strong), is helping the French prepare an invasion. That stuff is good, and engrossing, while the story of Crowe's "Robin Longstride" taking the place of the missing Robert Loxley in Nottingham seems forced and almost a little silly. Crowe, Cate Blanchett, and Max von Sydow do fine work with it, but there's also a sense that they're killing time until Robin can join the battle against the French in the last act. There's references to a storyline about children who have disappeared into the woods and gone feral, but it seems to have mostly been cut from the finished picture.

The end result is actually a pretty good movie, although not much of a Robin Hood story. Quite enjoyable for what it is, but it might be hard to see that if you're looking for it to be something else.