Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 21 January 2011 - 27 January 2011

It looks like things are starting to get back to normal after the winter's nap - multiple films being released in multiplexes, the boutique houses back on calendar schedules, and the academically-affiliated venues back showing films.

Now, getting to and from them could be interesting, what with the snow and all - this certainly feels more like a traditional New England winter than any I can remember in years.

• Talk of winter leads logically to talk of Siberia (right?), Peter Weir's The Way Back may not be the biggest opening this weekend - in Boston, it's only showing up at Boston Common and Fresh Pond - but it's probably the safest bet. Weir tends to make interesting movies, the scenery and cinematography in the preview is gorgeous (somewhat to be expected, perhaps, with the National Geographic Society involved), and the cast is awfully solid: Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, and Saoirse Ronan may not jump off a poster, but they're all folks I would like to see walking four thousand miles from a Russian gulag to freedom in India.
  
  Maybe not quite so prestigious but also likely worth a look is The Company Men, which features a similarly noteworthy cast. Writer/director John Wells is mostly known for well-respected television (E.R., The West Wing), and the preview kind of looks like it's trying a bit too hard, but the cast is excellent: Aside from local guys Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper, it seems like it's been forever since Tommy Lee Jones showed up on movie screens. And, hey, Kevin Costner, who I think could be pretty good in this sort of blue-collar supporting role now that his leading man days are apparently done.
  
  The other big opener is No Strings Attached, with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman. I've got to say, the preview makes it look like something I've seen before. In fact, at various points in its development, it went by the names "Friends with Benefits" and "F--- Buddies". There was a Friends (With Benefits) at the Boston Underground Film Festival last year that I liked quite a bit, which also went by "F--- Buddies" while being made, that seems to have the exact same plot, and there's another "Friends With Benefits" (sans parentheses) coming this summer with Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. I suspect the best of the three will not contain any members of the That 70s Show cast (or, if you want to be less snarky, the Black Swan cast), but I've got to admit, I will probably see this one on the basis of "Kevin Kline is in it" alone.



• Over at Kendall Square, they actually got back into the announced one-week bookings last week with Partir; this week the one-week warning is also on a French movie, Nénette, a documentary by acclaimed director Nicolas Philbert about an orangutan who has just turned 40 and has lived in Paris's Jardin des Plantes for most of her life. It looks charming, and while not long (about 70 minutes), it's presented with a short film, "Night Falls on the Menagerie".
  
  The higher profile opening is Another Year, the new film by Mike Leigh which chronicles a year in the life of a married couple in his typically low-key way. It features Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, and Lesley Manville.



• The week's Indian opening is Dhobi Ghat, which actually looks fairly conventional for a Bollywood product: A story of intersecting relationships in Mumbai, it's not a musical and runs a relatively comfortable 95 minutes. It played the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, so if you've been curious about Indian cinema but nervous about its odd reputation, this might be a good place to start.



• The Brattle Theatre begins a two-week "(Some of) The Best of 2010" series tonight with Inception. It continues through Wednesday with a Chloe Moretz double feature on Saturday (Let Me In & Kick-Ass), a pair of great leading ladies on Sunday (Isabelle Huppert in White Material and Tilda Swinton in I Am Love), Bong Joon-Ho's fantastic Mother on Monday, Cesar winner A Prophet on Tuesday, and Exit Through the Gift Shop on Wednesday. Several of the screenings will have introductions by members of the Boston Society of Film Critics. Check the calendar, because there have been some schedule changes to accommodate a couple special events.
  
  Those events include a nifty-looking screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre on Monday at 9:30pm; it's presented with the Boston Underground Film Festival and includes a special guest, actress Sabrina Dennison. Wednesday at 5:30pm, Race to Nowhere makes another appearance in the area, and someday this documentary about the unhealthily competitive environment in our schools will play at a time when I can get to see it. If you can make it to this screening, there will be a discussion with parenting/education expert Alfie Kohn afterward. And, on Thursday night, the Found Footage Film Festival comes to town with a program of oddities from the VHS age.



• The Coolidge Corner Theatre basically carries its programming from last week over, but has a couple of special presentations. The midnight show tonight and tomorrow is Primal a new bit of old-style Ozploitation featuring folks trying to survive a friend going nuts in the Outback. It's a quick preview booking before a Tuesday video release (they're actually screening the Blu-ray), but it sounds like fun. Monday night's Science On Screen program is Full Metal Jacket, which will have an introduction and Q&A by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, a "nationally known expert on combat trauma". And, on Thursday night, filmmaker Jesse Peretz flies out from Park City, UT, for the "Sundance USA" screening of My Idiot Brother, which has a heck of a cast (Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, and Emily Mortimer). It's sold out on-line, and probably at the box office, so consider this a reminder for those who already have their tickets.



• The Harvard Film Archive opens back up after a winter break with a massive presentation, the 25th Anniversary re-release of Shoah. Saturday and Sunday, both parts will screen - Part One at noon, and Part Two at 6pm. Part One also screens tonight at 6pm, and Part Two also runs Monday at 6pm. It is a titanic work - nine and a half hours, all told - but also a clearly important one.



• Emerson's film program also returns with a pair of Hungarian films. Tonight, director János Szász is present to screen and discus his second feature, Woyzeck, his 1994 adaptation of early nineteenth-century playwright Georg Büchner's most famous work (though his version is set in contemporary times). Tomorrow, they show 1972's Red Psalm by Miklós Jancsó. The family-friendly matinees are also back, with The Wizard of Oz showing Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening on genuine 35mm film.



• At the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Festival of Films from Iran continues. Note that Salve has been dropped from the schedule, with tonight's screening replaced by Please Do Not Disturb. That festival will be running through the 29th, but The Agony and Ecstacy of Phil Spector will be starting on the 26th for a five-day run (with one screening a day, at various times). The director will be present for that first screening, but on the others, it's "just" an hour and a half long interview with the legendary (and now infamous) record producer conducted during his first trial.



• I've failed to mention it several times, but the ICA has been presenting "The Art and Technique of the American Commercial" on and off for the past month as part of their film program; the screening on Thursday loks like it may be the last chance to catch it.



• The second-run shuffle has All Good Things popping back up at the Somerville Theatre, sharing a screen with The Social Network, despite not being very good. At FEI's other theater, the Arlington Capitol, Casino Jack grabs a screen, as does Tron: Legacy (in 3-D). The Studio Cinema in Belmont opens Black Swan, while the Stuart Street Playhouse bumps Love and Other Drugs in favor of more shows of the out-on-video The Social Network (which is also playing on full screens in Arlington and Waltham). Apparently, there are a lot of folks as lazy about seeing that movie as I have been.

My plan? Well, I've already got my ticket for My Idiot Brother, and the priority for the new releases is The Way Back, The Company Men, then No Strings Attached. In between, maybe I'll do the Brattle Saturday night (I never did get around to seeing Kick-Ass) and find a spot for Nénette in between.

This Week In Tickets: 10 January 2011 to 16 January 2011

Busy week at work + snow + all-day Chlotrudis society meeting =



After a whole day spent discussing independent film, seeing a couple of mainstream movies seemed like a good idea. And both turned out to be firmly in the "good enough" category - not great examples of their genres, but pretty ably handled. The particular genres are common enough that a good job isn't enough to make a person really fall for a movie, but when folks ask you about it, you can say "yeah, that was pretty good."

They at least aren't upstaged by the previews, although the ones before Green Hornet gave it their best shot. For example, I'm actually finding myself pretty excited about Thor, even though it's never been a comic I ever followed (and quite honestly, I tend to scratch my head when the guy shows up in other Marvel books). It looks like a really fun movie, though, and I'm kind of excited by the look of the thing - the safe thing to do would likely have been to give it a realistic, Viking-influenced style, but Kenneth Branagh has opted to Kirby it up much more than I expected. That, I think, is going to make it a lot of fun.

And the Transformers 3 teaser... I think I've seen it three times now, and every time, every time, it fools me into thinking it's going to be for something a lot cooler than Transformers 3. Fortunately, it's scheduled to come out while I'm usually in Montreal, so I suspect I'll be able to resist the temptation to spend $20 and/or a lot of time getting to it.

The Green Hornet

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 January 2011 at AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, digital Imax)

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: I respect the heck out of how Sony, Seth Rogen, and company have handled The Green Hornet. Rogen dropped enough weight that it wouldn't just be gags about a fat superhero - indeed it was going to be a straight-out action movie at one point. Then Stephen Chow got attached, wanted more comedy, and writers Rogen & Evan Goldberg had the good sense to say "Stephen Chow wants funny, we add more funny!". Chow drops out, and instead of getting some pliable non-entity - a Brett Ratner or Martin Campbell - they hire Michel Gondry, and apparently rejigger it to be a Gondry film. This could have been homogenized and forgettable, but for all its faults, it's not that.

The main fault, I think, is that the "clueless" dial is turned one notch too high on Rogen's Britt Reid. On the one hand, I admire how uncompromising they are in that - Britt is a danger to himself and others when he tries to be a superhero, and Rogen, Goldberg, and Gondry aren't going to back down from that with a prefab plot about him just needing to gain confidence in himself. On the other hand... Well, I didn't much dig it the last time Rogen went this way, in Observe & Report. The unpleasant lead can be a really hard sell, even when it is the honest route.

Still, there's plenty else to recommend the film: Jay Chou is a really great Kato, and actually does the buddy-comedy stuff as well as the action. Christoph Waltz is a hilarious but still threatening villain. And while there are only a few moments that are absolutely and obviously Gondry's, his distinctive visual style does show up, and the finale is a rather nifty alchemy of silly, cartoonish slapstick and clear, well-directed action: It displays a sense of the absurd that more conventional directors wouldn't have in them.

The $12 ticket was likely an overpay - though I suspect the 3-D conversion is pretty good as far as such things go, it's clearly not built into the film's DNA the way it is for others, aside from a very nifty end credits sequence. It's a worthwhile matinee, though, maybe more if the idea of

The Fighter

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 January 2011 at AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run)

The Fighter is a more conventional movie, and perhaps works better for that. It's a boxing movie, but a good one; I generally don't have much patience for the genre, but this one's got a nice cast, a straightforward storyline that doesn't so much avoid hysterics as it keeps them on a leash. You can see director David O. Russell and his cast walking the fine line between playing to the rafters and chewing the scenery. It's the sort of sports movie where the hero's athletic technique perfectly matches what's going on in his real life (take all the punishment life gives you, strike back when you're counted out), but that's okay, because there's no speech about it.

It's got some pretty nice performances, too. Mark Wahlberg does well as the film's stable center, giving us full and heartfelt emotion without yelling too much, Amy Adams does trashy & sarcastic better than one might expect, and Christian Bale leverages his eating disorder to even better effect than usual. Add very nice supporting performances by Melissa Leo and Jack McGee as the parents of Wahlberg's Micky Ward, and you've got a nice portrait of a loving, but far from perfect, family.

The Fighter isn't a great movie, but in a year as relatively unimpressive as 2010, it looks pretty good. It gets the job done, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 January 2011 - 20 January 2011

Happy birthday, Mom. I'd absolutely take you to a movie this weekend if you weren't way down in Florida.

• Only two major films open at the Boston multiplexes today - we are, apparently, spared The Heart Specialist, even though it apparently won the audience award when it played the Boston Film Festival way back in 2006 under the title "Ways of the Flesh" (Yes, I saw it then). We do get The Dilemma, though, and Brian's review at EFC intrigues me because he seems to be suggesting that the terrible preview is miscasting it by just showing the broad comedy I hope so, because I like Ron Howard and the cast enough to want it to be good.
  
  The other major opening is The Green Hornet, and buying a ticket for this is a gamble on whether the January release date is Sony dumping the movie or grabbing a slot where they will have the IMAX and 3-D houses for three straight weeks. The things that make me nervous abot this one are also what makes it interesting - for all "Seth Rogen, crimefighter!" sounds ridiculous, he's apparently made sure to tailor the script toward his director and co-star, and I'm very curious to know what a Michel Gondry superhero movie looks like. The question is whether or not to see it in 3-D; from reading reviews, it seems that the exact same scenes are convincing people that 3-D is either optimal or a disaster.



• Only one film opens at Kendall Square this weekend as they keep potential award contenders in place (sometimes by a thread, with 127 Days playing once a night for a second straight week): Leaving (or, in the original, better-sounding French, Partir), which features Kristin Scott Thomas attempting to leave her bourgeois husband Ivan Attal for the more exciting Sergi Lopez. For a while, I found it kind of amusing and telling that Thomas has more or less moved to France over the past few years, grumbling that there just aren't many parts in English-language movies for a woman of a certain age, a look at her IMDB page shows that she's basically been going back and forth across the Channel for her entire career.



• The Brattle Theatre opens Steven Soderbergh's tribute to Spaulding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine, and runs it through Thursday. Soderbergh is taking films of the famed monologist and cutting them into one virtual performance, after having previously worked with the late Gray on Gray's Anatomy. In a different sort of post-mortem story, Gaspare Noe's Enter The Void plays late shows - 9pm on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; 8pm Monday. Note that although the print calendar lists the full 3-hour director's cut, apparently the only print of that in North America is in New York this week, so the theatrical cut (which runs a mere 161 minutes) will be playing instead. On Sunday afternoon, there will be a special presentaiton of the documentary Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.



• The main shows at the Coolidge - The King's Speech and Black Swan - stay the same, with I Love You Phillip Morris moving to the 14-seat "GoldScreen", but there are some special features to check out. The winter horror series of late shows continues with Dead Snow, a Nazi-zombie movie with a major debut to Evil Dead 2. I didn't love it when I saw it a year and a half ago, but that was on a screener in my living room versus a crowd at the Coolidge. That's midnight tonight and tomorrow; Saturday night also has a midnight show of The Room. Saturday morning has a kid's show of Babe, and Sunday morning is the "Talk Cinema" screening of Bride Flight.
  
  The Coolidge is also running a selection of short films that played the Sundance Film Festival in 2010; the only one I've seen is Don Hertzfeldt's "Wisdom Teeth", but that's worth the price of admission on its own. Here's the list of what's included. It's a nice warm-up for the actual 2011 Sundance Festival, which even those of us who sure aren't going to use precious vacation time to go someplace even colder and snowier than Boston can follow, with five movies playing on demand and the Coolidge hosting a special screening of My Idiot Brother on the 27th (and yes, I don't mind telling you about it now as I already have my ticket).



• Speaking of one-night screening events that I already have tickets to, the Fathom Events presentation on Thursday (20 January) is Gantz, an adaptation of the ultraviolent manga. That's roughly 75% cool, in that it's a fun comic with crazy action, and this showing is actually roughly concurrent with the film's Japanese premiere. That it's being made by the director of the cute Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror is also amusing. The uncool 25% is that it's being presented dubbed. Honestly, who wants that? This is a likely hard-R sort of movie whose main market is people who buy chunks of comics that they read right-to-left for authenticity's sake. We can handle subtitles.



• The MFA has final screenings of Typeface and A Walk Into the Sea this afternoon and evening, but the bulk of the week will given over to The Boston Festival of Films from Iran. The festival runs from today (14 January 2011) to roughly the end of the month, with Mondays and Tuesdays off.



• Yamla Ragla Deewana is the Bollywood film opening at Fresh Pond today - or at least, the one with English subtitles. It's apparently about a Canadian-raised Hindu who learns he has a con-artist family in Varanasi, only to become entangled in his new brother's romance with a pretty Punjabi girl. That's not including the two Tamil-language and two Telegu-language films playing various times without subtitles, of course - I only track what I have the slightest chance of understanding.



• The second-run shuffle has The Social Network hanging on at most of its venues despite being out on video already, so those of us prone to procrastination still got a chance to see it on the big screen. The Somerville Theatre picks up The Tempest, which merits a second chance, while the Arlington Capitol gives Megamind some 3-D matinees. I hope they do the same for Tangled in a few weeks; I wouldn't mind seeing that in 3-D again.

My plans: Maybe get to that first night of Enter the Void tonight, especially if doing so means I have 23 nominations per category at tomorrow's Chlotrudis nominating meeting rather than 22. Get to a cheap-ish AM showing of Green Hornet in 3-D Saturday or Sunday morning. Fit in a couple award contenders in between then and Gantz on Thursday. Catch the Sundance shorts. Maybe actually for real start watching the screeners I've had piling up for the past couple years.

This Week In Tickets: 3 January 2011 to 9 January 2011

The first full week of the new year was, in fact, a full week:



Stubless: The Matsugane Potshot Affair (Friday, 7 January 2011, 7pm, at MIT E51-151) and A Gentle Breeze In the Village (Saturday, 8 January 2011, 7pm, MIT E51-151)

One more reason why I hold that Making Lists Is Stupid: The time spent working on This Year In Tickets over the past few days could have been used on full reviews of these films, many of which seem to have terribly little written about them.

Poison

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2011 at the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché)

Todd Haynes's first feature is interesting, and in some ways seems to be making a concerted effort to be interesting. It draws its inspiration from the works of playwright and novelist Jean Genet, and intercuts quotes from his work while switching between three apparently unrelated stories that take place in different time periods. The stories are not just different genres, but vastly different styles: "Hero", the story of a young boy who apparently killed his abusive father and then flew out the window, presents itself as a television documentary; "Horror", wherein a scientist disfigures himself and fears spreading this disease, as a 1950s B-movie pastiche; and "Homo", a tale of love and jealousy in a 1940s prison, recalls Ken Russell's more historical pictures.

At the time, Haynes was considered more of an artist than a filmmaker, and his ability to mimic these various styles is impressive, especially since what he's doing is not merely empty, mocking parody, but solid storytelling, coaxing convincing performances out of his cast, especially in "Hero". As co-editor, he also does a fine job of moving us between stories despite how potentially jarring the transitions could be.

Strangely, though, even though time is divided relatively equally between the three strands and the entire film clocks in at just under an hour and a half, it still drags a bit about midway through. All three segments start to grind at about the same point, which means that there's no relief going from one to another for a fifteen or twenty minute stretch.

Cluny Brown

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2011 at the Brattle Theatre (20th Century Fox 75th Anniversary)

I wish it were possible today for movies to end like Cluny Brown: The last five minutes (if that) are (1) the moment that you have been waiting for since meeting the two main characters, (2) a quick "happily ever after", and then (3) an equally quick last gag. Then "The End" comes up and you go home satisfied, with no endlessly scrolling credits.

And the ninety-odd minutes that get us to that point aren't bad, either. We know, from the very start, that sparkplug Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) does not naturally fit the sort of world where one's role is very much determined by the sex and economic class of one's birth, and we know that Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer) is instantly smitten with her. Cluny must, however, remain oblivious of this so that she can have an awkward courtship with the local chemist (Richard Haydn) who is entirely wrong for her, so that we can laugh at this Jonathan Wilson's priggishness, Belinski's annoyance, and Cluny's misplaced enthusiasm.

This is the sort of thing producer & director Ernst Lubitsch did so well; farce that has its participants exaggerated but not outrageous, with one joke following another in orderly sequence in a way that pokes fun without ever seeming mean-spirited.

All Good Things

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 January 2011 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

I certainly hope All Good Things was inspired by a true story, not because I would necessarily wish any of the events of this movie on real people, but because the existence of it then makes some sort of sense. It's a story that features almost every sort of weirdness you could want from a thriller - a writer must take a look at the machinations of the last act and think he would never get away with all that if he made it up.

But, wow, does it not pull together. Director Andrew Jarecki does not see this insanity and dive head-first into it like, say, a young Brian De Palma. Instead, he tries to go the "chilling because of the seeming normality" route, even after the normality is well and truly done away with. Ryan Gosling doesn't help; his character is completely lacking in personality, displaying just the briefest flashes of charisma necessary to get Kirsten Dunst's to fall for him. Dunst is OK, which likely makes her the best part of the movie. She's at least not a sad waste like Frank Langella and Phillip Baker Hall, showing up to collect paychecks between projects where they're probably great additions to the cast.

Matsugane ransha jiken (The Matsugane Potshot Affair)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2011 in Room 151 of MIT's Tang Center (Nobuhiro Yamashita retrospective; projected crappy video)

Most of the people who came out for this retrospective were fans of Nobuhiro Yamashita's previous film, Linda Linda Linda, and thus likely found this off-kilter mix of crime and family rather odd. As screwy Japanese movies go, though, it's almost straightforward in plot: Hikaru (Takashi Yamanaka) accidentally hits a woman with his car, and while she's initially believed to be dead, it turns out that she and her boyfriend are looking to recover a box of lost gold.

It's a straightforward plot, but Yamashita and his cowriters build an intriguingly tight set of relationships around Hikaru, his brother Kotaro (Hirofumi Arai), the rest of their family, and the small town that they live in. At times, it seems like two stories awkwardly tied together, and while they don't necessarily come together to become one larger story, it does present a perfect feeling of how a tight-knit community or family can create pressure on a person.

One thing I do wonder about is the sound mix, which tended to emphasize background noises to a strong extent; a lot of the times what was happening just off-screen is almost louder than what's going on right in front of us. This may be the relatively lousy source being projected, though - the subtitles on the legitimate DVD were apparently lousy, so an alternate source was used, one which had a lot of pixelization, so maybe the mix was screwy, too.

Tennen kokekkô (A Gentle Breeze in the Village)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 January 2011 in Room 151 of MIT's Tang Center (Nobuhiro Yamashita retrospective; projected DVD)

A Gentle Breeze in the Village is likely closer to what one might expect of the director of Linda Linda Linda, in that it's another coming of age story, but it also shares a fair amount of DNA with The Matsugane Potshot Affair in that it focuses on the denizens of a very small town, so small that the elementary and middle schools consist of single rooms in the same building, more than enough for the community's seven children. The tiny size of the community is a crucial part of the story, in that Migita Soyo (Kaho) finds herself attracted to Hiromi Osawa (Masaki Okada) not just because he's a good looking young man, but because he's the only person in town close to her own age - which also means that there is almost inevitably pre-existing ties between their families.

It's an intriguing set-up, although one that Aya Watanabe's screenplay perhaps doesn't take full advantage of. As good as the young cast is, Kaho in particular, it feels a bit constraining to limit things to Soyo's point of view. The end also feels a bit rushed - there's one thread that just takes up time without a resolution, and while the very end may be honest, it perhaps deserves a little more elaboration.

Still, the film as a whole is a clever look at growing up in miniature - the small community lets us see every piece of the social web that touches Soyo and how they interact.

Season of the Witch

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 January 2011 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

Man, I hope that this turd doesn't deter anybody from seeing Black Death when it comes out in a couple of months. They're superficially similar - dark ages knights heading through unknown territory to deal with a witch accused of being behind the plague - but Dominic Sena doesn't have the directorial skill of Christopher Smith, Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman combined aren't as awesome as Sean Bean for this sort of role, and let's face it... Witches aren't nearly as scary as witch-hunts, as we use the term in the modern sense.

(Similarly, it's tough to get really worked up over the preview for The Rite if you've already seen The Last Exorcism, or so I've found.)

Still, I think that even if you don't have trouble with the whole supernatural angle, it's not a particularly thrilling movie. It starts off goofy, with Cage's Behmen and Perlman's Felson going soldiering in the Crusades for a dozen years before seeing an innocent woman get cut down, at which point, whoa, wait a minute... No-one said anything about people getting hurt in this war! The party escorting The Girl (Claire Foy) is a pretty standard-issue group, and the final twist is a dud.

Black Death will be hitting theaters in a couple of months, so wait for that. It's a lot better.

The King's Speech

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 January 2011 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run)

The previews for The King's Speech make it out to be a very narrowly focused film about a man with a stammer who gets help from an unconventional therapist so that he can give a rousing speech to lead his country during World War II. It is that, of course, but the speech impediment turns out to be the least interesting thing about Colin Firth's "Bertie" - while watching him learn to get his words out is very nice, the reasons why he must are more interesting. This is the story of a good, but timid, man who becomes a reluctant leader because he has a sense of duty that his brother (Guy Pearce) lacks.

And, of course, he's surrounded by sensible people - Geoffrey Rush's Lionel Logue, of course, but also his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter). Rush gets the flashy, funny role, and he makes the most of it, playing up the exaggerated lack of bowing and scraping but also letting us see how quietly impressed he is, respecting the man rather than the office. And it's an almost-unfamiliar joy to see Carter in a good role - she's seemed to be in nothing but Harry Potter and Tim Burton freakshows for so long that one can be forgiven for forgetting that she is capable of playing something other than a Living Dead Doll.

This Year In Tickets: 2010

The official position of Jay's Movie Blog is still "Making Lists Is Stupid", so I'm offloading the year-end round-up to eFilmCritic. It's still not really a top ten list - it has 27 entries, goes back and forth between good and bad films, and is restricted not to films with an official 2010 release date, but covers anything I happened to see last year. Thus, it is probably the only year-end round-up you'll find on-line that includes three silent movies, digressions on how much fun it is to read Raymond Chandler, and contrasts I Am Love and The Good, The Bad, The Weird (no, I'm not letting go of that anecdote any time soon).

So, go read This Year in Tickets: 2010 over there, and then come back here for a quick rundown not of which movies I saw, but of where I saw them.

...

Back already? Well, here we go:

Landmark Kendall Square: 57 tickets

That number is boosted a little bit by the Boston Underground Film Festival - 17 films in seven days - and a little by seeing all three parts of Red Riding there one long Sunday. That this is on top is not surprising - if you live in the Boston area and like foreign/independent films, Kendall Square is your workhorse theater, with nine screens, fair warning on when things are only likely to run a week, and things tending to be handled pretty professionally.

An amusing statistical oddity is that, once you take the BUFF screenings out of the equation, which screens I see things on aren't close to evenly distributed. Somehow, I never saw anything on screen #8 at all, and over half of the remaining forty were either on screen #4 or screen #9. The latter, I get - I tend to see a lot of stuff last-minute, and so it's often migrated to the smallest screen - but I'm not sure why twelve of my forty non-BUFF trips there wound up on one particular screen. I'm guessing that's where the new releases tend to go, but not the big ones.

Brattle Theatre: 42 tickets, 10 for double features

Not necessarily all tickets - there's an IFFBoston show or two in there, as well as stuff like CineCaché where I don't necessarily get a ticket. Every time I go, I consider myself lucky to have the Brattle, a fantastic place to increase one's knowledge of film as a whole and see movies in the environment for which they were designed.

Concordia University, Theatre Hall - 43 "tickets"

Plus 31 at Salle J.A. de Seve across the street, and one at Place des Arts. Fantasia mades up about 22% of the movies I saw in a theater this year, which is a lot to cram into three weeks. And I'll likely do it again this year, and this time I'm going to go back to working in the office a little less and getting around the city a little more.

Somerville Theater - 40 tickets

I believe that all but one of those is special event related, whether it be SF/35, the Alloy Orchestra, IFFBoston, or the TerrorThon. It wasn't until November that I just went there to see a first-run movie, Love and Other Drugs. I suspect this will change in the new year, as they are on my way home from the new office space and have the best prices in the Boston area.

AMC Boston Common - 40 tickets

Roughly half of those are "AM Cinema" tickets that cost $6 (plus any 3D or "Imax" surcharges), because I am cheap thrifty. Unlike Kendall Square, these are pretty evenly distributed, although there are probably spikes around the 3D-equipped screens.

There's also some interesting outliers in what you'll find there; it's not just the mainstream stuff, but a few independent flicks, some foreign films (the Millennium movies all played there, for instance), particularly stuff aimed at the local Chinatown audience.

Stuart Street Playhouse - 13 Tickets

11 of those were for the Boston Film Festival, because I have a really hard time giving bad habits up.

Stuart Street is really the most frustrating Boston-area theater. It's a very nice room and lobby, the folks who work there are friendly and helpful, the snacks are reasonably priced, and I absolutely never go there because, despite proudly proclaiming themselves to be the only art-house theater in Boston proper, their programming is less adventurous than their neighbors on the Common (because it's a lot easier to take chances on one screen out of nineteen than one screen out of one) and their prices are still pretty high - $8 before 4pm, $10 after. That's especially irksome considering that these are often second-run films, stuff I've already seen somewhere else.

I wish I had good advice on how to make the place more enticing other than just being close. A friend suggested playing to the Chinatown audience (perhaps with cheap double-features one night a week) or the college kids. I think they need to update their website in a more timely fashion (it's often impossible to know what's playing that evening if you check the site on Friday morning). I hate the idea that a place like this perhaps can't be profitable, but I worry about it seeing 2012, quite honestly.

Coolidge Corner Theatre - 9 tickets

That's kind of crazy, to be honest - I think of myself as going there far more often, I know a bunch of people who work there, and I really like the place. I'm definitely going to get more value out of my membership this year.

Harvard Film Archive - 8 tickets, one for a double feature

I wind up going to the HFA in spurts, as they tend to have one or two programs be quarter that draw me in, and whenever I do, I think I really should get a membership and save some bucks. But, looking at the numbers, I don't really go all that much. Of course, if I had a membership and movies there cost a few bucks less, that would change the calculus, wouldn't it?

Regal Fenway - 9 tickets

Expect this to go up a bit in the new year, as I think their 3-D prices are a bit better than Boston Common's, their afternoon prices are about fifty cents less, and they are an easier walk home. The new RPX screen is also pretty nice, although I suspect it will take a particularly special occasion to get me to go there rather than the furniture store.

Entertainment Cinemas Fresh Pond - 4 tickets

Two Indian sci-fi musicals, two pieces of crap. I may go there more often this year, either because the Bollywood stuff continues to intrigue me or because they have decent prices and my new route home will have me changing buses at Alewife anyway, but probably not that much - it's got a lot of rooms set up in an unappealing fashion, with aisles down the middle and screens too high in narrow cinemas. It's a sad example of how partitioning large theaters can make for really crappy small ones.

Still, as much as I didn't like Echo's Pond and Ca$h!, I like the idea of them grabbing movies that don't fit the big multiplexes or the boutique houses well. Just find better ones (I have no idea why they haven't had the AfterDark HorrorFest there for the past few years). When I first moved to Cambridge, I went to this place all the time, but the new theaters that opened up at Fenway and Boston Common were worth the extra dollar. To get me to come back regularly, these guys are going to need interesting movies.

Institute of Contemporary Art - 4 tickets

Half for IFFBoston, half for Oscar shorts. I love going there, because the set-up of the theater is one of the coolest you'll ever see - curtains come down to block out the panoramic view of the harbor, and the suspended screen gives a sense of unreality - but they don't have many film programs.

Jordan's Furniture Reading - 4 tickets

The premium local movie theater experience, with the big, genuine IMAX screen, TempurPedic chairs, and individual "buttkicker" subwoofers for each person in the audience. The place to see big movies, although the trip to and from can eat the day.

Lincoln Center - 4 tickets

Done on one day, for the New York Asian Film Festival. I must admit to being a little disappointed at the move from the IFC Center, which is more conveniently located (or at least, it is for people taking the bus in from Boston). The AC was also going full-blast that day, too.

Museum of Fine Arts - 4 tickets

Like the HFA, I find myself going in spurts, as the programs grab my interest. I probably would have gone twice as often, truth be told, if they would program a few more screenings - just last week, I was talking to someone grumbling about how it was almost impossible to see Summer Wars there if you had a job.

That I missed the closest bus stop entirely on at least two occasions is entirely my fault, though.

New England Aquarium - 4 tickets

I love going here, either for the cool science docs they run during the day or the second-run IMAX films they run at night. Although, wow, they do keep some of the latter running for a long time. I was pretty sure that they would swap Inception out for Harry Potter 7.1 either when Tron: Legacy hit the other IMAX screens or Inception hit video, but so far, no plas to change that.

AMC Harvard Square - 3 tickets

One would think it would be higher, as they're an easy ten minute walk from me and a little cheaper than the other national-chain theaters, but the thing is, while the main screen is big and very nice, the other four have issues - as either converted balcony or backstage areas, they have funny shapes (the "balcony" theaters have the seats angled to face a larger screen) and spotty projection.

Chinatown Gate - 2 tickets

Well, shows, as "Films at the Gate" is an outdoor event that encourages audiences to grab snacks at local eateries before setting up in a vacant lot or park. It's always a cool event (weather permitting).

Paramount Center - 2 tickets

Despite some warnings about the Bright Screening Room, I like this new addition to the Boston film scene quite a bit; ArtsEmerson is curating interesting programs, including attempts to expose kids to a broader variety of film.

Two suggestions to those heading there, though: (1) There's no concession stand, so the nut roaster across the street is your friend. (2) If it's on video, sit fairly far back. That's good advice everywhere, but The Azemichi Road really didn't look great from my perch fairly close to the front.

Regent Theater - 2 tickets

Both for Spike & Mike shows. Prior to this year, I had no idea Spike & Mike was still a going concern; I though that its disappearance was one of the main motivations for Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt starting The Animation Show. The Regent is kind of a nifty venue, but their film programs are irregular, so you have to watch their site to see if anything good is scheduled.

Apollo Theater - 1 ticket

Easily the coolest place I've ever seen a movie, and likely the coolest place I ever will see a movie. I could kick myself for not getting my ticket earlier, as I wound up pretty close to the aisle rather than the center. When a publicist sends you information about a new silent film playing one night at a legendary venue with an amazing group of musicians accompanying, well, that's one of those situations where you should see the ticket confirmation email in your inbox an hour later with no clear memory of actually ordering it, because doing so is an entirely involuntary reflex action.

Arlington Capitol - 1 ticket

... and that was back in January. That will go up this year, as the 350 bus I'll be taking home from work starting in two weeks runs right past it, they've got an ice cream shop, and the prices in general (and 3-D in particular) are more than reasonable.

Liberty Hotel - 1 screening

There are a number of video-based screening series in the city, and I don't keep up with most of them because they're video and not always easy to get to. I got a specific invite to this one at the Liberty Hotel (an IFFBoston sponsor which is actually a former prison), and... well, I've got no idea what happened to the series afterward. It was a nice idea in a nice spot, but I was never really sure who it was for; it didn't have an "open to the public" vibe, but I don't know if the guests at the hotel are really going to be down for unreleased movies.


... and there you have it, 330+ movies saw before we even get into video (which wouldn't add that much; I almost don't know what I even own a Blu-ray player). I'm half-tempted to make averaging one movie seen in a theater per day a goal for the new year, but , well, that would be nuts. So, of course, I'll probably end up doing it anyway.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 January 2011 - 13 January 2011

Hollywood likes to get into the new year slowly. Expand some awards contenders (or would-be awards contenders) from their small New York/L.A. qualification runs, put out stuff that has been sitting on the shelf for the better part of a year, and maybe give something a quick re-release to re-establish its awards buzz while also pushing the imminent video release a bit. Next week, things start to move a little more, but for the most part, we're in the January/February doldrums.

• It doesn't just seem like I've been seeing previews for Season of the Witch for a solid year; the first trailer appeared back in November 2009; I believe a March 2010 release was initially planned. This sort of delay can mean a lot of things, from a bad movie looking for a slow weekend to contract clauses related to Universal selling their Rogue label to Relativity Media, and I half-suspect Relativity is looking to get it out before Magnet's similarly-themed Black Death. Still, it's Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman in a Dark Ages action/adventure, and even in bad movies, Cage seldom turns in a boring performance.
  
  The other large opening is Country Strong, which apparently had a qualifying run last month. I don't know if that will get it much notice for things other than "original song" - the trailer makes it look like a pretty basic "musician with addiction problems" movie (I'm tempted to make that a genre tag) - but that's not nothing. I'm a little curious, because I like Gwynneth Paltrow (this may be an excellent reason to get to that DVD of Duets I bought because I like her and Huey Lewis but never watched), wonder if Garrett Hedlund can do better than Tron: Legacy with a director who specializes in dealing with actors, and have enough country music fans in my family to know that Tim McGraw is a big deal.



• Some more typical expansion happens at Landmark Square. I half-wonder if Blue Valentine would have gotten the attention it did if not for the MPAA initially handing it an NC-17 rating for what is allegedly pretty mild material, even accounting for "Americans panic over sex but not violence". It wound up rated R on appeal, though, so now it's not only opening on a couple screens at Landmark, but two at Boston Common as well. It's a movie about a marriage in trouble with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, who are usually pretty good.
  
  The other opening at Landmark is Casino Jack, a biopic starring Kevin Spacey as a Washington lobbyist who was the feature of a similarly-titled documentary (Casino Jack and the United States of Money) just a few months earlier. It's also noteworthy for being the final film by George Hickenlooper, who died at the relatively young age of 47 back in October.



• Hollywood may be serving leftovers, but the Bollywood film opening at Fresh Pond looks interesting: No One Killed Jessica is a crime story based upon an actual case that is apparently getting good notices pre-release. Director Raj Kumar Gupta's first movie was well-liked, and this certainly has the most interesting title of anything coming out this week.
  
  Another Hindi movie is scheduled to open on the 14th (with a Telegu release coming on the 12th), so this might be a one-week-and-done release or get consigned to spotty showtimes starting Wednesday. In related "foreign films arriving on U.S. shores quickly" news, If You Are the One 2 continues to do fairly well at Boston common; even with four screens worth of new movies coming in, it's hanging around for a third week, albeit only for early and late shows.



• The Brattle splits their week down the middle. Friday through Monday they are presenting a new 35mm print of Todd Haynes's Poison for the film's 20th anniversary. It was also the film which closed out the fall CineCaché series this Monday, and it's certainly an interesting one. It's worth seeing; though fairly draggy in the middle, it's an impressive early piece of work from a director determined to play with the medium as well as tell interesting stories.
  
  In contrast, the matinee on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is the last show of the 20th Century Fox series, Fantastic Mr. Fox. This bit of family-friendly stop-motion comedy is the best thing Wes Anderson has done in years (you may decide how much of a compliment that is on your own), with a cast that certainly merits the "fantastic" in the title.
  
  Tuesday through Thursday, in dual commemoration of the director's death and the film's 50th anniversary, the Brattle screens Breakfast At Tiffany's. Not that one needs any sort of excuse to play that movie, but it's as good a reason as any. More Blake Edwards fun can be had on Saturday at 11am, when the free Elements of Cinema show is Edwards's original The Pink Panther.



• As mentioned last week, the MFA will be rotating Summer Wars, A Walk into the Sea, and Views on Vermeer for the next week. Friday night they add one other art-related documentary to the group, Typeface, about a midwestern print shop and museum dedicated to keeping traditional printing alive.



• The Coolidge mostly shifts a few things around in their smallest theater (see below), but they start midnight screenings for the new year with Let Me In, the unfairly overlooked Hammer remake of Let the Right One In. I found it an interesting alternate take on the story, and I doubt that all of the people who ignored this fairly intelligent vampire story the first time around did it because they'd seen and loved the Swedish movie. Second chance, folks.



• The second-run shuffle this week is mostly about The Social Network, which is getting a bit of a theatrical push even though the DVD & Blu-ray come out on Tuesday. In addition to getting a few more showtimes at the Somerville Theatre and Capitol Theater in Arlington (and hanging around at the Stuar Street Playhouse in Boston), it will also get a couple evening shows at the AMC theater in Harvard Square and a screen and the Landmark Embassy in Waltham.
  
  In addition to shuffling its other films around, Somerville is also picking up Inside Job on a full screen after that ends its run at Kendall Square tonight. The itty-bitty screen at the Coolidge splits White Material and Tiny Furniture.

The plans for the weekend will likely be snow-dependent here in Boston, but I'm going to make a genuine effort to see The Social Network before it hits video (I really mean it this time!), probably on a trip to Arlington that lets me hit No One Killed Jessica on the way back. Similarly, I'd like to get out to Coolidge Corner for The King's Speech, but I've been saying that for the better part of a month, too. Around that, I'm planning on a matinee of Season of the Witch and maybe hitting Breakfast at Tiffany's at some point.

This Week In Tickets: 27 December 2010 to 2 January 2011

Here's something you don't see every week: A T.W.I.T. page that not only has two new movies starring Jeff Bridges (first-billed in both although, arguably, his younger co-stars should be), but two movies featuring characters named "Beef".



Pretty good week - two award contenders, and two movies, that while really not great, are at least visually interesting. I maybe would have preferred that Tron not eat the entire day on Tuesday, but you live and learn on that.

Saturday was spent on a day-trip to Maine, seeing a bunch of extended family that, most years, I hardly see at all, but between weddings and family get-togethers, I saw them a bunch in '10. This is a cool thing, really, although it made my holiday weekend movie viewing sluggish. Of course, part of that was just me - I have no idea what I did with December 31st, although I do recall looking up and realizing that grocery shopping was going to have to be put off if I wanted to get to Phantom of the Paradise. It was that kind of lazy long weekend.

So, this closes the book on another year of movie-going. I'm planning on writing up a "This Year in Tickets" piece for eFilmCritic this weekend, and will have some stats up here when it goes up. The 2010 weekly planner isn't quite as ready to burst as 2009's was, but that is in large part the result of switching to a model that is able to take being stuffed full better. I note that I have pretty much failed on my "watching the backlog" resolution from last year, but I'm going to try again anyway - look for a "Fantasia in January" series soon. I'm also going to try and check out more of what I can find online; the new laptop makes it a much less painful experience than trying to feed things through the SlingCatcher.

The theaters I go to will probably shift a bit, as my employers are moving offices from Waltham to Burlington this month. I probably won't go to the Burlington Mall AMC very often (unless its suburban prices are much better than the city's), but I suspect I'll be hitting the Arlington Capitol a lot more, as new bus route will make it and Fresh Pond places that are on my way home, rather than out of my way. It'll also leave me less time to write, though, as I won't have the nearly one hour on the same bus that I do right now.

But, that's a couple weeks away. In the meantime, here's my last movie of 2010 and my first of 2011:

Phantom of the Paradise

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (20th Century Fox 75th Anniversery)

You look at the description for Phantom of the Paradise and you know it's going to be screwy: Brian De Palma doing a glam-rock version of "The Phantom of the Opera" with diminutive Paul Williams as the villain. Even taking that into account, this is a seriously screwy movie. Fortunately, it's the sort of screwy that is energetic as opposed to just weird.

Rock impresario Swan (Paul Williams) is about to open a new club in New York, The Paradise, but he needs a fantastic opening act, and what fifties throwbacks The Juicy Fruits are playing just won't cut it. He hears a great piece from singer/songwriter Winslow Leach (William Finley), but rather than actually doing business with him, swipes the sheet music, starts auditioning singers, and throws Leach out of his house and into jail when he tries to clear things up. Leach escapes, is deformed, and makes a deal with Swan to have the talented Phoenix (Jessica Harper) sing his music - although Swan opts for a rocker who goes by "Beef" (Gerrit Graham).

Laid out like that, Phantom sounds ridiculous, and that's before seeing the slapstick details and truly bizarre last-act left-turns that things take. De Palma's screenplay really makes almost no sense whatsoever, especially where Swan is concerned. Sure, there is a certain purity in being completely evil, even when being honest - or even merely extortionate - is clearly of greater benefit, but if the idea is even partially satirical, then De Palma overshoots the mark by some distance. Then he heaps some more silliness on top, but, hey, at this point, there is no point in being less deranged.

While it's a relatively early and, even for this director, not-particularly-subtle movie, it's still a De Palma film, which means it's certainly a treat to watch at times. There's a split-screen tracking shot that is right up there with anything he's ever done, which makes it pretty spiffy. The look of the film is garish as hell, but it's a fun ugliness; the filmmakers merrily blur the line between what was considered cool in 1974 (but dated now) and which bits of tackiness are timeless. Like the best of Brian De Palma's movies, there's often a feeling of just letting it rip even though looking at what's going on suggests everything must have been very tightly controlled, from the background anarchy in the first music number forward.

That cast can't really be said to elevate their material, sad to say - William Finley's performance improves markedly when his face is hidden behind a mask and his voice is electronically mangled, for instance. Paul Williams is a talented musician and a songwriter with an impressive range (he penned the music for both this and The Muppet Movie, and hit the nail square on the head with both), but except for rare moments, is neither threatening nor silly enough to get Swan to the proper extreme. There's some good work at the supporting level, though - Jessica Harper makes Phoenix sweet and crush-worthy without making her a complete doe-eyed innocent, and George Memmoli actually manages a few moments of dry, deadpan wit as Swan's second in command. And then there's Gerrit Graham's Beef. Graham may not do his own singing, but the man holds nothing back otherwise, making Beef as over-the-top as a proper glam-rocker should be while getting laughs beyond his role's silliness.

There's at least one surprisingly good print of Phantom of the Paradise floating around, and a midnight show at a funky theater seems like the best way to see it. It's not a great movie in and of itself, but it's just well-done enough for the kitsch to bring out more laughs than groans, either of which can be contagious with the right crowd.

(Fromerly at EFC)

True Grit '10

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2011 at AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run)

No individual movie is truly necessary, but few recent films have likely seemed as unnecessary as a new adaptation of Charles Portis's novel True Grit. At least, until after one sees it; at that point, having Joel & Ethan Coen apply their distinctive voice to this particular story seems the most natural thing in the world, and the movies would be a poorer thing without it.

Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is a fourteen-year-old girl, but who else is going to put the affairs of her recently gunned-down father in order? Her siblings are younger than she is, her mother is certainly not up to it, and her head for sums and determination means she will likely be taking control of the business anyway. It is not just money that concerns her, though - she wants Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man responsible, to hang, which means hiring a marshall to track her down. Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is described as the meanest in the territory, which appeals to her, even if he is a fat old drunk. Their party is crashed by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who wants Chaney for the murder of a Texas state senator, but even with their combined experience and determination, catching Chaney will be difficult - he has fled into Indian Territory and allegedly hooked up with Lucky Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper).

This initially seems a very talky western; Mattie's years-later narration is initially plentiful, and there is a wonderful bit of black humor that comes from the last words of three men about to hang. We see Mattie's talents as a hard (and pushy) negotiator, many jokes are made about how LaBoeuf (pronounced "La Beef") does like to run on, and even Rooster turns fairly chatty after a bit. The words come in big, chewy chunks, the sort that gives the audience a clear indication of the level of education nd sophistication the various characters have (or wish to project). More often than not, the exact words are not nearly so important as the grammar and way it rolls off the tongue.

The assembled cast helps a lot with the latter part, naturally. Though her name appears after her better-known, more experienced castmates, Hailee Steinfeld is the film's impressive star. A lesser actress might just manage the grim-faced Mattie, mature and hardened beyond her years; Steinfeld manages to sneak in moments of petulance without making the audience think less of Mattie, and a sense of a kid setting out for an adventure that is always there but never prominent enough to make her seem silly or immature. She manages to hold her own alongside Jeff Bridges, who makes Rooster her complement, outwardly laid-back but jaded. It's a nifty performance, in that he gives off the initial impression of being silly, but dispenses of it pretty quickly, and his interplay with the slightly puff-ed up Damon is always good. Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper make for interesting villains - dangerous not because they are typical raving or icy monsters, but because the actors convince us that Chaney's cowardice and Pepper's practicality don't have much room for respecting human life.

The Coens and company take all this and sew it all together with the genre's usual trappings, which they have a handle on as well as anyone. Regular cinematographer Roger Deakins shoots fine footage of the wide-open spaces, making them as beautiful and foreboding as the moment demands. Carter Burwell's score is always a perfect fit, making nice but not ostentatious use of traditional music. And every detail of the sets, costumes, and other production design is just right, hitting the sweet spot between backlot-clean and revisionist-gritty.

And the shoot-outs are great. Westerns are about confrontations, and everything from the last paragraph combines with the Coen's knack for setting the right pace and knowing how to quickly jump from words to action. The first shootout comes after a crackling scene where the audience gets just enough time to have the hairs on the back of its collective neck prick up, feeling like anything can happen, before the situation is quickly, violently, and decisively resolved. That sort of action can be tough; quick build-up, clear action, and a finish that doesn't leave the audience feeling cheated is a tall order, but one the movie delivers a few times.

Has it done before? Sure, and not just in the novel's first adaptation; this True Grit is an unashamedly traditional western even with some of the Coens' signature style. But there aren't enough of those made in this day and age that for ennui to be a reasonable reaction, and even if there were, few would be so well-done in every detail as this one.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 31 December 2010 - 6 January

It's New Year's Eve, so, as we flip the calendar to a new page (and hang the new Brattle, HFA, MFA, etc., schedules), it's time to say out with the old, and in with the new...

Oh. It's not. Nothing new opens this weekend. A good time to catch up on what you might have missed with the more busy holidays, I guess, especially if you want to be able to include year-end prestige pictures on your top ten list and have it out soon after the end of the year (not something we'll be worrying about too much here, as the official policy of Jay's Movie Blog is Making Lists is Stupid).

So, anyway, here's a link to last week's new releases; it more or less covers what's in the big theaters this week - even the Indian films and If You Are the One 2 are staying put; the biggest change is that exact times are moving around, and Kendall Square is knocking Rare Exports down to half a screen, ending The Tempest, and adding a third screen for The King's Speech.

Still, there is some movement going on where the repertory screens are concerned:

• The Brattle continues their 20th Century Fox 75th Anniversary series throughout most of the week. Tonight they finish 2010 off with Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, a 1974 glam-rock adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. I'm sure that it will be restrained and tasteful. Sunday is a classic sci-fi double feature with the original versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Planet of the Apes. I've somehow never managed to see the first one. Tuesday is a new 35mm print of an Ernst Lubitsch comedy, Cluny Brown. Apparently "Cluny" is a girl's name, and this one features a chambermaid who doesn't quite fit into the class structure. In case you missed the sing-along version at the Regent last week, Wednesday's main feature is The Sound of Music; there are also matinees of Heidi. And on Friday, things finish up with The Princess Bride and Young Frankenstein. The latter is a tentative booking and the former is kind of stretching the definition of a Fox film - they distributed it during its original run, but it's been part of the MGM library ever since (although now Fox distributes MGM films on DVD and Blu-ray, so, I guess...).
  
  There are a couple of holes in that schedule; on Saturday, there is the now-traditional Marx Brothers Triple Play. For $15 ($12 for members), you can start at basically any time and watch three comedy classics in a row. This year, the movies on the schedule are A Night in Casablanca, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races. Monday is the final screening of the first CineCaché program, a preview of the re-release of Todd Haynes's Poison.



• The MFA is running a short film program as part of First Night; it's free for button-holders and regular price for everyone else. Get down there quick, though, because this 50-minute package has its last screening at 3:45 this afternoon.
  
  Then the screen there goes blank for the weekend, but starts up again on Wednesday (5 January 2011) with three films that will be rotating slots for the next week: A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory and Views on Vermeer: 12 Short Stories are two anthology films about quite different artists, the former being composed of fragments of short films made by Warhol's lover Williams, while the latter is contemporary interviews with those inspired by Vermeer.
  
  The third film is Summer Wars; I liked it when I saw it at Fantasia last summer; it's a worthy follow-up by director Mamoru Hosada and writer Satoko Okudera to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Hosada and Okudera have a knack for making stories that are simultaneously sprawling and intimate; they're part of an exciting new generation of animators in Japan that includes the likes of Makoto Shinkai and the late Satoshi Kon. Their latest film is well worth seeing, although, fair warning: Wednesday night's screening is the only evening show; if you can't make it to that, the options seem to be clearing your schedule for a weekday matinee or a 10:30am show a week from Saturday (8 January 2011).

... and that's basically it. My plans for the weekend are mainly playing catch-up around the Fox series and final CineCaché program.

Rabbit Hole

Four-star reviews don't need much introduction: Rabbit Hole is really good and you should go see it.

As much as I find it to be an unexpectedly uplifting film, be warned: It can hit close to home. I, thankfully, have not yet had to deal with the sudden and unexpected loss of a family member like this, but I'm pretty sure the woman sitting behind me had. So, fair warning - it's good enough that there could be crying.

---

Rabbit Hole

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run)

Rabbit Hole could easily be the most miserable movie a person could imagine; plenty of movies with the same subject matter have been unrelentingly grim. The beauty of this one is that it is about coping with loss, rather than just displaying the suffering. It's not a happy film, but in attempting to get its characters to "bearable", it manages to be excellent.

Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) are a nice young couple who used to be a nice young family. Their son Dan died in an accident eight months ago, and their instincts for dealing with it are different. Howie watches a video stored on his phone again and again, while Becca feels oppressed by all the reminders of what she's missing. They go to a support group with other couples like Gaby (Sandra Oh) and Kevin (Stephen Mailer), but Becca can't stand them. Her mother (Dianne Wiest) only makes things worse with her good-intentioned attempts to help. And then Becca's less-responsible sister Izzy (Tammy Blanchard) announces she's pregnant.

Rabbit Hole is a movie of little moments, the best of which allow the people in the audience to empathize, either by calling forth things from their own individual experience or just having the ring of truth, while also guiding them. For instance, in an early scene, when Gaby and Kevin mention that they've been coming to this group for eight years, there's a little flash of horror between Becca and Howie. It's despairing and sad but it also gives us a reassuring baseline for the main characters, that they don't want to become defined by their grief; it's an honest reaction that the audience can hold on to when things get darker later. And, it's a little bit funny. Not disrespectfully so, but just enough to mix with the fear and depression and say that human emotions are complicated, and the not-obvious ones are going to be present and legitimate.

Full review at EFC.

Tron: Legacy, my dad, and unanswered questions

One might think that Tron would be a big deal for me - I was eight years old when it came out and as obsessed with computers as I now am with movies. This was a movie that was more or less made for elementary-school me, and you'd think that I'd be one of the fans who saw the twenty-eight-years later sequel come out and said "it's about time!"

Strangely, I'm not. I remember watching it on TV but not in a theater, and its details did not stick in my memory. Maybe I never saw it there - when you're eight years old and live in North Yarmouth, Maine, you see movies at your parents' pleasure. Still, you'd think that I would have seen the movie on its initial release, because I remember my dad liking it. And that's kind of a big deal - my parents, like most people, tended to see a couple movies in theaters every year and basically enjoy the evening out. Nowadays, Dad and his wife have a Netflix account that gets the standard amount of turnover, and he'll occasionally mention whatever the last movie he saw on it was. He's not a big movie fan.

But, I remember him talking about Tron. And when I was up in Maine for a couple days for Christmas, Tron Legacy was the movie he asked if I'd seen. I hadn't, but mentioned I would use this "floating holiday" to do so. Sorry I can't say it's a better movie.

(I'll have a few observations that reference the end of the movie after the eFilmCritic excerpt, two horizontal lines down.)

Also: I didn't realize that I was actually going to use the entire day to do it. But, the bus to Reading dropped me off at 1pm for a 2pm show (there was another one, but it would be very close to the start time even without padding for delays as one does the day after a blizzard). I thought an inbound bus was coming when the movie got out rather than an outbound one (the 136/137 routes make a circle, so it makes sense to take the outbound 137 and then stay on it as it becomes an inbound 136 to get back home), and wound up on the wrong side of the road as it passed me. So, to see a two hour movie at two in the afternoon, I left the house at 11:30am and got back at 7:30pm. Yeah, Jordan's has the best set-up for this kind of movie, but it didn't really turn out to be worth it in this case.

I will admit, though, that I initially thought it had some especially awesome surround sound and 3-D effects going on - right as Sam Flynn is breaking into Encom tower, there were flashing lights and alarms going off all over the place. Cool, until the movie stops and we're directed to exit to the parking lot. Then it's just cold (and, yes, I'm mentally tracking how likely it is that each minute we spend out there is a minute shrinking from my window between the end of the movie and when the bus arrives).

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Tron: Legacy

* * (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2010 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run)

Tron: Legacy would dearly like to be the Star Wars prequels. That's not the nasty insult from me that it might be from others - I liked the new Star Wars movies. It's trying to do the same thing - return to a world last seen a generation ago, pretty it up with new effects, and throw some philosophy in there (and, yes, sell a bunch of merchandise and keep the property going in other media long after it leaves theaters). It just doesn't do so nearly as well.

Twenty years ago, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared, leaving a young son and his company Encom behind. Now, Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is the majority shareholder of Encom, but is more likely to pirate its new operating system release before its launch than actually attend board meetings. The day after one such escapade, Kevin's old friend Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) mentions he's received a page from the old arcade, and when Sam goes to investigate, he's zapped into "The Grid" just as his father was back in 1982. Now, though, it's a dystopia which CLU, a program modeled on Flynn and designed to create a perfect world (played by a digitally de-aged Bridges), rules with an iron fist, and now he'd like to get out an impose order on our world. Fortunately, a "program" by the name of Quorra (Olivia Wilde) rescues Sam and reunites him with his father, and they must race CLU to the exit portal.

Tron Legacy aims to be a chapter in a sci-fi epic, and is perfectly watchable as the first chapter (it has to be - Disney has made the original Tron hard to find, fearing its dated effects and other weaknesses would hurt this movie's box office); it contains enough information to get the audience up to speed. Just enough, perhaps; there are some scenes where this viewer who hasn't seen the original in something like twenty years didn't know whether the movie was recapping or introducing new information, especially when not a lot was done with it in this movie - are these scenes something longtime fans expected to see, or set-up for sequels? Even with that attempt to build complexity, it's a rather thin world, glossy on the surface but lacking detail and heft.

Full review at EFC.

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In case you missed it up top, I'm going to mention things you might not want to know before seeing the movie down here. Navigate away if you don't want any of that.

As I mentioned, it's been twenty-odd years since I've seen the original Tron - I would have purchased a DVD if any had been available in 2010, but Disney is apparently embarrassed of the movie it spent nine figures on a sequel to - so some of these questions are probably obvious to the big-time fans, but some things about it don't make a lot of sense. The impression of it that stuck in my mind was that it was sort of like The Wizard of Oz - what went on inside the grid may have meen real, it may not have, but it didn't really matter, at least not until you start making sequels. Then it's real.

With that in mind... What is "The Grid", anyway? Some sort of virtual-reality simulation? Unlikely, since we can't do that now, let alone run it on 1982-era computers (or, okay, 1989-era, as the Grid in the sequel is mentioned as being a new one). Has it been running for twenty years continuously? Who's been paying the power bill at Flynn's for that? If not, if it's some alternate dimension, that computer programs make some sort of impression on... Well, how sophisticated does a program have to be to do so? Does 10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10 do it? Am I killing a bunch of people when I purge my hard drive?

I mean, when CLU is rallying the troops against the Flynns in the end, he talks about the tyranny of the users, and from their perspective, he's kind of right about that. So when Tron breaks his brainwashing/repurposing in the end, saying his duty is to protect the users, isn't that kind of like the creepy moment in Gone with the Wind when the slaves decide they were better off with their old masters?

What the heck are Sam, Kevin, and Quorra eating in their dinner scene? I mean, I know it's a pig, but do the programs have livestock? If so, what are they, lesser programs (maybe p-code or system utilities)? Does that go all the way down to plants and algae; is there an entire digital ecosystem in there? And do all programs need to eat, or is it just Users and Isos? Obviously they drink, because there needs to be a bar in which to have a fight, but that just seems silly, especially since when programs and isos are derezzed, there's not a bunch of blood and guts flying all over the place.

And finally, in terms of stuff about the set-up that just doesn't make sense to me, when Quorra exits the system in the end - just what sort of biology does she have in the physical world? After all, Sam appears to have a working simulation of a human circulatory system when he's on the grid - they can tell he's a user by the fact that he bleeds - so it stands to reason that Quorra is some sort of nano-constructed robot thing at the end.

Oh, and just in terms of "bad writing" - is James Frain's character supposed to be a traitor of some kind, with his toadying actually him trying to extract information to give to the resistence? That's what it seemed when he blurted something out before getting the failed-henchman bullet to the head, but if that's the case, they really needed to do better with that.


You may say all this is nitpicking, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but I do tend to think that it goes to how, for all Tron: Legacy's style, it has a lack of imagination. It doesn't really get into what a virtual society would be like. It doesn't have much in the way of commentary on the Flynns' conflicting philosophies (you want a really interesting story, have Kevin still thinking in terms of late 1980s business and architecture models, unable to see that Sam's twenty-first century distributed, open-source thinking is the key to defeating CLU). The Grid is just a snazzy-looking environment to render action scenes on, and that seems like kind of a waste.

This Week In Tickets: 20 December 2010 to 26 December 2010

It's a sparse week, but Christmas shopping and Christmas visiting are priorities. Besides, it creates a nifty sort of theme week - all foreign films, but making their way to the United States in necessarily different ways:



I probably think about distribution and exhibition entirely too much for someone who, all running jokes about finding an eccentric millionaire to finance me opening a Keystone/Alamo-type theater aside, is not going to gain much by thinking about it. It's not wasted mental effort, especially if you love international cinema - the decision whether to buy import Blu-rays of 20th Century Boys versus the Viz Pictures DVDs versus waiting for something better is much easier if you know the lay of the land a little.

(It's almost like comics, in some ways, in that it takes a lot more effort to be much more than a casual fan. Where comics basically requires you to browse the retailer's catalog two months in advance if you want cool independent books, film fandom means knowing your local boutique theaters and what the changing release patterns are in order to catch movies without a major-studio-sized advertising budget.)

Applause is a boutique film¹. It's not light entertainment; it doesn't feature names that the average audience member will look at and say "I know who ___ is, and even if I don't enjoy this movie, being able to discuss it will make me look good". (Sorry, Paprika Steen fans!) It didn't get buzz at festivals. So, it fell past the notice of the bigger distributors of boutique films - Magnolia, IFC, the studio imprints - and then past the second tier - Oscilloscope, First Run, Music Box, Roadside Attractions² - and winds up with World Wide Motion Pictures Corporation, a tiny label that in the past seems to have mainly picked up pictures that went unsold for years and appears to create a very small number of prints.

It's a very targeted release right now - very select markets with the hope of either a Best Actress nomination for star Paprika Steen - in which case, new prints and an expansion becomes practical - or enough discussion to get small bookings, like a few shows at museums or film societies. A lot of films like Applause probably don't even get this big a push, but Steen's performance is worth pushing and there's a time limit on how long a foreign film can sit on a shelf and still be eligible for the Oscars.

Rare Exports, on the other hand, while arguably still a boutique film, is one that has a strong hook for a broader audience ("demon Santa"); got good buzz at festivals, especially genre festivals like Fantastic Fest and Sitges; and by its nature has a short shelf-life. Any studio that picked it up was looking at either getting it in theaters within three months, or hanging on to it until next December, when the buzz might have been exhausted. Oscilloscope appeared willing to do that; with a small slate, they've got a little more flexibility than some of the larger distributors, and they were willing to commit to this movie without seeing how it did in its home market, as it got the sort of simultaneous international release usually only associated with American blockbusters.

Then there's If You Are the One 2 which, as mentioned last night, is getting near-simultaneous releases in China, America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It's not quite following the Bollywood model where foreign cinemas are simply treated like other screens in the domestic market; distribution rights are sold to a middleman who negotiates with theater chains. Also, unlike Applause and Rare Exports, things like If You Are the One 2 and the vast majority of Indian films are not being marketed toward a broad audience; they're being marketed toward ethnic communities, to the point where tickets often have the untranslated name on them, as does the signage above the theater door, where "Fei Cheng Wu Rao" really stands out amid a bunch of "True Grit" and "Little Fockers".


There's no one best way to go about this. As much as I like the really fast turnaround of the latter two movies, there aren't enough screens in New York, let alone Boston, to handle day-and-date releases of everything that plays theatrically in its home country. I do think, though, that we will see fewer and fewer situations like that of Applause as time goes on - the Academy will eventually emend the qualification rules so that films which are not released theatrically are eligible, digital infrastructure will make it possible (and even necessary) for even smaller producers to market globally.

¹ I'm not really a fan of the term art-house; it sounds snooty, with the implication that calling these films art means that those film's aren't. (Back)

² No disrespect to those distributors meant; they just don't have the resources and multi-platform reach that the others do. (Back)

If You Are the One 2, or, what do I know about what mainstream-foreign distribution?

A couple months ago, I saw and reviewed Feng Xiaogang's last movie, Aftershock, and added a few words about getting foreign mainstream films in front of American audiences. Looking at them now, after the same group (China Lion Film) released this movie, I see that half of my comments seemed to be about right and half were way off.

If nothing else, it seems clear to me that mainstream foreign films can be quite viable in the U.S. if played in the right neighborhoods and if the distributors get them out ahead of the pirates - although, as I likely should have noted back in November, one screening is not really a useful sampling. For instance, I thought Aftershock was a disaster, considering the single handful of people in the theater when I saw it, but it apparently did well enough to hang around in a split-theater situation for a second week. If You Are the One 2, on the other hand, had a fairly crowded house Sunday afternoon - and that's potentially no small feat, considering that it meant people were coming out despite a blizzard warning.

So, what's the next step? Well, for China Lion, the next two movies listed on their site are Mr. and Mrs. Incredible (due out in China in early February) and The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman (apparently due out in China this coming weekend). Supposedly, they are planning to release around 15 films per year internationally, so they may actually do two new Chinese releases in relatively short order. I personally hope that other, similarly aggressive distributors will pop up for Korean, Japanese, and other nationalities' films.

These hypothetical distributors may have a harder time, though, in that even cities the size of Boston don't seem to have well-defined Japanese and Korean neighborhoods with theaters nearby akin to Chinatown, at least not that I know of. AMC Boston Common is very close to Boston's Chinatown, which makes playing the occasional Chinese-oriented movie a canny choice. These movies do seem to be marketed directly to the Chinese immigrant community, as well - not only did my ticket stub say "Fei Cheng Wu Rao 2" as opposed to the English translation, but the Subway Cinema newsletter seemed taken by surprise about it opening on four screens in New York City - and when the New York Asian Film Festival guys don't see your release coming, you're flying under some radar.

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Fei Cheng Wu Rao 2 (If You Are the One 2)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2010 at AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run)

Romantic comedies (and romances in general) probably shouldn't have sequels; after all, if you want to recapture what made the first work, you've got to either roll back the happy ending of the first or shift the focus to a new couple, and who knows if they have the same chemistry. This holds true even when the movie in question is the highest-grossing film ever in the most populous country in the world. Resist temptation, or you'll get something like If You Are the One 2: Nice enough in spots, but fighting an uphill battle.

Two years ago, Qin Fen (Ge You) fell into a relationship with Liang Xiaoxiao (Shu Qi), despite the fact that she is some twenty years his junior and they had intended to just be friends. Two years later, he has proposed to her. However, things don't always run smooth - their best friends, Mango (Yao Chen) and Li Xingshan (Sun Honglei), are getting divorced after five years, and it leads Xiaoxiao to suggest a "test marriage" to see if their love will last once their initial ardor cools.

From what I gather, describing the original film (which I have not seen) as a romantic comedy may not be wholly accurate; if the sequel is similar in tone, it is a contemplative love story that is frequently funny because romance can be crazy at times. In that case, this movie's odd changes of tone is in perfect keeping with the series, although the extreme nature of its mood swings is rather unsettling. If You Are the One 2 starts out not just funny, but with an emotional complexity that romances seldom attempt, and the process of pulling Fen and Xiaoxiao apart and back together seldom approaches the same level of wit.

Full review at EFC.