This Week Month Late Summer In Tickets: 11 July 2011 to 18 September 2011

For the thing that I tend to think of as the signature element of this blog, This Week has certainly gotten away from me a few times. When festival time starts up again next year, I'm going to have to figure out how to not let that happen.

No film festival knows how to derail a posting schedule like Fantasia:









I've written about this in pretty exhausting detail, so let's assume you know the drill: Click on the ticket or part of the schedule, get to its blog entry. The last one, here, has the stats and wrap-up.

As mentioned on the last day, I took the 11:30pm bus, which got me into Boston around 8am, giving me plenty of time to rest up for a 4pm Red Sox game (sadly, the ticket has since gone through the wash. The Sox beat the Yankees, despite John Lackey being on the mound, but they naturally did it in long, grinding fashion. It left us barely enough time to "murder a burger", as my friend Justin put it, before the restaurants closed for the evening, but I was fortunately able to introduce him and his girlfriend to Boston Burger Company. Mmm...

Then it was time to start catching up on stuff that I missed, as well as hit the last film of the Somerville Theatre's summer Buster Keaton series:

Captain America: The First Avenger

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2011 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, digital 3D)

I wouldn't say Marvel's movies have been disappointing of late; more that the first Iron Man was one heck of a tough act to follow, and to a certain extent, recent entries have introduced the general movie audience to some of the more frustrating elements of reading comics - the way other books encroach on the one you're reading, or how what's happening now seems like set-up for what would come later. Fortunately, Joe Johnston and company are mostly able to avoid that in Captain America - this one stands on its own, and is a pretty great adventure movie.

What makes it work? I think a large part is that writers Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely did an impressive job of synthesizing several takes on the character of Steve Rogers into one that works extremely well: The look most closely resembles Bryan Hitch's designs from The Ultimates, and the relationship between Steve and Bucky Barnes brings to mind the way Ed Brubaker has redefined them during his current run on the book(s), but the big, adventurous stories and WWII can-do spirit of the Joe Simon & Jack Kirby originals. It's potentially a tricky alchemy, but Johnston and the writers make it work.

And tone's kind of a big deal with this movie; it's big pulp adventure that is wonderfully sincere as it throws big Saturday-Serial menaces at Cap and his allies pursue the Red Skull and Hydra (as bad as the Nazis, but not making the movie too somber). The ties to other Marvel movies give the feeling of a larger world but don't hamstring things; if you've seen Iron Man and Thor, there's easter eggs, but if not, it's still a blast. Chris Evans hits the right humble, sincere attitude as Rogers.

He's got a bunch of nifty people around him, too - despite my fears that Tommy Lee Jones would be sacrificed early as the inevitable lost father figure, he sticks around, and even if there's a bit of a weariness to him that suggests he might be a bit too old for the role, I can't come up with a better fit. Hayley Atwell, Sebastian Shaw, Neal McDonough and more are good supporters (and speaking of McDonough, who plays Dum Dum Dugan, I love that the Howling Commandos seem done right, keeping their distinct personalities while shedding the feeling of being stereotypes); Hugo Weaving is a fine villain.

It looks pretty good too. I'm not sure what miracles the folks who told me that the 3D adds nothing expect the technology to perform; I think it added a little more pop to the action scenes and gave a bit of an extra sense of scale to some of the more fanciful environments. Johnston didn't shoot in 3D - he switched back after finding the cameras too difficult to wrangle - but did have a smaller camera to use as second-eye reference, so it feels a lot closer to native 3D than many upconversions (like, say, Thor).

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (special engagement)

I reviewed this back in November 2004 (yikes!), though it's very easy to read that more as "Jay learning to appreciate silent movies" rather than something specifically about Steamboat Bill, Jr., I stand by it and my great fondness for the movie. Accompanist Jeff Rapsis talked about how, at the time, it was a sort of nostalgic image of small-town America; and yet, for all that it's very much of its time and before, it never feels old or irrelevant. It's still sweet and funny and an amazing production.

As per usual, Rapsis did a fine job with the soundtrack, both for this and the two Keaton shorts that preceded the movie. It was also good to see that the series had built some momentum; with enough people in the auditorium to open up the balcony. It doesn't look like there's going to be any September show, but Jeff did talk about doing something cool for Halloween.



Hey, I'd seen something like 75 movies in the month before and had a huge pile of comics and stuff awaiting me when I got home - I felt like staying in!

Cowboys & Aliens

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2011 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first run; digital projection)

Cowboys & Aliens isn't a bad movie at all; it's just tough to shake the feeling that it could be better. It's the sort of movie where six writers (not counting the ones who wrote the original comic) and another dozen producers pound at it until any truly distinctive voice is gone. These producers spend a fair amount of money that shows up on screen, but a certain spark is missing.

I talk about "fun" at the movies a lot, which can be sort of a cheat - it's a terribly vague term and an extremely subjective thing - but I think it's a large part of what's missing here. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford are both stony-faced protagonists of few words, and neither Sam Rockwell nor Olivia Wilde are in much of a position to be an upbeat counterbalance. This movie really needs someone who sees tracking down a ship full of creatures from outer space and rescuing their loved ones as an adventure as well as a grim mission, and the kid played by Noah Ringer can only do so much to counteract that. He's one Robin to a half-dozen Batmen.

There are moments when it works - when the posse is told just why the aliens are there, Harrison Ford snorts "that's ridiculous". The audience sort of agrees with this, sure, but it's an acknowledgment of the goofy pulp origins of this sort of tale, and we're expected to be fine with it, so why can't the movie be a little cheerier even while being thrilling and suspenseful? Ford is the main joy of this movie, looking and sounding like a guy who should have done many more Westerns than he has, and the filmmakers maybe should have sacrificed some "realism" for a chance to really let the audience take pleasure in what's going on.

SPOILERS: That includes letting certain characters live in the end. This is not a movie that needs to pay for the pure joy of watching the alien ship blow up with losing a character the audience likes. :SRELIOPS



A bit more of a "back to normal" week, the relatively short weekend the result of heading north for my niece Maisy's first birthday party. I apparently further solidified by status as the weird uncle by giving her an Uglydoll. Apparently, even though I've seen them at toy stores for the past few years, it's just not a brand that all parents are aware of.

(Allow me to take a moment to mourn the passing of the Tokyo Kid store in Harvard Square, which will make it much more difficult to someday give a niece a totally kawai stuffed toy that is actually a monstrous character from a very adult series.)

The ballgame was cool for a while, but turned out to be one of Erik Bedard's less impressive games in a Sox uniform. But, I got to see the Red Sox turn an around-the-horn triple play, which was pretty awesome.

The two other tickets here have been covered elsewhere, so see Point Blank and Attack the Block if you wnat more on them.

Der Räuber (The Robber)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Recent Raves)

I joked with a friend after seeing this that whoever described this as a thriller must have had a very low threshold for getting excited, much like the guy right next to me who jumped and gasped at the least provocation. Of course, after saying that, I'm not really able to find evidence of anybody ever calling it a thriller, so the joke is on me for assuming that a movie about a distance runner who robs banks would be an exciting crime movie.

Looked at for what it is, rather than what I was expecting it to be, it's certainly no failure. Andreas Lust gives a nuanced, thoroughly believable performance as Johann Rettenberger, the gifted runner/thief of the title, and he has to, because that's the movie, with everything else meant to work alongside it. It's a well-realized portrayal of a man controlled by obsessions; while it would be easy to suggest that Rettenberger is addicted to the adrenaline of the heist with the running a personal detail, enabling him to escape on foot, that's actually secondary to the elite athlete's obsession with improving his skills; we can actually believe that robbing banks is mainly the way of earning money that allows him to have his rigorous training schedule.

After a while, though, this intense internality becomes quite a lot to bear. Lust's performance is perfect but that sort of obsession makes his character static; once we get Rettenberger, the film doesn't have a whole lot more to show us until it's time for things to start going wrong. Sure, at that point, co-writer/director Benjamin Heisenberg does a pretty nifty job of tightening the noose visually, but even then, the arc seems pre-ordained and a bit standard.



There would have been more tickets here, but what can I say - Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene shut everything down on Sunday, including the MBTA. Honestly, it wasn't that miserable out Sunday afternoon - wet and windy, sure, but by the time I got cabin fever that afternoon, it was actually kind of bracing.

The hurricane also meant that the Red Sox ticket marked "Sunday" was actually the second game of a doubleheader on Saturday, and that wound up being a long day of baseball - the first game started at 1pm, endured multiple delays, driving me nuts as I waited for an announcement - which finally wound up being "come on down, we'll even let people with tickets for the second game in before the first finishes". Later on, with not a lot of us in the stands, the Sox evidently tweeted that gate C was open for anyone in the neighborhood. Hey, might as well - can't sell beer to people who aren't there.

So, not a lot of movies seen that week; the ones I did make it to were the last shows in the Bernard Hefrmann retrospective. I love the Brattle's old-school vertical schedules in the summer; too bad it so often conflicts with my trip north.

Sisters

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Bernard Herrmann Centennial)

SPOILERS: Hey, you may not know this, but Brian De Palma really likes Alfred Hitchcock - especially Psycho; he spent much of his early career talking little bits of Norman Bates's insanity and sprinkling it into his villains. Of course, there's a certain logic to "If you're going to steal, do it from the best", and it's not like he regurgitates this stuff lazily. :SRELIOPS

Even without that sort of reference, this is a thoroughly De Palman movie, with an opening that is both risqué and tongue-in-cheek, some shocking violence, a somewhat unconventional amateur sleuth, and an enjoyably twisty/bizarre storyline. Actually, that may undersell it; when you add the sheer number of just absolutely crazy things that go on in this movie together, the end result should be utterly laughable - and, really, the use of hypnotism in the last act is absolutely ridiculous - but somehow De Palma stitches it together into an entertaining, cohesive whole.

But, hey, I dig it. It's a crazy movie but it keeps its crazy going through to the end.

Twisted Nerve

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Bernard Herrmann Centennial)

Now, here's a pretty brilliant way to cap off the Bernard Herrmann series (or at least come close to doing so) - a movie that is probably best known for the bit of Herrmann music that Quentin Tarantino lifted to drop into Kill Bill, creating a tremendously effective earworm. To be quite honest, it's the part of this movie that most deserves to enter the general public consciousness. Well, that and "good lord, was Hayley Mills a cutie in her early twenties".

After all, the plot is more than a bit ridiculous, with Martin Durnley (Hywel Bennett) apparently thinking that the best way to get close to pretty young librarian/med student Susan (Mills) is to pretend to be mentally handicapped. Of course, he turns out to be insane in other ways, which leads to an expositional outburst that reminds the modern audience that forty-odd years ago, people used to use the term "Mongoloid" and attribute all sorts of psychosis to this. It is, shall we say, a product of its time.

That's not entirely a bad thing; director Roy Boulting and his co-writers are generally able to negotiate the border between "anything can happen" and "what the hell?" pretty well, and when it comes time for a character to snap, he snaps very well indeed. I can't say I was terribly impressed with the movie, but it certainly has moments, and who knows, maybe if I saw it on a non-terrible print (this one was very, very red), it might make a better impression on me.



Yes, I saw a great deal of this homestand, although not a whole lot of winning. The funny thing? Early in the season, when it seemed like the Red Sox wouldn't win a game all year, they always seemed to win - and decisively! - when I went.

Sunday, though, was so rough that my Dad and brother who came down for the game left early. Well, they had to catch a train back home, but they left early enough to make sure they had plenty of time to do so. Can't say I blame 'em.

Following that, I took the B line to Harvard Street, had some BBQ at SoulFire, and then hit The Debt at the Coolidge. I've got to admit, the BBQ wound up being the highlight of the day.



Labor Day on Monday, and since I didn't want to pay a whole lot of money for what looked like a thoroughly mediocre movie, I went to Fresh Pond for Shark Night 3D. Big mistake. The movie wasn't completely beyond salvage, but as much as I would have liked to write about what a great value 3D shows at that spot are, it wound up being more "you get what you pay for".

Then it was a bit of a layoff until the weekend, where I caught a couple of new releases from China, a couple of old releases from Germany, and thought I was going to get to the cheap show of Contagion in not-really-IMAX, but misread the schedule and wound up seeing, well, something else.

Colombiana

* * (out of four)
Seen 10 September 2011 in AMC Boston Common #5 (first-run, digital projection)

Remember how a few weeks ago, while reviewing Point Blank, I built the blog entry around how the French had pretty much taken over the mid-level action film, and referred to the then-upcoming Colombiana (co-written by Luc Besson and directed by Besson protege Olivier Megaton) as an example? Never mind. Colombiana isn't quite a disaster, but it's not very good.

How is it a letdown? It takes what seems like forever to get started, for example. This sort of Europa-Corp. action movie tends to have a pretty straightforward plot, but this one feels the need for a long prologue where we see what makes Zoe Saldana's Cataleya what she is. It's got a pretty spiffy chase scene where the ten-year-old Cat escapes from her parents' killers, but even after all that, the "I want to be a killer" scenes still feel wrong, like an oddly specific thing to ask. As the movie goes on, we get two separate scenes of Cat vomiting something up, her doing jobs that seem to rely on both gaining information she had no time to research and a lot of luck, and then, when we've been prepped for an extremely clever infiltration - the villains have even commented on just how good she is at that sort of thing - the finale is just a brute-force attack. And Olivier Megaton is not the most talented action director Besson has found; he's the type that is generally competent, but also does things like shake the camera and cut quickly when the really good ones would give the audience a good look at what's going on..

It's not a total loss - Zoe Saldana is good at the action-girl thing, and Lennie James handles what is a relatively thankless role as the FBI agent tracking her down with aplomb. It looks good, has a couple good action sequences. It's not close to Europa's best, though - this sort of movie is straightforward and familiar enough that the execution needs to be flawless to stand out (see: Taken), and that's not the case here.



Another time mix-up; I somehow got it in my head that The Driver was starting at 7pm on Saturday, instead of 6:30pm, so I wound up missing that and taking the T to Somerville for Contagion instead. I'm kind of disappointed by that - it looked like a good warm-up for Drive. A little disappointed about missing the other pre-code Raoul Walsh film at Emerson this weekend, too - even if Me and My Gal wasn't that great, "not available on video" is always tempting.

Sunday was a bit of a repeat of two weeks earlier - ugly Red Sox loss, supper at SoulFire, movie at the Coolidge. It wound up being a loop, since I went there for the 10am Talk Cinema series. Anyway, packed weekend of movies:

The Lion King

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 September 2011 in AMC Boston Common #5 (3D rerelease)

I expected from the start that this specific 3D upconversion was a particularly bad idea, but seeing as there was a $10 early show ($6 admission + $4 tack-on for 3D) and AMC and Disney were running a program where they'd put $5 on the rewards card for seeing it, I figured that I was $5 worth of curious as to how it turns out, even if I do have the Blu-ray coming in a few weeks.

And how does it turn out? Interesting tech demo, at least, albeit one that exposes the technology's flaws as much as its potential (if not more). The opening number, "Circle of Life", looks impressive, given that it's full of things that 3D shows well, and that upconversion handles well - multiplane set-ups (that is, where you want to show that various sets of objects are different distances from the viewer but don't want them breaking that plane), establishing a distance to the horizon, uncomplicated flight, etc. It's easy to watch that and think, hey, this might work.

What the opening doesn't have a lot of, though, is character animation, and it's when we get to close-ups of the characters that things start to seem very ill-advised. Though I imagine The Lion King was easier to deal with than some older cel-animated films might be, in that the CAPS coloring system gave them shading and textures to work with as opposed to flat colors of previous decades, the current state of the art for stereo-conversion is basically mutliplane, which leads to an effect much like 3D comics, where a head will seem like a two-dimensional object separate from the body, just on a nearer plane. The stereographers try to get around that, but trying to made a 3D model out of a 2D object is tricky, and things like the feline characters' snouts often look vaguely wrong, poking out too far or not far enough depending on the "camera angle" being used, or wobbling as heads turn.

And part of that may come from how cel-based animation, unlike CGI, stop-motion, and the like, does not use rigid models. I remember how, when Beavis & Butt-head was popular, the guys making the action figures wound up having fits because it turned out that the title characters actually are designed differently when seen head-on or in profile. I don't know whether this is the case for any characters in The Lion King or not, but I could see animators flattening the characters' faces a little when seen from the front, humanizing them slightly. When Tangled came out last year, producer and longtime lead animator Glen Keane described how producing it meant developing new software to make the character models more malleable so that it would more closely resemble the animated films of the 1990s in style, but the tech for going the other way is apparently a bigger challenge.

Ultimately, the experience doesn't take much away from The Lion King, the movie - it's still better than the sum of its parts, even if those parts seem a bit weaker now than they did on its initial release - and I'm different too; the "normalcy restored by person reclaiming their birthright" really annoys me today, when it just seemed a bit off back then. I suspect many in the audience won't even feel that something is slightly amiss with this movie, but honestly, I'd still recommend the 2D version if that's playing theaters nearby (here in Boston, it is at Regal Fenway) and not springing the extra dough for the 3D Blu-ray. The converted image nifty at points, but the process is a net negative; not enough to compensate for the extra cost or the picture as a whole looking vaguely (or specifically) wrong.

Me and My Gal

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 September 2011 in the Paramount Center, Bright Family Screening Room (Movies Matter)

Me and My Gal is an old movie, and that's what one has to call it. It's not a classic, and "vintage" implies that, like wine, it ages well. Not all seventy-year-old movies do that; some, like this, were just made in 1932, taxied around the country to fill a screen for a week or two, and then vanished into relatively deserved obscurity. It's not all bad; in fact, it's just good enough to show what doesn't work.

We start with Danny Dolan (Spencer Tracy), a cop walking a waterfront beat. In one day, he meets Helen Riley (Joan Bennett), a sassy diner waitress, and saves an annoying drunk (Will Stanton) from drowning. This earns him a promotion but pulls another cop away from keeping tabs on the boat carrying Duke Cartega (George Walsh), a gangster that the law hasn't been able to make charges stick to, returning to the country after being away a year. It turns out he used to go with Helen's newlywed sister Kate (Marion Burns), and wants to use her respectable job at a bank to help rob the place while her sailor husband is away.

Or at least, it seems that way. The movie spends a lot of time talking about "the numbers" that the Cartegas want Kate to get so that they can burgle the appropriate safe deposit boxes, but even though Duke looks to have Kate hide him after the robbery, I have no idea whether she ever did actually supply him with these numbers. This whole half of the movie is a real mess, the plot of a gangster flick uncomfortably jammed into a romantic comedy as the B story, with neither actress Marion Burns or generally-respected director Raoul Walsh able to give us much of an impression of where Kate stands one way or the other.

Full review at EFC.

Contagion

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 September 2011 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run)

Part of what makes Contagion such a thoroughly nifty movie is how, even though panic is a large part of what it's about, along with some other strong emotions, writer Scott Z. Burns and directer Steven Soderbergh maintain a tight leash on any sort of outburst. Moments which could be used for cheap drama are allowed to pass as we watch the characters just try and make it through the next minute; Soderbergh allows shots to linger on possible surfaces on which a virus could rest for half a second without any sort of musical sting. We get the idea; there's no need to hammer it home.

Even with the quite frankly ridiculous cast - there's a lot of folks used to starring roles taking ensemble/supporting parts here - that's a really tricky balance to maintain. Contagion is as much about crisis management as crisis, and it's likely that as much as the filmmakers wanted to make a movie that salutes the level-headed problem solvers, their every instinct is likely to push for more obvious drama. Soderbergh is probably uniquely qualified to handle it; despite being much better than most at wrangling the scale of a large, complicated movie like this one, he's still and indie filmmaker at heart, so he can make the scenes with, say, Matt Damon and Anna Jacoby-Heron sing.

Not all of the half-dozen threads or so the movie has going for it are created equal; we both seem to see Jude Law too often and not really feel the impact his character is making. But, man, so much of it is good, emotional, and at least within shouting distance of being scientifically sound that it's able to stimulate our curiosity as well as the more primal fears, an unusual combination that makes the movie even more exciting.

(Random aside - is World War Z shooting yet? Seeing this movie done so well make me wonder if those filmmakers could back up and make something closer to the anthology feel of the book rather than the more straightforward sci-fi/action/horror movie being planned.)

Drive

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2011 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run)

I forget - which award, exactly, is it that Drive's opening sequence should make it a shoo-in for - sound mixing or sound effects editing? Whichever it is, Nicolas Winding Refn and his team put on a clinic of how to grab the audience with audio - a thumping bassline gives way to the Lakers game that the movie's nameless Driver puts on for background noise, minimalist but natural dialog enters, and loud, harsh sound effects highlight the danger. Add slick direction by Refn and taut editing by Mat Newman, and it's an early sign that the audience is in for something special.

The funny thing is that on the face of it, Drive isn't that exceptional. The plot could be a fourth Transporter movie; it's just that Refn sees pulp as beautiful, so he goes all in, paying loving attention to every tiny detail, taking cues from 1970s and 1980s car noir, and not backing off from the violence. It's a surprisingly harsh action movie - Refn doesn't go in for elaborate car chases quite as much as one might expect, but instead gives us up close and personal violence where guns and knives can be seen to really mess a body up.

Part and parcel of that is Albert Brooks as a villain and, man, is he fantastic. It's a wonderfully entertaining performance that separates itself from all the other cheery psychopaths in short order, especially since we initially think we've got the dynamic between him and business partner Ron Perlman figured out. Ryan Gosling makes the Driver an intriguing nut to crack; there's an almost childlike simplicity to him that we almost want to see him as some sort of idiot savant where cars are concerned, except that he's also clearly no stranger to the world of violence. Gosling does a very impressive job of making this guy seem like a whole person despite there not being a whole lot of information about him.

Each of those elements is a part of what makes Drive exciting to watch - it's a simple action movie, but one with art to it. Refn doesn't see any reason why this sort of picture can't have flourishes and embellishments even when the film itself is relatively straightforward.

Talk Cinema: Thin Ice (aka The Convincer)

The Talk Cinema series has been going on for a while - a few years at the Coolidge, and I think it was at one of the mainstream multiplexes before that (Fenway, maybe, back when it was a GCC theater). As tempting as some of the things that play there sounded after the fact, I just started going with this series, as its Sunday morning schedule tended to conflict with the much closer (and cheaper!) Eye-Opener at the Brattle. With that having become the Monday evening Cinecaché series, I decided to give this a try.

So far, I can't say I necessarily love the choice of movies; Thin Ice is just not very good. The conversation afterward may also be something to get used to; will I get to know these folks and where they're coming from for seeing them once a month as opposed to every week for a couple months in a row?

Still, this installment at least had the benefit of a moderator who had seen The Convincer at Sundance in January and could describe the differences. Apparently the soundtrack was a big one, with the new score making the big turn the film takes midway through less jarring. It led to a somewhat interesting discussion on whether the director should always be the person in complete control over a movie, with the implication being that The Convincers was flawed enough that some work should have been done.

(Amusing - the moderator brought up Donnie Darko as perhaps the best recent example of how maybe the director isn't always the best judge of when a movie's done, and explained the reference. I'm not used to people not just knowing it.)

Thin Ice

* * (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2011 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema)

Thin Ice started life as The Convincer (and played Sundance under that name) before being re-cut and re-scored to its current form, and that name would have put a bit of a target on its back. The movie requires we be believe that a character is charismatic and persuasive, and that's just not there. Calling the movie "Thin Ice" doesn't make it better, but it manages expectations a little.

Mickey Prohaska (Greg Kinnear) sells insurance out of a small office in Kenosha, and he's apparently good enough at preying on strangers' fears to lecture on the topic at the regional convention. While there, he poaches a young up-and-comer from a rival, although nice-guy Bob (David Harbour) has a tendency to talk people out of overinsuring themselves. That's how it's going with Gorvy Hauer (Alan Arkin), an eccentric and half-senile farmer, at least until violin expert Leonard Dahl (Bob Balaban) shows up to examine the apparently rare instrument in Gorvy's attic, but only talks to Mickey. Circumstances lead to Mickey believing he can keep the money from the sale of the guitar for himself, but a series of miscommunications lead to Mickey and locksmith Randy Kinney (Billy Crudup) being involved in something a bit nastier than fraud.

Mickey's not a good person; even considering that he's in a business that thrives on misrepresentation, he lies reflexively and is utterly unconcerned about other people. And while it's not necessarily important that the main character be likable, it would help a great deal if he were interesting. Whether because of sisters Jill & Karen Sprecher's script (Jill also directs) or Greg Kinnear's performance, though, that never really happens. His scenes with Lea Thompson as Mickey's soon-to-be-ex-wife don't do anything to add nuance to the character, nor do any others; there's no hint of a tragic flaw that put him in his financial hole. He's just a generically selfish guy, and Kinnear plays him that way, desperation covered with practiced pitches. There's no moment where we see him really good at this sort of thing, and he's such a blank that it's tough to either hate him enough to root against him or develop a sneaky admiration for his cunning or ruthlessness.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 16 September 2011 - 22 September 2011

So, tell me - who reads these things even when they're weeks old? I constantly see them on my stats page, but I honestly can't figure why anybody would have any interest in them past Thursday.

Once again, the big release this weekend is opening all over the place, both in the multiplexes and some of the independent places. That's often the sign of something set up to be both a critical and box-office smash, potentially an awards contender. Although, then again, The Debt opened that way a couple of weeks ago.

• That movie this week is Drive, the next step in Nicolas Winding Refn's steady-but-unorthodox infiltration of the Hollywood mainstream. It stars Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver by day, getaway driver by night, who finds everything going sideways after a botched heist. I missed my chance to see Pusher 3 at Fantasia one year, but Refn's previous two English-language features have been intriguing and he's got a very nifty cast, so while the trailer for this one didn't do a whole lot for me at first, it's got serious potential. It's at Boston Common, Fenway, Coolidge Corner, Harvard Square, and Somerville.
  
  Other new releases include a remake of Straw Dogs, whose trailer looks OK, but why do you even bother remaking Peckinpah, even with a decent-looking cast. Plus, I kind of feel like I've seen variations on the "class warfare bringing out the worst in everybody" movie a lot lately. Its polar opposite would appear to be I Don't Know How She Does It, a comedy about a woman who juggles a high-finance job and motherhood. Sarah Jessica Parker stars, with a pretty nice-looking cast behind her. Including Christina Hendricks, who is also in Drive.



• Also opening at the multiplex: The Lion King 3D. On the one hand, it's a chance to see a pretty good movie on the big screen, spruced up nice. On the other hand, I can't really think of any movies more thoroughly built for 2D than traditional cel-animated features. Fenway will apparently be having 2D features, while AMC theaters showing it will put $5 on your Stubs card if you've got one.
  
  Boston Common also has some smaller releases on tap: Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain, a stand-up/documentary from a comedian who appears to have "next big thing" status. It opened in a several other cities last week to packed crowds, and will actually be showing on two screens during the evening. They also open Farmageddon, a documentary on the supposed war on small farmers who produce and sell raw milk by the FDA, and have Chinese films My Kingdom and Love in Space held over for daily single shows. And, holy crap, is that Bad Teacher back again? I think that's third-run by now.



• The Brattle is programmed almost like a regular theater this week, with Rapt starting Friday and running through Thursday. It's a thriller by art-house favorite Lucas Belvaux starring Yvan Attal as a mover and shaker who is kidnapped and held for ransom - but whose scandalous affairs leave his family wondering if he's worth paying to get back. It runs at 4:30, 7:00, and 9:30pm Friday - Monday (with 2:00pm matinees on Saturday and Sunday), but shorter times midweek to accommodate special events: 8:00pm on Wednesday so that Craig Thompson can discuss his new graphic novel at six, and 4:00pm on Tuesday and Thursday for special preview screenings.
  
  The Brattle's website reports that the Tuesday premiere screening of Pearl Jam Twenty is already sold out (but it will open there on the 23rd), but there should still be tickets for Tucker & Dale vs Evil on Thursday the 22nd. I've got no idea if Tucker & Dale will be getting a larger release in Boston, but it should - it's funny, suspenseful, and, yeah, kind of gross at times, a fun inversion of a certain type of horror movie.



• Opening Drive shifts Circumstance to a digital room at the Coolidge, withThe Debt remaining on the other 35mm screen. The special screenings include midnights of The Warriors on Friday and Saturday, presumably the original version as opposed to the one that's recently appeared on video with comic book-style transitions. Also at midnight on Saturday is the Betsi Feathers Burlesque Show, which is pretty much what it sounds like, but has the unusual cachet of having a member of the Boston Ballet (Betsi Graves) in the troupe.
  
  Sunday morning features the first entry in the Talk Cinema series; get there early for Thin Ice, which played Sundance this year under the name The Convincer and has Billy Crudup, Greg Kinnear, Lea Thompson, and Alan Arkin in a thriller about a rare violin. And on Monday evening, The French Connection appears on the main screen in its original 35mm glory - worth noting, because the movie on Blu-ray is much different than the one on film; William Friedkin changed the entire look of the film for that release. And on Tuesday night, there is a special Deaf Awareness Week event, with director Ann Marie "Jade" Bryan screening her film If You Could Hear My Own Tune, a romance between a deaf fashion student an a musician.



• Relatively quiet week at Kendall Square; they don't get Drive but do get Gun Hill Road, with Esai Morales as a parolee who must both attempt to go straight while his son challenges his beliefs on manhood. The one-week booking is also focused on the inner city, with documentary The Interrupters telling the tale of former gang members in Chicago who have set themselves up as "violence interrupters", intervening to prevent strained situations from erupting into violence. One of those interrupters, Tio Hardiman, will be appearing at the theater in person for the 6:35pm show on Friday (16 September).



• School's back in session, which means ArtsEmerson starts their film programs back up again! They kick the season off with a weekend of movies chosen by film critic Dave Kehr, including a double feature of pre-code movies by Raul Walsh on Friday - Me and My Gal with Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, which also runs Saturday the 17th at 2pm, and Sailor's Luck with James Dunn and Sally Eilers, which also runs Sunday the 18th at 2pm. The Saturday movies include The Driver, directed by Walter Hill, which is over a quarter car chases, and Wim Wenders's The American Friend, an adaptation of Ripley's Game with Dennis Hopper in the main role.



• They're also busy at Harvard, with the bulk of the weekend at the Film Archive reserved for Viva l'Italia!: The Risorgimento on Screen, which features a number of films chronicling the nineteenth century unification of Italy from various city-states. That's Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoon; Sunday and Monday evenings are a program called "For My Crushed Right Eye - The Visionary Films of Toshio Matsumoto". Matsumoto was originally scheduled to visit, but it appears he has cancelled, although the psychedelic, experimental films may be a draw on their own.



• The MFA has a quiet week - no screenings on Friday, Saturday, Monday, or Tuesday, and just a short film program running Sunday as part of the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Arts Open House. Also Wednesday and Thursday feature documentaries on artists whose works are posted in those wings - Ellsworth Kelly, Alex Katz, and El Anatsui, as well as a Wednesday (the 21st) screening of Kenya: Passing the Baton, a short documentary on the surprising breakdown and reconstruction of the nation over the past five years, with a panel discussion after the screening.



• There's actually several notable things happening at the Regent in Arlington: Saturday evening features two showings of "The Restaurant", a short film starring Lenny Clarke, Tony V, Patty Ross, Frank Santorelli, and many other local comedians as the waiters and customers in a Boston restaurant hear that a director who likes to cast unknowns is in town and angle to get discovered. On Tuesday the 20th, the Banff Mountain Film & Book Festival presents the "Radical Reels" program, a collection of short adventure-sport films, a theme that continues on Wednesday and Thursday with two Women in Adventure Sports film packages. All three of those nights figure to be action-packed, while "The Restaurant" promises red carpets and meet & greets with the cast.



• You know who else likes red carpets? The Boston Film Festival; I half-suspect that getting to hobnob with celebrities is the entire reason that this current iteration of the festival exists. It's a pretty thin-looking line-up this year, with Eric Shaeffer's new movie - After Fall, Winter - appearing to be the big World Premiere. Wednesday night does look somewhat promising, with The Trouble with the Truth and Fort McCoy, and Thursday Night's closing film still unannounced.
  
  I've been bagging on and bailing on this festival more and more over the past few years (and I'm tempted to try and guess the winners of its awards by listing the highest-profile people scheduled to be there in person), but I honestly take no pleasure in how thin it looks in 2011; it's honestly sad to see what it's reduced to, with nothing that looks terribly likely to crack theaters, a venue in the Stuart Street Playhouse that hasn't actually shown a movie in months, and even the usual list of expensive parties missing in action.

My plans? Drive. Rapt, I think. Maybe Contagion. Some of the stuff at ArtsEmerson, though I'll likely miss the Friday night double feature (Burlington to Downtown Crossing by 6pm just ain't happening). I'll probably go for The Lion King in 3D, because I have a hard time denying curiosity. And, who knows, maybe I'll even check something out at the Boston Film Festival out.

Little-seen German films: World on a Wire and Nathan the Wise

I can't say I planned for these two back-to-back; as much as I keep an eye on the special presentations at Boston's smaller venues, I stumbled on each of these films as I was making up last week's Next Week in Tickets and found myself intrigued (so even if I'm not getting the hits on Next Week the way I used to, writing it up is certainly useful to me!).

Both had a surprisingly good turnout, although I'm not sure what the yardstick one would normally use is. The Harvard Film Archive seems to know its audience pretty well, so my having to sit down in front and a bit to the side for World on a Wire wasn't completely unexpected when I arrived at ten minutes to the scheduled start, but it is still a movie where you're going to leave about four hours after you come in, and that's not for the faint of heart. HFA must have known there were plenty of Fassbinder fans, since it was also scheduled to play Sunday night.

Nathan the Wise seemed to catch many of the presenters by surprise - it's an obscure foreign silent movie being shown at 11am on a Sunday, but it got a very nice crowd. I suspect that it was able to draw from a lot of mailing lists - about five people got up to the podium to introduce their group before the movie started - which is always nice.

Both films were restored, as well, and looked pretty nice. Nathan the Wise being complete is a really pleasant surprise - the copy found in the Russian archive was under another name (which really only described the beginning of the movie), and had replaced the title card, but that apparently was it. It was projected on digital video, but looked OK. World on a Wire appeared to be on film (with a Janus logo up front), and at a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which is interesting. It was shot for TV, which generally means a 1.33:1 ratio, and occasionally did look a bit like the top and bottom were cut off. Not sure whether this is a mistake on the Archive's part or how Janus is distributing the movie. Maybe Fassbinder was thinking about potential theatrical exhibition when he shot it, but how likely is that? At any rate, with Janus distributing, a Criterion DVD/BD seems likely, so we'll see how they encode it then.


Welt am Draht (World on a Wire)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 September 2011 in the Harvard Film Archive (special presentation)

Even though the novel being adapted was released ten years earlier, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire still manages to be ahead of its time for having been released in 1973. Neuromancer was eleven years in the future when it aired on German TV, and the phrase "virtual reality" wouldn't even be used in this context for another four years after that. And while parts of it certainly seem quaint in hindsight, it remains a surprisingly current bit of science fiction today.

Professor Henry Vollmer (Adrian Hooven) has spearheaded the creation of an extraordinary computer; a "simulation engine" which can create an astonishingly detailed likeness of the real world, with over three thousand autonomous individuals within. On the day he and agency head Herbert Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau) are demonstrating it to the secretary of state, though, Vollmer is erratic and mentally unstable; by the time the day is out, he will be dead from an electrical accident. That leaves Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) as the new head of the project, and while he initially enjoys the perks of the promotion, things soon get very strange for him: Head of security Guenther Lause (Ivan Desny) warns him that Vollmer's death may not be an accident, but vanishes before he can explain fully; Siskins appears to be making inappropriate deals with the head of United Steel, blatantly placing his assistant Gloria Fromm (Barbara Valentin) in Stiller's office as a spy when Stiller's secretary Maja (Margit Carstensen) mysteriously falls ill; and Vollmer's daughter Eva (Mascha Rabben) has her own mysterious comings and goings.

Though recently restored and playing a few dates on film, World on a Wire was originally produced for German television as a two-part miniseries, complete with a cliffhanger at the halfway point. That can make for a long evening when the whole thing is viewed in one sitting, and not just because of the sheer length of the thing (a little over three and a half hours): As an early example of this subgenre, it was made for an audience that had not seen this sort of science fiction very much, so while its original audience might have needed several hints dropped, even somebody who isn't a particular science-fiction fan in the twenty-first century will almost certainly guess where Fassbinder is going much earlier than the cliffhanger. It's a credit to Fassbinder as a filmmaker that he can keep things interesting anyway, but waiting for the supposed smartest character in the movie to catch up can be frustrating.

Full review at EFC.

Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2011 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sounds of Silents; digital projection)

Nathan the Wise has had a tumultuous journey to reach modern audiences: The original play (based on a narrative poem) was first performed two years after writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's death, and though this film version was very popular in many other parts of Germany upon its 1923 release, it didn't open in Munich the ascendent Nazis threatened violence against any theater that ran it. In 1933, after they came to power, they destroyed all known copies, and it would be over sixty years before one was found in a Russian archive. The film itself isn't quite on the level of its history, but it's well-made, interesting, and heartfelt; well worth seeing.

The story takes place in twelfth century Jerusalem, during the time of the Crusades. Sultan Saladin (Fritz Greiner) takes the city over the efforts of his brother Assad, who had converted to Christianity and fought with the Knights Templar. In the chaos that follows, pacifist Jewish merchant Nathan's seven sons are killed when rioters set fire to the synagogue. He despairs until a fleeing soldier presses Assad's newborn baby into his hands. Fifteen or twenty years later, Nathan (Werner Krauss) has raised "Recha" (Bella Muzsany) well; both father and the pretty, cheerful girl are known for their kindness and chairty. Saladin, meanwhile, has successfully defended the city from Crusaders again, and though most have been imprisoned, he frees one (Carl de Vogt) for his bravery and resemblance to the Sultan's lost brother.

The paths of these people will cross, naturally; given what we have seen in the prologue, it is destiny. Interestingly, that opening sequence was not part of the original play, and in some ways it's an awkward compromise between what works in a written story or play and what works in a silent film. Screenwriter Hans Kyser and director Manfred Noa essentially show the audience how all the characters are connected before the title card for Act One appears, and while it likely reduces the number of later scenes that are just walls of intertitled exposition, it certainly reduces the number of later surprises while casting a shadow over the scenes with Recha and the Templar.

Full review at EFC.

New from China: My Kingdom and Love in Space

Hey, China Lion, it's been a while since I saw you. We're a bunch of prudes in Boston, so even the indie theaters booking 3-D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy was right out, and I passed on The Beginning of the Great Revival back in June, so it's been almost five months. Good to see you're making up for lost time, with a potential double-feature. Quality-wise, it's fifty-fifty, but at least My Kingdom may be my favorite movie of the ones you've released.

I wonder if any of the places playing these movies offered them as a double feature; they're not exactly an obvious pairing other than being released on the same day, but both screenings I went to were sparsely attended. Probably not to the point of Creature-like per-screen averages, but I had some elbow room. I tend to wonder if this would appeal to thrifty people who might not otherwise give these movies a chance (I've written about this before, but it bears repeating: Theaters would benefit a heck of a lot from bringing back the double feature), both within and without the core Chinatown audience.

Of course, when measuring attendance for Love in Space, it depends whether you're talking about at the start of the movie or at the end. The fire alarm went off about 2/3 the way through, so we all went out and milled about in the lobby, returning to our seats once the flashing lights stopped. Then they started again, so it was back to the lobby until the Boston Fire Department gave us the thumbs up and we sat back down. Each alarm caused a bit of attrition; I'm guessing that the attendance went from eight to two over the course of the two hours. This was not a movie were it paid to give the audience a chance to leave!

Da Wu Sheng (My Kingdom)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 September 2011 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)

Fans of action cinema respect the Peking Opera School - it's where Jackie Chan and many others trained, finding their way to martial-arts-movie-stardom when they graduated to find little demand for traditional Chinese opera. In My Kingdom, we see a tale from the form's heyday, and while it maybe overdoes some things, it seems like bad form to complain about this movie being too operatic.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a Prince Regent ruled China, and part of the way he solidified this rule was to execute whole clans martial artists, including children. One boy, Meng Er-kui, sang as he was led to the headsman.and was rescued and taken in by Master Yu Sheng-ying (Yuen Biao), to be trained and raised as a brother to Guan Yi-long. How the Regent favored Yu did not go unnoticed, and Yue Jiang-tien (Yu Rongguang) journeyed from Shanghai to challenge Yu for the title and golden plaque of the country's greatest Opera Warrior. Fifteen years later, the grown Yi-long (Wu Chun) and Er-kui (Han Geng) journey to Shanghai to make their fortunes and challenge Yue, despite their Master's demands they do not. They find their old enemy to be the star of the city's most popular troupe, engaged in a taboo romance with his leading lady, Xi Mu-lang (Barbie Hsu).

Say what you will about the rest of the movie, but there can be little argument that it is gorgeous to behold, especially the first half, which is filled with opulent costumes and elaborate recreations of 1920s Shanghai. There's not a frame that doesn't seem to have some sort of detail that makes the audience grin: General Lu (Louis Liu) lounges in the back of the theater like something you'd see in a movie from the period. The brothers' wardrobes show them assimilating to the city, going from the traditional costumes of the rural Chinese to a more western hayseed look to Yi-long's spiffy suits and top hats. And the make-up jobs are utterly fantastic, transforming some faces into masks while still letting emotion come through.

Full review at EFC.

Love In Space

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 September 2011 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)

Movies that get their science wrong (by, say, having one character in a microgravity environment throw something at another only to have it slowly float across the room like it was underwater) annoy me; movies that flaunt their ignorance (having the second character snidely comment about how the first should have known that was going to happen) just flat-out tick me off. Basic physics is not hard, even for creative writing majors! But I'll leave the examples of bad science at that example, because (a) many people, sadly, just don't care; (b) it only really impacts one of Love in Space's four storylines; and (c) even without those errors, this film is plenty stupid.

Mary Huang (Xu Fan) has always loved flowers; all three of the widow's relationship-challenged children are named after one. Rose (René Liu) is an astronaut, currently on a mission to the International Space Station with Commander Michael Chan (Aaron Kwok) - who happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Lily (Gwei Lun-mei) went to Sydney, Australia to study art, but her germophobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder is holding her back. She has just met a nice guy, Johnny Chen (Eason Chan), but they may not be a perfect match, as he's the "Son" in Chen & Son Trash Collection. Youngest daughter Peony (Wing "Angelababy" Yeung) is an actress who has just received China's equivalent of a Razzie. Having never led a normal life but determined to do much better in an upcoming role as a waitress, she takes a job in a café alongside frustrated writer Wen Feng (Jing Boran) - who, shall we say, is not a fan of her work - while her manager "Uncle Hua" nurses a crush on Mary.

While some of these storylines certainly have a lot of miles on them, each one of them has a decent enough idea inside them that a talented filmmaker and a charismatic cast could make an entertaining romantic comedy out of each of the daughters' stories (with Mary and Hua a B-plot for Peony's). Combine those with a fairly strong cast - all seven main cast members are big names in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan - and the raw materials look promising. No, Love in Space is not likely to be a classic, but as cinematic comfort food, it's got potential. Just don't screw it up.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.23 (5 August): Voltaire, Puppet Master of the Macabre and wrap-up

Sadly, I only got there once this year, same as last year. This year's milkshake: 70% cacao with orange, which is yummy. My goal for next year is to try and compare at least 20 of the 40. The fun thing about the place is that it's Swiss chocolate in the front, Swiss timepieces in the back, including a bunch of truly awesome grandfather clocks. A part of me wonders if those are the owners' true passion, but the chocolate provides day-to-day operating capital in between selling $2,000 clocks.

And so, we reach the end of the pre-screener portion of the Fantasia coverage. My last day at the festival is usually less about seeing movies than housekeeping, and this year was no exception: I walked down Maisoneuve to have construction pancakes at Eggspectation, did some laundry (I had money on the card anyway), put in my time at the day job, waited to return the keys to the apartment, took the Metro to the bus station, stowed my luggage, came back for my last show, and then headed back to the bus station.

Ah, the bus. As much fun as it is to actually put something into a locker at a bus station - if I'm ever found wandering a strange street with amnesia, I darn well want a mysterious bus station locker key in my pocket! - they tend to be crowded, with long lines that blend into each other and ticketing systems that can be charmingly quaint reminders of a bygone era. It was especially crowded that day, so they had to put a second bus on, and I was lucky enough to have the cutoff be just in front of me. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but the second bus was significantly less crowded, meaning I could recline my seat without being in someone else's lap, use the power outlet without negotiating, and move about a bit when I slept after the border (which was relatively painless! I half think I made the officer's day in that "sublet an apartment I found on Craigslist" was an answer he hadn't heard before).

Before that, though, was one last show - "Voltaire: Puppet Master of the Macabre". Fans may laugh, but I was kind of expecting some actual puppetry. Instead, there were a couple of reels of the work he did as a stop-motion animator, a viewing of his 16mm copy of the Oscar-winning short "Balance", and some entertaining storytelling before he broke out the guitar and started in with his quirky, goth-inspired folk songs.

(Or is this the proper time to use "filk"? That's fannish-folk, right? Or is that not even a thing any more; I think I first/last saw the term twenty years ago, and never with a formal definition.)

I get the feeling that the initial response to the show wasn't quite what the organizers had hoped for; in the days leading up to it, the volunteers were handing out a lot of postcards to people waiting in line, eventually with a "buy one, get one free" sticky note attached. It was a good show but perhaps a tough sell, as it was three different things, came at the end of a long festival, and despite the French name, everything was in English. It was also scheduled at about the same time as another multimedia show and the Fantastique Weekend shorts programs.



I was sitting close to the back so that the fans could get closer, so this picture doesn't really show the contrast between the evil-looking album-art photo and the gregarious raconteur on stage. It's kind of amusing to me that Amazon puts his albums in the "Metal/Industrial" category, considering that he's probably now best known for doing songs for the Grim & Mandy cartoon, and the live show was folk-y, which is just about the opposite of metal in terms of tone. Of course, since this is my only exposure to the guy, he could just be a chameleon - doing some recordings and shows with tons of distortion and backup, but going acoustic on others, even if it's the same songs.

He also brought being friendly with the audience to a new level:



I think this was during "When You're Evil", one of his more popular songs. I may be wrong, though. Anyway, plenty of people seemed to know the words.


So that's the last day (for me; there were two more days of shows, but they were mostly repeats and French-language shorts). Now, as with IFFBoston earlier this year, let's wrap things up the way only a database programmer who spends the better part of a month in a different cities watching movies would: With graphs!



I'm only including the films here, so the Voltaire show in Theatre DB Clarke is not shown. This isn't anything close to a big deal like it was for IFFBoston; both rooms are comfortable and getting from one to another just means crossing the street. To a certain extent, it's indicative of how much of what I saw was the stuff expected to draw the larger crowd, I guess, but that's really it.



"International" here is DJ XL5's Rockin' Zappin' Party, which was mostly American and Canadian content, but not entirely. For a genre film festival, this isn't a particularly surprising list - Japan not only produces a lot of material, but enthusiastically exports it (several of its entries are Sushi Typhoon films half-built for the international market, or ones made with similar goals). South Korea cranks out a lot of great stuff these days.

The relatively low numbers for the Chinas may be deceptive - I had already seen True Legend and wound up taking a screener for Ocean Heaven home. Still, the lack of anything out of the People's Republic is somewhat surprising (caveat: they were probably involved in Hong Kong's three entries). Biggest shock is the very low score for Thailand; there was no Thai horror this year, no quirky comedy/dramas, and just Bangkok Knockout for martial arts.



Halves are awarded somewhat haphazardly - the description for Art/Crime indicated that it was a combination of English and French, so I went with that, although I remember much more French with English. I called Ip Man: The Legend is Born half-Cantonese and half-Mandarin and treated both Don't Go Breaking My Heart and Detective Dee as all-Cantonese, although I'm really sort of guessing there.

English dominates, roughly equaling the totals of the next four languages combined (or exactly, if you give the half-film to French), with about 43% of all films I saw, and it could have been much higher; I saw several English-language features that I would have seen at Fantasia at other festivals. The somewhat sad thing is that these films don't just come from English-language countries - Urban Explorer had its international cast using English as a common language (hence, Germany appears in the country list while German is absent from the languages), while Blackthorn was made in Bolivia by Spanish filmmakers (and money), so we'll call it Spanish. That's not really new; Spain has been cranking out English-language films for the last decade or so.

And then there's The Devil's Double, which is apparently Belgian in origin. Good luck finding anything even vaguely Belgian about it, from its English star, French co-star, Iraqi setting, Kiwi director, and English-language dialogue. It does make Belgium an interesting entry in the previous chart, in that its three films each had different primary languages: Bullhead was mainly Flemish (though with some characters who spoke French), Please Kill Me was mainly French (with English-speaking characters), and The Devil's Double.



I'm not sure which view I like more, so here's both. The bar graph shows a bell curve; the pie chart makes it easier to see how much of what I liked was in a certain range. The N/As are the Zappin' Party and Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), where I not only nodded off, but slept through such a large chunk that I couldn't even fake it if I were inclined to. I split the difference between the two ratings I gave Kidnapped (two & three and a half) and called that 2.75.

Three stars was not only the mode rating, but also the median and close to the average (which is 2.95 stars, not counting the N/As). That's a solid festival; you'd always like it to be skewed more to the high end, but isn't that true of everything in life? Again, the amount of things I saw at other festivals (and which got theatrical releases in the US) skews it - if I hadn't seen The Corridor at BUFF, that's another three-star film in the books. True Legend was 3.5, etc.

In conclusion (well, sort of - I do intend to review the screeners this year), Fantasia is a great festival, and to be totally honest, I kind of don't mind that there are ways in which it extends into September for me. It's generally a bunch of pretty good movies, with a lot of variety. It's even cooler in ways because most of these aren't art-house movies which may not have made any impression on their native audience, but an example of what people in other countries actually like.

So, see you next year, Montreal. The next ten months are going to take forever.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 September 2011 - 15 September 2011

Big festival going on up north in Toronto, where several of the fall's awards contenders will be rolled out. Meanwhile, back here, there's a little bit of that, as well as some stuff that was at IFFBoston, some apparent crap getting shoved into theaters before the good stuff crowds it off the screen, and some programming that is at least interesting.

• Contagion is the big premiere this weekend, with Steven Soderbergh directing a quite frankly ridiculous cast (Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet above the title on the poster, and there's even more!) in a thriller about an attempt to stop a global pandemic. It's a big canvas, and will get the biggest screens this weekend, popping up in IMAX at the furniture store in Reading (though not Natick), the main screen in Somerville, the IMAX-branded digital screen in Boston Common, and the RPX screen in Fenway.
  
  The other big studio release is Warrior, which has been getting very enthusiastic reviews for its story of two brothers (Joel Edgerton & Tom Hardy) both drawn into the world of mixed martial arts in order to make ends meet. In particular, those who've seen it rave over Nick Nolte as the father. I only get goodness as opposed to greatness from the trailer, but those can be deceptive.
  
  Also opening at the multiplexes: Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, which looks to be a script that Adam Sandler wrote but didn't consider worth his further time (yikes!) but somehow managed to snag Christina Ricci as the female lead (that's just sad), and Creature, a monster movie with a title, cast, and premise so generic I'm kind of shocked that it's playing theaters rather than SyFy or straight to video. Remember, tickets to actual promising movies cost the same as seeing these things.



• One of the IFFBoston alumni, Circumstance opens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. It's the tale of a couple of teenage girls in Tehran who have a bit of a crush on each other, which is more than just a little complicated in a country that has "morality police". I liked it quite a bit when I saw it at the festival, as much for the nifty last act that shows us how dictatorships solidify in microcosm as for the love story. Cinematographer Brian Rigney Hubbard will be there in person for a Q&A on the 7:10pm show on Saturday (10 September).
  
  Perhaps the most interesting of the place's special presentations this week might be the easiest to overlook; at 11am on Sunday morning, there's a combined Sounds of Silents/Goethe-Institut presentation of Nathan the Wise, a 1922 film from Germany that advocated religious tolerance among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. As you might expect, it was banned by the Nazis and remains topical, screening on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Local composer Aaron Trant composes the new soundtrack, which the After Quartet performs.
  
  Before that, the weekend's midnight movie is Class of 1984, in which a high-school music teacher is going to have to do more than just inspire his students to get out of his new inner-city assignment alive. There's also a National Theater simulcast of Man, Two Guvnors on Thursday (15 September).



• Circumstance also opens at Kendall Square, as does Bellflower and Higher Ground. I didn't like Bellflower quite so much as Circumstance when I saw them back in April, but the apocalyptically-inspired tragic love story does have a visceral appeal, and props to the filmmakers for not only building all the tricked-out flamethrowers and custom cars featured in the picture, but much of the camera equipment as well.
  
  Higher Ground, on the other hand, is likely a bit quieter; the directorial debut of star Vera Farmiga is about her character gaining and losing faith in religion as tragedies enter her life. A fair number of films are sticking around, so there's only room for the one-week booking, Mr. Nice, to play two shows a day (1:40pm and 6:30pm; Magic Trip has the complimentary slots). It stars Rhys Ifans in a comedic biography of a dope smuggler who was apparently quite brilliant in other fields.



• With their one-a-month schedule interrupted by summer (and nobody in Boston stepping up to show 3-D Sex & Zen), China Lion opens two Chinese films at Boston Common this week. Both appear to be romances of a sort, but dig into the descriptions a little and they sound interesting. My Kingdom is a period piece about two brothers who entered the Peking Opera School because martial arts was forbidden; naturally they get involved with the same woman in Shanghai. Barbie Hsu is the biggest name in the main cast, but Yuen Biao plays one of their teachers, and Sammo Hung choreographs the action, so that should be fun.
  
  Love in Space, meanwhile, is stocked with plenty of bigger stars, including Canto-pop idols Aaron Kwok, Eason Chan, and "Angelababy". It's four times the romantic comedy, as a mother and her three daughters take a chance on finding love in environments including high school, the moon, and everywhere in between. Well, I don't know if they ever reach the moon, but we'll see.
  
  Both share a single screen, although AMC is likely not selling single-admission tickets for a double feature. My Kingdom plays at 11:40am, 4:40pm, and 7:10pm; Love In Space takes the 2:00pm and 9:40pm slots.



• If you prefer Indian to Chinese, Mere Brother Ki Dulhan opens at Fresh Pond; it's about a man trying to arrange a marriage for his brother, only to fall for the lady himself (she's played by Katrina Kaif, and thus gorgeous). It's a musical comedy, and thus perhaps the most Bollywood film I can imagine. It splits the screen with the still-playing Bodyguard. Still no sign of That Girl in Yellow Boots.



• The Brattle has a special guest this weekend, Crispin Hellion Glover, who may have disappeared off the mainstream radar between Back to the Future and Charlie's Angels, but earned a big cult following as an actor and filmmaker while the rest of us weren't looking. His two films playing this weekend are both very much on the odd side: It Is Fine! Everything is Fine! features screenwriter Steven C. Stewart in a semi-autobiographical tale that is "[p]art horror film, part exploitation picture and part documentary", and runs Friday and Sunday night; Saturday's program features What Is It?, an avant-garde movie whose cast incidentally features many actors with Down's Syndrome. Both films will be precede by a different version of Glover's "Big Slide Show"; there will also be Q&A and a book signing.
  
  Monday's DocYard feature is Rain in a Dry Land, with director Anne Makepeace and editor Mary Lampson there to introduce and answer questions about their documentary. It follows two Somali families who arrive in the United States as refugees and find that living here is a whole new sort of culture shock.
  
  The rest of the week finishes up with the second half of The Neurotic Genius of Woody Allen. Tuesday night (13 September) is a double feature that blurs the line between real life and reel life (Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo). Wednesday is given to Radio Days, apparently one of Allen's favorites. And Thursday sees Allen back in serious mode, with the recent Match Point.



• The Harvard Film Archive continues its American Punk series this weekend, with Border Radio and Desperate Teenage Lovedolls on Friday and The Blank Generation on Sunday and Monday. On Saturday and Sunday nights, there are two chances to catch the full three-and-a-half hour cut of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire, which was produced for German television in 1973 (from a 1964 novel) but seems to anticipate a great deal of the virtual-reality a corporate paranoia that would show up in later science fiction.



• The Museum of Fine Arts continues their series of selections from the International Festival of Films on Art with screenings of six different films. In between, the restored print of Black Narcissus gets another screening on Sunday the 11th.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has another one-night documentary premiere this Thursday, Beyond The Myth: A Film About Pit Bulls and Breed Discrimination; he title seems pretty self-explanatory. Director Libby Sherrill will be in attendance, as will "Cherry", one of the dogs seized from Michael Vick.



• There's a bit of second-run shuffling going on, including Attack the Block moving back to Boston Common after spending a week across the river in Harvard Square. Sarah's Key moves to the Arlington Capitol (closing at Kendall Square and Coolidge Corner).

My plans? It looks like I may be good and booked, grabbing both Chinese films at some point during the weekend, probably combined with Contagion. Among the specials, I'm very tempted by both World on a Wire and Nathan the Wise, as well as the non-Match Point Allen movies. And on Sunday, I'll also be hitting the Ice Cream Showdown, because I love ice cream and it's for charity.

What, no reviews yet?: The Debt and Shark Night

I'm not usually the new-release guy at eFilmCritic; there are other guys who get invited to press screenings and can even get to them because they don't have a day job with potentially late hours out in Burlington (or whatever the local equivalent to Burlington, MA, is). I mostly pick up the stuff that falls through the cracks - indie films that hit Boston before Chicago, or horror movies that don't screen for critics. That explains Shark Night, but The Debt just seems to have fallen through the cracks.

Anyway, both were interesting theatrical experience (if mediocre movies). I caught The Debt at the Coolidge Corner Theatre after stuffing myself at SoulFire and feeling like I was going to explode. That's not necessarily important information, except that to get from A to B, one walks through Brookline's Coolidge Corner neighborhood, which has a fairly sizable Jewish presence - signs say things like "Established 5757", which was a head-scratcher the first time I saw it. After walking through that, a marquee like this:



... which features a drama/thriller about the Mossad hunting down a Nazi war criminal, a drama about a French family discovering Holocaust-related secrets, a comedy from Woody Allen, and a documentary about the guy whose stories inspired Fiddler on the Roof... well, it's kind of amusing. They don't usually play to the neighbors that much, but it seemed to be working out well enough for them this weekend: There was a pretty good crowd when I got there, and the screenings in the smaller digital rooms were sold out. Not bad for a Sunday night, albeit one with a holiday coming up on Monday.

I used that holiday to catch the matinee of Shark Night 3D at Fresh Pond, which I regret. Not because of the movie - it has its issues, but I could see enjoying it if shown at a decent theater. Fresh Pond was not that, though - the 12pm show did not start until 12:25, and it looked terrible - dark and muddy and low-res. The end credits were basically unreadable, the whole picture looked maroon, and the 3D tech was working against me; my eyes couldn't lock onto the foreground plane much of the time. I'm usually pretty comfortable with 3D, and this looked to be shot that way rather than post-converted, so I strongly suspect that this was just bad projection rather than something inherent to the process.

Which stinks, really, because I would like to go to Fresh Pond more: They are an easy stop on my way home from work, their base ticket prices are some of the best in the metro Boston area, and the surcharges for 3D ($2.25-$2.75) are actually reasonable. But presentation is king, and while I'm willing to accept the center aisles and high/small screens (the likely result of going from two screens to ten at some point) at that price, I've got to be able to see the movie. So, I guess it's back to only going there when something isn't showing anywhere else.


The Debt

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 September 2011 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run)

Attach enough talent to a movie, and more often than not, you'll at least wind up with something worth watching, and The Debt has a fair number of good people working on it. Does it translate into a great movie? No, not really; the people involved have to settle for having made one that's okay, and at times a little better.

Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) is a hero; back in 1965, as a younger woman (Jessica Chastain), she and her fellow Mossad agents David Peretz (Sam Worthington) and team leader Stephan Gold (Marton Csokas) infiltrated East Berlin and captured Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), with Rachel shooting him as he tried to escape. Thirty years later, Rachel's and Stephan's daughter Sarah (Romi Aboulafia) has written a book about the mission, and as parties are held for its release, we see that the scar on Rachel's face is only the most visible reminder that there was a cost to this mission: David (Ciarán Hinds) is clearly full of despair before walking into the path of a bus, and Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) must ask his ex-wife to revisit the parts of the mission that didn't make it into their daughter's book.

The Debt doesn't quite break neatly in half, but comes close enough, with Jessica Chastain anchoring one half of the movie and Helen Mirren the other. The thing that may surprise audiences is that Chastain's is the better half. It's not perfect by a long shot, but it plays as a well-tuned Cold War thriller, with the agents quickly established as capable people up against a formidable task that goes sideways in a way that cranks the tension up a notch of two, even considering that much of how it will end is a foregone conclusion. The main storyline with Rachel having to get very close to Vogel, is exceptionally creepy in an unusual way, and the "evil bastard plays mind games with captors" segment is quite well done as well.

Full review at EFC.

Shark Night

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 September 2011 at Entertainment Cinemas Fresh Pond #1 (first-run, digital 3D)

So, there's going to be an "unrated" cut of this when it hits video, right? Because as it stands, this PG-13 flick seems like a waste of a perfectly capable boobs & blood delivery system despite its genial cast. Was director David R. Ellis so spooked by how Snakes on a Plane underachieved with an R rating that he felt compelled to go too far in the other direction?

It's a pretty standard set-up: Tulane senior Sara (Sara Paxton) has a nice vacation house on a salt water lake, and she's bringing some friends up for the weekend: Malik (Sinqua Walls), a football star; Maya (Alyssa Diaz), his girlfriend; Nick (Dustin Milligan), his tutor with the crush on Sara; Gordon (Joel David Moore), Nick's roommate; Beth (Katharine McPhee), the sort of slutty girl; Blake (Chris Zylka), the sort of slutty guy; and Sherman, the yellow Labrador Retriever. On the way, they meet some of Sara's old friends she hasn't seen since going away to college, Dennis (Chris Carmack) and Red (Joshua Leonard), and the local Sheriff (Donal Logue). Everyone's having a good time, at least until one gets maimed by a shark which has no business being there and the boat gets wrecked.

The script for Shark Night is pretty standard stuff; writers Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg set out to build a slasher movie with sharks and hit all the expected beats, and they aren't exactly loading up on the irony (the scene where the college kids meet Dennis and Red is exactly the sort of thing Tucker and Dale vs. Evil hits gold spoofing). That's not exactly a bad thing, though - the filmmakers never look down on the audience for liking this sort of material, and they can push it to reasonably silly places while staying just on the good side of self-parody.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.22 (4 August): Brawler, Haunters, and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Wow... There is an end to this!

Not quite here, but Haunters is probably the last non-screener review I'll write from the festival. There's thirteen more I'd like to do, and maybe I'll try, but 55 (or 56, if you want to count Attack the Block) out of seventy movies seen is pretty good for a guy who has a day job. I want to write up Detention, I really do, but that was seven weeks ago.

Anyway, fairly quiet day on the filmmaker front. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark producer Guillermo del Toro was going to come, but he instead sent a video message, apologizing for being fat and not being able to come. I imagine he will make it some other year, because he seems like the sort of guy who'd love it and who would legitimately feel bad about disappointing people.

Before Haunters, though, the festival honored these folks:


Sadly, the page of my notes with their names in them appears to have been torn from my notebook along with notes on movies I'd already written up, so I can only refer to the guy in the center - the much beloved Daniel Walther (please, leave a comment to fill me in and I'll update this quickly). These, though, are the behind-the-scenes folks who handle projection and sound, doing a generally very impressive job. The award is for managing Concordia's Hall Building Theatre for years, including the ten that the festival has been located there. It's a great venue for a festival, and you really are not going to see one that runs more smoothly than this.

Of course, the biggest applause came when it was hinted that before the next festival, there might be some upgrading of the actual seats. Most are pretty good, but there's a reason I took this picture from seat E-14: Not only is five rows back and touching the theater's center-line pretty much ideal for someone who likes to sit as close to the screen as I do, but seat D-14 is broken enough so that people avoid sitting there - and has been for several years - meaning that I can generally get a less obstructed view.


(l-r) Brawler co-star/producer Marc Senter, writer/director Chris Siverston, co-star/producer/co-writer Nathan Grubbs

The Brawler folks were there earlier in the day, after screening the night before. Nice folks, with plenty of good stories about how some of the best days of shooting were almost accidents - Grubbs's day job is as a river pilot in New Orleans (where the movie was set), so he was able to help Siverston talk his way onto ships for shooting.

And for further proof that the Fantasia audience is one of the good ones, they didn't nag Siverston about I Know Who Killed Me. To be fair, that movie was better than some of the stuff he'd been involved in before, and Brawler is an impressive step up from that.

Brawler

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

It seems as though there's been a recent run of "brothers who are also fighters" movies lately, all claiming to be based on true events (though sometimes loosely, as in this case), and it's not a bad template: There's a built-in story structure and climax, and brothers can be close without innuendo. Brawler is a solid example of the genre, although its indie roots means it may not get the attention of its own more-hyped siblings.

Like their father before them, Charlie Fontaine (Nathan Grubbs) and his younger brother Bobby (Marc Senter) are fighters - Charlie's more the old-school boxer, while Bobby throws in some mixed martial arts - who ply their trade in literally floating establishments (barges near their New Orleans home). Charlie has a steady girlfriend, Kat (Pell James), and is otherwise pretty grounded, while Bobby suffers from the combination of ambition and impatience that tends land him in trouble. His latest screw-up sucks Charlie in, and the injury pushes Charlie out of the fight game. One would hope that would make Bobby take stock, but of course it just slows him down for a bit. The question, then, is whether he'll destroy himself or his relationship with his brother first, and if there's any way to stop it.

The rest of the story's broad strokes fill themselves in, to an extent - the local gangsters, the trainer who's like a surrogate father to the brothers, the way Bobby screws things up worse even when an attack of conscience leads to him doing the right thing. It's the finer details that help make things interesting - for example, the gangsters' disdain for the more violent aspects of their job, and the way Bobby finds he's apparently not quite enough of a punk to do it for them. Or how the New Orleans setting is a an integral part of the picture without being the film going out of its way to point it out.

Full review at EFC.

Choneung Ryukja (Haunters)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011 - Korean Film Spotlight)

Though I suspect many of those who clamored for an Unbreakable sequel over the past decade have suddenly "realized" the first wasn't as great as they thought now that M. Night Shyamalan is treated more as a punchline than a standout, that group especially should give Haunters a look. It's got the same hook of superpowers in a spandex-free real-world environment, but has a sense of fun to it, giving the audience the action it craves.

Lim Kyu-nam (Ko Soo) isn't invulnerable, but he's never been sick and recovers from injury unusually well. Case in point - the hit he takes from a truck would kill most people, but just lays him up long enough that he loses his job in a junkyard. He eventually finds a new job working in Choi Jung-sik's Utopia pawn shop, though, and one afternoon Choi (Byeon Hie-bong) and his daughter Young-sik (Jung Eun-chae) are having lunch with Kyu-nam's friends Bubba (Abu Dodd) and Al (Enes Kaya) when the shop is visited by Cho-in (Gang Dong-won). Cho-in may have a prosthetic leg, but as we saw in the prologue, can impose his will upon anybody within his line of sight. He intends to have Choi empty his safe while the whole group forgets he was ever there, but funny thing - supernatural healing powers apparently allow Kyu-nam to shake off mind control. Now, Kyu-nam's a simple man who tries to do the right thing, so he would not approve of this even if it weren't his friends involved, while Cho-in doesn't like the idea of there being anybody out there he can't control. In short, it... is... on!

Writer/director Kim Min-suk avoids the trappings of American comic books almost entirely, but he distills the essence of what makes superheroes fun down to the basics: The hero and the villain are both pure-hearted in their own ways, and their powers represent their personalities: Cho-in is a cruel, hateful man unable to relate to others except by bending them to his will, a hidden puppet master who twists even good people and institutions to evil purposes, while Kyu-nam is a model of persistence and good cheer; he gets back up no matter what life throws at him, and has friends to help him on his mission (and it's likely not an accident that Kyu-nam's friends are unusually diverse for a Korean movie, with Bubba a Ghanan immigrant, Al a Turkish Muslim, and Young-sik hapa; he likes everyone, including those that the rest of society looks down on). Kim doesn't overburden the audience with backstory and explanations that just don't matter; he gets that superhero stories are, at their core, tales of good fighting evil on a big canvas, and delivers just that.

Full review at EFC.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011 - Closing Night)

Most everybody that likes horror movies is annoyed by PG-13; cutting the scariest or bloodiest bits out of a movie specifically made to scare people and gross them out so that teenagers can buy tickets is burning the village to save it. And yet, I wonder if the makers of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark may have erred in not doing this. As much as grown-ups should enjoy its jumps and creepy atmosphere, this seems like a movie designed to scare little kids.

It centers on one - Sally (Bailee Madison) has flown from her mother's home in California to spend some indefinite amount of time with her father Alex (Guy Pearce), an architect who is restoring an old mansion in Rhode Island with his girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes). Though Sally's sullen and doesn't want to be there, she's the one who stumbles upon a sealed-off basement (in which, we know from the prologue, horrible things happened a century ago). It should have stayed sealed off - while lots of old houses have pests inside the walls, this one's got little monsters.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is an old-fashioned haunted house picture, harkening back to a time when haunted houses were meant to be not just run-down, but also enticing as well. Secret rooms and ornate decor makes this one weird and fun to explore, while the mostly-complete restoration gives it just the thinnest veneer of safety. It's the sort of attention to detail and atmosphere that producer and co-writer Guillermo del Toro has built his career on - creepy with a touch of whimsy - and even if del Toro has handed the director's chair over to another here, the place certainly has his stamp on it. And while the film is set in the modern day, with laptops on desks and comments about gluten-free diets, it's not aggressively of the moment.

Full review at EFC.