Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 11 November 2011 - 17 November 2011

This week, I bought membership to both ArtsEmerson's film program and MoviePass; let's see how they're going to get used.

• I believe J. Edgar is the first time that Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio have worked together; it's a biography of the notoriously driven and paranoid head of the FBI. He's certainly got the potential to be a fascinating subject, although Eastwood admittedly isn't on a particularly hot streak as a director.
  
  The other big opening is Immortals, another variation on the story of Theseus that was told just last year in Clash of the Titans. The difference, I guess, is that this one was planned for 3-D from the beginning and director Tarsem Singh seems like he'd be a natural for that; even his bad movies (see: The Cell) are striking to look at.
  
  And, yes, fine, there's an Adam Sandler thing opening, but the trailer sets new records for looking terrible. You know you have better options.



• I've actually had a chance to see two of the three new movies opening at Kendall Square this weekend at previews, and they're both very good: Melancholia is the latest from Lars Trier; it features Kirsten Dunst as a bride trying to fight back depression on her wedding day despite the way that the guests range from well-meaning but unable to understand to flat-out horrible - good thing the world's about to end! Into the Abyss is Werner Herzog's new documentary about a death row the crime that landed him there, and everyone involved. Very good, especially since Herzog is not shrill, even though he very clearly doesn't approve of capital punishment. The other movie is The Other F Word, is the one-week booking. It's another documentary, this one about punk rocker Jim Lindberg, who after years of making songs that rail against authority must now be that authority as a father. There's also a two-day run of a recently unearthed Steve Jobs interview conducted by Bob Cringely. It's a 1995 interview, so he was at NeXT at the time; there may be some amusingly bitter comments about Apple (interestingly, the sickeningly fawning text on Landmark's website doesn't mention Pixar at all, even though Toy Story would open that year). It bumps evening showings of Take Shelter on Wednesday the 16th and The Skin I Live In on Thursday the 17th.



• Getting back to rocker dads, the Coolidge opens Janie Jones in its tiny digital "Goldscreen" room. The movie stars Alessandro Nivola as a guy who has the tween-age daughter he never knew he had (Abigain Breslin) dumped in his lap mid-tour. Disaster naturally ensues. They open Le Havre on the main screen; it's a French film (albeit by noted Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki) about an older resident of the port city that takes a young African refugee under his wing. Note that both will have some shuffling and reduced playtimes when Being Elmo opens in the Screening Room on Wednesday.
  
  Midnights this weekend are both Giorgio Moroder-related: His cut of Metropolis with a 1980s rock soundtrack plays downstairs in advance of being released on home video next week, while Flashdance (for which he wrote the score) plays upstairs. Pick your poison. Other special events include the Goethe-Institut screening of Almanya, Welcome to Germany at 11am on Sunday morning (the 13th); it tells the tale of an ethnically Turkish family that has lived in Germany for three generations and has decidedly mixed feelings when the grandfather announces he has bought a house in the homeland and wants the entire family to move back there with him. Monday night has a "Big Screen Classics" 50th anniversary screening of West Side Story; while a number of multiplexes have been advertising screenings, those are digital, and I think the Coolidge's will be on film. And on Tuesday night, director Michael Hazanavicius will bet here for an IFFBoston screening of The Artist. It's a free preview, so you've got to get a pass and get there early. And buy some popcorn and corn syrup-free soda, ya freeloader.



• The Brattle is all about Steven Tobolowsky this weekend - the ubiquitous character actor will be doing a live version of his podcast, "The Tobolowsky Files, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 8pm, and be the guest of honor at the Brattle Film Foundation's annual gala at the Charles Hotel at 5pm on Sunday. If that's not enough, four of his movies will play before and after the live performances: Sneakers and Groundhog Day on Saturday, and Groundhog Day, True Stories, and Memento on Sunday.
  
  The guests continue for the rest of the week, with a live concert to benefit the New England Folk Music Archives on Monday the 14th and director Jacqueline Goss present for the Balagan presentation of The Observers, a 16mm film that follows climatologists on Mount Washington. Another director will the there on Wednesday night to introduce a 9:30pm show of Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, a look at the punk & funk band still trying to play after twenty-five years. I'm not sure which director - both Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler are credited - but at least one will be there for opening night.
  
  It's a bit late for guests, but Everyday Sunshine is only playing the late show and only for five days; it will be sharing the screen with Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, which also opens Wednesday the 16th. I quite liked this documentary on Kevin Clash, the man who has performed the little red monster on Sesame Street for years and is now an executive producer on the show, when it ran at IFFBoston this year. It's scheduled to run for a little over two weeks and will have some fun co-features starting next Saturday (the 20th).



• Down the street, the Harvard Film Archive continues its Once Upon a Time... Sergio Leone with Duck, You Sucker! (Friday and Sunday evening), Once Upon a Time in the West (Saturday evening), and The Colossus of Rhodes (his debut film, Sunday afternoon). According to the website, Duck, You Sucker! will also include an hour of Clint Eastwood's early television work, even though the movie itself stars Rod Steiger and James Coburn.
  
  On Monday evening (the 14th), Oliver Laxe will visit with his film You All Are Captains, which he made with his students in Tangier and which blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction. Sounds like a great one to grill a director about afterward.



• There's a pretty great line-up at Emerson's Paramount Theater this weekend. The week's Kate Hepburn/Spencer Tracy film is State of the Union, in which Frank Capra has Kate play the estranged wife of presidential candidate Tracy (Angela Lansbury is in it, too). It runs Friday at 6pm and Saturday at 6:15pm. If you've been there for a movie in the past few weeks, you've probably seen the gorgeous looking trailer for House of Bamboo, a Sam Fuller noir (albeit a gorgeous CinemaScope color one) set in occupied Japan starring Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, and Shirley Yamaguchi; it runs Friday at 8:15pm and Saturday at 8:30pm.
  
  The family-friendly stuff at 2pm looks good, too - on Saturday, director Jeff Chiba Stearns presents his partly-animated documentary One Big Hapa Family, which focuses on how a stunning number of ethnically Japanese Canadians are marrying outside their demographic. It's presented as part of the Boston Asian American Film Festival, which also presents a special appearance by James Hong on Friday night at MIT (where two shorts programs will also screen, at 9:15pm on Friday and 1pm on Sunday) and three movies at AMC Boston Common: Touch and Bang Bang on Saturday and Knots on Sunday; all will have directors attending.
  
  Oh, and there's a members-only preview screening of The Muppets on Sunday at 2pm. I'm not saying this screening alone is worth the $60 membership fee, but it more than pays for itself if you see enough movies there. Good luck finding the film membership page on their site, though - I think you have to sign up for the email newsletter and hope there's a link to it in that.



• The Boston Jewish Film Festival wraps up at the Museum of Fine Arts this weekend (there's also one show in West Newton on Sunday) with screenings of My Best Enemy and Dusk on Saturday and Breath Made Visible, Lenin in October, and Mabul on Sunday. After that, the focus shifts to The Films of Catherine Deneuve, with Belle de Jour, The Girl on the Train, and Genealogies of a Crime playing on Wednesday the 16th and I'm Going Home playing on the afternoon of Thursday the 17th.



• The new Bollywood film showing at Fresh Pond is Rockstar, with Ranbir Kapoor as a wanna-be musician who believes that his songs will never take off until he falls in love and has his heart broken, so he seeks out the most beautiful girl in his college (Nargis Fakhri). Popular composer A.R. Rahman does the music, and the soundtrack has apparently been a big deal in India for months pre-release. That one's got English subtitles, Telegu flick O My Friend apparently does not.



• The Somerville Theatre is down to four screens this week, with the big auditorium used for live theater Friday and Sunday, a concert on Thursday, and The Alloy Orchestra with the restored Metropolis on Saturday night. I saw this earlier this year at a sold-out show, and it's well worth checking out. As a bonus, even with the Red Line out of service between Harvard and Alewife on weekends, there's still plenty of time afterwards to get to Brookine for the Moroder version. Metropolis double feature!
  
  They free the room by pushing The Rum Diary over to the Arlington Capitol. It's in the 48-seat screening room, while in amazing second-run news, Midnight in Paris, after months playing in Cambridge, is apparently set up in the main auditorium. Note that Midnight has no screenings on Thursday (a Steve Katsos benefit for Autism Speaks) and Puss in Boots has no 3D screenings on Tuesday (and only one 2D matinee at 3:30pm; not sure why).

My plans? Actually, kind of laid out: Duck, You Sucker! tonight. All afternoon and evening at ArtsEmerson on Saturday for One Big Hapa Family, State of the Union, and House of Bamboo. Maybe stay up late for the Moroder Metropolis. Right back there for The Muppets the next day. The Artist on Tuesday. Try to fit J. Edgar, Puss in Boots and Immortals in between.

Chaplin: Modern Times

And so the Chaplin retrospective runs its last shows at the Paramount. Would it be unduly selfish of me to hope for another return to the Boston area, even though they've already played at the Museum of Fine Arts and Somerville Theatre? There's still a few I haven't had a chance to see on the big screen yet and a couple more places that would seem happy to book them.

I jest a bit, but seeing these films really has been a fun and somewhat educational experience. The last time I inhaled a lot of Chaplin was years ago - I think the Brattle had a series featuring Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Jacques Tati - and I don't know if I ever really appreciated Chaplin like I did Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Charlie Chaplin is much more openly emotional than the other geniuses of silent comedy, and while there are times when this can lead him to get overwrought, it also sometimes camouflages what a great filmmaker he was. With Keaton and Lloyd, their precise staging is right out in front for the audience to be astounded by, while Chaplin is using stunts and tricky camerawork to serve the story.

In some ways, this perhaps makes him the most mature filmmaker of the three, although the flip side is that the perhaps less humanistic Lloyd and Keaton are often more solid with their plotting. Take the end of Modern Times, when the truant officers appear out of nowhere to come after Goddard's Gamin, or how the sisters she worried about so toward the beginning basically become a non-factor. Chaplin, making art, doesn't really worry about this; he's achieved the emotional response he wanted, while Lloyd, building a machine, may have been more likely to make sure it made that much sense. Chaplin does something similar in The Circus, where the tightrope walker is useful, and the last scenes are great, but the foundation isn't as strong as it might be.

Ultimately, I think Buster Keaton is probably my favorite of the three, but the trio are all so close that the ranking can easily change based on what I saw last. It's a shame that the silent comedy is so close to dead aside from the occasional curiosity (though I am really looking forward to the upcoming curiosity of The Artist very much indeed!).

Modern Times

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2011 in the Paramount Theatre Bright Screening Room (Chaplin)

While Harold Lloyd enthusiastically embraced the new technology of talking pictures only to find that it didn't reciprocate, and Buster Keaton similarly fell out of favor, Charlie Chaplin was still making mostly-silent films when Modern Times was releasedin 1936. Considering that both Keaton and Lloyd would have to be rediscovered in order to get their due while Chaplin's Tramp became and remained an icon, it seems to have worked for him. When this movie came out, though, he must have seemed as wary of progress as his main character. Fortunately, he still knows his way around a gag, and can balance slapstick and sentiment as well as ever.

Here, Chaplin plays a factory worker who winds up having a nervous breakdown as the president of Electro Steel orders the pace of the assembly lines accelerated beyond the limits of human endurance. When he comes out, coincidence places him at the front of a workers' protest, leading to him being jailed as a communist, although his helping the guards during an attempted escape gets him early release. Meanwhile, an orphaned gamin (Paulette Goddard) runs when separated from her sisters. The pair meet up and face the challenges of a world that is stacked against them together, although the man's earnest efforts often wind up with him in jail again.

Though originally conceived as a full talkie, Modern Times is at its heart a silent comedy, and it's as episodic as many of them; a sloppy projectionist could mix up the order of the Chaplin character's various disastrous work experiences between the night watchman gig and being a singing waiter without the story being adversely affected. Still, almost every one of those segments is a miniature classic, featuring some of cinema's funniest set pieces pulled off with flair. Chaplin was a master in having things quickly spin out of control and then get even more chaotic; the café scene at the end is a perfect blend of Chaplin as instigator, victim, and improvisor.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 November 2011 - 10 November 2011

No "This Week in Tickets" this week, not for lack of material, but actually for so much seen that I had no time to write. This week looks a little quieter, so I should have time for a double-sized TWIT next week.

• The movie getting on a lot of screens this weekend is Tower Heist, with Ben Stiller as an apartment concierge scheming to rob the occupant of the penthouse suite, as that guy's Ponzi scheme destroyed the staff's retirement savings. Not knowing the first thing about doing this, they recruit Eddie Murphy's professional crook to help. I'm a bit higher on this than some others; I don't hate director Brett Ratner the way a lot of writers seem to (granted, I find him mediocre-but-capable as opposed to actively bad). Also opening is A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, so I guess Kal Penn isn't working at the White House any more. Aside from the returning Penn, John Cho, and Neil Patrick Harris, I see that Richard Riehle is reprising his role from The Hebrew Hammer (I'd say more, but, honestly, I haven't seen the other Harold & Kumar movies, and it's a little early for Christmas stuff, honestly).



• Surprisingly not opening at the multiplexes is Like Crazy; you've got to head to Kendall Square (where it's got two screens) for that. I may not have loved it, but I kind of liked it, and the long-distance romance story with Felicity Jones and Anoton Yelchin seems pretty mainstream-friendly. Maybe Paramount's giving it a slow roll-out. Also playing at Kendall Square is Oranges and Sunshine, a based-on-a-true-story story of British kids sent to Australia by the government and told their parents were dead; Emily Watson plays the social worker who stumbles onto it and tries to reunite the adult children with their parents; Hugo Weaving (in what seems like a rare non-villain role) and David Wenham also star. Also kind of rare is the scheduled one-week booking, in that Revenge of the Electric Car is a documentary sequel, following up Who Killed the Electric Car? with the story of how consumer demand has led to a resurgence of development in the Electric Vehicle field. The first was an entertaining bit of advocacy, so here's hoping the same can be said for the second.



• The Brattle has a somewhat cobbled-together schedule this week, although many of the parts are interesting. On Friday and Saturday, the screen is split between Margaret (matinees and 7pm) and The Catechism Cataclysm, a pair of interesting if imperfect films. I'm not sure whether Margaret needed to lose about forty-five minutes or have the extra half-hour in Kenneth Lonergan's director's cut put back in, and I'm not sure whether The Catechism Cataclysm could do with being weirder all the way through or whether it should have saved all its strangeness for the end, but they're both worth watching at least once.
  
  The next couple of days (Sunday the 6th and Monday the 7th) are sort of an Alexander Payne series, with a double feature of Sideways and Election playing on Sunday and a CineCaché preview screening of his new movie The Descendants (with George Clooney as a father forced to take unaccustomed responsibility for home and family in Hawaii) on Monday. That one's free but will sell out; admission is only guaranteed with a series subscription or for the first 100 people to buy tickets for Sunday's double feature.
  
  Sunday also features Israeli gay activist Assi Azar in person to introduce his featurette on coming out, "Mom & Dad: I Have Something to Tell You". The Harvard Book Store will be hosting author talks at 6pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; I suspect Wednesday's Guest Jonathan Lethem had a hand in choosing the screening of John Carpenter's They Live that follows his talk at 8pm (if not, then it's amazingly random!).
  
  And on Thursday evening, the Brattle hosts Opening Night of the Boston Asian-American Film Festival. The picture is Almost Perfect, which features Kelly Hu as the stable center of a California family who helps everybody else but doesn't have time to help herself. Director Bertha Pan Bay-Sa and co-star Tina Chen will be on-hand to introduce the film and take questions afterward.



• Another festival, The Boston Jewish Film Festival, will be spending time at the Coolidge Corner Theatre throughout the week; there's at least one showing every day, although it's sometimes matinees and sometimes evenings. The means there will be a fair amount of bouncing between screens and formats for Martha Marcy May Marlene (always on film), Margin Call (some film, some video), and Take Shelter (all video); check The Coolidge's website before heading out.
  
  Aside from the BJFF, there are a few nifty specials: True Romance plays midnight on both the 4th and 5th; it's joined on Friday night by a Dumb & Dumber quote-along and on Saturday night by the monthly screening of The Room. If you prefer getting up early to staying up late, Saturday morning offers a Kids' Show screening of The Great Muppet Caper and Sunday morning a Talk Cinema screening of Lars Trier's apocalyptic drama Melancholia.



• The Museum of Fine Arts film program also has several BJFF screenings, but this weekend also features a couple of other new presentations: On Friday night, there are two chances to see Urbanized with director Gary Hustwit in person for both; it's his third film about design (following Helvetica and Objectified; this one focuses on making cities both beautiful and liveable. There are also three chances to see His Mother's Eyes, a new film from French director Thierry Kilfa starring Catharine Deneuve as a successful woman at the center of a family that has torn itself apart; it plays Saturday the 5th at 4:30pm, Sunday the 6th at 10:45am, and Wednesday the 9th at 8pm. It's the start of a Film of Cateherine Deneuve series, which continues on Thursday afternoon with Time Regained.



• Speaking of directors in person, ArtsEmerson has a couple coming to the Bright Screening Room: Hassan Ildari introduces his 1989 thriller Face of the Enemy, set during the aftermath of the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, at 6pm on Friday, and director Naomi Uman is there for her "Ukranian Time Machine" collection of films made during her return to her ancestral village on Saturday at 8:15pm.
  
  There will also be classic films on offer: Saturday afternoon, they'll be running an IB Technicolor print of the 1939 animated Gulliver's Travels, made directed by the legendary Fleischer brothers and preceded by two of their cartoon shorts. They also start the second leg of their "Kate the Iconoclast/Katharine the Icon" series with Woman of the Year on Saturday the 5th (5:45pm) and Sunday the 6th (2pm). November highlights her films with Spencer Tracy with a theme of Kate's character attempting to be a supportive wife, even if that's not always her nature; here they're married newspaper columnists.



• The Harvard Film Archive sometimes goes for the obscure, but this weekend they begin a program dedicated to a widely known master: Once Upon a Time... Sergio Leone. This weekend kicks off with two of his "Man with No Name" westerns, A Fistfull of Dollars (Friday at 7pm) and For a Few Dollars More (Friday at 9pm and Sunday at 4:30pm), along with the full 229-minute European cut of his final film, Once Upon a Time in America (Saturday at 7pm). Sunday and Monday nights, the venue will host the local premiere of Nicholas Ray's just completed/restored We Can't Go Home Again.



• RA. One, Velayudham, and 7am Arivu continue at Fresh Pond; note that only RA. One is subtitled and there are no more 3D shows.



• The third annual Killer Film Fest takes place in the Somerville Theatre's "micro-cinema" on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; I can personally vouch for El Sanatorio (Friday the 4th, 8pm) and The Dead Inside (Saturday the 5th, 5:40pm). Upstairs, there's live theater in the main auditorium this weekend, and the latest ski movie from Warren Miller Entertainment, Like There's No Tomorrow. And while it's not quite this week, the Alloy Orchestra returns on Saturday the 12th with the restored Metropolis after a sold-out show earlier in the year.



• The Arlington Capitol - aside from having a BJFF screening on Tuesday night (Life Is Too Long, 7pm) and opening Tower Heist - picks up a couple of other movies for second runs: Moneyball slides over from Somerville, and Midnight in Paris from Kendall Square. Here's hoping the latter can find an audience in its second-go round!

My plans? Yeesh, I don't know; Urbanized if I can make it tonight, the previews of Melancholia, The Descendants, and hopefully Into the Abyss I'll maybe go for the Emerson screenings of Gulliver's Travels and Woman of the Year while also catching up on In Time, Puss in Boots, and Moneyball.

Too Late: The Guard & The Big Year

Well, bummer - by the time I get these two written up, they're good and gone from the Boston area. I knew that was going to be the case with The Big Year, as I wound up seeing it on its last night at the Arlington Capitol (after it had moved there from Somerville), and knew it was likely near the end for The Guard - it opened in Boston in early August, had a pretty good run for a little movie, sticking around Kendall Square long enough to still be playing there when the Brattle showed it as part of "Recent Raves" (usually movies that have come and gone) before also making its way to Arlington.

At least The Guard had a good run here; The Big Year came and went fast. I've got warmer feelings for it than are perhaps warranted; it reminds me of my late grandfather, who probably never did anything like a Big Year himself but loved birds all the same. I never really got that when I was a kid (at least once being a real brat about it), and while I can't necessarily say I've grown much fonder of birds or anything about the great outdoors since, I do understand having hobbies that other people think are weird or being strangely devoted to them.

As expected, it was just me and a half-dozen other people at the last screening, the folks behind me being a group that was likely a little older than the usual crowd for a Jack Black/Owen Wilson movie and which seemed to contain at least a couple of birders. It makes me wonder if Fox maybe should have tried to figure out some sort of alternative marketing for this movie; despite the stacked young cast, its natural audience is probably a generation or so older, the folks who would identify with the Steve Martin character. It's probably too late to get this a holiday release on DVD/BD, which is a bit of a shame; it really is one of the relatively few recent movies for grown-ups that I'd feel comfortable recommending to my grandparents.

The Guard

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Recent Raves)

At one point in The Guard, it's suggested that there are hidden depths to the title character, with a visiting FBI agent saying he's not sure whether he's an idiot or a genius (in a somewhat saltier manner). That's oversimplifying, of course; a large part of what makes the movie so much fun is that even if Sergeant Gerry Boyle is neither, he's so perfectly suited to his environment that Brendan Gleeson is able to make such a screwy character cool.

Boyle is pretty much the entire police department for a small town in County Galway, Ireland, and since he's lazy and mildly corrupt, that makes it a good place to dump a body if you don't want a murder investigated too closely; even a conscientious new subordinate, Aidan McBride (Rory Keenan), isn't going to push Boyle to work particularly hard investigating. Still, when he sees the victim's face during a briefing on a gang of drug smugglers suspected of being in the area, he speaks up, bringing even more straight-laced FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to town, which threatens to throw a wrench into the plans of the other gang members (Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot, and Mark Strong), who are planning to bring quite a bit of white powder into the country there.

The Guard is built like a buddy-cop movie, but it's really Brendan Gleeson's show. Gerry Boyle isn't a particularly complex character, but he is a nuanced one, well-rounded enough that although the audience may not always be able to predict what he'll do, it's always the thing that makes the most sense in retrospect. The trick is that Boyle doesn't really change that much over the course of the movie, but Gleeson has such a strong idea of who this guy is that he can slip from buffoonish to sly so smoothly the audience doesn't realize those bits are at opposite ends of a scale. The feeling is not that he's committed to something, but rather that he's accepted it - Gerry Boyle just is this guy, and Gleeson just needs to be Boyle instead of forcing him at the audience.

Full review at EFC.

The Big Year

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2011 in the Arlington Capitol #1 (second-run)

What a curious thing The Big Year is in this day and age - a movie made for a broad adult audience that is nevertheless so tame that the MPAA rated it PG. Throw in a couple of stars often known for wackier work and I suspect that its brief stay in theaters is due at least in part to audiences just not knowing what to make of it. Sure, even in retrospect, it's unlikely to be seen as a forgotten classic, but it's nice in more than one sense of the word, and that's a surprisingly rare commodity.

The film takes place among "birders", avian enthusiasts who often travel great distances to observe different species, with Brad Harris (Jack Black) as our narrator. Brad's got an unusual gift for identifying birds by their call, and he's planning his first "Big Year", where he'll attempt to see and identify as many different types of bird as possible within a calendar year. The current record of 735 is held by Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson), who initially says he only intends to set the pace and see if anybody will come close to his record, though his wife Jessica (Rosamund Pike) knows better. Another man trying for the Big Year is Stu Preissler (Steve Martin), an executive whose attempts to retire from the company he founded are continually being interrupted by the merger that needs his personal input.

At times, it seems as though director David Frankel and screenwriter Howard Franklin had planned to go with a somewhat zany take on Mark Obmascik's book. The opening features an animated history lesson narrated by John Cleese, a series of snappy cuts and contrasts that emphasize the nerdy nature of the characters' hobby, and the on-screen counters that pop up with their totals emphasize the competitive aspect. There are comedic moments throughout the movie, and while the majority work, there are a few lazy ones in there, and the movie seldom seems to go for t)he really big laugh, settling instead for chuckles.

Full review at EFC.

RA. One

There were probably only a half-dozen of us in the theater for Saturday's 3D screening of RA. One, although I don't know how much of that is down to interest in the movie, not particularly caring to see it in 3D - especially considering that it only ran that way for the 10pm show, which would have made for a really late night for kids - or the fact that it was snowing outside despite October not yet being over and who wants to go out in that?

(Me, obviously, and I must admit that I got a certain amount of amusement out of the college-aged girls who clearly had not anticipated this sort of weather when choosing their skimpy costumes and high heels for the night's Halloween parties; some were having a pretty rough go of getting home afterward.)

I was actually pleasantly surprised at the quality of the projection; the last time I tried to see a 3D movie at Fresh Pond was miserable, and while I still think that the digital 3D they use isn't quite as easy on the eyes as the Real-D/IMAX/RPX branded screens elsewhere in town, it was much better than the mess of Shark Night. The movie also looked surprisingly good in 3D, especially given that it seemed mostly post-converted, if the endless closing credit scroll is any indication - everything was much more textured and natural-looking than is usual for that process, and some of the action and dance scenes at least seemed composed with it in mind. And those closing credits did go on forever; it's the only time I can remember the music running out a good three minutes before the text, with the rest unspooling in silence. I'm guessing that the stereo conversion people are only listed on the 3D digital files, and rather than pulling more music out of the film, we're subjected to an uncomfortable quiet.

One thing I found myself wondering while watching it was how much Endhiran (aka The Robot) influenced it. Big action movies like this tend to have long gestation periods in Hollywood, but that may not quite be the case in India, so even though this was pushed back to a Diwali opening from summer - in part to accommodate a Rajinikanth cameo that directly references Endhiran - there are a lot of similarities. Some of them are very basic - the robot with the same face as the scientist developing it, for instance - but the two big chase scenes also seemed very familiar. There's a car chase that defies a fair amount of gravity, and a robot running through, on top of, and on the side of a train to rescue the leading lady, with very similar staging to the equivalent chases in Rajini's movie.

The big trouble with these similarities (and the fawning cameo) is that their main effect is to remind that audience that RA. One is not really as good a movie as Endhiran. Both are kind of silly, but S. Shankar really embraced that last year - Endhiran doesn't just have bigger action scenes, but it gets more absolutely bug-nuts as it goes along. Anubhay Sinha, though, never really creates something in his movie that is big and crazy enough that the dumb stuff doesn't matter.

RA. One

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2011 in Entertainment Cinemas Fresh Pond #3 (first-run, digital 3D)

It may be hard for those who haven't seen many Bollywood productions before to believe, but RA. One is kind of disappointing because it just goes through the motions. Oh, sure, it's a musical sci-fi action/adventure comedy, and those aren't even a dime a dozen in India, but the filmmakers don't put those things together in a particularly interesting way. It's a combination of the most familiar and sometimes annoying parts of those genres, with the occasional clever or surprising bit only occasionally making the audience sit up and take notice.

Ten-year-old Prateek Subramaniam (Armaan Verma) loves video games and is great at them, but that doesn't mean having a father who programs them is cool. That goes double when one's father is as nerdy as Shekhar Subramanium (Shah Rukh Khan), an accident-prone dork who clearly won the heart of Prateek's mother Sonia (Kareena Kapoor) with his big heart and surprisingly good dance moves. Shekhar tries to please Prateek by giving his newest game an unstoppable villain, modeling it on Ravaan, the ten-faced demon of Hindu mythology. Prateek play-tests the game and pronounces it good, but it gets crossed with another piece of tech the company is developing and "RA. One" manages to escape to the outside world, looking for the boy who beat him. The best shot of stopping him: "G.One" (Khan), the game's hero, although bringing him to life may be a bit trickier.

There are a half-dozen credited writers on this thing, including star Shah Rukh Khan and director Anubhay Sinha, and yet there are some pretty severe flaws to the screenplay. Ignore that the technical details for how RA.One and G.One escape with all the powers that they have in a video game world are stupid even by the standards of bad science fiction, but the timeline frequently makes no sense. The comedy is generally lame and often inexplicable (Shekhar sees a Bad-era Michael Jackson poster on Prateek's wall and decides imitating MJ will make him seem tough and cool - really!). And as exciting and unexpected as one of the movie's big cliffhanger moments is, the rest of the movie is crippled character-wise because of it.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 October 2011 - 3 November 2011

It's Halloween weekend! Let's push the big releases down a little bit and see what's off-beat and scary!

• The Brattle Theatre goes super-old-school with their Silent Screams series this weekend, showing off (mainly) some early and justly famed early horror. Friday night offers up The Golem (with a pre-recorded soundtrack by Frank Black) from 1920 at 8pm and the recent period-style silent adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu at 10pm (both on video). Sunday offers a matinee pair of German classics - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at noon and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (for my money, still the best vampire film ever made nearly 90 years later) at 1:45. 8pm that evening has Cirkestra back in town to accompany The Unknown, which from their premiere earlier in the year is a pretty good show. Unfortunately, the other planned film with live accompaniment (Volcano Kings with the film White Zombie) has had to be postponed; as yet there's no replacement on the schedule.
  
  If that's not enough silent film for you, Wednesday and Thursday (the 2nd and 3rd of November) will feature the (in)famous Moroder Metropolis, a truncated version of the classic (from well before the recent recoveries of nearly the full picture) that uses subtitles instead of intertitles and a then-contemporary rock & roll score. Before that, there will be a live Tanya Donelly concert on Saturday night (the 29th), while Tuesday brings the second entry in the new Balagan series, Robert Todd's experimental documentary Master Plan.



• The Coolidge starts their celebration of Halloween off with a midnight screening of An American Werewolf in London on Friday, in 35mm no less. Then, on Saturday night, they offer their annual midnight horror marathon. It kicks off with a midnight double feature of the uncut Suspiria and Return of the Living Dead, but for $5 and nine hours more, you get five other movies, including Demons 2, Hardware, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, plus shorts, trailers, costume contests, and other good stuff.
  
  No special events on Halloween proper, but there's a bit of a vibe to the other films playing - the excellent Martha Marcy May Marlene opens Friday and features newcomer Elizabeth Olsen trying to return to normal life after escaping a cult lead by John Hawkes; that's kind of creepy! There's also likely a feeling of dread to held-over Take Shelter and thrills (and economic horror!) to Margin Call, which occupies both digital rooms. And then Tuesday night (November 1st), there's a "Science on Screen" presentation of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, with Dr. Robert Stickgold on-hand to discuss the role of dreaming in the film and life.
  
  The Coolidge will also be one of the main venues for The Boston Jewish Film Festival including Wednesday's opening night screening, Kaddish for a Friend. The BJFF will also be having screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts and West Newton Cinema this week.



• The Somerville Theatre wraps up their week-plus of horror double features on their main screen with a couple of classics - Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and James Whale's Frankenstein running from Friday to Monday in 35mm. $8 for the pair in the evening, $5 for matinees.



• Head out to Showcase Cinemas Revere if you're in the mood for some locally-produced horror; Inkubus was shot in Providence by local filmmaker Glenn Ciano, and has Robert Englund as a demon terrorizing the cops in a police station scheduled for imminent demolition. It's actually got other familiar names in the cast (William Forsythe, Joey Fatone, Jonathan Silverman), and who knows, maybe it'll surprise.



• Maybe the fact that Roland Emmerich's new film is playing boutique theaters like Kendall Square is not exactly scary in and of itself, but it's certainly enough to make a moviegoer wonder if something is off with the universe. The movie in question is Anonymous, which posits that Shakespeare did not actuallyl write the work attributed to him, and has the true author involved in the tricky court & succession politics of the time. This also plays at Boston Common and Fenway.
  
  The one-week opening at Kendall is Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, a biography of the famed French chanseur who is just as well-known for his women as his music. It's directed by Joann Sfar, who is best known as a comic book artist, and it will be interesting to see how his style translates to live action. Kendall also gets in on the horror train, somewhat, with The Skin I Live In, in which a scientist whose wife was horribly burned goes to great lengths to test his new artificial skin. Perhaps not the sort of movie one would expect from Spanish legend Pedro Almodovar, but he's dabbled in this sort of thing before (heck, he even produced Alex de la Iglesia's first movie), and he's collaborating with Antonio Banderas for the first time since they were doing sex comedies back in the early nineties.



• Of course, some would probably like their Banderas speaking English and animated; they get Puss In Boots, opening on the bulk of the 3D and IMAX-type screens this week. It's probably worth shelling out for the extra 3D, as DreamWorks Animation builds their movies with that in mind. The movie apparently jumps back to the early days of Banderas's swashbuckling cat (a fairy tale character who did, in fact, exist long before DreamWorks included him in Shrek 2). The other big star turn this week is Johnny Depp, who sports a shockingly conventional haircut in The Rum Diary. It's Depp's second go at Hunter Thompson (having also starred in the author's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas), though not technically the same character.
  
  Last but not least among the big openings is In Time, which has survived a number of screwy name changes and a Harlan Ellison lawsuit. It depicts a future where people stop aging at 25 and from then on use lifespan as currency. I'm actually pretty excited for this one, as it's both somebody giving Andrew Niccol money to make a big sci-fi adventure (the premise has a fair amount of his Gattaca in it) and Amanda Seyfreid in a movie I want to see. Justin Timberlake stars.



• Arts Emerson wraps up their run of Charlie Chaplin films with Modern Times, Chaplin's last mostly-silent movie (released in 1937, well after talkies took over). In it, the Tramp not only confronts the Depression and increasingly mechanized current life, but sings! It plays Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The first leg of their Katharine Hepburn series finishes, too, with The Philadelphia Story on Friday and Saturday evenings, in which Hepburn must choose between Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and, oh yeah, her fiancé. A different "Story" - The Palm Beach Storyfollows in on Friday, although they're not related; this Preston Sturges comedy is part of the "Marriage Circle" series. That series closes Saturday night with Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor remaking The Marriage Circle as a musical in One Hour With You



• It's Festival time at the MFA, with The Boston Palestine Film Festival wrapping up with screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and their screenings as part of The Boston Jewish Film Festival beginning on Thursday (November 3rd).



• The Harvard Film Archive will present A Celebration of Helen Hill Friday night, with the late filmmaker's mother introducing a selection of short films, including the one she was working on at the time of her death in 2007 (since finished by her husband). And after a weekend off, "Frederick Wiseman, Institution U.S.A." returns Saturday through Monday with three long documentaries - Public Housing on Saturday the 29th, Deaf on Sunday the 30th, and Blind on Monday the 31st.



• It looks like Indian films will be playing on two screens at Fresh Pond for Diwali, with Telegu-language 7th Sense playing at 3:25pm and 9:45pm today (Friday the 28th) and Tamil-language films 7am Arivu and Velayudham splitting the screen for the rest of the week (no English subtitles). Ra.One plays all day on the other, with special 10pm 3-D shows bumping the late shows of Puss in Boots on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.



• Some second-run movies shuffle to the Capitol Theatre in Arlington: 50/50 comes from Somerville and The Debt and The Guard arrive from Kendall Square. I must admit, I'm very pleasantly surprised by how well The Guard is sticking around; I think only Midnight in Paris has seen more longevity this summer. Speaking of which: Woody Allen's movie is down to just matinees at the Kendall, which makes this weekend likely the last chance to see it in theaters for those of us who work.

My plans? I'd love to get out to Revere to check out Inkubus (I don't expect it to be good, but like to support the locals), but a great weekend of silents at the Brattle and Paranount mean that The Golem, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Modern Times will cut down on many chances. Similarly, I'd love to see Puss in Boots in proper IMAX in Reading, but I'll probably settle for digital elsewhere. In Time definitely gets a look, as does The Skin I'm In and I really should catch Moneyball before it disappears now that actual baseball is ending.

This Week In Tickets: 17 October 2011 to 23 October 2011

10am movies, a really World Series that is pretty exciting despite the lack of Red Sox involvement, and a desire to grill one last time before winter shut that down for good account for a reasonably slow week for me at the cinemas:



Plus, I picked up a new laptop on Saturday so as not to use my work machine for everything and got to playing with it. Technically, anything I create on that machine belongs to my employer, and while I have no idea what the special products division of a pharmeceuticals distributor would want with my blog and eFilmCritic reviews, it's good to stay on the right side of the contract.

The Three Musketeers (2011)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run; RealD 3D)

On the whole, Paul W.S. Anderson's new version of The Three Musketeers is just not good. That's not really surprising; Anderson doesn't have a great reputation and he's working from a script that is, to be frank, pretty awful. It's outright "why did a buy a ticket for this" groan-worthy at times. And then the movie will hit something that Anderson is good at, and that almost makes it worse, because it means that this bad movie wasn't a bad idea, but just got screwed up.

What's bad? Oh, lots of stuff. Every place where writers Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies could have written some clever bit of dialogue, they basically do the opposite. It's not just that nearly everything every character says is bland, but it's as if every single bit is calculated to make the characters seem like jerks, and only Ray Stevenson's Porthos and Milla Jovovich's Milady de Winter can make that work for them. Honestly, even though D'artagnan is supposed to be the viewpoint character we like, he's such a smug little bastard that the natural desire of the audience throughout the movie is to punch him in the face (and man, is Logan Lerman terrible). The plot is a goofy mess, frequently advanced in dumb, dumb ways.

And then Anderson and company will throw anachronistic airships at us.

Sure, one can complain about how the filmmakers are taking ridiculous liberties with the source material, but it's sort of akin to complaining that Robin Hood movies don't follow Ivanhoe or that superhero flicks generally don't follow any specific comic book storyline. The crazy clockwork technology and environments are fun enough on their own for it to be forgiveable, and the fun that the filmmakers and actors are having is palpable. If Anderson has one saving grace, it's that he knows when to say "screw realism" and go for larger-than-life fun.

If he's got two, it's that he knows how to use 3D fairly well. He was a kid let loose in a candy store with Resident Evil: Afterlife, spending what seemed like half the running time throwing poorly-rendered stuff at the audience in slow motion; this one looks a little nicer and uses the third dimension more for depth and scale than jumps. The Three Musketeers is a spiffy-looking movie, and while the 3D isn't necessary, it looks good and has a fun sense of awe and grandeur.

And, finally, I really like the way Anderson ends his movies, including this one, with ridiculous cliffhangers. He doesn't do it in a cocky or presumptuous way; he gives a satisfying climax and then basically says that these characters have more and bigger adventures ahead of them.

Chaplin: The Circus

You know what amused me about this movie that is really not funny in an objective sense? The gloves worn by the ringmaster character, as they are the exact sort of gloves worn by Mickey Mouse. They are pure white, have two slits and a button on the back, and seem to give an exaggerated roundness to his hands and fingers. I wish I had a screen capture, because it's not nearly as amusing just describing them (and considering how they aren't actually silly at all, most readers are probably raising an eyebrow to the screen or hitting "back" right now). The part that's sort of kind of a little bit more amusing is that I think I saw similar gloves in another classic movie recently (maybe Bringing up Baby), and they amused me a bit there, too.

Of coruse, it's not surprising in any way; Mickey dates from roughly this time period, so he's not wearing stylized things entirely designed to create a certain shape and hit a sweet spot between clean and busy design; they're based on real things that apparently fell out of fashion between then and now, even though Mickey (and his old cartoons) hasn't ever really disappeared.

I like seeing reminders of Mickey in The Circus, though, because Chaplin's take on The Little Tramp here is an awful lot like how Mickey would wind up portrayed in his comic strip by Floyd Gottfredson: Short and sweet, but also scrappy and brave - Mickey wouldn't back down from crossing a high-wire without training to help the show, and he'd probably be similarly ingenious in improvising a harness. He'd also absolutely stand up for Minnie (or Merna), even if it meant a fight. Both Gottfredson's Mickey and the Tramp are a lot tougher and less cutesy than they're given credit for.

The Circus

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 October 2011 in the Paramount Theatre Bright Screening Room (Chaplin)

The Circus is potentially a tricky movie, because it's built on the idea of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character being funny. This seems like a safe assumption, but it's not just about him being funny to us, but within the movie (in most cases, a joke that doesn't work is just a joke that doesn't work, but one that doesn't work when the story needs it to be funny is a problem). Fortunately, Chaplin has no troubles on that front, and manages to make one of his more purely entertaining features.

The circus is in town, and a certain Tramp (Chaplin) is wandering the grounds, hoping to find a snack. An encounter with a pickpocket (Steve Murphy) has him stumble into the big top, which gets a bigger laugh from the audience than anything the clowns are doing on purpose. The circus's proprieter and ringmaster (Allan Garcia) sees opportunity and hires him on, only to discover that the Tramp isn't that funny when he's trying. Meanwhile, the Tramp is falling for the ringmaster's stepdaughter Merna (Merna Kennedy), although her eye is caught by Rex (Harry Crocker), the handsome tightrope walker who has just joined the show.

Made between two movies often considered masterpieces (The Gold Rush and City Lights), The Circus is perhaps one of Chaplin's slighter films. It doesn't much go for the pathos that sets Chaplin apart from the other great silent comedians until the end, and even then it's perhaps misplaced, a mirror image of other movies' forced cheer. Chaplin executes those moments of seriousness well, of course, especially the scenes of Merna and the Tramp bonding over how the world is mistreating them (her stepfather is rather cruel toward her).

This just leaves more room for funny bits, though, and Chaplin loads the movie up with them. The opening chase goes through a funhouse and hall of mirrors and is filled with great, classic slapstick and silliness; the tightrope scene toward the end is a classic, transforming itself from goofy physical comedy to a wry high-wire act. In between, there's plenty of laughs to be had from the various scrapes the Tramp finds himself in, from the various disasters engineeered to make his stumbling in front of the audience genuine to a funny encounter with the show's lion. Some of the physical comedy may seem quaint to a modern audience - and maybe wouldn't work in a color talkie - but the execution is close to flawless.

Which is to be expected; Chaplin was pretty good at this sort of thing. He actually turns the broad clowning down a bit in this movie where he's frequently surrounded by actual clowns, playing the Tramp here as a plucky underdog and a bit of a romantic. Merna Kennedy makes a nice pairing for him, playing her namesake as worn-down but still hopeful - she's capable of breaking someone's heart but still being worth loving afterward. Harry Crocker is blandly handsome and charming as Rex - maybe the movie's weak link, considering how we're naturally going to love the Tramp. Allan Garcia is a perfect antagonist as the ringmaster, though, able to dance the line between hissable monster and humorously amoral.

The print screened is relatively new (2010-ish), and includes the soundtrack Chaplin wrote for the film, which is fine (it's decent circus-style music). Also included in this version (and also fine) is the opening song that Chaplin added in 1969.

The Circus is, perhaps, not one of the great silent comedies - Chaplin directed other movies with more heft, while others would create set pieces that were as astonishing as they were funny. Even lesser Chaplin gets the job done, however, providing a constant stream of chuckles and pulling on the heartstrings more successfully than it has any right to.

(Formerly at EFC)

Like Crazy

This is the second movie I've seen at the Coolidge-hosted "Talk Cinema" series, and as with Eye-Opener and CineCaché flicks, some of what I write about in the review is not insight I've reached unaided. And, as usual, I had a bit of a "hey, don't say anything about the movie before it starts" reaction to Ty Burr's intro. It's not just Burr, of course - every entry in one of these screening series seems to start with the host saying he or she learned this, that, or the other thing while researching the movie, and this really struck me when I saw the movie at a festival, and the director is best known for doing this thing... but I don't want to say too much. And I'm thinking, geez, you just did.

And now, to avoid being a total hypocrite, I'll let you jump right to the review (or, heck, the Full version at EFC) before getting into what association I heard that I could have done without. Note that there's going to be some spoilers in the next section.



Okay, no need to go crazy with the blank space.

The word Burr used that I didn't really need influencing how I thought about the movie was "mumblecore", along with the usual note about how the people most associated with it hate it. As much as that's where director Drake Doremus came from, and how there are certain similarities between this and a typical mumblecore picture, I don't really think of this as being near that category. Mainly, it's because too much money is spent on it - it's slick looking, shot in London and Los Angeles, and has River Song and Pavel Chekov in the cast as opposed to just the director's fellow film/music buddies. Clearly, Doremus has graduated from "underground" to "indie".

One thing that ran through my mind during the post-film discussion (I probably should have raised my hand and mentioned it, but the conversation went in a different direction very quickly) is that a lot of the young filmmakers making films like this never seem to have held long-term jobs, and soemtimes don't seem to get the mindset. Sure, maybe Jacob's indifference to deadlines is supposed to reflect how Anna didn't give thought to the consequences of overstaying her ­visa, and young people apparently do quit jobs for emotional reasons like Anna does at the end, but... Well, the movie is meant to cover three years, and a person does get settled in a job by then; the thought of losing insurance coverage and retirement benefits gives one pause. I kind of wonder whether a filmmaker in his twenties would get this, though; it's a life where you're less "unemployed" than "between gigs", and while you may have a much more intense identification with what you do with half your waking hours than those of us who sit behind a desk, you also know that it's a temporary thing.

Another thing: The filmmakers could have done much better in indicating that there was time passing; though they probably didn't have the sort of shooting schedule to show the change of seasons (which they don't have in L.A. anyway), you could give the characters haircuts or something. It's mainly a problem as it relates to the other boyfriends and girlfriends we meet - we've barely heard that Jacob and Anna agreed to Just Be Friends sometime earlier before we meet Jennifer Lawrence's Sam, and in the last act, it's not long after we see Jacob and Anna have gotten married (and then having some issues) that we jump forward far enough to hear that Anna and Charlie Bewley's Simon have been seeing each other for six months.

That's a real problem with the end of the movie, quite honestly - even though the marriage was presented as roughly equal problem-solving and true love, that Anna and Jacob seem to be dismissing it so quickly from the audience's perspective does a number on any sympathy we may feel for them when the visa problems clear up and they get back together. Up until then, their relationship was immature, but at least it was genuine; this sort of pulls the rug out from under the characters in the wrong way, and Doremus's tendency to skip over pivitol moments really hurts the movie especially badly here.

It's not a bad movie by any means, but it's also not that much better than the trailer that seems to have been on repeat at the theater for the last month or two. As I mention in the review, I think it will do well over time as the younger audience that is maybe inclined to take it at face value eventually gets to look at it with a more mature perspective.

Like Crazy

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2011 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Talk Cinema)

First love can burn very bright but not be that complicated, and since that's what Like Crazy is about, it makes a bit of sense for it to have a certain shallowness about it as well. The question is whether the movie demonstrates this sort of unconditional affection or whether it falls victim to it, even when the audience may be ready for more.

The two young lovers start out as students at a Los Angeles college. Anna (Felicity Jones) is a journalism major from England; Jacob (Anton Yelchin) is a local studying furniture design. They connect and fall hard for each other, and when Anna's student visa expires, she stays for the summer before returning home for a family wedding. The government is not particularly flexible about this sort of thing, though, and she's deported before Jacob can pick her up. Her parents (Alex Kingston, Oliver Muirhead) hire a lawyer to help sort things out, but in the meantime, a long-distance relationship can be a fragile thing.

The movie has a lot going for it, most obviously Felicity Jones. Anna is a part that would be very easy to oversell; she's got to be smart and passionate but also very immature at times. That immaturity is not exaggerated, though, so it's something that the audience recognizes as it starts to recede. It's quite the charming performance, all the more so because we get a chance to discover Anna's flaws without ever being pushed to turn on her.

Full review at EFC.

Weekend

Oddly enough, in the week since seeing this, I've seen two separate movies that could potentially be a good thematic pair: Like Crazy, another movie about young people in love, and Unhappy Birthday, another gay-skewing movie from the UK (though horror rather than romance). Unfortunately, this one has felt like it took far too long to write, so... Time to move on.

Well, one other thought: I do sort of wonder how some of the gay-specific stuff which seemed interesting to me (coming out as a rite of passage, claiming that in some ways things are better off in America than the UK, etc.) played to the home crowd. I arrived late, so I was sitting away from the usual folks I'd ask for insight there, and I wonder if it was true but little-discussed or trite.

Weekend

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

It would be nice to say that Weekend is a good example of those independent movies where two people meet, talk, flirt, and fall in love in a short time period and have the fact that both people are men be a minor detail rather than an important one, but we're not quite at the point where we can expect it to work that way. That's about 50% of what this movie is, but the other half is interesting as well.

Russell (Tom Cullen) is pretty well-adjusted; he's shy, but doesn't seem excessively uncomfortable either when hanging out with his straight friends on Friday night or in a Nottingham gay bar after. It's there he meets the extroverted Glen (Chris New), a would-be artist who whips a tape recorder out the next morning and starts asking Russell what he thought about the night before. Despite this awkward start, they hit it off - so of course Glen has plans to fly to America Sunday evening.

Weekend is a hang-out-and-fall-in-love movie, and like most of those it rises and falls on what the actors playing the central couple bring. Cullen and New make a nice pair, with the actors able to pick up on the aspects that are opposites both above and below the surface. Cullen makes Russell pleasantly soft-spoken but not weak-seeming; there's a level of comfort with who he is that belies his shyness. New, on the other hand, gets that while Glen may be much more forward, he's uncertain about everything.

Full review at EFC.

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

It's a good thing that I'm not opting to go nuts with the horror movies this October, because Hollywood is really not doing much to help - an unwanted remake a week ago and a quick-turn-around franchise release this week. As much as I normally think Magnolia/Magnet does a good job, I kind of think Tucker & Dale vs Evil might have killed if it had been pushed into a genuine wide release. It's really not a spooky time at the multiplex.

• It's the first October in nearly a decade without a new Saw movie, but Paramount has stepped in to fill the gap with Paranormal Activity 3, which takes place in the late 1980s and may or may not be connected to the others beyond the basic format - I'm not sure how this works, having skipped the second one and never had a chance to see the Japanese spin-off. I do know that no VHS camera in 1988 was recording the sort of high-definition, widescreen picture we see in the trailer.
  
  Two other movies that are different sorts of retreads open as well: Johnny English Reborn has Rowan Atkinson reviving the title character (curious in that while there would probably be something of an audience for Mr. Bean or Edmund Blackadder, I don't think anybody really expected the 2003 Johnny English movie to be anything but a one-off) with a potentially decent cast along for the ride. The latest adaptation of Dumas's Three Musketeers comes courtesy of director Paul W.S. Anderson and features a bunch of good-looking but forgettable folks alongside Anderson's wife Milla Jovovich. This one looks goofy and with exaggerated 3D, but I have to admit - that kind of worked for the last Resident Evil movie, so this could be fun. Maybe.
  
  Some smaller films also infiltrate the multiplexes: The Mighty Macs is actually playing at both Boston Common and Fenway and some places in the suburbs. The story of an underdog Catholic college's new girls' basketball coach taking them to the playoffs looks like one of those movies funded by a group wanting to see more positive depictions of faith on-screen (it's even G-rated!), but it's got a decent cast in Carla Gugino, David Boreanaz, Marley Shelton, and Ellen Burnstyn. Norman, meanwhile, looks to be a less-conventional family movie, with Dan Byrn playing a teenager who, for various reasons, lets the other kids at school think he has the same cancer diagnosis as his father (Richard Jenkins). It previewed at the MFA a week or two ago, but I didn't hear from anybody who saw it. That one's at Boston Comon



• Also playing Boston Common - as well as the Kendall and Coolidge Corner - is Margin Call, which features a heck of a nice cast (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Mary McDonnell, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, Zachary Quinto) in a story about an investment firm trying to avoid disaster in the first hours of the financial crisis. Great ensemble, slick-looking trailer, but the list of producers is almost as long (meaning that there were a lot of hands involved) and the filmmaker is unproven.
  
  I think the one-week booking at Kendall Square is Puncture, which features Chris Evans as a personal injury lawyer who winds up in way over his head when he takes a case against a local hospital which sends him up against the entire health care industry. Or it may be The Mill & The Cross, Lech Majewski's film which takes place inside Pieter Bruegel's sixtheenth-century painting "The Way to Calvary", with enough painstaking work taken to get the visuals just right that many critics have been blown away.



• Both the Kendall and Coolidge also open Take Shelter, in which a paranoid father, convinced that a disaster is coming, begins obsessively building a sotrm shelter in his backyard, with enough zeal that he may actually be the real danger to his family and community. It's also been getting a great critical reception, with the lead role absolutely perfect for Michael Shannon. It's mostly playing in theater #1, but check the Coolidge's website, as some shows are in #2, while Margin Call skips between film rooms and video rooms depending on the time of day.
  
  It's a huge weekend for midnight movies there as well - Human Centipede II and The Dead did well enough last weekend to be held over, meaning that this weekend is the rare time that all four screens will be used for midnights. The other two are the new restoration of Lucio Fulci's Zombi - considered a classic of the genre and presented on 2K video taken direct from the original negative - and this weekend's Steven King adaptation, Pet Semetary, which is one of the few (only?) King movies actually to be shot in his native state of Maine (hey, I grew up there and it was a big deal at the time)!
  
  Aside from the scary stuff (and, hey, both Take Shelter and Margin Call probably count toward that count in their own ways), Sunday morning (the 23rd) has the second Talk Cinema preview of the season at 10am, Like Crazy, which got some awards at Sundance for its story of a trans-Atlantic romance complicated by visa problems. Monday night (the 24th) has a National Theatre Live presentation, The Kitchen.



• The Brattle spends most of the week on its "Recent Raves" series, and I can actually recommend many of them (or not). Friday the 21st features Another Earth, which is nicely-acted but flawed both narratively and scientifically; Saturday the 22nd gives my brother Matt Attack the Block for his birthday (unfortunately, the double feature with Super 8 listed on the schedule has had to be cancelled); Sunday the 23rd is a double feature of Meek's Cutoff and The Future (both of which I found had interesting ideas but sometimes torturous execution); Tuesday the 25th is a pair of recent comedies from across the pond, The Trip and The Guard (the latter such a Recent Rave as to stil be playing in theaters!); and Wednesday the 26th finishes things up with apocalyptic love story Bellflower.
  
  Around those, there are a couple of new movies to see. Monday night's CineCaché presentation is Unhappy Birthday, a new British thriller about two men looking to surprise a friend on their birthday, with things getting very strange when another woman joins the party. On, Thursday night (the 27th), MSP's latest ski movie, Attack of La Niña screens twice, with footage taken as an unusually cold winter in western North America creates unusual and (presumably) exciting conditions.



• I've really grown to love ArtsEmerson's film programming lately. This weekend continues the Katharine Hepburn and Charlie Chaplin programs, with Kate in Holiday (Friday evening and Sunday afternoon) and the Little Tramp in The Circus (Saturday afternoon). I remember liking Holiday a lot from when I saw it five years ago, so that's a good start.
  
  They've also got another program running, though, "The Marriage Circle", which ties in with the live theater happening downstairs at the Paramount. On Friday and Saturday evening, they're showing a new 35mm print of Divorce Italian Style, in which Marcello Mastroianni conspires to eliminate his wife in order to trade for a younger model. The similarly-named but for more serious documentary Divorce Iranian Style, meanwhile, plays Saturday night (the 22nd) and examines the torturous hoops Persian women must go through to end their marriages, despite the fact that their husbands can do so at will.



• The Harvard Film Archive spends the weekend paying tribute to "The Legend of Taylor Mead", as the poet and actor will be in town to introduce three of the underground/counter-cultural films he has made over the years: The Flower Thief on Friday the 21st, Brand X on Saturday the 22nd, and Tarzan and Jain Regained... Sort of on Sunday the 23rd. For those who want more Mead, they will also be showing Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man on Sunday afternoon and Lonesome Cowboy on Monday evening.



• The MFA is mostly booked by The Boston Palestine Film Festival, which runs from Friday the 21st through Sunday the 30th. Twenty-three different films will show over the course of the festival, with ten showing this week. Each only shows once, so check the musuem/series webpage to see what's running when. There's also a Wednesday afternoon screening of Raoul Ruiz's Time Regained as part of "An Evening in France", but that appears to be sold out.



• The Somerville Theatre has a concert on Friday, and I'm not sure what they're using the big auditorium for on Friday and Saturday, but Starting Monday, it's horror dobule features, all on 35mm! Monday the 24th is random (Satanic Rites of Dracula & Nightmare on Elm Street 2); Tuesday the 25th is an It's Alive double feature (including the sequel, It Lives Again); Wednesday the 26th is "1980s movies set in movie theaters that aren't Gremlins" (Demons & Night of the Comet); and Thursday is horror essentials (The Shining & Carpenter's Halloween).



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington also has a number of different live shows over the weekend ("live radio" on Friday, a kids' concert on Saturday morning, and the Ultrasonic Rock Orchestra doing a Bowie/Queen/Zeppelin set Saturday night), so it only makes sense that their one film selection during the week is also a concert - Rush Time Machine 2011: Live in Cleveland. Shot in April, it notably includes their 1981 album Moving Pictures in its entirety. I knew a girl in college who really liked Rush, so I hope she digs it if she's still around here.



• Most of the Indian films playing Fresh Pond this week are doing so without English subtitles, but that change with RA. One, the big Diwali-season opening on Wednesday the 26th. Diwali is when the big summer/holiday-type movies get released in India, and this looks to be a gigantic one, with big effects and action, a cameo for superstar Rajinikanth, songs, and whatever else might make this story about a father and son who get sucked into a computer game and become superheroes more fun. And on top of that, the 9:50pm shows will be presented in 3-D, I believe a first for Bollywood films in the United States.



• There's a little bit of second-run-shuffling going on, as the Arlington Capitol picks up The Big Year (from the Somerville) and My Afternoons with Marguerite (from the Kendall & Coolidge).

My plans? I'm thinking The Big Year tonight (right on my way home AND at a convenient start time for that!), The Three Musketeers and The Circus tomorrow, Like Crazy and The Holiday on Sunday, Unhappy Birthday on Monday, maybe a preview or maybe the Brattle's double feature on Tuesday, and try to go for RA.One in 3D because I do like novelty. It's going to be a busy week unless work and other things interfere (as they are, admittedly, wont to do).

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

A busy moviegoing week:



Did I deliberately miss the bus last Thursday because it's much easier to make it downtown for screenings of Margaret and Love Crime (on their last day in town) when working from home in Cambridge than it is from the office in Burlington? No. But seeing as Thursday has been the usual day on which folks at my company are encouraged to telecommute, it's not a bad idea.

Margaret

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run)

The easy comment to make about Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is that it drags terribly at 149 minutes, so it's kind of amazing that the thing that kept it from release for over five years was the director's inability or unwillingness to budge from the three-hour cut to get it down to the two-and-a-half that the studio demanded. The last thing this movie needs, perhaps, is to be longer. Of course, one must then think of all the directors' cuts where some extra length has helped. After all, "boring" isn't just a matter of something taking a long time; it's taking a long time without seeming to accomplish anything.

So maybe this movie actually would play better with Lonergan's cut... but I kind of doubt it. Margaret doesn't feel like a group of interconnected stories that each needed to be given room to breathe; it feels like Lonergan started from one reasonably simple, interesting story (Anna Paquin as a teenage girl who struggles with the repercussions of a traumatic experience) and got distracted, following every subplot he could think of. These side-trips don't enhance or reinforce the central story, though, at least as the movie is constructed - it just dilutes it.

And that is really too bad, because Anna Paquin is kind of great in this. Her character can be pretty darn difficult to like at times, but it's a believable sort of teenage snottiness. Two and a half hours is a lot of time to spend with this character, though, and none of the others make for an especially interesting contrast, though they're all played well.

So, a disappointment. Hopefully Lonergan at least has this out of his system now, and can move on to hopefully make another movie as good as You Can Count on Me

Crime d'Amour (Love Crime)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)

I think I read something about how the filmmakers opted to make Ludivine Sagnier sort of frumpy in this movie, as opposed to the usual sex-kitten image. This means messy hair, glasses, and a pimple on her forehead. Oh, and she's only ever naked from behind.

I kid. This is actually a deliciously fun little movie in which Sagnier plays Isabel, a loyal and admiring junior executive who routinely has her work appropriated by boss Kristin Scott Thomas. When each makes an attempt to move up in the company - and a man comes between them - Thomas's Christine opts to humiliate Isabelle. What she doesn't realize is that even though Isabelle seems meek, she has the potential to be just as ruthless as Christine, and is probably smarter.

There's a couple of things I really like about this movie. It's structured like the best kind of magic trick, with practically every bit of deception done in plain sight, with it up to the audience to figure out just where filmmaker Alain Corneau (with co-writer Nathalie Carter) is going with everything. We're given an unusual rooting interest, and the movie at times seems to stake out an interesting moral position - that it's not necessarily ruthlessness and ambition that are most evil, but arrogance. as SPOILER: the lynchpin to Isabelle's plan is that she's willing to act without ego, something that Christine just couldn't do. :RELIOPS

50/50

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2011 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run)

There are many, many things about 50/50 that are kind of terrific, but something I always appreciate is when a movie or TV show finds good use for Matt Frewer. He and Philip Baker Hall have small parts as fellow cancer patients that share chemo times with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character. It's a little thing to notice, but it's the sign of of a movie that that sweats the details.

You'd expect those details to be sweated, as it's based on writer/producer Will Reiser's actual life, and funny, because his buddy when going through this was Seth Rogen, who co-stars as, well, basically Seth Rogen. Someday Rogen is going to win an Oscar for playing a sad or tragic variation on his jovial stoner persona, despite it being arguable that his ability to get the audience attached to these guys who make the audience laugh is the greater achievement. Here, he's really giving a great supporting performance, funny as usual but also displaying strength in just how he doesn't change as a friend.

Everyone's pretty good, especially Gordon-Levitt, who does a good job playing Adam as just a little tightly wound, which makes him at least a little funny even when the jokes come from how the people around him are reacting. Mostly, though, he's likable and able to let us see how afraid he is without it being overwhelming for the audience.

Katharine Hepburn: Bringing Up Baby

I wish I'd thought of it earlier, but next October, I think I'm going to try and do a "screwball-comedy-a-day" thing on eFilmCritic. Either just act like everybody always spends the month of October watching goofy slapstick movies, or push it as "after reading 'goriest deaths' lists on other sites, come to us for a Marx Brothers chaser!"

Heh.

A couple other things that aren't really part of the review struck me while watching this movie. First, Cary Grant would have made a fantastic Superman. Of course, the character debuted the same year as this movie, and back then superheroes were the fodder for serials, not big-budget features. Still, he had the "seeming like a completely different man when he takes off his glasses" thing down in this movie, and according to the IMDB trivia page, his character was sort of based on Harold Lloyd and his "Glasses" character - just as Clark Kent was.

Also, I wonder how we'd look at Hepburn's Susan Vance if she popped up as the main character in a movie today. I remember a bunch of reviews for Sandra Bullock's All About Steve pointing out that the main character was unlikable and probably mentally disturbed for inventing this obsessive romance out of nothing, but... Isn't that the whole deal behind this movie? Susan meets cute with David, falls for him, and then does a string of improbable and strange things to try to keep him from leaving her side. I'm guessing the other isn't executed nearly as well as this one is - what Kate Hepburn and the filmmakers do is a lot trickier than it looks - but I wonder. Take this script, make it with Isla Fisher and Matt Damon, release it in theaters... Would critics and audiences recognize its brilliance or pick at it for not having a straight man, not really giving the characters a story arc, etc.?

I kind of suspect that's what would happen; as I say in the review, this movie is just too dedicated to being funny to fit audience expectations.

Bringing Up Baby

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 October 2011 in the Paramount Theater Bright Screening Room (Kate the Icon, Katharine the Iconoclast)

When somebody uses the phrase "screwball comedy", what does it mean? Everybody who has written a book on film probably has a different definition, and every one of those writers probably cringed over trying to define something so raucous and free-spirited with precise rules. But let's be honest - what they really mean is "like Bringing Up Baby, and hopefully half as funny." It works, because a movie can be half as amusing as this and still be pretty good.

We start with Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant), who has spent the last five years excavating and reconstructing a two-story brontosaurus skeleton, which is nearly complete on the even of his wedding to his assistant. Still, the department needs funding, so he's spending the afternoon playing a round of golf with the representative of a widow considering donating a million dollars. Things go awry, though, as he runs into Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), an incredibly flighty young woman who wrecks his afternoon and evening before calling him up the next morning for help with the leopard that her brother in South America has just sent her.

This, of course, is only the start of things; the script by Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols is one nutty thing after another, and remarkably clear of purpose: Things happen and people do things because the filmmakers think that they would be funny, and they would probably be funniest happening in this order. Large chunks of what Susan does would probably get her set up as the man-stealing rival in a modern romantic comedy, but because those actions without fail lead to a funny bit, they come across as impish as opposed to mean. It really is a wonder of comedic construction: It's not that every joke is good, but even the two or three that don't work lead directly to something that does.

Getting the gags lined up is director Howard Hawks's job, and he's the talented conductor of a comedy orchestra here. There really is a rhythm to this sort of thing, like how a dinner scene has two distinct themes going on, which Hawks brings forward and back for maximum effect. Fast-paced banter will suddenly give way to a sudden slapstick crash. Characters will reappear just as the audience has forgotten about them, and every member of the broad, goofy-in-their-own-way supporting cast gets a chance to shine (even Virginia Walker, who as Huxley's fiancée has perhaps the most thankless role of all time). He also manages to integrate a fair amount of special effects almost seamlessly, as shooting around the leopard required a lot of trickery.

And, of course, there's Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who are doing a fairly brilliant job playing against type. Hepburn, after all, was making her name as a dramatic actress, and even in her comedies, she usually tends to be whip-smart with a sharp tongue; here, Susan is scatterbrained and almost ditzy, thoroughly guileless in a way one does not expect from this actress. She had to learn comedy on the job, but she masters it. Grant, meanwhile, upends the cool, debonair image we have of him (at least in hindsight) for an awkward, nerdy scientist who is just no match for Susan's manic self-assurance. He winds up being so good at playing awkward that the audience may not realize just how perfect his timing is.

As hilarious as this movie is, it's not totally surprising that it flopped in 1938; it's so committed to being funny that the expected narrative beats of characters baring their hearts feel a bit off - even back then, audiences expected romantic comedies to fit a certain pattern. Fortunately, we've got hindsight, home video, and archive prints, so we can enjoy this near-perfect example of screwball comedy any time we want.

Full review at EFC (Dead Link).

The Dead

A grain of salt with which you may wish to take this review: I missed the first five minutes or so of the movie after miscalculating the length of the one I saw before it in Somerville, mishearing whether a train was C or E, and then needing to take a shuttle bus from Kenmore to Coolidge Corner. In retrospect, the 66 bus might have looked a little better (which is saying something!).

So, whatever information co-director Howard Ford had to impart at the start of the show, I missed. Hopefully it was a good one; he did pretty well with the Q&A after the movie. It was maybe not the most informative Q&A I've ever seen, as I often got the impression that he was torn between wanting to speak well of the people he worked with - including himself and his brother, but also the locals, because nobody who makes this movie really wants to be the comfortable European talking about how backwards the folks he met in Africa were - and wanting to convey the madness of shooting on these locations. I imagine that there's a great DVD commentary in this movie's future, because there were some stories to tell: Star Rob Freeman got seriously ill; schedules got destroyed; customs held up boxes with prop guns and severed limbs until the proper bribery had been done; they recruited limbless people off the street, had them wait around until a shooting day came, put them in zombie make-up, and paid them more than they'd normally see in months. These are great stories, but a Q&A might not be the best place to tell them - you stop when you'd answered the question posed and midnight movie audiences aren't exactly the greatest at the follow-up question. A conversation between people involved months/years later, though? That would work.

I liked this one quite a bit, and it pleases me to see that the Coolidge is having it back for a pair of midnight shows this weekend; if you're in the Boston area and like zombies - especially the classic Romero-style shamblers, as these Ford made their love of the original Night of the Living Dead quite clear - this is worth checking out.

The Dead

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2011 in the Cooldige Corner Theatre #1 (@fter Midnight - Fresh Blood)

Most people who decide to make a zombie movie do it in a bare-bones way, shooting in their hometown rather than going particularly far afield; when you're working with no budget, it's best to be in familiar territory. Brothers Howard and Jonathan Ford decided to do something different, packing their severed limbs in a suitcase and heading to Africa. It's the sort of crazy decision that makes an otherwise conventional movie into something memorable.

Zombie outbreaks can spread fast; the one in The Dead is already consuming a large chunk of northwestern Africa as the movie opens. Foreigners are heading home, but with limited success; an plane evacuating Americans crashes just off-shore and the walking dead are waiting for the three survivors at the beach. Only USAF Lieutenant Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) is able to make his way through the woods to a nearby village, where he meets local soldier Daniel Dembele (Prince David Oseia). Murphy gets a car running, and the pair set off to find a way back their respective families - Brian searching for an airfield with a plane he can repair and fly to Europe, Daniel heading for the fort where his son has been relocated.

This fort, happily for the audience if less so for the characters, is not in the same fairly generic environment that many post-apocalyptic films favor; it's on the outskirts of the Sahara, on the other side of a series of jagged peaks. The Fords more or less completely upend what this sort of horror film is supposed to look like with a series of breathtaking locations: We get to see an unspoiled-looking beach, villages large and lived-in enough that the characters can move around, forests, those beautiful peaks, and the majestic desert. Cinematographer Jonathan shoots in lush panoramic 35mm, and it's not just a spectacular feast for the eyes: The changing environments give the pair's quest a sense of scale, and the brothers make good use of the widescreen frame.

Full review at EFC.