Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 16 March 2012 - 22 March 2012

I was going to spend the last week doing a #EXNE gag on Twitter, being excited about what I was seeing and how it was cooler than what was happening in Austin but... Yeah, not much moviegoing; even when I had the opportunity, there wasn't a whole lot I really wanted to hit. This weekend, though, there's at least one thing I'm stoked for.

• The Bright Screening Room in ArtsEmerson's Paramount Theater has the Boston release of A Life Without Principle, a new movie from Hong Kong master Johnnie To starring Denise Ho, Richie Ren, and the great Lau Ching-wan as a banker, a cop, and a gangster involved in a financial crime in the wake of the economic collapse. To is fantastic, and while it's a shame that it's only playing four times - Friday at 9pm, Saturday at 7pm & 9pm, and Sunday at 2pm - that's four times more often than his movies usually play here, and it's screening in 35mm to boot.
  
  Rounding out the usual schedule of six screenings per weekend are a couple entries in continuing series. Friday night's 7pm film is Lumumba, a biography of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; it's a part of "Visionary Filmmaker: Raoul Peck", a series of talks and screenings around dedicated to the Haitian director that includes a book signing at 2pm, though it appears Peck won't be on-hand for the screenings. The Saturday afternoon family matinee is also the week's "Gotta Dance" screening, Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes, one of nine movies she made in 1934 at the age of six. So what have you accomplished with your life so far?



• Another limited weekend release is happening at the Brattle, with The FP playing at 10pm from Friday to Sunday and at midnight on Friday and Saturday. It's more fun than most movies this eager to be a cult hit are. The non-late shows those days feature the work of Canadian director Atom Egoyan - The Sweet Hereafter on Friday, two double features on Saturday (Next of Kin & Speaking Parts in the afternoon and Exotica & Adoration during the early evening), and Calendar Sunday evening. They're in support of the Chlotrudis Awards, where Mr. Egoyan will be a guest and receive an award as the Chlotrudis society honors the best in 2012 independent film.
  
  (Don't blame me if you don't like the results; my indie films seen and the nominees don't intersect enough for me to vote in many categories.)
  
  The rest of the week is filled with a number of one-off screenings. On Monday, the DocYard presents Battle For Brooklyn, which follows Daniel Goldstein, who no sooner moved into a new apartment than he was informed that the New Jersey Nets would be knocking the building down to build a new arena, as he organizes opposition. Tuesday is a premiere screening of 40 West, a chamber piece featuring Wayne Newton in a supporting role. Wednesday still says "TBA" on the website, and Thursday is the opening night of Irish Film Festival Boston, with the U.S. Premiere of Stella Days, with director Thaddeus O'Sullivan and star Stephen Rea in person to introduce and answer questions afterward.



• Only one new release hitting the multiplexes this week, the feature version of 21 Jump Street, with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as the youthful looking cops sent undercover to uncover crimes in high schools. It's a comedy (intentionally), unlike the version which launched Johnny Depp's career twenty-five years ago (man, I'm old). It plays Somerville, Fresh Pond, Fenway, Harvard Square, and Boston Common.
  
  Boston Common fills a couple of other screens in with smaller releases. Love sticks around for on 11:05am show a day, and they also pick up Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which had previously only been playing Landmark's places in Kendall Square & Waltham. They're also opening a couple of movies that have the cast to open wider, but are sort of off-beat: Casa de mi Padre is a high-concept Will Ferrell parody of Mexican telenovelas and narco-dramas, with Ferrell playing his part entirely in Spanish alongside Genesis Rodriguez and legit Mexican stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. On another screen, the Duplass brothers continue their transition from mumblecore to the mainstream with Jeff, Who Lives at Home, featuring Jason Segel as a twenty-something still living in his mother's basement who may finally be motivated to move out on his own after spending a day helping his brother track down his unfaithful wife.



• Jeff also opens in Kendall Square, as does The Salt of Life, Gianni Di Gregorio's follow-up to Mid-August Lunch. Not a sequel; though much of the cast overlaps, they're playing different roles in a movie about a middle-aged man who feels that the women of Rome look right through him. It's cute but thin, and booked for a week. They also open Undefeated, the Oscar-winning Documentary about an underfunded high-school football team that turns becomes a winner under the guidance of a new coach.



• Things mostly stay the same at the Coolidge, with the exception of swapping one animated film (Arrietty) out for another, more adult feature (Chico and Rita). Chico mostly plays in the Goldscreen room, although the 5pm show will be on screen #2 (whether that means it will be on film or not is not clear). There's still some animation for kids, though, with Kids' Shows of Looney Tunes both Saturday and Sunday mornings.
  
  There are a couple of other special events at 7pm during the week. Monday's Science on Screen program is Ma Vie en Rose, about a young boy convinced he should be a girl, and is introduced by Norman Spack, MD, an endocrinologist who is one of the world's top authorities on gender-variant children. On Thursday, filmmaker Kevin Smith will be on hand to speak and sign his new book TOUGH SH*T: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good; the $28 ticket includes a copy.
  
  And later still, at midnight on Friday and Saturday, the Boston Underground Film Festival presents Shogun Assassin, a movie made by editing two Lone Wolf and Cub pictures together and dubbing them into English. Saturday night also has a midnight show of The Room.



• The Harvard Film Archive has a Terrence Davies program coming up next weekend, but gets a jump-start on it on Friday as Mr. Davies will be there in person to introduce his newest film, The Deep Blue Sea, featuring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston in an adaptation of a Terrence Rattigan play. After that, they return to their Bela Tarr retrospective. His seven-and-a-half-hour Satantago plays both Saturday and Sunday at 2pm - not split into two, but with the whole thing showing both days, with a 15-minute intermission and a one hour dinner break. Monday night's screening of Almanac of Fall, running only two hours, should be much more manageable. And on Thursday, Ernie Gehr returns to present a set of "Recent Video Work"



• The MFA concludes its New Latin American Cinema series with screenings of Bonsai, Machete Language, and Craft over the weekend; Bonsai serves double-duty as part of the Friday Night Films series, with folks arriving early treated to Latin American music courtesy of DJ due Pajaritos. On Sunday the 18th, they begin sporadic showings of Being Jewish in France, a three-plus-hour documentary by Yves Jeuland that means to serve as a primer for the entire history of Jews in that country. And on Thursday, they begin The Boston turkish Film Festival with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has a couple of film programs this week. Loot runs Sunday at 7:30pm and Monday at 8pm; it's a crime flick from Nepal set against the backdrop of Kathmandu. On Thursday, they've got a screening of 40 West, for those that missed it at the Brattle on Tuesday.



• The Somerville Theatre and Arlington Capitol are shuffling a few second-run films around, with The Descendants opening in Somerville after closing in Kendall Square - since it's already out on video, this week is likely the last chance to see the nice Hawaiian scenery on the big screen. Of course, the Capitol is still running Hugo on its main screen in 3-D despite it already being on video; they also picks up In Darkness as it also leaves Kendall Square. And in an odd move that suggests the two cinemas owned by the same company operate in neighborhoods with different curfews, the Somerville Theatre will have a midnight screening of The Hunger Games on Thursday before shipping the print up Mass Avenue to open in Arlington on Friday.

My plans? A Life Without Principle on Friday, the Chlotrudis awards on Sunday, and then who knows in between and afterward. Chico & Rita, maybe, if I can get to the big-screen showing after Japanese class on Saturday. It is kind of slow right now.

The Intruder

This is the second Roger Corman movie I've seen in less than a month (I saw War of the Satellites at the Marathon). I normally don't inflict that upon myself, but Corman directing Shatner in a serious-minded film, which is not an expected combination. I must admit, I half-expected it to be a train wreck, but was happily surprised when it turned out to be a good movie. Maybe "best performance of Mr. Shatner's career" good, and I like me some Star Trek.

Speaking of which - there are moments in this movie where Shatner looks astonishingly like Chris Pine, who plays James T. Kirk in the new Trek movies. Obviously, the new Kirk was cast in part to evoke the old one, but it's really uncanny just how similar they looked at the age of 30 or 31. It's also worth noting that Shatner looks the most Pine-like in this movie when his character is at his most Satanic; I wonder if that plays into finding New Kirk just a bit more of a jackass than the old one.

It's kind of hard to believe that Corman and Shatner only worked together twice - in this movie and 1974's Corman-produced Big Bad Mama. Shatner's larger-than-life style would seem well-suited to Corman's 1960s material, but legend has it that Corman partially blamed Shatner for The Intruder being the one blemish on his spotless record of profitability. And, of course, by the end of the decade, Mr. Shatner had a steady job. Still, they made one pretty darn good movie together, and that's worth something.

The Intruder

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2012 in the Paramount Theater Bright Family Screening Room (Crazie for Cult, 35mm)

You might not guess, based on the director (Roger Corman), star (William Shatner), and some of the titles it was released under (I Hate Your Guts!), but The Intruder is a high point in both men's careers and a pretty daring movie for the early 1960s. For a long time, it was said that this film is the only one on which Roger Corman ever lost money; it is arguably also one of the few where he had ambitions beyond making money. It's still surprisingly powerful today, fifty years after being ripped from the news.

On Monday, the high school in Caxford, Missouri will integrate with ten black students starting classes; a huge deal in 1962. No white person in town seems particularly happy about it; even liberal newspaperman Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell) seems more resigned to his daughter Ella (Beverly Lunsford) sitting next to a Negro than anything. At least, until Adam Cramer (Shatner) steps off the bus in his fine white suit. He's a "social activist" member of the "Patrick Henry Society" from Los Angeles (or Washington, depending on who he's talking to), and before he's even checked into his hotel, he's getting people agitated about the school integration. Soon he's making speeches to the townspeople and advances on Ella and Vi Griffin (Jeanne Cooper), the wife of the salesman in the next hotel room (Leo Gordon). Joey Greene (Charles Barnes) didn't expect his first day at his new school to be easy, but if Adam has his way, it may be his last.

The subjects of racism and resistance to the change that integration represents weren't completely absent from the screen in the early 1960s, but it still must have been rare for such volatile news of the day to be addressed so directly, especially at the hands of a guy like Corman who made his name on fun and thrills as opposed to confrontation. In some ways, the exploitation filmmaker in Corman is what makes The Intruder work - where more "respectable" directors might use euphemisms or hints, Corman uses the n-word, pointed hoods and burning crosses the way he might use a mummified corpse or a bucket of blood in a horror movie, tossing the nastiness right into the audience's face to get a visceral reaction. He's not entirely doing a brute-force attack; Corman knows how to create a sense of menace - just check out a great scene where Adam insinuates himself into Vi's hotel room while her husband Sam is away.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

This Week In Tickets: 5 March 2012 - 11 March 2012

Another week where I want to review everything, even though there doesn't seem like a lot to review:



That "John Carter 3" on the ticket looks kind of optimistic, doesn't it?

Not a whole lot I was really jazzed to see this week, to be honest, although the commute is a part of the issue. I've got a sort of reverse commute, where I take the bus from the city to the suburbs every morning and back every night, and lately it's been working out that seeing something at Kendall Square means being there between 6:30 and 7:00pm, which is too early, but I'd have to wait around a half hour or so at Arlington or Somerville. Plus, it's been a quiet couple of weeks; I'm starting to feel like there's not going to be anything really exciting until The Avengers comes out.

At regular theaters, I mean. There's A Life Without Principle this weekend and BUFF the next and IFFBoston after that... And some good old stuff if you know where to look.

The Intruder

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2012 in the Paramount Theater Bright Family Screening Room (Crazie for Cult, 35mm)

Well, looky here, William Shatner in a Roger Corman movie. And it's not just some goofy sci-fi/horror thing; it's a principled drama about school integration that may just be Shatner's best role. He plays a member of the "Patrick Henry Society" who comes to Caxford, Missouri in the days before its high school is set to be integrated to make sure that there's an ugly enough scene to set the civil rights movement back nationally.

Shot on the cheap, with Corman and cinematographer Taylor Byars actually getting some shots done guerrilla-style after the locals got wind of what the movie was about and they were kicked out of town, it's got a lot of the same energy as Corman's exploitation films, putting the racism and violence in the audience's face and not caring about "subtle" one whit. This sort of racism is the province of ignorant monsters, say Corman and writer Charles Beaumont, and it's a shame that enlightenment is seldom spontaneous, but the result of having the violence right in your face.

Corman and Beaumont sometimes have a little trouble getting that precise message across, and the heavy-handedness (especially with the music) can be a little much, but, you know, good on this guy who made no bones about seeing film as a business being willing to put an unpopular opinion right out there.

The Lady from Shanghai

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Film Noir Weekend, 35mm)

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, ladies and gentlemen. It's almost all you have to say here, because while the film noir plot is pretty basic - man falls for beautiful woman above his station, she demonstrates that her life's not perfect, but before they can run away together, there's a little murder that must be done - but it's the way they execute it that makes it memorable.

And when you get right down to it, the way writer/director/producer/star Welles and company play The Lady from Shanghai out is kind of loopy: Welles's narration is equal parts broad Irish accent and tough-guy dialogue, George Grisby is way over-the-top as the lawyer looking to fake his death so that he can run away from his fears of nuclear annihilation, and the final showdown in an abandoned amusement park is equal parts absurd slapstick and artsy cinematography. Welles is dead serious about things that would today be played as parody.

Plus, Rita Hayworth. Good gravy, is she beautiful in this movie, playing the sort of woman who is so beguiling that, even as Welles's Michael O'Hara and the audience realize that he is slipping into a mire from which there may be no escape, it's hard to think that it's the result of anything but a man's own nature - women like this just can't help but leave a string of wrecked men in their wake.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Film Noir Weekend, 35mm)

I'm not sure whether this movie makes a good double feature with The Lady Shanghai or not, seeing how similar their templates are: Vagabond, married blonde, murder, bizarre trial, finale. It's at least instructive to see what Welles, a genius, is able to do with the material versus the merely solid crew here.

It's not a bad movie, by any means - Lana Turner and John Garfield are well-cast as the girl with the inconvenient husband and the drifter who falls for her, and get a load of Hume Cronyn as the lawyer who is so gleefully corrupt that he would wind up dominating the average episode of Law & Order. It just frequently seems to take forever: Its nearly-two-hour runtime is quite long for 1946, and during the first half, one does find oneself wishing that they would just kill Cora's husband already. Some of the standards of the day are kind of hilarious, as well: Cora and Frank continuing to live under one roof (though in separate rooms) after Nick dies is apparently not just suspicious, but criminal, while Nick habitually driving while cartoonishly inebriated is apparently sort of goofy.

It's not bad, though - for all its faults, it quite frequently plays as more than the sum of its parts.

3D CGI stuff: The Lorax and John Carter

Very sleepy, so I'll just point out that the difference in price between seeing these two movies would have been something like 75 cents if I hadn't used MoviePass for both (and, yes, it's about time to do a serious write-up of MoviePass). John Carter cost much more in time - I had to leave the house at 9:30 and take two subway lines and a bus to arrive at the furniture store in Reading in time for an 11:30 movie, while Fresh Pond is an easy walk from one of the stops on my route home from work - but, good lord, is the difference worth it, especially when you're not trying to cram a full day of movies in.

It's weird - I can handle 3D just about anywhere but Fresh Pond. The Lorax was not quite the disaster that Shark Night was, but there was a lot of things splitting into two for me. Mostly, it was at the top of the screen, but that might just be because the stuff there is often further in the background. Point is, it looked bad, and the folks in the auditorium paid a premium for it to look bad that way. Meanwhile, at Jordan's - whose 3D genuine IMAX screen (the pre-show snippet actually boasts about in being a 70mm film-based system!) exists to get people to walk past the bedroom sets, kitchen tables, and recliners they have for sale - was just heavenly. Six-story screen, clear projection, comfy chairs made out of Posturepedic material with individual "buttkicker" subwoofers. It's a beautiful thing, and well worth the trip.

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2012 in Entertainment Cinemas Fresh Pond #2 (first-run, digital 3D)

This "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" movie might have been perfectly fine if it wasn't so intent on making Dr. Seuss's The Lorax into a feature. As fine and wonderful a children's book as that is, it often just doesn't seem compatible with Illumination Entertainment's cute CGI style and is stretched at almost ninety minutes. This doesn't make The Lorax a bad movie, especially for its target audience; just one that often feels off the mark.

In the all-plastic city of Thneedtown, Ted (voice of Zac Efron) has a crush on Audrey (voice of Taylor Swift), who wants to see real trees more than anything. So, based on the stories his grandmother (voice of Betty White) tells him, Ted leaves the city walls to ask the mysterious Once-ler (voice of Ed Helms) about trees. In Thneedtown, the diminutive tyrant who controls the town by supplying bottled air is concerned by this development, while outside, the Once-ler relates how his arrival led to the disappearance of the Truffula Trees, despite the efforts of the Lorax (voice of Danny DeVito), the forest spirit who speaks for the trees.

There's a great deal to like about this movie, looked at as just any animated picture for kids. The character and "prop" designs, both Seuss-derived and original, are pretty spiffy-looking. The musical numbers are light and bouncy, filling the screen with fun motion and underlining the points the filmmakers are looking to get across. They keep the message pretty simple for their young audience without being patronizing. Director Chris Renaud and co-director Kyle Balda are good at gags; there are some very funny bits and impressively-staged thrill rides throughout.


Full review at EFC.

John Carter

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2012 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, IMAX 3D)

John Carter is a grand adventure taken from a book published one hundred years ago, and age has some privileges: You can posit that Mars has a breathable atmosphere and basically-human inhabitants (among others), for instance. A pulp novel's job was to be entertaining and exciting, and an adaptation of such a book should do the same. Andrew Stanton's adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars manages that in fine style.

John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) served for the South during the Civil War, and having lost his family, went to Arizona to seek his fortune alone. The Army tries to draft him to fight Apache, which leads to a strange cave of gold and a stranger medallion which transports him to another desert - this one on Mars (or "Barsoom", as the locals call it). There, he's captured by Tharks, ten-foot-tall warriors with four arms on their bodies and horns on their jaws, whose leader Tars Tarkas (voice of Willem Dafoe) is intrigued by the amazing leaps "Virginia" can make in Barsoom's reduced gravity. Elsewhere on Mars, Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) - a brilliant scientist as well as a beautiful princess - wants no part of marrying Sab Than (Dominic West), even if it will prevent his parasite city of Zadanga from crushing her native Helium; she'd trust him even less if she knew about Than's mysterious, shape-shifting ally Matai Shang (Mark Strong).

John Carter has its issues, mostly on the ends. A bookend sequence set in 1881 that includes Daryl Sabara as Edgar Rice Burroughs (Carter's nephew and heir, apparently, though he would have been six that year) is nothing but bloat for an already long movie, an unnecessary delay in getting to the action at the start and part of what holds the audience hostage too long after the climax at the end. It's not alone there; the script also includes a symbolic-but-dumb action (though one which is at least immediately recognized as such) and a number of late exposition dumps that are as seemingly-contradictory as they are ultimately unimportant. Their main purpose seems to be setting up future installments that may never be made, and while this sort of focus on serialization and sloppiness with details may hearken back to the pulps of a century ago, they're annoying in a movie.

Full review at EFC.

Talk Cinema: We Have a Pope

Usually, the roughly-monthly Talk Cinema series is hosted by a local film critic; this time around, it was hosted by the man who runs the program (which also occurs in other cities and puts together travel packages to film festivals), and... Well, it was a bit of a different experience. He'd seen Habemus Papam at Cannes and seemed to have really fallen for it despite the fact that his fellow critics didn't seem to love it. It seems to have made him determined and defensive on the subject, with the post-film discussion not quite becoming a lecture, but very much shaped by his opinion all the same. It's one I wasn't quite able to share; as I say in the review, it has real, massive problems of execution despite a premise with great possibility.

(Of course, the Q&A and latter half of the movie also had the accidental soundtrack of the Lord of the Rings marathon going on downstairs as part of the Viggo Mortensen tribute. I kind of feel sorry for the people who were seeing silent movie The Artist or frequently-still movie The Secret World of Arrietty later!)

As I say in the review, it's a shame. I'm not Catholic - far from it, I'm so far from religious that I tend to describe it as being superstitious - but as the movie starts, I did kind of find myself fascinated by the dynamic of organized religion. I can sort of get believing in God, but how that translates into giving a small group of old men in funny hats (and how ridiculous is it in the twenty-first century that the leadership is still all male?) such tremendous power and influence with any sort of transparency or checks on their power?

It's strange to me, but still intriguing, enough so that I wish this movie was able to skewer the whole situation and process much more effectively.

We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, 35mm)

While many films lack even one original, interesting idea, Habemus Papam has at least two at its heart. Quite possibly three, and maybe even four if you're feeling very generous. Nanni Moretti gets fairly far by sharing his curiosity about the papal election process and what might happen if it hit a snag with the audience; he just seems to wind up adrift when it comes time to make a real story out of it.

The process of the Catholic Church selecting a new pope is shrouded in mystery; the college of cardinals not only sequesters themselves, but burns all records of their voting and all notes kept during the deliberations. The faithful (and press) massed outside the Vatican have an idea of who is likely to be chosen, and very few expect it to be Cardinal Melville (Michel Piccoli), who has more humility than ambition. It is him, though, and just as the smoke changes color and "habemus papam" is announced from the traditional balcony, the new leader has a panic attack and refuses to address his flock. The church finds itself at an impasse, with the layman administrator (Jerzy Stuhr) bringing in a noted professor of psychiatry (Nanni Moretti) before trying more desperate measures.

To give it its due, it starts out with the right actor in the right part - Michel Piccoli is the perfect man to play Father Melville. At first, he certainly looks like just another old man in a room full of old men, but a closer look shows an almost youthfully open heart and lack of guile. Melville must be utterly deserving but also terrified at the responsibility he's been entrusted with. Piccoli is able to sell the cardinal as somebody that anyone can approach and trust but also seemingly out of place in every situation he's placed into. That paradox is at the heart of the character and the movie - the things that make Melville the person one would want as Pope also make him terrified of the job - and Piccoli embodies the role wonderfully.

Full review at EFC.

New British Indies: Kill List and Tyrannosaur (w/ ending discussion)

Even before sitting down for Tyrannosaur, I kind of figured on grouping these two movies together; they're both lower-budgeted British movies that happened to play Boston on the same weekend. As the titles started for Tyrannosaur, though, I was struck by how both these movies were coming from the same groups. The UK Film Council (Awarding Funds from the National Lottery!) is almost a given when seeing a British film these days, and the Film Four logo shows up an awful lot as well, but Screen Yorkshire is rather specific, as is production company Warp X. And then when they had certain structural similarities...

Not huge ones, mind you; things aren't a whole lot closer than any two random stories. But both have a man prone to bursts of anger at the center, starting off with examples of that rage getting out of control and ending with a fairly shocking finale. It's those endings that merit a little discussion, but we'll leave that until after the EFC reviews.

Kill List

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run/IFFBoston Presents, 35mm)

Movies like Kill List are relatively rare; while there are few individual things in the movie that someone buying a ticket for such a movie hasn't seen before, the combination of ingredients is unusual. And not just in what's combined, the way they are put together is sometimes even more peculiar. Considering how frequently rote the hitman drama genre can be, different is a very good thing.

The assassin in question is Jay (Neil Maskell), who still feels like he needs to recover mentally and physically from a botched job in Kiev eight months ago. This extended "recovery" - which includes a fair amount of drinking and pills - is putting a tremendous strain on his marriage to Shel (MyAnna Buring), leading to some ugly fights in front of their son Sam (Harry Simpson). So maybe, when Jay's partner Gal (Michael Smiley) and his new girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) come for a dinner party, it's time to get back out there. So they meet a new client, who gives them a list of three people - but there's something very strange going on from the start.

Kill List is the new movie by Ben Wheatley, last seen on the festival circuit with Down Terrace, and it's immediately clear that it shares a lot of DNA with that movie. Both sit squarely in the Venn Diagram intersection between "crime" and "yelling family" movies, with what seems like a decided slant toward the latter at first. And as a portrait of a volatile marriage and family, it's pretty fantastic. Wheately and company spend the first third of the picture making it very difficult to form a simple opinion on Jay's and Shel's relationship, switching between caustic screaming matches and quiet moments of support in such a way as to keep the audience from getting too comfortable. The eruptions and deflations happen fast, but this seems perfectly keeping with who these two are, both in general and at this specific point.

Full review at EFC.

Tyrannosaur

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in the Museum of Fine Arts Alfond Auditorium (Special Engagement, 35mm)

Paddy Considine's first feature as writer and director packs a wallop at both ends, and is pretty impressive in between as well. It's absolutely the sort of movie an actor makes, with meaty roles for its stars to dive into and plenty of one-on-one time. It's a pretty darn great actors' movie, though it's far from a carefree hour and a half.

Joseph (Peter Mullan) is a man almost consumed by rage. We see three examples of it right off the bat, and it's after the third one blows up in his face that he ducks into a charity shop to hide. The shop is being manned by Hannah (Olivia Colman), who approaches him with amazing calm and kindness. Cruelty surrounds them - Joseph's best friend is dying of cancer, the boy who lives next door (Samuel Bottomley) is tormented by his mother's boyfriend, and Olivia's husband James (Eddie Marsan) is himself prone to expressing his jealousy in nasty ways.

Cruel is perhaps the best way to describe the world in which Joseph, Hannah, and company live; idleness and lack of means don't create the sort of situations that kill people, but rather the ones that chip away at their dignity and create a status quo that feels inescapable - even spending time with friends doesn't seem to lift the spirits. Heck, the most joy seems to come during a funeral - one man's suffering is over, and the other characters have a reason to dwell on happier times.

Full review at EFC.

Discussion of the ends of the movies from here on out! You have been warned!

Kill List's ending has gotten a fair amount of attention, even if it has been of the "don't let anybody tell you the ending!" variety. I think I avoided that as well as I could, which was tough, because it kind of bugged me.

First, let me just say - I've never seen The Wicker Man. Either version. Which was kind of awkward at Fantasia last year, because Robin Hardy was in town and practically everybody I talked to was acting like it was a really huge deal. And while I don't know how much Kill List draws from that specifically, the cult that's ultimately behind everything seems to be drawing from the same roots. Maybe it's just me, but this sort of Celtic/Druidic thing seems to be showing up a lot more, and I don't get it. Does the symbol Fiona draws on the back of the mirror have significance? Is killing his wife and son part of some specific ritual that British folks, for whom this is a more direct part of the culture, would see as significant?

Because if not... well, it leaves a taste in my mouth I don't know if I really like. What's the in-story point? Sure, there's an argument that it's a symbolic fit - the job and giving into his anger eventually leads to Jay destroying his family. Why's this important to the cult, though? Are they just monsters for the sake of being monsters? Are they meaning to break Jay to build him into their weapon or so he'll serve as some sort of example or demonstration? We're not ever given much of a glimpse of any greater purpose to this, which is fine on one hand - we're seeing it from Jay's point of view - but it's a bit unsatisfying, an unearned worst-case-scenario. Dark-for-the-sake-of-dark has a bit of limited appeal.

The end of Tyrannosaur, meanwhile, is just as horrific in its way - the scene of Joseph making his way through the house, key between his fingers as a reminder of both how hardscrabble and potentially overmatched he can be, and eventually finding James's not-fresh corpse, is fantastic, and the two hits after that are gut-punches: I initially thought James had committed suicide, but finding out Hannah was responsible was obviously devastating to Joseph, and the dog attack and Joseph's retribution feel like the whole world collapsing.

It's an earned collapse, though; Hannah seems to absorb the worst of Joseph's anger rather than Joseph gaining her kindness. But Considine lets things run just a bit longer to show that it's at least focused violence, and that after bottoming out, the pair have confronted the anger and fear in their souls - and faced the consequences of their actions - and aren't alone any more.

Which is earned, too. And that's why I think Kill List stumbles at the end while Tyrannosaur achieves something really impressive: Not just because Tyrannosaur is as upbeat as an ending with that sort of carnage can be, but because that raw ending is the logical result of everything that came before, while Kill List is a "gotcha!" that doesn't seem quite as organic as it should.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 March 2012 - 15 March 2012

Weird set of stuff opening this weekend. Let's see what!

• The big opening this week is John Carter, Disney's big-budget adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, with the name changed because marketing people decided boys wouldn't go see something with "Princess" in its name and girls would run screaming from "Mars". Silly, because a hundred-year-old story about a Civil War veteran who is somehow transported to a habitable Mars where he gets involved in the wars between various native races is going to sink or swim no matter what words are in the title. The Arlington Capitol and Fresh Pond split single screens between 2D and 3D (so check times); Boston Common and Fenway each have 2D and 3D screens; Harvard Square has it in 3D only; and it plays the premium screens at Jordan's Furniture, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  Stars on the way up and down take the other mainstream screens. Elizabeth Olsen follows up Martha Marcy May Marlene with Silent House; it's a real-time horror movie about a girl trapped in her family home (edited to look like a single take) from the directors of Open Water, working from an original from Uruguay. It plalys Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway. The same screens have the latest from Eddie Murphy, A Thousand Words, in which he plays an insincere talent agent who will die when he speaks the thousand words of the title.



• The Coolidge opens Friends with Kids, with Kissing Jessica Stein's Jennifer Westfeldt writing, directing, and starring in a movie about two platonic friends who decide to have a baby together. It also plays Boston Common and the Kendall.
  
  In special programs, the Boston Underground Film Festival gears up for the main event later this month by presenting the infamous Cannibal Holocaust at midnight on Friday and Saturday; it's one of the first found-footage horror movies, originally banned in many places for being thought authentic. Sunday morning is the latest Goethe-Institut presentation, Cracks in the Shell, in which a meek young actress is cast completely against type in her first role.



• Kendall Square is also finally opening We Need to Talk About Kevin in Boston, just two or three months after it hit New York and L.A. Tilda Swinton is one of several actresses criminally overlooked by the Oscar nominators, because her performance as the mother of a teenaged monster is fantastic. They also open The Forgiveness of Blood, an Albanian film from an American director (Joshua Marston, who also went abroad to make Maria Full of Grace) about a murder that turns into a blood feud.
  
  Aside from Friends with Kids, they've got a couple other movies with more mainstream appeal. Being Flynn also opens at Boston Common; it features Paul Dano as a man whose father (Robert De Niro) unexpectedly re-enters his live. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, in which Ewan MacGregor and Emily Blunt fall in love while trying to introduce a sport (and species) to a country whose environment rahter inhospitable, will almost certainly play in the multiplexes considering how many times the trailer has played everywhere over the last few months, but for now is just at Kendall Square and their sister cinema in Waltham's Embassy Square.
  
  Speaking of the Embassy, they are the only theater in the area playing Ralph Fienne's adaptation of Coriolanus, a modernized take with a screenplay by John Logan and a cast that includes Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Chastain, and Brian Cox. There's a poster or two up elsewhere, but if you want to see this movie, you may want to take the 70 bus out there.



• The Brattle has Battle Royale back this week, playing one more week of late shows in advance of it finally hitting legitimate US video and the American remake coming out. (Wait, you say The Hunger Games isn't a remake? Huh.)
  
  The things playing earlier that 9:30 are sort of mixed and matched, starting with a Film Noir Weekend: Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place play as a double feature on Friday and Saturday; The Lady from Shanghai and The Postman Always Rings Twice are the twin bill on Sunday and Monday. The Balagan show on Tuesday is A Visit from Bruce Bickford, with the stop-motion animator presenting a 90-minute program of his clay work in person. The week is finished out with two French-language films as part of Francophone Week - Switzerland's La Petite Chambre on Wednesday and Quebec's Starbuck on Thursday.



• ArtsEmerson wraps up "Portraits of New Orleans" with three screenings of Trouble the Water (Friday and Saturday), a documentary on Hurricane Katrina constructed from the home movies of someone who started shooting herself just before the storm began. The "Gotta Dance" screening on Saturday and Sunday afternoons is Kid Millions, an Eddie Cantor-starrer in which a young Brooklynite has misadventures claiming an inherited fortune; it's notable for switching from black and white to Technicolor for the big finale. And the "Crazie Cult Classics" screening on Saturday night is The Intruder, with Professor Eric Schaefer introducing a 1962 Roger Corman film that stars William Shatner as a provocateur looking to whip up unrest about school integration.



• The MFA kicks off their "Friday Night Films" series on the 9th with Such Hawks, Such Hounds, a documentary on "the American hard rock underground". It starts at 7:45, but folks who arrive at the museum by 7pm will be treated to a set by Zozobra beforehand. The other documentary playing that weekend is also musical, with A Drummer's Dream playing at various times on Friday through Sunday. The Saturday afternoon screening will also feature live performance afterward, along with a Q&A and a raffle for a cymbal set.
  
  Sunday afternoon features the full four-hour-plus Cleopatra, and when they start showing films again on Wednesday, it's a New Latin American Cinema program, with Argentina's The Prize on Wednesday and Colombia's animated Fat, Bald, Short Man on Thursday.



• The Harvard Film Archive begins The Melancholy Worlds of Béla Tarr this weekend; it will run through the 25th. The series opens with Tarr's latest (and, allegedly, last), The Turin Horse running at 7pm on Friday and Sunday evenings; also featured will be Damnation (Saturday at 7pm), The Outsider (Saturday at 9:15pm), The Prefab People (Sunday at 4:30pm), and Family Nest (Monday at 7pm).



• The Hindi movie opening at Fresh Pond this weekend is Kahaani, a thriller starring Vidya Balan as a pregnant woman from Londan searching Kolkata for her missing husband - who may or may not exist.



• And in second-run-shuffling action, the Somerville Theatre picks up both The Secret World of Arietty and A Dangerous Method as they leave Kendall Square, with The Iron Lady and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy both making their way to the Arlington Capitol.

My plans? Maybe some of the Brattle noirs, The Intruder, and Silent House. Maybe try to make it to the furniture store to see Mars on the giant screen. And if I wind up working from home, maybe catch Coriolanus (the Embassy used to be on my way home, but now I haven't been there in at least a year). Maybe Starbuck, as I tend to get unnaturally curious about movies when I see posters for them all over Montreal during my annual Fantasia visit.

Ai (Love)

I see that this is getting another week at Boston Common with a full slate of shows, which I suspect means it's doing pretty well for China Lion. My completely unscientific reading of the crowd has it as pretty good - even for three weeks after the movie opened in the Far East, where the bootlegging is fast and not stigmatized at all - leading to the secondary conclusion that Chinese people really dig Jason Statham's co-star in The Transporter.

Shu Qi is a great big star in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, right? It certainly seems to me like she is, but it's not like I've got a huge sample size to work with here. She should be, at least - she's crazy beautiful and acquits herself well on screen. And she's only drunk for one brief scene this time! Of course, I suppose China Lion might be choosing to bring movies with her over because she was in The Transporter and therefore has something like ten times the marketability of other Chinese actresses - I mean, Fan Bingbing is pretty too, but what do you put in parentheses after her name to remind American audiences where they've seen her before?

It's worth noting that China Lion seems to have made their release patterns a bit more flexible - previously, it seems as if things would open sort-of nationally and never really expand, whereas both The Viral Factor and Love have opened in new markets after playing others. It also seems like they're going to be doing it less blind than they were - there have been a few tweets from their account lately asking what people think of trailers, maybe trying to get a handle on what will play well and what won't before setting the schedule.

Ai (Love)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DLP)

Love is exactly the sort of movie that gets released for Valentine's Day, which is when it showed up in Taiwan and a few larger American cities. It's not a classic romance, but it sets the mood well, being full of good-looking people whose intersecting stories are fairly likely to work out in the end.

It opens with a positive pregnancy test for Taiwanese student Li Yijia (Chen Yi-han) and a tryst between mid-level executive Mark Na ("Mark" Zhao Youting) and his boss's famous-for-being-famous girlfriend Zoe Fang (Shu Qi) that Mark backs out from. From there, the three go their separate directions: Mark goes to look at a house in Beijing, where realtor Jin Xia-Ye (Zhao Wei) gets him into a couple of sticky situations; Yijia breaks the news to Kai (Eddie Peng), the boyfriend of her best friend Ni (Amber Kuo); and a fight with her boyfriend Lu (Doze Niu Chen-zer) leads to Zoe meeting up with Kuan (Juan Ching-tien), who is considerate and hard-working, even if he does have a bad stammer.

Kuan also happens to be Yijia's brother, and there are other connections between the various characters that actually make it a little odd that the Yijia/Kai/Ni and Zoe/Kuan/Lu stories aren't tied together even more closely than they are. It still makes the Mark/Ye thread seem comparatively isolated story-wise as well as geographically, though a closer connection might be a little more coincidence than the audience can take. The individual stories each have an issue or two - much of the second half of Ye's and Mark's is built on a silly and needlessly maintained lie, for instance, while Yijia, Kai, and Ni don't really do or say very much to resolve their situation - but the stories are big enough to matter but not really enough to carry a feature on their own.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 27 February 2012 - 4 March 2012

I'm going to try and keep this quick, in large part because most of what's on it is going to be getting its own review as well, and who really needs to write about things twice?



In some ways, seeing this particular line-up this was was the result of poor planning; I thought Japanese class started up again on Saturday, so I rushed out of the house and through the rain to get there only to realize that it was starting on the 10th. That did give me time to fit in a couple of things I would have had to find a space for later in the week, but I might have preferred to do it without being so rushed. I also was strongly considering a day-trip to NYC to see the new movie by Makoto Shinkai at the New York Children's International Film Festival, but that sold out before I stopped dithering. If it doesn't play Fantasia, I'll be kicking myself hard.

Plus, rejoice! The Red Line has been shut down between Harvard Square and Alewife during weekends for the last few months, but re-opens this Saturday. I missed a few minutes of You Only Live Twice on Sunday because the shuttle buses are much slower. I think I still might have been late anyway, unless I ducked out of Tyrannosaur while the credits were still running, but it's tremendously frustrating to watch the clock at the front of the bus tick past your movie's start time while stuck in traffic.

Hugo

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2012 in the Arlington Capitol #1 (second-run, Real-D)

There's no reason to go over Hugo's many virtues here again; I gushed over it last December, and my feelings about it have not changed that much in the interim. It's a charming little film that doesn't just gush with love of the movies but is also a really fun kids' mystery. It uses 3D extremely well, too.

It's also really fun to see a movie in theaters and then arrive home and find the Blu-ray waiting for you. The movie being an Oscar contender (and eventual winner, though The Artist took most of the marquee categories) did a nice job of extending its run and having it re-open on a few screens in the run-up to the awards. It will be interesting to see how long it sticks around the smaller 3D rooms, since the movie looks really good in that format and most of us don't have a 3D television to watch it on. Seeing a movie in the theater three times during its initial release is pretty rare for me, but who knows when I'll have another chance to see it like this?

Ai (Love)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DLP)

Not exactly the movie I thought it was going to be - there have been two different movies whose name translates to Love over the last few years, one an anthology and this one a set of three overlapping tales. This one's got Shu Qi, though, and there's not a much more pleasant surprise than sitting down for a movie and seeing her face appear.

The cast is, in general, pretty good - an attractive group that has chemistry enough to make up for some of the deficiencies in the screenplay. It's not really a bad story, but two of its three pieces overlap too much to be as separate as they are, and there's one pairing that perhaps doesn't really deliver the audience to its ending. It's a pleasant enough group of stories, though, and I suspect that each storyline is kind of a tweener - not really big enough to become a feature of its own but needing a little more room than it gets here.

Kill List

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run/IFFBoston Presents, 35mm)

You think you're pretty hip to certain genre conventions, and you even go years talking about this sort of movie without looking like some sort of ignorant goof, and then it suddenly seems like this thing is all over the place. I'm not going to say what "this thing" is, but it plays into Kill List's final act big-time, and I kind of suspect that it's something native English people are much more likely to get than me.

Potentially peculiar ending aside, Kill List is the new movie by Ben Wheatley, last seen on the festival circuit with Down Terrace, and it's immediately clear that it shares a lot of DNA with that movie. It sits squarely in the Venn Diagram intersection between "crime" and "yelling family" movies, with what seems like a decided slant toward the latter at first. And as a portrait of a volatile marriage and family, it's pretty fantastic; I could watch a lot of Neil Maskell and MyAnna Buring as a young married couple fighting over the lack of income and such even if they never did reveal that Maskell's Jay was a hired gun. And then if the new job with Michael Smiley's Gal didn't...

Ah, but that would be telling. Let me just say that, even though I personally could have used more detail there, I like Wheatley's commitment to an unusual story, and he doesn't spring the late twists completely out of nowhere. I do think the finale comes off as a little ____-for-the-sake-of-being-____, although, again, that may just be my relative ignorance.

We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, 35mm)

I'm not sure whether Habemus Papam is built with people like me in mind or if I'm a part of the audience that really doesn't matter. It is, after all, a movie about the Catholic Church, and I'm so non-religious I refer to myself as not being superstitious. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in some of what the movie has to say - indeed, I'm kind of fascinated by the idea of how a large, singular organization with a unique structure works - I just might be inclined to see it in a way that filmmaker Nanni Moretti may not intend.

To give it its due, it starts out with the right actor in the middle of a pretty fantastic hook - Michel Piccoli plays Father Melville, a long-serving Cardinal who is elected Pope, but just as he is about to be announced, he has a panic attack, leaving the Church utterly flummoxed about what to do next. Early on, Moretti does an excellent job of nailing both the satirical possibilities of the situation and a respect for Melville's faith and how that puts him in crisis. The finale picks up on the latter in a way that demands further exploration.

In between, though, he loses his way badly. The situation within the Vatican goes from absurd but incisive to just silly and tiresome, while Melville's personal odyssey seems clear enough in intention without really having the detail and big moments to give it weight. It's easy to lose patience and wish Moretti would get back to making his point more directly, because the idea and star deserve much better execution.

Tyrannosaur

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in the Museum of Fine Arts Alfond Auditorium (Special Engagement, 35mm)

This one is going to get paired with Kill List for review for a number of reasons - there's a lot of the same companies behind them and other similarities, not the least of which is an opening that spews rage and a jaw-dropping finale. It's an unfair pairing in that they are different genres looking to do very things; so saying I like this one even more kind of doesn't matter.

It's an impressive, flattening feature, though; Paddy Considine does an excellent job in his first feature behind the camera. In front of the camera, Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman are excellent as the tormented widower and traumatized woman he connects with. They've apparently played these characters before, in Considine's short "Dog Altogether", and it's impressive how nothing feels inorganic - every single horrible thing that happens moves the story forward, and it's not just empty suffering - the finale, while matching the tone of the rest of the movie thoroughly, offers more than just a crescendo of misery

Impressive. I've liked Considine as an actor since In America, and now can't wait to see what else he's going to do behind the camera, as well.

James Bond Weekend: From Dr. No to On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Not a huge amount to say here other than that the weekend practically living at the Somerville Theatre was a genuine delight. I don't know if the folks who run that place get the credit they deserve for having the lowest prices of any theater on a subway line (both for tickets and concessions) in the Boston area, high quality projection overseen by an obsessed lunatic who knows making film look good backwards and forwards, and a schedule which supplements a relatively recent move to first-run features with quality repatory and festival programming.

Of the six prints, only Dr. No looked kind of beat up; the others were quite good-looking and the three "flat" prints (Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger) each started with a United Artists cartoon. The crowds were good, and there was plenty of applause when manager Ian Judge announced that, yes, they were planning to do more of these later in the year, probably in the fall to lead up to the opening of Skyfall in November.

And, without further ado, the movies:

Dr. No

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

The thing that's kind of striking about Dr. No is how, as the first James Bond movie, a lot of stuff hasn't gelled yet. There's no Q Division yet, for instance, and in a way, that makes the balance between certain elements very different: Bond is more human here - he doesn't just get knocked unconscious to revive exactly where he needs to be for a villain to exposit at him, but he gets beat up. By the end of the movie his clothes are shredded, a great many hairs are out of place, and he's never the unflappable 007 we've come to know since (witness how he goes to town crushing a tarantula with his shoe; dude does not like arachnids). He crawls through vents like John McClane in Die Hard, all sweat and clenched teeth.

So he's just a very good MI-6 agent, not yet a super-spy, which means that when he and Honey Ryder get past Dr. No's decontamination process and into the secret base which is staffed like a luxury hotel, the situation is rather surreal. Bond's a fantasy figure, but the audience still identifies with him, and suddenly his life isn't just dangerous, but weird. That's also when we first hear of SPECTRE, as opposed to this simply being a Chinese plot - which I believe is a change made for the movies; if I remember correctly, SPECTRE really only figured in three of the books (a trilogy formed by Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice).

As an aside, Honey Ryder is unusually incidental to the plot; for as much as Bond Girls are traditionally eye-candy, it's rare for them to just be folks in the wrong place at the wrong time and fill a bikini well. It's a relatively small thing, but it shows how the formula is not really in place yet. And in a lot of ways, that's for the best, there are scenes in Dr. No that are more tense than usual for their realism and others that are stranger than expected despite likely not looking out of place in later Connery/Moore Bond films.

From Russia with Love

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

From Russia With Love has always been one of my favorite Bond films, and that's in part because I somehow got it in my head that it was a realistic spy movie. It's not, of course, although it comes closer to it than many in the series. The plot's smaller in scale, and the deceptions are a lot closer to the chess game used as an obvious but fitting metaphor in the beginning. You've still got SPECTRE in the middle, of course, and the occasional goofiness of MI-6's Istanbul station.

And, of course, there's the whole bit with the Romany camp, where "settling things the gypsy way" means "no holds barred catfight". The franchise's attitudes toward women are still thoroughly rooted in male fantasies and fears, with naive beauty Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) one one side and nasty lesbian Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) on the other. Romanova is plenty likable, though, and there's just enough chance she'll stay a double agent to keep things interesting toward the end.

The movie is still one of the best of the series, even if it's not quite the one I remember. It is really an excellent little chase film in the second half as Tatiana and 007 discover that their escape plans have been thwarted and have to get to Western Europe without being killed. The supporting characters are fun, and there's just enough intrigue to make it feel like we're watching a more cerebral spy movie than the action picture we're actually getting.

Goldfinger

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

Man, you shouldn't drop pop-culture references in your movies unless you know they'll hold up. Early on in Goldfinger, Bond dismisses something by saying he'd "rather listen to the Beatles without earmuffs". At the time, it probably made made him seem refined, a symphony-and-opera type. Now, he's totally square.

I wouldn't go nearly as far to snarkily comment on Goldfinger as Bond would on the Beatles, but, wow, does it have some fundamental problems that are hidden by its iconography. For example, Bond spends the entire movie being really terrible at his job as a covert operative - instead of observing Goldfinger, he decides to be a smirking jackass, which basically results in some poor family losing both of its daughters. His method of investigation is to show up, announce himself, and then get knocked unconscious and brought closer to the center of the villains' web but somehow not killed outright. And he pretty much stumbles through the last act uselessly, until he gets very lucky.

Despite all this, it's still a fun, memorable entry in the series. It gives us Gert Frobe as Auric Goldfinger, Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore, Harold Sakata as Oddjob, and Shirley Eaton painted gold as the doomed Jill Masterson. It's got one of the greatest lines in movie history, and Frobe seems to know that he's got a moment that will be remembered for a long time as it's coming out of his mouth. Sure, it's where the seeds are lain for the franchise to start getting really silly, but what does work and what is at the very least memorable is more than good enough to make up for the things that would get a new screenplay torn apart.

Thunderball

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

Thunderball is not quite so well-remembered as Goldfinger, in part because it led to Never Say Never Again and a weird legal battle which almost led to competing James Bond franchises in the 1990s (one of which would have had Liam Neeson as Bond), and in part because it does tend to lean rather heavily on the underwater stuff. The stuff with Kevin McClory isn't really its fault, although some of the other issues can be a little much.

It is, however, a whole lot of fun. Unlike a lot of Bond movies, especially later ones, the story here is less high-concept than execution - even in 1965, I suspect that terrorists stealing a nuclear weapon and attempting to hold the world hostage had been done a few times, but the details are a blast, from landing a bomber on the ocean floor (after a clever hijacking) to the final battle, which is one of the series' greatest. I strongly suspect that the underwater filming helped it a lot, in that the precision necessary results in clearer action, with less speeding up, extreme close-ups, quick cutting, and shaky camera work. You can see everything that's going on here clearly, and because underwater action is almost by definition a knife fight, it's vicious, mean stuff, which totally works for it.

There are issues, sure. Once the bombs are stolen, the movie does seem to be killing time until that finale, and while I dig the way these old Bond movies have a good deal of travelogue to them, the chase through the parade in the Bahamas seems kind of obligatory here. It's still fun, and was probably more so in the mid-sixties when there was no HDTV (heck, no color TV in many households), and this sort of movie was the closest a lot of people could get to world travel.

You Only Live Twice

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

I came in a bit late for this one (I can't wait for the Red Line to run all the way to Alewife on the weekends again!), so I missed the opening gambit, theme song, and a few minutes of the "real" start of the movie. Still, I liked what I got quite a bit. It's enjoyably grandiose, hitting a sweet spot midway between Thunderball's commitment to the basics and Goldfinger's enthusiastic silliness.

The plot is on the goofy side - SPECTRE has the resources for their own space program, including a base in a hollowed-out volcano, but don't want to strike at the US or USSR directly, instead snatching spacecraft from orbit to get the superpowers to declare war on each other. And the second half requires Bond to "become a Japanese man" in order to train as a ninja in less than a week. It could be worse, though - one of the things I remember about the book is that Bond was astounded by how the ninjas could take so many blows to the groin, to be told that ninjas can retract their "equipment". Kind of glad we got body-hair jokes instead.

It's a nifty-looking movie - the location shooting of Japan is very nice indeed, and while the sets for the underground lair look kind of dated now, they're enjoyably big and elaborate. So is the action; there very seldom feels like anything is being held back, and while it may be a little more chuckle-worthy than usual at times, the movie does go for it more often than not, and that makes it a lot of fun.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #1 (James Bond Weekend, 35mm)

There's a really good argument to be made that On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the best of the Bond movies. It's a little rough getting started - George Lazenby has a little trouble fitting into the part at times, although to be totally honest, Connery never really seemed to own the bon vivant aspects of the part either. This one's got the usual bunch of good action scenes (the ski work, especially, is tremendous) and over-the-top plot, but what it's also got are rare examples of the heroes and villains being genuinely motivated and interesting. Lots of Bond films have suspense; this one's actually got an emotional hook, something the series arguably wouldn't really have again until Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.

A large part of that comes from Diana Rigg as Contessa Teresa "Tracy" Di Vicenzo. She's one of the few Bond Girls to really be created as a potential match for 007, coming across as just as smart, adventurous, classy, and physical as he is. She's also fragile from the start, and that changes things; both the audience and Bond know that, unlike most of the women in this series, she can't be used and discarded; it would destroy her, and while Bond is a rake, he's no cad. Rigg and Lazenby really are great together and separately, with Tracy's brittle pride healing itself while Lazenby makes Connery's character his own by the time the movie is out while still keeping him recognizably Bond.

Sometime, I'd love to talk to people who saw OHMSS in 1969 without having read the book (or maybe having done so, considering that the adaptations were often quite loose). Watching it in sequence after the first five Connery movies during this weekend points up both how good and risky it is, since it genuinely feels like a radical reinvention might be going on. Given the way we meet Tracy and how she clearly becomes more than a dalliance, we know the formula is going to be broken somewhat early. But there's sharpness in other places - the relationship between Bond and M is less convivial, for instance. And the familiar Monty Norman James Bond theme doesn't appear until very late - it's like a concerted effort to give Lazenby's Bond his own feel. When that theme does re-appear, it's connected to Tracy just as much as Bond, like a signal that from then on in the series, she's going to be important.

Obviously, that doesn't happen, and the series soon returns to normal, arguably not getting under Bond's skin again until License to Kill and the recent Casino Royale reboot. Even if you don't think that has any part in a Bond movie, though, this one is done well, with pretty great action, a jaunty wit, and some somewhat creepy elements to its broad story. Meeting (and believing) the love of James Bond's life is the icing on the cake.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 2 March 2012 - 8 March 2012

Not much opening in the multiplexes, but some really fun stuff in the smaller places.

• I just spent 24 hours straight in the Somerville Theatre a couple weeks ago; what prompts me to camp out there again? James Bond Weekend - they'll be showing the first six Bond movies on their big screen from 35mm prints. You've got Dr. No and From Russia with Love on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon; Goldfinger and Thunderball on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon; and You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service Sunday evening. $10 a pop or $40 for a weekend pass.



• Over at the Brattle, they've got a special engagement of a new British thriller, Kill List. It's by the guy who did Down Terrace (at IFFBoston a couple of years ago; they co-present this run), which was pretty darn nifty, and I've been told that one is best off going in cold. No trailers, no reading reviews, no learning what director Ben Wheatley has up his sleeve.
  
  They've got a couple other special programs this week, as well. Sunday at 1pm, they'll be showing Central Square Detective Agency, a creation of the Charles River Swimming and Diving Team. It's a series of comedy/noir shorts; the first two have been running on local access TV and online; the full set of three will be showing at the Brattle. Folks will be there in person. No guests are scheduled for the DocYard's presentation of Bombay Beach on Monday at 8pm, a documentary on three people living in California's Salton Sea by noted photographer Alma Har'el featuring music by Beirut and Bob Dylan.



• If you want to see a couple of the movies nominated for the less-prominent Oscars before the broadcast... Oh. Well, if you want to see a couple of the movies nominated for the less-prominent Oscars after the broadcast, Kendall Square is still running A Separation and both the live-action and animated shorts, but they also pick up In Darkness and Chico & Rita this weekend. The former is Poland's nomination for Foreign Language Film, and tells the story of a thief during World War II and the dozen Jewish refugees he hid in the Lvov city sewers. The latter is an animated love story and musical about two musicians whose paths cross in Havana, New York, and beyond.
  
  Also opening: Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie. In it, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job get a billion dollars to make the greatest movie ever and blow it on other things. Apparently it's run for five years on Adult Swim, so they've got their fans.



• Over at the multiplexes, likely the biggest opening is The Lorax, an adaptation of Dr. Seuss's children's book that looks spiffy from the trailers but seems to have a lot of new characters and storylines bolted onto it's simple environmental message. It's running in both 2D and 3D at the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including the Imax-branded screen), and Fenway (including the RPX screen); 3D-only at Harvard Square. The furniture stores give it a pass, though.
  
  For the older kids, there's Project X, which is not a remake of the 1987 flick about chimps mistreated by the air force, but a comedy about a house party that balloons completely out of control. It's loosely based on a true story, apparently.
  
  And two-plus weeks after its Valentine's Day debut in New York and L.A., Love opens up in Boston Common. More disambiguation: This is not the meticulously built sci-fi movie by Angels & Airwaves, but an anthology film from Taiwan with four filmmakers each telling a different kind of love story.



• The Coolidge shuffles some movies around, opening A Separation and Pina in the screening rooms (A Separation has some screenings in Theater #2 as well, but I don't know if they're 35mm). Pina is in 2D here, though it's still hanging on for a few 3D showings at Boston Common. They've also got a few screenings as part of their Coolidge Award ceremonies for Viggo Mortensen, although the Lord of the Rings marathon on Sunday and award presentation on Monday are sold out (a screening of Eastern Promises at noon on Monday with post-movie Q&A still has seats available).
  
  There are other goodies, too. Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain screens Friday and Saturday at midnight on 35mm, and is as trippy as a very trippy thing. Saturday at midnight, there's the premiere of the first two episodes of web-series Super-Townie, along with some connected short films; creators Paul M McAlarney and Greg LaVoie will attempt to explain themselves afterward. The Talk Cinema screening on Sunday morning is We Have a Pope, which examines the process of papal succession, focusing on the relationship between a hypothetical new Pope and his psychologist. Tuesday night features a preview of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, for which members can RSVP ahead of time.



• Three very different-looking films play this weekend at the MFA: Tyrannosaur, the fierce directorial debut of actor Paddy Considine; a new 35mm print of Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert; and Stitched, a documentary on quilters rushing to complete their entries in America's largest quilt show. Apparently competitive quilting is a thing. Tyrannosaur has one final show on Thursday the 8th, although a few different movies are added to the mix on Wednesday the 7th: A new print of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's epic Cleopatra and the documentary A Drummer's Dream.



• Over at the Harvard Film Archive, they are awarding the Geneviève McMillan Award (for a Francophone filmmaker from Africa or of African heritage) to Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, who will be present for several screenings: Smuggler's Songs on Friday, Adhen on Saturday, and Back Home on Sunday. All those are at 7pm; he's not scheduled to appear at the screening of Wesh Wesh Sunday at 5pm.
  
  On Monday the 5th, Ernie Gehr will make his first of two visits to the Archive this month, presenting An Evening of Early Cinema from his collection of 16mm prints. No film is fewer than 100 years old, and while most are very short, the centerpiece is George Méliès's "The Impossible Voyage", which should interest the folks who've seen Hugo over the last few months. There is also a free screening of Deepa Mehta's Water at 2pm on Saturday.



• ArtsEmerson features a Portraits of New Orleans series this month, as a tie-in with their upcoming main-stage show Ameriville. It kicks off on Friday with Les Blank's 1978 documentary Always for Pleasure, double-billed with featuertte "The Florentine Collection", which Paul Gailiunas completed after his wife Helen Hill's death. Friday and Saturday also feature Tootie's Last Suit, a documentary on the Mardi Gras Indians in general and Allison "Tootie" Montana (who made impressive costumes for the festival) in particular.
  
  "Gotta Dance" also continues with Saturday and Sunday showings of Footlight Parade, a Warner Brothers backstage musical from 1933 featuring James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, and Ruby Keeler. Lloyd Bacon directs, Bubs Berkeley choreographs, and there's pre-Code spiciness!



• The Museum of Science is offering Free Film Fridays to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their OMNIMAX theater, which includes both free admission to giant-screen movies every Friday this month and a revival of "New England Time Capsule", a pre-show feature with narration by Leonard Nimoy and music by John Williams that was originally shown on that screen back in 1987.



• The Regent Theatre has one screening this week, Bicycle Dreams on Tuesday the 6th. It documents the Race Across America, one of the most grueling races in the world, if not the toughest.

My plans? I'm going to try and hit Bond, Tyrannosaur, and We Have a Pope. Anything else is a bonus.

These Weeks In Tickets: 13 February 2012 - 26 February 2012

As I mentioned last week - festivals throw the entire schedule off. But, it's not like seeing a bunch of good movies is exactly a bad thing!



So, as you can see, the science fiction film festival ate the entire week, with the marathon at the end an exclamation point. Overall, pretty good, although it was a bit of a disappointment that we were back in the micro-cinema after being on real screens last year (and having only four films playing at the theater all week) for all but the marathon and, oddly, The Golden Age of Science Fiction, when I suspect we were only sitting in screen #2 because there's a regular improv thing in the tiny room on Thursday.

The programming has improved in quantity this year, although the quality control could definitely use some work. I used the "crap" tag a lot more than I would have liked on the blog over the last couple of weeks, and I chalk this up to festival honcho Garen Daly wanting premieres. He's been rather more free with that word than he should be at times - this year, claiming Endhiran as an "East Coast Premiere" even though it played Cambridge for a month back in 2010, which frustrates me because one can check this stuff so easily - but I don't think any of the festival films were mislabeled this year. A large chunk of them just weren't very good.

Now, it's not that I don't see the value in having premieres, but it was odd to see Garen bragging about them toward the end of the week, when those of us in the audience had been saying that in a couple of weeks, nobody would care about which movies were having world premieres, but which ones were good. I have no idea whether The Last Push played elsewhere, but it's the one from the festival I'll be recommending. I think both the fest's long-term reputation and short term attendance would be helped if the lesser premieres were replaced with sci-fi stuff from Fantasia/Fantastic Fest/Sundance. Heck, I'll mail folks a program which includes contact information if they want it next year.

On the balance, though, it was a fun week, with more good than bad. The full program is a step forward, some of the premieres and other movies were pretty good, and having non-local guests on most days was pretty impressive. Here's hoping it grows for next year.



Believe it or not, I wasn't really movie-d out after the festival and marathon; I just had a couple of days at work where things are quiet all day until a bunch of stuff lands on my desk at 4pm, and getting to a 7pm show in Cambridge or Brookline from Burlington via public transportation impossible. Arietty really should have been seen on Tuesday (and, yeah, they gave me the wrong ticket on Saturday; oops). Plus, one of the movies I really wanted to see, Declaration of War, was only playing 4pm and 9:30pm, even in its first week. That 9:25 movie is a tough one to get out the door for if it's not the tail end of a double feature.

I'll be writing up Whit Stillman's first couple of movies in the next couple of days, maybe even pulling out the Last Days of Disco DVD to finish the set. He was at the Harvard Film Archive for the weekend, including a preview of his first movie in fifteen years, Damsels in Distress. That sold out, with me at the front of the line when it happened. The very front. Kind of disappointing, that.

So I went and saw The Phantom Menace in 3D instead. Don't judge me.

Metropolitan

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2012 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Discreet Charm of Whit Stillman, 35mm)

Baby-faced Chris Eigeman freaks me out; the man just doesn't look right to me.

Metropolitan is the sort of movie I'm inclined to dislike, full of privileged young people who talk a lot but don't do very much, but it works very well. This is in large part because Whit Stillman is very good at putting words in his characters' mouths; from the very first scene, it's clear that these are chatty folks, but also funny ones, and Stillman is able to have just the right amount of detachment: He's aware of how ridiculous these kids are, but he doesn't hoard it, instead giving the cast just enough self-awareness to not be hopeless cases but not be self-loathing.

It turns out to be a pretty nice little coming of age piece, with Stillman deftly narrowing the cast down to the most self-analytical characters and then confronting them with the need to actually do things. What sets Metropolitan apart is that he always does it in a funny, natural way; it's the sort of careful, clear writing where Tom's preference for "good literary criticism" to actual literature is is a clever metaphor until sitting down to write/think about it - and one which fits the present pretty perfectly.

Not bad for a movie made twenty-odd years ago and set in the 1970s. Metropolitan may seem a bit cobbled-together now, but it's surprisingly skilled and resilient.

The Secret World of Arrietty (Kari-gurashi no Arietti)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2012 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run, 35mm, US dub)

This doesn't really apply to the Coolidge, but if Boston Common is playing this digitally, why isn't, say, the 10pm show presented subtitled? Even if it's not the same as choosing different audio and titles on a DVD, a second hard drive wouldn't be as tough to wrangle as a second print. The icing on the cake is that the UK has a more promising dub than the US, with Saoirse Ronan voicing the title character rather than Disney Channel kid Bridgit Mendler. (I imagine it would still sound wrong; the first "nnh!" grunt from a kid is a reminder that that this movie wasn't made for English.)

That aside, Arrietty is pretty darn good. Hayao Miyazaki doesn't direct personally - Ghibli animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi makes a fine debut. but plans and writes the screenplay, and it reminds me of Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro in a lot of pleasant ways. It's relatively quiet and restrained compared to what other filmmakers might do, but very smart: Shawn/Shou and Arrietty are never presented romantically, but even with few scenes together, their attraction makes sense. Arrietty is reaching an age when she needs more than her family, while Shawn needs to be seen as capable - a man - rather than sickly. There's also an intriguing duality to the usual environmental message: The "Borrowers" fear extinction at the hands of man, but turning away from technology leads to a life like wild boy Spiller's, which they don't seem to want.

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2012 in the AMC Boston Common #15 (3D re-release, Real-D)

As much as the 3D in the re-release disappoints, it was a surprising pleasure to see this one again and realize that for all the attention that its faults get, the things that George Lucas does really well should get a lot more mention. There's probably nobody better at big sci-fi action than he is, the machinations of the villain are fascinating to watch, and he's committed to having something cool on-screen as much as possible. It's a fairly self-contained story and also the start of a trilogy which will grow with its main character from kids' adventure to something darker, and plants the seeds well.

Yes, it's the weakest of the six movies. It's still got terrific action, a great score, and good work from Liam Neeson, Pernilla August, and especially Ian McDiarmid. Lesser >Star Wars is still better than most other fantasy action movies being made.

Barcelona

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2012 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Discreet Charm of Whit Stillman, 35mm)

I liked Metropolitan quite a bit, but Barcelona may be a notch better for being more active and focused on a smaller group of characters. It's just as absurd at points but less arch about it, which lets Stillman build a disaster out of things that seem too strange or tiny to matter, even given what we see in the beginning.

It's not perfect - I never quite believe in Fred's attraction to Montserrat beyond "well, obviously" - but it's a light, zippy movie that shows Stillman losing none of his distinct voice and ability to get at the heart of characters despite their tendency toward circumlocution, and the extra polish makes it even more enjoyable.