Potential Buried Treasures: Beauty Is Embarrassing, Alps, and Sound of Noise

As I mentioned before, I'm generally not very good about actually seeing the nominees for the Chlotrudis Society Buried Treasure award, in part because I hate watchinig movies like they're homework. I could be seeing something I'm really interested in, or doing something else, after all. But, since I made the effort to get one movie nominated this year, I decided not to make someone else see a movie to vote on the award if I wasn't willing to do the same.

It does somewhat skew the perception of the movies, though. I strongly suspect that I would have hated Alps anyway, but would I have disliked it quite so much if I didn't resent it for making me put off watching Justified? Probably not. I also think I would have liked Beauty Is Embarrassing a bit more if I had found it on my own, perhaps fitting it into my IFFBoston schedule last year. It's actually the sort of documentary I want to see more of in that it's informative and positive rather than an attempt to sway one's opinion or elevate a guy who makes a mess of his life - but when I have to watch it, those elements make it seem sort of slight.

It probably also didn't help that somewhere between Amazon sending a stream out, my computer decoding it, and it traveling down an HDMI cable to my TV, the picture seems to get too dark. This wasn't really a problem with Sound of Noise, but there were large chunks of Alps where I really can't see what is going on.

Still, it got me able to see enough to vote by the Friday deadline. The awards ceremony is this afternoon at the Brattle Theatre; if you're in the area, it's a kind of fun show, and with any luck, we'll see A Simple Life win the Buried Treasure award (with Oslo, August 31st also an acceptable victor).

Beauty Is Embarrassing

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (PBS Independent Lens, HD)

Wayne White seems like a nice fellow, thoroughly well-adjusted and funny without the wackiness necessarily seeming too much like a put-on. That may make Beauty Is Embarrassing a relatively unique entry in the genre of artist documentaries, which all-too-often ask the audience to believe that because someone can use a paintbrush or guitar, their substance abuse or self-centered nature is somehow interesting. Of course, this means that it's up to White and his art to keep the audience interested, and, well, they're nice enough.

White is probably best known for designing the sets of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, a cramped, surreal, and wonderfully silly environment that netted him three Emmy Awards. That was twenty years ago, but he's been keeping busy since, often with a series of words painted on found landscape paintings. He's also worked in cartooning, puppetry, and animation.

There's not necessarily a lot of drama in White's story; he started drawing at an early age, and while each step he took in his life moved him further from his Tennessee roots, he generally seems to find some measure of success and contentment in college, New York, and Los Angeles without much bitterness toward what he's leaving behind (though it doesn't happen overnight). Director Neil Berkeley does find a certain amount of tension there, mainly during a return home and reunion with a fellow artist who stayed there - not so much tension between them, but White seeming a little more reticent and with interview comments about the southern paternal figure being something he always rebelled against and something that makes it into his work. There are some entertaining plays on that - a scene where he dances a barefoot jig after saying nobody considered him particularly southern until he left the south which is as much a play on Yankees' stereotypes as a swipe and the big Lyndon Johnson mascot head he and son Woodrow build plays into - but it's worth noting that they were literally manufactured for the movie.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Alpeis (Alps)

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)

It's not crippling for a movie to have a peculiar, almost preposterous premise; the weird ones are often the best kind. It helps a lot if that premise is realized in an exciting manner, though, and Alps sucks any possible thrill from the telling that it can.

The story follows four people in Athens - a gymnast (Ariane Labed), her coach (Johnny Verkis), a nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia), and a paramedic (Aris Servetalis) - who form a group called "Alps" (the paramedic calls himself "Mont Blanc" as the leader) that offers a service in which they impersonate a dead loved one for a few hours every week. Of course, there are already existing tensions within the group, and sometimes it can be easy to lose oneself within this sort of role-playing.

It might be easier for the audience to lose itself if director Girogos Lanthimos didn't play everything so completely straight, though. The aliases acknowledge that this arrangement is peculiar, and there is naturally a point where things start to fall apart, but for most of the film, the characters go about their business as if this was perfectly ordinary, with the audience observing how they go about it but never seeing how it bumps up against more traditional means of mourning a loss. Sometimes, treating the outré as ordinary allows an audience to connect it to an absurdity in ordinary life, but the closest this movie comes is letting the audience compare the Alps' drilling with how the coach torments the gymnast, but that sort of student-coach relationship is hardly the sort of thing that requires an unusual metaphor. Instead, not letting the strange thing be strange just means there's little to do but watch the details.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Sound of Noise

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)

A little bit of IMDB link-following as I prepared to write up The Sound of Noise has me somewhat more curious than usual about how it played and was perceived in its native Sweden. Was it a Six Drummers feature with a lot more plot than their usual shorts, or was it considered a funny detective movie with antagonists that fans of goofy percussion might recognize? It doesn't really matter, as the end result is great fun, but I'm curious nonetheless.

It's not the drummers that get the movie started, though, but Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson), the head of Malmo's anti-terrorism squad, which would be impressive to most families, but he comes from a family of musicians, with his brother Oscar (Sven Ahlstrom), a conductor and one-time child prodigy, much favored over tone-deaf Amadeus. When he recognizes the ticking outside an embassy as not a bomb but a metronome, he doesn't realize that perpetrators Sanna (Sanna Persson) and Magnus (Magnus Borjeson) are planning a four-act opus of musical anarchy, "Music for a City and Six Drummers", with four other comrades (Marcus Haraldson Boij, Johannes Bjork, Fredrik Myhr, and Anders Vestergard) joining in.

Amadeus Warnebring is an interesting creation; a lot of movies would make the cop who hates music because of something in his past a cartoonish monster, receiving either his comeuppance or an unlikely conversion at the end. Amadeus is sympathetic, though; the scenes where he is unable to connect with his family will likely strike some as familiar, as will the idea of not loving something everyone assumes you should even though, yes, you "get it". Nilsson plays his part straight, but doesn't make him so uptight that audiences can't like the guy, and is pretty funny when the action starts to drive him around the bend.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 15 March - 21 March 2013

Still just me for this screening of The Brass Teapot? C'mon, folks, this looks like fun! Show it some of the same love you're showing Veronica Mars!

As for this week... Hey, did you realize that by the end of the month, there will likely be two movies starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in theaters, and two produced by WWE Films, with no overlap?

• Seriously, what's up with that? After not scoring with Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace, they go with Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin in The Call. Berry's a 911 dispatcher who hears a serial killer murder a caller; Breslin is his latest potential victim who manages to get through to her. It seems like a couple of decent actors in service of a powerfully silly idea, and plays at Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond.
  
  Those theaters plus Somerville get a movie that at least seems to be doing that on purpose: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone stars Steve Carrell as the titular magician whose star has fallen, with Steve Buscemi as his partner, Jim Carrey as the guy whose stunts are overshadowing proper illusion, as well as Olivia Wilde, Alan Arkin, James Gandolfini and others.
• Kendall Square is back to turning movies over fairly quickly, with three new ones opening this week. The most anticipated is likely West of Memphis, Amy Berg's exhaustive documentary on the West Memphis Three, a trio who were convicted of murder as teenagers eighteen years ago, though evidence has long suggested they were innocent.
  
  It's got a one-week booking, as does Like Someone in Love, the new film by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who this time travels to Japan to tell the story of an octogenarian professor and a student paying her bills with escort work. It's potentially the second-oddest relationship among the films being released, as Upside Down stars Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess as star-crossed lovers who live on neighboring planets - as in, they share an atmosphere, and the inhabitants of one can look up and see the other.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up a couple movies that opened at the Kendall last week, but Stoker is definitely worth seeing in 35mm, and Lore (which splits time between film and video screens, as does The Gatekeepers) looks like it may be as well. Tuesday's 7pm screening of Lore is an "Off The Couch" screening, with members of the Boston Psychiatric Society introducing the film and discussing it afterward. The theater also opens A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, in which Roman Coppola directs Charlie Sheen having a fictional nervous breakdown, with Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Patricia Arquette as friends and family. It opens in the GoldScreen.
  
  John Dies at the End is having a pretty nice run as a midnight movie, held over a second time for another couple shows in the screening room. It's joined by "cult cut" Repo Man on screen one on Friday and Saturday, with the monthly screening of The Room in moviehouse 2 on Friday.
  
  Sunday morning's Talk Cinema screening is Ginger & Rosa, Sally Potter's coming-of-age film with Elle Fanning & Alice Englert in the title roles and some pretty nice character actors in supporting parts; it seems like I've been seeing trailers for this forever. On Monday, it's "Science on Screen", where This Is Spinal Tap will be followed by a discussion of spontaneous human combustion (kidding; Dr. Christopher Shera will discuss the physics and biology of sound and hearing). And Thursday features a special screening of Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats, presented by the Quebec Government Office in Boston.
• The Brattle is having what you might call an interesting week. Most afternoons and evenings are part of The Lubitsch Touch series, a tribute to the exceptional director of romantic comedies, Ernst Lubitsch. A new 35mm print of Ninotchka plays Friday and Saturday, with The Shop Around the Corner on Sunday, a double feature of Bluebeard's Eighth Wife & Angel on Monday, and the pairing of Trouble in Paradise & Design for Living on Wednesday.
  
  Something quite different, The ABCs of Death plays at 10pm, with a pretty great set of directors from around the world inclining me to believe the Austin-enhanced hype on this anthology of 26 short films. In between, you've got the Chlotrudis Society Awards on Sunday afternoon, with special guest Christopher Abbot, and a special preview of Shane Carruth's Upstreem Color with Carruth in person to discuss his first movie since his twisty debut Primer. Thursday is a special Rock Band Night, with the game's maker Harmonix hosting a live contest on the eve of PAX East.
• The Harvard Film Archive kicks off a two-weekend tribute to King Hu and the Art of Wuxia, mostly featuring his post-Shaw Brothers work. It's a rare chance to see classic Hong Kong-style action in 35mm, including a new print of Dragon Inn (Friday & Monday evenings), his late film All the King's Men (Friday night), a new print of three-hour epic A Touch of Zen (Saturday evening), Classic Come Drink with Me (Sunday afternoon), and thriller The Fate of Lee Khan (Sunday evening).
• The MFA's film programming is mostly New Latin American Cinema, including La Sirga (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday), Post Tenebras Lux (Friday), Thursday Till Sunday (Friday, Saturday, Wednesday, and Thursday), Jonathas' Forest (Sunday), and Clandestine Childhood (Sunday and Wednesday). On Thursday, they segue into The 12th Annual Boston Turkish Film Festival with director Zeki Demirkubuz presenting his award-winning film Inside.
• ArtsEmerson's film program focuses on female filmmakers: Jessica Yu's In the Realms of the Unreal (Friday evening), Lisa Cholodenkko's High Art (Friday night), Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel, Point Break & The Weight of Water (Saturday afternoon, evening, and night), and Ava Duvernay's Middle of Nowhere (Sunday afternoon, followed by a live remote interview with the director). All but Middle of Nowhere screen on DVD, which is shown on Blu-ray. The Bright Lights presentations are Rubin & Ed on Tuesday and a talk by Kanen Flowers about online production.
• This month's All Things Horror Presents show is at the Somerville Theatre at 8pm on Saturday, the locally-produced zombie movie The Battery, with writer/producer/co-star Jeremy Gardner on-hand to introduce and answer questions afterward. There's also a short and passes to a sneak preview of the new The Evil Dead. It's in the micro-cinema, so getting tickets early might be advised. They also have their monthly installation of Faith Soloway's Lesbian Cinema Schlock Treatment, this time featuring 2006's The Gymnast. To make a bit of room, Identity Thief moves over to the Arlington Capitol, which also picks up Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild as they leave Kendall Square.
• Last chance for 2012's Oscar-nominated Shorts at the ICA on Sunday, with animation at 11am and 5pm and live action at 2pm.
• The Regent Theatre has one "film" program, with a February performance of Great Expectations from London's West End presented on Thursday night.

My plans? As much King Hu as I can manage, half-cursing the Chlotrudis awards for keeping me from more. I've already purchased by tickets for Ginger & Rosa and Upstream Color, and I'll probably try and fit The ABCs of Death and maybe The Battery in there as BUFF warm-up. Who knows what I can cram into the rest of the week?

This Week In Tickets: 4 March 2013 - 10 March 2013

Ah, stupid snow and work and knowing I'm not going to make it through a two-hour-plus midnight movie, leaving all that white space:



I meant to see a couple other things, but for some reason Tuesdays have been keeping me at work late (stuff you can't put off until tomorrow just always seems to spring up at 4:30pm on Tuesday), while Thursday's attempt to see Side Effects was thwarted by MoviePass not bloody working again. Honestly, when I'm standing in the lobby and it's giving me "please wait" for ten minutes while trying to verify my location...

To be fair, it did get me into two movies during the weekend - neither Dead Man Down nor Emperor was particularly good - but that's the kind of frustrating thing about its user experience - the 75% of the time when it works smoothly do not stick in one's memory nearly as well as the 25% where it either fails or feels like it's about to fail.

Other on-line offers got me into the other movies for cheap - discount Aquarium IMAX tickets for "The Last Reef" and another offer got me $13 toward Oz: The Great and Powerful on Fenway's premium screen, and those were both pretty good. 10am-on-Sunday shows at Fenway can be pretty odd, though, since there's a church that rents a room there (whether it's for live preaching or something beamed in, I don't know), so when you arrive at 9:45 there are smiling folks handing things out while the manager has to hop behind the counter when she realizes that this guy is here to see the movie with witches in it and wants popcorn for his brunch.

A fair amount of walking both days, leaving me a bit worn down, which was probably as much a factor as uncertain weather in me not seeing ABCs of Death at the Coolidge (did I feel like walking home from that at 2:30am? No, I did not!). Not sure I'll see it this coming weekend, either, what with all the keen wuxia at the Harvard Film Archive.

"The Last Reef"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 March 2013 in the New England Aquarium Simonx IMAX Theatre (first-run, IMAX 3D)

Venues like the New England Aquarium and Boston Museum of Science don't use the same playbook as other cinemas in booking their screen. A new IMAX film will be released, it will go into the rotation, and then stick around potentially forever, especially if its subject matter matches what's on display at the institution. Which means that there's a good chance that the Aquarium will keep this one around for, say, a year or two, if not longer.

Which is cool, because "The Last Reef" is a pretty good IMAX documentary. It's informative, entertaining, and impressively put together. It's an nicely focused featurette, not trying to focus on the whole ocean as opposed to this one facet of it, which has left more than one of these movies feeling somewhat shallow. The movie makes the unavoidable points about what increased carbon dioxide levels do to coral without seeming too strident or taking the focus off how amazing coral reefs are; the end includes a lot of hope to go with the caution. It's pretty basic information, but when you figure that kids are the primary audience, it's a good start.

Not that you need to be a kid to enjoy the main draw of these movies: Amazing photography. The ocean is a fertile setting for IMAX 3D movies, since they're full of amazing things moving about in three-dimensional space as opposed to hugging a surface like we land-dwelling creates do, and the movie serves up plenty of colorful creatures with improbably structures like sea slugs and flatworms that make the CGI creations in fantasy films seem boring. Other cool things include symbiotic relationships that have small fish feeding on stuff that sticks to much larger rays, fiercely territorial clownfish weaving in and out of reefs, and massive schools that fill the six-story screen. Plus, jellyfish (the Aquarium could probably sell me a ticket to an IMAX film called "forty-five minutes of jellyfish swimming" every time I feel a little tense).

Filmmakers Luke Cresswell & Steve McNicholas (who write, direct, edit, and compose the music; D.J. Roller shoots) break things up a little so that it's not all just schools of fish, lest the audience take what it's seeing for granted. Some attempts are a little over-thought, like the bit about atomic bomb testing on bikini atoll that opens the movie, though the basic idea is revisited at the end. The cutaways to New York City sometimes seem to fall in this category, but they do serve to connect the themes of reefs being natural cities and modern life stressing the world's CO₂ capacity; they're also some nifty bits of 3D time-lapse cinematography in their own right. There are occasional bits of whimsy, as well, especially when human divers enter the picture.

On a certain level, the three underwater documentaries playing the Aquarium are kind of interchangeable - you're going to see them for the same basic reason, and may wind up choosing which one based on what fits your Aquarium visit. It's a good IMAX doc on its own, too, if you're looking for forty-five minutes of nifty photography and cool science.

Dead Man Down

* * (out of four)
Seen 9 March 2013 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, digital)

It doesn't seem that way at first, but once Dead Man Down gets started, it's basically a movie about rooting for a Batman villain, making big elaborate plans for revenge when he could just put a bullet in someone's head, and who knows what sort of collateral damage is going to go on in the meantime?

Kind of a silly story, though it admittedly acknowledges how overcomplicated it is and mostly overcomes it with a strong cast: Colin Farrell tends to be a little too low-key and hangdog, but it works opposite Noomi Rapace, who tends to see just how far she can push as the neighbor who sees he's a killer and wants to use it to further her own revenge. Terrence Howard is a fine villain, and Dominic Cooper has a nifty supporting role is the crook who is smarter than you might expect - maybe a little too smart for his own good.

And while the plot may grind forward fairly slowly, director Niels Arden Oplev does a pretty good job of camouflaging it. He also stages one or two fairly well-done action sequences, especially a finale that may not quite fit the rest of the movie - it's raucous where what comes before is often dour - so it's far from a complete loss. It means the movie is just below average, rather than really bad.

Oz: The Great and Powerful

Funny thing; before a few years ago, I would have really been down on this movie before seeing it, in a "why the heck is Peter Jackson spending so much valuable career time on those freaking midget movies" way. I love Sam Raimi but was never particularly fond of The Wizard of Oz. It's weird; the family watched a large chunk of it most Thanksgivings (CBS would play it every year), but for some reason, the scary parts didn't make the lasting impression on me that they did others. The songs, either, for that matter.

Then Marvel released some art from the comic book adaptations they were doing, written by Eric Shanower and drawn by Skottie Young. They're gorgeous, sort of why Young is in the comic-drawing business. It was great fun to see them go back to the source material and adapt the stories without being especially influenced by the famous movie. It's a comic worth getting in hardcover, and while I haven't become a hardcore Oz fan, I've gained some affinity for the world.

And while I don't particularly love The Wizard of Oz, my nieces apparently do. The part of me that hates the Lord of the Rings stories for how they represent Tolkein's disdain for modernity and technology similarly reads too much into Wizard, thinking "there's no place like home" is a terrible message for that story to give kids - you get transported from the Kansas dustbowl to a magical land where you make amazing friends and have grand adventures, and all you can think of is getting back to your boring farm?

Anyway, the girls love it, so I'm naturally even more curious than I usually am when I go to see a family-friendly movie at how they'd react to it. I don't know about recommending it - I don't see them enough to know what would scare them for one thing, and there's some scary bits in it, though I don't think anything worse than the 1939 movie.

It's kind of neat that my six-year-old niece and I might both be excited for this movie, though, albeit from different directions (I'm guessing she's not a big Sam Raimi fan, what with being six).

Oz: The Great and Powerful

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2013 in Regal Fenway #13 (first-run, RPX)

I must admit, I groaned upon finding out that one of my favorite filmmakers would be making a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. Not just because I'm not a particularly big fan of the original, but because it seemed like kind of a dumb idea: Why do this exercise in putting things into place when L. Frank Baum built so much more? Of course, that question ignores how Oz has thrived for a hundred years in part because many beyond Baum have made fine contributions, with this group being just the latest.

Still, it can't be denied that director Sam Raimi and writers Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire aim to recreate as much as expand: The movie starts in black-and-white, with circus magician Oscar "Oz" Diggs (James Franco) stopped near where he grew up in Kansas before a tornado transports him to the magical land of Oz. There, he meets friendly witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), who tells him of a prophecy that that a great and powerful wizard would fall from the sky and defeat the wicked witch who poisoned the king of the Emerald City, becoming King himself. Well, this Oz isn't exactly a wizard, but being King sounds nice, so he heads off down the yellow brick road, picking up a couple of fantastical companions - Finley the flying monkey (voice of Zach Braff) and a China Girl (voice of Joey King) from a teapot village - along the way.

Yes, the filmmakers take every visual and storytelling cue they can from the MGM musical that won't lead to legal action from its current owners, but they create enough of their own and update it with enough modern special effects to grab the attention of those who don't appreciate what 1939 had to offer. The landscape Oz finds when arriving in this new world is big, colorful, and beautiful, and while the visuals don't always look fully real, they always look like something that could spring from a child's imagination. New sights like the China Girl's village are fun discoveries, and there's always just enough going on in the background so that the fantasy world doesn't seem to stop at the edges of the screen but not enough to distract.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Emperor

One thing I didn't particularly worry about when reviewing this movie was accuracy. Part of that is not really having time to dig through a bunch of WWII history for a movie review that I want to get posted while it's still in theaters (and not necessarily being inclined to do so, to be honest); part of it is that the movie itself was disappointing enough that you don't really need to talk about actual accuracy to feel it did history a disservice.

Still, it's kind of amazing just how thoroughly the filmmakers seem to have missed the mark on what is interesting and what is not. A quick search on Gen. Bonner Fellers yielded both his Wikipedia page and this book excerpt which suggested that Fellers and MacArthur proactively acted to prevent Hirohito from coming before a tribunal, as opposed to that being a hoped-for conclusion. I suspect that it's not so easy to make a movie about subverting the machinery of justice to achieve what one feels may be a greater good, but who needs the easy movie? The moral ambiguities there are more interesting to chew on, as well: Consider how the second link mentions how this action influenced Japan's perception of the war, allowing them to more easily cast themselves as victims as opposed to aggressors.

And then there's Aya Shimada. I don't know whether she's real or not, but she feels like something a lazy screenwriter would come up with, from how she seems to exist to fulfill plot necessities to how she really doesn't fit into the real Fellers's timeline: She's a college student in 1932, and while it's possible that Fellers could have been on campus working on a doctorate at the time, but what I could see online was the Fellers became interested in Japanese culture by meeting an exchange student in 1914. Still possible in the movie's timeline, but in that case, is meeting Aya not quite so transformative, and she's less the direct representation of Japan to him as he tries to rebuild it.

In the end, Emperor may not be strictly inaccurate, but it seems to choose the least interesting parts of the story. Which is a shame, because there's fascinating stuff there.

Emperor

* * (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2013 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, 4K digital)

Under normal circumstances, I might grumble about Emperor being a case of keeping an interesting story and larger-than-life characters at arm's length in favor of someone that the audience can perhaps more easily relate to. In this case, though, things seem like they've been made a bit more bland beyond that. There's a fascinating moment of history here that too often seems to be playing second fiddle.

That moment is in 1945, when General Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) arrives in Tokyo after Japan's surrender to oversee the occupation and reconstruction of Japan. Initially, Emperor Hirohito is not on the list to be arrested for war crimes, but many in the United States want him to hang, and have given MacArthur ten days to provide a recommendation one way or the other. MacArthur delegates the job to General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox), the member of his staff who understands Japan the best - although Fellers is also spending a fair amount of time looking for Aya Shimada (Eriko Hatsune), a former girlfriend he last saw before the war.

It's not hard to see what the filmmakers are looking to do here (and perhaps author Shiro Okamoto, whose work was adapted), showing the war and its aftermath on both the scale of nations and individuals. The trouble is, the thread of Bonner & Aya is just not that interesting. It's a story that we've seen a great many times before, right down to the flashbacks of meeting while she's in college (what the World War I vet Bonners is doing there in 1933 is not clear), happier times, and separation, and neither these particular characters or situations seem special. That flashback structure is a chestnut, and a particularly silly and limiting one here: It keeps Bonners from looking in the most obvious place until the viewer is caught up, and not because there's a particular sense of him not being ready to face it until then.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 March - 14 March 2013

Hey, a miracle could happen and that March 25th screening of Back to 1942 could come off! I will be trying again later, though. I'm also trying for this screening of The Brass Teapot; why not join me?

In the meantime... NEW SAM RAIMI! And, uh, other stuff.

• The new Sam Raimi movie is the big deal this week, with Oz: The Great and Powerful grabbing a whole big thwack of screens, including 3D and 2D showings at Somerville, Boston Common (including the Imax-branded screen), Fenway (including RPX), Jordan's Furniture (IMAX), and Fresh Pond. Admittedly, I'm not sure why they did a prequel when Baum wrote a whole bunch of Oz novels, but word is that Raimi loves them along with the MGM movie and tried to do right by them (and also applied his signature style to 3D). James Franco, Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams, and Rachel Weisz star. With any luck, Bruce Campbell and Ted Raimi will be playing munchkins.
  
  If you're looking for a less all-ages thrill ride, Dead Man Down reunites director Niels Arden Oplev and star Noomi Rapace (they did the first Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, easily the best Lisbeth Salander movie) in an English-language movie where Salander's character blackmails a killer played by Colin Farrell into taking revenge on the man who maimed her. It plays Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Boston Common also picks up Stoker, the first English-language movie by another pretty darn great foreign director, Chan-wook Park. It's really good.
• Emperor opens at both Boston Common and Kendall Square, and features Tommy Lee Jones as Douglas MacArthur deciding Japan's fate - most specifically, that of its emperor - in the wake of World War II.
  
  The end of the war on its other front is the setting for another movie opening at Kendall Square, Lore, which follows the children of imprisoned Nazi war criminals who must cross Germany on their own to reach an aunt, as a result facing the results of what their parents fought for. In another corner of the world, No tells the story of how an advertising executive, among others, spearheaded a plan to win a 1988 referendum on Chilean dictator Pinochet's regime. That's not the end of the theater's globetrotting, though - they've got a week of Israeli director Eytan Fox's follow-up to Yossi & Jagger, Yossi, which catches up with the title character ten years later, meeting a new young lover.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up a couple new movies as well, both documentaries playing in the video screening rooms. Don't Stop Believing: Everyman's Journey, focuses on Arnel Pineda, a fan of the band Journey who apparently nailed them so well in his YouTube clips that he was chosen to be the new frontman. Greedy Lying Bastards, meanwhile, sets its sights on the energy industry and efforts to prevent meaningful action on climate change. I'm guessing it is not a calm, even-handed approach.
  
  They also go midnight-crazy this weekend, with three separate movies playing Friday and Saturday at 11:59pm. John Dies at the End gets held over for a second weekend, albeit in the screening room. The other upstairs screen has The ABCs of Death, in which a murderer's row of genre filmmakers from around the world each have an average of five minutes to kill someone in a way inspired by a different letter of the alphabet. It also will play the Brattle next week. The main screen, meanwhile, goes old-school with a 35mm print of the original Brian De Palma adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.
  
  The polar opposite of those movies plays Sunday at 10am, with a Kids' Show of The Care Bears Movie. Monday night offers a "Stage & Screen" showing of Fritz Lang's M, a fantastic movie with Peter Lorre in the role of his life as a serial child-killer who is ultimately hunted by the underworld as well as the police; it's introduced by playwright Ryan Landry, who has apparently made a comedy of it which will play at the Cedarwood Pavillion from 29 March through April. There's also a special screening on Thursday night of recent French critical darling Aujourd'hui, which follows a Senegalese man putting his life in order before his impending death.
• Endings loom in Night Across the Street as well; the final film of Raoul Ruiz plays the Brattle. Created while the dying Ruiz knew the end was near, it follows an elderly man as he takes a trip down memory lane, where life merges with fantasy. In only runs three days, from Friday to Sunday, and plays from a digital source.
  
  After that, it's a series of one-night stands. Monday's DocYard presentation is Planet of Snail, an award-winning documentary about the lives of people who are both deaf and blind. After the screening, director Yi Seung-jun will conduct a remote Q&A via Skype. There will be guests in person for Tuesday's presentation of Royal Wedding - film critic/Turner Classic Movies host Leonard Maltin and star Jane Powell, to be precise, talking about the classing Fred Astair dance movie as part of TCM's "Road to Hollywood" tour. After a Harvard Book Store reading/discussion with The Boston Globe's Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy (from their new book on Whitey Bulger), there will be an 8:15pm screening of The Departed, which clearly drew on Bulger's legend almost as much as Infernal Affairs. Finally, Thursday is a Balagan show, DIY Dystopia, which includes both hands-on manipulation of 16mm film and "a special collaboration with the Papercut Zine Library".
• The Harvard Film Archive reaches the end of Action! Action! Action! A Raoul Walsh Retrospective with Pursued and The Man I Love on Friday night, The Strawberry Blonde and The Bowery on Saturday, and Sadie Thompson on Sunday afternoon (all single-admission features; The Man I Love is 16mm rather than 35mm, and Sadie Thompson is silent with accompaniment by Martin Marks).
  
  After that, they have a pair of anti-war anthologies: Far from Afghanistan plays Sunday night with directors John Giavito and Yoo Soon-mi there in person. It combines documentary, fiction, found-footage and avant-garde looks at the war in Afghanistan, and is inspired by Monday night's Far from Vietnam, which had Chris Marker joined by the likes of Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, and more.
• The MFA'sfilm programming continued what it started Wednesday, with Habibi and Little Fugitive each playinig Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday at various times. Habibi also screens Thursday afternoon, with the first screenings in the New Latin American Cinema series, Thursday Till Sunday and La Sirga, playing that evening.
• ArtsEmerson's film program has Coen Brothers classic Barton Fink playing Friday night and Sunday afternoon, with Saturday featuring repeats of last week's "Metamorphasis" tie-ins for those who missed them watching the play: The Trial at 1pm, Cronenberg's The Fly at 6pm, and the original with Vincent Price at 9pm. All are on DVD. The Bright Lights screenings (which I feel terrible about not knowing about before now, since they're free and programmed by Anna Feder who is one of many to have done great work with the Boston Underground Film Festival) include documentary Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story on Tuesday and a selection of student films on Thursday.
• The ICA has just one screening this week, the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts on Sunday at 3pm.
• iMovieCafe bumps popular cricket-academy drama Kai Po Che back up to main-feature status, also bringing back Special 26 for single shows on Saturday and Sunday. There's also one show daily of Telugu-language Gundello Godari through Wednesday.
• The Arlington Capitol once again picks a movie up after it leaves Kendall Square; this week that would be Lincoln.

My plans? Well, I think I might try to hit the furniture store for Oz, then come back for Dead Man Down, Emperor, Lore, and maybe No. Plus catching up on the Buried Treasure nominees I've been procrastinating on at home.

Boston Sci-Fi Marathon Redux: The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

Well, I was going to review two or three from the Marathon, but ultimately decided I did't need to write more about Battle Royale after the big ol' post where I compared it and The Hunger Games, and I kind of conked out a bit toward the end of Reptilicus. Besides, reviewing that one would have meant a double-whammy of "eh, fifties sci-fi silliness isn't really my thing, and apparently that's just not done.

Part of it's principle - I'm not a big fan of science fiction as a nostalgia act, something you look back upon fondly. The golden age of science fiction should always be in the future, and fetishizing the way it was in the past strikes me as missing the core appeal of the genre, the discovery and imagination of new things, in favor of the trappings. A part of me wonders if The Ghastly Love of Johnny X doubles down on this in a way by paying such tribute to the pop-culture of the time; is this fondness for the actual thing, or what was learned via Happy Days and Grease?

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Boston Sci-Fi Marathon, DCP)

Many films boast of firsts, but The Ghastly Love of Johnny X has to settle for lasts: Last film shot on Kodak's Super-X black-and-white film stock. Last role for Kevin McCarthy of Invaders of the Body Snatchers fame. Last... Well, almost certainly not the last tongue-in-cheek homage to 1950s sci-fi movies. Probably not even the last musical one - though the songs do give it a little more energy than usual.

Johnny Xavier (Will Keenan) is a teenager from outer space, banished from his home world for being too much of a rebel, banished to... Earth! When next we see him, he's chasing down Bliss (De Anna Joy Brooks), the girlfriend who was also banished, who falls in with nice soda jerk Chip (Les Williams), who figures they can hide with his uncle King Clayton (Reggie Bannister), who is trying to mount a comeback show for legendary rock & roller Mickey O'Flynn, The Man with the Grin (Creed Bratton), who may be a big part of the reason Johnny got himself banished to Earth in the first place!

That description is relatively straightforward compared to the way the story actually winds up running; it's a mess of antagonists suddenly being sold as heroes, sidekicks becoming villains, and couplings that happen and disintegrate seemingly at the writers' distracted whims as opposed to any sort of thing that the audience feels from the characters or might find satisfying. The characters do everything for what feel like arbitrary reasons, right from the set-up of "you can come home if you do this" and then never bothering to convince the audience of why Johnny would even want to go home.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 25 February 2013 - 3 March 2013

Thought it was going to be busier, but there was baseball to watch. Baseball! On television! That makes ignoring snow outside easy!



Stubless: Stoker, Brattle Theatre, at 7pm on 28 February 2013.

I honestly meant to take in more Park Chan-wook stuff at the Brattle last week, but the late-ish show time on Monday made it difficult to overcome inertia to see Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance at 9:30, and though I was already there after "Kokoyakyu" on Tuesday, I didn't feel like hanging around for an hour and, besides, work the next day. Ah, well, I've got them all on Blu-ray, so I can give them another viewing another time. Wouldn't quite have been the same as seeing them on 35mm, which is one of the reasons why I was glad to get to the preview of Stoker.

I originally intended to see more first-run stuff over the weekend, but I opted to watch both a spring training and World Baseball Classic game Friday night, and then when I was done hanging around with my brother and grocery shopping on Sunday, well, did I really need to see The Last Exorcism Part II? No, I don't think I did. Jack the Giant Slayer and Phantom made a pretty nice ad-hoc double feature, though - neither great movies, but enjoyable, especially when you're not laying out a whole lot of cash for them specifically.

Which leaves us with one last little ticket on the page, "Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball'. I actually got a heads up on that one from my Japanese teacher at Boston Language Institute emailing me - a nice thing to do, as I was not a particularly good student (and a ton of what I've learned is just gone now - lack of opportunity to practice has really hurt me). She'd never been to the Brattle before, despite being in Boston for a while, and seemed interested when hearing about the range of things that played there. That seemed to be the case with a lot of the folks attending, especially those in education; hopefully, they'll come more often, especially now that they're going to be putting some upgrades in.

The screening was for a group called "Primary Source", which mainly looks to connect educators with material that will help them bring the world to their students. Thus, this documentary that originally aired on PBS's P.O.V. series back in 2006. While I half-suspect that Japan isn't nearly the sort of strange, mysterious place it was to me growing up - a guy living in suburban Maine didn't see much manga, anime, and proudly Japanese videogames in the 1980s, especially compared to WWII in history class - but this is probably a pretty good way to introduce kids to Japanese culture; it's familiar but also quite different.

(Especially here in New England, where we like the baseball; perhaps you noticed that from the rest of the post?)

"Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Primary Source, video)

High school baseball is kind of a big deal in Japan, especially the annual koshien tournament. How big? Imagine high school football in Texas, only there's a nationally televised single-elimination tournament that has been played since 1915 and gets the same sort of national attention as the NCAA Basketball tourney does in the USA. "Kokoyakyu" is a relatively rare behind-the-scenes look at the high school baseball culture, and a fairly enjoyable one.

The movie follows two high school teams in the Osaka prefecture - Tennoji, a public school whose coach Masa sees this as a class for developing its players as men, and Chiben, a private academy known as a baseball powerhouse whose coach Takashima played in koshien as a boy and has brought his team to the promised land before. Both feature long hour of practice year-round, dedicated players, managers, and cheering sections, and, of course, a shared dream, although only one can win the six consecutive games they must to represent the prefecture in the national tournament.

Director Kenneth Eng opts to spend most of his time as a fly on the wall, capturing the daily routines and pressures of the teams rather than spending a lot of time on interviews or filling the audience in on the history of baseball in Japan. There's little time for the rest, as the documentary had to fit in a one-hour PBS timeslot, but the focus works to the movie's advantage - by not setting up comparison to American institutions or practices, or questioning their subjects much beyond acquiring information, Eng and writer Alexander Shear let the audience have its own reactions and form its own opinions.

It's entertaining and enlightening to watch, though I did occasionally wonder if some of the more intense bits were held back or kept out of the filmmakers sight (other accounts of Japanese high school ball describe a win-at-all-costs pressure we don't quite see here). The strong emotions and occasionally blunt assessments of not just the players but the highly-organized cheer sections are often as surprising as they are intriguing, with great contrasts between the two environments, It's also quite clear that Eng and Shear love baseball itself; the games are not just edited for suspense, but with a fan's eye. You're not just watching a movie, but also watching baseball.

SPOILERS! They're also an example of how baseball is fairly unpredictable at the individual game level, as neither team makes it to koshien. While that may have been disappointing for the filmmakers at the time, it winds up working for the movie: Instead of being an underdog story, or look at how the big guys win, it just becomes about the game itself, which will break the hearts of most but is beautiful even without a trophy being hoisted - and the scenes of the players being graceful in defeat even after being so intensely competitive tell us something vital about the character of this game in this country. !SRELIOPS

Sure, that result leaves the audience missing some of what they might have watched for, and there's plenty that would have been interesting to explore if there had been more time. For instance, it was a big deal when someone received the number 18, presumably because it represented being the last person to make the cut for the tournament roster and thus being considered a leader, and I wondered if there was meaning to Daisuke Matsuzaka wearing it with the Red Sox that I had missed these past five years. Then again, I figure it's a good thing if a doc like this makes one want to learn more - and there's certainly more to learn!

Stoker

I suppose I could have passed on doing a review of Stoker, what with there already being one on eFilmCritic, but I've done one for each of Park's other movies (including one for Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance that suggests I really need to give it a second look), so might as well keep the streak alive, right?

It wasn't quite the early preview I'd thought - I half expected Stoker to only open in NYC/LA this weekend and hit Boston seven days later, but instead we got it right away. Almost not worth winding up in one of the side-sections to the Brattle and, if not actually deliberately missing my bus in the morning, not being too broken up when I would up telecommuting rather than trying to make it back from Burlington in time for a 7pm movie, right? Maybe. On the other hand, I got to see the movie on 35mm film, and who knows how many chances I'd have for that in the Boston area, right? Heck, a few months from now when the Brattle's successful Kickstarter has paid for DCP to be installed, maybe Fox wouldn't supply them a print even if that's what the theater prefers.

One thing that has been both amusing and impressive to me is how happily and effectively Palisades Tartan has jumped on the Stoker train. They're the company with the rights to all three "Vengeance trilogy" movies, and their Twitter account has been merrily retweeting any review of Stoker or interview with Director Park that might mention them, apparently figuring that they should do everything they can to benefit from being in the Park Chan-wook business at the same time Fox is. This includes getting their movies into theaters - from what I've seen, the Brattle's quick Vengeance Trilogy program (running once more as a marathon this Wednesday) isn't the only one happening across the nation. Not sure if it's a concerted push on Palisades' part or just trying to be accommodating, but either way, it's a pretty canny thing to do.

Stoker

* * * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (preview, 35mm)

With any luck, a fair number of the people seeing Stoker will do so without already being fans of director Park Chan-wook, drawn in by the nifty cast and striking previews. They're in for a treat, because Park has crossed the Pacific without losing any of what made him a big deal in South Korea, which means that not only is this movie a chilly thrill unlike most anything else in theaters right now, but there's half a dozen other good to great movies like it for them to discover.

India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) lost her father on her eighteenth birthday, and being a somewhat odd girl to begin with, the funeral is a special kind of torture, especially since it seems to highlight the differences in temperament between her and her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). As strange as the whole thing seems, the arrival of her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) makes it even more unsettling: For as much as Evelyn quickly hooks onto him as a younger, more attentive version of the husband from whom she drifted apart, nobody ever told India about him, and neither longtime housekeeper Mrs. McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville) nor great-aunt Gwendylon (Jacki Weaver) seems particularly happy to see him return from his travels.

Much of the first act of Stoker takes place at the large family home and its grounds, and what Park and his cohorts do with that location is kind of clever: It feels expensive and tony and until someone mentions their cellular telephone, it could be any time within the past fifty years there, with some things like India's wardrobe and the live-in help almost seeming deliberately anachronistic. Park and his design team (who really should be remembered next awards season) create a perfect, spotless upper-class New England environment - even tubs of ice cream have an idealized look to them - before visually pointing out that there are dark passages underneath or showing India in a normal public school and letting the audience chew on that juxtaposition.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Jack the Giant Slayer & Phantom

If there's a theme to the movies I saw on Saturday, it would probably be something along the lines of "not getting a fair shake". I won't claim either Jack the Giant Slayer or Phantom are masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination - when giving them star ratings (because I can't break bad habits), I vacillated between the ones that say "OK/average" and "I like it", in part because a lot of folks don't take two and a half stars here or three on eFilmCritic - basically, the midpoints - as good movies. Maybe I'm forgiving or just like movies a lot, but an average movie isn't a bad thing, and these two are each worth a matinee ticket.

Their troubles come from different directions, though. At least I gather they do, because I tend to avoid the box-office prediction and "buzz" columns on entertainment websites; I care about the business only so far as good movies making a profit means more money spent on things like those good movies.

Jack the Giant Slayer seemed to get a lot of the same treatment as John Carter did last year - pot shots taken at a high profile director, big budget being spent on lots of effects rather than name stars, the whole thing falling out of favor with the studio. And like that movie, it's not really bad. It's probably not a great investment; two hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and even if there's a good chance it can make that back once foreign markets and post-theatrical life is taken into consideration, it's a lot of risk for what is probably never going to be a great movie.

But, you know what? I'm not paying $200M for it; I'm paying $15 (well, $6.50 by paying new release/RPX/3D surcharges on a rewards program ticket, but anyway...). And for an afternoon's entertainment, it's not terrible value. All the reporting on the behind-the-scenes stuff poisons the well early, though; people hear there's something wrong with it, and that impression sticks, no matter how the previews and reviews look (and influences those who write the reviews some; we're only human). It's a spiral that a movie has to be extraordinary to climb out of, but Titanic doesn't happen very often.

Phantom, meanwhile, seemed to have trouble enough just getting seen. It was produced by a small company that seems to make most of its money on doing direct-to-video sequels to franchises that the originating studios feel have been more or less tapped out, and was the first film they distributed theatrically. They got it into about 1100 screens nationwide, which isn't bad - gets you into every market, though not in the same way Jack was, where it's on multiple screens in multiple theaters.

Getting the word out, though, is tougher. RCR is not going to be doing a television blitz like Warner is, and while AMC Boston Common did set up the standee that they were sent, I don't recall ever seeing a trailer for this one. I kind of get that - with some restrictions, previews are attached to movies at the theater/chain's discretion, and when I worked at a multiplex, we often didn't know what we'd be running on Friday until Tuesday morning. So a theater might have had a DCP file for Phantom for months, but given the small studio and lack of buzz elsewhere, it probably seems unlikely that they'll be playing that movie at that theater, so what's gained by putting the trailer in the rotation? Sure, if it were my theater and I was going to be programming 20-minute blocks of previews like AMC does, I'd throw two or three previews for movies that may or may not play into the package and see which ones got a reaction, but I suspect it doesn't work that way in chains.

Even beyond that, though... The screening times for evening shows are at 6:15pm and 10:50pm, for a 97-minute movie - or, as I tend to look at it, "too early to get there from work" and "too late to get home on the T". Even if you add twenty minutes for previews and another twenty for the First Look thing, that still leaves about two hours and fifteen minutes between showtimes. Just looking over their schedule, it looks like they're jamming an extra screening of The Last Exorcism Part II into that gap, and while that may do better for them at the box office - in part because they didn't promote Phantom, of course - a movie that doesn't have any screenings within "prime time" is going to have an uphill battle.

Jack the Giant Slayer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2013 in Regal Fenway #13 (first run, RPX/digital)

Here's a fun thought experiment - what if you took the cast and design work for Jack the Giant Slayer, and instead of shooting a live-action 3D movie, you did a little work on the script with the idea of moving the rating down a notch and had Disney animate it? You would not necessarily get a classic, but you'd maybe get something about as good that might be looked upon a little more fondly.

As in every version of the fairy tale, Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is a farmboy who winds up with a handful of magic beans instead of a farm animal, which grow into a beanstalk that leads to a land of giants, taking his house and runaway princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) with it. King Brahmwell (Ian McShane), naturally, dispatches top knight Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to retrieve her, with Jack and Isabelle's fiance Roderick (Stanley Tucci - it's an arranged marriage) in tow.

Traditionally, the hero of Jack and the Beanstalk is kind of a jerk - making a foolish trade, trespassing, stealing, and ultimately killing the giant when his crimes are discovered. Not exactly a fitting protagonist or plot for a family movie, so the four credited writers have added some backstory and a brace of other characters, which all conspire to cast Jack in a rather more heroic light. It brings the story to the modernized fairy-tale template, with the princess who bristles at her fate and what seems like the occasional anachronism, but it's a style that's tried and true; director Bryan Singer and the rest play it straight enough for it to be comfortable while still giving the characters enough room to be funny and individual.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Phantom

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2013 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first run, 4K DCP)

Many elements of Phantom are almost certain to remind audiences of The Hunt for Red October, and it actually draws heavily on one of the incidents that inspired Tom Clancy's novel and the later film adaptation - or at least, the popular theories about the sinking of Soviet submarine K-129. It's not quite in Red October's class, but by the time it's done, it's hit a nice little peak as a fairly decent thriller.

It opens with Dmitri (Ed Harris), a Soviet submarine captain with a revered father but a more checkered personal history being told that he and his crew will be having their scheduled shore leave cut short to staff D-23, an ancient submarine on a secret mission to test some new equipment. First officer Alex (William Fichtner) notices a few other red flags - the sailors supplementing the crew members who could not return in time have the sort of empty personnel files that indicate KGB, and members of a radical branch at that. Bruni (David Duchovny), the man in charge of this "Phantom" device, is the worst, keeping secrets close to the vest and constantly undermining Dmitri's authority.

Phantom has its problems, especially with how writer/director Todd Robinson chooses to get things started and dole out information in the beginning - there's a fair amount of speaking cryptically about things that will perhaps get explained later (and perhaps won't), bits of Soviet protocol like naval political officers that viewers who weren't born while there was still a Soviet Union may not pick up, and things that just aren't clear: Does Dmitri see what Lance Henriksen's Admiral Markov does as the D-23 sets sail, or not? The framing and cutting suggests he would, but it's not referenced. Are the scenes of Dmitri's wife and daughter supposed to be present day or flashbacks indicating he messed things up long ago? And there's a whole thing about Dmitri having hallucinations and epileptic seizures that sits there like a Chekhov's Gun only to figure into the movie very little.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

These Weeks In Tickets: 11 February 2013 - 24 February 2013

It's okay to miss a week during festivals, right? When you're seeing two movies a day but can only really write up one and a half, falling behind is sort of inevitable.



As you can see, the Boston Sci-Fi Film Fest ate my week (and, yes, it was apparently a "fest" versus a "festival" this year). I've managed to review everything I saw at the festival - The Final Shift, War of the Worlds: The Untold Story, Found in Time, Earthbound, Mars et Avril, When Time Becomes a Woman, Juan in a Million, El Xendra, S.I.N. Theory, Love & Teleportation, 95ers: Echoes, Space Milkshake, Motivational Growth, The History of Future Folk, and War of the Worlds: Goliath- and put up a diary of the marathon. Like always, I wish this event would grow a little faster; the emails I got for the Philip K. Dick science fiction festival in Brooklyn last fall suggests that it has already leapfrogged the festival portion of Boston's in its first year, although I don't know what sort of funds they have to go after movies rather than just rely on what showed up in their Withoutabox.

Like before, I'd really like to see a little more professionalism - better communications (which includes burning the website down and rebuilding from the ground), not projecting industry screeners, and, honestly, giving the awards out on merit rather than just because someone from the production showed up. Just as I felt in the last few years that the festival abused the "premiere" designation, both by advertising it for studios that weren't premieres and being the first to show movies because there were no other takers (honestly, would you recommend a festival on the basis of the movies being terrible but you get to see them first?), I think bypassing superior movies to give a best-in-fest award to Motivational Growth and giving War of the Worlds: Goliath a best animated film award when there's a field of one sends the right message to the wrong people: Sure, it might encourage some filmmakers to bring their movies in person, but does it impress those who could win the award on merit? I suspect not, and since a good reputation is the most valuable asset a festival can have, I don't see how these shortcuts can work.

Hope I'm wrong, though; as I say every year, this is something I'd love to see grow into a real "studios premiere their spring movies here and indies value Boston more than SXSW's midnight screenings" festival.

I did have time to squeeze one more movie in, and it sure was squeezed: I caught the Saturday midnight screening of Lost in Thailand on Saturday night, then walked home (no T after 1am-ish), wrote until I fell asleep, and then somehow made it to the marathon at noon as a non-zombie. Mostly worth it; it's a broad comedy, but that broadness translates reasonably well. I half-wonder if it's one of those movies that got a special, less-nationalistic cut for foreign distribution, because what I saw does much less to shove Chinese prosperity down one's throat than many similar movies from the People's Republic do.



Stubless: The second half of the marathon. Scroll up.

The Monday afternoon following the marathon is kind of weird - I'm generally actually pretty alert as things let out, get home, take a shower, and then start to drag mid-afternoon, at which point it's a struggle to get to eight or nine o'clock so that the rest of the week isn't messed up. I'd actually considered Happy People: A Year in the Taiga for that afternoon, but in that situation, Werner Herzog's voice and the relatively mild material would have knocked me out.

I caught it on Tuesday, and then didn't get to anything until the weekend, when it more or less revolved around The Alloy Orchestra's Buster Keaton show - I'd purchased the ticket a while ago, so it meant I was only going to see a bit of the Brattle's Matthew McConaughey mini-series (Magic Mike on Friday). For some reason or another, I didn't feel like heading back home immediately after that, so I headed to Boston Common and went for the next one I hadn't seen, which turned out to be Snitch, which wasn't bad. Sunday's movie was A Good Day to Die Hard, and I didn't dislike it nearly as much as others (faint praise!).

Had time after that to get some groceries before the Oscars started, although missing that might not have been a particular tragedy, as Seth McFarlane was more or less terrible, and I really didn't get the celebration of Chicago's tenth anniversary. That was pretty bad.

Magic Mike

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Matthew McConaughey, 35mm)

So, when did we start taking Channing Tatum seriously? 21 Jump Street seems like a reasonable if unlikely place to date it from, although some people did like him in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.

But, here he is now in the title role of this movie, pretty darn charming as an exotic dancer who isn't ashamed of that job but has other ambitions, eventually including the sister (Cody Horn) of the new kid (Alex Pettyfer). Add in Matthew McConaughey as the owner of the club and Olivia Munn as Mike's regular booty call, and it's a pretty nice cast, although not so star-powered that anyone overpowers the ensemble.

What's interesting is how it inverts a number of expectations. The biggest, of course, is going for the beefcake instead of the cheesecake, not just in finding reasons for characters to have their shirts off, but having scenes that are just there for the ladies to ogle men. Even more unusual, though, is how the apprentice winds up providing the object lesson for the mentor; Pettyfer's Adam spirals out of control in the way that Mike never did, and it's not really "man, I've gotten lucky" moment as much as seeing that he's the one that doesn't quite fit.

Buster Keaton Shorts

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Alloy Orchestra, digital)

Well, actually it's more Keaton & Arbuckle, as the first two of the three shorts are Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle things in which Buster has a supporting role - although the last one certainly makes up for that. It's a surprisingly stark difference, with Arbuckle going for very broad material while Keaton is still doing physical comedy, but it's incredibly precise and well-planned. To a certain extent, it shows why (beyond scandal and never really doing features) Keaton has endured and Arbuckle hasn't; Arbuckle's material feels dated and primitive while Keaton's, though clearly of its time, is narratively and technically sophisticated enough to hold up.

"The Butcher Boy", for instance, is certainly funny enough, but it's basically a collection of slapstick that you'd mostly find in kids' movies nowadays. It also becomes basically an entirely different movie halfway through, going from hijinks in a general store to Arbuckle and co-star Al St. John both sneaking into the boarding school where the owner's daughter has been sent (which means she's, what, 17 at most? Ick!). Amusing stuff.

"Good Night, Nurse!" is interesting in that it seems more like Buster is playing a part than usual, as the sadistic doctor running the sanitarium to which Fatty has been sent to with the intention of curing his alcoholism. Large chunks of it are completely arbitrary, but the cast (which overlaps a great deal with the previous movie) sells each joke pretty well.

"The Play House", though, is pretty amazing, especially in the opening sequences, as Keaton playing every part on screen, sometimes ten or eleven at once, and the compositing is pretty incredible. The funny thing is, as much as the trick photography is something to be marveled at there, it doesn't necessarily cross the audience's mind that Keaton and company are using it to make twins out of a single actress later. That's in part because Keaton is surprisingly good at the technical aspects, and in part because he's making good jokes that lead from one to the next.

It's pretty amazing, really, just how good Keaton was from an early age; he was 21 when he made "The Butcher Boy" (his first movie) and only 25 when creating something as technically impressive as "The Play House". Alloy was pretty good, too, although kind of low-key - I wasn't sure just how much anybody but keyboardist Roger Miller was playing; the others were in the pit and it was tough to see much activity.

Snitch

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2013 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)

Man, does Dwayne Johnson need to find better parts. The guy is tremendously charismatic, has the sort of physical presence that the likes of Schwarzeneggar and the other action stars of the 1980s and 1990s did. And yet, this one has him behind the wheel of a truck for most of the action, which is still more impressive than a lot of what he's done in the past.

It is some pretty impressive action, though - writer/director Ric Roman Waugh came up through stuntwork, and he knows what he's doing. The last big chase scenes are actually pretty incredible, especially since, as far as I can recall, there were no digital effects companies listed in the closing credit crawl - Waugh and company just smashed the crap out of a bunch of cars, trucks, and a big rig or two. The execution of the action stuff, and a good deal of the crime story, is pretty darn good.

Unfortunately, there's an agenda at work, and while it's a noble one - I sympathize with the film's message of how mandatory minimum sentencing laws prevent the system from considering people as individuals - it's incredibly heavy-handed. There's also perhaps too little effort to sell the main premise of the movie, that Johnson's character, who works in construction, can do this sort of undercover work on behalf of the government to help his son.

A Good Day to Die Hard

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2013 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, 4K DCP)

It's kind of amazing, really - you can spot the exact moment when A Good Day to Die Hard goes wrong. The first half of the movie makes a concerted effort to call back to the first, with John McClane (Bruce Willis) out of his league, confronted by his failure as a father, wandering into a mess orchestrated by folks who are, let's face it, much smarter than him. Even when he gets involved in a gigantic car chase, he seems to be kind of desperately making it up as he goes along.

And then, pretty close to the mid-point, son Jack (Jai Courtney) tells him to "do what you're good at - kill bad guys!" From that point on, McClane is in super-hero mode, tossing off cocky wisecracks rather than nervous ones, and often obviously right rather than really working to get things right. It actually makes the movie go too quickly at times - between John being too good at this and Jack being a very capable CIA guy, there's not time for the traditional Die Hard stuff where regular law enforcement is being played or a step behind, McClane just gets physically worn down, and the pieces of the real puzzle take a while coming together. They're too able to move from set-piece to set-piece.

Still, there are enough good parts that this movie won't actually sully the box set. The breakout and car chase in the first act are insanely good - I've been impressed with the stunt driving they've got in Russia ever since Junk, and while I'm sure there's a lot of CGI enhancement going on in this chase, it's insanely elaborate and dangerous-looking. There's also a nifty little scene toward the end, where John looks at Jack and says the day's been fun, that's easy to look at as macho neanderthal crap but which Willis acts well enough that it says, no, this has actually been a nightmare, but he is really happy to be with his boy anyway. There's a lot of dumb stuff in the movie's last act, but that bit makes a lot of it worthwhile.

(Still, given what everyone thinks they know about Jack in the beginning, would it have killed the producers to bring in Bonnie Bedelia for the last scene? Although, now that I think about it, it would kind of be great if Die Hard 6 were to include her in a bigger role than that sort of cameo, especially if the kids are going to be around. Let the facts of being divorced and knowing he screwed it up make John McClane squirm!)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 March - 7 March 2013

Before getting to the new releases, reminders of upcoming events you can help make happen: I'm trying to schedule a March 25th screening of Back to 1942 via Gathr; it needs a bunch of tickets sold by the 11th, so let's see what we can do! The Boston Underground Film Festival has a Kickstarter which they'll use to bring cool guests to town.

• The Oscars being over is not quite the reason why Kendall Square shuffles things around (the only nominee being cleared out is The Impossible), but they do turn over four screens this week after being content to squeeze one or two new movies in weekly. Half of that is for Stoker, the English-language debut of Park Chan-wook, acclaimed Korean director of a whole ton of great movies. I saw this last night, and it's pretty great, with Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, and Matthew Goode as a mother, daughter, and heretofore unknown uncle who get even creepier after the funeral of the father. Gorgeous to look at, but on the weird side.
  
  The other two movies are documentaries. A Place at the Table has the one-week booking, with the makers of Food Inc. attempting a detailed examination of how the United States has high rates of both childhood hunger and obesity, and what can be done to stop it. The Gatekeepers is an Oscar-nominated collection of interviews with six men who have headed Israel's domestic security agency, discussing the dark, dark gray area that job places them in and how it has changed their perception of the ongoing conflict. It also opens at the Coolidge
• The multiplexes have a fair amount of turnover, too, with perhaps the most surprising being that Die Hard 5 is down to single screens or gone entirely after a mere two weeks; how the mighty have fallen. A fair amount of those screens go to Jack the Giant Slayer, with Nicholas Hoult as the title character, who really shouldn't have traded his cow for those beans (they are keeping the traded-the-cow-for-beans thing, right?), and a fun cast including Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Eddie Marsan. Christopher McQuarrie worked on the screenplay and Bryan Singer directs, but they can be uneven. Plays 2D & 3D at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including the Imax-branded screen), and Fenway (including the RPX screen).
  
  Those theaters all have 21 & Over, a kids-getting-drunk-and-crazy-things-happening movie that takes place as one turns twenty-one. Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond also have The Last Exorcism Part II, which seems like a terrible idea, as the first one worked best when the supernatural stuff was toned down and the new one lacks both the documentary conceit and Patrick Fabian as the exorcist. But the team they've hired to put it together - writer/director Ed Gass-Donnelly (Small Town Murder Songs) and co-writer Damien Chazelle (how does the guy who made Guy & Madeline on a Park Bench wind up doing this?) - make me genuinely curious.
  
  Boston Common has another screen to fill, so they've got Phantom, which stars Ed Harris as the captain of a Soviet submarine who may be going insane. It's also got David Duchovny, William Fichtner, and Lance Henriksen, which is a pretty nice ensemble. Probably a week and done, considering that I can't recall seeing any advertising for it at all.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre, as mentioned, opens The Gatekeepers on one of its film screens, pushing Amour to the screening room. The other screening room gets Let My People Go!, in which a French Jew returns home to his zany family after an fight with his boyfriend just before Passover. Wackiness ensues. Things get serious again in "Never Forget to Lie", an autobiographical film that Marian Marzynski produced for Frontline that will have a special presentation on Sunday evening; it's a look at his and others' experiences as child survivors of the Holocaust
  
  The Midnight Movie on Friday and Saturday night is John Dies at the End, so if you missed it during its week at the Kendall, you've got a couple chances to see it on a bigger screen. Monday night's Big Screen Classics presentation is Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's black-and-white "noir comedy" featuring Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni, and John Lurie. And on Thursday night, the Swiss Consulate has a special screening of Sister in the larger video room; I believe it had a short run at the Kendall earlier this year and tells the story of a 12-year-old grifter who looks after his older sister.
• The folks at the Brattle deserve a bit of a rest after their big Kickstarter push over the past month, and the schedule does thin out a bit for March. Still, they've got Rubberneck playing Friday through Sunday, with writer/director/star Alex Karpovsky there for Friday's 8:15pm and Saturday's 7:30pm shows. Not my favorite from last year's IFFBoston, but locally made and with an interesting bit or two.
  
  Sunday afternoon, they've got a special screening of After Words, a documentary on living with aphasia, that will also include a panel discussion including the filmmakers, several of the film's subjects, and presumably some other experts. The theater will be closed Monday and Tuesday, but Park Chan-wook's complete Vengeance Trilogy will run Wednesday (starting at 4:30pm, so consider bailing on work early!). Thursday night is the annual Boston Cinema Census, a night of locally made short films of every variety.
• The Harvard Film Archive sticks to one program this weekend, Film = Activisim, the Revolutionary Underground Cinema of Masau Adachi. Adachi took his revolutionary ideals seriously, joining the Japanese Red Army and other underground groups (living as a fugitive and, later, in jail) between making art-house films, pinks, and documentaries. The series includes "Bowl" & "Closed Vagina" (7pm Friday), Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War (9pm Friday), AKA: Serial Killer (7pm Saturday), Gushing Prayer (9pm Saturday and is that thing bizarre), Galaxy (4:30p Sunday), Prisoner/Terrorist (7pm Sunday with a Skype conversation with Tadachi), and finally It May Be that Beauty has Reinforced Our Resolve on Monday, with director Philippe Grandrieux on-hand to discuss his documentary on Adachi.
• New month, new calendar for the MFA'sfilm programming, although How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire (one show each Friday, Sunday, and Wednesday) got a slight jump on the calendar. So did New South Asian Cinema, which offers a second screening of Delhi in a Day on Sunday and the 5.25-hour Gangs of Wasseypur (about a multigenerational feud) on Saturday. The next week's programs start on Wednesday, with both Palestinian romance Habibi and a re-issue of 1953's Little Fugitive playing the 6th and 7th and continuing into the next weekend.
• Ha! The main stage at the Paramount Theater is presenting an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis this weekend, so ArtsEmerson's film program is going bug-crazy: Both versions of The Fly on Friday (original at 6pm, Cronenberg at 9pm, repeating in the opposite order on the 9th); A Bug's Life at 1pm Saturday; and Guillermo Del Toro's Mimic Saturday at 9pm. They approach Kafka from the other direction, with Orson Welles's The Trial, at 1pm on Sunday. All screen from DVDs.
  
  So does Arjun & Alison (6pm Saturday), part of the same New South Asian cinema program, which features Indian and American students looking to avenge the murder of their friend at a British university. Director Sidarth Sharma will be on-hand to discus the movie afterward.
• The ICA continues to run the Oscar-nominated shorts, with the animated and live-action programs running at various times on Saturday and Sunday. A museum ticket will also include a screening of "Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of My Mother" on Saturday (1pm) and Sunday (12:30pm & 1:30pm). Saturday's screening will be followed by a discussion with director Mickalene Thomas, whose art (including some featuring mother Sandra Bush) is currently on display at the ICA.
• The Regent Theatre has a "Film Premiere Event" of The Bitter Buddha on Tuesday the 5th; it's a documentary on comedian Eddie Pepitone who will also be on-hand with director Steven Feinartz and local comic Jimmy Tingle, who opens the movie with stand-up and will host the post-film Q&A.
• Folks, the main character of I, Me Aur Main - the English-subtitled Bollywood film iMovieCafe has at Fresh Pond this week - is a musical producer, so be prepared for lots of singing and dancing as the egotistical main character learns to be a better man, especially where women are concerned. It splits a screen (mostly) with Kai Po Che, so I guess the cricket-academy movie did well enough to get a second week.
• The Arlington Capitol seems to be down a screen, but they've still got room to pick up Django Unchained now that the Kendall's let it go. If it were at Somerville, I'd feel confident in predicting 35mm, but the theater's website doesn't say.

My plans? Yeah, I want to see Jack, plus Gatekeepers and Phantom, and I've got morbid curiosity where The Last Exorcism Part II is concerned. Still haven't seen Side Effects, either, and should probably correct that.