Schlock Around the Clock: Carnival of Souls, Spider Baby, Phantasm 2, Dr. Who and the Daleks, and Dredd

I'm sure that the Orson Welles Theater in Cambridge wasn't the only independent theater that had B-movie marathons under the name of "Schlock Around the Clock", but there are apparently still some fond memories of that even though the place burned down decades ago. The Brattle revived the tradition last year in something close to its original form - more an overnight than a 24-hour marathon, and I'm guessing folks liked the idea more than the execution, since it mutated into a weekend film series for 2013.

That's cool with me; I think I realized a few months ago that the definition of middle-age is still wanting to see the midnight movie but really wishing it started at 8:30pm or so. This was a pretty easy set of movies to catch, even around baseball returning and other things I wanted to see. I didn't catch all of it - I'd seen the Sunday matinees at sci-fi marathons in the past and hadn't particularly liked them, so decided to watch some baseball after Renoir, and opted for the new Evil Dead instead of the one-off showing of Drafthouse Films's "Trailer War" compilation on Saturday. I wanted to see Evil Dead with a crowd and, besides, two hours of trailers is a lot and I think it was the only digital thing on the schedule.

The big chunks of 35mm on the schedule, at least, was awesome. Carnival of Souls and Spider Baby were both new restorations from the UCLA archive and looked gorgeous. According to Brattle creative director Ned Hinkle's introduction, director Jack Hill was apparently tickled to hear that someone was showing the movie and emailed to thank the theater, which is pretty cool. The Phantasm II print was also a lot better than they were expecting - if it's the one used for the new Blu-ray, that's going to look pretty sweet.

The Dr. Who print wasn't the greatest, but it was a good-looking original IB Technicolor print, complete with British Board of Film Censors approval on the front, that the Brattle now owns themselves. That means they'll certainly be pulling it out for a 50th-Anniversery-of-Doctor Who event this fall, and the sci-fi festival will probably try to get their hands on it soon enough (wait until 2015, guys; too soon otherwise). Fun to see after spotting this while I was on vacation in London last year. I forget whether that one or the Dredd print was the one where whoever had projected it last forgot to label the reels, so they had to guess the order between the first and last. Got it right, at least.

In short, it was a pretty enjoyable weekend, even if it was a lot of nuts coming right after BUFF.

Carnival of Souls

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Schlock Around the Clock, 35mm)

A lot of time when writing about horror movies, I lament that there's not necessarily any underlying logic to their mythologies, even in strictly metaphorical terms - it's just scenes that are creepy stitched together in a way to keep the audience off-balance. That is 1962's Carnival of Souls in a nutshell - a bunch of random spooky scenes that somehow become a movie out of director Herk Harvey's sheer force of will.

It starts with some boys-versus-girls drag racing which ends with the ladies' car being forced of a bridge into a river. One of its occupants, Mary Henry (Candace Hillgoss), makes it back to land. Six months later, with no memory of the incident, she's taken a job as a church organist off in Utah. It's strictly a job to her, to the consternation of the minister (Art Ellison). She initially rebuffs the maternal nosiness of her landlady (Frances Feist) and the more intimate interest of her neighbor (Sidney Berger). She's drawn to the shuttered fairgrounds just outside the city, and soon starts to see visions of the dead even as people seem to act as if she's not there.

Herk Harvey and writer John Clifford make some choices with Carnival of Souls that seem quite peculiar to the audience that has seen a lot of movies - especially genre films - and knows what makes them tick, either instinctively or analytically. Right away, we see the boys who ran the car in which Mary was a passenger off the road lying to the cops about how the incident went down, which seems to set up a revenge scenario - but, no, Mary just leaves town and neither she nor the film looks back. Maybe this connection she has with the dead will help solve the mystery of this haunted place? No, not so much. For better or for worse, these threads only the slimmest of connections.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Spider Baby

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Schlock Around the Clock, 35mm)

Spider Baby is subtitled "or, the Maddest Story Ever Told", and while that probably wasn't necessarily the case even when it was filmed or released (three and a half years later)... It is a weird one, no question, still able to raise some eyebrows forty or fifty years later with its particular madness that leaps between daffy and downright disgusting.

Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.) has been taking care of the residents of Merrye House for generations now, a kindly caretaker of a family whose particular condition has them start a horrible mental regression as they enter their teens. Not knowing this, distant cousins Peter (Quinn Redeker) and Emily Howe (Carol Ohmart) come to collect the building as an inheritance only to discover that there are still Merryes there - spider-obsessed Virginia (Jill Banner), slightly more responsible Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), and hulking brother Ralph (Sid Haig). Staying overnight may not be the best idea.

For all the nasty things that go on in Spider Baby, it's actually disarmingly sweet much of the time. Lon Chaney Jr., who spent much of his career portraying hulking, intimidating monsters, plays Bruno more as a fussy, loving caregiver than anything else, patient with his charges even if he is exasperated, awkwardly trying to shield them and their cousins from each other. Polite but vaguely threatening would be the usual way to play it, but having Chaney of all people play uncomfortable but kind of funny is doubly odd.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Phantasm II

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Schlock Around the Clock, 35mm)

In general, it's probably not a great idea to settle in for a sequel without having seen the predecessor, especially when dealing with a filmmaker with as peculiar a vision as Don Coscarelli. But, hey, the Brattle didn't book the original Phantasm before this twenty-fifth anniversary screening of Phantasm II, did they? So, sure, maybe this thing makes sense with a bit of context, but I'm guessing it's still downright weird.

There is a helpful recap, showing how nine years ago, only two people survived when The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) - an extradimensional alien disguised as an undertaker - came to their town. Now Mike (James Le Gros), who was just a kid at the time, is being released from an asylum to hook up with Reggie (Reggie Bannister) to follow the Tall Man's trail. He's got a psychic connection to a girl in Oregon, Liz (Paula Irvine), where the Tall Man seems to be setting up shop Add one hitchhiker by the name of Alchemy (Samantha Phillips) and a bunch of flying balls armed with knives and lasers, and you've got yourself a fight.

Give Don Coscarelli credit - he does not stint on the strange. Casting Angus Scrimm as a murderous undertaker is something anybody might do, and taking the next step to reanimating corpses isn't that far out. Coscarelli, on the other hand, adds premonitions, portals, and more to the hovering Sentinel Spheres and shrunken dwarf minions inherited from the first movie. As Mike and Reggie follow the Tall Man's trail, it leads through a series of destroyed towns, giving an apocalyptic feel that horror sequels with their boosted power levels and accumulating mythology should have more often, but seldom do.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Dr. Who and the Daleks

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Schlock Around the Clock, 35mm)

Alternate realities are a staple of science fiction, and this movie (along with its sequel) are an interesting example of the idea - not so much because its characters explore parallel universes, but because they're a strangely skewed version of a sci-fi favorite themselves. The first movie based upon the TV series Doctor Who changes almost every detail in ways that the fans will likely have trouble looking past, but is kind of fun if they do.

Here, Dr. Who (Peter Cushing) is an elderly, eccentric inventor who has built a machine that can transport people anywhere in space and time with the help of his granddaughters Barbara (Jennie Linden) and Susan (Roberta Tovey), a child genius. Not quite so bright is Ian (Roy Castle), Barbara's new boyfriend, who accidentally activates it, sending them to another planet. They opt to explore a little bit, finding a strange city populated by the Daleks - warlike creatures who travel within personal armored vehicles to protect against radiation.

I know, fans, believe me, I know - that's not the way the characters were portrayed in the series at all! But put fifty years of surprisingly consistent continuity out of your head, and it's not really a bad set-up: The precocious/curious kid with an indulgent, kind of doddering grandfather who nevertheless makes the suitor for his quite capable adult grandchild nervous and accident prone dynamic is arguably a more cohesive, entertaining unit than that presented on the show in its early years.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Dredd

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Schlock Around the Clock, 35mm)

I don't really need to restate what I said when I saw it last fall, other than to point out that I'm going to be asking people to produce their ticket stubs for this when they complain about Hollywood putting out brainless, boring action pap for the next couple of years (stubs for The Raid will also be accepted). It's good stuff that did everything right but which nobody went to see.

And it's still pretty good. The action was just as hard-core as I remembered, and everything still looks good in 2D 35mm, even if some of the effects were better in 3D. It's a crying shame that we almost certainly won't get a sequel on film (movie-continuity stories apparentlly are planned for the pages of Judge Dredd Megazine), because I kind of wanted to see what these guys would do with the Dark Judges and other more broadly sci-fi concepts.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Talk Cinema: Lore, Renoir, and Still Mine

I didn't actually see Lore at a Talk Cinema showing - that was the plan, but then it got delayed a week due to that old-fashioned February blizzard, bumping it to the week of the sci-fi marathon. That means that there are two movies on the ten-movie season pass I didn't get to see (I forget exactly which one played while I was in London), and I'm not sure that I'll spring for it again next year. It's nice to see movies early, sure, and sometimes you get good discussion, but it's also $15+ for a 10am Sunday morning show of things that generally show up later.

And the discussion can be iffy at times, too. It starts with the comment cards - a half-hour to get one's thoughts together after the movie isn't really enough time, so you hear a lot of puffed-up superlatives when they're read the next week. Plus, folks can get stuck on the path where the host guides them.

For Renoir, we had a fellow who produces new plays most of the time, and he went on and on about how "brave" it was for the movie to consist of lengthy, static shots for most of the time. And, certainly, I agree that it was an unusual choice, but given the older art-house audience that this was likely targeting even in its native France, it wasn't really going out on any sort of limb. But we got into an anti-Hollywood mode, and talking about how good it was for a movie to be slow sort of prevented much discussion of why this particular movie benefited from that sort of pace.

Similarly, Peter Keogh - amid a few jokes about the late, lamented Boston Phoenix - made a comment about Still Mine having a disturbing subtext about being anti-government-regulation, dropping the phrase "Tea Party" (triggered, in part, from his having first seen the film during election season last fall), and the room full of good Massachusetts liberals wasn't going to let that go. I think it's a misguided observation, considering that the movie (a) certainly has no problem with Canada's universal health care, and (b) has a line from Campbell Scott's character that explains the issue perfectly - that these rules are about standards, and when enforcement loses sight of that, it's an invitation to absurd situations like the one depicted here. The funny thing is, I think this is something liberals and conservatives should be able to agree on, as the effect of these onerous rules is to push business toward the corporations that can absorb their expense.

We talked about that so much that we really didn't get much of a chance to discuss the James Cromwell character's father, who clearly casts a tall shadow and is linked to the main characters by the baseball the group found kind of problematic. Ah well, at least I was able to sort that out for the review.

One other thing I noticed about Renoir and Still Mine: They appeared to have some cheap opening credits. Admittedly, I have tended to think that pretty much all opening titles look like they were rendered on an Amiga 500 ever since digital projection at 2K started becoming the norm (and honestly, before that, when a great deal of post-production started going digital), and I was sitting in the front row for movies projected from what appears to be a Blu-ray. But these looked like placeholders until something more elaborate could be created.

Lore

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2013 in Landmark Kendal Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

Set Lore in almost any other time and place, and it's an impressive adventure story of a certain type, with fine young actors playing kids who must make an impossible-seeming journey against incredible odds. But it's not set in some generic time period; it's set in the aftermath of World War II, with filmmaker Cate Shortland determined that we not give its title character our sympathy too readily.

See, Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is about fifteen, and her parents (Ursina Lardi & Hans-Jochen Wagner) were active in the Nazi party - she a scientist, he a member of the SS. Soon, she is the one left in charge of her siblings: Liesel (Nele Trebs), a few years younger; Günther (André Frid) & Jürgen (Mika Seidel), twins in the mid-single-digits; and newborn Peter. Their grandmother awaits in Hamburg, but the country's infrastructure would be a mess even if the Allies weren't busy dividing it up. Thomas (Kai-Peter Malina), a young man they encounter along the way, may be able to help, but can the family trust anyone now?

The obvious thing to provide a twist here happens - Thomas does, in fact, have a Star of David stamped on his papers - but it doesn't necessarily happen in the obvious way. Thomas is neither overtly angry and Lore and her family nor some ideally kind-hearted person despite all that has happened to him. Lore learns this through glimpses, and the audience does with her, but doesn't necessarily react immediately, giving everyone involved time to mull things over, and maybe think pragmatically about what they need from each other. Shortland plays things a little ambiguous at times, especially with Thomas's age and what that would make Lore to him between being potential love interest, kid sister, or just a kid. Malina does a nice job of portraying him as both mysterious and complex.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Renoir

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, Blu-ray)

I'm certain that I must, at some point, learned that famed Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and noted filmmaker Jean Renoir were father and son. Somehow the information failed to stick, so re-learning that bit of information was kind of neat. That's not all the movie has to offer, happily; it's a modest but interesting look at the Renoir family from someone who straddled its boundary.

That would be Andrée "Dedée" Heuschling (Christa Theret), who arrives at the family's Riviera estate in 1916 saying that the artist's wife has suggested she model. Auguste's youngest son, Coco (Thomas Doret) says his mother is dead, but brings her to the main house anyway. She'll do, says the artist (Michel Bouquet), bidding her to come bak daily. Soon the household will grow by a member, as son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) returns home from the war, a handsome fellow not sure what he will do after.

One can tell straight off that this is a movie about a painter; the leaves on the trees form a colorful backdrop and one of my first thoughts upon seeing both Dedée and Coco was that they had the sort of reddish-orange hair that one sees on the canvas more than in life. Director Gilles Bourdos, cinematographer Mark Ping Bing Lee and the rest of the crew responsible for the look of the film reference a number of paintings by Renoir and others, and even when they're not doing so, they're making a film that is quite a pleasure to look at. If you feel that a film about an artist should represent their art, Renoir certainly has that covered.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Still Mine (aka Still)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, digital)

It's funny what gets to a person during this type of movie. I was doing okay through most of Still Mine (which played festivals as "Still", and may have kept that name in some places), and then I see that this elderly couple has a door frame where they recorded the growth of their kids and grandkids like my own grandparents did, and then I start to lose it. I suspect that there's a thing like that in this movie for everyone, which will make it even more effective beyond just being a fine movie on its own.

Craig Morrison (James Cromwell) is one of those wiry old farmers who may have slowed down some, but still tends to his strawberries, chickens, and the like in his mid-eighties. Though he hasn't changed much over the years, the world around him has - not just because the local market will no longer purchase his berries because of policy, but because his wife of sixty years, Irene (Geneviève Bujold) is in the early stages of dementia. He wants to build a smaller house to meet their needs, but if he thought selling strawberries involved onerous regulations, he can barely imagine modern building codes.

Still Mine is about memory and continuity, most obviously in how Irene is slipping away despite Craig's attempts to remain the independent, capable person he is. Writer/director Michael McGowan also populates the movie with more tangible symbols of these ideas, though, from that briefly-glimpsed door frame to a kitchen table that has, in its own way, recorded the Morrison family's entire life. The film starts and ends with the story of a baseball Craig owns, signed by both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and while its purpose in the story can sometimes be unclear, it's also a solid representation of Craig's memories of his father, a figure who may be long dead but who clearly still looms large in his life. These connections may seem temporary and massless, as Irene's deterioration suggests, but that's only one side of it - lives well-lived, we see, leave impressions.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 19 April - 25 April 2013

Do you like film festivals? Of course you do, they're awesome! Boston's best starts on Wednesday, and there's plenty of other good stuff around it.

• The Tenth Annual Independent Film Festival Boston starts on Wednesday, with The Spectacular Now kicking things off at the Somerville Theatre for opening night. The festival takes over all five screens on Thursday, with another teen-focused movie, The Way, Way Back playing on the big screen. One of the other movies playing, Before You Know It (about how the gay community deals with aging), also has a free screening Thursday afternoon as part of the UMass Boston Film Series.
• Before that festival starts, The Boston International Film Festival wraps up at Boston Common. Among the things of interest are locally-produced This Killing Business at 10pm Friday, Queen City with Vivica A. Fox and a number of musical guests at 10:10pm Saturday, and closing night picture Mission Park at 6pm Sunday.
• Surprisingly, Boston Common only opens one movie this week, Oblivion featuring Tom Cruise as one of the last people left on Earth after an evacuation. It also features Morgan Freeman and comes from writer/director Joseph Kosinski, who hopefully has better material here than with Tron: Legacy. It also plays at the Arlington Capitol, Fenway, Fresh Pond, and Jordan's Furniture. The Imax-branded screens on the Common and at the furniture store will be playing a special reformatted version for those screens' 1.40:1 aspect ratio.
  
  Unusually, it's the Regal 'plex at Fenway that has a couple smaller openings this week. In addition to picking up The Place Beyond the Pines, they've also gotThe Lords of Salem, the new Rob Zombie horror movie about a DJ in modern-day Salem who may have been warned about some group seeking revenge for old crimes. They've also got a one-week booking of Girl Rising, a documentary about nine girls around the world facing big challenges. It's been playing Gathr screenings for the past few months, apparently doing well enough to get Regal's attention and a one-week booking across the chain. Narrators include Anne Hathaway, Chloe Moretz, Meryl Streep, and Kerry Washington.
• Kendall Square also has a one-week booking, A Fierce Green Fire. It's also a documentary with multiple narrators (including Streep) about the history of environmental activism. It's playing inconvenient times around other shows, so don't wait on it, folks who cheered the preview before The Company You Keep last weekend!
  
  Also opening there is Blancanieves, which all but swept the Goyas, Spain's equivalent of the Oscars. It's certainly interesting - it's a retelling of Snow White as a black & white silent film with the characters recast as matadors - but I don't know that it's that great. Haven't seen much like it, though.
• Two days left of Upstream Color at the Brattle, and it's well worth checking out. After that, there's a series of one-night events before they join the IFFBoston party next weekend: Three Buster Keaton Shorts with accompaniment by the Not So Silent Orchestra on Sunday; a DocYard event on Monday, "An Evening of Localore", with PBS NewsHour's Hari Sreenivasan and WGBH President Jon Abott there to discuss this public-media initiative; Balagan's "Vicious Circle" on Tuesday, featuring cyclical structure including a Thomas Dexter "16mm proection performance"; a Matt Damon double feature on Wednesday with True Grit & Ocean's 13; and, finally, "Found vs. Found" on Thursday. Brooklyn Brewery sponsors this showdown between the Found Footage Festival and FOUND magazine. "Music, comedy, and blood" are promised.
• If you miss Upstream Color at the Brattle, the Coolidge Corner Theatre will have it in the GoldScreen all week. The screening room, meanwhile, opens Room 237, a documentary which focuses on the various theories, insane and otherwise, that fans have about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. It's got midnight screenings on Friday and Saturday night as well as the usual.
  
  Another new release is midnight-only - Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral, in which he attempts to channel the old-school version of his father with modern body horror, including fans collecting celebrity diseases. It plays screen #2 on Friday night but the screening room on Saturday night, because it's time for the monthly screening of The Room. They've also got a 35mm print of Ken Russell's trippy, creepy Altered States on both nights.
  
  Sunday morning's Talk Cinema screening is Still Mine, with James Cromwell and Genevieve Bujold as an elderly Canadian couple, trying to build a house as wife Bujold begins to fade mentally. On Monday, they've got a Science On Screen presentation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, with BU Biomedical Engineering professor Frank Guenther talking about developing ways for people like Jean-Dominique Bauby to communicate.
• Two series come to an end at the MFA - The National Center for Jewish Film’s Jewishfilm.2013, with two screenings each on Friday and Saturday, and The Boston International Children's Film Festival, running through Sunday. I can personally vouch for A Letter to Momo, a nifty, Ghibliesque story of a girl moving to a small island town after her father dies; they also have Zafara, which I missed at Fantasia but had hoped to see.
  
  Some of the slack is picked up with Samurai Cinema, which ties in with their exhibit of Samurai armor; it actually started on the 18th and includes shows Friday, Saturday, and Wednesday, including The Hidden Fortress, Kuroneko, Onibaba, Sword of Doom and the original Harakiri. Good stuff, and the series will continue through May. Also, if the exhibit is the same one I saw in Montreal last summer, it is pretty darn awesome.
• the Harvard Film Archive also starts a new series that will continue into May with L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, featuring programs by African-American filmmakers who studied at UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s and produced this work about a decade later. Director Bill Woodbury will be on hand to introduce his film Bless Their Little Hearts (and short "The Pocketbook") on Friday at 7pm, with curator Allyson Nadia Field introducing Bush Mama on Saturday at 7pm. Also presented this week are Passing Through (9:15pm Saturday), a package including featurette "A Different Image" at 7pm Sunday, and My Brother's Wedding at the same time Monday.
  
  There's also a free double feature of two Taiwanese documentaries, A Year in the Clouds and Go Grandriders! on Saturday afternoon. Last week's Proust series concludes on Sunday afternoon with Swann in Love at 4:30pm.
• Dr. Kenneth Anger will be appearing at ArtsEmerson this weekend, appearing between screenings to discus his work. That includes two films from his Magick Lantern Cycle (Lucifer Rising at 6pm Friday and Scorpion Rising at 9pm, with the times flipped on Saturday), along with new work not on DVD.
  
  There will also be a guest Saturday afternoon, with Lawrence Millman introducing The Wedding of Palo, which plays as part of an early-documentaries-of-the-Arctic double feature with Nanook of the North. Another early documentary, Man with a Movie Camera, plays Sunday afternoon. Tuesday night's Bright Lights screening is We're Not Broke, with executive producer Charles Davidson taking questions on this docuemtnary about the current economic crisis.
• The ICA has a single screening on Sunday afternoon of "The International Cinema Exposition 2013"
• iMovieCafe has NH4 in both Telugu and Tamil languages at Fresh Pond, along with Gouravam in Telugu only. Just Telugu for Friday and Saturday late shows of Baadshah, too.
• In addition to Oblivion, the Arlington Capitol picks 42 up a week into its release and also gets The Gatekeepers after it finishes its runs at Kendall Square and Coolidge Corner

My plans? Still haven't seen Trance, 42, and The Place Beyond the Pines, so I'd better get on that before IFFBoston. I'll almost almost certainly hit up Oblivion and Antiviral, and strongly consider seeing if I can fit Side Effects in around the ballgame on Saturday.

Recent genre stuff: Thale and The Host

Not really planning on having a theme to this one aside from "stuff I wanted to knock off before doing a big catch-up post", but it doesn't quite work out that way. Both wound up being genre films missing fairly important chunks of their story.

It's an odd coincidence, seeing these two in close proximity (albeit with a bunch of Brattle Schlock Around the Clock entries and Evil Dead in between). It's also kind of surprising to see how much better relative newcomer Aleksander Nordaas does than Andrew Niccol at both getting a story out of a setting and portraying a creature that looks human but is, underneath her appearance, quite alien.

To be completely honest, I don't think there's a lot of real plot to Thaleat any point; it's an hour of building a mythology and fifteen minutes of having the other part of it show up. But it's got Silje Reinammo being gorgeous and tapping into something about how, while Thale is not quite human, she is not exactly huldra either. There's tragedy to this movie.

Whereas with The Host... Ugh, that friggin' movie. There's never that sense of being not-quite-human with Wanda - heck, even calling her "Wanda" is a sign that the storytellers don't know what they're doing. "Wanderer" sounds strange and culturally-different and mysterious, which is exactly what you want your alien who has lived in all sorts of different biologies and had hundreds of years of experiences. Or at least, I think she has; Wanda says she's a thousand years old but the implication is that the Souls don't have faster-than-light travel, so maybe a large chunk of that lifespan has been spent between stars in a sort of stasis, and she's actually still fairly young. Or maybe what Souls have for a brain is mostly memory storage, and they do most of their thinking with the human brain they attach to.

That would be an interesting bit of science fiction. So, of course, it's ignored in favor of mooning over boys and cutting Wanda off the moment she starts to describe anything beyond Earth. It's not even like following up on this would take time away from important things happening, because of all the slow and stupid. Ugh, this friggin' movie. Plus...

SPOILERS!

Is it just me, or does the Emily Browning character whom Wanda winds up inhabiting at the end come across as creepily young? Which leads me to ask, is this a thing Stephenie Meyer does regularly - set up a pairing between the odd guy out in the love triangle and someone who is just Way Too Young? I seem to remember it being a point of contention where the last Twilight book/movie is concerned.

!SRELIOPS

Not that I really know anything about Twilight beyond what I've been able to absorb from the air - the previews for the movies looked laughable and I've got a whole big pile of books that look interesting to geth through first. Still, when I saw that Niccol and Saoirse Ronan were attached to The Host, my first thought was that this was going to be a sort of battle over what the film would eventually be - Niccol on the side of good, Meyer on the side of bad. Now, I'm less confident of Niccol meaning "good" - Gattaca and The Truman Show were a long time ago, and what he's made since those films hasn't been nearly so impressive - but I don't think he makes something this terrible on his own. So it looks like Meyer won this battle.

I just hope Niccol can bounce back; he really needs to. And I hope that Nordaas can get something higher-profile, because he's got some potential.

Thale

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (special presentation, Blu-ray)

"I think it would make a good short" is kind of a nasty thing to say about a feature film, a compliment so backhanded that the implied praise for how skillfully many things are done can seem completely obliterated by the implication that the filmmaker thought too highly of his minor idea. I admit, it was my first reaction to Thale. My second reaction, though, is that maybe writer/director Aleksander Nordaas should have reached a little higher.

Elvis (Erlend Nervold) is filling in for a friend with a cleaning service that specializes in taking care of human remains, and it's proving to be pretty rough on his stomach. He and his supervisor Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) are called to a remote house in the Norwegian woods where the resident seems to have met a particularly grisly fate. Inside, Elvis stumbles on a secret passage that leads to a secret basement with canned food, notebooks, a tape recorder, and a beautiful, silent girl (Silje Reinammo).

Nordaas has half, or even three quarters, of an impressive horror movie here: The set-up is great. The backstory he gives to the girl and the owner of the cabin is intriguing and becomes more creepy the closer the audience looks at it, with every new revelation stoking both the audience's revulsion and curiosity in roughly equal measure. He pulls the curtain back slowly, revealing just enough new information to keep the audience satisfied, recognizes a good, intense situation when he sees one, and gets excellent work from the design staff and passable results from the effects guys.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

The Host (2013)

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)

The Host is fairly awful, but in some ways the basic fact of its awfulness isn't the worst part. I hate that it and In Time back to back make me wonder if Gattaca was something of a fluke on screenwriter/director Andrew Niccol's part. I hate that it wastes the time of some talented people, including star Saoirse Ronan. I hate that this was made in part to cash in on the success of the Twilight franchise (the source material is by the same author), but the fans of that whom I know were so indifferent to its existence that it probably didn't end up pleasing anyone. And I really hate that there are moments when the story has the potential to go in interesting directions but instead runs in the blandest possible direction.

Sometime in the future, Earth has been colonized by an alien race that calls themselves "The Souls", parasitic invertebrates that take up residence in the human brain and continue on in an idealized imitation of human life. There are some free humans remaining; one, Melanie (Ronan) is captured near the start and has a Soul implanted. Melanie, however, has an incredibly strong force of will, and has soon convinced the "Wanderer" in her body to flee and seek out her little brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury), boyfriend Jared (Max Irons), and uncle Jeb (William Hurt) - with a Soul Seeker (Diane Kruger) in dogged pursuit.

Put aside all of the lack of ambition in this movie, just looking at it as a basic sci-fi B-movie, and it's still hard to overstate just how boring and flat-out stupid it can be. There's a long period in the middle where Jeb and his group have captured "Wanderer" (later called "Wanda") and locked her up but never, as far as I can tell, ask her any questions. The audience is told the same information several times, and when Wanda & Melanie argue, it's often cringe-worthily trite dialogue. A fairly important change comes out of nowhere, only to be quickly reversed and half-heartedly explained afterward. Melanie changes her mind on whether or not Wanda should tell her family that she's still around inside her head several times for reasons that either make no sense or contradict the idea that Melanie's consciousness survived out of force of will pretty strongly. It's a barrage of things that make no sense that don't even have the virtue of being exciting enough to distract from their stupidity.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

The Company You Keep

I don't have a whole lot to say about this movie beyond what's in the review; The Company You Keep is what it is - an enjoyable movie with a very impressive cast. From reading the description of the book as I created an Amazon link, it looks like director Robert Redford and screenwriter Lem Dobbs did a good job of reconfiguring it, downplaying the suspense aspects and giving room for the performances to take over, while also compacting the story, at the very least. It does make me somewhat curious to hear what a fan of the original novel thinks of it.

Anyway, I'll just let this post be the "yes, I live in Boston but am okay" post after today's events. It's naturally had me distracted all afternoon, to say the least - although I was off at work in Burlington this year, I've gone to the Patriot's Day Red Sox game in previous years, once or twice even winding up in Copley Square around the time the bombs went off. This isn't about "it could have happened to me", though - I'd like to think that despite not always showing it, I'm empathetic enough to be disgusted without it. It's more a case of wanting to know why someone bombs the Boston Marathon. It's an event that people from all nations, ethnicities, faiths, and social strata take part in. Many use it as a way to raise money for charity. What evil thing can it possibly represent?

At least I don't feel dirty posting this tonight, just because this is the thing I was writing on the bus this morning and writing movie reviews keeps me sane better than watching news coverage that goes wall to wall without a lot of information I can use dribbling out; this movie doesn't have much sympathy for the terrorists who used violence in the past, even if there is a bit of a redemption arc at play.

On a lighthearted note: In one of the first scenes of the movie, Susan Sarandon's character stops at an Esso station, making me wonder if she was hiding out in Canada all this time. No, she was apparently making her way from Vermont to New York. Kind of struck me as weird, seeing as movies usually make a little more effort to disguise obvious differences between where they shot and where they're set, and that would have been an Exxon station on this side of the border.

The Company You Keep

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run, 2K DCP)

The Company You Keep can play a bit like a brute-force attack at times - sure, it's kind of slow at times and eventually the audience winds up a couple steps ahead of the protagonist, but every ten or fifteen minutes, Robert Redford will throw another great actor from his generation at the audience, perfectly cast and with at least one scene that makes them warmly received. You can only take so much of this before wearing down and enjoying the movie quite a bit.

Decades ago, a bank guard was killed in a robbery carried out by Weather Underground members, and three of the four perpetrators got away. One, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), has just been captured on the way to turn herself in, and while she won't give any of the others up, both the FBI and young journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) find a trail that leads to Jim Grant (Redford), a public-affairs attorney in upstate New York. As they get closer to sniffing out his secret, he starts looking for Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), the member of this group of "Weathermen" that never settled down.

Grant's and Shepard's quests will take them halfway across the country, and while it may occasionally seem like it could be done in fewer steps, would you eliminate the ones where Richard Jenkins or Nick Nolte show up, so that their characters can reminisce with Redford's, debating about what they did back in the day and how it figures in their lives now before pointing him to the next stop? No, those scenes are gold. Maybe you could do without Shia LaBeouf's reporter, make this a more conventional thriller with Terrence Howard's FBI agent the main pursuer. But then you don't get the jailhouse interview where Sarandon's and LaBeouf's characters face off with their generations' different forms of principle - or at least, you'd have something very different with either Howard or Anna Kendrick (playing a junior agent) on the other side of the table.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Koch

Went with this one at the last minute as sort of a third or fourth choice - I was intending to see the 6pm 42 at Boston Common, got there only to find out MoviePass's list of times didn't include that one. So, okay, turn around to go back to Boston Common for The Company You Keep, only the Red Line was apparently a mess along its entire length even if only Porter to Alewife was off-line for the weekend. By the time I got there, it was too late, and approaching too late for From Up On Poppy Hill. But, I remembered that there was a director Q&A attached to this and grabbed a ticket just in time.


Filmmaker Neil Barksy doing Q&A.

Not a bad Q&A, in that it had a filmmaker who was happy to answer questions about making the film and his subject. As sometimes happens with documentaries that are kind of high-level examinations of a subject, there will often be questions about something relatively specific, and when the filmmaker answers them, it's not hard to ask why that bit wasn't in the final film. Barksy had a great line about how Ed Koch has written fifteen books - eight of them autobiographies - that sort of has to make it in there.

Barksy also was able to talk at a bit of length on what he felt about Koch's personality and motivations were, sometimes seeming to hash it out while talking - for instance, he thinks Koch was gay, probably couldn't have been elected mayor in 1977 if he were out, but might have found a good reception if he came out later, perhaps during the AIDS crisis. I wonder, though - considering that a scandal throughout his office but seemingly not actually involving him made re-election impossible, he might have felt his reputation couldn't stand having that lie confirmed, no matter how sympathetic i might have made him.

He also said that Koch was in many ways a dream subject, in that he quite enjoyed being on camera, had entertaining things to say, and didn't expect to exercise much influence over the film in exchange for extensive access, which isn't always a given. Koch just wanted to see the final cut before it started playing. He apparently did get impatient about it eventually - like many independent docs, it spent a lot of time in post-production, and Koch was in his mid-eighties. It's kind of a shame that he didn't get to review the movie as he wanted to - Koch was a big movie-lover and did reviews for alt-weeklies and online on a regular basis.

Knowing that, I did feel a bit of an extra bit of sadness watching the scenes of Koch alone in his apartment toward the end; I don't really feel like I'm on the path to marrying and/or starting a family, and watching him just drop newspapers on the floor of his apartment when he's done reading because who the heck else cares seemed uncomfortably familiar (as did other things). Parts emphasized how alone he was - although I don't know if that necessarily translated to "lonely" - and that's a thing that can cause nightmares.

Then again, I've still got a few years to go before I get to the age he was in 1977, when he started his twelve year run of doing the thing he seemed to want and love the most. If I can get a dozen years of that sort of satisfaction under my belt, I may yet like the quarter-century after that yet.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, Koch is playing at Kendall Square now, although as part of a one-week booking and splitting a screen, so if it sounds like your thing, I suggest not delaying.

Koch

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)

The lettering used for the main titles of Koch is the same as that used at a New York City subway station. That's fitting; the subway is how New Yorkers (or those who visit) most frequently interact with the great machine that keeps the city running, and it the mayor is that machine's operator, it's hard to imagine anyone with a closer association with the role - in both directions - than Ed Koch.

Aside from a couple of quick present-day clips, the film starts with him running for mayor in 1977 and has little to say about his life before then. Similarly, his activities since losing the 1989 election are almost all viewed through the lens of him being mayor emeritus, a man whose influence and importance is tied to those twelve years. It's almost as if he arrived at that first election fully formed and hung on as the ghost of his true self afterward, to hear director Neil Barsky tell it.

And while those are certainly some of the most productive and eventful years of Koch's life, they are just twelve out of eighty-plus. And for all the time Barsky spends on those years, the film can occasionally come across as a list of events - not even necessarily accomplishments. There are a few moments during the section focused on the '77 campaign that paint him as shrewd, but relatively little that shows what sort of master politician he must have been in order to be both effective at making tough decisions and popular enough to get re-elected. Just what role Koch had in the scandals that eventually drove him from office is never seriously examined.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Boston Underground Film Festival Closing Day: Los Chidos, Vanishing Waves, and Big Ass Spider!

Ah, at last, the end, two weeks later!


Weird day, beyond what you might expect for an Underground Film Festival. I could have started earlier - remember how last year I said maybe I'd actually stay awake through Mondomanila if I saw it under different circumstances? Well, I could have - it played at 12:30pm - but after staying up late for Samurai Cop, that wasn't going to happen.

Also, it was apparently Easter that Sunday! As a non-religious person, I find that an easy holiday to lose track of, what with it moving around and mainly affecting me in terms of being able to find Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs cheap afterward, but it put a crimp into browsing and finding something to eat between Los Chidos (yes, I could still eat after that) and Vanishing Waves - a lot of people really take this thing seriously!

I'm actually kind of surprised it wasn't played up at the festival more; aside from the easy "perfect day for zombie movie" jokes, their mascot has always been Bacchus the Bunny, and while there was a bunny theme to most of the "no talking/texting" clips, nobody explicitly made the connection to Easter. Going soft, guys?



Last bit of Horrible Photography of the festival, with Big Ass Spider! producer Travis Stevens and director Mike Mendez. I recognized Mendez's name from The Gravedancers, which I saw at Fantasia in 2006, and I'm actually very surprised he hasn't done a movie since. That movie was good, darn it, and fun, and while I gather he's worked steadily as an editor since then, there's something wrong with the system when a guy who makes this movies this entertaining can't get work.

I guess that's why he joked about receiving a "Megaspider" script and saying "has it come to this? Yes, apparently it has..." before putting his own mark on it. And, based on Gravedancers, it seems like he did; it's very much the same style and tone. He also spoke pretty highly of Epic, the company that made the movie, saying that they want to be at least a little better than Asylum, both in how they found a little extra money to get some music rights and were working on a theatrical release rather than just going straight to VOD and/or SyFy.

He also mentioned that Grunberg and Boyar improvised a lot of their material, even before being asked. Does that count on your festival Q&A bingo card or not?

At any rate, this was a pretty darn good edition of BUFF, and I'll try to get to the short films soon. Here's hoping it's just as much fun next year!


Los Chidos

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Yes, Los Chidos goes there. Fill whatever twisted thing you want in for "there", and that statement is likely to be true, although in actuality it's not even in answer to a question - it's doing something jaw-droppingly crude and awful before the audience has asked how far writer/director Omar Rodriguez-Lopez intends to push things and will soon enough be moving on to the next. It's impressively energetic in its vulgarity.

On the outskirts of Jalisco, there's a tire shop owned by a long-married couple (Maria de Jesus Canales Ramirez & Manuel Ramos), their kids (Cecilia Guitierrez & Erasmo Rodriguez), and their niece and nephew (Alejandro Rodriguez & Monica Guzman). Well, in theory; in practice they're lazy slobs shooing business away from their run-down shack. That is, until Kim, an American who doesn't speak any Spanish (Kim Stodel), shows up and refuses to take no for an answer, not just actually coming back mañana, but sticking around with them, even as they rob, berate, and abuse him. It may have something to do with their cute neighbor Alma (Maimuna Achleitner Jimenez), who though married could probably do better, what with her husband tending to drug her and go out wearing her clothes and make-up.

So, yeah, all that happens, and that's really just the set-up for the movie; the actual events that this situation facilitates are even more weird and transgressive. It's a series of gross-outs and people treating each other terribly that will, sooner or later, hit something that causes automatic rejection because you can't joke about that for many, and that's okay. What's surprising is how well Rodriguez-Lopez manages to play with tone and pacing to keep it from happening more often: He'll hit the awful thing quickly and casually enough that it's over before the viewer has the time to work himself or herself into an offended lather. There's also a farcical feel to the whole thing, so that bits that don't really make sense still seem to work in the outsized world he's created. An ironically upbeat narrator adds to the feeling, even when his actual lines aren't that funny.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Aurora (Vanishing Waves)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

I suspect that every film director would like to make a film that takes place inside dreams at some point - it's free reign to create imaginative visuals, dig right into a character's subconscious, and make the occasional narrative leap that skips right over the boring parts. Telling a story that way is trickier than it looks, though, even before you get to the science fiction bits, though Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte and company do quite well here.

We enter the story with Lukas (Marius Jampolskis), one of several scientists working on a mind-reading project. He's the one who will be shaving his head and donning a cap of electrodes to interface with a comatose test subject - a mentally active person would produce too much noise to sift through - and when he does, he's almost immediately plunged into a quite sexual dream with Aurora (Jurga Jutaite). He keeps this secret from the project leader (Vytautas Kaniusonis), the psychologist meant to interpret his findings (Rudolfas Jansonas), and his girlfriend (Martina Jablonskyte), telling them what they want to hear lest the program be halted.

And that, folks, is why an experiment should always have more than one test subject! Well, maybe the team does and we're just not seeing the less-spectacular results they achieved, which wouldn't surprise me, as the film actually seems to do an unusually good job in presenting science to its audience. There are details like Lukas not knowing who the coma patient is initially to prevent his findings from being biased that could easily have been omitted to streamline the story but instead make it feel more solid. Buozyte and co-writer Bruno Samper also fill the team with characters who can butt heads without falling into "intuitive rule-breaker versus petty bureaucrat" traps.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Big Ass Spider!

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Well, there's certainly no denying that Big Ass Spider! delivers what it promises - that is certainly one big-ass spider menacing Los Angeles from the very start. For those that want maybe a little more to their movies, it's at least got a fairly charismatic cast and a crew that both recognizes that monster movies should be fun and is able to reach that goal.

Alex Mathis (Greg Grunberg) is in pest control, and is in fact brilliant at it, though he still winds up in the emergency room with a spider bite after a customer panics. That's fortuitous, though, because an unusually large spider has arrived there inside a corpse, and the administrators put him and janitor Jose Ramos (Lombardo Boyar) to work finding it. They're soon joined by the army in the persons of Major Braxton Tanner (Ray Wise), Lieutenant Karly Brant (Clare Kramer), and Lucas (Patrick Bauchau), a scientist who knows that this thing's not going to stop growing at "unusually large".

Well, we know that from the start, which gives us a preview of the last act with pumped-up dramatics and a cool song on the soundtrack before doing the twelve-hours-earlier thing. It more or less lays out what the audience can expect from the next hour and a half: An everyman hero, decent but not incredible special effects, and the filmmakers playing with their genre but not stooping to making fun of it. That's a crucial difference, because Big Ass Spider! is a throwback to the monster movies of the fifties and sixties, and while a fair amount of "homages" to that period come out, most recreate the surface warts and all while making fun of folks doing the best they can with limited resources as opposed to doing the best they can to create the same sort of thrills with modern-day resources.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 April - 18 April 2013

It's a holiday weekend, so the studios bring out... Oh, just in Massachusetts and Maine? And I don't get Monday off? Well, then, it's no wonder it's not a big new release weekend. Might as well start with the local independent theaters, then, especially since they've got good stuff.

• The Brattle, for instance, starts its regular run of Upstream Color on Friday. I saw it when director Shane Carruth came in the do a preview, and it's pretty keen; I highly recommend going in to see it cold.
  
  I'm guessing this is school vacation week, although the Brattle's Muppet Madness! series only continues through Patriot's Day with matinee double features Saturday (The Muppets & The Muppet Movie), Sunday (The Great Muppet Caper & The Muppets Take Manhattan), and Monday (The Dark Crystal & Labyrinth).
• I hope that when The Coolidge Corner Theatre installs their DCP projectors soon, they'll make sure to label when they're using that and when they're using film. I think they're still all-35mm, so that makes it the place to see Trance, the new one from Danny Boyle with James McAvoy as the inside man in a heist who loses his memory of where he hid a painting, Rosario Dawson as the hypnotist charged with getting it out of his head, and Vincent Cassel as the thief who will beat it out of him otherwise. It also plays Kendall Square and Boston Common, while the Coolidge's 7pm show on Tuesday is an "Off the Couch" screening, at which I suspect members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society will debunk as well as discuss.
  
  The Midnight Road Trip movie this weekend is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Terry Gilliam directing Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro in an adaptation of Hunter Thompson's roman a clef. They've also got two special screenings on Tuesday - Marian Marzynski's featurette Never Forget to Lie at 7pm and a sneak preview of the first two episodes of Sundance Channel's original series Rectify - while Wednesday has MassMouth taking over the main room for their "Story Slam Grand Finale".
• The mainstream theaters, meanwhile, tie into the opening of baseball season and the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947 with 42, with Chadwick Boseman playing Robinson and Harrison Ford growling as Branch Rickey. Nice cast beyond that and writer/director Brian Helgeland has some good scripts on his resumé. It's at Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Meanwhile, a lot of guys whose careers have seen better days star in Scary Movie 5, since it's been a couple years since the last one and there are new obvious pop-culture jokes to make. It's at Somerville, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway.
  
  Boston Common also has Disconnect (as does Kendall Square), an interconnected-story drama that appears to be playing the "there's less real connection despite all the ways we can talk electronically" angle, which seems a bit stale. On the other hand, nice ensemble and a lot of folks speak highly of director Henry Alex Rubin's documentary Murderball. They also devote a screen to The Boston International Film Festival - not to be confused wtih the Independent Film Festival of Boston, which happens a few days later - and if you can dig through their terrible website, there are some interesting movies there, but there's a lot with just the vaguest of descriptions and no trailers or stills.
• It's got to be considered a pretty busy week at Kendall Square; not only are they among the places getting Trance and Disconnect, but they've got new ones by notable filmmakers: Robert Redford directs and stars in The Company You Keep as a public interest lawyer whose past as a member of The Weather Underground resurfaces; amazing ensemble to it. Then there's To the Wonder from the suddenly-prolific Terrence Malick, with Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko as a married couple faced with temptation in the forms of Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem.
  
  It's busy enough that they've barely got room to open Koch, a biographical documentary on New York's iconic 1980s mayor who recently passed away. It's marked down as a one-week booking, and only playing twice at day (4:15 and 7pm) at that. Still, if you go on Saturday, director Neil Barkshy will be at both shows to introduce and take questions.
• The MFA has some good stuff; the biggest series is The National Center for Jewish Film’s Jewishfilm.2013 with five films playing at various times on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday (and at other times at the ICA and West Newton, plus a preview of No Place on Earth Monday at Kendall Square. The MFA also has three more screenings in the Hollywood Scriptures series - Taste of Money on Friday, A Separation on Saturday, and The Kid with the Bike on Sunday.
  
  The other event is The Boston International Children's Film Festival, which has some really terrific movies for all ages playing Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (and continuing into next weekend). It kind of kills me that these are all matinees, because I would love to see Starry Starry Night again, but I can't skip work Tuesday morning.
• Hey, the Harvard Film Archive has its program descriptions for the next couple months online! They're running two programs this weekend. Toward a Proustian Cinema ties in with a conference celebrating the work of Marcel Proust on the centennial of the publishing of Swann's Way. Two adaptations of Proust's work play this weekend - Time Regained (Friday 7pm) and La Captive (Sunday 4pm) - with a third coming up next weekend.
  
  They've also got a visit from South Korean filmmaker Lee Jang-ho, featuring three films connected by "Art Cinema as Rebellion". He will be there for three 7pm showings: The Man with Three Coffins (Saturday), Eudong (Sunday), and Good Windy Day (Monday).
• There's a pattern to ArtsEmerson's film program this weekend, but I'm not sure what it is. It includes Far From Heaven (Friday evening and Saturday night), Medicine for Melancholy (Friday night), Swimming to Cambodia (Saturday afternoon), and Zabriskie Point (Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon). The Bright Lights screenings are YERT: Your Environmental Road Trip with director Ben Evans on Tuesday and two student films with their directors on Thursday.
• iMovieCafe has a Hindi movie with English subtitles, Nautanki Saala!, starring Ayushmann Khurrana as an actor who plays matchmaker between Kunaal Roy Kapur and Pooja Salvi.

My plans? 42, Trance, From Up on Poppy HIll, and whatever other catch-up I can manage. Maybe head to the furniture store for Jurassic Park in IMAX 3D. If you're free Tuesday morning, go see Starry Starry Night. It's terrific and (mostly) kid-friendly.

Beyond the Hills

Plenty more I'd like to say about this one, but it ends in Boston (well, Cambridge) today and I need some sleep before work. I do strongly recommend it, though - it covers some fairly familiar ground with what I think is unusual grace, far mroe than I could manage when talking about its subjects (religion, sexuality, mental illness), and leaves an impressive amount for the audience to at least feel like they're figuring out themselves.

One thing I will mention is that I did look original author Tatiana Niculescu Bran up on Wikipedia, and it was interesting from the descriptions of her "non-fiction novels" to see how much Mungiu left out, but sort of didn't. It looks like the end of his movie shifts the ambiguity around a little:

SPOILERS!

In the description of the books, who is ultimately responsible for Alina's death appears to be vague, with the hospital staff taking potentially dishonest steps to absolve themselves of the blame, causing the priest and nuns to be imprisoned for murder; the film appears to place the blame much more squarely on the exorcism but leaves the ultimate fate of the clergy up in the air, the implication being that the church is too much a part of society for them to completely take the fall.

!SRELIOPS

At any rate, it's worth checking out, even if it is a bit of a long one.

Dupa dealuri (Beyond the Hills)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)

Beyond the Hills is a slow builder, with writer/director Christian Mungiu's point almost never in doubt. He knows, though, that you don't change someone's beliefs with one bold demonstration, especially if it's built on a premise that the audience doesn't necessarily believe, so he spends his time nudging, not seeming to do anything big, until finally stepping back, having attacked points that are often far from subtle obliquely but still creating something engrossing.

Things start quietly, with Alina (Christina Flutur) returning to her home village in Romania after having lived in Germany after aging out of an orphanage. She's met by her best friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), who stayed behind to enter a convent. Though Alina protected Voichita when they were children, she is the one who seems fragile now, begging her friend to return abroad with her. Voichita would like to help Alina, but she has found a home in the monastery, and the priest in charge (Valeriu Andriuta) demands her commitment to God be total.

There's a wonderful shot early on in this movie where Alina and Voichita walk away from the town toward the convent which, despite taking them up a mountain, feels like sailing away from a shoreline - the clumped-together buildings a land mass with a very definitive border. The landscape becomes important again toward the end, as mounting snow makes the environment more perilous, despite there not being talk of a storm. I wonder if this is fortuitous or deliberate - the film was shot in sequence, so the filmmakers may have just taken the weather they got and made it work - but it's impressive how Mungiu works these perhaps less-obvious characteristics of the setting more than well-worn ones. He could have had the nuns using horses or donkeys to travel to and from the town to mark their home as a place stuck in the past, for instance.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Boston Underground Film Festival Day 04: Pieta, White Reindeer, Cheap Thrills, and Samurai Cop

Time flies - not even done writing about BUFF, and I'm already starting to obsess about my IFFBoston schedule. Saturday, at least, was a pretty good day, even though it did start out on a high note and have trouble equalling that as it went on.

The high note was Pieta, one of the movies with names I recognized that had me excited for the festival, all of which more or less delivered. I'm kind of surprised in some ways that I've warmed up to Kim Ki-duk as much as I have; he's a guy who does a lot of the pretentious art-house stuff with characters who don't speak and the like. For some reason, though, I kept going to his movies - maybe because at the time, they were some of the only Korean movies that were playing local theaters; maybe because if a guy's movies show up often enough, he feels like someone you should know about. It didn't hurt that some of his movies started playing genre festivals as well as hoity-toity ones.

The "only Korean films playing" thing has something to do with it, and it's kind of funny the way it colors the way I write about it. Once the full plot really reveals itself, my brain went immediately to Park Chan-wook, and while I think that's justifiable - the guy has made his name on a trio of movies called "The Vengeance Trilogy", after all - there's a joke (half-serious) about how baseball players are generally only compared to folks within their ethnicity, to the extent that a decent all-around outfielder coming over from Japan was once described as a "cross between Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki", two complete opposites as ballplayers. Can't compare him to a player of European or African descent, though!

Could have been worse. I was this close to comparing it to Bong Joon-ho's Mother.



I've really got to remember to take notes during Q&As, if only so I don't wind up wondering just which producer the guy on the left who isn't listed in the festival program is the next day (that's producer Melodie Sisk and director Zach Clark in the center). Nice folks, Sisk also worked on See You Next Tuesday (spot her in the horrible photography!) and appears on-screen here in a mostly-silent part that I kind of felt must have seemed clever at the time but struck me as a bit of a mis-step (and likely would have been if she hadn't been stepping in for a model who got another job at the last minute).

One thing that they mentioned was that Clark, in particular, wasn't a big fan of Christmas when he started working on raising money for this movie, so having to live in that holiday more or less non-stop for the next two years was not always the greatest experience. At least they said they grew to appreciate it more by the time it was done, because otherwise - yikes. They did a nice job of avoiding clichés with it, though, limiting themselves to one "true meaning of Christmas - not the presents and decorations et cetera" bit. Someday, I'm going to write a screenplay that has characters sincerely and (hopefully) convincingly declaring why they strongly believe in the presents and decorations that tracks why I love Christmas. The monologue has been in a half-formed state in my head for years, and I'd like to have it down if only to use once or twice in real life.



Once again, missing the name of a filmmaker. I'm pretty sure the shorter guy is director E.L. Katz, one of the two folks on the left is producer Travis Stevens (after a weekend of horrible photography, I presume the readers all know Kevin Monahan by now), but the fourth person. No clue.

I mention in the review that I was kind of disappointed in this one; it seemed to get a tidal wave of positive reviews during SXSW, so great movie, right? Well, no. I think I've written before about how the internet can become a sort of echo chamber as various websites pass around the same news, especially since we'll often find ourselves focusing on those that align closely to our interests, creating a sense of unanimity that doesn't really exist. SXSW seems to amplify it, as the folks who have already gravitated toward Austin's film scene show up in force, see the movies together, talk about it, and sort of homogenize their general feeling before writing about it.

I think their strong love for the Alamo Drafthouse plays into it, too - folks trust Tim League and his business, and Drafthouse Films. What played BUFF is a pretty strong statement on how much of a force Drafthouse has become in the niche-film world - just for this day, both Cheap Thrills and Pieta had managed to be picked up for distribution by that label by the time they played BUFF (as did I Declare War and maybe another one or two).

It does still make me wonder just how influential the Austin/Drafthouse group is going to be on genre films over the next few years, and whether it's necessarily good for that one group to have so much influence that is properly reserved for east-coast cities with many storied academic institutions.

(Kidding, mostly)

Speaking of distribution, I saw that Samurai Cop was distributed by Cinema Epoch, a company operated by Blue Dream director Gregory Hatanaka. I half-wonder if having Blue Dream play the festival was a quid quo pro for having a midnight show of Samurai Cop.

Also, it's worth mentioning that I attended Samurai Cop in no small part because "Bio-Cop", the latest short film/fake trailer by Steven Kostanski and the Astron-6 gang, was playing before it. It's a parody that is arguably better than the real thing, and as much as Kostanski seems to be getting a lot of make-up work from big studio productions, folks should hire these guys just to do awesome 1980s-throwback title sequences.

Pieta

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Kim Ki-duk has a reputation - well-deserved, honestly - for movies with strange premises, minimal dialogue, and execution that's maybe a bit pretentious. It's not all he does, though; he'll occasionally serve as a writer and producer for something a little less iconoclastic. Pieta plays like he decided to direct one of those more commercial scripts himself, making for a movie that's undeniably his but also a much more mainstream Korean movie.

Much of the action takes place in an industrial area that's not doing well; things are rough enough that Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) can practically go door to door collecting and enforcing for a loan shark. A pitiless sort, Kang-do's method for collecting from those who cannot repay is to take out an insurance policy and injure them with their own equipment. Then one day Mi-seon (Jo Min-soo) shows up at his door, explaining that she's his long-lost mother and wants to make up for lost time. Perhaps this can restore some amount of his missing humanity.

If it does, it's not going to be through long, revealing conversations; this is, after all, a Kim Ki-duk movie, and that is really not his thing. Kim likes his stubborn silences, and there's plenty of those here, with Mi-seon abjectly refusing to explain the reasons for her absence and return, or what she has been doing in between. Kang-do isn't nearly so laconic as Kim's usual male lead, although he certainly does know that relatively few words are a nice way of demonstrating control and domination - watch how much more he runs his mouth when revisiting people in a panic compared to his cool initial visits. It's a well-known trick by now - keeping a character silent often makes another spill more than he or she might otherwise, and it forces the audience to examine what they see on-screen much more closely than usual.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

White Reindeer

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

It would be kind of amusing if, in the future, White Reindeer winds up dropped into the Christmas rotation of independent-minded theaters, television stations, and online-streaming-lists as an apparent poison pill. Not that there aren't already plenty of those, but this one's a bit different: It's neither gleeful in mocking the holiday nor secretly trying to convince the audience of its true meaning.

Suzanne Barrington (Anna Margaret Hollyman) loves Christmas; just as soon as Thanksgiving has passed, the realtor is trying to create that sort of homey environment. She sells one house to Patti & George (Lydia Hyslop, Joe Swanberg) , assuring them that she lives in the neighborhood and the worries about recent break-ins are overblown. But on the first of December, her own husband Jeff (Nathan Williams) is killed during a home invasion, and to make things worse, she soon learns that he had an affair with Fantasia (Laura Lemar-Goldsborough), a twenty-two year-old stripper. It's going to be a rough holiday season.

White Reindeer isn't a yelling movie, nor is it one where the poor widow spends every moment visibly brittle and on the edge of breaking down. Indeed, the angle often played here is that sometimes losing a person you love is not constant outward torture, which can make a person feel even more horrible. So, instead, there's a great deal of quiet loneliness, online binge-shopping to try and bring oneself a little happiness, and befriending her husband's mistress because she'd understand, right? Even when this sort of thing leads to weird misadventures, it's fairly low-key.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Cheap Thrills

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Given the fairly impressive cast, decent behind-the-scenes talent, and loudly proclaimed praise for Cheap Thrills coming out of its festival appearances, I expected more from the movie. What I got was an acceptable gross-out movie with a nugget or two of commentary somewhere in its body, but overall it feels kind of hollow and familiar. It's got its moments, but it's not much more than passably entertaining.

Craig (Pat Healy) is still a writer in that he has a blog he posts to regularly, but these days he works as a mechanic - at least, until he gets laid off on the day he was going to ask for a much-needed raise. Drowning his sorrows in a bar afterward, he runs into old high-school buddy Vince (Ethan Embry), who runs in some shady circles these days. They wind up sharing a very expensive bottle of tequila with Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Sara Paxton), a wealthy couple slumming it for Violet's birthday. At some point, the "$20 if you..." dares start, naturally escalating in both price and outlandishness.

That's not quite all there is to the story, but it's pretty close. The plot takes a turn when the group wind up at Colin's & Violet's house, but it winds up being less of an interesting twist than an acknowledgment that the characters will almost certainly have a certain idea, so the script therefore must detour through it before returning to the main path. Before and after that, the movie basically comes down to details, with stunts that go from tacky to gross to mean in a pretty straight line as the film goes on. Maybe, somewhere, writers Trent Haaga and David Chirchirillo have something to say about the rich exploiting the poor for their own amusement and the poor going along with it because they think they can get rich too, but that's not exactly cutting, original insight presented in a new way.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Samurai Cop

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

I'll readily admit, I don't have enough memory of this a week and a half later to give it a full review. That may argue that it's just mediocre rather than actually terrible, or just that it was pretty late and I occasionally napped.

At any rate, Samurai Cop is pretty awful, with terrible actors speaking terrible lines in a terrible story and production values that are really rather sub-par. It's the sort of all-around ineptitude that makes Robert Z'Dar, in the role of the film's villain, somehow look worse because even though he's not nearly as bad as the rest of the cast, his moderation seems out of place. Though director Amir Shervan is credited with the screenplay, that's probably because the WGA will not allow the Scriptotron Mark III to be credited.

But, hey, you've seen worse. Shervan and company know that they're making a terrible movie, so they do the only thing they can: Turn up the volume. The action isn't exactly great, but it's bloody as hell. There's plenty of nudity and sex as well, and the filmmakers are equal opportunity where the pandering is concerned, letting buff star Matt Hannon play a chunk of the movie in little but a tight speedo and somewhat awe-inspiring mullet. I kind of love Dale Cummings as the screaming captain, especially when he just goes "screw it, kill all the yakuza you can!" toward the end. Mark Frazer is the kind of trying-too-hard-to-be-cool that is hilarious a quarter-century later.

That may be the way to go with this sort of mess - don't even try to make it a commercial success when you first make it, but rather stick it in a vault and allow it to accumulate camp value for a couple decades.

Boston Underground Film Festival Day 03: See You Next Tuesday, Jug Face, and The Rambler

So, when we last left BUFF, I had worked from home so that I could see the first film on the program and not particularly enjoyed it. You can only do that so many times during the work week, though, so the second day I opted to skip the shorts program at 5:45 and maybe get a little to eat before hitting the 7:30pm show.

BUFF sets its programming unusually tightly - the schedule often only allows for fifteen minutes between the end of one movie and another, so when you factor in Q&A, it's not unusual for things to run over, which means that See You Next Tuesday starting at 8pm was unusually late, but not impossibly so.



Still, sometimes the way it's handled can tick you off. That's Drew Tobia, director of See You Next Tuesday in the middle of the photo above (star Eleanore Pienta is on the right, and I only know the name of Melodie Sisk on the immediate right of Tobia because she was introduced for another movie), and he apparently spent about twenty minutes trying to get the presentation of his movie just right while the audience was standing out in the cold, and didn't seem terribly apologetic about that or how doing so might have a domino effect on the other movies on the schedule. Maybe I"m wrong about that, but between how he yelled out that his movie's title was a play on "cunt" after festival director Kevin Monahan commented on his previous short film's vulgar names... Well, for all the times when it's great to hear people talk with enthusiasm about their movies, sometimes a guy just rubs one the wrong way, and he did for me this time. Probably more me than him, but it didn't help that I was not very fond of his movie, either.



I wasn't able to get nearly as good a picture of the Jug Face crew, unfortunately. That's producer Andrew Van Den Houten, director Chad Crawford Kinkle, and Kevin Monahan hosting the Q&A. They didn't wind up with nearly so much time as the See You Next Tuesday folks, but also didn't have quite so much to get through - they talked about how the face jugs were a real thing in the south and part of the inspiration, but most of the other mythology was invented from whole cloth. There's not really a whole lot to discuss with this movie, as it doesn't go the ambiguous route and is pretty well-done but still kind of rough. I liked it, but as I saw in the review, might have liked it more if there was nothing supernatural about it.

See You Next Tuesday

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

There's a guy on a mailing list I subscribe to who tends to judge movies in large part based on how much he agrees with how the characters act. I suspect most of us do so a little more than we'd like, and See You Next Tuesday certainly had me doing it: I hated watching this movie a little more every time a character did something stupid and self-destructive, which means that by the end I'd worked up some good anger. On reflection, some of that reflects a well-executed presentation of imperfect characters, although I don't know if that gets me from disliking this movie to actual positive feelings.

The movie is mostly the story of Mona (Eleanore Pienta), who is fairly upbeat despite reasons not to be: Most of the other employees at the neighborhood market where she works pick on her, she's in her third trimester but the father of the baby is so absent as to not be worth mentioning, and her best friend is her mother May (Dana Eskelson), a recovering alcoholic who leans on Mona for support and hasn't spoken to her other daughter Jordan (Molly Plunk) in a few years. She seems to be doing okay, considering all that, but she's actually just a couple steps away from falling to pieces.

Even if the movie can be frustrating in a number of other ways, it's at least got an impressive turn by Eleanore Pienta at its center. Mona enters the screen fully formed, working-class but not showing that via the usual ignorance or combative nature, instead tending toward a sort of worn persevering nature. She's pretty easy to like rather than judge, and as the movie goes on and Mona goes into a downward spiral, Pienta does a fine job of conveying the character's desperation to keep from falling down completely. It's easy enough to remember why one liked her in the beginning when she's being somewhat alienating toward the end, and not everyone can manage that.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Jug Face

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Jug Face is the sort of horror movie that I often have trouble with, where any hint of supernatural activity actually seems somewhat deflating, as there's plenty of real-world unpleasantness at work. It's done well enough to overcome that much of the time, in part because its mythology is at least original.

There is, it says, a community out in the Tennessee backwoods whose residents worship at a pit of what looks like blood - which, of course, demands regular sacrifices. That's where Ada (Lauren Ashley Carte) has grown up, but now she's in trouble, betrothed to an unexciting neighbor by her parents (Larry Fessenden & Sean Young) but quite possibly pregnant from her brother Jessaby (Daniel Manche). That blind artisan Dawai (Sean Bridgers) has made a jug with her likeness, generally taken as a sign of who should be fed to the pit next.

So which is scarier - a pit that contains a demonic presence which will kill whoever is nearest when not given its tribute, or a reasonably intelligent young woman surrounded by people who think that a hole in the ground demands human sacrifices? There's not necessarily a right or wrong answer to this question, but it is kind of tricky to make both work at once, as the one tends to lessen the impact of the other more often than it reinforces the pair. That's less of the case here than usual, as writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle builds the earthly situation steadily before adding the paranormal elements to it in a similar slow burn, introducing new bits without often stopping to explain, so that the situation with the pit often feels part and parcel with the isolation as opposed to two different things going on.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

The Rambler

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Much of the time, a movie that was expanded from a short will feel bloated and kind of boring, as though the striking idea behind the original work has been watered down and made bigger without gaining more detail (last year's BUFF selection Excision struck me that way). For The Rambler, that may be a plus - could a twelve-minute film really capture the vastness and leisurely pace of the title characters rambling the way that this movie does?

The rambler of the title (Dermot Mulroney) is a quiet man with a way with horses who has just been released from prison to an obnoxious wife (Natasha Lyonne) and a miserable job in a pawn shop. Fortunately, there is another option - a job on his brother's horse farm in the northwest. Not starting out with much, if any, cash, he opts to walk and hitchhike, encountering a girl (Lindsay Pulsipher) and an inventor who claims he can record dreams (James Cady) among others. The further he gets down the road, the more surreal his adventures become.

At times, things become downright fantastical. Things don't get quite strange enough for the genre to take a full right turn into sci-fi, horror, or the like, but it's enough to push our conception of what writer/director Calvin Reeder is getting at. We're never really told what this man was in prison for, but there are enough hints through repeated encounters of various natures to work the basics out, although that's not those scenes' only purpose; even as they're only vaguely implying what happened, they're also saying that it's something he can't escape in his mind. The very strangeness of some events suggests that after four years behind bars, he doesn't fit in the world - or at least, doesn't think he does.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 5 April - 11 April 2013

Aw, crap. Roger Ebert just died. Go see some great movies and talk about why you loved them with your friends. Or at least fun ones.

• There does seem to be some potential fun at the multiplexes, with the new Evil Dead (no "The", no Ash) opening on a bunch of screens and promising a gory, legitimately frightening, no-CGI take on Sam Raimi's 1981 horror classic. It's interesting how, though the previews sort of look like all the other recent remakes, they've pushed intensity over the brand while still having Bruce Campbell and company up front saying that it's okay to like this if you liked the original. It plays Somerville, Boston Common, and Fenway (including the RPX screen).
  
  Not quite going back quite so far is a re-release of Jurassic Park in 3D, hopefully done nice. It's at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, Fenway (including one 2D matinee daily), the Imax-branded screen at Boston Common, Jordan's Furniture, and Fresh Pond. Boston Common also picks up Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, Shola Lynch's documentary on college professor Angela Davis, a social activist whose membership in the Black Panthers and Communist Party found her linked to a kidnapping attempt and on the FBI's Most Wanted list in the 1970s.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre (along with Boston Common and Kendall Square), meanwhile, gets The Place Beyond the Pines, featuring Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper on opposite sides of the law whose confrontation will apparently have lasting effects, with their kids picking things up a generation later. Note that Tuesday's 6:30pm screening is an "Off the Couch" screening, with members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society hosting and leading discussion afterward.
  
  There are three midnight movies this weekend, with Natural Born Killers being the Road Trip movie (a theme for their April selections) in the main theater, Tattoo Nation playing upstairs (and also at The Regent Theatre Friday night), and Trash Humpers in the screening room for those who want more Harmony Korine after Spring Breakers (what's wrong with you?). Sunday morning, there's a Talk Cinema screening of Renoir, where the same woman inspires both the famed Impressionist painter and his future-film director son. Monday night's BIg Screen Classic is Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, a truly great one.
• Kendall Square, as mentioned, also gets The Place Beyond the Pines on two screens, as well as three other movies, including a couple from noteworthy filmmakers. Hayao Miyazaki, admittedly, primarily writes From Up On Poppy Hill for son Goro to direct; it's a nostalgic look back at kids trying to save their school's clubhouse in the early 1960s. Looks like decent Ghibli stuff, although I have to wonder - if the theater is all digital now, why isn't the 9:20pm screening in Japanese rather than what sounds like a pretty lifeless dub in the previews.
  
  Cristian Mungiu, of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days fame, is the one doing Beyond the Hills, in which a pair of friends who grew up together find themselves heading in different directions - one to the city, another to the convent. And the scheduled one-week booking is Gimme the Loot, a SXSW award-winner about taggers looking to do an amazing caper in the period of a couple days.
• The Brattle has a quite varied week on hand. The weekend features this year's Schlock Around the Clock, which starts with a double feature of restored prints of Carnival of Souls & Spider Baby (Friday night/Saturday afternoon); Saturday single screenings of the Wonder Woman TV pilot, Phantasm 2, and Drafthouse's Trailer War; a Sunday matinee of The Giant Claw & Earth vs the Flying Saucers; and finally singles of two British icons - the color, 35mm version of Doctor Who and the Daleks with Peter Cushing and the recent excellent Dredd.
  
  Monday's DocYard screening is Ricky on Leacock, which features both a documentary on influential non-fiction filmmaker Ricky Leacock and a 1994 short film ("A Hole in the Sea") that he directed. The feature's director, Jane Weiner, will be on-hand to discuss. Tuesday evening is a special 10th anniversery double-feature from The 48 Hour Film Project, with family-friendly movies made in two days at 7pm and more grown-up stuff at 9:15. And on Wednesday and Thursday, they get a jump on April Vacation with the start of Muppet Madness - a sing-along screening of The Muppet Movie on Wednesday and a double feature of The Dark Crystal & Labyrinth on Thursday.
• The Harvard Film Archive has the second half of their Art Theatre Guild retrospective, with Funeral Parade of Roses (Friday 7pm), Dear Summer Sister (Friday 9:30pm), Silence Has No Wings (Saturday 7pm), The Human Bullet (Saturday 9:15pm), Lost Lovers (Sunday 7pm), and Human (Monday 7pm). VES will be screening In the Mood for Love on Tuesday and Thursday at 7pm, free for the public.
• The MFA's film program wraps up the 12 Annual Turkish Film Festival over the weekend, with screenings of Beyond the Hill, Mahmut & Meryem, Voice of My Father, and Strangers in the House. There are also more screenings of Chinese citizen-journalist documentary High Tech, Low Life (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday), as well as the start of two new series: Roman Polanski's Carnage is the first of four "Hollywood Scriptures" on Wednesday, which also sees the start of The National Center for Jewish FIlm's Jewishfilm.2013, with Numbered and Hannah Arendt on Wednesday and My German Friend on Thursday.
• ArtsEmerson's film program is sort of a hodgepodge (all on DVD or Blu-ray) this week: Thelma & Louise with a post-screening conversation with Polly Carl on "The End of Feminism" after the Friday evening show (and another show on Saturday night). Chilean film Machucha Friday night, matinees of Moonrise Kingdom on Saturday & Sunday afternoons, and The Battle of Algiers on Saturday evening. The Bright Lights series includes a lecture from Disney executive Kevin Campbell on Tuesday and Far from Afghanistan with two of its directors (john Gianvito and Robb Todd) in person on Thursday.
• iMovieCafe's screen at Fresh Pond looks to be subtitle-free with again, with Telugu action comedy Baadshah and Tamil/Telugu caper flick Settai.

My plans? Schlocking around the clock, Evil Dead (maybe even hitting up a midnight!), From Up on Poppy Hill, and some other catch-up, plus my first Red Sox game of the year.