Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 May - 16 May 2013

I presume Boston is kind of weird in how movies get distributed to the various theaters, at least compared to other large cities. I mean, it would make sense that the suburbs would only get the most mainstream releases and the more niche things would only play in the city where there's more and more varied people. But, no, it's the other way around here. Weird.

• Within the city, it's not quite "you'll see The Great Gatsby and like it", but it's fairly close. Baz Luhrmann's attempt to make this story not boring involves having Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, Tobey Maguire as Caraway, shooting in 3D, and probably bringing the same sort of contemporary style and soundtrack to a period piece that he did to Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge. It plays 2D and 3D at Somerville, the Studio Cinema in Belmont (2D only), Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Fenway. After all, there's also the option of Peeples which is being sold under the Tyler Perry name, but is actually the work of Tina Gordon Chism. It features Craig Robinson as a man who finds girlfriend Kerry Washington's father (David Alan Grier) hostile. It plays Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond.
  
  Fresh Pond (now called Apple Cinemas), meanwhile, is apparently the only place in the Boston area playing Aftershock, a Chilean thriller by Nicolas Lopez where an American tourist (played by co-writer/producer/horror movie impresario Eli Roth) and his friends survive a major earthquake only to find humanity can be nastier than nature. Tremendously gory, by all reports. That's the same profile as No One Lives, which is noteworthy for being Ryuhei Kitamura's second English-language movie. It's about a group of modern-day highwaymen who kidnap a wealthy couple only, apparently, to find they're a match for them. It's only playing at the Showcase Cinema in Revere, which I guess is at least closer to Boston than The Midnight Meat Train got.
• Speaking of potentially gross stuff at Fresh Pond, iMovieCafe gets into the act with Go Goa Gone, a horror comedy where a zombie outbreak occurs near the resort island of Goa. It's in Hindi with English subtitles, with daily shows of Greeku Veerud in Telugu.
• The Somerville Theatre has a pretty darn cool set of special screenings this week as well. Their first "Silents! Please" screening of the year is Sunday afternoon at 1pm, with Jeff Rapsis accompanying a 35mm print of The Thief of Bagdad on the big screen. On Wednesday, the big screen is also used for the monthly All Things Horror Presents screening, where instead of an under-the-radar indie, they'll be showing a 35mm print of Re-Animator. It's a fun movie, and all proceeds will go toward The 1 Fund for those injured in the Boston Marathon attacks. After that, they'll be screening 2009's Star Trek at 9:30pm before the midnight premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness (which opens Thursday on most screens and Wednesday on IMAX screens at Boston Common and Jordan's Furniture)
• Gatsby is the first 3D film to play Kendall Square, and they also have two others opening. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the new one by Mira Nair; it stars Riz Ahmed as a young Pakistani man who embraces America only to be rejected in the aftermath of 9/11. The one-week booking also comes from a notable filmmaker, Olivier Assayas. His Something in the Air is a semi-autobiographical picture of a young filmmaker who is torn between art and revolutionary action in the early 1970s.
• While we're in the 1970s, The Coolidge Corner Theatre keeps the same films on the main screens, but they open The Source Family, a documentary on a group that apparently evolved from being hippies to a cult which imploded in spectacular fashion, in the screening rooms.
  
  The midnight movie on Friday and Saturday is the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which isn't nearly as good as the TV series, but has its own sort of charm. On Monday night, they will welcome John Lurie to introduce and discuss three episodes of Fishing with John featuring Tom Waits, Dennis Hopper, and Willem Dafoe.
• The Boston LGBT Film Festival continues through the 12th, with screening throughout the weekend at the Brattle and MFA, with shows Saturday evening at the Revere Hotel's Theater1 venue and Sunday afternoon at the ICA.
• After the festival, the Brattle Theatre has a couple special presentations. Sunday night, they celebrate Mother's Day with two screenings of Psycho, because why not? The Monday night Balagan show is "Mirror Stage", an hour of short films where the filmmakers captured and audience. They were going to be closed for the rest of the week, but they scheduled a last-minute Ray Harryhausen tribute double feature for Wednesday and Thursday, with Jason and the Argonauts and the original Clash of the titans.
• The MFA's film program has more Samurai Cinema - Sanjuro on Friday evening and Saturday morning, Taboo and Rashomon on Wednesday the 15th, and Three Outlaw Samurai on Thursday afternoon. They've also got another Japanese cinema tie-in with their samurai exhibit with a Wednesday matinee of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. And there's also "HDADD+", a cinema performance by multimedia artist Brian Kane on Thursday evening.
• The Harvard Film Archive starts a new retrospective, "Revelations of a Fallen World - The Cinema of Arturo Ripstein". A Mexican director described as a "maverick contrarian" by the program, he and his frequent screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego will visit in person next weekend, but this weekend is a chance to get familiar with his work ahead of time: Deep Crimson and Life Sentence on Friday, The Castle of Purity and "No One Writes to the Colonel" on Saturday, Time to Die and The Beginning and the End on Sunday, and The Holy Office on Monday.
• ArtsEmerson's "Bright Lights" series has one last presentation before closing up shop until the new academic year with a set of screenings of grad student thesis projects on Sunday evening.

My plans? Well, I hate missing The Thief of Bagdad, but I've got baseball tickets for Sunday. Still heartily recommend it. So that means I'll try to make it out to Revere for No One Lives on Saturday, and maybe do a horror double feature at Fresh Pond Friday night. That means Gatsby likely happens sometime during the week, as does any other catch-up.

No Place on Earth

Following businesses on Twitter or Facebook can be kind of silly - it's voluntarily requesting more advertising on a screen that can be quite cluttered with it - and Landmark Kendall Square's feeds can often contain a lot of filler like "Mondays!" or "what did you see this weekend?" whose purpose is mainly to just make sure you don't forget about them. Still, the posting on Monday or Tuesday that says which movies will be leaving on Thursday (and which screenings will be skipped for previews or other special events, because some will be) are worth rolling your eyes at the silly ones for. It's a fairly essential part of planning my moviegoing week, since there's no excuse these things will pop up elsewhere or I'll remember them when they hit disc or streaming.

Or writing, obviously, since I'd like to recommend this one before it leaves town. I don't know how completely gone it will be - the subject matter makes it fairly likely to show up in one of the Coolidge's small rooms or hang around for a screening or two daily in West Newton, as those places do know their local audiences - but room's got to be made for Gatsby this weekend.

Aside - the Kendall screening things at 7:25pm is more or less perfect for me. Just enough time to get there from Burlington without running, worrying about the T running late, or hanging around for a half-hour. If they could start more movies then, I'd be really grateful.


No Place on Earth

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, 2K DCP)

There's enough staged footage with actors in No Place on Earth that one almost wonders why director Janet Tobias didn't just present this story of a Jewish family hiding from the Nazis in caves for the better part of two years as a conventional narrative feature, or at least figures somebody will, eventually. It's not a particularly hard question to answer, though - it is, after all, a great joy to see these survivors (in every sense of the word) telling their own story.

The Ukraine/Poland border was one of the most dangerous places to be a Jew during World War II, and that Esther Stermer saw the storm clouds coming and made arrangements to get her family on a ship made no difference when the Nazis arrived earlier than expected. Like many, the Stermers fled into the woods, and eventually into a cave. Most of the family his in there while eldest son Nissel kept watch outside, and when discovered, they eventually took refuge in another, deeper cavern, where they and four other extended families would stay from 5 May 1943 until 12 April 1944, when the Russians re-took the area.

The audience isn't introduced to the survivors right away, though - the first voice we hear comes from Chris Nicola, an investigator for the state of New York and avid spelunker who found evidence of twentieth-century habitation in the Priest's Grotto cave in 1993 while on a trip to Ukraine to learn more about his own ancestry (his family were Ukranian Orthodox Christians) and spent the next decade chasing stories. It might seem like an unnecessary distraction from the main story, but it's not: Nicola's expertise gives the audience some idea of how dangerous and unusual this achievement is while also sharing the audience's wonder and setting up how this story became something that had to be rediscovered.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 04: Secundaria, Night Labor, Computer Chess, Oxyana, and V/H/S/2

Only nine days behi... Oh, wait, the clock just struck midnight. Ten days behind!

Saturday was kind of a wacky day - I got my usual slow start, for a festival weekend day, and would spend some time bouncing back and forth between venues as the day went on, although there was more than enough time scheduled between "blocks" that it wasn't hard to get from one thing to another.

It was a day for busy lines, too - though it's usually easy enough to keep everyone at all five movies at the Somerville Theatre in one line during IFFBoston, they had the Much Ado About Nothing folks broken out during the afternoon, as the cult of Joss Whedon can get folks out for this sort of targeted event. The real surprise was around 9pm; while I waited for Oxyana: I sort of assumed the big crowd was for The Hunt, but apparently The Dirties brought out a big crowd; I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffled it from screen #2 to #5 to fit more people in. It was a rowdy crowd, too, for a movie that didn't really seem to leap off the page of the program for me.

Didn't have time for dinner - Boston Burger Company was packed, and I didn't want to wander much further from Davis Square (probably should have hit Tasty Burger after Computer Chess) - so I grabbed some snacks at the concession stand and Ian (the Somerville's manager) greeted me by name. That always freaks me out a bit - I don't post a lot of pictures of myself online or go introducing myself, so folks recognizing me means I've got to be pretty pretty ubiquitous. It's tough to get to the concession stand during the festival, since you'll often have everybody trying to fill a theater in a five minute period, and as I may have mentioned, with a lot of climbing over people and going back and forth in the theater, not to mention the merch cart and general loitering in the lobby. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that the theater ought to have a pushcart to sell some basics to folks waiting in line, but there's probably not enough sidewalk as there is.

OK, movies and guests!



There you have director Mary Jane Doherty, the composer (whose name I didn't get and can't find because the film's web and IMDB pages are shells), and producer Lyda Kuth. Ms. Doherty is a professor at BU, so there were a number of her students in the audience - meaning folks got called on by name and there were some inside jokes during the Q&A. It was a pretty friendly crowd.

SPOILERS!

The most interesting questions, naturally, revolved around the film's main subject Marya defecting to the United States at the climax - did she know what was going on? Did she assist? Did it make finishing the movie with Gabriela and Moises more difficult? No, no, and obviously. She said a couple of interesting things about the situation, though - for one, apparently defecting is almost considered an inevitable part of a ballerina's career in Cuba - every talented dancer walks away from a touring company eventually, although this was the first time a student had done so. The other was that before that happened, the movie was shaping up more as a sort of visual poem, but this is the sort of event that immediately puts everything that came before into a new context - that scene where Maryara's prize money is taken by the school goes from being about how poor Cuba is to how that sort of authoritarian system can push its talented youth away.

It turned out, I was seated in front of a Cuban ballerina. Not Maryara - she's apparently busy in Orlando as a lead dancer in that city's company - but someone who was able to leave Cuba by dint of her mother being Spanish and having dual citizenship.

!SRELIOPS

Add Cuba to the list of places I might like to visit someday, though - every movie I see shot there makes it look so lively, even where it's very poor. The Talk Cinema people do a trip to the film festival, but I think I'd rather wait until the country is more open and on its feet; I'd rather not engage in poverty tourism.



Man, is that the best picture I got of Computer Chess producer Andrew Finnigan (I think), actor Gerald Peary (better known as a local film critic and teacher), and the Brattle's Ned Hinkle? Let me check the phone...



That's better. Anyway, Gerry made a more impassioned plea than usual for folks to donate some money to IFFBoston, stating (not incorrectly) that it's kind of crazy that the festival is in its eleventh year and the folks in charge are still all volunteers, probably burning all their vacation time from their day jobs on this event (between spending a week running it and heading out to other festivals to scout potential selections).

I don't want to spend too much time on the Q&A (or this movie in general), because it kind of annoyed me, highlighting that this time it was mostly improvised (compared to Bujalski's previous films, which were actually tightly scripted but had the awkward stumbling feel of improvisation). It was the kind of discussion that served to push some of my buttons, with a lot of how they were casting people who already embodied the characters, and need a lot of nerds, so who are the nerdiest people you know - well, editors! The movie already had the sort of Big Bang Theory attitude I don't like - where the filmmakers are making the same mocking jokes about nerds as usual, but by throwing a few references in they expect to curry some favor. Combine this with a precious essay in the program and it's become pretty clear that this filmmaker's stuff is just not for me.



Oxyana director Sean Dunne, executive producer Colby Glenn, and (I think) co-producer Cass Marie Greener. No, I don't know why I get better shots from my phone than my real camera at this festival.

Anyway, they seemed like a really great group of folks, with a lot of respect for the people in their film that didn't seem insincere in the least. Like their movie, they were admirably straightforward and plain-spoken about what was going on down there, getting into why they thought towns like Oceana were mostly dealing with prescription drugs rather than meth or harder stuff (isolated enough that it's not yet worth expanding into the area) and why dealing with the problem was so problematic (a real "pray it away" attitude. As I mention in the review, I might have liked hearing some of that in the actual film, but that would have been hard to do with the people involved telling it in their own words.

So, that's Saturday at IFFBoston. Next up: A nearly-as-busy Sunday!


Secundaria

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

For someone who has never been to the ballet, I sure tend to find a lot of movies involving the combination of art and athleticism fascinating. Maybe it's the way that the intense discipline necessary to master the form naturally creates great drama as well as great beauty; maybe ballet is a tough enough sell to many Americans that what manages to make it on screen is exceptional. Either way, Secundaria is quite the strong documentary, even if some of its most interesting material isn't about the ballet itself.

Ballet is a big deal in Cuba, and vice versa, even if the island is best known for other styles. Many of the world's foremost companies have Cuban performers taking lead roles, though, with many of them trained at an internationally-renowned academy in Havana. This film follows three who entered the three-year program in 2007: Maryara, who lives in a small apartment with her mother and brother and rides a bus for an hour each way to get to the school; Gabriela, who by contrast comes from a comfortable background (her mother is a hotel accountant and her father is in the military); and Moises, a new friend of Maryara's who comes from one of Havana's poorest neighborhoods. At the start of each year, students are ranked by how they perform in a competition, and while Gabriela is one of the most heralded talents, Maryara surprises by coming in second for the whole school.

That's the story's starting point, and filmmaker Mary Jane Doherty sticks with these characters for the full three years rather than the more common path of choosing, say, a freshman, a senior, and a graduate and following them in parallel. It works out nicely; it means that the various threads don't play as disconnected while it seldom seems forced when the group interacts (although I half-suspect that the decision to make Moises one of the central characters was made later).

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Night Labor

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin had two features at IFFBoston last year; I saw the one about teenage Russian models in Japan rather than the one about the attempt to open a fish-processing plant in Maine. The latter would have been a natural complement to Night Labor, to the extent that I almost wonder if this film is constructed out of unused footage from the other.

The film focuses almost entirely on one man, Sherman Frank Merchant. He's the sort of fellow who looks his age and then some; there's evidence of a lot of hard living and cigarettes on his face. Now, he clams in the afternoon, eats his catch for dinner, and then works the night shift at the plant. He doesn't talk much, but he doesn't seem to have too many people to talk with.

And so, Night Labor is a documentary that is almost 100% pure observation. We watch Merchant go through what seems like a typical day, with no narration and no particular attempts to add context. Even when Merchant says something, it's not really directed to the camera as much as it's an under-his-breath muttering that brings Popeye to mind when the audience feels generous and that guy wandering the street or riding the bus who is so disgusted or enamored with something that he has to say it out loud. How much the audience enjoys the movie may be directly proportional to how much they see as interesting details and demonstrations of processes with which they weren't previously familiar versus how much seems like banal minutia.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Computer Chess

* * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

I think I'm done with Andrew Bujalski. I've seen three of his four films, and even the one I kind of liked didn't really impress me. And while I can see some merit in the ones like Computer Chess that bore me to frustration, it's not enough. This thing is just not clever enough to go without a story.

Sure, it sort of looks like it has a story: In the late 1970s/early 1980s, there's an annual convention where the developers of various chess-playing computer programs set their creations against each other round-robin style. The winner will play host and chessmaster Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), although at the time, the idea that a computer could defeat a human being is ludicrous. Among the competitors are a team from MIT that includes Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) and Tom Schoesser (Gordon Kindlmann); one from Cal Tech that includes Shelly (Robin Schwarts), the only girl in the tournament; independent operator Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), who apparently hasn't booked a room; and a privately-funded team with Martin Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins). There's also a sort of swingers' group sharing the space, and... cats.

Bujalski and his cast of what are, for the most part, non-actors (Wiggins and Paige have prior credits but have been doing other things lately) create a few memorable characters, and a great many others that run together. As is often the case, there's a certain authenticity to their performances, especially since they are by and large editors, computer programmers, and others who can easily handle the retro-technical terms. Paige gets the most memorable character, with Papageorge just cynical and snide enough for his being thwarted to be entertaining but not quite enough to really get on the audience's bad side. Riester's Peter winds up drifting toward the center of the story, and he does project a likable everynerd quality.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Oxyana

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Addiction to prescription medication is hardly limited to rural America, but it thrives there. The reasons why communities like Oceana, West Viginia have such a serious problem with painkillers like Oxycontin are far from the first concern of this movie, which concerns itself almost entirely with showing the effects, becoming a tragic study in human frailty.

Director Sean Dunne builds the film almost entirely out of interviews with local residents; some are functioning addicts, some are dealers, some are relatives who have tried to get their loved ones into rehab but to no avail. There's a man suffering from cancer and the wife who is determined to go down with him. Young men who left for a little while after graduating from high school who came back to find their friends dying at an astonishing rate, and a dentist shocked at his patients' prescription requests. There's a couple of scenes with the district attorney and other officials, but not many; this isn't a story about enforcement.

They're country folks, in general, plain-spoken and not particularly prone to seeking anyone's pity. They spell out the reasons why they think drug abuse has become so endemic in towns like Oceana both as a trend and for themselves personally, and that they can communicate this clearly is somewhat unusual for movies about addiction: There's no metaphor to it, just a simple description of how each feels on and off oxy that makes it more easy than usual for the viewer to put themselves in their positions. Though the idea of "Appalachian Fatalism" is brought up, this tendency to think it's impossible to win brought on by (among other things) decades of exploitation by the coal industry never feels like the end of their arguments; there's a sad willingness to accept responsibility.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

V/H/S/2

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)

To call last year's V/H/S uneven would be generous; while it managed "pretty good" in a couple of segments, it was awful in more. Still, the good thing about commercially successful anthology films is that sequels need not be encumbered by prior entries' failings, and V/H/S/2 is a great example of this: The new segments feel tighter, more creative, and scarier than last time, with the new filmmakers inspired to top what came before and the returnees opting to step up their game.

The opening/wraparound story - "Tape 49" by Simon Barrett - is still kind of stupid; as the premise is apparently that these VHS tapes unleash monsters and/or make their viewers homicidal just by being VHS, and for all the format's shortcomings, I think you have to be a cinematographer to have that reaction. It's more fun than last time, though - the obnoxious bros from last time out have been replaced by a co-ed team of private investigators (Lawrence Michael Levine & Kelsey Abbot), and their pulpy banter is a definite step up, with the whole deal of them recording themselves watching the tapes they find actually making a reasonable amount of sense.

The first one they watch, "Clinical Trials" by Adam Wingard, has a premise borrowed from movies such as The Eye by the Pang Brothers: Guy (Wingard) is outfitted with a prosthetic eye which records everything it sees as part of its engineers' QA process, only to discover that he's now seeing things that normal people can't. Simple premise, but fun - Hannah Hughes soon pops up as a hot, sarcastic mentor figure and Wingard works plenty of good jumps and a fairly impressive escalation into the short's runtime. My biggest complaint is that it feels less like a complete short film than half a feature, stopping rather than ending just when things are starting to get good - or, alternately, getting out before Wingard has to build a boring mythology and get predictable.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 03: Soft in the Head and A Hijacking

I grumble about how late these festival posts are going up - and now that we're approaching the weekend and its four-plus-movie days, that's only going to slow down - but there was a benefit to that here. Friday night, I liked Soft in the Head a lot less and A Hijacking quite a bit more, so it was good to give my thoughts a little more time to marinate. The reviews, I think, are better as a result, although the analysis does sort of push away the initial reaction that people tend to want as a movie recommendation.

Then again, my first reaction for Soft in the Head involved the word "retarded".

Specifically, I said that it was going to be a challenging review to write because I'd need to find non-offensive synonyms to describe one of the movie's characters. Which probably makes the use of that word even worse, because then you're using it to specifically describe people rather than as just a vaguely insulting thing. I tweeted this, and found it kind of amusing that both the production company and lead actress Sheila Etxeberria favorited/retweeted/followed. Were they taking it as a compliment, that the character of Nathan was such an believable evocation of someone with cognitive challenges? It certainly wasn't (only) meant that way; it was meant to convey frustration, too. Of course, they may have been mocking - "look how terrible this person that still says 'retard' is!". Or I may be reading way too much into folks just clicking on my tweet a couple of times.

I guess Nathan is meant to be autistic, although I only really know that because the film's website describes the character as "borderline autistic", which understates the matter; there are some scenes where that's the case, but as a whole he seems much more handicapped than that. Interestingly, the festival program's description of the movie also gives a description of Etxeberria's Natalia that doesn't really jibe with how I saw her. I find both of those cases kind of interesting, in that neither may be a deliberate attempt to influence how the audience views what's going on but they can't help but do so, and I think that's sort of cheating. Sure, reviews and criticism do the same thing, but with both of these at least quasi-official, it's easier for the viewer who reads them to mentally integrate them into the movie, maybe making it something that the film, taken completely on its own, is not.


Nathan Silver, Nechama Kessler, Carl Kranz, and Sheila Etxeberria

Folks showed up, which was nice. Writer/director Nathan Silver is the fellow with the eyepatch, along with his mother and two of the main actors. It wasn't really a great Q&A - they answered the expected questions about improvisation, shooting in sequence, how many are actors and how many are real-life analogues that the filmmakers found and cast all right, but otherwise, things kind of rambled. That's fitting, I guess, as this was a movie with a simple outline that evolved rather than being carefully constructed, so there just weren't going to be definitive answers. Still, it often seemed indulgent, and I wondered a bit whether the light crowd had a fair number of friends and family members, just from the level of familiarity displayed (and at times required) during the session.

Silver had another movie playing the festival the next day; I opted for something else. And, sadly, nobody came from Denmark to do a Q&A after A Hijacking.

Soft in the Head

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

I don't feel bad about not particularly liking Soft in the Head, but one of the reasons I don't like it bugs me. I look down on its characters, which means I probably look down on their real-life analogues who are less fortunate than I am, and I don't want to be that guy. Understand, the movie has a ton of other problems, but that it's about folks who don't look like movie stars with five o'clock shadow shouldn't count against it.

Natalia (Sheila Etxeberria) is out on the street after a smacking-around and ejection by her boyfriend; she stops by her friend Hannah's family dinner, makes a scene there, and eventually winds up in the apartment of Maury (Ed Ryan) - not as a one-night stand, but because he has cots in his living room for folks he finds in the street. Hannah (Melanie J. Sheiner) does take her in, but her brother Nathan (Carl Kranz) has a crush on her, which causes all sorts of problems what with him having mental issues and her not being Jewish. And, well, a hot mess.

Most of the characters in this movie are a bit of a disaster - Natalia, Nathan, some of the folks bunking out in Maury's apartment - and it's not necessarily just having made bad choices, but something baked-in. At least one character is clearly mentally ill, Nathan is at the very least in the Asperger's area of the autism spectrum (frustrated viewers may use less charitable words). And while that does make them different from what one typically sees on-screen, it doesn't necessarily make them interesting. Nathan, as he's portrayed, is not likely to make a decision that the audience can really spend much time considering, and Natalia is impulsive to the point of randomness. How do you tell a story with that?

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Kapringen (A Hijacking)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Unless a filmmaker is exceptional at drawing things out and tossing in new perils when the previous threats are starting to wear thin, compact is a very good thing for a thriller to be. Another exception is when the tension is actually built out of waiting for a response; the audience actually needs to feel it drag a bit then. That's why a funny thing happens with A Hijacking - its crisp, efficient 99-minute runtime winds up making it feel taut and impressive as one initially watches it, but somewhat hollow as it winds down.

MV Rozen, a Danish-flagged cargo ship on the way to Mumbai, has been taken by pirates off the coast of Africa. Though advised to hire an outside negotiator by expert Connor Julian (Gary Skjoldmose Porter), CEO Peter Ludvgsen (Søren Malling) takes on the job himself - this is, after all, what he does. On the other end of the satellite-phone link, cook Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk) is pressed into service as the voice of the crew by the pirates' negotiator, Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), since the captain is in rough shape. It is, as all involved soon learn, a situation designed for stalemate.

The film deserves a fair amount of praise, and a great deal of it deserves to be laid at the feet of the cast. It's a talented ensemble, and nobody playing a major part takes the easy way out by playing their character as a villain or falters at making their character someone the audience can understand, no matter different his background may be from the viewer or the other characters. Pilou Asbæk plays the guy that the audience can most likely easily relate to, an everyman whose job just happens to be in the middle of the ocean, and he quickly establishes Mikkel as an affable fellow (even if he's not completely even-tempered) in the scenes before the pirates board, giving him a solid foundation to become frazzled, frightened, and angry later on. Søren Malling does a nifty trick, giving Peter a level of hubris that is undeniable without it crossing the line to arrogance or callousness. It would be easy for this hard-nosed one-percenter to become the "real villain" of the film, but he doesn't, and that's not just what writer/director Tobias Lindholm has him do but how Malling does it. Abdihakin Asgar, meanwhile, manages a neat job of playing Omar right on the line between being a reasonable person and being a guy whose job is to seem like a reasonable person. Lindholm doesn't follow him the way he does Mikkel and Peter, but that we can buy into him when we know his function is impressive.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 3 May - 9 May 2013

Rejoice! You have many places to see the director and star of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang reunite!

• Not kidding there, the message from the multiplexes seems to be that you will watch Iron Man 3 and like it; it's the only thing opening on mainstream screens in the Boston area this week and it's grabbing a ton of them, including all the deluxe screens. Here's hoping that Robert Downey Jr.'s fourth turn as the Armored Avenger (counting The Avengers but not The Incredible Hulk) is as fun as previous ones, especially since writer/director Shane Black is supposedly adapting Warren Ellis's "Extremis" storyline and will almost certainly give it a different feel than John Favreau and Joss Whedon. In 2D and 3D at the Arlington Capitol, Boston Common, Fenway and Fresh Pond; 3D-only at Jordan's Furniture.
• Kendall Square makes up for the stasis at the multiplexes by turning over half of its ten screens. I've seen Renoir; it's certainly a pleasant and pretty look at the late years of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the formative ones of his son Jean. Also from France: In the House, the new one by François Ozon, which weaves a web of two teenagers, their families, their teacher, and the latter's wife.
  
  One of the grander attractions is Kon-Tiki, Norway's nominee for best foreign language film which chronicles Thor Heyerdahl's quest to prove that South Americans could have settled the Polynesian islands by using period-appropriate vessels. Oddly, IMDB lists The Weinstein Company as distributing an "English version" (and the trailer I've seen does have a lot of English). Apparently the Weinsteins really just can't help themselves.
  
  There are also two documentaries: No Place on Earth mixes interviews, recreations, and a reunion of Ukranian Jews who hid in the local caves for a year and a half during World War II; Bert Stern: Original Mad Man takes a look at the famed photographer who created iconic images for magazine layouts and advertising. Stern is the only one marked down as being a one-week booking, but expect The Great Gatsby to bump a fair amount next week.
• Mud expands to The Coolidge Corner Theatre this weekend, doing an odd sort of screen-share with The Company You Keep, with Mud playing the big screen in the evening and the smaller rooms during the day with Company having the other screen.
  
  In case you missed it during the craziness a couple weeks ago, Antiviral returns for midnight shows in the screening room this weekend, with a live Q&A via Skype after Friday's show. The movie's got problems, but it's interesting. The main midnight is the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead.
  
  Music seems to be a theme of several other special screenings: There's a Ballet In Cinema presentation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on Sunday moorning, as well as a Talk Cinema preview screening of Twenty Feet from Stardom, a documentary on backup singers which played IFFBoston last week. Monday night, the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra is in the main theater for a "Sounds of Silents" screening of Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality, a pretty great comedy; the Berklee kids put on a pertty good show, too. And from Tuesday through Thursday, they have three different short programs (YoungCuts, Elder, and International) as part of the LGBT film festival
• The Boston LGBT Film Festival also plays the Brattle Theatre all week and through the 12th. That each show is labeled L/G/B/T depending on just which section of the audience it featuers; not sure if that's helpful or oddly limiting. There are also screenings at the ICA on the 5th (and 12th), ArtsEmerson's Paramount Center on the 4th and 8th, and the MFA on the 3rd to 5th and 8th through 12th.
• The MFA's film program also has a few more Samurai Cinema screenings, specifically Samurai Rebellion on Friday & Saturday, and a Saturday morning screening of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast as part of their "Myths, Folklore, and Fairy Tales from Around the World" series.
• The Harvard Film Archive wraps up their "L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema" series on Sunday and Monday, with a short program Sunday afternoon, the not-technically-part-of-the-program To Sleep with Anger Sunday night, and Emma Mae on Monday evening. There are two free screenings on either end - the 1969 Soviet King Lear (with an introduction by scholar Tiffany Ann Conroy Moore) Saturday afternoon, and a preview of Frances Ha (which played IFFBoston) followed by a Skype conversation with director Noah Baumbach.
• ArtsEmerson is not showing much in the way of film while school's out, but their Bright Lights series has screenings of Emerson's thesis programs on the 5th, 9th, and 12th.
• Hey, iMovieCafe is programming stuff with English subtitles at Fresh Pond. This week, it's Shootout at Wadala, a two-and-a-half hour crime flick directed by Sanjay Gupta and starring John Abraham, Manoj Bajpayee, Priyaka Chopra, and Anil Kapoor. It's got big action scenes and songs! There's also scattered showings of Greeku Veerudu if you happen to speak Telugu.
• The Somerville Theatre used the time since IFFBoston to replace the seats in screens #2-4, and they've turned over everything but Evil Dead, picking up The Place Beyond the Pines, No, Disconnect, and Oblivion. Their sister cinema, the Arlington Capitol, picks up Quartet for a second-run.

My plans? Iron Man 3, Twenty Feet from Stardom, Our Hospitality, and maybe some catch-up. I'm also kind of curious to see what the new management at Fresh Pond (now called "Apple Cinemas") is like, so maybe I'll check out Shootout at Wadala.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 02: Tokyo Waka and Wasteland

Both of these films were in The Somerville Theatre's #4 screen, and if you're the sort who tends to take note of these things (or have just paid attention to recurring things on this blog), you know what even-numbered screens there mean - center aisles, no leg room, looking way up if you wind up near the front. During the festival, I'll tend to be one of the first ones in, grab an aisle seat, and then get climbed over right up until the movie starts. Part of it's my fault, but part of it's "why can't you people hit the concession stand and the restroom before taking your seat like I do?"

At least some of that, apparently, is going to be eased in the coming week as they've announced that they're installing new seating with more leg room in screens #2-5 as soon as the festival's done, which will bring tears of joy to regular customers' eyes. I suspect that probably means losing a row or two of seating, but that will likely only really hurt during festival week, but as someone who spent what seems like half ost of the past week in screen #4, I don't mind; I honestly can't imagine what folks larger than my 179cm (5'10") think.

Anyway, enough about the venue - movies!



No, I don't imagine that the new arrangement will do anything about festival-week Horrible Photography. Hey, it could be worse; John Haptas has a weirdly-shaped head in the pictures taken on my camera rather than my phone. As you can see, he and Kristine Samuelson came to introduce and discuss their movie, although it's short and simple enough that there wasn't a great deal to discuss. They apparently spent some time traveling in southeast Asia, looking for a movie to make, eventually finding both a comfort level and a topic when they hit Tokyo and observed the crows.

One thing Haptas mentioned that I think we all know but tend not to give a lot of thought is that you can make up for not having much in the way of material resources with time. For him, that means sitting on top of a building next to a tree all afternoon if that's what it takes to watch a pair of crows build a nest out of stolen coat-hangers, while other filmmakers can edit until things are just right or render their CGI in great detail because they're not staring at a staked-out release date. Of course, there are other pressures that make time translate into expense, but I suspect they're less onerous than one might think for the truly independent.

One thing I do kind of wish I'd asked during the Q&A was how threatening they intended the crows in their movie to be. I don't know if it's a flaw that they kept finding ways to present them as worrisomely intelligent and adaptable, letting that stew, and then popping up a shot that wouldn't have felt out-of-place in The Birds without ever really paying that tension off - the tension was probably a non-universal and accidental side-effect - but I swear, I spent half of that movie expecting a really horrible attack as opposed to the relatively mild ones they found in their stock footage.

Tokyo Waka

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

It's not uncommon to watch a documentary and say that the scale is in-between the usual levels, neither comprehensive nor truly a broad introduction. Tokyo Waka at times seems to be around those extremes, covering an extremely specific topic but without a great deal of detail. It's often pretty and kind of interesting, and that may be all someone wants from a movie about Tokyo which focuses on its crows.

And Tokyo does have a lot of crows; a city official says that roughly six hundred crow attacks are reported each year, and attempts to reduce that number by capturing and humanely killing them often seem to have the result of making the next generation of these unusually clever birds even smarter. Cities provide them with a dynamic environment for nest-building and scavenging, and an architect suggests a couple of reasons why Tokyo may draw them more than usual: It's a very three-dimensionally-complex city with many nooks and crannies, and the average residential building has a mere thirty-year lifespan, meaning there are always a great deal of construction sites.

The engineer isn't the only person co-directors John Haptas & Kristine Samuelson talk to; there are students, zookeepers, artists, keepers of a Buddhist temple, street-food vendors and a young homeless woman living in the park. Some are experts, some are just people who have encountered crows in their lives, and others just appear to be people that the filmmakers met while living in Tokyo who may have an interesting story to tell. The interviews may not often be particularly revelatory but usually have at least one interesting nugget of information (for instance, I have a hard time imagining a tent city in an American park getting regular mail delivery).

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Wasteland

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

What, exactly, is the difference between a crime movie and a caper movie? Scale? The intricacy of the plan? Do the characters being a notch more charming or less working-class change the classification? Or is this just a distinction that vanishingly few people care about? Rowan Athale's Wasteland, you see, is right on the border, centering on the one big score but still getting kind of dirty on the way.

There's a saying that prison gives petty crooks a chance to learn the skills to become career felons, and that may be the case with Harvey (Luke Treadaway), emerging after a year behind bars with a potential business opportunity in Amsterdam and a plan to raise the stake that involves robbing the man who set him up, local gangster Steven Roper (Neil Maskell). He brings in three friends - best mate Dempsey (Iwan Rheon), tradesman Charlie (Gerard Kearns), and hot-headed Dodd (Matthew Lewis) - but while he's learned a thing or two inside, most of them aren't even small time, and maybe not completely sold on packing up and leaving Leeds, let alone England, behind. It may not matter, since a well-bloodied Harvey is explaining everything to a CID detective-inspector (Timothy Spall).

Athale's story is firmly in film noir territory, though it lacks a classic femme fatale (Vanessa Kirby's Nicola is an ex-girlfriend who wants Harvey on the straight and narrow). It's a distinctively English one, though, with regional accents that it might take Americans a few minutes to get used to and a setting that still feels industrial even if industry has by and large been gone for a while. There are areas on Harvey's plans that are actually marked "wasteland" but the empty pubs and industrial spaces where the friends meet tell the story of the place as well as anything. It's not completely barren yet, but it might be on its way.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Opening Night: The Spectacular Now

First day of the festival! Well, it was four days ago (five by the time this gets posted), but seeing a bunch of movies doesn't leave one a whole bunch of time to write about them. Trying to more or less go in order when this is the opening night picture also turns out to be tough, but we'll get to that later.

I was actually running behind from the start; I usually attend on a press pass, but I missed the deadline for applying this year. While eFilmCritic has had its challenges over the past year, it's not like I was worried about not getting accredited; I just tend to be very sequential, and by the time I'd finished with all the reviews for the Boston Underground Film Festival, the deadline had passed. Thoroughly embarrassing, but it's not like I mind giving the IFFBoston people money. They're all-volunteer and do great work; it's not like they're getting rich off these donations/purchases (and I can't say I'd mind if they did).

I continued running late because of work - whole day of nothing, then emails with needs at 4:30pm - so when I arrived to pick up my pass, there wasn't any need to queue up, just head straight in and find myself a row well-off-center in the front row, and enjoy the theremin.



Not sure how this became a thing, but it has; I think there's been theremin before opening night for five years now. It's always cool, though.



If you've been coming to the festival for a while, you know these folks by now: Brian Tamm, Adam Roffman, Christine Harbaugh, Nancy Campbell, and Dan McCallum. The fellow on the right may also be familiar; it's Casey Affleck, who was announced as a "Creative Consultant" a couple months back. As an outsider, I don't necessarily know what any of the folks involved do, specifically, and that seems like an even more nebulous position. Still, having a guy with that sort of name recognition in Hollywood might help them bring in more prominent narrative features.

Also, he's a decent arm. One of the things that they do at the start of the opening and closing nights is give away previous years' t-shirts (and some new ones) by throwing them into the crowd, and getting them into the balcony is rare. I don't know if Casey got one up there, but I saw him wince after one toss, so I'm guessing that someone wound up with a t-shirt by catching it in the face.


Adam and The Spectacular Now's James Ponsoldt (director) & Michael H. Weber (screenwriter)

Anyway, that's the festival; what about the movie? It's pretty good, although it took me a while to write the review, just out of being busy. The film itself made it a bit tricky, too - at one frustrated point, I figured it was an example of how a movie could be good without actually being interesting. It's a somewhat unfair judgment, which reflects the way I feel about coming-of-age movies more than anything - basically, they really have to be something special, because otherwise, they're kind of as same-y as genre films are often accused of being, at least in the broad strokes.

The Spectacular Now

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP?)

It's hard enough to try to review the first films to play a festival, writing a paragraph at a time between other screenings, but something like The Spectacular Now makes it even more difficult. It's does almost nothing wrong and the cast is pretty great. It's easy enough to recommend, though, managing to be quite good if not quite, well, spectacular.

Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) was just dumped by his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larson) over something that seems innocent enough, although given how quickly she's paired up with star athlete Marcus (Dayo Okeniyi), she might have just been looking for an excuse. Upset, Sutter gets drunk, and is found passed out the next morning by Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley) on her paper route. They start hanging out together.

Kids grow up so fast today. Time was, you'd get movies about troubled teenagers and movies about alcoholics driving their lives into the ground, and they'd be separate movies made for separate audiences. This two-for-one deal of a movie hardly chronicles a new phenomenon, and it's certainly not the first time I've seen teenagers drinking on-screen, but I don't know if it's ever been so central to the characters rather than just a reaction to other things going on. In fact, it still mostly plays that way - it's not about people feeling like they need to help Sutter get sober, so the audience will tend to look elsewhere for some other root to his issues until it eventually becomes clear that this is something pervasive, not a weekend-binging reaction.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 26 April - 2 May 2013

I really need to sleep after that massive This Week Month in Tickets, so let's race through this.

• The Tenth Annual Independent Film Festival Boston has begun and it is fantastic. Go to their website, scope out all the great stuff playing, and remember that I recommend Sightseers and The Hunt wholeheartedly, having seen them in the UK last fall. The Festival runs at the Somerville, and the Brattle all weekend, with single shows at the former Stuart Street Playhouse (now the Revere Hotel's "Theatre1") on Monday and the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday.
• That Closing Night presentation at the Coolidge Corner Theatre is In A World..., but they've got other noteworthy stuff as well. Granted, their main opening is Hava Nagila: The Movie in the screening room, a documentary on a song which is a bit of Jewish kitsch. They also pick up The Company You Keep in 35mm, which should look pretty nice.
  
  In terms of specials, one noteworthy one is Sunday morning's Goethe-Institut German Film, Hannah Arendt, with Margarethe von Trotte as the Jewish journalist whose coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial was not what anyone expected. It's a preview, with a regular run scheduled for July. Yet another Jewish-oriented event comes Monday night, with Alicia Svigals performing her new score to silent movie The Yellow Ticket with pianist Marilyn Lerner; there will be other multimedia components and a post-film panel discussion. The weekend's midnights are David Lynch's Lost Highway as part of the "road trips from (to?) hell" series, and Quentin Dupieux's awesomely absurd Wrong, both on Friday and Saturday.
• If you're at the festival or can't stay up late for Wrong, the Brattle will be playing it on Wedesday and Thursday (1 & 2 May) as part of a double feature with Dupieux's equally but differently bizarre Rubber. That's after spending the weekend as one of IFFBoston's venues, and shutting down Monday & Tuesday for a quick between-festival rest.
• If the indie stuff isn't your bag, the multiplexes have some powerfully mainstream openings. Pain & Gain is apparently a "smaller film" for Michael Bay, but it's still crammed with big stars (Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Ed Harris) in an over-the-top story about not-so-bright bodybuilders kidnapping a Miami mobster. It plays the Arlington Capitol, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Presumably The Big Wedding is female-oriented counter-programming, with a decent ensemble (Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfrien, Robin Williams) in a remake of a French farce about a divorced couple who fakes still being together for their son's weding. It plays Boston Common and Fenway.
  
  Interestingly, the multiplexes go different directions to fill some extra screens before Iron Man 3 wipes everything clean with night-before shows on Thursday. Fenway picks up The Company You Keep and is also the only place on the T opening Arthur Newman, with Colin Firth as a man who fakes his death to start a new life, romancing Emily Blunt, who has done something similar. Boston Common, meanwhile, opens Mud, with Matthew McConaughey apparently continuing a string of great parts. He's hiding out on an island in the Mississippi, but looking to reunite with his girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon). Neither, apparently, has room for Tai Chi Hero, to which I say boo! I totally would have caught a Friday midnight around the festival!
• Kendall Square also has Mud opening, along with two movies that seem like a potential double feature: The Angels' Share, a comedy from Ken Loach (really!) about a parolee who gets involved with distilling whiskey and an attempt to steal a rare cask, and My Brother the Devil, where brothers of Arabic descent in London walk the line between crime and a better future. Oddly, Devil is the one marked with the one-week booking while Angels' is supposedly open-ended.
• It's fairly quiet at the MFA's film program. There are three Samurai Cinema screenings Harakiri on Friday night, Kwaidan on Wednesday the 1st, and Ran on Thursday the 2nd. There's also an afternoon screening of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast on Tuesday as part of their "Myths, Folklore, and Fairy Tales from Around the World" course.
• The ICA has the opening night film of The Boston LGBT Film Festival on Thursday night with Bye Bye Blondie, a new film by Virginie Despentes about two middle-aged women trying to rekindle their teenage affair. Supposedly it's lighthearted, despite Despentes's track record. The festival will continue at the ICA for a few more screenings and also settle in at the Brattle and MFA.
• the Harvard Film Archive has two screenings of Paolo & Vittorio Taviani's new film Caesar Must Die on Friday (6pm) and Sunday (5pm). They also continue the L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema series, with a pair of features from the 1990s - Compensation at 9pm Friday and Daughters of the Dust at 7pm Saturday - and three different collections of featurettes at 9:15pm Saturday and 7pm Sunday & Monday.
• iMovieCafe goes with Telugu-language Shadow for the most part, although with a couple screenings of Gunde Jaari Gallanthayyinde (also Telugu) mixed in during the weekend.
• While the Somerville Theatre is booked up for IFFBoston, the Arlington Capitol picks up Oz: The Great and Powerful; it will return (along with Evil Dead, Spring Breakers, and Scary Movie 5) when the festival leaves on Tuesday.

My plans? Living at IFFBoston, and then decompressing afterward, although the Wrong/Rubber double feature is tempting.

This Week Month In Tickets: 25 March 2013 - 21 April 2013

So, between BUFF at the start of this four-week period and the chaos at the end, and being busy seeing movies and baseball in between, this has slipped. Sorry. At least there's nothing coming up to keep it from happening again...

Oh, right, IFFBoston started tonight. Well, let's hope it doesn't slip quite so much.

25 March - 31 March
1 April - 7 April
8 April - 14 April
15 April - 21 April



Not going to lie - when I left for the last day of BUFF, I was hoping that they'd be using green tickets for passholders that day. Wouldn't that have looked cool? Instead, they used purple, but also just took them instead of ripping them instead of waving us in. It's like they don't care how an obscure blog looks at all!

As you can see, it was a busy week - Lore on what I think was its last week in town, Spring Breakers, and all five days of the Boston Underground Film Festival (count 'em - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!). Plus, apparently, it was Easter or something on Sunday. Apparently that's a thing.

Spring Breakers

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

While waiting in one of the two or three lines necessary for to get into BUFF the next night, I heard a group of people dissing Stoker and praising Spring Breakers, and, man, I had a hard time imagining people being more wrong. Actually, I can - Spring Breakers is not an actual terrible movie, just one that failed to impress me.

This is where I half-expect people to tell me I didn't get it, but I think I did - I just didn't like it. Sure, writer/director Harmony Korine exaggerates the whole "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon by using actresses known for their wholesome Disney Channel material and pushing the exploitation story from semi-innocent/supposedly-empowering half-naked-girl-power into straight-up psychopathy. That's kind of clever, but it's also just about of the end of what Korine does with it. So, ha-ha, bros, that tacky thing you idiots go for is actually really vile, and I've managed to lure you into a movie that insults you by making a satire almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

It's just mean, and it's not mean to go along with an interesting story - I never cared about what James Franco's character was up to as a local gangster, nor the self-discovery of the four girls who fall in with him. It's just stuff that happens, and all Korine has done is to mock something everybody mocks already. Sure, it's better-shot and the girls (Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson) play their parts well, but, honestly, it's a parlor trick, and a boring one at that.



Stubless: Renoir at the Coolidge (10am, Sunday 7 April 2013)

After a festival, it's nice to decompress for a bit, spend some time just writing and watching baseball on TV. Well, fat chance. Starbuck was only going to be playing for that one week, Thale only for the one night, and then the Brattle did their Schlock Around the Clock even the next weekend. At least that was a fun event, with lots of spiffy 35mm prints. Thale was okay, although I hoped for a bit more from it. Starbuck was also pretty charming; I wound up quite fond of it. And while Renoir wasn't great, it certainly looked great.

I considered going to more of Schlock Around the Clock, actually, but...

Evil Dead (2013)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)

... I wanted to see the new Evil Dead with an opening weekend crowd after the sun went down and that's when I had my chance. Horror movies, like comedies, are best with a crowd to feed off each other's reactions, so even when you don't necessarily like the way other people in the theater act, it's what you have to have.

The kind of funny thing about this verison of Evil Dead is that it kind of suffers for being an "Evil Dead" movie, at least if you're familiar with the source material. Director Fede Alvarez, his writing partner Rodo Sayagues (and an uncredited Diablo Cody) put together a fine spam-in-a-can movie, no dobut, but they've also built it around Mia (Jane Levy) trying to quit drugs cold-turkey, and that suggests a story where you don't necessarily know how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is in her head. Of course, we know what Evil Dead is (and we've seen how this one opens), so that specific suspense isn't really there even though the cast is good enough to play it. There's still some more depth to the story - it ultimately becomes about being there for family as much as just random mayhem - but the dismemberment is what you're there for.

Still, Alvarez and company are able to keep this a damn fine experience in grueling horror even as they wink at the source material, tending to fake the audience out - we gird ourselves against what we remember from the original movie only to have things veer off in a new gross manner. One of the fun things about the Evil Dead series is that everybody gets to play both hero and villain at some point, and another is the copious blood, which Alvarez doesn't stint with. It's not the most original horror movie, but it is pretty intense for something with a studio behind it.



Stubless: Jurassic Park at Jordan's Furniture Reading (2:15pm, Sunday 14 April 2013)

My first trip to Fenway Park this year was a heck of a way to spend an evening - what started out as a pretty good game with the Red Sox appearing to have things in hand wound up having a pretty miserable rain delay in the middle, and then the end featured an epic ninth-inning collapse. You leave the ballpark kind of stunned after that.

But, before that, I did a couple of nights seeing things by interesting directors. Sharply different results: The Host made me downright angry at how the apparent terribleness of the source material seemed to take down a decent filmmaker in Andrew Niccol, while Christian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills wound up being right up my alley, an insistent indictment of religion, although one that seems to lead the audience to its position rather than browbeating them.

It was back to Kendall Square on Saturday night for a double feature, although that wasn't the original plan - I'd originally gone to Boston Common to see 42, only to find the showtime that worked for me wasn't in MoviePass's database. So, turn around and head back to Cambridge, pick Koch based on starting time, a likely short run, and a director Q&A, follow that up with From Up on Poppy Hill, because it's a quick turnaround.

Sunday started out as 3D-day, where I used a voucher to see the cheap show of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and then hopped a train and bus to make it to Jordan's Furniture just in time for Jurassic Park in Imax 3D. A little grocery baseball on TV and I was ready to see The Company You Keep to round the week out. I had no idea that I would kind of need to store moviegoing up!

Kokuriko-zaka kara (From Up on Poppy Hill)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #18 (first-run, DCP, English Dubbed)

When this movie got booked, I found myself grumbling a bit - while the company that distributes the movie is called "GKids", Studio Ghibli's films do have a substantial adult audience that generally prefers to see them subtitled, and since you'd no longer have to wrangle two prints to show both English and Japanese versions (even if a DCP doesn't have the subtitling and soundtrack options of a DVD, handling two hard drives shouldn't be difficult). But, no, not even the 9:10pm show is subtitled.

At least this time it's a pretty good dub. Part of the reason for it, I think, is that the screenplay (by, among others, Hayao Miyazaki) feels a little less formal than other Ghibli films involving teenagers - at least in the English-language version, these kids quip and joke with each other, and the girls aren't particularly shy or demure, even when they've got a crush on a boy. And while much of the voice casting is decent but low-key, Beau Bridges really should do more anime dubbing; he nails the bigger-than-life personality of a certain character type perfectly.

Amid all the fun, the movie throws up some serious obstacles to its first-love plot, and while it could be all gnashing of teeth, it's maturely matter-of-fact, with one character even stating that he's not going to act like he's in some TV melodrama. Director Goro Miyazaki and the writers turn the screws a little bit, recognizing that sometimes knowing something awful isn't as bad as not knowing whether something awful is true. The resolution is somewhat pat, but it's something the movie has quietly earned, so the audience isn't likely to mind.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation

* * (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, Real-D 3D)

What a peculiar thing G.I. Joe: Retaliation is - it's a direct follow-up to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, picking up on that movie's ending, but pretty much wiping the slate clean, character-wise. It's the ultimate example of the brand beign the drawas opposed to the cast or filmmakers. And, honestly, I don't really think the first needed such a complete purge - it has its weaknesses, but it was fun more often than not.

This one has a decent cast of Joes - I'm generally not going to complain about Dwayne Johnson and Adrianne Palicki starring in a movie - but the ninja stuff is kind of a waste of Lee Byung-hun, despite containing the best action scene in the movie. Bruce Willis is kind of superfluous; I can't see how the movie would be much different without him. The trouble is the villains. Johnathan Pryce, playing a master of disguise who has replaced the President of the United States, is entertaining, but clearly not the alpha villain; Luke Bracey's Cobra Commander is generic and off-screen through much of the movie.

Plus, the climax is off in every way possible. Forget the question of just how the ninjas wind up being brought into Cobra's inner circle pretty much overnight; that might be boring and easy to cut. We don't get that big special-effects scene of London being devastated until late in the last act, when having it earlier could have really defined the stakes more than "the one guy who came back from the first movie dies", and it makes the Joes' response look kind of small-potatoes.

Jurassic Park

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2013 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (20th Anniversary re-release, Imax-branded 3D)

Guys, Jurassic Park is still pretty darn awesome. Sure, it hits some of its themes without subtlety, and the characters Steven Spielberg inherited from Michael Crichton's novel are kind of thin. As a guy who loves science, I kind of hate Crichton's distrust of it, here personified in the most obnoxious way possible by Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm. But the filmmakers set out to create the best action/adventure featuring dinosaurs eve, and they succeeded.

When you've got some time, take a look at the first big action scene, when the T-Rex attacks the jeeps, and kind of marvel at how great Spielberg is at putting it together. He takes what had been kind of a funny scene - the characters being disappointed that the dinosaurs aren't showing up - and then builds the tension up just enough so that we're ready for the big jump into all-out action. There's horror movie gore in it as the goat's leg lands on the jeep, freaking the kids out, and then once the T-Rex shows up, it's a masterfully composed sequence: The dinosaur's head pushes the car, the people scramble to stay behind it, pushing down on the overturned car makes it harder to get out, this motion leads to the edge (which appears to go down forever due to a nifty 3D effect), which Alan and Lex have to climb down, leading to the car... There's a ton of moving parts, but Spielberg and cinematographer Dean Cundey always have the exact right angle to show what's going on without resorting to slow motion or just having two things smash into another and calling that action. It's one thing leading to another clearly and quickly, and right in the middle, Spielberg injects some of the themes that define his work, with a panicky Lex crying "he left us!" - referring to the lawyer who had been sharing the kids' jeep, but remember that she and Timmy are on this trip because their parents are going through a divorce, so this big action scene how has this very human dimension injected into it without reducing the crazy science fiction stuff to a mere metaphor.

Seriously, that's one of the best action sequences ever made. And there's two or three more like it coming, including some virtuoso editing when Grant & the kids are climbing the fence while Ellie & Muldoon are trying to switch the power on with Malcolm & Hammon on the other end of the walkie talkie. "Clever girl!" The can full of embryos becoming a fossil itself. "Let's hope they don't figure out how to open doors!" Tyrannosaurus Rex living up to its name. And it still looks darn good twenty years later - some of the animatronics may be a bit stiff, but the filmmakers never overreach what they can do. The 3D upgrade is nice, although only rarely a big deal. It's a shame Jordan's doesn't run genuine sideways-70mm IMAX any more; the digital projection was occasionally fuzzy, especially with things in the middle distance that maybe should have been more clear.

Then again, I was in the second row looking up at a six-story screen because I arrived just a couple minutes before showtime. Not complaining - I didn't haul my butt out to Reading to not have life-sized 3D dinosaurs in my lap - but, man, I wish Colin Treverrow was shooting the next sequel with the big cameras. That would be genuinely awesome.



Stubless: Still Mine at Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (10am, Sunday 21 April 2013) and Buster Keaton Shorts at the Brattle Theatre (7:30pm, Sunday 21 April 2013)

Also stubless: Everything horrible that happened this week. I'd figured on going to see something downtown Monday evening, but a couple of bombs at the end of the Boston Marathon scotched that. I said it elsewhere on the blog, but it's worth re-iterating: What kind of monster attacks the Marathon? The elite runners are from every country, ethnicity, and culture; the rest are just ordinary people doing something very difficult, often as a way to raise money for charity. I went straight home instead, and then mostly continued a busy week as normal until I got text messages on the way out the door on Friday, telling me to turn on the TV. That's when I heard of the mess the previous night and that the T wouldn't be running. I let WCVB run, but mostly went into the back room and tried to work.

It wasn't really an act of defiance, trying to do normal stuff; I just get antsy doing nothing. I went to Antiviral after the "shelter-in-place" order was lifted, because I wanted to see it and the Saturday midnight show was out of the question (I wanted to see Still Mine there Sunday morning, and the folks at the theater probably wouldn't let me spend the night). I was glad to see a fair amount of other people out that night; if we were making a statement, I guess, it was that as much as the attack angered us, we were going to treat it as an irritant, rather than life-changing.

I wouldn't be free of it right away; I had tickets for Saturday's ballgame, where security was tighter than usual but the pregame ceremonies were, as usual on such a big day, excellent. That's the game that will probably become known as the "our fucking city" game, which was actually great baseball in addition to being cathartic: David Ortiz came back from injury, Mike Napoli and Daniel Nava continued murdering baseballs, and Clay Buchholz continued to be a beast. I did have to to scratch my heads at some of the drunks doing "USA!" chants - I mean, I love my country, but this was a local attack, with the man who had been captured a citizen. It's okay to be provincial at times, even if an "us versus them" mindset generally does more harm than good.

Anyway: Movies happened again after that; I headed to Boston Common for Oblivion, then slept fast enough to get to Still Mine in the morning - got there early but was seated at the last moment, having waited like half an hour for a crepe and a smoothie. I limped home because my new shoes were digging into my ankles in a really painful way (#BostonStrong!), re-emerging just in time for Not So Silent Cinema's Buster Keaton Shorts, because Buster Keaton.

Antiviral

* * (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run/@fter Midnite, digital)

I wanted to like this movie more than many I've seen in some time; Brandon Cronenberg's first feature has him doing the same sort of grotesque, satirical body-horror that his father made his name with but has eventually moved away from. And Cronenberg fils certailly has enough cool ideas to be worth watching, but he also doesn't seem to have his father's skill at teasing a story out of it that makes the audience shake as well as squirm.

Antiviral isn't really boring, at least, but it is kind of nonsensical. I can deal with a world where people eat 3D-printed meat grown from the DNA of celebrities and pay to contract their recent illnesses; I don't know where faking one's death makes any sense in it, though. The motives of the characters seemed vague rather than alien. The late bits about corporate ruthlessness didn't quite have the teeth of the attacks on celebrity culture.

I'm kind of torn on whether I wish Caleb Landry Jones and Sarah Gadon had better characters to play, too. Gadon, especially; she was good in Cronenberg pêre's Cosmopolis last year, and her character here has the potential for a tragic arc disproving the "celebrities are not people" assertion from earlier on in the movie as she suffers out of the limelight, but there's an argument for keeping her cryptic as well. It doesn't quite work out for me, though - I see the ideas, but I have a hard time getting excited about them.

Oblivion

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2013 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)

Here's something to ponder - if Oblivion had come out thirty-ish years ago, I would have wanted all the toys from it. Today, big sci-fi epics are so common that there's no toy line for this at all, despite it being full of cool and merchandisable things.

Kind of surprising, because it sort of feels like the kind of movie that's built to sell toys; it's a bunch of not hugely original ideas pieced together in a fairly capable form. Actually, "fairly capable" undersells it - co-writer/director Joseph Kosinski executes this movie very well indeed - he stages actions scenes that look cool and are easy to follow, and knows how to give something expressionless and mechanical genuine menace. He deploys Tom Cruise well, and while Cruise may sort of be aging out of this sort of movie (he's noticeably older than his female co-stars in close-up), he has an easy charisma in the part, as much as you can when you start a movie with "after a mandatory memory wipe..."

The story fits together, more or less - it's easy to find holes but just as easy to smooth them over (though I think I might have preferred it without the opening narration). It's a shame that they couldn't come up with a more clever line for the climax than the one f-bomb PG-13 allows. The music by M83 is pretty great - it's modern and driving without feeling particularly unusual (Kosinski apparently has a knack for this; the Daft Punk soundtrack was arguably the best part of Tron: Legacy). The supporting cast is nice, although there's no question that the movie is about Tom Cruise with a side of Morgan Freeman.

And, man, there is stuff in it that would make great toys.

Buster Keaton Shorts

Weird thing - I think I've seen all four Buster Keaton shorts presented relatively recently. Within the last couple years, anyway. I've already got reviews for "The Goat" and "One Week" elsewhere, so I'll leave those to be read in those posts (the one which includes "The Goat" has just been crazy popular over the last few weeks; I'm guessing someone linked to it when talking about the Somerville Theatre's upcoming silent series). But let's get to the other two!

"The High Sign"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Not-So-Silent-Cinema, digital)

A thoroughly goofy short which has Buster tossed off a train, disrespect some cops, then stumble into the service of both a fiendish secret society and the man they intend to assassinate while working at a shooting gallery, and then fight villains off in a house filled with secret passages and trap doors. All within twenty minutes! It's a remarkable dense bit of silent comedy, with more intricate set-pieces than many current features have.

Some bits of the setting and humor are dated, but nothing that relies on Buster's ingenuity both as a filmmaker and a character. It's actually an amazing bit of filmmaking, both technically and in pacing, even if it does include some jokes early on that are only amusing, rather than gut-busting.

"Cops"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Not-So-Silent-Cinema, digital)

"Cops" once again finds Buster Keaton in trouble with the law, as he was with "The Goat", this time as a love-struck but trouble-finding young man whose attempts to make enough money to woo the mayor's daughter find him accidentally committing a number of crimes, until finally the city's whole police force is after him.

Like almost all Keaton films, it's frequently very funny, especially since Keaton has a knack for escalation, even within the confines of a short. Some of the gags here aren't necessarily among his funniest - some are undoubtedly funnier in the context of the 1920s, some just have a set-up that victimizes people in a way that's not entirely amusing - but it's got a pretty good chase or two, and it's quite funny to watch Buster dig himself into a bigger and bigger hole.

Made it this far? Have yourself some Horrible Photography!



That there is Not-So-Silent Cinema, taken from the Brattle's balcony. Kyle Tuttle plays banjo, Brendan Cooney is on keyboards (he also composed the scores), and Andy Bergman plays clarinet & jaw harp.

One of the reasons it's always fun to see silent movies is that with new accompaniment, it's not quite like seeing a new movie, but it's a new experience. For instance, NSSC puts a lot of bluegrass into their scores, a fun and energetic sound for comedies like this which feels more or less period-appropriate, especially in the more pastoral shorts. Cooney is also an entertaining narrator, tossing in information that may or may not be true but is fun to hear nevertheless.

They're a fun group. Their main April tour has completed, but their website shows a few early-May shows in Newton and Bethlehem, PA, if you happen to be in that area - a trip well worth taking.


There, the end. Now, to write up Next Week and then get to working on IFFBoston stuff!