Things Never Said

Well, I didn't figure on two days of surprise cast-member appearances this weekend. Though one of the guys from a 1985 Hong Kong kung fu breakdancing romantic comedy just happening to be in the Boston area and coming around to greet people at Friday night's Films at the Gate screening was probably the more unlikely one, having the volume go down during the credits for Things Never Said and having one of the co-stars stand up from his seat and say hi was probably the bigger one:



Yep, we're using the horrible photography tag today; movie theater auditoriums just aren't built for people snapping pictures with phones. Anyway, that's Elimu Nelson, who plays the protagonist's husband Ronnie. He grew up in Milton, MA, and I gather he was in town when the movie played the Roxbury Film Festival as well. Him being there seemed to take most, if not all, of the audience by surprise; I wouldn't be shocked if you had to be on a mailing list to find out about it, since AMC theaters don't exactly have the sort of websites that alert audiences to this.

I've got no idea how much longer Nelson's going to hang around; he may already have gone elsewhere, or might plan to be there through Thursday. It's worth a visit just for being a good movie, that he's there to tell you that Omari Hardwick wrote his own poem and writer/director Charles Murray didn't hear it until shooting started is gravy.

Anyway, the rest of what he said (and the rest of my thoughts) are kind of spoilery, so they're at the bottom, after the EFC linkage.

Things Never Said

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2013 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, DCP)

Things Never Said, while it spends a lot of time on spoken word performances, enough for it to be a major focus of the film and the way most people recommending it will describe it to others, isn't necessarily about poetry, and the last few scenes tell that to the audience in no uncertain terms. It's at that point that it becomes clear that writer/director Charles Murray has done something quite clever - he's made a movie about something that can unfairly define a person that presents everyone involved as well-rounded characters. That is not something you see every day, and worth checking out.

It does start with spoken word, though, specifically that of Kalindra Stepney (Shanola Hampton), a young woman in Los Angeles who has only been writing and orating for about a year, but is making plans to go to New York for a month, work as a waitress at the famous New Yorican Café and learn from all the great poets who frequent it. Her best friend Daphne (Tamala Jones) encourages it; her husband Ronnie (Elimu Nelson), not so much. Things get more complicated when she meets Curtis (Omari Hardwick), a non-performing poetry lover who appreciates that part of her life a lot more than Ronnie does. And he's handsome, too.

There's a montage near the start of the movie that wordlessly summarizes Kalindra's and Ronnie's life together up until that point, and just for doing that, and doing it well, rather than having the characters tell each other things they already know or awkwardly work those details into conversation, it's a nice move by Murray. That something eyebrow-raising grabs a couple of seconds but doesn't quite dominate makes it an interesting sign of things to come, and that it's not referenced immediately afterward lets it be part of a more complex situation than it might otherwise be. That's a neat trick; while Murray doesn't claim there's a moral gray area for reprehensible acts, but he doesn't allow them to wholly define these people, and it carries through the film and applies to multiple characters.

Full review at EFC.

SPOILERS!

It's a bit odd to use the spoiler alerts for a movie that's not really about late-act plot twisting, but like I said, a great deal of what impressed me about this movie was how it handled domestic violence. By which I mean, stealthily for much of the runtime. As much as the movie seems to be advertised as being about writing poetry and performing spoken word and not giving up your dreams, there seems to be little enough mention of how men hitting women is one of the primary means by which dreams are potentially crushed, even though the movie's coda spells out pretty damn clearly that this is a big part of what Murray wants audiences to take away from it.

And while this is the sort of thing that can seem like a bait-and-switch, or a filmmaker trying to attach an important social message to a movie that was about something else, I approve of it here in large part because you almost have to handle it this way to talk about it intelligently. Spousal abuse is something that right-thinking people tend to treat with a zero-tolerance attitude - which they should! And while I don't have too much trouble with treating a man who hits his wife or girlfriend as a social leper who is going to have to do something so great I can't even conceive of it before I treat him like a human being again, it also tars the victims, if only because it becomes a label, where they're someone's punching bag first rather their own people with a lot more going on than that. And that sucks.

So I appreciate that about Things Never Said - at no point did I think of Kalindra primarily as a victim. She's a poet, she's someone who married too young, she's someone who saw what happened with her parents and who, despite being quite smart, isn't able to extricate herself from the same situation cleanly. I like her, disagree with her, and never have to settle for pitying her. That pleases me no end.

I am, at times, a little queasy about the characters on the other end of the act. As one of the folks in the audience told Mr. Nelson, she really liked him until he hit Kalindra. That's a reminder of the lazy way many films will use domestic violence - a cheap way to make sure you don't like character X. Murray does seem to do better than that - there's still something likable about Ronnie afterward, and the storyline with Kalindra's father does raise the question of whether an abuser can reform enough not to be hated. I wonder about that - it's the sort of violence that we exempt from forgiveness, but is being unforgiving itself a virtue? And does the fact that the writer and director is a man play into it.

The ambiguity isn't a bad thing, though - we should wrestle with this, and that's what makes Things Never Said more impressive than the standard "chasing your dreams" movie.

!SRELIOPS

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 13 September - 19 September 2013

You know the Red Sox are just rolling when I look at how a cool movie event overlaps with a series against the Yankees, and I don't wring my hands over how impossible it will be to see both. The Sox just have this.

• The cool event this weekend is Films at the Gate, the Asain Community Development Corporation's annual event where they set up a projector near the Chinatown gate and project Chinese movies for anyone who shows. It's fun - you stop to get some take-out in Chinatown beforehand, watch lion-dancing and martial-arts demonstrations, and then some cool flicks. This year, all three nights are at the Rose Kennedy Greenway rather than the vacant lot, and all look fun: Mismatched Couples on Friday (an early Donnie Yen film where he and Yuen Woo-ping are breakdancing as much as fighting), Shaw Brothers classic Heroes of the East on Saturday, and 2004 kung-fu fantasy White Dragon on Sunday. Come, it's fun!
  
  (You know what would make a ton of sense? If China Lion showed up with Tiny Tales 2 and passes for My Lucky Star, or Well Go USA did the same with The Rooftop and Ip Man: The Final Fight. Two mainstream Chinese movies in the USA opening next week, great platform for promoting them in Boston. Do that next year, guys!)
• It's an easy walk from there to Boston Common, so I'll probably be doing some double features that way. One of those will likely include The Family, Luc Besson's new film about a mafia family headed up by Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer relocated to France as part of the witness protection program, with Tommy Lee Jones as the officer looking after them. Hopefully Besson and the pretty-nice cast outweigh the DeNiro + comedy = laziness equation. It plays the Capitol, Apple, Fenway, Boston Common, and the SuperLux.
  
  Also opening wide: Insidious Chapter 2, the sequel to what I've heard was a pretty good horror movie, with most of the cast and the original writer & director returning. Good sign! This one's at Somerville, Apple, Boston Common, and Fenway. Funny thing: I had no idea whether I'd seen Insidious but missed Sinister or vice versa up until tonight.
  
  Boston Common also picks up Things Never Said, which features Shanola Hampton as an unknown poet out west who dreams of performing at a legendary New York venue, although her husband (Elimu Nelson) is holding her back and then some. Also, every place playing One Direction: This Is Us will be getting an "extended fan cut" this weekend.
• Kendall Square gets three new independent movies this weekend, all comedies: Drinking Buddies is the new comedy from Joe Swanberg, in which two co-workers are perfect for each other but are already in other relationships. It's got his biggest-name cast yet - Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston, and Jake Johnson - and really puts this indie-oriented guy in the mainstream. Of course, he's so prolific that the film he made after this (24 Exposures) is already playing festivals.
  
  They've also got another American indie, Afternoon Delight, in which Katherine Hahn plays a bored wife who hires a stripper (Juno Temple) as her live-in nanny. The one-week booking is another comedy, this one from France: Populaire, which is a throwback to 1950s romances with Déborah François as an girl who can type at incredible speed despite otherwise being a terrible secretary, with Romain Duris as the boss who discovers there are competitions for such things. Bérénice Bejo of The Artist has a supporting role, too.
• Woody Allen movies can just set up shop in the Coolidge so that there's no change there for like a month, aside from midnights. That's when the closest thing they've got to a new release, the infamous The Canyons, and that's apparently only in the screening room on Friday & Saturday nights. The big house, meanwhile, gets An American Hippie in Israel, a re-release of a 1972 psychedelic "classic". The Monday night "Science on Screen" selection, Memento, is listed as sold out, but they've also got a special screening of documentary Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve playing at the same time. Another doc, Letters to Jackie: Remembering President Kennedy, plays in the big room on Thursday night.
• The Regent Theatre actually gets Letters to Jackie first, with two shows on Tuesday the 17th. That means the Gathr Preview Series screening of Zero Charisma is bumped to Monday. I wasn't fond of it, but a lot of people are. There are a couple more film screenings this week, as well: August to June: Bringing Life to School is the first in a series of documentaries presented by the National Institute for Student-Centered Education over the coming months, and Dream Theater: Live at Luna Park is a king-sized concert film (160 minutes) that plays Thursday night.
• The Brattle Theatre continues Recent Raves this week with some smaller movies that one might have missed in a busy year: Friday night has a dobule feature of Frances Ha and The To Do List (35mm), while Saturday is Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing (though a Harvard Book Store event with Bob Odenkirk & David Cross makes the schedule a bit odd). Museum Hours plays Sunday, Leviathan on Monday, a double-feature of Byzantium (finally!) & Berberian Sound Studio on Wednesday, and Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited on Thursday. That leaves a whole on Tuesday, which is reserved for a Balagan presentation of Consuming Spirits, an animated film that Chris Sullivan (appearing in person) shot on 16mm over the course of fifteen years.
• the Harvard Film Archive wound up one summer series last weekend, so they're starting something new on Friday: Nuvove Visioni: Italian Cinema Now, which (just like it sounds) focuses on contemporary movies from Italy. This week features Piazza Fontana: the Italian Conspiracy (Friday 7pm), The Mouth of the Wolf (Friday 9:30pm), The Interval (Saturday 7pm), and As the Shadow (Sunday 5pm). That leaves time for just one Complete Alfred Hitchcock picture, Spellbound at 9:30pm on Saturday. Sunday and Monday nights feature a tribute to Anne Charlotte Robertson, a local experimental filmmaker who passed away last year and whose collection is now part of the archive. And now that school is back in session, there are occasional free VES screenings, with this Tuesday featuring "The Baloonatic" and The Last Laugh.
• The MFA continues to screen Portrait of Jason, with shows Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday. They've also got more of the Matías Piñeiro retrospective with Viola playing Friday, Saturday, Sunday, & Wednesday; Rosalinda on Friday, Saturday, & Sunday; and They All Lie joining the rotation on Thursday. Also popping up is The Wall, an Austrian film about a woman (Martina Gedeck of The Lives of Others who is suddenly and inexplicably cut off from the rest of humanity by a mysterious wall.
• ArtsEmerson has another two screenings of Truth in Translation on Friday & Saturday as part of the Global Arts Project. They also re-start their Bright Lights program on Tuesday the 17th with alumnus Allison Gillette's documentary Cow Power (about a Vermont program to generate power from manure), while Thursday the 19th brings Ameer Got His Gun, a narrative about a Muslim Israeli citizen who joins the army.
• iMovieCafe opens Grand Masti at Apple Cinemas this week; it's a sequel to a 2004 comedy that reunites the original writers, director, and actors playing three guys in another sticky situation. There's also shows of Telugu-langauge Kiss.
• The Capitol will be showing Quentin Tarantino movies in the main theater through September, with Pulp Fiction playing Friday & Saturday at 10:30pm.

My plans? Films at the Gate, The Family, The Canyon, Drinking Buddies, Byzantium (which was supposed to pay Kendall Square back in July but never showed), maybe Things Never Said and a few other things.

Closed Circuit

I hadn't been in one of the Somerville's even-numbered screens since the post-IFFBoston upgrade. Still got the center aisle, but huzzah for more legroom!

As to the movie itself, I spend a fair amount of time in the review complaining that I've seen its conspiracy material before and done with more excitement. It makes me wonder if there's a good movie to be made along the lines of my reaction to this: Given that post-9/11 America has more or less accepted that the government is corporate-controlled, Constitutional protections are apparently easily avoided, and the President can send flying robot assassins after "enemy combatants" without a lot of due process - and the press seems more or less toothless in the face of heavily-redacted documents and explanations that boil down to "national security, trust us" - what would have to happen to shake us up? What's the moment of overreach that provokes a reaction?

I mean, the stuff we see in Closed Circuit and read on the net is appalling, but we're numb. And while I'm pretty sure that I'd be shocked and angry if this played out in real life, I'm not sure. I definitely know that I need more in a movie now, though, and the fact that I'm not saying "this is ridiculous, democratic governments don't do this" instinctively, or requiring an extraordinary bastard of a villain (which Jim Broadbent provides, but not as a singular force) is worrisome.

Closed Circuit

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 September 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)

It says something about humanity, the world we live in, or perhaps just me personally, that I'm bored by the brand of paranoia that keeps Closed Circuit running. Is that in spite of how visible abuse of power has become, or because of it? I'm not sure. It creates a strange paradox, though: What should be dry legal procedure here here becomes a lot more intriguing than the life-and-limb stuff it leads to.

The court case that sets the action in motion is trial of Farroukh Erdogan (Denis Moschitto), a Turkish immigrant who is accused of masterminding the explosion that killed dozens in a London outdoor market six months prior. His barrister has committed suicide, so a new attorney, Martin Rose (Eric Bana) is starting from scratch very close to the trial. The wrinkle is that because some of the evidence is far too sensitive to put into the hands of a suspected terrorist or his representative, a special advocate, Claudia Simmons-Howe (Rebecca Hall) is assigned to review the material separately and argue for its inclusion in closed court. They are not allowed to have any contact, and thus conceal that they are former lovers. As they individually discover that something doesn't smell right, Martin is contacted by an American reporter (Julia Stiles), while Claudia is watched by a friendly spy (Riz Ahmed).

Writer Steven Knight asks an interesting question here: How does one conduct a fair trial in situations like this, where the demands of justice and security seem to oppose each other so directly? As dull as legal maneuvering might seem to the layman, this situation provides both a clearly-stated problem and a potentially unique way to structure the plot with two leads working separately that could serve as commentary on the situation - does dividing the labor in this way put the defendant at an inherent disadvantage? Could the prosecution be hoisted on their own petard because Claudia might supply Martin with evidence he wouldn't think to look for himself? There's material for a pretty great courtroom drama in this set-up.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 2 September 2013 - 8 September 2013

Shortish week because of the holiday, so I spent some time lollygagging at home and parceling my movie-watching out, for the most part.



Stubless: The rest of online screeners I watched fromt Fantasia: The Grand Heist on Monday morning, Horror Stories that night, and Across the River on Tuesday the 3rd. Plus, I gave Go Down Death another view on Wednesday, just to get names because I didn't take notes back in Montreal, and, wow, that thing makes a lot less sense when you're awake and alert

Theatrically, the work week went to indie/foreign stuff that got written up for eFilmCritic: Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster is pretty darn good, though I look forward to seeing the un-Weinsteined version; A Single Shot has its good points but doesn't quite have the nifty twists that make for a great bag-of-money film; and Short Term 12 is generally excellent.

That leaves the weekend, where I tried to fit moviegoing in around the Red Sox clobbering the Yankees on TV. Family Plot and Under Capricorn were the latest HItchcock movies I saw at the HFA, and they were better than OK. I was happy to get a new Riddick movie, even if it was kind of franchise servicing more than something great on its own. And though I didn't get to Somerville on time to see Harold Lloyd's The Freshman on Sunday, that did make it fairly easy to fit in Prince Avalanche.

That means I saw both Vin Diesel and David Gordon Green go back to what they do best on consecutive days. The means by which they did so were obviously different, although the results weren't bad in either case.

Baramgwa hamjje sarajida (The Grand Heist)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

For all the noir, caper, and pulp material I've consumed in my life, I don't know how many times I've ever actually heard someone refer to the jewels they were looking to steal as "ice", and I don't know if that's part of the vernacular in Korean. Even taking that as a given, the gimmick of The Grand Heist - a rag-tag group of thieves who are actually looking to steal big blocks of ice - still makes me grin. That it turns out to be a pretty entertaining caper movie on its own doesn't hurt.

After all, it does the two things an audience wants this sort of movie to do well: It sets up a robbery that is sufficiently complex to take up a full-length feature but whose parts can be grasped fairly readily - and which can be swapped out by last-minute snafus or hidden for double-crosses and surprises - and which the audience doesn't really mind happening. Then it assembles a team to do it which is a lot of fun, both in terms of the odd couple leading things and the entertaining array of specialists who help out. Add a smooth directorial hand like Kim Joo-ho's, and you're in business.

If there's a flaw, it's with how much time Director Kim and writer Kim Min-sung spend setting up the antagonists. While they may play much less confusingly to Korean audiences than Western ones, and they actually do a good job of making the actions of a nineteenth-century Korean monarchy an easy metaphor for the incestuous relationship between government and contractors in a modern democracy, it's actually some time before the good guys are teaming up and getting together, and the story only really needs one guy to serve as a target at the end. That's a quibble, though; the rest of the movie is pretty much the breezy fun it hopes to be.

Mooseowon Iyagi (Horror Stories)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

You could get a lot of horror anthology action at Fantasia this year, between this, Hong Kong's Tales From the Dark, and America's V/H/S/2. One thing that I find interesting, looking at the three, is that curation can in some ways be as important as individual scary segments. Tales had a common author's works as source material, and V/H/S/2 had a unifying feature that at least had room for variety. Horror Stories seemed to be four or five teams working separately and pasting things together, and while they avoided stepping on each other, the end result felt kind of sloppy.

There are certainly good moments throughout, whether in terms of being scary, gory, or what-the-heck?-inducing. One thing I found very problematic, though, was that every single segment seemed to include a "no, hang on, this is what really happened" moment, and while those can be great, the first was just so screwy as to make the whole thing unsatisfying, and by the end... Well, it's no longer shocking, is it? Someone, it seems, should have been told to play it straight.

Horror Stories has moments, though, and you only need one or two for a quality horror short, most of which deliver. That's not the greatest result, but it's not a bad one.

Oltre il Guado (Across the River)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I get the feeling that when the time comes to do a full write-up of Across the River, I'm not going to have a whole lot to say. It is, after all, a pretty minimalist movie - guy goes alone into the woods, weird stuff happens, and there's a real possibility that nobody is coming out again. There's almost no dialog and backstory is parceled out in miserly fashion toward the end.

It does pretty well in the atmosphere department, though. Start from how the woods is inherently creepy, add a crossing of running water that filmmaker Lorenzo Bianchini makes far more portentious than it logically may be, and give away so little that it's not even clear whether what's hidden in these woods is cryptozoologic or paranormal - or what the motives of the researcher we spend most of our time following are, and things get thoroughly unnerving. Bianchini knows what he's doing, though - he appropriates found-footage techniques without ever making it that sort of film, and he never feels like he's holding back just to string the audience along.

Would I like it if he were a little less stingy? Yeah, a bit, although he avoids the feeling of only having part of a movie that this sort of project often has. But I'll bet that if I'd seen it in the festival setting, I would have jumped more and been more thoroughly creeped out. It's got a good Blair Witch vibe to it, and could use the effect of people jumping.

Riddick

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 September 2013 in AMC Boston Common #17 (first-run, DCP)

So, what, am I supposed to move these movies from "R" from "C"on my shelves now? I already moved Pitch Black from "P"!

I kid, but this silly complaint demonstrates the sort of dilemma this movie inspires; like Curse of Chucky (which I'll be getting to relatively soon), it's built to be a sort of soft-reset of the franchise, although there's actually enough material that references the previous movies that audiences are either actively encouraged to find them on Netflix or are assumed to have already done so over the past decade. For a back-to-basics movie, it carries a bit of mythology.

And yet, I kind of like that it does, not just because I've absorbed that stuff and want to be rewarded, but because when you combine it with the narration the title character provides, the movie suddenly gets a film noir/pulp sort of atmosphere: Riddick (Vin Diesel) feels like he's losing a step, and while he's still big, powerful, and very dangerous, there is a certain amount of wear on him. Heck, Richard B. Riddick sounds like a film noir anti-hero, which is a pretty cool approach for a movie that doesn't ape that genre but instead throws its character into the middle of Aliens.

The end result does feel a little calculated - this is the movie that Diesel and writer/director David Twohy could make for $35M in the hopes that it will do well enough to make the big "Underverse" movie that was going to be Chronicles of Riddick II. It's not a bad movie at all - it looks pretty spiffy, it's got some quality monsters, a reasonably enjoyable cast of supporting characters (though the females could use some work; Katee Sackhoff is great but not exactly well-served here). It's just very much Pitch Black redux, with Riddick pushed into a lead role rather than part of an ensemble. And, hey, I liked Pitch Black and am glad to see more. I just hope that Diesel & Twohy get to finish the series the way they intend, because even this scaled-back entry shows that they've got a universe they want to grow and a story they want to tell.

Family Plot

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 September 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Hitchcock, 35mm)

It's kind of a weird thing to see Hitchcock rubbing against the present day like this. Family Plot, Hitchcock's final film, has a number of people involved that I think of not for how they're involved in classics but for how they're around in the present: Composer John Williams, for example. The cast of Barbara Harris, Bruce Dern, William Devane, and Karen Black. Now, they're all either aged or have recently passed (RIP, Ms. Black), but that 50-plus-year career is something kind of amazing.

And while it didn't end on a masterpiece, Family Plot is a very entertaining little movie. It's premise of dueling teams of crooks - one relatively benign, one being revealed as ever-more malevolent - sets things up in an entertainingly amoral fashion, and Hitchcock seems to have a good time getting the two groups to circle each other. It's a fun cast, too, and the master's trademark dark humor pops up in unexpected places.

It does feel kind of tired in some spots, though. There's a car chase toward the end, for instance, where Barbara Harris is panicking and climbing all over Bruce Dern that feels like a leftover bit from a screwball comedy decades older, and it never quite works with the modern style the rest of the production tends toward. It's interesting that Hitchcock's last movie, Frenzy, seemed to embrace the 1970s without any problem, perhaps because there were boundaries to push there, but he wasn't sure ow to be lighthearted in this new environment.

Prince Avalanche

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Hitchcock, 35mm)

Remember a few years ago, when David Gordon Green was making stoner comedies with James Franco and we all (for certain definitions of "we all") wished he would go back to the quiet, character-based indies with which he made his name? There are moments when Prince Avalanche seems like an admonition to be careful what you wish for, because it's small to the point of being undetectable, and seems a bit like a conscious effort to be such.

And in some ways, it never really escapes that It's not quite the self-consciously limited thing Riddick is (to something this movie's makers probably didn't figure on being compared to), but there's a theatricality to how Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch both portray fairly obtuse characters who recognize what is ridiculous about the other but not themselves that works on stage but seems kind of artificial on film. Meanwhile, this is a fairly cinematic production, with Green and cinematographer Tim Orr shooting the heck out of Texas backroads. Odd combination, although something about it fits together and works, especially with the late-80s post-wildfire timeframe: It's just similar enough to be familiar most of the time, but without the cell phones and internet access that would have sped the story up too much.

For as good as Rudd and Hirsch wind up being, though, there is an element of frustration to this movie: A bit toward the end is screwy for the sake of being screwy, and the rest of the last act is kind of... I don't know, facile? Clichéd? Or just kind of annoying, in that Green sets up the question of how these two characters can get along if the connection that originally linked them is severed, and all they can come up with is "get drunk and throw stuff around". Maybe that happens in real life, but it just seems like a cop-out or shortcut, and leaves a bad aftertaste, like after spending an hour and a half putting pieces in place, all he needed to do was randomly smash them together.

Under Capricorn

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2013 in the Harvard F (first-run, DCP)

It was mentioned at the screening for Jamaica Inn that Hitchcock really didn't like doing period pieces, and he certainly did far fewer of them than one might expect given the time period when he was most active. And whether because of a lack of enthusiasm or as a trigger for it, Under Capricorn is definitely one of his lesser films; there's a spark that's missing that can be found even in movies that are more egregious failures.

What can't be avoided, I think, is that this one feels much like any other period piece, only mismatched. Michael Wilding's Charles Adare seems like a standard-issue fop, for instance, and though he's the character the audience shares the most perspective with, he seems to bounce through too randomly even through the events where he's a major actor. Ingrid Bergman has to play Hettie Flusky as a fairly theatrical alcoholic (with an accent that can generously be described as "not Irish"), and Jospeh Cotton has the bad luck of not being on-screen for the scene that defines his character.

That scene is pretty great, though - Bergman suddenly reaches out and grabs the movie, and she turns it into a viable romance almost through sheer force of will. The script takes that sequence and creates a conundrum that is interesting even if the way out isn't quite so much, though Margaret Leighton makes her chief housekeeper a heck of a Lady MacBeth. It becomes a serviceable-enough movie, just not quite what one would expect from the people involved.

Short Term 12

Not a whole lot to say beyond the review here - this is a pretty darn good movie. As mentioned in the review, it's the sort of movie you expect to see in a festival but not necessarily in wide (or even limited) release. It's an odd sort of movie, in that one doesn't exactly want it reduced to the size of a TV, but which is still too intimate in scale to necessarily be shared with a crowd. There's a crowd at festival screenings, of course, but it's one selected to potentially more connected to what's on screen than the crowd around them. It's different; there's fewer people there just on a whim or because that's what was showing when they arrived at the theater.

Or I may be full of crap and trying to find patterns where there aren't any. I don't quite think so, though.

Short Term 12

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 5 September 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run, 2K DCP)

That Short Term 12 did very well on the festival circuit is no surprise, but that it managed to get into theaters afterward is a pleasant one. It's pretty great, but it's also the sort of observational movie where the plot emerges rather than announces itself. Those can be wonderful things, but hard sells. Worth it, though, in cases like this.

"Short Term 12" is a county-sponsored group home for at-risk teenagers; though the intention is generally for them to be there weeks or months, it's not uncommon for kids like almost-eighteen-year-old Marcus (Keith Stanfield) to age out. The folks overseeing them are not a whole lot older: Grace (Brie Larson), who reports in to a supervisor but is in charge at the house, is in her mid-twenties, with her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.) and their co-worker Jessica (Stephanie Beatriz) about the same age; the new guy, Nate (Rami Malek), is just out of college. Also new: Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), a cutter who clearly reminds Grace a lot of herself at the same age, sometimes showing just how much she has and hasn't been able to move forward since her own time in places like this.

Though writer/director Destin Cretton (who had previously done a short-film version of the story) initially seems to set things up for the audience to be guided through this environment alongside Nate, he wastes no time in making it clear that Grace is the main focus of the story, although the troubled kids around her are not just going to be props that exist as her reflection. Brie Larson, then, is charged with making Grace singular enough to command the audience's attention without exactly standing out, and she does so in the best way. Her reaction to everything that puts pressure on Grace is note-perfect - the audience can feel the stress on her - but she never becomes larger-than-life; even when acting out, she never feels like she's performing. She's got a personality beyond her issues.

Full review at EFC.

The Grandmaster and the Ip Man poly-narrative

When you visit eFilmCritic to read the rest of the review of The Grandmaster, take a moment to select Peter Sobcynski's review and read that one, in part because Peter's a fine writer who arrives at roughly the same conclusion I did but also because he gets there from a somewhat opposite direction, basically looking at it as "The New Wong Kar-wai Movie". There's a lot of that in my write-up as well, but I can't help but look at it as "The New Ip Man Movie".

Ip Man, after all, has been a staple of my festival-going for the past four-plus years: I saw Ip Man at Fantasia in 2009, Ip Man 2 at New York Asian Film Festival in 2010, Ip Man: The Legend Is Born at Fantasia in 2011, and Ip Man: The Final Fight at Fantasia, just a bit more than a month ago. A part of me really wishes the release dates could have worked out a little differently (and Grandmaster could have played Fantasia) to make this an annual event.

Aside from being an example of how Hong Kong can absolutely beat something to death when it becomes a fad, though, it explains why I scratched my head a bit at a thing or two in his review. He mentions that the bit noting how Bruce Lee was Ip Man's student seems kind of shoehorned in, and, well, compared to what the other movies about the guy, it's pretty restrained. He also mentioned finding the movie hard to follow and having to look stuff up, while I thought it was fairly straightforward. Then again, I didn't have to look things up because I've been absorbing various versions of this story for a while, and already knew the framework.

It's interesting to consider how these five movies merge into one story as a result. It was fairly clear that large chunks of Ip Man 2 and The Legend Is Born were made up from whole cloth, but there were enough things in common with the other movies that I feel comfortable considering them reasonably factual. Still, it's entirely possible to have thoroughly different ideas of how much time Ip Man's wife Wing-sing spent in Hong Kong: Ip Man 2 made it seem like she and their whole family moved there with him (and that they were still relatively prosperous with no children starving to death); The Final Fight has her there briefly with Ip her husband having a chaste friendship with a lounge singer after she returns home to Foshan; while Grandmasters never shows her visiting Hong Kong at all, implying that she was never there and the only thing that kept him from reuniting with the love of his life was her vow.

Gong Er being such a central character here was initially kind of weird for me at first, as she doesn't seem to be mentioned in the other movies at all. Which in reality means nothing; all biographical movies pick and choose what to emphasize and eliminate or composite people around that. Still, it was strange that someone so central hadn't been mentioned before. And yet, when I first heard the word "opium" connected to her, my brain happily seized upon how this connected to how thoroughly disdainful Ip was of the drug in The Final Fight.

I suspect that a few years down the line, these five movies (or more; I've heard Donnie Yen is doing Ip Man 3D, and I've still got the Chinese cut of this to watch) will have blended into one semi-contradictory narrative for me. In general, that our brain does this is a good thing. It's how we learn. But I'm glad there's stuff that reinforces each other and diminishes other parts, if only so that I'm not sure Ip Man had a Japanese sleeper agent as a foster brother.

Yi dai zong shi (The Grandmaster)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 September 2013 in AMC Boston Common (first-run, DCP)

Wong Kar-wai is a notoriously slow worker in a movie industry that can turn things over with ruthless efficiency, and as evidence I present the four movies about martial-arts master Ip Man (by two different directors and starring three different actors) produced between his announcing this film as his next project and the thing hitting screens. And while it's a little difficult for those who have eaten those up to avoid the feeling of having been there and done that as a result, a new WKW movie is an event in and of itself, and this one doesn't disappoint.

It starts in 1930s Foshan, where highly-skilled wing chun practitioner Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is chosen as the southern representative to spar with visiting northern grandmaster Gong Yuitan (Wang Qing-xiang) to begin work on the unification of the two regions' fighting styles in advance of the inevitable Japanese invasion. Gong is retiring, and while he has chosen a successor in Ma San (Zhang Jin), he has only taught the 64 Hands style to his daughter Ruomei (Zhang Ziyi), familiarly called "Gong Er". A connection forms between Ip Man and Gong Er, but the Sino-Japanese war will prevent them from meeting again until 1950, when both are refugees in Hong Kong, and soon cut off from their homes in what is now the People's Republic.

At least in the American cut screened, The Grandmaster starts with action, a big fight scene choreographed by Yuen Wo-ping, which quickly establishes Ip Man's prowess against a crowd and offers a nice preview of what's to come. Like many of the fights in the movie, this isn't so much a battle of good versus evil, or even people with opposing interests, but of masters testing themselves against each other. Great pride will often be on the line, but Yuen and Wong have a chance to show off a little here and stage things to look cool, or explain the differences of various styles and their origins before demonstrating them. There's a particularly impressive sequence relatively early on where various older masters demonstrate the individual techniques that Gong Yutian has mastered to Ip Man, which makes the ensuing sequence when they are all in play all the more exciting. You don't have to be the sort of martial-arts fan that dives into this sort of minutia to enjoy the fights - the filmmakers offer up slick packages with a little wire work, a lot of style, and plenty of hard, quick hits that the casual action movie fan will thoroughly enjoy - but the attention to detail is impressive.

Will the casual action fan get quite the same pleasure from the parts of the parts of the film that focus on longing and loss? Maybe not, but this is a Wong Kar-wai picture, and that's as inevitable a part of the picture as the 1950s Hong Kong setting may seem. It's an interestingly different take on the emotion, though, as what passes between Ip Man and Gong Er is not necessarily romance - certainly, not the sort that poses any threat to Ip's marriage - as much as a connection between kindred spirits. The Grandmaster trades in the same emotion that Wong has built a career on, though the longing and nostalgia are often expressed in terms of action, whether it be Ip Man wishing he could travel to the north to spar with Gong Er rather than have a tryst, or the mysterious assassin-cum-barber (Chang Chen) who longs to hear the sounds of blades clashing again.

Though Ip Man is the primary focus of the film (it occasionally shifts narrators), Gong Er arguably has the better story; while it initially looks like just another "woman in a man's world" tale, it becomes beautifully operatic in how she responds to this injustice (among others), with the biggest stumble being in how it ends. To a certain extent,the film as a whole stumbles at the conclusion, although it's not clear whether that's because this "simplified" cut tries to fit footage intended to be used in a different style of movie into a different pattern or because Ip Man's life doesn't quite fit the narrative.

It's reflected a bit in the performances, too. Tony Leung Chiu-wai is fine as Ip, playing the character with a little more ambition and eagerness than other iterations (especially Anthony Wong's recent portrayal in Ip Man: The Final Fight), and he expresses longing and sadness well enough. Zhang Ziyi, meanwhile, gets to do a lot more with her meatier role, especially during her initial meeting with Ip Man and her war flashback. It's great to watch her move between the dutiful daughter and someone with strong, aggressive emotions and opinions of her own; she and Yeun Wo-ping bring this out fantastically during her fight scenes. The roll call of kung fu masters is great, too: Certainly, Wang Qing-xiang and "John" Zhang Jin give fine performances as Gong Er's proud father and his prize pupil, but there's at least a good half-dozen actors who give their characters memorable personalities in the moments before they give us memorable fights.

The picture is as beautiful as one might expect. Wong and his team know how to tie mood to time and place, with the start of the film featuring an up-and-coming Ip Man wearing a snazzy western hat and the whole thing shot in either with a slick black-and-white palette or bright colors, while wartime takes on a grainy documentary style and the Hong Kong scenes look somewhat faded, with the previously up-to-date Ip starting to look like an anachronism. It's done relatively quietly, but the way every detail of the movie follows Ip Man's fortunes certainly makes it feel that much better even when it's not quite up to Wong's standards.

Of course, the original Chinese cut may in fact be just that good, and I'm anxious to see it. In fact, I considered skipping seeing this version entirely just out of general annoyance at how The Weinstein Company treats its Asian acquisitions, which can border on contempt. The thing is, Wong Kar-wai makes beautiful movies that deserve the big-screen treatment, and The Grandmaster is both striking enough and good enough to deserve to be seen that way, even if does tacitly support cutting movies that likely don't need it.

(Previously on EFC)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 September - 12 September 2013

If you've seen everything in theaters and are looking for something new, you are not getting a lot of choices.

• At the multiplexes, you're basically looking at Riddick, the third movie featuring Vin Diesel as the title character - an interstellar convict who has eyes that let him see in the dark - which promises to be more of a throwback to the monster-fighting of Pitch Black than the more ambitious but also more uneven Chronicles of Riddick. Diesel and writer/director David Twohy have been trying to make this movie for years, and I hope it pays off for them (and audiences). It's at the Capitol, Apple, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), and Jordan's Furniture.
  
  There are some other options: This Is the End has a quick pre-video re-release at Boston Common and Apple, and the surprisingly successful Instructions Not Included adds a screen at Fenway to the one it has at Boston Common. And if you want to head out to Reading, they have The Ultimate Life, which appears to be a sequel to 2006's The Ultimate Gift, although with only a handful of supporting cast returning. Apparently both were based on best-selling novels, and this one has the protagonist of the first story learning about the grandfather who bequeathed a fortune and charitable foundation to him. Drew Waters gets to be compared to James Garner; Peter Fonda shows up in a supporting role. Boston Common has a single screening of Out of the Clear Blue Sky on Wednesday (it's a documentary on a business devastated by the September 11th attack), and Fenway has a repeat of the RiffTrax folks attaching themselves to Starship Troopers like parasites. Both 'plexes are planning Insidious double features on Thursday as the sequel opens.
• There's even less turnover at Kendall Square, which swaps out last week's one-week booking for Terraferma, in which a Sicilian family takes in a pair of drowning illegal immigrants while trying to decide whether to continue their traditional way of life as fishermen.
• You think that's very little turnover? The Coolidge opens Hell Baby, but it's playing midnights in the screening room onFriday and Saturday and then 10pm shows on the Goldscreen from Sunday to Thursday. I missed it at Fantasia, but it features Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb as an expectant couple in a spoof of antichrist movies. In other weekend midnights, they start a month of "so bad it's great" with the first movie of the The Fast and the Furious franchise in the main theater for those who can't get enough Vin Diesel on Friday & Saturday, while bringing The Room out on the upstairs screen on Saturday. On Monday, they have a "special screening" of The Departed, apparently to celebrate the permanent incarceration of Whitey Bulger. They also have their first Boston Open Screen night on Thursday, where anyone can bring some video to show in the screening room in a sort of movie open-mic night.
• The Brattle Theatre has the Boston Comedy Arts Festival on Friday and Saturday, but starts another Recent Raves series on Sunday. That day has a double feature of The Kings of Summer (35mm) and Prince Avalanche; the rest is single features - Only God Forgives (35mm) on Monday,The Bling Ring on Tuesday, and The Act of Killing on Thursday. Not quite a part of that series is Vanyaland's co-presentation of Morrissey 25 Live, celebrating the Smiths frontman's twenty-five years as a solo artist.
• Morrisey 25 Live actually plays The Regent Theatre first, on Sunday the 8th. They also have a screening of another music-oriented film, The Harder They Come with Jimmy Cliff, on Friday the 6th. And, on Tuesday, they've got a Gathr Preview Series screening, And While We Were Here, which stars Kate Bosworth as a writer on a beautiful Italian island recovering from a broken heart but apparently finding forbidden love.
• Plenty more Complete Alfred Hitchcock at the Harvard Film Archive: Comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith at 7pm Friday, horror classic The Birds at 9pm, final movie Family Plot at 9:30pm Saturday, Under Capricorn at 4:30pm on Sunday, and the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much at 7pm Monday. In between, they wrap up the Burt Lancaster Centennial with John Casseavetes's A Child Is Waiting at 7pm onSaturday and Judgment at Nuremberg at the same time Sunday.
• The MFA's film program continues a couple of things that started earlier in the week: Rock-doc Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm plays at various times on all the days the museum is showing films (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday). They also continue their Matías Piñeiro retrospective with The Stolen Man on Saturday & Sunday and his most recent, the Twelfth Night-inspired mystery Viola on Wednesday and Thursday, continuing into next week. They (along with the Boston LGBT Film Festival) also have a 35mm print of 1967's Portrait of Jason, in which Jason Holliday tells stories on stage. It's also playing Wednesday and Thursday and continuing on.
• ArtsEmerson seems to be starting screenings up again with the new school year, although it doesn't seem like a cohesive program (or even all show up in their system). Friday & Saturday evening, they have Truth in Translation as part of the Global Arts Project, which follows a group of South African actors as they dramatize stories from the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Sunday afternoon features Hare Rama Hare Krishna, a Bollywood film from 1971 about a Montreal family that falls apart against the background of the Hare Krishna movement.
• Somehow, I never realized that iMovieCafe were the new owners of Apple Cinemas. They've got plenty of things in various languages playing this week, including Zanjeer, a new remake of a 1973 Bollywood movie with Ram Charan stepping into the role that first made Amitabh Bachchan famous, falsely-imprisoned honest cop Viay Khanna, with Priyanka Chopra as the love interest. Chennai Express, Madras Express, Satyagraha (all Hindi with English subtitles) play at various times, with Telugu-language Thoofan and Tamil-language Varutha Padatha Valibar Sangam also worked in.
• Second-run shuffling this week has the Somerville Theatre picking up The Spectacular Now, bumping Jobs to The Capitol.

My plans? Riddick, the Gathr preview, maybe Hell Baby, and some Hitchcock.

Gathr Previews screening: A Single Shot

I'm sure that the "preview screening attendance report" bugs the Gathr folks by now, but this week's was so peculiar as to bear mention: I saw two other people buy tickets, and even walked around the theater so I wouldn't be climbing over them to get to my customary third-row center seats, but a few minutes before the movie began they left - I figured for the concession stand - and unless they decided to watch the movie from the balcony, didn't show back up. I gather this is already playing on VOD, so maybe that can explain the low attendance of a movie with a cast that should attract some attention (not actually being on the marquee when I got there probably didn't help), but this is disheartening, especially since it's hard to tell the movie is only so-so until after you've seen it.

One other factor that might play a role, I fear, is presentation. The guys at the Regent are all quite pleasant and friendly, but I'm guessing that they're showing these off a Blu-ray player rather than a DCP set-up (an expensive upgrade for a venue that only shows a movie about twice a week), and the image was fairly dark. There are a lot of scenes that are a little harder to see than you might expect, including one or two where I think we're supposed to read some text that is tough to make out. Plus, I saw a preview for the movie before The Grandmaster the night before - a theatrical release is scheduled for the 20th - and what AMC Boston Common put up on screen was a lot brighter, and they're not exactly known for cranking the bulb up as high as it can go.

I like the Regent, and want cool film programming there - it's a rare place I know I can reach with plenty of time given my commute - but I honestly don't know how much longer this series can continue there. Is anybody going to show up when I skip Zero Charisma in a couple of weeks? This series seems like it would be a really good fit for the Coolidge's screening room, but I just don't know how to get people to this location for these movies, especially if Gathr as a whole is just not taking root in the area for anything but screenings of Girl Rising.

A Single Shot

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 September 2013 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Preview Presents, digital)

There are two general ways a "bag of money" movie can go: Navigating the intricate set-up that is revealed through a constant series of revelations and double-crosses that the anti-hero must navigate in order to keep the cash that has fallen into his lap is generally the primary activity, but giving the audience a good look at the desperate environment people will kill to escape can occasionally eclipse it. A Single Shot does each passably well, even if it doesn't necessarily achieve greatness in either.

The man who stumbles upon this windfall is John Moon (Sam Rockwell), who could use some help: His wife Moira (Kelly Reilly) has left him with their baby in tow, and his best prospect for employment comes from Cecile (Ted Levine), the man who bought his family farm after the bank took it. His friend Simon (Jeffrey Wright) refers him to a lawyer (William H. Macy) to deal with the first problem; for the second, he's living off the land, poaching. That's when he finds the dead girl, and while trying to hide her body, the box full of money.

Naturally, there are plenty who would rather John not keep that money for himself, and perhaps one or two folks whose good feelings he would like to reacquire. The great examples of this genre build a web out of those strands such that it's hard to pull on one without disturbing another, and writer Matthew F. Jones (adapting his own novel) does that fairly well in spots. There's one section of the structure that looks fairly elegant, for example, while others seem held together by flimsy coincidence. Other parts simply come loose, requiring replacements before the finale. It's not the ideal thriller design, but is acceptable enough because John's never going to be the sort of character that is going to outwit his enemies.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 26 August 2013 - 1 September 2013

You know, I don't know that this week was actually that much busier than a typical week, it's just that all the places I went had great big tickets:



Stubless: I started going through the online screeners for the films I couldn't get to at Fantasia: Tiger Mask on Tuesday the 27th, After School Midnighters on Saturday the 31st, and Les 4 Soldats & The Battery on Sunday the 1st.

Okay, fit those in, and it actually was a busy week. I'm trying to cram those in late not just because I tend to procrastinate, but so that they're not terribly far from the front of my mind when I have finished with writing up the stuff I saw in person. I'm also planning to do the same with the Hitchcock stuff, but who knows? That slowed down a little this week, with just two screenings for me: "Aventure Malgache" & Lifeboat on Monday, and Murder on Sunday.

Also coming in a pair: Red Sox games. I had really good seats for the one on Thursday night - not only were they in the loge box along the first-base line, but they were right at the top of a walkway, so I had something resembling leg room. The Red Sox lost, in large part because it seemed like John Lester would not throw strikes and Johnny Gomes could not play left field, but Shane Victorino clobbered an impressive homer. Sunday, I was in the bleachers with my brother Matt and his wife Morgan, and it kind of rained on and off, but this game they won. It was a long, kind of grinding game, and kind of the start of September baseball - you know, when there are too many call-ups and so there's a lot of pinch-hitting and relief appearances. As inefficient as Doubront was, usually Farrell would leave him in for a chance at the win. It was kind of a weird feeling - for as close as the score was, it never seemed like the White Sox were actually going to take the lead, even before Koji time.

The Gathr screening this week was Breath of the Gods, which isn't bad at all, although it's the kind of thing that doesn't leave a terribly strong impression. That can't be said for the other films I saw in theaters - The Last Dragon is thoroughly bonkers, but in a cheerful sort of way; I already knew I loved Starry Starry Night, but it was very nice to share it with some friends and see that, yeah, it holds up like crazy; Getaway was a harsh lesson in not going to see a movie just because of its start time; and Phantasm was at least as genuinely weird, although I don't know if you're going to get anything else with Don Coscarelli.

And, right in the middle of the week, I went to my second concert of the summer at the Bank of America Pavilion, this one for Huey Lewis & the News. I saw them there before, I think on the tour for Four Chords & Several Years Ago, when I think it was still called Harborlights, and I realize that marks me as old in two different ways - though, to be fair, Huey mentioned having played Great Woods, so we're all likely to revert back to pre-naming-rights-sale titles when there is one.

Fun concert. The opening band was The Stompers, a Boston band that got their start at the same time as the main act but never really took off; it's a reminder that this sort of success can be random. I see now that their last song was "Never Tell an Angel", which in retrospect makes a lot more sense than "Never Tell a Ninja". Then Huey came on and played the entire Sports album, which still holds together very well, and it's neat to see an album played in concert like that; good albums are built with the flow from one song to another in mind, and the "grab the hits" format of the typical concert loses that. Plus, there was a lot of other fun stuff - "Some Kind of Wonderful" running right into "But It's Alright", bringing the drummer's daughter up on stage to sing Gwynneth Paltrow's part in "Cruisin'", and making "Plan B" a way to show off the horn section, including special guest Grace Kelly on alto sax. Obviously, a different one.

I recommend the show a lot; the thing about this band is that, while they never particularly influenced rock & roll, they made a lot of solid songs, and the vibe is upbeat. You can understand the lyrics, and the style is encompassing enough that playing oldies doesn't seem out of place. They're arguably the world's greatest and most successful bar band, and they make it a positive.

"Aventure Malgache"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

"Aventure Malgache" is an oddity from Hitchcock; a half-hour-long propaganda film that he returned to England to shoot in French during the war. It was meant to be used as a propaganda film, but apparently portrayed the Resistance as being too human and imperfect to be distributed at the time, and as such wound up languishing in obscurity.

Looking at it now, I'm not sure that those complaints are particularly valid, though I'm not living in that particular sort of wartime environment; maybe the ambivalence the French in Madagascar are shown as feeling at the start just wouldn't fly. It is, more disappointingly, rather dull; much of the action takes place off-screen and there are frequent returns to the framing device of exiled Frenchman in a theater troupe. This sort of film seems like an excellent chance to amp the melodrama up, or engage in some barbed black comedy. Instead, we merely get a few lines disparaging Vichy water, and the admittedly amusing way a collaborator tries to hide the evidence of working for the Germans.

Lifeboat

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

I'm not sure I quite love Lifeboat as much as when I first saw it, but I may appreciate it more. It's really quite a remarkable film for its time, daring to wonder about wartime morality and its costs when many other films might be satisfied with either demonizing the Germans or having ethical behavior be unrealistically rewarding. It's also got an impressively full role for Canada Lee, a relatively rare thing for African-American actors at the time.

It also holds up very well for a movie that is often in the Ten Little Indians mold, remaining quite compelling even when one knows just what is going to happen next. It gets into impressively dark territory, enough so for the last act especially to contain multiple kinds of horror beyond mere surprise.

EFC review from 2006

Tiger Mask (Taiga Masuku)

* * (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

Tiger Mask is disappointing in a way that resembles lack of ambition, but may very well just be low budget problems. After all, during the first act, my jaw was regularly dropping about how genuinely nuts it seemed to be; it's not very long at all before you've got a whole passel of orphan boys being trained by whip-wielding women in tight leather dresses, all aiming to be the one that gets to wear the skill-enhancing Tiger Masks made by Mister X. And while the idea of funding a criminal network by having these guys participate in underground pro-wrestling deathmatches is goofy, it can certainly work in this story's world.

Unfortunately, at that point, the filmmakers seem to reach the end of their madness and resources. The action may be well-staged, but the matches look small. There's a neat idea that the environment in which they were raised has left hero Naoto Date very much unprepared for things like bars and girls and the like, but they don't do much, and the shadowy organization behind Mister X remains too shadowy, despite seeming awfully central to the plot.

There's a post-credits tease promising more in a sequel, but it's the sort of "more" that really should have been in this movie in the first place.

The Last Dragon

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (@fter Midnite, DCP)

The Last Ddragon is as goofily 1980s as something can manage to be, and early on I realized just what that meant when all the broad parody it was doing fit in pretty seamlessly with an El Debarge music video, and I couldn't help but feel some kind of amazement that Debarge was a thing back then. It's kind of scary to look at things from your youth and not have any idea where reality stops and mocking begins.

One thing which I hope is real - although it falling out of favor since then makes me sad - is just how gleefully cultures were shown as cross-pollinating. "Bruce" Leroy Green (Taimak) loves kung fu and acts a bit like a stereotyped Asian, but nobody really cares, and he doesn't have to embrace his blackness to succeed. The same sort of goes for Sho Nuff (Julius Carry), plus there are Asian folks acting like the popular perception of African Americans; Green owning a pizza place even though folks say a black guy doing so is strange; and the youngest Green child has a bunch of names from different cultures, as if they're not going to make her be one thing or the other yet. Heck, the villain (Chris Murney) is the guy who is ashamed of where he comes from and disdainful of what he does, and that's just the worst thing he can be.

The movie's a lot of fun that way in general, and while it doesn't necessarily have great kung fu, it's lively and over-the-top enough to maintain smiles and laughter all the way through. I'm not particularly surprised that this was the role that most people remembered Julius Carry from after his death - I may prefer "Lord Bowler, MANHUNTER", but Sho Nuff reaches out and grabs one's attention, doesn't he?

After School Midnighters (Hokago Middonaitazu)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

This was scheduled as Saturday Morning cartoons at Fantasia, and I found myself holding out on the screener until I could watch it as such at home. I'm quite glad I did - just like it's more fun to watch horror movies when it's dark outside, kids' cartoons are more fun when you're alert and maybe feeling a bit of a sugar rush from breakfast. You just feel like you're doing it right.

And this one, for all it clothes itself in spookiness, a self-contained loop of a time-travel subplot, and some weirdly adult references (although if Animaniacs could have a regular bit based on GoodFellas twenty years ago, why shouldn't a Japanese CGI cartoon give gun-toting bunnies names from The Godfather?), After School Midnighters really is for kids, leaping past explanations or much in the way of logic the same way a kid's brain does, propelling things forward with raw energy, cuteness, and just plain being silly. It goes for the gross-out humor at times, and I can't imagine what an American distributor would do with it as a result - but never as anything truly malicious or humiliating.

I kind of wish I'd had a chance to see it on the big screen (got stuck with Zero Charisma instead, and, ugh), if only because the HDMI output from my computer to my TV runs kind of dark, and I'd have liked to see how poppy the colors were. It's got a video-game level of detail, but the style mostly works for it; everything on-screen is kind of smooth and rubbery, lending itself to slapstick and exaggeration. It's all over the place, at least for an adult watching it by himself, but it's at least never boring.

Xing Kong (Starry Starry Night)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in the Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (Boston Children's Film Fetival, 35mm)

I spent a bit of effort pushing how great this movie was for its two shows at the MFA, and while I did get three people in, I still feel kind of bad that it was a pretty empty auditorium, with no kids present for something that's part of a Children's Film Festival. Sure, they may have come the night before, or when many of these same movies played back in April, but I must admit to being rather puzzled by how this movie really just hasn't gained any traction in the US at all. It had a tiny China Lion release last year and doesn't seem to have been picked up on video at all. Shame, because it's great and not so specifically Taiwanese that an American audience would be thrown by it - heck, most of the references are Western.

One thing that really impressed me the second time through was just how much Tom Lin's flights of fancy really worked, even when they're not surprising or just being admired for their beauty and ingenuity. They're the sort of artifice that can be distancing - it's not for nothing that I occasionally describe this movie as what Moonrise Kingdom would be with real kids instead of Wes Anderson quirkbots - but they do actually heighten the emotion here.

I also like how much effort there is to not make the mother of the collapsing family a monster. It's easy to see her as horrible - she's so deeply unhappy that she doesn't just want to leave her husband, but her country - but she does come off as more hurt than selfish, and I think it's clever that the beret Xiao Mei wears at the end is the one she got from her mother and mostly ignored toward the beginning. It's a detail I missed the first time, but it's impressively gentle and real.

Original 2012 review on EFC

Getaway

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

As I mentioned earlier, Getaway is an excellent argument for not seeing movies just because of when they start. For whatever reason, it was the only movie I hadn't seen in the 5:00-6:30pm window on Saturday (and even that qualifier may not have been necessary), so out came the MoviePass card, because why not?

Well, "because it stinks" is why not. As much as I'm going to have some affection for any movie that commits to smashing up real cars, this one didn't have a whole lot to offer beyond that, and it had the sort of hacky editing and staging of the car chases that felt like the filmmakers were just trying to set a record as opposed to creating excellent chases. It seems like a huge mistake to not put anyone of any interest or consequence in any of the other cars, and a script can only point out that a plan is stupid so many times before it stops being likably self-deprecating.

On the plus side, it does have Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez, who aren't doing great work, but are better than the movie deserves. They try for chemistry despite it being tough to get blood from a stone. You can see the benefit of experience as Hawke does a slightly better job of building a character out of nothing than Gomez does from her nameless, whatever-the-script-needs-her-to-be-right-then construct. Jon Voight, on the other hand, is just picking up a paycheck, with the director trying hard to use style to create menace despite the fact that they've got a perfectly capable actor there to do it.

Phantasm

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Cinema Slumber Party, 35mm)

Sometime I'm going to have to go through Don Coscarelli's output, especially the "Phantasm" series, to see if he's really displayed a specific interest in certain subjects, or if I'm finding patterns where there aren't any. For instance, in the first film I saw from him, Bubba Ho-Tep, he's got an Egyptian mummy sucking souls out of the anuses of the elderly - including a long-forgotten Elvis and JFK - and it's not hard to see that as a commentary on the indignity of death, impending and otherwise. I didn't make the entire connection when watching Phantasm II a few months back, because I was mostly trying to process all the strangeness on display, especially considering that it did relatively little to catch the folks who hadn't seen the first up, but there's something similar going on in his most famous series.

Here, the focus is less on impending death than the recent variety, but it's set around a mortuary and graveyard that is a passageway to another world. If he's not referencing some form of mythology, he's doing something wrong. Granted, that he's creating his own mythology is undeniable, and he just goes for flat-out weird on occasion. What is with the fortune teller Mike visits, for instance? In a lot of movies, he'd be trying to spend time with the cute granddaughter, but they play that as the pair being straight psychics, and then the granddaughter is pretty much just removed from the movie, and the fact that this town has something supernatural going on is more or less forgotten.

It's still plenty enjoyable, though - Coscarelli has a knack for the strange, and when he decides he wants to scare, he knows how to get the job done. The cast may not exactly be great, but they're pretty good matches for these characters, and that gets the movie most of the way there. I do tend to think that the second film is an improvement on this, although I suspect I'll need to see the whole series to really get an idea of the scope of the world being created.

Les 4 Soldats (The Four Soldiers)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I definitely wish I could have seen this one in Montreal, although it seemed as though there weren't going to be any English-language subtitles. I really should brush up on my French, so that maybe I can enjoy movies like that and the Q&A afterward.

I gather writer/director Robert Morin is kind of a big deal in French-Canadian film, which doesn't surprise me from watching Les 4 Soldats; it's a very confident, assured independent film, impressive for how it can take relatively minimal activity and still make something very dramatic. He establishes a civil war of sorts at the beginning but mainly uses it to isolate his characters, shrinking their world physically, emotionally, and in terms of direction.

He does a number of interesting things with his narrator, too - occasionally Dominique will start talking mid-scene for only the audience to hear, though other moments will be standard voice-over. There's something more intimate about the former, naturally - those are her feelings as opposed to just information being delivered. I also wondered if the other characters were meant to think she was a boy - the pronouns occasionally worked that way, and she never does undress at the pond. At any rate, Camille Mongeau gives an impressive performance as Dominique, and the rest of the actors playing the core group are just as good, even though some don't have particularly showy parts.

The Battery

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I've heard a lot of praise for this one, and in some ways I find it somewhat puzzling. I suppose you could say that it does what it's looking to do fairly well, exploring the bond and antagonism that form between two survivors of the zombie apocalypse thrown together by chance. The question, then, is whether this is a story worth telling.

Maybe if World War Z had been adapted as an anthology, this would have made a nice hour-long entry, but as it is, it feels a little padded, especially when minor league ballplayers Ben & Mickey find themselves at the edges of bigger stories that might have made for the plot of a fine story-based zombie movie but wind up being less of a focus here.

It's also worth noting that this movie has some of the least-scary zombies even by slow-zombie standards, with very little make-up in many cases and one memorable extended moment when Mickey's response to being near the undead is rather unconventional. I also found the end rather frustrating, both in "we're leading up to this?" terms and requiring a certain lack of common sense to get there. It's a nice-looking movie and writer/director/star Jeremy Gardner does a fine job of making something intriguing from very little, but it just didn't grab me like it did some others.

Murder!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

Murder is notable for being one of the few "whodunit" style thrillers Hitchcock made, and it certainly is entertaining enough as that sort of cozy mystery. You can probably blow any number of holes in it, but it's also interesting to look at it as a sort of deconstruction of that type of mystery story, in the way Hitchcock pays particular attention to one facet that, even decades later, fans tended to take for granted.

That would be the "gentleman detective", a subset of amateur sleuths whom everyone - be they cops, suspects, witnesses, or friends and family of the victims - gives something approaching carte blanche to look into the matter. The unspoken assumption is that this upper-class fellow is presumed to simply know better by dint of his or her social position and implied education/influence. It's intriguingly magnified here, with sleuth Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) presumptuously deciding to investigate a case on his own after having been on the jury that convicts a woman for murder, cavalierly offering favors to people who are in no position to refuse. There are some strong working-class accents among the latter, and a weird combination of opportunism and deference.

Eventually, of course, it goes "the play's the thing", as it sort of must with a plot so full of actors, and it's not necessarily the most satisfying finale. But that's okay, since the murder mystery seems sort of secondary from 2013. I don't know how much of that was deliberate and how much was just "how things are done" in 1930, but it makes the movie an interesting artifact, at least.

Gathr Previews screening: Breath of the Gods

Another week, another stop at the Regent Theatre on my way home from work, including a stop at Elton's Roast Beef, because it's a pretty decent grease merchant close to the theater that will get you food quickly enough that there's no worry about bumpint into the start of the movie. Always an important criterion when you're looking at 10pm or so before arriving home.

The co-presenter this week was The Arlington International Film Festival, which takes place in late October but has a number of events scheduled that will lead up to the main event. There was also a live event that tied in on Thursday, and the theater itself is right around the corner from a yoga school, so it wasn't surprising that there was a pretty decent turnout.

I kind of wonder how the film played for folks who already had some yoga knowledge. I found it interesting enough, in the way that I generally enjoy learning new things, but it didn't exactly link up with anything else in my head or inspire me to learn more. I wonder where this fits for the more knowledgeable audience member - things everybody knows but presented fairly well, interesting but not necessarily important extra information, or thing that makes for a much better understanding?

It's interesting, at least. Anyway, the next show in the preview series is tomorrow (the 3rd), and it will be interesting to see what attendance is like: It should be something pretty audience-friendly (it stars Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, and a fair number of other folks people have heard of), but is not, I believe, getting the benefit of another organization helping to drive traffic.

Breath of the Gods

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2013 in the Regent Theatre (Gathr Preview Presents, digital)

Jan Schmidt-Garre's Breath of the Gods is not a movie advocating yoga as much as it is an overview of the modern form's history. In fact, it's almost certainly going to be of strongest interest to those who are already devotees of the technique. However, the very fact that so many of the early masters are around and active certainly makes an argument in favor of its health benefits.

Legend has it that yoga was handed down directly from the Hindu gods in ancient times, but its most modern form was codified by T. Krishnamacharya, a scholar born near the present-day village of Muchukunte in 1888. Skilled at reading Sanskrit, he memorized the Yoga Kuruntha from a series of rotting scrolls and, with the patronage of a local Maharajah of Mysore, founded the Yogashala, where he would teach the next generation of students, many of whom would become influential masters in their own right.

As he journeys through India to learn more about Krishnamacharya and the history of yoga, Schmidt-Garre gets to meet and learn from several of the people who learned from Krishnamaharya personally, including his children. Though many are quite elderly - Pattabhi Jois, Krishnamacharya's first student, was in his late 90s when Schmidt-Garre spoke to him, and passed away before filming was completed - most (including Jois) were still teaching and quite sharp. Krishnamacharya's son Sri Washel gives a tour of several important places, and early student B. K. S. Iyengar - Krishnamacharya's brother-in-law as well as one of the most influential yogis of the twentieth century himself - is refreshingly unromantic in his recollections, telling stories of how Krishnamacharya was a harsh taskmaster and often gave frustratingly non-specific instruction.

Full review at EFC.