One Chance

It seems like I saw the preview for One Chance a lot at Kendall Square this year, so it was kind of a surprise when it wound up only opening at Coolidge Corner and just generally landing with a thud at the box office.

I mention in the that the Weinsteins, during their Miramax heyday, would have done more with this, selling theaters and audiences enough on it to get a wide release and make some cash, whereas when it started I was actually kind of surprised to see the "Weinstein Company" logo; I'd sort of figured on this as a Fox Searchlight sort of production. Apparently all those previews ran before the studio decided to make it available for free on Yahoo! Screen, although considering how few people probably knew YS existed before it was announced they had picked up Community (and probably still won't really go looking for it before that premieres), I don't know how much that affected audiences opting not to see it that way versus theaters not booking it.

And that really seems to be the story of The Weinstein Company this year - in trying to embrace the new realities of video on demand and streaming, they really seem to be screwing up what seem like fairly good bets. Snowpiercer shouldn't have been a sleeper as a great big sci-fi action movie starring Captain America. One Chance is pretty darn mainstream, but unless Yahoo! paid them a ridiculous amount, a $32K opening weekend is just embarrassing. And their deal with Netflix for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2 had the brilliant result of getting every theater chain in North America to say that they won't play their movie eleven months in advance.

Maybe they're ahead of the curve, and by taking these hits now they're learning how to survive and even thrive in the next version of the movie business when you don't have the massive franchises that the major studios do. But in the meantime, it sure looks like repeated shooting themselves in the foot.

One Chance

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2014 in Coolidge Corner #1 (first-run, DCP)

Once upon a time, the Weinstein brothers might have been able to make the pleasant-enough One Chance a sleeper hit, if not necessarily an awards contender; today they are barely able to get it noticed. And that's not fair either - it's a fine evening's entertainment, delivering exactly the same sort of charming true story that it promises.

It's the story of Paul Potts (James Corden), a cell-phone salesman still living with his parents in his late twenties. It's not a terrible life - he works with his best mate Braddon (Mackenzie Crook); he's finally meeting Julz (Alexandra Roach), the nice girl he's been chatting with online for the past year; and he's almost saved enough to attend a prestigious opera school in Venice. Singing opera is a dream that his mother Yvonne (Julie Walters) has always supported far more than aggressively working-class father Roland (Colm Meaney), and one that seems to get two steps further away with every step he makes in that direction.

One Chance came out in the UK about a year ago, where Paul's eventual run on Britain's Got Talent is much better known, which may help explain just why the film proceeds on such an even keel: Even beyond how they don't generally make movies about guys who choke on stage and then, after a number of trials, choke on stage again, the events are fresh in the mind of the film's main audience. As much as this kind of drains tension and suspense, it does have an upside in that what could be a series of very melodramatic moments instead becomes comedic: For crying out loud, what other sort of injury that messes with one's ability to sing will he suffer?

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 October - 16 October 2014

Lots of stuff coming out this weekend, although once you get past the multiplex stuff, it can be a bit of a scavenger hunt, with many things playing in just one location in the Boston area

Aside from the openings, though, there's also the second annual Terror-Thon at
• the Somerville Theatre. We all know how much the Somerville loves 35mm film, so the entire 13-hour program will be running off it in the main theater from noon to 1AM on Saturday. The seven features are Cat & the Canary (silent with live accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis), Poltergeist, Creature from the Black Lagoon (in 3D, likely anaglyph), The Thing (1982), Wait Until Dark, A Nightmare on Elms Street 3, and Let the Right One In. That is a pretty great line-up.
• Somerville (along with Kendall Square, West Newton, Boston Common, Fenway, and the SuperLux) also opens up Kill the Messenger, featuring Jeremy Renner as real-life journalist Gary Webb, who put together the connection between drug smuggling and Nicaraguan rebels in the 1980s. Another major opening is The Judge, featuring Robert Downey Jr. as a big-city lawyer who returns to the small town where he grew up for his mother's funeral only to wind up defending his father (Robert Duvall as the title character) in court. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Embassy Square, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  That gets the most screens; the biggest ones are likely going to Dracula Untold, with Luke Evans starring in what seems like an ill-advised attempt to give Dracula a sympathetic background. It's at the Capitol, Jordan's (in Imax), Apple, the Embassy, Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Fenway (including RPX), and Revere. There's also Addicted, an erotic thriller featuring Sharol Leal as a successful woman drawn to extramarital affairs; it's at Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere.
  
  For the kids, there's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which features Steve Carrell and Jennifer Karner as the title character's parents, as his poor luck apparently spreads to the rest of the family. It's at Capitol, Apple, Fenway, Boston Common, Revere, and Assembly Row.
  
  The absolute strangest opening is #Stuck, which features Joel David Moore & Madeline Zima as a couple who hooked up the night before - and then get caught in a traffic jam when they would have rather just gone their separate ways. It plays Boston Common for, apparently, one screening at 7:30pm on Friday and 3pm Thursday. They're apparently skipping the classic this week, but will be screening a One Direction concert on Saturday (as is Showcase Revere).
• Kendall Square not only has Kill the Messenger, but they have Pride, a comedy about the strange anti-Thatcher bedfellows of union miners and gay & lesbian activists. They also bring back The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, only instead of the two halves being edited together into one film, "Her" and "Him" will screen in sequence, although the order depends upon the showtime.
  
  Art and Craft, one of the one-week bookings, has co-director Mark Becker in person to present the Friday/Saturday 7:05 shows of his documentary on Mark Landis, an art forger who has not seen jail time in part because he gives his work away. The other (scheduled) one-week booking is The Two Faces of January, with Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Isaac in Hossein Amini's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel.
  
  For even shorter-time bookings, there are midnights on Friday and Saturday of Raiders of the Lost Ark (not 35mm, so not quite drop-everything); and a "Globe on Screen" presentation of The Taming of the Shrew on Tuesday.
• Despite having previews playing all over the place, One Chance is only opening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre; it stars James Corden as an amateur opera singer who becomes famous on Britain's Got Talent. It's also got Colm Meaney as his father, and the world is just better with Colm Meaney playing resistant working-class dads.
  
  The main midnight this Friday & Saturday is Neil Marshall's excellent The Descent. Special guests will be on hand in the other theater, with undertaker J. Cannibal presenting his final Feast of Flesh on Friday, including Peter Jackson's Bad Taste but also including music, prizes, and burlesque. Johnny Cupcakes is the presenter on Saturday for Casper, with special edition posters and t-shirts. All midnights are on 35mm this week. There's also an Open Screen night on Tuesday and a Found Footage Festival show on Wednesday, and a Sound of Silents screening of the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera with new music by the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra.
• The Brattle has two special bookings this week, with a new restoration of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist playing Friday through Monday, and Terry Gilliam's new one, The Zero Theorem playing late shows Friday to Monday, early ones Sunday and Monday, and a full day on Wednesday.
  
  In between are other fun things: A Feline Film & Video Festival for Humans on Saturday afternoon, a 35mm "Reel Weird Brattle" show of Raw Force (aka "Kung Fu Cannibals") at 11:30pm that night, and the first IFFBoston Fall Focus screening on Tuesday; they kick the preview series with Lynn Shelton's new one Laggies. The week wraps up with Nas: Time Is Illmatic on Thursday.
• The West Newton Cinema appears to be the only place in the area screening Wladyslaw Pasikowski's Aftermath - not to be confused with a couple other movies with the same name! This one is from Poland, telling the story of a man who returns to the country after decades in America and uncovers an ugly secret about what happened to the Jewish residents of his village during WWII.
• The Harvard Film Archive continues Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, with Dust in the Wind (Friday 7pm), Flight of the Red Balloon (Friday 9:15pm), Good Men, Good Women (Saturday 7pm), Café Lumière (Saturday 9:15pm), Growing Up (Sunday 5pm), and A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Sunday 7pm). Monday night, Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso and visiting lecturer Dennis Lim will be screening Alonso's new film Jauja, featuring Viggo Mortensen. And on Wednesday, VES will be using the room to screen silent The Big Parade, with Jeff Rapsis on the piano.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has two final screenings of the new DCP restoration of Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter feature Accident on Friday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday; the other holdover, Field of Dogs, plays Friday, Saturday, and Wednesday. There are two Documentary Spotlights this week - Saturday's is A Will for the Woods, with directors present to discuss their film about "green burial"; Thursday's is States of Grace, whose filmmakers will also be on hand after their film about a doctor severely disabled after an auto accident.
  
  There are also two shorts programs - "Black Radical Imagination" on Sunday afternoon, with filmmakers/curators present, and a free Fall Open House program on Monday
• This week's Bright Lights events at Emerson's Paramount theater include a "Conversations with Boston Creativer Pro User Group" on Tuesday, Animation Show of Shows with curator Ron Diamond on-hand Wednesday, and a Boston LBGT Film Festival presentation of The Dog with directors Alison Berg and Frank Keraudren on Thursday.
• The Regent Theatre continues Mad in America film festival from Friday to Sunday, including some live performances. The theater is dark Monday, but have an Alive Mind presentation of Web Junkie on Tuesday, while the Arlington International Film Festival starts on Thursday and runs through Sunday the 19th.
• The ICA has once again has Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters and Diller Scofido + Renfro: Reimagining Lincoln Center and the High Line playing free with museum admission on Sunday.

My plans? I'm kind of curious about #Stuck, will probably do the Terrorthon, and look forward to getting a chance to double back to The Big Parade; I'll also probably catch up with Gone Girl and The Boxtrolls, with Kill the Messanger and several stops at Kendall Square the new-release priorities.

Breakup Buddies

As I mentioned in the most recent sparsely populated This Week in Tickets, I didn't get to see Breakup Buddies on Friday night despite the fact that a second screen was put on. And while the screen I did see it on Tuesday wasn't huge - maybe a 100-seat room - when you consider that my experience seeing these Chinese day-and-date releases has generally been "me and a half-dozen other people" even on Friday or Saturday, this thing where there are three times that many in the audience on a Tuesday night after that sold-out opening weekend is pleasing but confusing.

I recalled later on that China Lion was giving out free tickets for Friday's show on Facebook, and while it looked like only a few people took them up on it, maybe there were other promotions going on within the local Chinese community that I didn't know about, not being a part of it and all. It makes me wonder if, for whatever reason, Regal and/or their Fenway theater is more willing to grow this sort of release than AMC was - it's worth noting that there was a poster for their next release, The Golden Era, right outside the screen for this one, a simple enough thing that wasn't always done across town. They had an exclusive contract with AMC before (in the US), and I wonder if it was holding them back, especially in areas like Boston where AMC seems a bit skittish about booking foreign films.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad; I'm looking forward to The Golden Era and I see that someone (whether China Lion or AMC) is going to be distributing Johnnie To's Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 day-and-date in the US next month. And that had better play here.

Anyway, here's the EFC review, and come back after reading it/maybe seeing the movie for a little about something I liked about its ending.

Xin Hua Lu Fang (Breakup Buddies)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 October 2014 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

Director Ning Hao has received some attention over the last few months because the Chinese censor board finally allowed the release of No Man's Land, a movie from 2009 that he is reluctant to discuss, whether for political reasons or because he has been busy with other projects since. But while his latest, Breakup Buddies, is a much less controversial comedy - one which stands on its own well enough to get laughs from someone who buys a ticket based on the title with no idea that the film is in Mandarin - it's kind of amusing to see the main character also not wanting to be reminded of something from five years ago.

The man in question is Geng Hao (Huang Bo), who is reacting to his divorce in the time-honored, healthy manner of sawing everything he and his wife own in half. It's bad enough that his best friend Hao Yi (Xu Zheng) decides to get Geng Hao back on his feet by dragging him (and his dog Juice) along on a 3,000km road trip to deliver props to a film set with plans for one-night-stands - Hao Yi's specialty - along the way. While each encounter with a new woman is a new misadventure and Geng Hao is adamant that the road trip not pass through Dali, a song he recorded in his brief career as a singer has drawn a thirty-something woman ("Yolanda" Yuan Quan) with her own romantic woes to the vacation spot.

Breakup Buddies is an oddly-paced movie at times; Ning Hao takes a script credited to a dozen or so writers between the story and screenplay and lets each episode play out at a pace measured enough that the players can somewhat recognize the strangeness of the hole they've gotten themselves into this time even as they keep digging. It's somewhat questionably put together at times - there must be a deleted scenes that explains Hao Yi's gun, for instance - and a couple of swerves toward the end are kind of great despite the filmmakers seeming to stumble on where to go next before recovering. It's bumpy, but Ning and company do well in keeping a steady stream of chuckles coming without making things so broad that Geng Hao's honest heartbreak isn't out of place even if it doesn't overpower the funny stuff.

Full review at EFC.

SPOILERS!

It's not often a movie gets me to say "you got me" out loud, but when this one circles around to reveal that all the scenes with Yuan Quan take place in 2009 and that she was actually playing Geng Hao's ex-wife Kang Xiaoyu was a legitimately great surprise. They kept it going longer than expected, not just in that it lasts up until the almost the end of the movie, but the scene where the two characters meet plays pretty much like it could be 2014 right until they start writing on the wall and I realize, dang, that's even the same dog.

And while I kind of don't get Juice winding up with Geng Hao (he sure seemed like her dog) how well it worked really surprised and pleased me. It's a moment that feels like it could just be a gotcha, a twist that doesn't mean anything and just leaves the audience feeling empty - I've seen enough of those - I wound up liking that he wasn't going to be handed a new love on a silver platter, and also that it was suddenly very difficult to see Xiaoyu as the villain of the piece. She never really seemed mean on the phone, but going along with Geng Hao's perspective on events had sort of been the default way of looking at it. But now we like her, and not only does that mean maybe it wasn't her fault entirely, but that Geng Hao's attempts to erase her from his life is kind of horrible. The catharsis suddenly seems like too much.

That's a pretty darn impressive way to get those ambiguous feelings across rather than just have the actors spit them out; we feel them a lot more directly this way. And I think that's why I like Breakup Buddies a bit more than I might otherwise, given that it is kind of sloppy in places and not always hilarious. It manages a neat trick, and neat tricks are worth supporting.

!SRELIOPS

This Week In Tickets: 29 September 2014 - 5 October 2014

Here's what a page out of the movie ticket scrapbook of a normal person looks like, presuming that non-lunatics would be keeping such a thing:

It's not exactly that I meant to make My Old Lady the only movie I saw last week - Boyhood was actually playing at a convenient hour for what seemed like the first time - but I had a run of just not being able to get out of the office on time and on Thursday, I opted to do some birthday shopping for my niece instead of going for something slightly later.

Friday, I tried to see Breakup Buddies, and it was not just sold out, but sold out on an extra screen, which is so far away from my previous experience with Chinese movies opening day-and-date in Boston that I wonder what the heck is going on - is director Hao Ning suddenly really popular, or the cast (Lost In Thailand was popular enough to stick around for late shows in its second week last year, amid crappy weather). Unfortunately, it sold out after I had already checked in on MoviePass, and hitting "Sold Out" on the app doesn't quite free you up to see another movie immediately. So I went home, watched some baseball, and realized there was no way I was going to stay up through the Coolidge's midnight screening of The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears and wake up Saturday morning in time to make it to Maine. Pity; I wanted to give it a second chance after dozing off during BUFF, but its first return to Boston was while I was in Austin, and this second one wasn't going to happen. Ah, well. Maybe when it hits video.

The rest of the weekend was spent on a trip to Maine - a cousin got married on Saturday (with a "speakeasy" theme, which I'm convinced was entirely based around wanting to wear the cool hat he busted out for the reception), and we celebrated my niece's birthday on Sunday, even though our actual shared birthday was a few days earlier. Didn't see much of her, though, because she now has a public-school number of friends and a dozen eight-year-old girls (plus younger sisters and cousins) is a lot of squealing. I was truly impressed with how her mother kept some semblance of order, though - her regular job is in tour management, but that's just rock stars.

Not quite as much fun as I'd hoped, though, as a pretty nasty cold hit me just as I was boarding the bus north. That is not the best way to sit through a wedding and reception, folks.

So, quiet week, more so than I'd expected.

This Those Weeks In Tickets: 15 September 2014 - 28 September 2014

Last major film festival of the year for me in Austin's Fantastic Fest, and it needs a little talking about on its own.

... but first, here's what I did before and after. And, yeesh, do I take a lousy picture.

There were a couple things I wanted to catch before heading south, and they were interesting in their own way. I caught But Always after having missed it on Sunday, and, yeesh, does it have issues. The next night, I knew A Master Builder wasn't likely to last the week, let alone past the end of the festival. Glad I saw it, because it's pretty nifty.

And what did I see there?

18 September: Hardkor Disco, As Seen by the Rest, and Cub
19 September: Force Majeure, Redeemer, Over Your Dead Body, Necrofobia, and Wyrmwood
20 September: The Duke of Burgundy, The Babadook, Tommy, The World of Kanako, and The Editor
21 September: Wastelander Panda, Shrew's Nest, The Tribe, Tokyo Tribe, and The Man in the Orange Jacket
22 September: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and I Am a Knife with Legs
23 September: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2
24 September: Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and It Follows
25 Septembe: I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, and The Treatment

Then I got back, woke up barely an hour before the Red Sox game, and made my way to Fenway. It was great; I was still in line to buy food while most of the tribute to Bud Selig was going on, so it didn't make me wretch too much, especially since it wasn't for Derek Jeter. I wasn't prepared for it to be quite so hot, like I hadn't left Texas the previous day (in contrast, the trip from Boston to Austin was a forty-degree swing in temperature). It was quickly fun, though, as Masahiro Tanaka had nothing, and that led to a forty-five minute second inning that left the Yankees behind 8-1 and the Yankees fan next to me literally slack-jawed. After getting the first refill on the day, I headed down to see if Tony & Ken were around. They were, there were free seats, so I got to see the last Red Sox victory of the year from five rows behind the home bullpen.

After that, I headed up the street to Boston Common for A Walk Among the Tombstones, and liked that quite a bit. Still kind of on Austin time, it wasn't tough for me to stay awake through The Boxer's Omen at the Brattle. Then, Sunday, the week and a half without a full night of sleep caught up with me and I didn't do a darn thing.

So, the festival. In a way, I don't really want to write about Fantastic Fest itself as an experience, because I think that doing so will badly overshadow what you can see in the eight "daily" posts and seventeen reviews (with about thirteen more to come) say: I saw a bunch of movies that I might not have had a chance to see elsewhere, most were pretty good, and even those that weren't that great were at least interesting. That's the most important thing to remember, enough to merit a repeat:

If you go to Fantastic Fest, you will see a bunch of good movies that you might not otherwise see on the big screen.

You might not know which ones ahead of time, of course; theater assignments for each "round" are determined by everyone stating preferences the day before, the VIPs being given their choices, and then the rest being drawn in random order and positioned as best they can; this is probably when they assign films to screens, a good way to match capacity to demands that prevents the occasional situation where a big auditorium winds up half-empty or a smaller one leaves a lot of people outside looking in. When I first read about this, I was prepared to hate it for how it seemed to fly in the face of what I looked about having a pass at other festivals: It made it hard to build a schedule strategically ("I'll skip A for B because A is playing against C which I don't much care about later on") or spontaneously ("I know I was planning on seeing D next, but I am in no mood for something like that, so I'll go with E"). There's some room for the latter with an hour's notice, at least.

Fortunately, I'm reasonably well-positioned to deal with that as a system; I like a broad range of genres, have no issues with subtitles, and am already going to be passing up the big spotlight screenings with Hollywood guests in favor of things that won't be playing in the multiplexes. It's easier to take what comes without strong preferences, and I tried my best to maximize that mindset during the festival - quick scans of the options, put the names into the system, and forget, this saving a lot of investment in whether I got my first choice or not. I did pretty well on that, I think, and the one time i had to swap, it was relatively painless. If I were coming in with a narrower set of interests or things marked as must-sees, it might be frustrating or never-wracking, but I found it kind of fun once I accepted it.

A side-effect of this "rounds" setup was that building the schedule that way means it can be rather stretched. Every day aside from the shorter opening and closing dates had five rounds, the first of which began at roughly 11am and the last of which went in at midnight. At other festivals, those start times indicate a six-movie day, while a five-movie schedule might mean starting the first at roughly noon and getting out of the last at roughly midnight, and those extra three hours of potential sleep can be a big deal. It also means that there are regularly long gaps between movies, sometimes as much as two hours, which gets me twitchy - I feel like I should be able to fit another one in there.

Filling those gaps is where this festival reveals itself as well-tailored to my tastes but not really my personality. I'm not particularly sociable, don't hear well in crowds, and don't drink, so I'm stuck out in the Texas sun with a vague din going on around me, and the fact that smokers aren't keeping their toxic clouds in their designated area isn't helping. I'm coughing, sweating, waiting for the next movie to be called, and then having to push through a too-dense lobby to get to it. Part of this might just be that I don't know an awful lot of people in (or visiting) Austin, and the same setup in Boston or even Montreal plays better (or if I did a few more of these, although it took me years to get to know people at Fantasia). Folks who do strike up conversations and friendships easily clearly love it, which helps explain how downright evangelical the fans are and how worried many were at the prospect of the theater's old "back porch" area being lost as it was remodeled.

As an aside about that remodel, it kind of struck me as curiously indicative of how the Alamo Drafthouse and the area around the theater have changed since I was last there in 2007 - a lobby that was once fairly utilitarian is now festooned with murals and Alamo-branded stuff hanging from the ceiling, a strip mall and parking lot has been replaced with condos, and a great big bar with themed karaoke rooms has been attached. It's become a much more upscale, specific brand in a lot of ways, and sometimes a weirdly paradoxical one with equal parts "we're ca-ray-zee" and "follow the rules or get tossed".

On a practical level, it seemed kind of screwy that they rebuilt the theater but didn't exactly make sure there were nine screens worth of toilets, although I suspect that on a regular schedule exit times are a lot more staggered. The corridors still seem rather cramped in a lot of spots, exacerbated by having "Fantastic Arcade" stations set up in a spot that was already sort of a bottleneck and initially cordoning way too much of the lobby area off for red carpets and photos. I found myself much less enamored of the cinema seats and bar setup than I was last time I visited - not only did the servers seen less unobtrusive than before (to be fair, I spent a lot more time in the front two rows), but I've gotten used to the desk-style arrangement at Fantasia and the Showcase SuperLux; at the Drafthouse, you have to kind of lean in and down to deal with your food rather than look up at the movie or move your plate to your lap.

Another thing I noticed was that the Q&As seemed very short, especially considering all the time built in between screenings. I'm kind of curious as to why that is. Many films were showing on multiple screens, with those in the smaller rooms getting a simulcast of the Q&A and having to run to another room if they had a question, which maybe served as a barrier (same with everything having two screenings, instead of one). I also kind of wonder if the set-up which had almost everyone on a pass rather than able to make plans for individual movies in advance had an effect of having the audience filled with general film fans rather than ones with a specific interest who would have more questions.

Odds are I won't be back next year - it's too soon after Fantasia for me to jump back into a festival with such a similar roster of films, there's only so much vacation time, and if I feel like something like this at that time of the year... Well, Sitges is just a week later, and takes place on the coast of Spain rather than Texas. I can see why Fantastic Fest has its fans, but I do think my time would be much better spent trying out new places than returning to this one in the future.

A Walk Among the Tombstones

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2014 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)

I was buttonholed to fill out a survey when A Walk Among the Tombstones let out, which is always great fun because I genuinely enjoy skewing averages in such things (why yes, I have seen more than ten movies in the last two months). In this case, I suspect that I was one of relatively few to put down that I saw this movie primarily because of director Scott Frank, as opposed to star Liam Neeson or general timing of the show. Frank wrote one of my favorite movies in Dead Again, did the screenplay for two of the best Elmore Leonard adaptations, had a pretty good directorial debut with The Lookout, and tends to have his name on good stuff. The guy is good at his job, especially where crime is concerned, so, yes, I was expecting pretty good things from him adapting Lawrence Block with Neeson in the title role.

And I was not disappointed. Tombstones is a great introduction to unlicensed private detective Matt Scudder (Neeson) and the world he lives in, specifically starting with a story that is particularly suited to that sort of protagonist: The loved ones of drug dealers being kidnapped, ransomed, and then murdered anyway. The how of it is interesting but kept low-key enough to not be the while fulcrum on which the story rests. Instead, a character mentions Spade & Marlowe, and although 1990s New York is quite a different beast than Raymond Chandler's mid-century L.A., the feel is often the same, with Scudder and self-appointed apprentice T.J. (Brian "Astro" Bradley) plugging along, pulling threads until something unravels, meeting interesting characters along the way but not making them all so resolutely gray that villains cannot ever be summed up with "you're insane". It's a great-looking movie with some excellent performances.

There are moments when I suspect that Frank and/or Block go a little too far, getting somewhat over-enamored with words as writers are wont to do. I don't really blame them, because it works in some cases, like how the film keeps returning to an early defining moment for Scudder, transforming it from a thrilling chase (with throwback cool) to a tragedy as he grows more willing to open up to T.J. Toward the end, though, I have to admit that I was starting to develop a theory about writers developing an ironic dependency on AA and other twelve-step programs as too-easy ways to connect unrelated characters or give structure via the steps. There's also a very thorough housecleaning toward the end, past the point where it becomes a bit wearing.

Mostly good, though, and I'd like to see Frank & Neeson do more of these if they're interested. It's quality P.I. storytelling, and you hate to see a good team break up if there are more stories to tell.

This That Week In Tickets: 8 September 2014 - 14 September 2014

Heh, I thought I was going to finish this on the plane to Austin. Then my laptop crashed while this was halfway done. But, hey, more time than I expected tonight.

The Fantastic Fest trip loomed over this week a bit, as I tried to get stuff in beforehand, but most of it was just things that were not going to be playing many other times.

The Maze Runner was one where I got a preview pass and decided to use it, both because it was opening while I'd be in Texas and because it specified the RPX screen at Regal Fenway; it's a nice screen that I don't hit that often, as not only does MoviePass not work there but they've closed the hole where it's only a little bit more expensive for 3D presentations. Glad I got to see it there, but also kind of glad I didn't pay anything for it; the movie is good-looking but thoroughly generic until a frustrating ending.

It was back to the same area on Tuesday, this time at Fenway Park for another Red Sox loss. Bleah. Xander Bogaerts got a home run, which was nice to see after a summer-long slump, but Anthony Ranaudo stunk, they pinch-hit Craig for Nava, and even with a relatively low score, it never seemed like the Red Sox were in it.

Thursday, I did one of the work-from-home things so it was possible to get to Kendall Square for a last-day-in-Boston double feature - they've gone to the one evening show schedule rather than two on weekdays in recent months, which I might like more if the Chlotrudis folks were still doing the regular pre-show dinners. Worked out okay this time, though - Calvary was very good, but The Last of Robin Hood was not.

Then it was a busy weekend, bookended by two Films at the Gate presentations - Fearless Hyena & Come Drink with Me on Saturday and Sunday nights, respectively. As always, it was a lot of fun, and pretty good movies both times. I was interested in the one on Saturday, too, but not only was it raining, but I was kind of wiped after two movies already that day: Korean film The Pirates played in Revere, so I had to get there fairly early, and then was at Assembly Row just in time for The Drop. The lady at the box office tried to talk me out of the front row, but the next two were full in the middle. Fortunately, the first few rows there are recliners, so it's unusually tolerable.

I forgot the MoviePass 24-hour rule, which meant that instead of seeing But Always on Sunday, I had to wait for 4pm to pass and then catch Finding Fanny. It worked out okay - Fanny is actually the better movie.

Next up: Fantastic Fest.

Calvary

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)

Calvary is so good that I keep trying to find ways to separate it from the Catholic Church in my head. After all, when the end comes, wouldn't you rather be aligned with Brendan Gleeson's Father James then not? Of course you would - he's kind, generous, funny, and genuinely concerned about all around him - but the Church (and, for some of us, religion in general) has not made it easy over the past few years. And though I think that it is important to uncouple our sense of morality from our belief in fables and superstitions, I suspect that writer/director John Michael McDonagh may aim to do the exact opposite, whether I agree or not.

After all, that's the entire arc of the film, from the opening scene where the unseen man in the other half of the confessional promises to kill James in one week's time, precisely because he wants his message clear: Killing a bad priest would just be cleaning house, while murdering a good one like James would be an attack on the institution itself. After that, the film is almost split in two, with the first half demonstrating that he is a good man, if as imperfect as any human. It's the second half where I begin to suspect that McDonagh isn't just telling the story of a good but flawed man in an impossible situation, but making an argument for the Church itself. As much as James's less charming traits come closer to the surface, the townsfolk get even nastier, belittling and ostracizing him in large part for his connection to the Church, and it seems like no coincidence that the vitriol increases when the town's church building is burnt down. Even if McDonagh and James struggle with the hypocrisies and other failings of the institution, the suggestion is that humanity is in big trouble without that anchor.

Even if one doesn't buy that, though, the film is well worth seeing entirely because Brendan Gleeson is as fantastic as usual in it. He zeroes in on the combination of humility and ego necessary to believe that one has been called to the clergy, and it helps him build the sense that Father James is a good man, and most of the time even a likable one. He's also adept with all the various shades of humor that McDonagh has him work with, but still sharp when the situation calls for it. He's worked with McDonagh before (The Guard), and makes the most out of both the lines he's given and the spaces between. There's a fine cat around him as well, with special attention serving to go to Kelly Reilly as the daughter whose reaction to her mother's death was less healthy than turning to the priesthood.

I'm not sure McDonagh meant Calvary as a defense of the Church in a time when people are leaving it behind, even in places like Ireland where Catholicism is a part of the national identity. If he didn't, it's still a darn good movie, making me want much more from the Gleeson/McDonagh pairing. If he did, I don't agree, but like the way he stakes his claim.

The Last of Robin Hood

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)

Look at the talent wasted on this thing. Kevin Kline. Susan Sarandon. Dakota Fanning. All of them playing potentially colorful characters in a lurid story against a snazzy period backdrop. There is absolutely no excuse for this movie to be boring, and yet, that's what happens, as the story of an aging movie star having an affair with a teenaged girl fizzles.

I suspect part of the problem comes from this being a Lifetime-produced movie and skewed toward their audience. Much of the film takes place from the point of view of Sarandon's mother character, with her relating the story and including occasional returns to the framing scenes to demonstrate that she's an unreliable, self-serving narrator. It never quite feels like she goes full stage-mother, at least not to the point where she feels like she should be as central as her positioning. On the other hand, scenes with just Kline and Fanning are often kind of fascinating, as Kline sort of muzzles his natural charisma to show Flynn as a shell of a man whose game seemingly would only work on the inexperienced, and even then, Fanning's Beverly Aadland doesn't quite seem to be buying it completely, but enough. Later scenes where Flynn seems disappointed in Beverly being a teenager rather than a sophisticated adult highlight the ickiness of their relationship but are also kind of tragic - neither is being well-served by what the situation can give, despite the superficial benefits.

Every time the movie threatens to really look at this May March-to-December relationship - and, to be fair, that would necessarily be a great movie; neither Kline nor Fanning is playing close to capability and filmmakers Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland seem to lack both resources and focus - it goes back to Sarandon's Florence, and she's just not active enough to keep the audience's interest. She's got a potentially interesting story, but clearly not the most interesting, and the filmmakers don't have what it takes to elevate it.

The Drop

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 September 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #7 (first-run, DCP)

It's not particularly surprising that The Drop is based on a short story rather than a novel; it actually doesn't have a particularly twisty story, instead opting to let the audience marinate in a seedy environment, watching to see how things play out, but mostly just seeing people talk about the way things were and are. There's a bit of a jolt in the last act, but it doesn't make the machinery grind much.

Which is fine, because you've got Tom Hardy in most scenes, and he's excellent throughout. The role he plays is one that's usually off to the side, the guy without enough going on to thrive outside his native environment, but with the brains and self-awareness to recognize this situation. Give him a puppy and a woman who is justifiably wary (Noomi Rapace) and you can easily forget that his backstory necessarily includes some rough stuff. Hardy keeps the audience's focus, giving Rapace, Matthias Schoenaerts, and especially the late James Gandolfini the chance to carve out interesting niches without making things operatic. Then, when the time comes, Hardy is quite capable of taking the movie back and holding onto what's left.

Michael R. Roskam uses those resources fairly well. There are occasional signs that Dennis Lehane has stretched his story a bit in converting it to a screenplay, with something off at the end in what is not quite the right way. It moves at a good pace, though, and builds more tension than you might expect, even though everything seems to be out in the open, by the end.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 3 October - 9 October 2014

Back doing this after a couple of weeks in Austin when I just wouldn't have the time. This week, I just won't have the time to see some of them, which is kind of disappointing on my birthday week.

• The big opening, especially in this Boston area, is David Fincher's Gone Girl - we do love native son Ben Affleck, who co-stars as a man accused of murdering his wife after she (Rosamund Pike) disappears, leaving a diary pointing suspicion his direction. It plays at the Somerville (main screen), Kendall Square, West Newton Cinema , Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  Also opening wide is Annabelle, a prequel to The Conjuring focusing on the evil doll. It's at Somerville, Apple, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere and the SuperLux. A much smaller multiplex opening goes to Left Behind, with Nicolas Cage starring as one of the many sinners remaining on a chaotic Earth after the pure of heart are taken in the Rapture. It's at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere. It apparently opens for one show a day at Boston Common on Saturday; on Sunday and Wednesday, that venue will be showing M*A*S*H for $6
• Both Apple Cinemas/iMovieCafe and Fenway open Bang Bang!, a masala action movie starring Hrithik Roshan as a mysterious stranger and Katrina Kaif as the bank teller who winds up swept along in his adventures. Haider, a Hindi-language adaptation of Hamlet set in modern Kashmir, will just be opening at Apple, which also gets Telugu-language Govindudu Andarivadele and Tamil action-adventure Yaan; the latter two are unsubtitled.
  
  Back at Fenway, China Lion is apparently settling in, as Breakup Buddies opens. It's the latest from Ning Hao, once again starring regulars Xu Zheng and Huang Bo, this time as friends who go on a road trip after one's painful divorce.
• Along with a couple screens of Gone Girl, Kendall Square also doubles up on Men, Women & Children (as does Boston Common), Jason Reitman's ensemble piece that uses online communication as a thread to tie its storylines together. They've also got a one-week booking of The Notebook - not the Sparks book, but a story of twins sent to live with their cruel grandmother during World War II. They've also got midnight (or 11:45pm) screenings of Only Lovers Left Alive on Friday and Saturday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre goes kind of nuts with midnights this Friday and Saturday: The big house has the original Fright Night on 35mm, an encore of The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (it played the Brattle a couple weeks ago) in theater #2, and Unearthed & Untold: The Path to "Pet Semetary" in the screening room. There's also a "Science on Screen" presentation of Soylent Green at 7pm Monday, with nutrition expert P.K. Newby introducing and discussing.
  
  They're also opening a couple of movies in the screening rooms: Last Days in Vietnam is a documentary on the desperate final days of the war when South Vietnamese allies would potentially be left behind. Memphis, on the other hand, follows a singer wandering the title city. It's mostly in the GoldScreen, though a special screening on Sunday afternoon will be attended by the director and play on a larger screen.
• The Brattle has a fun weekend of musical movies, with both a new restoration of A Hard Day's Night and the pretty nifty Stuart Murdoch musical God Help the Girl; they're single features, and the 9pm shows of the latter on Friday & Sunday will be followed by a Belle & Sebastian concert film of the movie's songs.
  
  Not Saturday, as they must make room for the 11:30pm "Reel Weird Brattle" screening of Teen Lust, a 1979 curiosity notable for being directed by character actor James Hong. Things get classier on Monday, when the DocYard returns with E-Team, a fly-on-the-wall look at a human rights "Emergency Team" that investigates alleged abuses as soon as they are reported. Director Ross Kauffman will be on hand for a live Q&A afterward. Then on Tuesday, class goes out the window with a Trash Night presentation of Voyage of the Rock Aliens, which the Trash Night folks have wanted to show for a while but had to wait for a VHS to show up on ebay. Wednesday and Thursday, things are looking back up, with a new restoration of Double Indemnity, which ties into the Annual fundraising Gala at Oberon on Thursday.
• The Somerville Theatre has a "Silents, Please!" screening on Sunday, a 35mm print of King Vidor's The Crowd, a seldom-screened romance about two people in a big. anonymous city. As per usual, it screens on 35mm film in the main theater with live accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis.
• The Harvard Film Archive begins Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, a month-long retrospective of the Taiwanese filmmaker's thirty-year career, with A Summer at Grandpa's (Friday 7pm), Cute Girl (Friday 9pm), The Boys from Fengkuei (Ssaturday 7pm), Gren, Green Grass of Home (Saturday 9pm), and Cheerful Wind (Sunday 5pm), all on 35mm. The four-hour silent Hagiographia II at 7pm Sunday is on 16mm, and wraps a program on experimental filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos. And on Monday, Portugese director Pedro Costa visits with his latest film, Horse Money.
• The Museum of Fine Arts is playing a new DCP restoration of Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter feature Accident, a 1967 film of professors and a classmate seeking the attention of a beautiful female student; it plays Friday, Saturday, and Thursday. The same "Exclusive Screenings" label is attached to Field of Dogs, a new film from Poland about a distraught professor who quits his job to work in a supermarket (Friday, Wednesday, Thursday). A "Documentary Spotlight" screening of "A Matter of Conscience: Clergy Abuse" plays on Saturday, followed by a panel discussion. On Sunday, they've got this year's edition of the Manhattan Short Film Festival, where audience members can vote on which filmmakers deserve awards/prizes.
• ArtsEmerson has a "Globe on Screen" presentation of Twelfth Night on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; it's the Broadway staging of the very funny Mark Rylance/Stephen Fry production I saw and enjoyed in London. The free Bright Lights presentations both have post-film discussions this week: Kill Your Darlings with producer Christine Vachon on Tuesday and The Congress with faculty members on Thursday.
• The ICA has two programs playing free with museum admission on Sunday: Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters looks at an photographer who meticulously builds full-sized images, while Diller Scofido + Renfro: Reimagining Lincoln Center and the High Line looks at the architectural firm that actually designed the museum.
• The Regent Theatre will begin the Mad in America film festival on Thursday with a double feature of Bipolarized... and The Devil and Daniel Johnston.
• UMass Boston Film Series kicks off its fall session on Thursday the 9th with Love Child, a look at the first time "internet addiction" was treated as a mental illness in a courtroom setting. As usual, the screening is free and director Valerie Veatch will be on-hand to introduce and discuss her film afterward.

My plans? Not as much as I'd like - I have a wedding and birthday party to go to in Maine this weekend, so I'm missing The Crowd in favor of adorable nieces. I'll be going for Breakup Buddies and Strange Color beforehand, and probably at least Gone Girl and Soylent Green afterward.

My Old Lady

I was worried about missing this entirely while in Austin, and it looks like it's getting a third week. I don't know if it's a really great movie - watching it, I could never really ignore its flaws - but even with some pretty ill-advised maneuvering in the last few scenes, it works pretty well, and I could feel it having worked.

My Old Lady

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 September 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)

I'd heard the story that likely inspired My Old Lady (and is retold within the movie) before, and I suspect that knowing it or just getting the gist of it from the start of the picture may give one the wrong impression of what sort of film it's going to be. It takes a while for the film to really find its feet, but it does eventually, the way one sort of figures it must with the cast it has.

The story in question involves a viager contract - an arrangement in France where an elderly person sells a property at a reduced price but can continue to reside there, also collecting an annuity, until he or she passes away. Sometimes, though, the tenant will actually outlive the buyer. That's the case here, as Mathias "Jim" Gold (Kevin Kline) arrives in Paris, not realizing that the spacious apartment he inherited from his father is still occupied by Mathilde Girard (Maggie Smith), over ninety but quite healthy, and he owes her 2400 euros per month. More than inconvenient, as he's penniless, and the apartment's other resident - Mathilde's daughter Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas) takes an immediate dislike to him even before hearing he plans to sell to developer François Roy (Stephane Freiss).

There's a heck of a black comedy to be made with this premise, and given that it sounds familiar beyond both versions of The Ladykillers, I suspect it already has been done. And, indeed, the film spends the first little bit twitching in that direction, establishing Jim as something of a scoundrel - with Chloe perhaps being kind of sneaky herself - while Mathilde almost seems to be taunting him with her gourmet meals and fine wine, blithely living a lifestyle that threatens to drain him. The potential for that sort of movie is clear, and that's why it initially seems disappointing - writer/director Israel Horovitz (adapting his own play) seems half-hearted, not really letting his cast go for the fat target he's placed in front of them.

Full review at EFC

Films at the Gate (and Brattle): Fearless Hyena, Come Drink with Me, and The Boxer's Omen

Have I mentioned before that I love Films at the Gate? I do, unreservedly. I missed Saturday's screening, but I think it was raining that day anyway.



I don't know if the lanterns are there year-round, or if that was part of the decoration, but it's a nifty look. I didn't get any pictures of the opening presentations, alas, which is a shame because while I didn't make it for the lion dancing, there was some nifty things. Including an videotaped greeting from Donnie Yen, who stopped by an ACDC event early this year. But did Iceman open in the Boston area the next week? No. It did not. This continuing to happen boggles my mind.

I was also glad to see that Come Drink with Me was one of the selections; I think it was the only one from the Harvard Film Archive's King Hu series from last year that I missed, and while the Blu-ray (or even DVD) wasn't exactly up to the level's of the HFA's 35mm prints, it's still a pretty great movie.

Speaking of great 35mm prints, I got to the second leg of the Brattle's "Reel Weird Brattle" program this week; all of the movies are on 35mm from the American Genre Film Archive, and if they all look as nice as this one, it's a pretty good reason to stay up late. They'll be handing out pins with each one, and I'd say "collect them all", but it's a bit late for that (hey, I can't either; I'm missing at least two by being out of town). I think this is the only Chinese one, but if they're all this nuts...

Xiao quan guai zhao (The Fearless Hyena)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)

The Fearless Hyena is noteworthy in large part because it is Jackie Chan's first credited movie as writer and director as well as star, and given that "screenplay by Jackie Chan" never exactly became something that drew people to movies, it's not surprising that the story is fairly perfunctory. On the other hand, Chan's greatest skill as a director - getting out of the way of his own fight choreography - is visible from the start.

In this one, he plays Shing Lung, a lazy young man who would rather gamble that practice the kung fu of his grandfather Peng-fei (James Tien Jun), especially since said grandfather has said not to use it in public. He doesn't quite think he's doing that by running a scam with Ti Cha (Lee Kwan), head of a bogus kung fu school. Still, it attracts the attention of both Yen Chuen-wong (Yen Shi-kwan), the warlord determined to eradicate all practitioners of this style, and beggar "Unicorn" (Chan Wai-lau), secretly a master himself.

There are a lot of movies with the basic template of The Fearless Hyena - establish the villain, establish the student, make it personal, train under an unyielding master, and then build up a big fight for the finale. A lot of kung fu movies from the 1970s look like this - not studio-bound like Shaw Brothers films, but often taking place in big empty spaces, or likely-reused town sets - and have the same rhythms. Jackie Chan being in charge means that this is done with slapstick bits, even when things take the inevitably more serious turn.

Full review at EFC

Da zui xia (Come Drink with Me)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)

Cheng Pei-pei was cast in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because Ang Lee remembered her fondly from the films she made as a young woman, with several articles specifically mentioning this one, also a signature film of King Hu. It would be Hu's last for Shaw Brothers before moving to Taiwan, regarded as both a pivotal moment in the wuxia genre and a great film in its own right. It is not an undeserved reputation.

It starts out with a caravan being ambushed, with government official Zhang Buqing (Wong Chung) taken prisoner by rebels including "Smiling Tiger" Tsu Kan (Lee Wan-chung). In response the their demands, his father sends his other child, the Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), to negotiate his release - that is to say, rescue him. She takes up residence in the local inn, although the other non-bandit guest - "Drunken Cat" Fan Tai-pei (Yueh Hua) - may prove ally or hindrance.

Hu made a number of films set in inns - most notably, Dragon Inn - and sometimes entirely constrained to them, although Come Drink with Me is rather open. It still has some of the moments that Hu (and others) would return to off and on, generally playing more as straight-up action with relatively little intrigue, including not making a big deal out of folks initially thinking Golden Swallow is a man. In some ways, Hu is doing what the greats often do in influential movies, presenting things with a casual confidence that later imitators don't quite have.

Full review at EFC

Mo (The Boxer's Omen)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Reel Weird Brattle, 35mm)

The Boxer's Omen seems like two extremely different movies made into one, much as one character is... No, that metaphor is not quite right, and I am not going to spoil one of the more jaw-dropping moments of complete insanity that this movie offers up, even though that would likely still leave several dozen for the viewer to discover. It is a downright strange movie wrapped in something conventional and almost unrelated, a fine midnight movie if there ever was one.

The boxer is Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei), who challenges Thai kickboxer Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung Sze) after the latter's dirty and illegal moves seriously injure Chan's brother. That will be in three months, which is good: Both before and after coming to Thailand to issue the challenge, Chan Hung has had visions which lead him to a Buddhist temple where the monks tell him that their abbot was his twin in a former life, which means that he must become a monk and fight the black magician who cast a killing spell on the abbot for slaying the magician's student...

To say this makes no sense is more than a bit unfair; there is actually a pretty simple "you killed someone close to me and I shall have retribution!" logic going on with all the back and forth, so all the motivations are easy enough to buy into. As to all the reincarnation, transformation, and the evil wizard who seems to be hanging out in the same room as his arch-nemesis... Hey, I don't know that much about Buddhism; this could make at least as much sense as the exorcisms in western horror movies! In all seriousness, On Szeto's screenplay seems to run on completely arbitrary rules, seeming less the result of one or two writers than something handed off between four or five each instructed to the nuttiest thing he or she could come up with. Somehow, he and director Kuei Chih-hung make this flow better than it has any right to.

Full review at EFC

The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.08: I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, and The Treatment

I didn't have much time to talk about Fantastic Fest while it was going on - midnights every day before an 11am show the next doesn't leave a whole lot of writing time for anything but a few reviews - but one of the things I sort of committed to enjoying (because if I didn't it would likely drive me nuts) was the lottery aspect: Every day at 10am, you can start ranking which film you want to see in each "slot"; it closes at 6pm and then badge-holders are chosen in random order, given their first available choice. I decided early on not to get too riled about getting my first choice or not - heck, when people would ask how many of my first choices I got, I usually couldn't say; I made my choices quickly, went for the independent stuff over the bigger names as much as I could (while also prioritizing the Japanese Big Three of Miike, Sono, and Nakashima), and by and large not including stuff I didn't want to see or had already seen just to fill the list and be guaranteed something, lest I block someone genuinely enthusiastic about seeing that movie.

It's fun, but it also means that by the end of the festival, with some stuff having been knocked out by Fantasia as well, I'm not sure who is more to blame for my Day Eight schedule: Me, the random number generator, or whoever built the day's schedule as a whole. But, man, this was not the sort of thing that sends you away happy: Grim movie about a woman dealing with a horrific miscarriage, story about an entire family of sex criminals, dark crime thing about a detective drowning himself in a case, and finally a thriller about a detective hunting down a pedophile. Suffice it to say, that last one was the most fun, even though when I pointed out my schedule and that it was ending with that, at least one person grunted and said it was a pretty rough draw.

I actually considered trying to move some stuff around, but there wasn't much happier stuff to be found. I heard a theory that this was to make the closing night party seem even more celebratory by comparison. I didn't go - not a big fan of loud crowds of people smoking and drinking - so I can't attest to how much that might have been the case.

Anyway, not exactly the way to be sent off. I'll have a few more general thoughts of the festival as a whole when I write up the "This Week in Tickets" for these dates, but it's at least something I'm glad to have done once.

I Am Here

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I Am Here is heart-and-gut-wrenching in its first act, taking horrific events and making them hurt more with things that would at first glance have the opposite effect. It's not quite so sure-handed when it starts to actually tell a story around the situation it has set up, but is built on such a strong base that this hardly matters.

Maria (Kim Basinger) and Peter (Sebastian Schipper) are a wealthy, successful couple living in Copenhagen, but the one thing that they - especially Maria - feel would make their life complete is a child. It's no easy thing to conceive at their age, and their most recent attempt has ended catastrophically. With Peter realistically giving up any hope, Maria latches onto a comment at work and embarks on an extremely ill-advised quest.

Writer/director Anders Morgenthaler has his roots in animation and cartooning, and while one would likely not guess this from looking at this extremely grounded film, there are moments which certainly indicate a different way of looking at the material. The scene which introduces Christian (Jordan Prentice) to the film certainly qualifies in retrospect, and there are a couple others from before that which drop the jaw, with one becoming all the more heartbreaking because it briefly gives the audience a sense of wonder and joy before not just leading to one of the film's most horrifying moments, but setting something up which will carry through the rest of the movie, either as a narrative conceit or an indication of just how broken Maria may be.

Full review at EFC

I Am Trash

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

"Just jerk off when your brother tells you to" isn't quite the first line of I Am Trash, but it's close and gets the audience's attention. It also turns out to be one of the less horrific moments in this movie about a family of sex offenders. If that description puts you off, you're probably well-served trusting those instincts.

Writer/director Lee Sang-woo delivers that line as a character of the same name, a street cleaner and de facto head of his family. He wants his brother Sang-tae (Yang Myung-hun) to masturbate because he is prone to acts of sexual violence otherwise, and it seems to run in the family: Third brother Sang-gu (Park Hyung-bin) is molesting his barracks-mate while on his military service, and their pedophile father has just been released from prison after a ten-year sentence for raping an eight-year-old girl. The still-traumatized girl's father, Yong-suk, has casually informed Sang-woo that he will castrate the father if he shows up in town.

Signs posted in their neighborhood suggest that the mother went missing twelve years ago, so it appears that the brothers never had much in the way of sensible guidance. Sang-woo may try, but he's established as weak early on, getting attacked kids on the street as he does his job in the first scene. It's a theme that continues through the film, as he's blackmailed by someone who knows of his family's crimes and stymied in his attempts to get Sang-tae to actually take a job. It seems like a rather pessimistic view - men are slaves to their urges, while the women presented are all helpless victims - although it does serve to highlight the jam Sang-woo is in trying to exist with one foot in the civilized world and one in his family's. Perhaps that's what life is like for the sort of man his father and brothers are: Aggression is normal, women (and weaker men) are targets, and those who would impose some sort of order deserve contempt.

Full review at EFC

Waste Land

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

One of the best sorts of mysteries plunges its detective into a world not his own, such that figuring out how this other culture works is an important part of finding the killer. Some sort of personal growth is nice too. The trouble with Waste Land is that it never offers much more than the plunge, and that never with the sort of depth that makes the lack of a compelling mystery or fleshed-out character arc less keenly felt.

It's got the making of all three: Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) pulls the case of Lukengo, a 19-year-old Congolese man who is pulled out of the river with a couple of Nkonde statutes. The trail leads Leo and partner Johnny Rimbaud (Peter Van den Begin) to a collector and businessman named Géant who still has a mine in the former colony. In fact, all records indicate that Géant is still in the Congo at the time Leo meet with him. The investigation is affecting him in other ways, too - though he has promised his pregnant wife Kathleen (Natali Broods) that he would leave the force after this case, he's been feeling a strange pull towards Congolese mysticism from the start, and has been more attentive than usual to the victim's sister Aysha (Babetida Sadjo).

Leo sits squarely at the intersection of all that's going on here, and in the movie's favor, he is always interesting. The intense detective who is perhaps only able to weather what he sees on the job because he himself is a little off is a familiar character type, but in this case he is put together fairly well. There's a bit of paranoia to his depression, while scenes with his father quickly illustrate where his fear of admitting weakness comes from. Jérémie Renier plays Leo as seeming much more secure than he actually is, although it's a clear, well-essayed part to what he becomes as the case swallows him whole. It's a superior example of this sort of character, and Renier does him justice.

Full review at EFC

De Behandeling (The Treatment)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Film festivals, or the other ways that film lovers cram more movies than their friends watch in a month into a much shorter span of time, can really warp one's perception of a given picture via context. On its own, I might consider The Treatment to be a dark, pessimistic movie about especially horrible crimes; after three screenings that plunged me into that sort of dark water without any sort of lifeline, this movie's police procedural approach made it seem much more an exciting thriller.

It follows Nick Cafmeyer (Geert van Rampelberg), a detective for the Belgian federal police who has just been called in to take the lead on an ugly case - a couple found chained up in their home, their captor fleeing with their nine-year-old son upon being discovered. The whole department scrambles, but it's more personal for Nick than most: When he was nine, his brother Bjorn was abducted and never found. Neighbor Ivan Plettinckx (Johan van Assche) was the prime suspect, but nothing could be proven, and he has spent the last twenty-five years slipping Nick taunting notes containing conflicting accounts of what happened to Bjorn, stepping it up in recent months. Plettinckx almost certainly has nothing to do with this new case, although what looks like his most honest note yet may be the only thing that can break Nick's focus on what some of the kids he talks to call "the troll".

The Treatment is a detective story if not necessarily a mystery; it points its fingers in roughly the right direction early on on and then spends most of the next couple of hours having the police piece together the path necessary to get there. In fact, it lets the audience get far enough ahead of Nick and his colleagues that it can get a bit frustrating toward the end; viewers may find themselves frantically rewinding the picture in their heads, trying to remember if Nick has all the crucial bits of information they have our not. That's not necessarily ideal - not every detective story needs to be a fair-play whodunit, but it helps to know what everyone knows - but director Hans Herbots and screenwriter Carl Joos (adapting a novel by Mo Hayder) mostly have a good juggling act going, keeping plenty of balls in the air even as new ones are thrown in.

Full review at EFC

The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.07: Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and It Follows

You know the drill - 11:05 am movie I'll probably be late for. More another time.

Today's (finale) schedule - I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, The Treatment, and blessed sleep after what looks like kind of a downer of a day.

Man from Reno

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

There's a moment at the end of a lot of the really good "Coen-like" movies (a description unfair to everyone involved, but one people use) where someone sits down, has a long sigh, and considers just what all this insanity means, inviting the audience to do the same. I don't know if Man from Reno quite has that moment, and it's kind of missed. There's still quite a bit to like about this little mystery even without that moment, and maybe it works well enough without it.

We approach the mystery from two directions. First, Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna), the sheriff of a county just outside San Francisco, finds an abandoned car on an extremely foggy night - and then finds the driver when an Asian man jumps out in front of the officer's car. In the city itself, Japanese mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani) has bailed on a book junket back home to visit friends, also meeting fellow tourist Akira Suzuki (Kazuki Kitamura) in the hotel lobby. But what about the other people lurking in the background?

There are a lot of characters beyond that, from Aki's college friends to Paul's daughter, and their investigations wind up leading to some peculiar areas, although it's often the sort of situation that seems innocently baffling on its face rather than kinky or threatening. Given that there isn't much initial indication of where things are going, it's hard to say that the movie drifts particularly far from its initial destination, but it certainly feels like it does.

Full review at EFC

Fasandræberne (The Absent One)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I swear I've heard of the Department Q books from somewhere, even though I haven't really been keeping up on detective fiction as much as I'd like. If they're going to keep cranking out movies this good in adapting them, I hope they make it over here as well as the Dragon Tattoo books did.

It is kind of a familiar sort of detective set-up - the too-intense sleuth with the partner who grounds him, the case that leads into decadence among the elite going all the way back to boarding school, the finale that, let's face it, involves a lot of things that would get these guys fired from the police force. It's got folks involved who are pretty good at it, though, and a secondary protagonist in Danica Curcic's Kimmie who is downright fascinating and haunting. It's second of a series (the first came out last year), and I wouldn't mind seeing both get US distribution soon-ish.

Full review on EFC

Haemoo

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

This one has received a lot of notice in part because of Bong Joon-ho's involvement as a prodcer and co-writer for long-time collaborator Shim Sung-bo, and if that helps it out, that's great. It's a nifty little movie, the sort of thriller that South Korea seems to do better than anyone else right now - the type that plunges the audience into much darker than expected territory and still keeps one on the edge of his or her seat out of genuine excitement.

It looks great - I joked a couple weeks ago that someone in South Korea built a tank for shooting maritime movies and intends to get their money's worth, but I can't complain about the results, especially with how Shim handles the sea fog of the title, letting it really set the scene when the movie gets into murky territory. I do wonder a bit about the characterization, especially in the second half of the film - a lot of people seem to go way off the deep end, and although they're in a situation where I can't blame anyone for being messed up, I wonder if it's as much a sign of the film's roots as a stage play as anything else.

Full review on EFC

Dios Local (Local God)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I really liked this one from Uruguay, much more than I expected. It's easy to read the description and come in expecting something from like The Descent or As Above, So Below - friends in a spooky cave have to survive and get out - but what we get is a lot of genuinely eerie stuff, and just when it seems like the movie is about to disappear up its own tail, the filmmakers will drop a pretty great jolt on the audience.

It's a bit unorthodox in structure, and that causes a few problems - I don't know that the story which is supposed to set the stage really does the job, and the filmmakers have trouble avoiding "doing the same thing three times" with the set-up they have - but it's a horror movie with some truly memorable moments, and you have to respect that.

It Follows

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

It Follows is genuinely weird in a few places, and there are moments when I think writer/director David Robert Mitchell had a great idea for a horror movie without any idea of how he would finish it. This thing is pure distilled "stalker who won't stop and whom nobody will believe exists" without much worry about mythology, and that's okay - it lets Mitchell really get at the emotion of never feeling safe again, and the ending he comes up with certainly works on that level.

The pretty great cast is a big help, too - Maika Monroe is kind of transfixing as Jamie "Jay" Height, described by another character as "annoyingly pretty", and the audience goes for her easily. The group of supportive friends around her is interesting because in some ways they're as much her plainer (by movie standards) sister's friends as hers, but they work as a solid unit while also giving Keir Gilchrist a chance to stand out.

Ultimately, it's a movie about sharing weight even when you can't necessarily see a friend's problem yourself, and that's a pretty great thing to pile on top of a thriller that's already full of inventive, exciting material.

Full review on EFC