I include where and how I see a movie in these posts because it can be important - if you know these locations, you probably have some idea how the environment effects the experience. In this case, it's less the quality of projection than the general milieu and audience that defined how (at least) the final act was received.
We are a liberal bunch in Cambridge, after all, and while there are certainly churches and other places of worship around, there was also a cheerful sign up on the common across from Harvard University during the holiday season about how festiveness and generosity doesn't exactly need to be tied to the particular season in which your beliefs specify celebrations and rituals. Consider that, among the group that spends its time in Harvard Square, the self-selected subset watching a documentary at the Brattle on a weeknight may be even less a representative sample of the country as a whole.
Or maybe not; maybe I'm only speaking for myself. But I wouldn't be shocked if the attitude toward the churchgoing people in this movie was perhaps a little bit condescending and patronizing; it's easy to be cynical about religious people in this day and age, and see Pastor Reinke's generosity as out of the ordinary. He's a "good Christian", inclusive and charitable just like they're supposed to be even if so many fall short. We laugh a little at how he goes from doing good to wanting those he does good for to come to church on Sunday, but not maliciously; we're just not used to it. For much of the movie, I was kind of curious how it played outside of places like this, where much of the audience likely was church-going folk. Was Reinke seen as less unusual and the conflict with those who aren't so generous a little more uncomfortable? It's a genuinely interesting question, I think, because for all that I sometimes found the film's construction awkward, there's an impressive balancing act done where it could possibly feel informative and raise conflicting emotions no matter what sort of bias toward religion one arrives with.
And then it hits the last act and...
SPOILERS!
... you could feel a wave of disappointment go through the theater when Reinke talks about how he has struggled with same-sex attraction. This isn't a room where not being cool with men liking men is going to win you any points. That's also about when I noticed a couple copies of a book titled "Evolution Exposed" sitting around his office, and, yeah, a little checking after the film ends confirms that this is a publication putting forth young-Earth creationism. And while there was a scene earlier in the movie that I thought might have been meant to imply Reinke was gay or bisexual, this was the first time when the audience gets confronted with potentially less-than-progressive views.
I figure it has to be deliberate, but I kind of wonder what the goal is, and how different audiences will react to it. I certainly came out of those moments thinking less of him for feeling his orientation is something to be fought against or apparently peddling anti-science; suddenly the guy's not a "good Christian", or at least not an enlightened one, any more. Is it meant to make him more complex? Because even if it does, I think it might have the effect of restoring the viewer's initial assumptions rather than making us consider him more carefully.
I also wondered how strongly we were meant to assume that the unnamed person blackmailing Reinke at the end was the guy he was trying to convince not to leave earlier, though it was later implied that he was staying in the pastor's home before being kicked out for a registered sex offender. There's a vibe of attraction in the former scene, I think, although it's not made specific when the relationship Reinke is being blackmailed with took place.
!SRELIOPS
It's an unusual sort of last-act twist, if you want to look at it that way, kind of derailing the story and calling attention to how director Jesse Moss built the movie with certain important pieces obscured. I appreciate the ambiguous nature, but I also must admit that I don't like it when ambiguity seems to clearly come from a documentary filmmaker manipulating what the audience sees, rather than arising naturally because there's no actual way to know something.
The Overnighters
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (Some of the Best of 2014, DCP)
The Overnighters starts with economics on-screen and probably could have the same sort of genesis as a project: The fracking-based oil boom in North Dakota brings people there in search of jobs that pay well, but a lack of lodging leaves many still homeless or paying exorbitant rents as supply-and-demand fails to work for everyone. You can still see hints of that wider perspective throughout the film, even though a more intriguingly knotty story has taken center stage.
That would be the case of Jay Reinke, pastor of Williston's Concordia Lutheran Church. Reinke, in an act of Christian charity, has opened the church's doors and parking lot to those seeking work but who do not yet have a place to stay. This is not exactly a popular move to a congregation and community already tending to look at the outsiders arriving as criminally-inclined invaders, and that's before it becomes clear that Reinke is willing to offer a helping hand to even those with very questionable backgrounds.
There are a number of angles filmmaker Jesse Moss could have taken here, from focusing on the cross-section of transient guests of the church that give the film its title to perhaps comparing the environmentally questionable methods used to extract shale oil to what seems like a similarly exploitative way of churning through employees. Pastor Reinke winds up not just being the common thread connecting a number a different narratives, but a figure not seen often enough in movies not specifically made for a Christian audience: A man who takes Jesus's exhortations to charity and forgiveness seriously, and is willing to make personal sacrifices or take personal risks to that end. There's a cheerful sincerity to his voice that can sound naïve or put-on to those who don't encounter that personality type regularly, although he seems genuine most of the time.
Full review at EFC.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Monday, January 12, 2015
Tevar
Reason not to pay particular attention to star ratings: This is probably not as good a movie (in some ways) as Taken 3, but it didn't make me as angry as that one did. Maybe being colorful and having catchy songs helps more than you'd think.
Tevar
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2015 in Regal Fenway #7 (first-run, DCP)
There is a lot of bloat in Tevar, a 157-minute Bollywood "thriller" that could be remade as a direct-to-video action flick roughly half that length without particularly suffering for the revision. It's all well and good to have different paces and styles of movie out there, but a film that takes this much time should do something with it.
It starts by introducing Granshyam "Pintu" Shukla (Arjun Kapoor), a nominal student in Agra with little interest in anything but the kabaddi team, and he has to make a parkour-style run across town to not totally miss his game. His laziness doesn't keep him out of fights, though, much to the chagrin of his policeman father (Raj Babbar). Meanwhile, in Mathura, hugely corrupt Home Minister Mahender Singh (Rajesh Sharma) has instructed his "strongman" brother Gaherder (Manoj Bajpayee) to threaten troublesome reporter Manesh Mishra, only for him to become smitten with Mishra's younger sister Radhika (Sonakshi Sinha). She refuses, and when Gaherder does not take the news well, her family decides to expedite her travels to America. Gaherder catches up to her at the bus station, but Pintu also happens to be there, taking exception to seeing a woman get roughed up.
That's a fairly basic setup, which is fine; no need to reinvent the wheel in what is both a tried-and-true premise for this sort of thriller and the fourth remake of a 2003 Telugu-language film. But because it's so familiar, there really is no reason for it to take practically until the intermission for Pintu and Radhika to actually meet and start running. Sure, some time is killed with musical numbers that look fairly nice, even if they do go on a long time for the single points they make, but that only helps so much when the filmmakers are just loading up on side characters who will have no effect on the outcome. The first half of Tevar, as a result, doesn't necessarily feel long as one is watching it; but seeing how far it hasn't gotten is dispiriting.
Full review at EFC.
Tevar
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2015 in Regal Fenway #7 (first-run, DCP)
There is a lot of bloat in Tevar, a 157-minute Bollywood "thriller" that could be remade as a direct-to-video action flick roughly half that length without particularly suffering for the revision. It's all well and good to have different paces and styles of movie out there, but a film that takes this much time should do something with it.
It starts by introducing Granshyam "Pintu" Shukla (Arjun Kapoor), a nominal student in Agra with little interest in anything but the kabaddi team, and he has to make a parkour-style run across town to not totally miss his game. His laziness doesn't keep him out of fights, though, much to the chagrin of his policeman father (Raj Babbar). Meanwhile, in Mathura, hugely corrupt Home Minister Mahender Singh (Rajesh Sharma) has instructed his "strongman" brother Gaherder (Manoj Bajpayee) to threaten troublesome reporter Manesh Mishra, only for him to become smitten with Mishra's younger sister Radhika (Sonakshi Sinha). She refuses, and when Gaherder does not take the news well, her family decides to expedite her travels to America. Gaherder catches up to her at the bus station, but Pintu also happens to be there, taking exception to seeing a woman get roughed up.
That's a fairly basic setup, which is fine; no need to reinvent the wheel in what is both a tried-and-true premise for this sort of thriller and the fourth remake of a 2003 Telugu-language film. But because it's so familiar, there really is no reason for it to take practically until the intermission for Pintu and Radhika to actually meet and start running. Sure, some time is killed with musical numbers that look fairly nice, even if they do go on a long time for the single points they make, but that only helps so much when the filmmakers are just loading up on side characters who will have no effect on the outcome. The first half of Tevar, as a result, doesn't necessarily feel long as one is watching it; but seeing how far it hasn't gotten is dispiriting.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
This That Week In Tickets: 22 December 2014 - 28 December 2014
My cunning plan for using vacation time this year: Take the week of Christmas off and see if I'd be better off shopping during the hours when other folks are working than on the weekend or in the evening. It's not a bad plan, although it works best if you have a high-end chocolate shop to finish things off with.
Also helpful: A nut shop, toy stores, and a puzzle & game store. Believe it or not, I didn't hit the Red Sox team store.
After the first day of Christmas shopping, I went to the Brattle for their "Alt-Xmas" screening of Batman Returns, and that was an interesting experience; I didn't remember just how weird it was. After finishing the shopping on Tuesday, I decided to go with the Shane Black Violent Christmas Marathon while wrapping presents, getting through Iron Man Three and The Long Kiss Goodnight before finishing at 2am. I had The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ready to go, but didn't need them... Well, not then.
Wednesday afternoon - Christmas Eve - started off with Chinese import Love on the Cloud, which is an enjoyable romantic comedy, although it is a little too frantic for its own good. After that, a quick trip to the comic shop, put everything in the bag, set off for the train station...
And watch one of the three paper bags I had stuffed full of gifts fall apart because it was raining pretty hard and they were apparently highly compostable. Gather them up, get to Central Square, realize there will be no catching the Downeaster, so take the Red Line to South Station... and have the second bag split in half as I'm standing up. Happily, the other folks on the train both held the door and got me some canvas & plastic bags, but, man, was I ground down by the time I got to the bus. I wound up spending the night re-wrapping almost everything at my mother's house, wishing other people would come to me for the holidays just once (well, twice - it did happen once, seven years ago).
But, the brothers with the adorable nieces make the rules. We made a circuit Christmas morning - first to see Travis, Jen, and their awesome twin girls, who have apparently been watching Brave a lot lately and thus wanted bows and arrows like Merida. That should be fun! Then to my grandparents, then to Dan & Lara and their girls, who have gotten old enough to really like games, really starting to care about the outcomes. I wound up staying over there, helping put stuff together, reading to them, and finding that these girls can do one thing for a good long time if they are into it.
Friday, I headed back to Boston, and having nothing in the fridge, figured I had to go out to the fancy theater where they serve dinner in order to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in HFR 3D. Couldn't find a seat I liked in the really fancy section (so no steak), but they served a pertty passable burger up front. The movie... Well, at least now Peter Jackson can maybe go back to making stuff that's actually interesting.
Saturday's film was chosen on the basis of "The Gambler hasn't been reviewed on EFC, so I'll take it", and it was pretty good, some of the best work Mark Wahlberg has done, although it seems to work very hard to be clever.
Sunday was a much busier day - I used one of the gift cards I got for Christmas to see Exodus: Gods and Kings in 3D. It doesn't quite manage to transcend its weak source material the same way Noah does, but there's no doubt that Ridley Scott is a guy who knows how to use that third dimension (Prometheus was similarly gorgeous but dumb).
After that I went to the Art of the Brick exhibition at Faneuil Hall, which was pretty neat. The early sections, where Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya was reproducing & reinterpreting famous works, were okay, but the more he starts creating on his own, the niftier it got. And there was a dinosaur!
Last stop of the day (and vacation) was down the Green Line to the Coolidge, where I hoped to see Citizenfour but couldn't get there in time to buy a ticket for the 14-screen room it was playing in, so went for The Imitation Game instead. That was pretty good, although I suspect that the fact that we're getting major prestige biographical pictures about the likes of Alan Turing is a little more impressive than the actual movie itself.
It was back to work the next day, but sill a very productive week of family-seeing, niece-spoiling, and movie-watching.
Batman Returns
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 December 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Alt X-Mas, 35mm)
A few minutes into the Brattle's Christmas presentation of Batman Returns, I was willing to trade all three of Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batmovies for one more by Tim Burton with Michael Keaton, back when they were at their peaks. That's impossible, obviously, and I had talked myself down to maybe something like two for one by the climax, but was delighted to find that it was both weirder and more fun than I'd remembered it being.
I think it's a fairly reasonable reaction to have as the film starts and the audience gets reacquainted with Burton's Gotham City, an expanse of towering, interconnected skyscrapers with similarly-scaled status that looks like somebody built Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the 1920s and it's been decaying ever since. There's an opening that establishes Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot as an impossibly bad seed, though his parents' secretive attempt to dispatch him is similarly awful. Then it's the present day and garishly costumed villains are unveiling magnate Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) at the behest of the adult Cobblepot (Danny DeVito) while Batman (Michael Keaton) is busy with goons.
This vision of Gotham is probably the best ever put on film, and not just because it is full of references to silent movies I love (and remember, this was before Metropolis had the two restorations that returned it to its deserved prominence). Burton and his team create a city that is larger-than-life and run-down at the same time, but in a balanced way. As clearly as one can see that this is not a great place to live, even from aerial shots, it's not quite a post-apocalyptic hell, either. Better than any other adaptation - or indeed most runs on the comics - the filmmakers create a city that people would believably stay in, even as it drives them insane.
That's the other thing that works impressively well - Batman's villains get locked up in an asylum rather than a prison, and both DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer (in the role of Catwoman/Selina Kyle) are fantastic at being quite mad. It's different flavors - the Penguin is a murderous sociopath even if his rage is understandable, while Catwoman, afraid of nothing having survived a fall that should have killed her, is slowly losing her mooring to humanity (Pfeiffer is great - she makes a funny self-referential line into something also quite heartfelt). A lot of Batman's instability happens via production design - look at how empty Wayne Manor and the Batcave feel - though Michael Keaton complements Pfeiffer well as a troubled man also trying to be sane but not quite sure he knows how.
In some ways, that exposed the main issue not just with Batman Returns, but with most of the superhero movies of its era: There is a Bruce Wayne-shaped hole in the middle. The popular wisdom was that they were only as good as their villains, and while Marvel has made a mint in recent years focusing more on the heroes than their adversaries (quick, name an Iron Man villain!), Burton and his screenwriters focus so strongly on the villains that sometimes Batman can be shoved to the side of his own movie, leaving Michael Keaton with very little to do and less resolution at the end.
So he mostly stands around, posing in fight scenes that are relatively stiff, but still fairly lively. As things escalate, Burton and company make the action simultaneously bigger and weirder, and while things frequently threaten to careen completely out of control, there's always a sense of grand tragedy to go along with the absurdity of the situation. It's strange and sort of grotesque, but there's nothing that doesn't actually fit, especially in this insane setting.
And that's why, despite Christopher Nolan's "Dark Night" trilogy being more thought out and grounded, I can't help but think that this movie is the one that represents Batman best on-screen. It reflects the heightened reality comics can do almost as easily as realism, and I would love to see Gotham City's madness approached this way again.
Full review at EFC.
Iron Man Three
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Believe it or not, revisiting a film on video a mere year and a half after I've seen it on the big screen - and thus having the Blu-ray only sit on the shelf for about a year - is actually fairly quick for me. It's not quite enough time to be surprised because I don't remember the details any more, although there's still room to remember great bits and discover new details I didn't catch the first time through.
The good news: Iron Man Three holds up. It's a great big fun adventure movie that does an impressive job of navigating how these films will work in a post-Avengers world, gives the supporting cast plenty to do, and has some great big action scenes. It's also very much a Shane Black movie, and I really hope that all the big franchises - Marvel, DC, Star Wars - will continue doing this well in allowing guys with distinctive voices to use them even while being part of something bigger.
Anyway - my opinion hasn't changed much since I originally saw it; it's still highly recommended.
"Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Since I had the Iron Man Three BD already in and the TV series was going to be starting up in a couple of weeks, I figured I may as well give this a spin.
Who knows whether it was serving as a preliminary pilot for the series at the time or if it became one afterward, but it is certainly a fun fifteen-minute adventure story, setting up a situation, introducing a cast, and playing out a bit of action at a quick, exciting pace. It's great to see a supporting character who was able to grab a spotlight on her own get a check-in, especially since Hayley Atwell was set up to be left behind by the rest of the Marvel franchise. It's quite easy to see from how much of a kick this turned out to be why everyone involved would decide they wanted more.
The Long Kiss Goodnight
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
I don't know if I'd seen this one since it's original theatrical presentation (and, man, that means I may have paid for VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray copies of it; enjoy your residuals, folks), and that's not surprising; I like everyone involved but somehow never considered it a great movie.
Since then, I've come to know and love the pulp that serves as inspiration to writer Shane Black a bit more; it's a different movie once you've learned about Hammett and Chandler, even though it's no pastiche. Still, it's got the sort of borderline incomprehensible and silly plot that sort of private-eye story often featured because the writer was really more interested in everything around it. That "everything around it" is good stuff - Geena Davis as an amnesiac suburban mom discovering what kind of background she had (and then reconciling the two once her old persona returns to the fore), Sam Jackson as a low-rent private eye, and Brian Cox as a cynical old bastard who still might be the most honest man in an intelligence community crawling with self-serving sharks.
It may actually be Davis's best role (says the guy who hasn't actually seen Thelma & Louise); she splits her time as "Samantha" and "Charly" almost evenly, giving both aspects distinct characterizations and then doing a fine job pulling them together. Then-husband Renny Harlin handles the action well, and his tendency toward kind of overdoing the violence actually matches up well with Black's pulpy tendencies: It makes for a movie that's big, kind of ridiculous, and kind of crude, but which has an eye on what it's going for and never loses sight of it even while the audience is enjoying the explosions.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2014 in Showcase Cinemas SuperLux Chestnut Hill #3 (first-run, RealD HFR DCP)
Well, that's over with.
That something akin to relief is the dominant emotion at the end of a series made by a filmmaker I'm still fairly fond of is unfortunate, and I hope someday that the machinations of how Jackson wound up directing this Hobbit trilogy rather than just serving as a producer, and how it wound up split into three parts (it was just going to be two when filming started, if I recall correctly), and how something fans thought would be a great addition became a bloated obligation... Well, I hope a great book comes out of it. It wound up being just decent movies.
Why is that? Personally, I think it was having too close an eye on The Lord of the Rings. The original The Hobbit was a fantasy made with kids in mind, and whenever Jackson is building a kids' movie, these things are an awful lot of fun. There's a great deal of pure silliness in the destruction/escape from Lake Town, for instance, and the moment when Martin Freeman's Bilbo steps up and says he is the one who has been hiding the stone that Thorin (Richard Armitage) has become obsessed with, because he just wants everybody to get along, is played with a beautiful earnestness. There's joy to it, even if tragedy comes later.
But whenever the film starts looking toward setting up The Fellowship of the Ring, it feels like a distraction. This is material that is not going to pay off by the end of this movie/trilogy, but there's nothing in the details that gives us a new perspective on what we saw ten-plus years ago. It's just seeing it played out, and it messes with the tone of this one, padding it needlessly.
So we forget that there is some great action in here, a really good performance by Martin Freeman, a genuine moment of delight when Billy Connolly shows up as a dwarf prince - even if it does lead to the question of why the heck he hasn't been in all three movies - and a goofy Stephen Fry. The 48fps photography looks a bit odd at ground-level, with the sets probably needing a lot more detail to give the eye enough to look at with all that clarity, although when the action and 3D-centric scenes kick in, it looks beautiful.
So, we're done. Maybe now Peter Jackson can get to do his Tintin movie, or even better, his first movie that really comes from his own head in almost twenty years.
Exodus: Gods and Kings
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #12 (first-run, RealD DCP)
I joked above about Exodus having to deal with weak source material - say what you will about the Bible/Torah/Koran, but folks have been finding some worth in it for thousands of years - but I do think it's kind of unavoidable when tackling the Old Testament to have trouble dealing with how bloodthirsty its God is. Within the movie, Moses talks about how the Israelites "wrestling" with their deity isn't the same as opposing it, and I think that director Ridley Scott and his writers do want to do some of that wrestling, but don't quite have the nerve. This film is not Noah, where Darren Aronofsky was unafraid to draw parallels with the modern world, let the audience ponder what both what that kind of blind obedience to a vengeful God makes you as a man and the horrors that can come through interpretation.
Instead, there's an empty irony in how Christian Bale's Moses starts out disdaining prophecy but becomes the subject of one. There's a subtext about how God's terror attacks upon Egyptian civilians is what is ultimately effective, compared to Moses's more traditionally honorable campaign, but it plays as just a rendering of Judeo-Christian mythology, not an examination of its message. As a result, a fairly talented cast has nowhere to go but into melodrama.
That said: Wow, can Ridley Scott make a beautiful movie. Just like with Prometheus, which was similarly dumb but pretty, he uses 3D to excellent effect, building a wonderfully realized ancient Egypt, creating a sense of space during action scenes, and otherwise rendering quite frankly amazing spectacle. It's almost a pity that he didn't use it to do something not attached to a myth that is rather problematic in modern times, because while an Egyptian melodrama not connected to the Old Testament might not have sold as many tickets (and might have caught even more deserved flack for its very pale cast), it could have been a story that wasn't so boxed in.
The Imitation Game
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, RealD DCP)
The Imitation Game caught some flack for how it doesn't follow Alan Turing's life all the way to the exceedingly bitter end, although I think that's somewhat undeserved; by the time it finishes, there can be zero doubt as to how the homophobic laws of the time devastated him. Despite not rubbing the audience's nose in the last days of Turing's life in the most complete way possible, it gets its point across.
Up until then, it's quite the intriguing film, as it manages to be a great many things to a great many people: A historical thriller, a drama about what it means to be discriminated against, whether as a gay man or a scientifically-inclined woman in a society that does not have a place for you, a character piece. Because history is messy and screenwriter Graham Moore didn't feel the need to streamline it into something more comfortable, The Imitation Game sometimes feels like it is trying to do too much: The moral choices to be made after Enigma is cracked are a whole movie on their own, as is the story of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), a brilliant mathematician in her own right who becomes Alan's beard and closest friend.
Knightley is great, although I'm still not quite sure what to make of Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. Early on, there seems to be a reason for his broadness, like he's trying to play up his arrogance as a smokescreen to hide his homosexuality, but eventually the realization hits that he is that guy, and it becomes a little harder to be sure what to make of him in that case. It's a flashy role, one which for better or worse plays into the popular perception of Cumberbatch's on-screen persona, and by the time the film ends, I'm not quite sure whether that helps or hurts, or whether it's a fair criticism or not.
One thing I did like, that I'm not sure the folks who haven't done a lot of science, math, or computer work may not appreciate, is how much of the film is about understanding Turing's mindset in building "Christopher": Our normal approach to a problem is to try and solve it ourselves, whereas Turing proposes finding a way to automate the process, to understand the problem and take the mechanical parts out of human hands and leave them to a machine that can do them quickly and by rote without getting bored or distracted and thus making mistakes. As someone who has done a lot of that as part of my work, it's nice to see that communicated so strongly.
Also helpful: A nut shop, toy stores, and a puzzle & game store. Believe it or not, I didn't hit the Red Sox team store.
After the first day of Christmas shopping, I went to the Brattle for their "Alt-Xmas" screening of Batman Returns, and that was an interesting experience; I didn't remember just how weird it was. After finishing the shopping on Tuesday, I decided to go with the Shane Black Violent Christmas Marathon while wrapping presents, getting through Iron Man Three and The Long Kiss Goodnight before finishing at 2am. I had The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ready to go, but didn't need them... Well, not then.
Wednesday afternoon - Christmas Eve - started off with Chinese import Love on the Cloud, which is an enjoyable romantic comedy, although it is a little too frantic for its own good. After that, a quick trip to the comic shop, put everything in the bag, set off for the train station...
And watch one of the three paper bags I had stuffed full of gifts fall apart because it was raining pretty hard and they were apparently highly compostable. Gather them up, get to Central Square, realize there will be no catching the Downeaster, so take the Red Line to South Station... and have the second bag split in half as I'm standing up. Happily, the other folks on the train both held the door and got me some canvas & plastic bags, but, man, was I ground down by the time I got to the bus. I wound up spending the night re-wrapping almost everything at my mother's house, wishing other people would come to me for the holidays just once (well, twice - it did happen once, seven years ago).
But, the brothers with the adorable nieces make the rules. We made a circuit Christmas morning - first to see Travis, Jen, and their awesome twin girls, who have apparently been watching Brave a lot lately and thus wanted bows and arrows like Merida. That should be fun! Then to my grandparents, then to Dan & Lara and their girls, who have gotten old enough to really like games, really starting to care about the outcomes. I wound up staying over there, helping put stuff together, reading to them, and finding that these girls can do one thing for a good long time if they are into it.
Friday, I headed back to Boston, and having nothing in the fridge, figured I had to go out to the fancy theater where they serve dinner in order to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in HFR 3D. Couldn't find a seat I liked in the really fancy section (so no steak), but they served a pertty passable burger up front. The movie... Well, at least now Peter Jackson can maybe go back to making stuff that's actually interesting.
Saturday's film was chosen on the basis of "The Gambler hasn't been reviewed on EFC, so I'll take it", and it was pretty good, some of the best work Mark Wahlberg has done, although it seems to work very hard to be clever.
Sunday was a much busier day - I used one of the gift cards I got for Christmas to see Exodus: Gods and Kings in 3D. It doesn't quite manage to transcend its weak source material the same way Noah does, but there's no doubt that Ridley Scott is a guy who knows how to use that third dimension (Prometheus was similarly gorgeous but dumb).
After that I went to the Art of the Brick exhibition at Faneuil Hall, which was pretty neat. The early sections, where Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya was reproducing & reinterpreting famous works, were okay, but the more he starts creating on his own, the niftier it got. And there was a dinosaur!
Last stop of the day (and vacation) was down the Green Line to the Coolidge, where I hoped to see Citizenfour but couldn't get there in time to buy a ticket for the 14-screen room it was playing in, so went for The Imitation Game instead. That was pretty good, although I suspect that the fact that we're getting major prestige biographical pictures about the likes of Alan Turing is a little more impressive than the actual movie itself.
It was back to work the next day, but sill a very productive week of family-seeing, niece-spoiling, and movie-watching.
Batman Returns
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 December 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Alt X-Mas, 35mm)
A few minutes into the Brattle's Christmas presentation of Batman Returns, I was willing to trade all three of Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batmovies for one more by Tim Burton with Michael Keaton, back when they were at their peaks. That's impossible, obviously, and I had talked myself down to maybe something like two for one by the climax, but was delighted to find that it was both weirder and more fun than I'd remembered it being.
I think it's a fairly reasonable reaction to have as the film starts and the audience gets reacquainted with Burton's Gotham City, an expanse of towering, interconnected skyscrapers with similarly-scaled status that looks like somebody built Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the 1920s and it's been decaying ever since. There's an opening that establishes Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot as an impossibly bad seed, though his parents' secretive attempt to dispatch him is similarly awful. Then it's the present day and garishly costumed villains are unveiling magnate Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) at the behest of the adult Cobblepot (Danny DeVito) while Batman (Michael Keaton) is busy with goons.
This vision of Gotham is probably the best ever put on film, and not just because it is full of references to silent movies I love (and remember, this was before Metropolis had the two restorations that returned it to its deserved prominence). Burton and his team create a city that is larger-than-life and run-down at the same time, but in a balanced way. As clearly as one can see that this is not a great place to live, even from aerial shots, it's not quite a post-apocalyptic hell, either. Better than any other adaptation - or indeed most runs on the comics - the filmmakers create a city that people would believably stay in, even as it drives them insane.
That's the other thing that works impressively well - Batman's villains get locked up in an asylum rather than a prison, and both DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer (in the role of Catwoman/Selina Kyle) are fantastic at being quite mad. It's different flavors - the Penguin is a murderous sociopath even if his rage is understandable, while Catwoman, afraid of nothing having survived a fall that should have killed her, is slowly losing her mooring to humanity (Pfeiffer is great - she makes a funny self-referential line into something also quite heartfelt). A lot of Batman's instability happens via production design - look at how empty Wayne Manor and the Batcave feel - though Michael Keaton complements Pfeiffer well as a troubled man also trying to be sane but not quite sure he knows how.
In some ways, that exposed the main issue not just with Batman Returns, but with most of the superhero movies of its era: There is a Bruce Wayne-shaped hole in the middle. The popular wisdom was that they were only as good as their villains, and while Marvel has made a mint in recent years focusing more on the heroes than their adversaries (quick, name an Iron Man villain!), Burton and his screenwriters focus so strongly on the villains that sometimes Batman can be shoved to the side of his own movie, leaving Michael Keaton with very little to do and less resolution at the end.
So he mostly stands around, posing in fight scenes that are relatively stiff, but still fairly lively. As things escalate, Burton and company make the action simultaneously bigger and weirder, and while things frequently threaten to careen completely out of control, there's always a sense of grand tragedy to go along with the absurdity of the situation. It's strange and sort of grotesque, but there's nothing that doesn't actually fit, especially in this insane setting.
And that's why, despite Christopher Nolan's "Dark Night" trilogy being more thought out and grounded, I can't help but think that this movie is the one that represents Batman best on-screen. It reflects the heightened reality comics can do almost as easily as realism, and I would love to see Gotham City's madness approached this way again.
Full review at EFC.
Iron Man Three
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Believe it or not, revisiting a film on video a mere year and a half after I've seen it on the big screen - and thus having the Blu-ray only sit on the shelf for about a year - is actually fairly quick for me. It's not quite enough time to be surprised because I don't remember the details any more, although there's still room to remember great bits and discover new details I didn't catch the first time through.
The good news: Iron Man Three holds up. It's a great big fun adventure movie that does an impressive job of navigating how these films will work in a post-Avengers world, gives the supporting cast plenty to do, and has some great big action scenes. It's also very much a Shane Black movie, and I really hope that all the big franchises - Marvel, DC, Star Wars - will continue doing this well in allowing guys with distinctive voices to use them even while being part of something bigger.
Anyway - my opinion hasn't changed much since I originally saw it; it's still highly recommended.
"Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
Since I had the Iron Man Three BD already in and the TV series was going to be starting up in a couple of weeks, I figured I may as well give this a spin.
Who knows whether it was serving as a preliminary pilot for the series at the time or if it became one afterward, but it is certainly a fun fifteen-minute adventure story, setting up a situation, introducing a cast, and playing out a bit of action at a quick, exciting pace. It's great to see a supporting character who was able to grab a spotlight on her own get a check-in, especially since Hayley Atwell was set up to be left behind by the rest of the Marvel franchise. It's quite easy to see from how much of a kick this turned out to be why everyone involved would decide they wanted more.
The Long Kiss Goodnight
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23/24 December 2014 in Jay's Living Room (wrapping presents, Blu-ray)
I don't know if I'd seen this one since it's original theatrical presentation (and, man, that means I may have paid for VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray copies of it; enjoy your residuals, folks), and that's not surprising; I like everyone involved but somehow never considered it a great movie.
Since then, I've come to know and love the pulp that serves as inspiration to writer Shane Black a bit more; it's a different movie once you've learned about Hammett and Chandler, even though it's no pastiche. Still, it's got the sort of borderline incomprehensible and silly plot that sort of private-eye story often featured because the writer was really more interested in everything around it. That "everything around it" is good stuff - Geena Davis as an amnesiac suburban mom discovering what kind of background she had (and then reconciling the two once her old persona returns to the fore), Sam Jackson as a low-rent private eye, and Brian Cox as a cynical old bastard who still might be the most honest man in an intelligence community crawling with self-serving sharks.
It may actually be Davis's best role (says the guy who hasn't actually seen Thelma & Louise); she splits her time as "Samantha" and "Charly" almost evenly, giving both aspects distinct characterizations and then doing a fine job pulling them together. Then-husband Renny Harlin handles the action well, and his tendency toward kind of overdoing the violence actually matches up well with Black's pulpy tendencies: It makes for a movie that's big, kind of ridiculous, and kind of crude, but which has an eye on what it's going for and never loses sight of it even while the audience is enjoying the explosions.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2014 in Showcase Cinemas SuperLux Chestnut Hill #3 (first-run, RealD HFR DCP)
Well, that's over with.
That something akin to relief is the dominant emotion at the end of a series made by a filmmaker I'm still fairly fond of is unfortunate, and I hope someday that the machinations of how Jackson wound up directing this Hobbit trilogy rather than just serving as a producer, and how it wound up split into three parts (it was just going to be two when filming started, if I recall correctly), and how something fans thought would be a great addition became a bloated obligation... Well, I hope a great book comes out of it. It wound up being just decent movies.
Why is that? Personally, I think it was having too close an eye on The Lord of the Rings. The original The Hobbit was a fantasy made with kids in mind, and whenever Jackson is building a kids' movie, these things are an awful lot of fun. There's a great deal of pure silliness in the destruction/escape from Lake Town, for instance, and the moment when Martin Freeman's Bilbo steps up and says he is the one who has been hiding the stone that Thorin (Richard Armitage) has become obsessed with, because he just wants everybody to get along, is played with a beautiful earnestness. There's joy to it, even if tragedy comes later.
But whenever the film starts looking toward setting up The Fellowship of the Ring, it feels like a distraction. This is material that is not going to pay off by the end of this movie/trilogy, but there's nothing in the details that gives us a new perspective on what we saw ten-plus years ago. It's just seeing it played out, and it messes with the tone of this one, padding it needlessly.
So we forget that there is some great action in here, a really good performance by Martin Freeman, a genuine moment of delight when Billy Connolly shows up as a dwarf prince - even if it does lead to the question of why the heck he hasn't been in all three movies - and a goofy Stephen Fry. The 48fps photography looks a bit odd at ground-level, with the sets probably needing a lot more detail to give the eye enough to look at with all that clarity, although when the action and 3D-centric scenes kick in, it looks beautiful.
So, we're done. Maybe now Peter Jackson can get to do his Tintin movie, or even better, his first movie that really comes from his own head in almost twenty years.
Exodus: Gods and Kings
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #12 (first-run, RealD DCP)
I joked above about Exodus having to deal with weak source material - say what you will about the Bible/Torah/Koran, but folks have been finding some worth in it for thousands of years - but I do think it's kind of unavoidable when tackling the Old Testament to have trouble dealing with how bloodthirsty its God is. Within the movie, Moses talks about how the Israelites "wrestling" with their deity isn't the same as opposing it, and I think that director Ridley Scott and his writers do want to do some of that wrestling, but don't quite have the nerve. This film is not Noah, where Darren Aronofsky was unafraid to draw parallels with the modern world, let the audience ponder what both what that kind of blind obedience to a vengeful God makes you as a man and the horrors that can come through interpretation.
Instead, there's an empty irony in how Christian Bale's Moses starts out disdaining prophecy but becomes the subject of one. There's a subtext about how God's terror attacks upon Egyptian civilians is what is ultimately effective, compared to Moses's more traditionally honorable campaign, but it plays as just a rendering of Judeo-Christian mythology, not an examination of its message. As a result, a fairly talented cast has nowhere to go but into melodrama.
That said: Wow, can Ridley Scott make a beautiful movie. Just like with Prometheus, which was similarly dumb but pretty, he uses 3D to excellent effect, building a wonderfully realized ancient Egypt, creating a sense of space during action scenes, and otherwise rendering quite frankly amazing spectacle. It's almost a pity that he didn't use it to do something not attached to a myth that is rather problematic in modern times, because while an Egyptian melodrama not connected to the Old Testament might not have sold as many tickets (and might have caught even more deserved flack for its very pale cast), it could have been a story that wasn't so boxed in.
The Imitation Game
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, RealD DCP)
The Imitation Game caught some flack for how it doesn't follow Alan Turing's life all the way to the exceedingly bitter end, although I think that's somewhat undeserved; by the time it finishes, there can be zero doubt as to how the homophobic laws of the time devastated him. Despite not rubbing the audience's nose in the last days of Turing's life in the most complete way possible, it gets its point across.
Up until then, it's quite the intriguing film, as it manages to be a great many things to a great many people: A historical thriller, a drama about what it means to be discriminated against, whether as a gay man or a scientifically-inclined woman in a society that does not have a place for you, a character piece. Because history is messy and screenwriter Graham Moore didn't feel the need to streamline it into something more comfortable, The Imitation Game sometimes feels like it is trying to do too much: The moral choices to be made after Enigma is cracked are a whole movie on their own, as is the story of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), a brilliant mathematician in her own right who becomes Alan's beard and closest friend.
Knightley is great, although I'm still not quite sure what to make of Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. Early on, there seems to be a reason for his broadness, like he's trying to play up his arrogance as a smokescreen to hide his homosexuality, but eventually the realization hits that he is that guy, and it becomes a little harder to be sure what to make of him in that case. It's a flashy role, one which for better or worse plays into the popular perception of Cumberbatch's on-screen persona, and by the time the film ends, I'm not quite sure whether that helps or hurts, or whether it's a fair criticism or not.
One thing I did like, that I'm not sure the folks who haven't done a lot of science, math, or computer work may not appreciate, is how much of the film is about understanding Turing's mindset in building "Christopher": Our normal approach to a problem is to try and solve it ourselves, whereas Turing proposes finding a way to automate the process, to understand the problem and take the mechanical parts out of human hands and leave them to a machine that can do them quickly and by rote without getting bored or distracted and thus making mistakes. As someone who has done a lot of that as part of my work, it's nice to see that communicated so strongly.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Taken 3
There was no good reason for me to see this stupid movie. Oh, sure, nobody else had reviewed it on eFilmCritic, but that doesn't actually create any obligation on my part. And just because a MoviePass card makes things essentially free after three or four movies in a month doesn't mean I have to see everything. I just like Liam Neeson, Luc Besson, and Famke Janssen, and even if I know she's going to make an early exit, I can at least hope there's something worthwhile buried inside of it.
But there's not. It's just bad all around, and while there's plenty of blame to go around, I'm really starting to wonder why Luc Besson keeps giving Olivier Megaton money to direct this sort of movie, because he is terrible at it. But the guy keeps failing upwards - Transporter 3 was the least impressive of that series, but at least Cory Yuen was still around to handle the action. Columbiana wasn't very good - it was messy - but that could mostly be lain at the feet of a bad screenplay. Taken 2 was pretty bad, though, really showing what a hash Megaton made of even simple action beats, but it made enough money that a third one was going to get made and the director was apparently considered part of the reason for its success. In between, he chopped up two episodes of Taxi Brooklyn (another example of Besson being willing to pound a franchise into the ground until there's nothing of the original appeal left).
I just don't get it - he's demonstrably terrible, and his boss is someone who is generally great at making an action movie feel nimble, clear, and exciting. Why keep giving a hack like this work, especially when your own reputation is being damaged with his terrible work?
Taken 3
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2015 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)
Luc Besson almost certainly knows more about making action/adventure films than I do - there are times when he seems to have it down to a science - but there are a couple of things I'm pretty sure of: You should try to maximize the use of Famke Janssen, rather than minimize it, and Olivier Megaton's continued employment as a director of action/adventure movies owes more to his pseudonym than any particular skill at it. If I can see this, why can't Besson? Why besmirch the name of a movie that actually exceeded expectations like this?
After a teaser in which a Russian killer by the name of Oleg Malankov (Sam Spruell) fails to get money we're owed, we catch up with former CIA operative Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), who is buying the sort of birthday present for his college-aged daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) that shows he still thinks of her as a little girl and meeting, in turn, with his ex-wife Lenore (Janssen), who is clearly still attracted to him, and her husband Stuart (Dougray Scott), who would kind of like it if Bryan backed off. Soon, Lenore is found dead in Bryan's apartment and he's being chased by the police, led by Detective Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker).
Film-to-film continuity isn't really that important in a series like this, but wasn't Lenore done with Stuart and back together with Bryan in Taken 2? Given that Dougray Scott has no resemblance of any kind to the actor who played the character in the first movie (Xander Berkeley) - and how the character's personality seems totally different - I can't imagine I'll be the only one wondering what the deal is and why she's got a third husband. The funny thing is, if you wanted to, you could build some pretty good conflict around what it feels like to be the guy who just sort of stood by while your wife's ex murdered his way through the Paris and Istanbul underground when she or her daughter was threatened, but that angle never seems to occur to Besson and co-writer Robert Mark Kamen.
Full review at EFC.
But there's not. It's just bad all around, and while there's plenty of blame to go around, I'm really starting to wonder why Luc Besson keeps giving Olivier Megaton money to direct this sort of movie, because he is terrible at it. But the guy keeps failing upwards - Transporter 3 was the least impressive of that series, but at least Cory Yuen was still around to handle the action. Columbiana wasn't very good - it was messy - but that could mostly be lain at the feet of a bad screenplay. Taken 2 was pretty bad, though, really showing what a hash Megaton made of even simple action beats, but it made enough money that a third one was going to get made and the director was apparently considered part of the reason for its success. In between, he chopped up two episodes of Taxi Brooklyn (another example of Besson being willing to pound a franchise into the ground until there's nothing of the original appeal left).
I just don't get it - he's demonstrably terrible, and his boss is someone who is generally great at making an action movie feel nimble, clear, and exciting. Why keep giving a hack like this work, especially when your own reputation is being damaged with his terrible work?
Taken 3
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2015 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)
Luc Besson almost certainly knows more about making action/adventure films than I do - there are times when he seems to have it down to a science - but there are a couple of things I'm pretty sure of: You should try to maximize the use of Famke Janssen, rather than minimize it, and Olivier Megaton's continued employment as a director of action/adventure movies owes more to his pseudonym than any particular skill at it. If I can see this, why can't Besson? Why besmirch the name of a movie that actually exceeded expectations like this?
After a teaser in which a Russian killer by the name of Oleg Malankov (Sam Spruell) fails to get money we're owed, we catch up with former CIA operative Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), who is buying the sort of birthday present for his college-aged daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) that shows he still thinks of her as a little girl and meeting, in turn, with his ex-wife Lenore (Janssen), who is clearly still attracted to him, and her husband Stuart (Dougray Scott), who would kind of like it if Bryan backed off. Soon, Lenore is found dead in Bryan's apartment and he's being chased by the police, led by Detective Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker).
Film-to-film continuity isn't really that important in a series like this, but wasn't Lenore done with Stuart and back together with Bryan in Taken 2? Given that Dougray Scott has no resemblance of any kind to the actor who played the character in the first movie (Xander Berkeley) - and how the character's personality seems totally different - I can't imagine I'll be the only one wondering what the deal is and why she's got a third husband. The funny thing is, if you wanted to, you could build some pretty good conflict around what it feels like to be the guy who just sort of stood by while your wife's ex murdered his way through the Paris and Istanbul underground when she or her daughter was threatened, but that angle never seems to occur to Besson and co-writer Robert Mark Kamen.
Full review at EFC.
Selma
I occasionally tease folks for how they seem to gush an extra little bit about the filmmakers they've met or otherwise interacted with, so I'll admit - Selma's director Ava DuVernay did once send me an email thanking me for reviewing I Will Follow about four years ago. Probably one of dozens, because it was a pretty great movie, and one also had to admire DuVernay for the hard push she and her African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement made to get a small film with an African-American cast into theaters.
So, yes, I felt more happy than I likely have any right to when I saw that she was the one directing a big movie that I already thought looked pretty good from the trailers. It's the pushed-for-Oscars big time, even more so because images of black people protesting how they feel disenfranchised are a lot more fresh than they should be. It's great to see, then, that she's up to it.
The funny thing is, I thought the review should have come out easier - it's one of those movies where everything is done well, so you ought to just be able to make a list. Instead, it ate much of the day, and I still didn't get to say how much I liked the music among other things. But, anyway - as good as you've heard Selma is, it is, in fact, that good.
Selma
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 January 2015 in Arlington Capitol #1 (first-run, DCP)
Selma stood a good chance of a big deal from the moment it was greenlit; it's the first feature film to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, features excellent work by David Oyelowo in that role, and is generally built for prestige. Then 2014 happened, and suddenly a movie that was likely made with the idea of being a look at how things changed seemed to have a lot more to say about how things are (at least, to those of us who aren't living that reality every day). Fortunately, that's an extra burden that this film is well able to carry.
It covers a tight period, with Dr. King's receipt of a Nobel Peace Prize serving as a sort of prologue to his meeting President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), who urges King to focus less on voting rights than his planned War on Poverty, but King will not be deterred. So, he and several other pastors and civil rights activists converge on Selma, Alabama, where the groundwork for a major protest has been laid - one which will culminate in a march to the state capital in Montgomery.
Though marches and protests like the ones in Selma often feel like they just happened - they enter the historical narrative that way, as moments where widespread people with similar sentiments found themselves all moving in the same direction like a tide that surges up the shore - that's generally not the case, and the way Paul Webb's script recognizes this is part of what makes Selma fascinating. King, his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), LBJ, Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), and the younger activists who are native to Selma are all thinking in terms of tactics and strategy, explained quickly and clearly but without getting too bogged down in details.
The combination of passion for a humanist endeavor and sometimes cool-seeming intellect is what makes King a fascinating figure, and David Oyelowo hits it on the nose. In the almost half-century since his assassination, King has become an almost sanctified figure despite some ugly backlash about his extramarital affairs, and while Oyelowo captures the sheer charisma and forcefulness that came through in Dr. King's oratory, he also makes the moments when he's working to craft those speeches great to watch. They're not moments of doubt (though those are present), but concentration. We get to see just how aware King is that while he preaches non-violence, provoking it is part of his plan, and it doesn't sit perfectly well with him.
Though King is the one recognized enough that his birthday was declared a national holiday, he didn't work alone, and neither does Oyelowo. The other members of his team don't get the individual spotlight he does, but Wendell Pierce (as Hosea Williams), Common (as James Bevel), Andre Holland, Tessa Thompson, and many others stand out, making their characters amplify King in part by surrounding him with different personalities that don't waver. Carmen Ejogo's Coretta is sometimes the standard concerned wife, but she wears it very well. Nigel Thatch has a great appearance as a Malcolm X who is somewhat humbled, not the firebrand he once was. Tom Wilkinson occasionally seems miscast as President Johnson - a politician and President as canny as LBJ shouldn't seem so outclassed as he does in Wilkinson's scenes with Oyelowo - altough he does get a great moment when finally paired up with Tim Roth (a perfectly loathsome Governor George Wallace). Oprah Winfrey is memorable as Annie Lee Cooper, a woman humiliated while attempting to register to vote.
Cooper's being denied is one of the two sequences that set the stakes, and director Ava DuVernay uses them to quickly describe what was at stake in 1965, putting the audience in the situation without allowing it to overpower the specific story she's telling. She, Webb, and the rest of the crew do a great job of setting the environment - they punctuate scenes with lines from FBI surveillance of King and the rest of the civil rights movement, and there's a quiet emphasis on how, even though they were trying to affect the entire country, much of this was planned in modest spaces and over kitchen tables. Webb's script is very talky, but DuVernay and her cast make the somewhat theatrical dialogue lend import to the events, even as the bigger outdoor scenes show that the filmmakers can do more than just talk.
Selma is the story of a great victory, even if recent events and the song that plays over the end credits reminds us that the work that went on there still needs to be done. And yet, you can almost put the historic importance of the subject matter and the continued relevance aside, because it's also just a plain great movie, one that does every part of telling its story well.
Full review at EFC (dead link).
So, yes, I felt more happy than I likely have any right to when I saw that she was the one directing a big movie that I already thought looked pretty good from the trailers. It's the pushed-for-Oscars big time, even more so because images of black people protesting how they feel disenfranchised are a lot more fresh than they should be. It's great to see, then, that she's up to it.
The funny thing is, I thought the review should have come out easier - it's one of those movies where everything is done well, so you ought to just be able to make a list. Instead, it ate much of the day, and I still didn't get to say how much I liked the music among other things. But, anyway - as good as you've heard Selma is, it is, in fact, that good.
Selma
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 January 2015 in Arlington Capitol #1 (first-run, DCP)
Selma stood a good chance of a big deal from the moment it was greenlit; it's the first feature film to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, features excellent work by David Oyelowo in that role, and is generally built for prestige. Then 2014 happened, and suddenly a movie that was likely made with the idea of being a look at how things changed seemed to have a lot more to say about how things are (at least, to those of us who aren't living that reality every day). Fortunately, that's an extra burden that this film is well able to carry.
It covers a tight period, with Dr. King's receipt of a Nobel Peace Prize serving as a sort of prologue to his meeting President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), who urges King to focus less on voting rights than his planned War on Poverty, but King will not be deterred. So, he and several other pastors and civil rights activists converge on Selma, Alabama, where the groundwork for a major protest has been laid - one which will culminate in a march to the state capital in Montgomery.
Though marches and protests like the ones in Selma often feel like they just happened - they enter the historical narrative that way, as moments where widespread people with similar sentiments found themselves all moving in the same direction like a tide that surges up the shore - that's generally not the case, and the way Paul Webb's script recognizes this is part of what makes Selma fascinating. King, his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), LBJ, Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), and the younger activists who are native to Selma are all thinking in terms of tactics and strategy, explained quickly and clearly but without getting too bogged down in details.
The combination of passion for a humanist endeavor and sometimes cool-seeming intellect is what makes King a fascinating figure, and David Oyelowo hits it on the nose. In the almost half-century since his assassination, King has become an almost sanctified figure despite some ugly backlash about his extramarital affairs, and while Oyelowo captures the sheer charisma and forcefulness that came through in Dr. King's oratory, he also makes the moments when he's working to craft those speeches great to watch. They're not moments of doubt (though those are present), but concentration. We get to see just how aware King is that while he preaches non-violence, provoking it is part of his plan, and it doesn't sit perfectly well with him.
Though King is the one recognized enough that his birthday was declared a national holiday, he didn't work alone, and neither does Oyelowo. The other members of his team don't get the individual spotlight he does, but Wendell Pierce (as Hosea Williams), Common (as James Bevel), Andre Holland, Tessa Thompson, and many others stand out, making their characters amplify King in part by surrounding him with different personalities that don't waver. Carmen Ejogo's Coretta is sometimes the standard concerned wife, but she wears it very well. Nigel Thatch has a great appearance as a Malcolm X who is somewhat humbled, not the firebrand he once was. Tom Wilkinson occasionally seems miscast as President Johnson - a politician and President as canny as LBJ shouldn't seem so outclassed as he does in Wilkinson's scenes with Oyelowo - altough he does get a great moment when finally paired up with Tim Roth (a perfectly loathsome Governor George Wallace). Oprah Winfrey is memorable as Annie Lee Cooper, a woman humiliated while attempting to register to vote.
Cooper's being denied is one of the two sequences that set the stakes, and director Ava DuVernay uses them to quickly describe what was at stake in 1965, putting the audience in the situation without allowing it to overpower the specific story she's telling. She, Webb, and the rest of the crew do a great job of setting the environment - they punctuate scenes with lines from FBI surveillance of King and the rest of the civil rights movement, and there's a quiet emphasis on how, even though they were trying to affect the entire country, much of this was planned in modest spaces and over kitchen tables. Webb's script is very talky, but DuVernay and her cast make the somewhat theatrical dialogue lend import to the events, even as the bigger outdoor scenes show that the filmmakers can do more than just talk.
Selma is the story of a great victory, even if recent events and the song that plays over the end credits reminds us that the work that went on there still needs to be done. And yet, you can almost put the historic importance of the subject matter and the continued relevance aside, because it's also just a plain great movie, one that does every part of telling its story well.
Full review at EFC (dead link).
Thursday, January 08, 2015
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 January 2015 - 15 January 2015
After a very slow week of releases to start the year, things start to pick back up with award-targeting movies, and a couple bookings especially worth supporting with money.
My plans? Selma, Mr. Turner, Predestination (worth it), Taken 3 (I'm a sheep), The Overnighters, probably Tevar and/or I. And Whiplash (which I tried to see twice this week only to find no evening shows that day)! I mean it!
- Falling into both categories is Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson's very funny adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel. You are going to want to see it at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, because that's the place where it's playing in 35mm (it does also play at the Kendall, Fenway, and Boston Common).
Also in 35mm: Friday & Saturday midnight screenings of The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Christopher Lee's final performance in the title role for Hammer. There are also midnight screenings of another noteworthy vampire film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which hangs around in the Goldscreen for a second week. There's also the monthly "Open Screen" night in the screening room on Tuesday. - Among the other likely-Oscar-nominees opening wider is Selma, a great-looking depiction of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous civil rights march with David Oyelowo in the title role, Tom Wilkinson as Lyndon Johnson, and a fine cast around them. It's opening at the Capitol, Apple, Kendall Square, Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
Also opening wide but not looking nearly so good is Taken 3, which hopefully won't wrap the Liam Neeson series on a completely down note, but reducing the amount of Famke Janssen on screen and allowing hack Olivier Megaton to continue directing isn't a great sign. It's at the Capitol, Embassy, Apple, Boston Common, Fenway (including RPX), Assembly Row, and Revere.
The Imitation Game also picks up some screens at Somerville and Fenway. Fenway also has a special presentation of The Wizard of Oz on Sunday - Hey, Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond is doing the thing where they book an independent genre film again! It's a good one, too - I liked Predestination a lot when it played Fantasia last year; it's a really nifty adaptation of Robert Heinlein's "Alll You Zombies" by the guys who did Daybreakers. This sort of thing usually goes straight to VOD in Boston, so, c'mon, support Apple screening this with money.
They also have two Indian movies opening via iMovieCafe this week. Tevar (also playing at Fenway) is a Hindi-language thriller starring Arjun Kapoor as a cocky athlete who finds himself sheltering a reluctant bride (Sonakshi Sinha, who seems to be in a new movie every other month) from her muderous fianc (Manoj Bajpayee). That opens Friday; on Tuesday, they open i, featuring "Chiyaan" Vikram as a former model, now a broken hunchback, seeking revenge on the rival who ruined his life. It's from the writer/director of Endhirian, has music from A.R. Rahman, is partially filmed in China, and just generally looks huge. It was shot in Tamil, but some screenings will be in Telugu, and all will be English-subtitled. - In addition to Selma and Inherent Vice, Kendall Square also has Mr. Turner (also opening at West Newton. It has director Mike Leigh reuniting with actor Timothy Spall for a biography of J.M.W. Turner, one of the great British painters of the 19th Century.
- For those needing to do a little catch-up on the films appearing on year-end best-of lists, The Brattle has their annual (Some of) The Best of 2014 series (obviously, it had different names in different years). It starts on Friday with The Grand Budapest Hotel (which also has screenings on Sunday to replace the pulled-for-rerelease Boyhood), and continues on with a double feature of Only Lovers Left Alive (35mm) & Under the Skin on Saturday, We Are the Best! on Sunday, The Overnighters on Monday, a double feature of Dear White People & Listen Up Philip on Tuesday, The Babadook on Wednesday, and Ida on Thursday.
They also start their latest "Reel Weird Brattle" series this weekend, this one six weeks of 35mm "Mad Romance" that will culminate on Valentine's Day. The first selection is David Cronenberg's Crash, with James Spader discovering after an automobile accident that this is a fetish for some folks. - More of The Films of Alec Guinness are on the the Museum of Fine Arts film program: The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets play Friday, followed by Lawrence of Arabia (Saturday), Oliver Twist (Sunday & Wednesday), The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sunday & Thursday), and The Man in the White Suit (Wednesday), with The Ladykillers finishing things off next Friday (the 16th)
- The Harvard Film Archive has their special members' weekend screenings from Friday to Saturday - if you're a member, you probably got an email. Hope it's good stuff!
- The Regent Theatre has the monthly Gathr "Alive Mind" screening on Tuesday, Concerning Violence, a documentary on the struggle of African countries to liberate themselves from colonial rule in the 1960s & 1970s, combining archival film footage and excerpts from The Wretched of the Earth. Dr. Julian Go, a Boston University history professor who specializes in empire and colonialism, will be on-hand to introduce the film. Other noteworthy up coming Gathr screenings include pregnancy documentary 40 Weeks at Assembly Row on Wednesday and a not-yet-confirmed screening of Mad As Hell (a documentary about online news program "The Young Turks") that needs 77 more tickets sold to play at Kendall Square on the 28th.
My plans? Selma, Mr. Turner, Predestination (worth it), Taken 3 (I'm a sheep), The Overnighters, probably Tevar and/or I. And Whiplash (which I tried to see twice this week only to find no evening shows that day)! I mean it!
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
This That Week In Tickets: 15 December 2014 - 21 December 2014
Another slow week, and this time work did have a little something to do with it. That and it being cold and rainy enough that if I couldn't walk out of the subway and almost directly into the theater, I needed to be convinced.
The first few days of the week were chock full of "agile training" at the office, with the idea being to change processes so that everything is done in two-week chunks, testing happens as you go, and the discovery that what you were told to build and what you were supposed to build are different things happens much earlier. It seems like half good ideas and half a consulting company trying to sell us stuff, but we'll see. In the early days, I'm amusing myself by seeing how long it takes for the folks on the team to realize that I will not say "SME" (pronounced "smee") out loud like it's a non-ridiculous made-up word, but will just abbreviate "subject matter experts" as "experts" and be understood by those who haven't taken the training.
Fortunately, I was able to escape the early enough on Monday evening to catch my last show of the Harvard Film Archive's Jacques Demy series, Lady Oscar, which is no classic but is at least a fascinating oddity - a French guy directing an English-speaking cast in an adaptation of a Japanese comic set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Yes, this one grabbed my attention as soon as I saw it on the schedule.
Thursday, with training safely over, I decided that I would, in fact, see Chinese romance Back in Time. It was another mixed bag - some entertaining moments and characters stuck in a story that finds a new way to be off the mark every twenty minutes or so. It's the type of thing where every potential tangent or alternate direction makes you wonder why you're not watching that story play out.
There weren't many new releases I had interest in over the weekend, other than Wild opening at the Somerville after having already been at lesser theaters, so I did that Sunday afternoon, after a little Christmas shopping. Enjoyable, pretty good little movie.
And after that, the crazy Christmas week - both for movies seen and running around.
Wild
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2014 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)
Wild is less a simple story told well than a fine job of giving shape to the anecdotes that form a life if not necessarily a tidy narrative. In a way, the teasers' voice-over saying that Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) wouldn't change a thing she's done because it has led her to where she is lays the necessity of building the movie that way out, right down to being said on-screen at an almost random point. There is cause and effect, and what you do does reverberate later on, but it's seldom tidy. Finishing her hike up the Pacific Crest Trail is a big deal, but doesn't get swelling music and doesn't conclusively close the door on the rest of her life; it just makes a chapter divider.
In getting there, writer Nick Hornby (adapting the real-life Strayed's memoir) and director/co-editor Jean-Marc Vallée do a nice job of jumping around. A movie about walking a thousand miles intercut with the downward spiral leading to it has the potential to be filled with excess bulk - and if it isn't it can feel like they are deliberately overlooking just how much effort something takes. Vallée and company do a good job of highlighting the Good Parts, cutting back and forth between Cheryl on her hike and appropriate flashbacks, but making some jumps so abrupt that there does seem to be some time spent elsewhere. It's a small thing, but progress captions are used well, both to show how difficult it is for Cheryl at first and to feel a rhythm later.
Mostly, though, this is woman-against-wilderness, and both play their part. Witherspoon doesn't always disappear into the role - she has movie-star charisma here even when she's trying not to - but she always feels genuine when discovering new things, and she does that enough to be a big positive. And, yes, a lot of time is spent gaping at the trail, but it's worth it, with Vallée and cinematographer Yves Bélanger always finding the right scale to make the world in comparison to Cheryl.
That's pretty good, especially with nothing to mitigate it if some of the big pieces go wrong. That doesn't happen, though, making Wild a drama worth the big screen even if it seems like a small story.
The first few days of the week were chock full of "agile training" at the office, with the idea being to change processes so that everything is done in two-week chunks, testing happens as you go, and the discovery that what you were told to build and what you were supposed to build are different things happens much earlier. It seems like half good ideas and half a consulting company trying to sell us stuff, but we'll see. In the early days, I'm amusing myself by seeing how long it takes for the folks on the team to realize that I will not say "SME" (pronounced "smee") out loud like it's a non-ridiculous made-up word, but will just abbreviate "subject matter experts" as "experts" and be understood by those who haven't taken the training.
Fortunately, I was able to escape the early enough on Monday evening to catch my last show of the Harvard Film Archive's Jacques Demy series, Lady Oscar, which is no classic but is at least a fascinating oddity - a French guy directing an English-speaking cast in an adaptation of a Japanese comic set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Yes, this one grabbed my attention as soon as I saw it on the schedule.
Thursday, with training safely over, I decided that I would, in fact, see Chinese romance Back in Time. It was another mixed bag - some entertaining moments and characters stuck in a story that finds a new way to be off the mark every twenty minutes or so. It's the type of thing where every potential tangent or alternate direction makes you wonder why you're not watching that story play out.
There weren't many new releases I had interest in over the weekend, other than Wild opening at the Somerville after having already been at lesser theaters, so I did that Sunday afternoon, after a little Christmas shopping. Enjoyable, pretty good little movie.
And after that, the crazy Christmas week - both for movies seen and running around.
Wild
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2014 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)
Wild is less a simple story told well than a fine job of giving shape to the anecdotes that form a life if not necessarily a tidy narrative. In a way, the teasers' voice-over saying that Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) wouldn't change a thing she's done because it has led her to where she is lays the necessity of building the movie that way out, right down to being said on-screen at an almost random point. There is cause and effect, and what you do does reverberate later on, but it's seldom tidy. Finishing her hike up the Pacific Crest Trail is a big deal, but doesn't get swelling music and doesn't conclusively close the door on the rest of her life; it just makes a chapter divider.
In getting there, writer Nick Hornby (adapting the real-life Strayed's memoir) and director/co-editor Jean-Marc Vallée do a nice job of jumping around. A movie about walking a thousand miles intercut with the downward spiral leading to it has the potential to be filled with excess bulk - and if it isn't it can feel like they are deliberately overlooking just how much effort something takes. Vallée and company do a good job of highlighting the Good Parts, cutting back and forth between Cheryl on her hike and appropriate flashbacks, but making some jumps so abrupt that there does seem to be some time spent elsewhere. It's a small thing, but progress captions are used well, both to show how difficult it is for Cheryl at first and to feel a rhythm later.
Mostly, though, this is woman-against-wilderness, and both play their part. Witherspoon doesn't always disappear into the role - she has movie-star charisma here even when she's trying not to - but she always feels genuine when discovering new things, and she does that enough to be a big positive. And, yes, a lot of time is spent gaping at the trail, but it's worth it, with Vallée and cinematographer Yves Bélanger always finding the right scale to make the world in comparison to Cheryl.
That's pretty good, especially with nothing to mitigate it if some of the big pieces go wrong. That doesn't happen, though, making Wild a drama worth the big screen even if it seems like a small story.
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
This That Week In Tickets: 8 December 2014 - 14 December 2014
First of two weeks full of stuff at work that kept me busy until the weekend.
Well, okay, I'll be honest, work didn't keep me terribly late that week other than one day, despite it being "spirit week". That's when the multibillion dollar company I work for has special events to make sure we know how lucky we are to work for them, which isn't really the implied threat it sounds like. It was pretty low-key this year - nobody from the home office (or one of the home offices; each layer above us has a different one) doing pep talks and the like. There was a superhero theme to the week, though, and yeah, I crushed the trivia contest. Don't know how I'll defend that championship next year unless the theme involves us being somehow similar to the films of Pang Ho-cheung or something.
No, it was more a case of having seen The Pyramid and Miss Julie the weekend before, and there not being many new movies, so I bided my time until a crowded weekend. I don't recall if Zero Motivation was my first choice that night, but it was a good one; it's a quality female-driven Israeli army comedy, and you don't see those every day.
The rest of the weekend actually became something of a tight squeeze. I loved Chris Rock's Top Five even more than I expected, in part because it really didn't sink in that Rosario Dawson was co-starring until after I started seeing listings instead of ads, and I was glad to see the two together. It didn't leave me a whole lot of time afterwards to get up the Red Line for the Brattle's preview of Inherent Vice, but I made it, just in case that was the only way the film was playing in 35mm in the area. Fortunately not, but I was certainly glad to see it early.
Locking Saturday night down with Vice meant that I would have to go for the encore presentation of the Etheria Film Night, which was actually Sunday afternoon. And a full Sunday afternoon it was, containing a couple hours of shorts, some more trivia (it's not often you win a DVD authographed by the director's dog), and then a feature on top of that. Fortunately, it was only a couple stops down the Red Line to catch The Young Girls of Rochefort as part of the Harvard Film Archive's Jacques Demy series, which I pretty much adored.
So, not the busiest week of movies, but the quality was high all around. Can't complain much about that!
Well, okay, I'll be honest, work didn't keep me terribly late that week other than one day, despite it being "spirit week". That's when the multibillion dollar company I work for has special events to make sure we know how lucky we are to work for them, which isn't really the implied threat it sounds like. It was pretty low-key this year - nobody from the home office (or one of the home offices; each layer above us has a different one) doing pep talks and the like. There was a superhero theme to the week, though, and yeah, I crushed the trivia contest. Don't know how I'll defend that championship next year unless the theme involves us being somehow similar to the films of Pang Ho-cheung or something.
No, it was more a case of having seen The Pyramid and Miss Julie the weekend before, and there not being many new movies, so I bided my time until a crowded weekend. I don't recall if Zero Motivation was my first choice that night, but it was a good one; it's a quality female-driven Israeli army comedy, and you don't see those every day.
The rest of the weekend actually became something of a tight squeeze. I loved Chris Rock's Top Five even more than I expected, in part because it really didn't sink in that Rosario Dawson was co-starring until after I started seeing listings instead of ads, and I was glad to see the two together. It didn't leave me a whole lot of time afterwards to get up the Red Line for the Brattle's preview of Inherent Vice, but I made it, just in case that was the only way the film was playing in 35mm in the area. Fortunately not, but I was certainly glad to see it early.
Locking Saturday night down with Vice meant that I would have to go for the encore presentation of the Etheria Film Night, which was actually Sunday afternoon. And a full Sunday afternoon it was, containing a couple hours of shorts, some more trivia (it's not often you win a DVD authographed by the director's dog), and then a feature on top of that. Fortunately, it was only a couple stops down the Red Line to catch The Young Girls of Rochefort as part of the Harvard Film Archive's Jacques Demy series, which I pretty much adored.
So, not the busiest week of movies, but the quality was high all around. Can't complain much about that!
Etheria Film Night 2014: Soulmate and shorts
I must admit to being kind of surprised that there was an Etheria Film Night in 2014; it started as a science-fiction offshoot of the Viscera Film Festival, a film program spotlighting horror productions directed by women which disbanded earlier this year. Apparently, though, it was only mostly dead, reforming in a way that put the various genres under one roof, and still partnered with All Things Horror to bring it to Boston.
In some ways, I think the consolidation has been a real boon. Previous Etheria shows just didn't have enough quality short films for great packages at times - which, it should be noted, is tough for all sci-fi blocks, since any sort of major world-building can take a lot more behind-the-scenes work than a short film's budget can support, though further narrowing the sample makes things even trickier. Other times, even narrower themes would emerge, like the time there were three or four red-riding-hood stories in one program. This year's broader focus seems to have led to a stronger program as a whole, with something closer to the cream being selected.
It was a fairly full house (for a room that holds thirty-odd people), so it was kind of disappointing that the "women in film" trivia questions for meet with uncomfortable levels of silence. I won a prize for knowing that Debra Hill was John Carpenter's writing/producing partner, which was why I didn't also raise my hands when asked who directed Tank Girl along with the two-part 2014 season finale of Doctor Who. I was kind of surprised nobody else got that one, although I like Tank Girl enough that I'm always surprised to see Rachel Talalay's name on a TV episode. In my head, she made a modest hit that naturally led to other feature opportunities. Of course, I also didn't remember Mary Harron's name when asked who directed American Psycho. In my defense, I have never seen that movie.
For knowing that bit of non-trivia, I won a DVD of the afternoon's feature presentation, Soulmate, signed by director Axelle Carolyn and one of the co-stars:
It is, think, important progress that where I remember much of the talk when one of her short films played Fantasia a couple years ago referring to her in terms of who her husband was, his name wasn't mentioned at all here, even though their dog's was.
To be fair, Nubi looks like a great dog who really should have an important part in all of their films going forward.
Etheria 2014 Shorts
Seen 14 December 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Etheria Film Night, digital)
This two hour block was, as I mentioned, one of the more solid genre short packages I've seen in a while. I'm not sure how much traveling this new version of Etheria is doing - I sometimes got the impression that the last one was Los Angeles, Boston, and not much else - but it's absolutely worth catching if it comes to your town, especially since none of these films are yet legitimately available online.
"The Guest" by Jovanka Vuckovic - This is the second sorry film I've seen from Ms. Vuckovic that has rather underwhelmed me on its own but which has me anticipating her first feature. Like "The Captured Bird", this is a tremendously striking film visually, but the story just seems to be starting to come into its own as the closing credits roll. She can grab an audience's attention, and I'm anxious to see if she can hold it.
"Serpent's Lullaby" by Patricia Chica - There is a whole lot to really like about this one - it tells a lot of story with an impressive economy of words and the memorable visuals hint at the climactic unveiling without quite giving it away. I do kind of feel that the tone falters a bit when the action moves outside of the spooky house, into the conventional world; there's an awkward comedy vibe that doesn't really fit with the spooky stuff. In general, though, it's a neat idea executed well.
"Little Lamb" by Heidi Lee Douglas - This one is a nifty little period slow-burner about a convict woman in nineteenth-century Australia who finds herself going from the frying pan to the fire in fairly short order. It's a bit long to start and seems to have a bit of a shortcut at the end, but in between it is plenty tense and occasionally rather gruesome. If the movie is a direct descendant of one of the bloodier classic fairy tales, then Douglas does a suitably nasty job of translating it.
"You, Me & Her" by Sarah Doyle - After close to forty-five minutes of intense horror to kick the program off, this being a more playful take on a sci-fi concept (meeting a bunch of alternate selves from parallel universes). The in-story logic trends to involve a fair amount of handwaving, but Doyle and star Shannon Woodward make the interaction and differentiation of the various Annas fairly funny, including flashbacks to the points of divergence. There's a fine nugget of an idea about it never being clear which risks to take in this one, and the generally smooth effects and dry humor help it go down easy.
"113 Degrees" by Sabrina Doyle - Another nice bit of science fiction, this one a more serious tale of two astronauts who have become lovers over the course of a long-term facing an uncertain future when they return to Earth... Well, if they make it. The filmmakers build a world that seems just solid enough to believe, doing an impressive job of selling us on the situation without a whole lot of hysterics. Things get a little touch-and go when Doyle apparently tries to create ambiguity on just how Francesca's mental state contributed to the disaster, but otherwise, a nifty interplanetary-era short.
"Dawn" by Rose McGowan - This one veers dangerously close to not just being all about a twist, but not being entirely behind it, like the filmmakers want to tell this spooky story but aren't totally comfortable with how conservative its message is. Even with that in mind, McGowan an lead actress Tara Lynne Barr are well able to evoke how Dawn's warm 1950s cage is both comforting and confining, and if some of its climax is a bit muted, it's in part because the supporting cast is doing good enough work that the audience might like to see them doing a bit more.
"Hide & Seek" by Kayako Asakura - I almost feel like this could be a segment of a new Ju-on movie, if the producers had continued along the anthology route rather than rebooting it. It's got a creepy ghost kid, a mother who might be even stranger, and a teenage heroine who may be in way over her head. That makes it a little familiar, but it's got a couple good jump moments to it.
"The Jelly Wrestler" directed by Rebecca Thomson/written by Claire D'Este - I might have enjoyed this one just a notch or two more if it had just stayed an off-center comedy all the way through. It's a pretty nutty one - an aging bartender finding herself drawn back to old habits when the bar she works at plans a jelly-wrestling contest. It's a fun performance from Elise Taylor, and the chaos around her gets weirder and funnier. Even the last over-the-top bit is good for a laugh.
Soulmate
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Etheria Film Night, digital)
What is a ghost? Potentially anything a writer wants, but probably the strongest way to use this particular bit of supernatural lore is as the past personified, with the question being how that can affect the living and the present. Writer/director Axelle Carolyn zeroes in on that idea with Soulmate, and playing it out makes for an interesting story.
It's one that starts with a suicide attempt, a young musician who has been recently been widowed. When next we see Audrey (Anna Walton), she is renting an old house some miles away from any neighbors in Wales, complete with a room that caretaker Theresa Zellaby (Tanya Myers) and her husband (Nick Brimble) say cannot be opened. So those noises Audrey thinks she's hearing would seem seem to be coming from somewhere else - at least, until she finds Douglas (Tom Wisdom) in the sitting room.
It's a while before Douglas makes his first appearances, giving the viewer some time to get familiar with Audrey, and Carolyn and actress Anna Walton handle that introduction well. Without many words devoted to explaining herself, they show her sadness and difficulty in knowing just what to do next, and often the way she goes about trying to minimize the bandages on her wrists or seems stymied trying to arrange some music is just as telling as her doing it. Even more impressively, there is at least a hint of something other than depression from the start, so that the process of her possibly emerging from her shell as the film goes on feels quite genuine.
Full review at EFC.
In some ways, I think the consolidation has been a real boon. Previous Etheria shows just didn't have enough quality short films for great packages at times - which, it should be noted, is tough for all sci-fi blocks, since any sort of major world-building can take a lot more behind-the-scenes work than a short film's budget can support, though further narrowing the sample makes things even trickier. Other times, even narrower themes would emerge, like the time there were three or four red-riding-hood stories in one program. This year's broader focus seems to have led to a stronger program as a whole, with something closer to the cream being selected.
It was a fairly full house (for a room that holds thirty-odd people), so it was kind of disappointing that the "women in film" trivia questions for meet with uncomfortable levels of silence. I won a prize for knowing that Debra Hill was John Carpenter's writing/producing partner, which was why I didn't also raise my hands when asked who directed Tank Girl along with the two-part 2014 season finale of Doctor Who. I was kind of surprised nobody else got that one, although I like Tank Girl enough that I'm always surprised to see Rachel Talalay's name on a TV episode. In my head, she made a modest hit that naturally led to other feature opportunities. Of course, I also didn't remember Mary Harron's name when asked who directed American Psycho. In my defense, I have never seen that movie.
For knowing that bit of non-trivia, I won a DVD of the afternoon's feature presentation, Soulmate, signed by director Axelle Carolyn and one of the co-stars:
It is, think, important progress that where I remember much of the talk when one of her short films played Fantasia a couple years ago referring to her in terms of who her husband was, his name wasn't mentioned at all here, even though their dog's was.
To be fair, Nubi looks like a great dog who really should have an important part in all of their films going forward.
Etheria 2014 Shorts
Seen 14 December 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Etheria Film Night, digital)
This two hour block was, as I mentioned, one of the more solid genre short packages I've seen in a while. I'm not sure how much traveling this new version of Etheria is doing - I sometimes got the impression that the last one was Los Angeles, Boston, and not much else - but it's absolutely worth catching if it comes to your town, especially since none of these films are yet legitimately available online.
"The Guest" by Jovanka Vuckovic - This is the second sorry film I've seen from Ms. Vuckovic that has rather underwhelmed me on its own but which has me anticipating her first feature. Like "The Captured Bird", this is a tremendously striking film visually, but the story just seems to be starting to come into its own as the closing credits roll. She can grab an audience's attention, and I'm anxious to see if she can hold it.
"Serpent's Lullaby" by Patricia Chica - There is a whole lot to really like about this one - it tells a lot of story with an impressive economy of words and the memorable visuals hint at the climactic unveiling without quite giving it away. I do kind of feel that the tone falters a bit when the action moves outside of the spooky house, into the conventional world; there's an awkward comedy vibe that doesn't really fit with the spooky stuff. In general, though, it's a neat idea executed well.
"Little Lamb" by Heidi Lee Douglas - This one is a nifty little period slow-burner about a convict woman in nineteenth-century Australia who finds herself going from the frying pan to the fire in fairly short order. It's a bit long to start and seems to have a bit of a shortcut at the end, but in between it is plenty tense and occasionally rather gruesome. If the movie is a direct descendant of one of the bloodier classic fairy tales, then Douglas does a suitably nasty job of translating it.
"You, Me & Her" by Sarah Doyle - After close to forty-five minutes of intense horror to kick the program off, this being a more playful take on a sci-fi concept (meeting a bunch of alternate selves from parallel universes). The in-story logic trends to involve a fair amount of handwaving, but Doyle and star Shannon Woodward make the interaction and differentiation of the various Annas fairly funny, including flashbacks to the points of divergence. There's a fine nugget of an idea about it never being clear which risks to take in this one, and the generally smooth effects and dry humor help it go down easy.
"113 Degrees" by Sabrina Doyle - Another nice bit of science fiction, this one a more serious tale of two astronauts who have become lovers over the course of a long-term facing an uncertain future when they return to Earth... Well, if they make it. The filmmakers build a world that seems just solid enough to believe, doing an impressive job of selling us on the situation without a whole lot of hysterics. Things get a little touch-and go when Doyle apparently tries to create ambiguity on just how Francesca's mental state contributed to the disaster, but otherwise, a nifty interplanetary-era short.
"Dawn" by Rose McGowan - This one veers dangerously close to not just being all about a twist, but not being entirely behind it, like the filmmakers want to tell this spooky story but aren't totally comfortable with how conservative its message is. Even with that in mind, McGowan an lead actress Tara Lynne Barr are well able to evoke how Dawn's warm 1950s cage is both comforting and confining, and if some of its climax is a bit muted, it's in part because the supporting cast is doing good enough work that the audience might like to see them doing a bit more.
"Hide & Seek" by Kayako Asakura - I almost feel like this could be a segment of a new Ju-on movie, if the producers had continued along the anthology route rather than rebooting it. It's got a creepy ghost kid, a mother who might be even stranger, and a teenage heroine who may be in way over her head. That makes it a little familiar, but it's got a couple good jump moments to it.
"The Jelly Wrestler" directed by Rebecca Thomson/written by Claire D'Este - I might have enjoyed this one just a notch or two more if it had just stayed an off-center comedy all the way through. It's a pretty nutty one - an aging bartender finding herself drawn back to old habits when the bar she works at plans a jelly-wrestling contest. It's a fun performance from Elise Taylor, and the chaos around her gets weirder and funnier. Even the last over-the-top bit is good for a laugh.
Soulmate
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2014 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (Etheria Film Night, digital)
What is a ghost? Potentially anything a writer wants, but probably the strongest way to use this particular bit of supernatural lore is as the past personified, with the question being how that can affect the living and the present. Writer/director Axelle Carolyn zeroes in on that idea with Soulmate, and playing it out makes for an interesting story.
It's one that starts with a suicide attempt, a young musician who has been recently been widowed. When next we see Audrey (Anna Walton), she is renting an old house some miles away from any neighbors in Wales, complete with a room that caretaker Theresa Zellaby (Tanya Myers) and her husband (Nick Brimble) say cannot be opened. So those noises Audrey thinks she's hearing would seem seem to be coming from somewhere else - at least, until she finds Douglas (Tom Wisdom) in the sitting room.
It's a while before Douglas makes his first appearances, giving the viewer some time to get familiar with Audrey, and Carolyn and actress Anna Walton handle that introduction well. Without many words devoted to explaining herself, they show her sadness and difficulty in knowing just what to do next, and often the way she goes about trying to minimize the bandages on her wrists or seems stymied trying to arrange some music is just as telling as her doing it. Even more impressively, there is at least a hint of something other than depression from the start, so that the process of her possibly emerging from her shell as the film goes on feels quite genuine.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, January 04, 2015
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
It's saying a little bit more than usual when I comment that A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was worth the trip to the theater - I say that pretty easily, but getting there yesterday was not exactly fun. It was snowing as I came out of the day's first movie (The Interview) at around 6:30pm, which should not have been as unexpected as it was for Boston in January, but it's been a mild winter so far, as exemplified by how it turned to rain while I was finishing up True Detective while killing time before the midnight show of this. That meant the snow didn't really even have a chance to be pretty for a night before becoming nasty slush.
I suppose the sensible thing to do might have been to not walk to the Coolidge Corner Theatre for a midnight screening, but those 11:59pm shows were the only ones not playing in the GoldScreen, and while I like the Coolidge's 14-person room when I'm able to get a ticket there, that part can be tricky when you don't like to buy movie tickets in advance unless you're absolutely sure you can make it (which I seldom am). So, I probably broke a pair of newish shoes in a lot more than they really needed, and still wound up with squishy, cold socks because there just isn't any avoiding deep puddles along that road. I managed to catch a bus for about five minutes, which naturally made me wonder if I might have been better off just standing around waiting for it at some point.
It got me there early enough to hang around in the lobby talking movies with Nancy & Brian, including the fun question of just how gross Why Don't You Play In Hell? is, because he doesn't like to be scared. My answer was "a lot of arterial spray", which was apparently acceptable. We folks who like weird genre films can sometimes have strange lines that we don't like to cross.
Also amusing: When we were finally able to go upstairs (Birdman was pushing right up against Girl's midnight showtime), the marquee above the auditorium entrance said "Home Alone" before alternating back to "A Girl Walks". Home Alone actually played there a couple weeks ago, probably to some of the same crowd, although obviously a much different experience.
It was still raining when I got out, so I wound up walking home, overhearing a conversation saying that writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour nailed Iran despite apparently never having been there, which interests me: The American media often feeds us an image of Iran as a very rigid dictatorship, with a much-feared "morality police", ayatollahs, extreme fundamentalism, etc., and while there's a lot of truth to that, it's a depiction that fosters an impression of a tiny ruling class and everyone else scraping by on the allowed scraps, even though Iran does have a middle class and living memory of a more liberal culture (albeit one with different autocrats at the top). A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was shot in California, and in many ways could easily be seen as a kind of heightened take on that area other than the Farsi dialogue and street signs. If it also scans as Iran, maybe there's a lot more common ground between us than people think - at least with the country's population, if not its rulers.
One more thing - while watching the film, I noticed that Amirpour did some things that were kind of comic-inspired, such as how the girl's hijab makes her a formless shadow; I did not realize until looking for related merch that she has actually written a couple of issues of a comic based upon the film. I don't know whether they ever came out in print editions or any local shop has them, so I'll probably have to dive into Comixology to read them. How to people like that service? Does it connect to my Marvel app (which uses it as an engine) or Amazon (who purchased them) with relatively little pain?
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3/4 January 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run/@fter Midnite, DCP)
I don't know that I necessarily buy the "western" part of how A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is billed as "the first Iranian Vampire Western", even if there is occasionally some Morricone-sounding music on the soundtrack. At least that description gives someone at the ticket counter an idea of how enjoyably odd this movie is.
It takes a while before we are introduced to The Girl (Sheila Vand); first we're introduced to Arash (Arash Marandi), who works odd jobs to pay for his classic car and the drug habit of his father Hossein (Marshall Manesh). That is supplied by local dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains), who also has an arrangement with hooker Atti (Mozhan Marno). But just as Arash is about to steal from his boss's pretty daughter Shaydah (Rome Shadanloo) to pay off Saeed, the dealer invites that harmless-looking girl back to his place.
Even taking into account that the movie's "Bad City" seems like a pretty modern place, this story is less of a Western and more a film noir or youth-oriented drama; the setting is industrial, with oil derricks busy working in the background, the problems seeming locked in place rather than just passing through. Lyle Vincent's black-and-white cinematography is crisp and urban, sharp contrasts instead of natural grays. Writer/director/producer Ana Lily Amirpour, of course, isn't trying to represent just one genre, though, and she and her team build this world in clever, intriguing ways, from the quarry in the middle of town that is half Boot Hill and half mass grave to how the girl's hijab often makes her a formless shadow even as the stripes on her shirt indicate a hip young woman inside.
I suppose the sensible thing to do might have been to not walk to the Coolidge Corner Theatre for a midnight screening, but those 11:59pm shows were the only ones not playing in the GoldScreen, and while I like the Coolidge's 14-person room when I'm able to get a ticket there, that part can be tricky when you don't like to buy movie tickets in advance unless you're absolutely sure you can make it (which I seldom am). So, I probably broke a pair of newish shoes in a lot more than they really needed, and still wound up with squishy, cold socks because there just isn't any avoiding deep puddles along that road. I managed to catch a bus for about five minutes, which naturally made me wonder if I might have been better off just standing around waiting for it at some point.
It got me there early enough to hang around in the lobby talking movies with Nancy & Brian, including the fun question of just how gross Why Don't You Play In Hell? is, because he doesn't like to be scared. My answer was "a lot of arterial spray", which was apparently acceptable. We folks who like weird genre films can sometimes have strange lines that we don't like to cross.
Also amusing: When we were finally able to go upstairs (Birdman was pushing right up against Girl's midnight showtime), the marquee above the auditorium entrance said "Home Alone" before alternating back to "A Girl Walks". Home Alone actually played there a couple weeks ago, probably to some of the same crowd, although obviously a much different experience.
It was still raining when I got out, so I wound up walking home, overhearing a conversation saying that writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour nailed Iran despite apparently never having been there, which interests me: The American media often feeds us an image of Iran as a very rigid dictatorship, with a much-feared "morality police", ayatollahs, extreme fundamentalism, etc., and while there's a lot of truth to that, it's a depiction that fosters an impression of a tiny ruling class and everyone else scraping by on the allowed scraps, even though Iran does have a middle class and living memory of a more liberal culture (albeit one with different autocrats at the top). A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was shot in California, and in many ways could easily be seen as a kind of heightened take on that area other than the Farsi dialogue and street signs. If it also scans as Iran, maybe there's a lot more common ground between us than people think - at least with the country's population, if not its rulers.
One more thing - while watching the film, I noticed that Amirpour did some things that were kind of comic-inspired, such as how the girl's hijab makes her a formless shadow; I did not realize until looking for related merch that she has actually written a couple of issues of a comic based upon the film. I don't know whether they ever came out in print editions or any local shop has them, so I'll probably have to dive into Comixology to read them. How to people like that service? Does it connect to my Marvel app (which uses it as an engine) or Amazon (who purchased them) with relatively little pain?
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3/4 January 2014 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (first-run/@fter Midnite, DCP)
I don't know that I necessarily buy the "western" part of how A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is billed as "the first Iranian Vampire Western", even if there is occasionally some Morricone-sounding music on the soundtrack. At least that description gives someone at the ticket counter an idea of how enjoyably odd this movie is.
It takes a while before we are introduced to The Girl (Sheila Vand); first we're introduced to Arash (Arash Marandi), who works odd jobs to pay for his classic car and the drug habit of his father Hossein (Marshall Manesh). That is supplied by local dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains), who also has an arrangement with hooker Atti (Mozhan Marno). But just as Arash is about to steal from his boss's pretty daughter Shaydah (Rome Shadanloo) to pay off Saeed, the dealer invites that harmless-looking girl back to his place.
Even taking into account that the movie's "Bad City" seems like a pretty modern place, this story is less of a Western and more a film noir or youth-oriented drama; the setting is industrial, with oil derricks busy working in the background, the problems seeming locked in place rather than just passing through. Lyle Vincent's black-and-white cinematography is crisp and urban, sharp contrasts instead of natural grays. Writer/director/producer Ana Lily Amirpour, of course, isn't trying to represent just one genre, though, and she and her team build this world in clever, intriguing ways, from the quarry in the middle of town that is half Boot Hill and half mass grave to how the girl's hijab often makes her a formless shadow even as the stripes on her shirt indicate a hip young woman inside.
t's one of the most clever ways of depicting someone supernatural so that they both fit into and jump out of the real world that I can recall seeing on film, instantly iconic. It's not immediately obvious that Amirpour stakes out any other symbolism for her vampire rather than just dropping her into this mash-up world; there's a part of me that wants to jump to the conclusion that a single young woman in Iran (or a similar place) must become this sort of shadow creature to survive if she doesn't have the privilege of a Shaydah or wish to sell herself like Atti, although that seems somewhat presumptuous. Even looking at the film through that prism, it makes Sheila Vand's nameless girl more intriguing than anything - Vand is great at mischief and shy cool, and while she does what she can when asked to be scary, the thinness of the story means there's no reason why she's threatening people.
Given that she's mostly targeting Bad City's lowlife population, it's a bit curious that she seldom seems terribly conflicted toward Arash, who at the very least seems willing to seize questionable opportunities as soon as they appear in front of him. Still, Arash Marandi does manage to project just enough reluctance and balance his namesake character's anger at the world's unfairness with appreciation when it drops something good in his lap to make him an entertaining anti-hero. He and Vand play off each other well even without a lot of words.
Is that quite enough to add up to a movie? If not, a nifty soundtrack, occasional amusing background gags, and a supporting cast where everyone has at least one good, often funny scene (Dominic Rains's absurd but still threatening Saeed being a standout in that regard), gets it over the hump and into territory that's a lot of fun. And that's before mentioning the cat, who is expressive and responsive enough in certain scenes as to make one wonder if he's a puppet or other bit of effects wizardry, because what cat looks where you want him to on cue?
That and a number of other things make A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night a unique movie (well, unique considering it's a feature version of something Amirpour previously did as a short). It's often rather loose, but there's something exciting about that - like putting a Persian-American spin on genre tropes has made them feel full of potential, rather than just harnessed them to make a specific point.
(Formerly at EFC)
Saturday, January 03, 2015
This That Week In Tickets: 1 December 2014 - 7 December 2014
I don't know how much this applies as a general statement, but I find that the weeks when a lot of people are making their "once every few months" trips to the theaters, I'm going less frequently.
See, while studios are mostly giving each others' big releases (Hunger Games 3, Penguins of Madagascar, and a fair amount of Interstellar & Big Hero 6 in this case) a whole ton of screens, the likes of me have seen those, so we're either staying home or catching the stuff on its last legs that we meant to see earlier or the semi-doomed things getting half-hearted releases out of contractual obligation. I saw two in each category.
The first of stragglers was Tommy Lee Jones's The Homesman on Monday night, which might have been splitting a theater in last week. It's not hard to see why it didn't hang around for that long; it's a bleak vision - sometimes gratuitously so - that makes few concessions to what we to think we think today. There may have been walk-outs on that count.
Things didn't really like up again until Friday, when I caught The Pyramid, a limited-release horror movie that's on shaky ground from the moment it reveals that it's tomb is a tetrahedron, but I found myself enjoying it maybe a little more than it deserves because there aren't enough movies about foolhardy archaeologists evading ancient deathtraps and it does get good and nuts toward the end.
Saturday's small-release special was Miss Julie, an adaptation of the Ibsen play directed by Liv Ullmann and starring Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Emily Mortimer. As you might expect with that group, it's impressively mounted although it doors begin to wear on a viewer by the end.
Finally, on Sunday, I found some time to take William Goss's advice and catch Beyond the Lights. I'd say something similar about romantic comedies a few weeks later, but it's the sort of modest story executed well that seems like it should be Hollywood's backbone, but these days reaches multiplexes infrequently enough to deserve more notice than I'm giving it.
The Homesman
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, DCP)
I can't recall Tommy Lee Jones ever working with Werner Herzog at any point, and that's probably for the best. The Homesman suggest they may be too much on the same page about how the untamed wilderness not only wants to kill any person who ventures into its domain, but it will first drive him or her mad. We are probably better off not having witnessed that combined bleak outlook.
And while Jones's adaptation of Gledon Swarthout's novel sometimes pushes said bleakness not just past the point of comfort but into territory that might make a viewer give up early (more dead babies than you need to see). It's worth sticking around, though, because Jones evokes the idea of a West that just pulverizes minds in a way that is pure horror: Men become cruel, to the point where the women they are with just shut down, and even strong, capable women like Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) have their sense of worth chipped away to an extent that is tragic. Jones's title character may be the most rational in his amorality, but he's hollow for it.
It's a fine, fragile performance on Jones's part, a notable contrast to his many more bombastic parts - or the sleepwalking turn in The Family which I suspect was done as barter for this movie (Luc Besson's Europacorp produced it). Hilary Swank is exceptional as Cuddy, giving a performance that evokes solid decency but also highlights the cracks that have been forming in part as a result of that. It's essential in making the film's last act completely believable even while it feels like a betrayal. The turns from Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter as the women who lost their minds are terribly effective, and there's a string of memorable appearances in smaller parts: John Lithgow, William Ficthner, James Spader, Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld.
I probably won't watch this one again - it is just too cruel at points to subject oneself to multiple times - but it's certainly worth one watch.
Beyond the Lights
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2014 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)
Does anybody else see Gugu Mbatha-Raw playing fairly young and inexperienced characters in movies like this and Belle and find it kind of weird because she played a semi-retired, veteran spy on Undercovers, or am I the only one who watched/liked that show?
I jest, a bit, although it does make me wonder if the movie plays better to those for whom Mbatha-Raw is a fresh face rather than someone who has already paid some dues. That's an issue I brought in, and though it's not quite the biggest one - the film seems to require her character Noni to simultaneously be a big star and about to have her debut album drop, although I suppose that sort of thing is possible in today's pop music industry and celebrity culture. - but that it's what stuck out to me, then the movie is in pretty good shape otherwise.
And, truth be told, it is in pretty good shape. There are a lot of places where it could go wrong - everything could seem to move too fast, it could get snotty or cavalier in how it approaches the sexualization of girls like Noni in the hip-hop/R&B world, it could make the parents of both Noni and Kaz (Nate Parker), the cop who pulls her off a ledge and gets attached, into too-simplistic caricatures. Instead, though, writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood manages to keep things moving smoothly; if she's not quite finding a fresh angle to her story of a young entertainer finding love and stability with a man from outside that world, she's smoothing the edges off the harsh turns, giving the actors good lines to speak, and lining up a bunch of interesting details.
She's also got a fine cast who can get what's going on with these character across well enough that she doesn't have to spell it out. Mbatha-Raw is front and center, and I love how she's able to play Noni's rock-star confidence in the opening parts of the film as not just a front - that for all the doubt and turmoil which Mbatha-Raw gets to bring to the forefront in due time, the brass is part of her as well. Nate Parker does a lot of little things right in what could be a bland, ideal-man role, especially when it comes down to looking like he's trying to be cool in a situation that could bring out (pleasant) agitation. They play off each other well, along with parents who manage to make good parallels without being terribly similar: Minnie Driver is a familiar nightmare of a stage mother, and she bites right into the part, but she's also always ready when we need a glimpse of better qualities; Danny Glover, on the other hand, has his characer project ambition onto his son in a way that seems to reflect pride as much as opportunism.
It's straightforward material, and doesn't always excel within its genre - the movie gets stretched until it reaches the end Prince-Bythewood wants - but it's an entertaining romance that goes down well. Like I said up top, we should be seeing movies like this all the time - it's funny, romantic, and dramatic in the proper turns, and should appeal to a wide audience - but we don't, and it's a shame that there doesn't seem to be much room for good love stories well told in the cinema today.
See, while studios are mostly giving each others' big releases (Hunger Games 3, Penguins of Madagascar, and a fair amount of Interstellar & Big Hero 6 in this case) a whole ton of screens, the likes of me have seen those, so we're either staying home or catching the stuff on its last legs that we meant to see earlier or the semi-doomed things getting half-hearted releases out of contractual obligation. I saw two in each category.
The first of stragglers was Tommy Lee Jones's The Homesman on Monday night, which might have been splitting a theater in last week. It's not hard to see why it didn't hang around for that long; it's a bleak vision - sometimes gratuitously so - that makes few concessions to what we to think we think today. There may have been walk-outs on that count.
Things didn't really like up again until Friday, when I caught The Pyramid, a limited-release horror movie that's on shaky ground from the moment it reveals that it's tomb is a tetrahedron, but I found myself enjoying it maybe a little more than it deserves because there aren't enough movies about foolhardy archaeologists evading ancient deathtraps and it does get good and nuts toward the end.
Saturday's small-release special was Miss Julie, an adaptation of the Ibsen play directed by Liv Ullmann and starring Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Emily Mortimer. As you might expect with that group, it's impressively mounted although it doors begin to wear on a viewer by the end.
Finally, on Sunday, I found some time to take William Goss's advice and catch Beyond the Lights. I'd say something similar about romantic comedies a few weeks later, but it's the sort of modest story executed well that seems like it should be Hollywood's backbone, but these days reaches multiplexes infrequently enough to deserve more notice than I'm giving it.
The Homesman
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, DCP)
I can't recall Tommy Lee Jones ever working with Werner Herzog at any point, and that's probably for the best. The Homesman suggest they may be too much on the same page about how the untamed wilderness not only wants to kill any person who ventures into its domain, but it will first drive him or her mad. We are probably better off not having witnessed that combined bleak outlook.
And while Jones's adaptation of Gledon Swarthout's novel sometimes pushes said bleakness not just past the point of comfort but into territory that might make a viewer give up early (more dead babies than you need to see). It's worth sticking around, though, because Jones evokes the idea of a West that just pulverizes minds in a way that is pure horror: Men become cruel, to the point where the women they are with just shut down, and even strong, capable women like Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) have their sense of worth chipped away to an extent that is tragic. Jones's title character may be the most rational in his amorality, but he's hollow for it.
It's a fine, fragile performance on Jones's part, a notable contrast to his many more bombastic parts - or the sleepwalking turn in The Family which I suspect was done as barter for this movie (Luc Besson's Europacorp produced it). Hilary Swank is exceptional as Cuddy, giving a performance that evokes solid decency but also highlights the cracks that have been forming in part as a result of that. It's essential in making the film's last act completely believable even while it feels like a betrayal. The turns from Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter as the women who lost their minds are terribly effective, and there's a string of memorable appearances in smaller parts: John Lithgow, William Ficthner, James Spader, Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld.
I probably won't watch this one again - it is just too cruel at points to subject oneself to multiple times - but it's certainly worth one watch.
Beyond the Lights
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2014 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)
Does anybody else see Gugu Mbatha-Raw playing fairly young and inexperienced characters in movies like this and Belle and find it kind of weird because she played a semi-retired, veteran spy on Undercovers, or am I the only one who watched/liked that show?
I jest, a bit, although it does make me wonder if the movie plays better to those for whom Mbatha-Raw is a fresh face rather than someone who has already paid some dues. That's an issue I brought in, and though it's not quite the biggest one - the film seems to require her character Noni to simultaneously be a big star and about to have her debut album drop, although I suppose that sort of thing is possible in today's pop music industry and celebrity culture. - but that it's what stuck out to me, then the movie is in pretty good shape otherwise.
And, truth be told, it is in pretty good shape. There are a lot of places where it could go wrong - everything could seem to move too fast, it could get snotty or cavalier in how it approaches the sexualization of girls like Noni in the hip-hop/R&B world, it could make the parents of both Noni and Kaz (Nate Parker), the cop who pulls her off a ledge and gets attached, into too-simplistic caricatures. Instead, though, writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood manages to keep things moving smoothly; if she's not quite finding a fresh angle to her story of a young entertainer finding love and stability with a man from outside that world, she's smoothing the edges off the harsh turns, giving the actors good lines to speak, and lining up a bunch of interesting details.
She's also got a fine cast who can get what's going on with these character across well enough that she doesn't have to spell it out. Mbatha-Raw is front and center, and I love how she's able to play Noni's rock-star confidence in the opening parts of the film as not just a front - that for all the doubt and turmoil which Mbatha-Raw gets to bring to the forefront in due time, the brass is part of her as well. Nate Parker does a lot of little things right in what could be a bland, ideal-man role, especially when it comes down to looking like he's trying to be cool in a situation that could bring out (pleasant) agitation. They play off each other well, along with parents who manage to make good parallels without being terribly similar: Minnie Driver is a familiar nightmare of a stage mother, and she bites right into the part, but she's also always ready when we need a glimpse of better qualities; Danny Glover, on the other hand, has his characer project ambition onto his son in a way that seems to reflect pride as much as opportunism.
It's straightforward material, and doesn't always excel within its genre - the movie gets stretched until it reaches the end Prince-Bythewood wants - but it's an entertaining romance that goes down well. Like I said up top, we should be seeing movies like this all the time - it's funny, romantic, and dramatic in the proper turns, and should appeal to a wide audience - but we don't, and it's a shame that there doesn't seem to be much room for good love stories well told in the cinema today.
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
I have very little to say about this one - the audience ate it up, with applause at the end, but I found that it had the feeling of a very long Electronic Press Kit piece - maybe not exactly a puff piece, but mostly meant to please, and anything which highlights its subject's difficulty does so in a way that also emphasizes his brilliance.
It's kind of unfortunate that it's playing alongside Isao Takahata's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya rather than Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises, because it is much more about Miyazaki's movie than Takahata's, even if it has the end result of making one more curious about "Paku-san" and his movie.
Yume to kyôki no ôkoku (The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2014 at the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is sometimes described as "a year in the life of Studio Ghibli", and one which is potentially its last year as an active production house. Many fans will likely be fascinated to watch renowned director Hayao Miyazaki work on his final film, although the documentary will give them more access than insight.
That's especially true for those who are most likely to drawn to Mami Sunada's picture - they already know that Hayao Miyazaki creates painted storyboards for his films rather than a conventional screenplay, or that longtime producer Toshio Suzuki hired Miyazaki to create the manga that eventually became Nausicaä in the Valley of the Wind while editing an animation magazine. They know the ins and outs of creating traditional animation, even if they are sometimes a bit taken aback at just how painstaking it is.
The access is impressive, though - not quite total, but Miyazaki and Suzuki certainly appear to allow Sunada plenty of freedom to look over their shoulders. Miyazaki, in particular, becomes a subject that merits the viewer's attention, charismatic and folksy but often expressing a pessimistic view of the world. It's an intriguing portrait, although one likely to be very much influenced by what the audience brings to it. Does this joviality serve to mask how he can be the sort of genius that can be very difficult to deal with, and is it done deliberately, especially with Sunada always being around?
Full review at EFC.
It's kind of unfortunate that it's playing alongside Isao Takahata's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya rather than Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises, because it is much more about Miyazaki's movie than Takahata's, even if it has the end result of making one more curious about "Paku-san" and his movie.
Yume to kyôki no ôkoku (The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2014 at the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is sometimes described as "a year in the life of Studio Ghibli", and one which is potentially its last year as an active production house. Many fans will likely be fascinated to watch renowned director Hayao Miyazaki work on his final film, although the documentary will give them more access than insight.
That's especially true for those who are most likely to drawn to Mami Sunada's picture - they already know that Hayao Miyazaki creates painted storyboards for his films rather than a conventional screenplay, or that longtime producer Toshio Suzuki hired Miyazaki to create the manga that eventually became Nausicaä in the Valley of the Wind while editing an animation magazine. They know the ins and outs of creating traditional animation, even if they are sometimes a bit taken aback at just how painstaking it is.
The access is impressive, though - not quite total, but Miyazaki and Suzuki certainly appear to allow Sunada plenty of freedom to look over their shoulders. Miyazaki, in particular, becomes a subject that merits the viewer's attention, charismatic and folksy but often expressing a pessimistic view of the world. It's an intriguing portrait, although one likely to be very much influenced by what the audience brings to it. Does this joviality serve to mask how he can be the sort of genius that can be very difficult to deal with, and is it done deliberately, especially with Sunada always being around?
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 2 January 2015 - 8 January 2015
Is there a better way to tell large chains that you would like a movie to play near you than tweeting at them? There doesn't seem to be an obvious place on their websites or an email address for that kind of feedback. So, I've just tweeted at Regal Cinemas and AMC Theatres that I'd like to see The Taking of Tiger Mountain play Boston, and encourage others who would like to see the new Tsui Hark action movie just a week or two after its Chinese run to do the same. Maybe they'll call Well Go up and we'll have it next week.
My plans? A Girl Walks Home at Night, Big Eyes, The Interview, Whiplash, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness and Why Don't You Play in Hell?.
- Not that I really want to prioritize what's not playing over what is, but there are not a lot of new openings. The multiplexes basically get The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, the sequel to the revived Hammer Films' film from three years ago. It takes place forty years later, so nobody in the cast returns (not even as the supernatural title character). It's at Apple Cambridge, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere.
Otherwise, you've got the Somerville Theatre opening The Interview for a very limited run - announced as just until the eighth, with daily shows at 4:20pm and 9:45pm shows on Friday & Saturday. It's still playing a full schedule at Apple Cinemas, though. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre has A Girl Walks Home at Night the Goldscreen, also pegged as a one-week booking. It's a Farsi-language vampire western, apparently, in black-and-whie, with female leads. Nothing like it, I imagine. It also plays midnights on Saturday and Sunday on screen #2, which is probably the easier ticket. The other midnight, on the main screen, is Trailer Apocalypse, a ninety-minute compilation of 35mm exploitation trailers. The week's other special presentation is Vanya on 42nd Street Monday night, part of a co-presentation with the Huntington Theatre Company who are staging Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike.
- The Brattle has some great Japanese cinema playing this week: Friday to Sunday is three single features, starting with matinees of Isao Takahata's farewell film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Studio Ghibli documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, and Sion Sono's fantastic, fast-paced salute to underground filmmaking, Why Don't You Play in Hell?. The first two continue Monday, at different times, with Princess Kaguya switching from English-dubbed to subtitled for that show.
The rest of the week is Studio Ghibli double features - Spirited Away & Princess Mononoke on Tuesday, My Neighbor Totoro & Kiki's Delivery Service (35mm) on Wednesday - and a single feature of Hayao Miyazaki's final film, The Wind Rises on Thursday. All are in Japanese with English subtitles. That Wednesday double feaure is what I got my nieces for Christmas, so you know it's good stuff. - After putting it on hold for the holiday break, the Museum of Fine Arts begins its January film calendar on Wednesday with The Films of Alec Guinness. The program starts with Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob on Wednesday the 7th and The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers on Thursday the 8th.
My plans? A Girl Walks Home at Night, Big Eyes, The Interview, Whiplash, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness and Why Don't You Play in Hell?.
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