This Week in Tickets: 7 January 2019 - 13 January 2019

If I made New Year's Resolutions, they might involve giving up even the attempt at midnight movies. But I don't so I didn't so here we are.



The week started off with Sisters at the Brattle, which has apparently been recently restored and looks nice, although I gather that I liked it a fair bit more the last time I saw it. The events of the past few years have highlighted the general creepiness of its narrative, and I'm not sure how well it sits now. It makes me curious to see just what is on that box of early counter-culture comedies director Brian De Palma did with Robert De Niro (though some of that is dread). I'd be back there on Wednesday for the start of the theater's Best-of-2018 series, watching the really impressive The Rider.

Thursday was a trip to the Fenway theater, as that's where they show the anime. Modest Heroes turned out to be a nifty little shorts program, although there was a fair amount of confusion toward the start regarding the subtitles, or lack thereof. It got sorted, but could have been avoided.

I was considering a double feature Friday night, but nothing aligned very well with Queen Boxer at the Coolidge at midnight. I thought I was in good shape for that, having slept in enough to almost miss two buses to work in the morning and having fortified myself with caffeine ahead of time, but I was frustratingly in and out. And while I"m not exactly going to shake my fist at the theater for loading up on old kung-fu trailers before the movie, I just missed the last 66 bus across the river and wound up taking a Lyft home (and, yeah, I feel bad, because I know the business model is predatory, but the genuine taxi app was quoting a price something like 6x as high and I wasn't adding $36 to the price of a movie I barely saw).

Back to the Brattle the next afternoon for Hereditary, which wasn't quite the slog I'd feared but was still kind of a lot. No way I was staying another 2.5 hours to try the Suspiria remake again, although that probably would have been better than taking the Red Line downtown to see Replicas, which was impressively Not Good, but not even in a surprising way. It was just boring.

Destroyer wasn't quite "boring" the next night, but it certainly wasn't what I'd hoped for when combining a favorite actress with a director who has a ton of potential. Of course, it didn't help that I followed it up by coming home and watching the first couple episodes of the new True Detective, which is thus far looking like a much better take on revisiting a case decades later.

More potentially good TV coming up this week, but still plenty of movies planned, with the Letterboxd page where the rough drafts go.

Sisters

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Refreshed, Renewed, Restored; DCP)

Hot take: The best part of Sisters is the segment in the beginning with the "Peeping Tom" show and African Room, where De Palma is doing some weird, mean satire on much more deserving targets than career women and people with mental health issues. The thriller stuff after that is stylish and arty and has a fair Bernard Herrmann score, but plays as seriously misogynistic, with Jennifer Salt's career woman pretty much useless in terms of actually figuring things out and instantly gaslighted when necessary (between this and The Hot Rock, I wonder if there was some weird fad for hypnotism in the early 1970s that now seems especially weird). The doctor may be a creep, but at least he's a creep with some agency.

The end loops back to the same level of knowing absurdity as the start, and while it's not as targeted as the opening minutes (a shame, because there's something to be said here about what happens to women who try to report crimes and evidence often being right there but people being unwilling to see it), I do kind of like how merrily destructive this sort of ironic ending is - it acknowledges just how much of what's gone on that it's undercutting, rather than just doing it to get an extra scare in. De Palma owns his nihilistic ending.

I liked it a bit more seven years ago

Chou (Queen Boxer)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (After Midnite: East Meets West, dubbed 35mm)

That is a lot of axes. Honestly, this movie deserves to be referenced more for the axes than the boxing. And maybe with the other guy more than Judy Lee's Ma Su-chen; from what I managed to be alert for, he certainly seemed to be driving the story more, with her drifting in and out.

Nice fighting, at least, and truth be told the dubbing wasn't horrific. I would have happily given this another chance when I got home if it were readily available anywhere, but I guess that's why I at least make the attempt to get through a midnight show. Hopefully the Police Story movies won't be like that!

Hereditary

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre [(Some of} The Best of 2018, DCP]

I guess if you're going to make a horror movie around a series a creepy scenes, as opposed to something basically unnerving at the core, it's tough to do it better than Hereditary. The staging of each individual scene is impressive, it looks great, it sounds creepy. Toni Collette gives a genuinely terrific performance, especially when one considers just how much of the center of the movie is her manically diving into something utterly irrational and making the audience believe she'd do that after having been so reserved and scared. It's a jump-scare movie, but it's dressed up nice for folks who feel like they want more.

But, boy, does it feel like an big collection of nice stuff. Though not quite so long as I'd thought it was (I'm not sure where the 2.5 hour runtime in my head came from), my biggest moment of dread came from looking up at the Brattle's clock, thinking it was almost over and then realizing I'd misread the hour hand and it was just at the halfway mark. All the nice sleight of hand and practical effects can't really cover how I always find this sort of movie less scary when the actual paranormal material pushes all the stuff in the characters' heads to the side - early on, there's this genuine feeling of dread as Collette's Annie lists out the various people in her family who suffer from some sort of mental illness, and her worries that she's eventually going to lose her mind - or that she's already just barely maintaining control and may not be up to what her family needs from her - is much more frightening to me than some ridiculous cult or demon.

I do wonder a bit how much my being less impressed than some comes from not seeing it early. There were some things that probably should have been bigger surprises based on what was emphasized in the trailer, but though the folks on social media didn't exactly "spoil" things in some cases, there were enough oblique references that I wasn't really shocked. There's an argument that a good horror movie can beat this by either being more than just out-of-nowhere jolts or by being so enveloping that even those who have seen it before get engrossed enough to be shocked, and I don't know if Hereditary does that quite as well as you might hope.

Destroyer

99% of the time when I see a fim at a festival, I don't have anything to ask during the Q&A until days later, but I felt like I had a pretty good question at the end of this one, about whether all the baseball references were meant to add up to something. It seems like they do - there are ballgames on the radio in both the past and present before things go to hell, the most uplifting moment early on in the movie has Erin suddenly finding herself above Chavez Ravine, looking down at the lights, and Bradley Whitford's lawyer is trying his best to make practicing miserable for his son. It disappears later on, so I wondered if it was meant to be some sort of calming influence.

On second thought, that would be tough to ask about without it coming across as an annoying "explaining the movie to its director" thing, which always frustrates me. I suspect I'm just relatively attuned to baseball, and the characters liking it is a thing that helps me identify with them, which is especially important in a movie like this where I really want to feel closer to what seems like a generic group. After all, it's not like Shelby's memory at the end involves baseball, or there are many references to campiling earlier. Maybe someone else would have seized on other throw-away background details to try and get something out of this movie.

It's a shame it comes to that, though. For as much as I've been lukewarm on director Karyn Kusama's movies, I always feel like they're almost there. The Invitation did pretty much nothing for me as a whole but had some great moments, and I've got to rewatch Jennifer's Body sometime; the people who really like it all seem to like it for the reasons I wanted to, even if it didn't really manage to pull it all together. I really wanted this to be great and Nicole Kidman to hit it out of the park, but instead it's mostly just fine.

Destroyer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)

Destroyer is a little better than the award-seeking gimmicks that show up front and center, but not by that much. The filmmakers tell their story of cynical cops and robbers well enough, but don't find a compelling reason to tell this particular story; there's a quick thrill as things click together in the end, but not quite to the point where one wants to go back and reconsider everything longer one is supposed to.

Seventeen years ago, LAPD detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) went undercover with a federal agent (Sebastian Stan) to crack a ring of bank robbers, and the fallout from that is a big part of why she's a mess now, regularly hungover on the job, her teenage daughter (Jade Pettyjohn), already living with her stepfather (Scoot McNairy), taunting her by dating an older creep. Now she finds out that Silas (Toby Kebbell), the ringleader they ultimately failed to capture, is back in town, and she's intent on finding him before more corpses appear in the present.

Two-track crime stories like Destroyer often seem like they would be better off if they were reconfigured to focus more on one time period or the other, and that's a major issue here. Both halves of the film are rather by-the-numbers, stepping through familiar situations with only the occasional interesting deviation, although hinting at situations just interesting enough to keep the audience's attention. The flashback sequences seem a bit lighter than those in the present; too much of who Erin was to start with is held back for this thread to give an idea of how the assignment changed her, and the gang as a whole barely gets enough holding it together to make what happened to them later particularly compelling. Writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi throw in a couple of sharp turns, but these aren't the sort of guys who commit entertainingly intricate crimes and the material around the robberies is restrained, saving too much for last-minute revelations that don't pack the punch they should.

Full review at EFC.

Replicas

Not much to say about this one - it's been on a shelf for a while, it got released in a spot where studios generally drop things that are too expensive to not try and recoup via theatrical play but which will get crushed by actual good movies, and it doesn't particularly look promising. Finding that it is not in fact very good is hardly surprising.

I'd hoped otherwise, though, because I like stars Keanu Reeves and Alice Eve, and maybe this was just a case of critics and studios not knowing what to do with science fiction that wasn't built as an action movie. No such luck, it's just bad and boring.

Oh, and Boston Common is now doing reserved seating for all theaters, not just the Imax one. I'm kind of neutral on that as an idea, but I've kind of liked that place being the last accidental hold-out of old-school moviegoing among the chains, and now they're apparently even letting you order food ahead. I don't see them ripping the seats out for recliners any time soon, but who knows?

Replicas

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

As much as we've all come to see Keanu Reeves not so much as a bad actor as a guy who can do quite well when he's playing something within a certain range, "ethically-conflicted scientist" is pretty damn far outside that comfort zone. It is, unfortunately, more or less the entirety of this movie, and makes Replicas a pretty tough slog. It's got about five times more in the way of interesting sci-fi ideas than it does actual story, and never finds a good way to close the gap.

Reeves plays Will Foster, an engineer working on transferring the contents of a human brain into a robot body at the Puerto Rico laboratory of Bionyne Industries. It's not going well; the latest soldier who had signed a release started ripping his new shell apart as soon as awakening, and the boss (John Ortiz) says funding will be cut if they don't see results soon. A weekend away with his family - wife Mona (Alice Eve), son Matt (Emjay Anthony), and daughters Sophie (Emily Alyn Lind) and Zoe (Aria Lyric Leabu) seems like it might be just thing, but a car accident leaves only Will alive. His co-worker and best friend Ed (Thomas Middleditch) has done advanced work on cloning, so if Will can figure out the transfer in the 17 days it takes to grow them to their previous ages, it might be like they'd never gone. The trouble is, Ed can only get hold of three cloning pods, and that's a lot to hide for two and a half weeks.

There are a lot of ideas that make for good science fiction here, and though the script by Chad St. John (from a story by producer Stephen Hamel) can sometimes handwave these challenges away, the decision to portray all of these issues as interconnected and happening at the same time, rather than isolated innovations and thus ethical conundrums, is a good one in theory. Practically, though, it often leaves little room for anything to be examined in much detail, and there are moments when the filmmakers don't seem to have figured the details of their near-future world out; some things are presented as very difficult while things such as editing memories is referenced very casually. Lots of things get brought up, but fewer lead to situations that put Will on the spot.

Full review at EFC.

Modest Heroes

I can't really complain about my trip to Fenway for this movie, especially since I brought a certain amount of frustration on myself by ordering hot food that wasn't nachos about five minutes before showtime. When there's no time to eat before the movie and you're hungry, though, it's hard not to imagine a job interview where an applicant talks about his love of cinema and the manager sighs, because what she really needs is people who are passionate about filling orders and making change fast enough that everyone in line can get to their seat before the lights go down. That I made it tight myself diminished my tension not a bit.

And the movie had already started when I got to my seat, but it was weird; people were talking, not in English, without subtitles. After a few minutes, it stopped, the clowns who think they're making a really funny and original joke by applauding like the movie had finished did so, and then it started up again, and I got the impression I wasn't the only one who hadn't seen the opening credits. The first segment starts, and… No subtitles, but it was also pretty clear that the characters were yelling each other's names and something like "Papa!" Still, it stopped again, and a manager came in and offered to play the dubbed version instead. By then, some folks had gotten out their phones and found out that the first segment didn't have dialogue as such and convinced the manager to play it as is despite the fact that they'd had customers complain.

I imagine we were all on pins and needles when the second one started, of course, even if we had seen some translated credits. It seems like something the distributor should have seen coming and warned the theater about.

Even with that going on at the front, I was on my way home relatively quickly. The show is probably about 45 minutes long and the bonus interview(s) about a half-hour, meaning I was waiting for a train by 8:30pm. The interview itself was interesting not so much for what the producer said about the film itself but for how often Studio Ghibli came up. Isao Takahata was going to contribute a segment, but passed away during pre-production, but two of the directors who did make shorts were lead animators and character designers for Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki at Ghibli, and there was plenty of talk about the studio not just being an inspiration, but a void they were specifically looking to fill, and not just because they consider themselves one of the few companies in Japan specifically aiming to make good films for children.

The most interesting bit in the interview was that, for much of the process, the filmmakers were working without conventional screenplays, instead going straight from concept to storyboards. I'm kind of curious about the inflection point where this becomes more practical than something more conventional.

Chiisana eiyû: Kani to tamago to tômei ningen (Modest Heroes: Ponoc Short Films Theatre, Volume 1)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2018 in Regal Fenway #9 (Fathom Events, DCP)

Unsolicited advice to Studio Ponoc and GKids: Do not put the short with unsubtitled dialogue up front in a movie like this; depending where people see it, they will either assume the disc is defective or that the theater or Fathom Events screwed things up, especially if there's already a bad reputation there. But do keep making short films and packaging them for theaters like this; it's a nice anthology, both in terms of the individual shorts being good and the whole working as a unit.

That first short is "Kanini & Kanino", with the two title characters (voices of Fumino Kimura & Rio Suzuki) a pair of tiny water sprites whose mother has just gone off to give birth, leaving them with their burly, loving father until he is swept away by the current while trying to rescue Kanino. Frightened but brave, they set out to find him, a dangerous prospect when you're only a few centimeters tall and a good-sized air bubble may as well be a boulder. Writer-director Hiromasa Yonebayashi finds great adventure in this while keeping it maybe a little less than epic; this isn't a story where all of some land or other is in danger if the father isn't found, but one where the focus is on the kids finding their courage and ability to be older siblings and eventual adults. This, perhaps, is why what dialogue there is in the segment is limited to characters calling out each other's names; it forces Yonebayashi to stick to what can be explained visually and with a bit of pantomime.

His telling that story visually is great fun, too. Though the character designs may be simple and in some ways familiar (nowhere else in the film is it quite so clear that Ponoc was created to be a sort of successor to Studio Ghibli), they're expressive and communicate big emotions. Yonebayashi will occasionally linger on a shot not just so that the audience notices details, but so that they can see characters noticing details, giving a sense of how this place works. There's a bit of whimsy, such as in the staffs topped with crabs' claws and how these underwater creatures cry bubbles, but also danger; a fish, for instance is a monster with pointy teeth and bugging eyes. That this CGI creature doesn't quite fit with the hand-drawn environment is not exactly a problem, in that it appears alien, although some of the shots of the water from above serve as reminders that liquid is harder than it looks on a budget.

Full review at EFC.

The Rider

I absolutely should have seen this last April rather than getting lucky that it popped up on the Brattle's best-of-2018 series as half of a double feature with Leave No Trace, another really fantastic movie directed by a woman that takes place well outside of the city and focuses on people having a hard time reintegrating with the world. It's a pretty terrific double feature, even if I bailed on the second half because I was pretty sleepy (had one of those nights where I look up, see it's 2am and wonder if I was still awake or if I had briefly slept, and then sucked down extra caffeine at work).

I'm kind of fascinated by where everyone goes next. Chloé Zhao has signed a deal with Marvel to make The Eternals, and even as a guy who likes Marvel and Jack Kirby and all, I couldn't name an Eternal to save my life; I don't know whether that gives her a blank canvas or sets her up for an Inhumans-style mess. Take that chance to do something huge, though. More interesting, potentially, is Brady Jandreau; it's got to be weird to try and drop back into your life after making a movie about how you can't drop right back into your life, and there's hints of real talent here. I suspect if studios were still making Westerns, he'd become a familiar character actor (his injuries seem to leave stunts out of the question), but they're not.

That we ask that sort of highlights what an interesting situation Zhao's decision to use Jandreau and his family to make a narrative of their story is. In most features, we're free to imagine what comes next, and the ambiguity is by design; documentaries are often definitive in some way or other. This has all the open-endedness plus the idea that the observation distorts the outcome which is kind of fascinating.

The Rider

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 January 2018 in the Brattle Theatre [(Some of} The Best of 2018, DCP]

Show someone The Rider without any background, and they'll probably come away impressed; it's a fine independent film that tells its story with understated respect for its characters and creates a few striking images. Add that context, and it starts to feel a bit like a documentary. It's not, of course, but filmmaker Chloé Zhao is able to find a middle ground between what is real and what is crafted that makes both elements more effective and the film more compelling.

It gives the audience Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau), a gifted South Dakota horse trainer in his twenties who is also a star on the local rodeo circuit - at least until he was thrown from a bucking bronco which stepped on his head, leaving him with not just a nasty gash on his head and post-concussion symptoms including dizziness and vomiting, but mini-seizures that leave him unable to unclench a fist. Beyond the questions of his health, this leaves him adrift - all his friends are involved with the rodeo, and raising and training horses has long been the family business. Who is he if he's not a cowboy?

Change the last names, and character Brady Blackburn's story is not far from that of Brady Jandeau; that scar on his head is real and his real-life situation inspired Zhao (who had met him while working on another project) to make this film. His family plays fictionalized version of themselves as well, and knowing this can make a viewer wonder about certain scenes in different ways - is the resentment one sees between father and son created to make the film more dramatic, or not, and what does it mean that they'd be willing to re-enact it and let Zhao record it for posterity? Is that different than giving a documentary filmmaker full access? There are a number of places where a viewer can't help but wonder about the blurred line between fiction and reality here.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 11 January 2019 - 17 January 2019

Things that have been sitting on shelves for a while, stuff with uninspiring trailers, and a likely Oscar contender that took a while to get out of New York and Los Angeles. Yeah, that's what mid-January looks like.

• Replicas for instance, played the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, but this thing with Keanu Reeves as a scientist trying to recreate his dead family as robots seems to have kicked around until the price went down enough for Entertainment Studios to afford it. It's at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Revere. There's also The Upside, which played the same festival, starting out with the Weinstein Company and landed at STX. It stars Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, and Nicole Kidman in a remake of Intouchable, about an unlikely assistant and friend to a paraplegic billionaire. That one's at Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Supposedly A Dog's Way Home is better than the trailer which has played in front of everything for the last month or so and which seemed to pretty much tell the whole movie's story about a dog who gets lost and crosses hundreds of miles trying to find her person. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  Fenway and Revere have the dubbed version of Modest Heroes on Saturday afternoon. It's pretty good, and one of the three segments is basically dialogue-free; another flavor of Japanese animation plays Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere on Wednesday and Thursday (with Boston Common having it all day rather than just the evening and in Imax on Wednesday). Fenway also has a double feature of two of DC's animated adaptations of comic book arcs, The Death of Superman & Reign of the Supermen on Saturday, and a RealD presentation of the Cousteau family's Wonders of the Sea on Thursday. Revere plays Forrest Gump on Thursday. Theaters still showing Bohemian Rhapsody will have special sing-along shows on the schedule, while Boston Common puts Free Solo and A Star Is Born on the Imax screen and South Bay does the same with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The Somerville Theatre re-opens Burning.
• Kendall Square and Boston Common get Destroyer, featuring Nicole Kidman as a worn-down cop still feeling the fallout of an undercover assignment she took years ago. Karyn Kusama directs, with Tatiana Maslany and Bradley Whitford in the cast as well.
• Apple Fresh Pond opens Telugu comedy F2: Fun and Frustration, continuing Petta, Simmba, NTR: Kathanayakudu, Viswasam, with Telugu entry Vinaya Vidheya Rama. They also open English-language The Aspern Papers, featuring Jonathan Rhys-Myers as a researcher looking for a poet's love letters. Boston Common, meanwhile, has another week of Mojin: The Worm Valley.
• The Brattle Theatre has another week of "(Some of) The Best", with a double feature of Eighth Grade & Madeline's Madeline on Friday, one of Suspiria '18 & Hereditary on Saturday, Monrovia, Indiana on Sunday, the pairing of Night Comes On & You Were Never Really Here on Monday, I Am Not a Witch & The Miseducation of Cameron Post on Wednesday, and Zama & Museo (the latter on 35mm) Thursday. The series also includes matinees of Paddington 2 on Saturday and Sunday, and probably doesn't include Trash Night on Tuesday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre has another pair of "East Meets West" midnights with a 35mm print of Judy Lee in Queen Boxer on Friday and Franco Nero as Django on Saturday. There's also a Goethe-Institut screening of 3 Days in Quiberon Sunday morning and the new restoration of Detour on Monday.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has more screenings of Life and Nothing More (Friday) and Border (Saturday/Sunday), with Museo (35mm Friday) and The Mystery of Picasso (Wednesday/Thursday) also starting runs. There's more Ida Lupino at 100, featuring Not Wanted (Saturday), The Trouble with Angels (Sunday/Thursday), and the Boston Festival of Films from Iran opens Thursday with the country's Oscar submission, No Date, No Signature.
• It's members' weekend at the The Harvard Film Archive; if you're a member, you know what they're showing. They restart regular screenings again on Monday, with Jacque Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi.
• The Boston Underground Film Festival and Boston Sci-Fi FIlm Festival team up for a "Dispatches from the Underground" show of five short films from 2018's Sci-Fi Festival on Wednesday night; it's in the Micro, so get tickets early if so inclined.
• Boston Jewish Film has their first event of the year on Wednesday at Temple Israel, presenting silent film The Ancient Law with live music by Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin.
• A selection of films from the 2018 Ottawa International Festival of Animation is the first of several short programs The ICA will be running this winter; its run begins Thursday evening.
• The Lexington Venue has featurette "Including Samuel" on Thursday evening, with a post-film discussion that expands on finding ways to facilitate access for people with disabilities.
• Cinema Salem plays Shoplifters in their 18-seat screening room.

I will see Destroyer and probably won't be able to help myself with The Upside and Replicas. Other things merit catching-up, whether Hereditary and You Were Never Really Here, or Detour, or more recent things.

This Week in Tickets: 31 December 2018 - 6 January 2019

New year, new calendar! Take a look:



It looks a little different because not only do I have to shrink it down more, but I accidentally bought one that's actually too large for a two-page spread to fit on my scanner, so I'm kind of cut-and-pasting the two pages together, which means you should prepare for a lot of funny-looking spiral bindings in the coming months. I do worry a bit that this now shrinks things down to a level that's tough to read, but I'm not sure. Let me know in the comments (or on social media, or whatever) if that's the case.

(And maybe follow one of the merch links, too - I've apparently been pennies away from a $5 gift card for a long time!)

Anyway, New Year's Eve was another day when I didn't do much of anything other than try to finally unpack a lot of the tubs in the back room and organize after the previous Saturday's Great Collapse of Shelves not Actually Strong Enough to Hold Books. Unfortunately, my method of doing so involves making a bigger mess as the first step, and I'm stuck midway through that now. By the time I was done with that, there were no movies playing because apparently nobody wants to have anything else going within a couple hours of midnight, and I just hit the hay.

That got me up early enough to do relatively early shows for New Year's, though, starting the year off right with If Beale Street Could Talk at the Coolidge, which, yeah, is as good as its trailers have made it look. After that, it was inbound on the Green Line for a second go with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and that, too, is every bit as great as people have been saying, holding up pretty darn well on a second viewing. I'm really hoping Sony does a combined 3D/4K release for this one, because it's gorgeous all around.

On the 2nd, the Brattle started a series with three movies arranged in two double features of Ida Lupino's films as director on consecutive nights, so I went with the late show of Not Wanted on Wednesday (after the weekly trip to the Million Year Picnic) and then did the pair of The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist on Thursday. It's a kind of fascinating trio, especially when you consider that Lupino was one of the few women directing mainstream movies at that time (if not the only one), and you can't help but wonder how it impacted each of them in different ways, just in terms of being different from how the men around her did them.

Friday was the first night for Mojin: The Worm Valley, which is on the low side of average and probably not helped much by my mentally comparing everyone in the cast to their predecessor (Gu Xuan, for instance, is actually pretty good, but she's also clearly "off-brand Shu Qi", and that thought just drives me to the internet to try and find out when Shanghai Fortress comes out). I'd actually meant to watch Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe earlier in the week, but wound up (mostly) watching it afterwards Twice, actually - once in 3D right after I got home, and then again in 2D the next afternoon to get what I missed nodding off.

Then on Sunday, I arranged things based on something showing once that day - not Escape Room, which was a new release and playing all day (and turned out to be decent enough, especially by eary-January-dumping standards), but Dark Money, which was one of fifteen documentaries sharing one screen downtown and as such played once over the weekend. I'd meant to catch it earlier, and it turned out to be all right.

Not a bad way to start 2019, all told More to come, with the well-thought out editions of my thoughts here and what I can get down on the train home on the Letterboxd page.

Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2019 in AMC Boston Common #?? (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

The sort of quick, potentially-expensive revisit you can do when you've got A-List and don't have to ration 3D tickets, done in part because while I certainly liked Spider-Verse a lot the first time, I was kind of taken aback by just how much the public at large seemed to go for this one - both online and hearing folks who usually haunt the art-houses and rep screens saying that they'd seen in six times already. That's a lot of love.

It's certainly deserved, and I think coming at it as just a movie rather than an assembly of comics I quite like helped it. It's just spectacularly well put-together, and I think the key is that it arguably gets Miles Morales better than the comics have, for the most part. Miles is an Afro-Latino teenager who has been written by basically one middle-aged white guy since he was introduced (at least until a few months ago), and I think having people closer to him voicing and directing et al has really sharpened his characterization. It feels like a movie made more by people who know its characters than by those intrigued by what they represent.

And, of course, it's still tremendously funny, gorgeous to look at, and full of action that feels like it's truly got all the possibilities of a comic book for a first time. Absolutely everything in this movie is working together, and it's no wonder people find it brilliant

What I said a couple weeks ago

Not Wanted

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Refreshed, Renewed, Restored; DCP)

This is basic B-movie melodrama, fit for the back end of a double feature that most people wouldn't have stayed for when it came out. I don't know whether Emerald Productions and Film Classics were technically Poverty Row studios, but this was no prestige picture with top-of-the-line talent. The acting is rough and the scripting at times rougher.

Ida Lupino co-wrote and produced the fim, eventually taking over as director when Elmer Clifton had a heart attack, and I'm curious how much that changed the movie. It's tremendously sympathetic to its main character (a 19-year-old girl who runs off to follow a man and winds up pregnant and alone), never taking the position that her strict parents knew best or treating her as ruined, and the last act is all about women helping women. It's a cautionary tale, but seldom a scolding one, and while men certainly can make that sort of picture, they're examining every aspect of Sally's situation from the outside.

It's still kind of a mess, but every once in a while you can see past its clumsiness to find a little style. There are moments that feel horrific and others that feel surreal, and though lead actress Sally Forrest is not great with dialogue, she is pretty good when she's not reciting banal lines; she's expressive in a lot of other ways.

It's not great, and maybe it winds up forgotten without Ida Lupino's involvement. It's better than just a curiosity, at least.

The Hitch-Hiker

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Refreshed, Renewed, Restored; DCP)

Famously the only classic noir directed by a woman, The Hitch-Hiker is nevertheless a testosterone-laden affair, just over an hour of a driver with the urge to fight back against the killer of the title being held in check by his smarter friend, who figures they should bide their time. The killer himself is even more pure id, nothing but the urge to take what he wants and kill anyone in his way. They're three different sorts of masculinity. William Talman makes a fine psycho, and Edmond O'Brien plays a frustrated version of the same impulses, with Frank Lovejoy trying to be less controlled by them.

Or maybe it's not really that deep, but it's a crisp thriller, surely tightening its screws without needing to complicate things. Its cutaways to show the pursuit are quick and perfunctory, never leaving the action behind for more than a minute or two, although they often tend to highlight just how basic the story is. Still, it's not stretched out, and at seventy-odd minutes, things don't need to get that complicated.

The Bigamist

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (Refreshed, Renewed, Restored; DCP)

This is one of those movies that's something like 75% flashback and lots something from that, becoming all recitation of facts and not particularly dramatic. It's capable and does all right with that, but Ida Lupino doesn't really manage to turn its sympathetic take on the situation into something tragic or even a fascinating sort of irony, despite how hard the writers lean on that word in the last few scenes.

It is, like Not Wanted, impressively sympathetic to its characters, which in some ways contributes to how it can feel rather uneventful - everybody involved is basically decent, and they're isolated enough to never come into direct conflict. That's a big part of why not a lot seems to happen, perhaps. Shame, because the cast is nice; director Ida Lupino does nice as the girl who could be the femme fatale but isn't, and Joan Fontaine is terrific as the first wife. Edmond O'Brien is kind of bland, but earnest enough when need be, and Edmund Gwenn is an entertaining foil as the adoption agency official. Weird that someone name-checks the actor at a couple of points.

Dark Money

A cool thing that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is doing this year is setting up a program where the entire documentary "shortlist" - the 15 pictures that some committee or other chose as the year's best, from which five will be nominated for the Oscar - actually get a chance to play in theaters as a group. Through Thursday, you can go down to AMC Boston Common, pay $5, and see a pretty good non-fiction film. I suspect that this is replacing or supplementing screenings for Academy members, but if so, it's still a cool idea to make them available to the public. The theater's got a lot of screens, it can't hurt the Oscars to give people actual access and insight to the smaller awards, etc. Granted, it was just me and a small handful of other people in the theater for this one, but what do you expect for a 9:30pm show the night of the Golden Globes?

And it's generally good to see these movies in a theater, even though non-Imax documentaries don't necessarily seem like they'd benefit that much from the big screen And maybe the immersive nature isn't as important; I don't know. I do know that it's much easier to be distracted when one is on TV or streaming, or get frustrated when this doesn't match one's personal politics and turn it off. Committing the time and having no distractions is good, though; you learn better and get to the end.

I probably won't be able to get to more in this series, unfortunately - the 6pm/9pm screening times probably work well for people in the city but is not so great when you're coming in from Burlington and it's too cold to hang around downtown (or, worse, go home and then back out). But if it fits your schedule, check it out. Have opinions come Oscar night Maybe learn something, It's $5/pop, one of the better movie deals going in the city right now.

(Now, is something similar with the animated and foreign shortlists too much to hope for…?)

Dark Money

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #9 (documentary shortlist, DCP)

Dark Money is a decent documentary on what can be a confusing minefield of a topic, though maybe not the sort of electrifying one that injects information and understanding directly into the brain. It's useful and informative, of the moment but not likely in any danger of becoming out of date any time soon, and makes a sincere effort to both be fair and seen as fair, which can be hard to do in today's climate. I don't know if it can get the attention of people who aren't already invested in campaign finance reform or if it will make those viewers more passionate on the subject, but it makes an honest effort, and you can't necessarily ask for more than that.

Director Kimberly Reed (and co-writer/editor Jay Arthur Sterrenberg) use the state of Montana as a microcosm to examine how so-called "dark money" - money and resources spent on a political campaign than cannot be easily traced back to its source because it does not go directly to a candidate - distorts American democracy. As a resource-rich but sparsely populated state, Montana was basically owned by the mining companies at the start of the 20th Century, until the 1912 Corrupt Practices Act put a large dent in it. That was one of many laws weakened by the U.S. Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision, and as a result, a great deal of targeted political spending began in the state. Reed follows the stories of John S. Adams, a reporter for the Great Falls Tribune; Deborah Bonogofsky, a candidate for the State House who feels she lost a primary due to a last-minute series of co-ordinated attacks that she, as a first-time candidate in a state where political office is considered to be an avocation rather than a full-time job, was ill-prepared to handle; and Gene Jarussi, the Special Attorney General appointed to prosecute a state senator believed to have won his office illegitimately.

Unlike many making what is basically a non-fiction conspiracy picture, Reed keeps her focus squarely on the narrative, with relatively few contributions from people not directly involved in the stories she's telling. Even some of the people who might be considered outside experts tend to have a story of their own that perhaps could have been connected to the rest had she chosen to go in that direction, though she doesn't force everything to tie together perfectly beyond an odd segue or two. She even uses infographics extremely sparingly, preferring to turn her camera on what her subjects are writing on a whiteboard or seeing as they flip through documents to creating her own animated presentations. It's an interesting and mostly successful choice; she's never seen as undercutting what the people she interviews say, and their ability to communicate these ideas boosts their own credibility. Maybe hers and the film, as well - they're not using the slick, manufactured techniques of the Political Action Committees, but the homespun methods of citizen legislators.

Full review at EFC.

Escape Room

The thing about having a blog like this one or being the movie guy at the office is that, when someone asks you what you think of a movie like Escape Room and you basically say, "eh, it's fine", they're going to take that as some sort of condemnation or sign that you've got some sort of elitist tastes, especially if they eventually draw more out of you and the stuff you like is kind of vague and subjective (it's a pretty good cast, most of whom could go on to bigger things!) while the stuff you didn't like is more specific (this thing kind of contradicts that thing and the filmmakers don't do a great job of using the action to emphasize the emotion and vice versa). But here's the thing: While Sturgeon's law of "90% of everything is crap" often holds, of the chunk that gets through the industry's various quality filters, something like 75% is within a standard deviation of average. You can't get excited one way or another about everything.

And the truth is, what a relatively minor wide release like Escape Room can do these days is pretty amazing; the production is fairly elaborate and the cast is pretty good. Folks making B-movies a generation ago would probably be astounded by this, but there's so much of it between theaters, Netflix, and stuff that hits the genre film festival circuit and then gets picked up by a small distributor that gets a VOD deal, that it's easy to take this for granted.

Truth be told, the thing that sticks with me the most is that it's a movie with characters named "Jason" and "Danny", and the "hey, neat coincidence" of both me and a brother having our names in the same film can be a bigger deal than anything else in the movie when the rest is otherwise average.

Escape Room

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)

For a movie opening in the early-January dumping ground, Escape Room is surprisingly competent. That is, obviously, a bit of damning with faint praise, especially since it's only a few months before people find it on streaming services and have no expectations based upon award-season and holiday cycles. They'll just see a thriller that chews up a hundred minutes without misstepping often enough to spoil anything.

The concept is pretty straightforward: Six people in the Chicago area - bright but shy college student Zoey (Taylor Russell), rise-and-grind executive Jason (Jay Ellis), shaggy supermarket stockboy Ben (Logan Miller), army veteran Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll), gaming enthusiast Danny (Nik Dodani), and affable truck driver Mike (Tyler Labine) - get invitations to test out Minos Entertainment's newest escape room experience, though only Danny knows how the things work (clues, puzzles, themes). This one, they quickly discover, is potentially lethal. Not only that, but bits of it seem to be specifically designed to play upon their anxieties and experiences.

It's a basic high-concept thriller plot; few people in the audience for this haven't seen a movie where seemingly innocent games turn deadly (heck, it's almost a trend, with Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Game Night both in theaters over the past year). There are lots of directions one can go with that, with director Adam Robitel and writers Bragi F. Schut & Maria Melnik opting for the most straightforward, running the group through a series of dangerous scenarios without a whole lot of subtext or complication to it. That's fine, for the most part - the production design team comes up with a lot of nice visuals for the deathtraps, and Robitel does pretty well showing the characters solving their problems visually with relatively minimal exposition. He and the writers don't try to add excess romantic subplots or too many twists (for the most part). It's a relief not seeing anything prioritized over survival.

Full review at EFC.

Ghost Blows Out the Light: Mojin: The Worm Valley & Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe

I usually try to catch up on a series before seeing the new entry in theaters, but in this case I didn't realize that I had had the first one on my shelf for the better part of a year, if not more so until I saw a couple people mention on Twitter that Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe was their favorite entry. I'd ordered a copy from Hong Kong a while back because it was 3D and relatively cheap, so I may as well get it while it's available, but didn't realize it was connected to the others at all. It came out three months before Mojin: The Lost Legend, which is some absolutely crazy "four different people played Philip Marlowe on screen for different studios between 1944 and 1947" stuff.

I wound up watching it after Worm Valley rather than before, which is fine because it in many ways is a totally different thing, although you can see plot points from one in the other, although a genetic defect caused by alien interbreeding in one becomes a curse that an empress put on her enemies in another (or vice versa). That I could watch one in 3D at home while the other was flat in the theater was kind of funny to me, but it doing so showed just how much all three of these films are really built for giant 3D screens. Watching one in 3D at home wasn't properly overwhelming, but did seem framed better, even though I was getting a different part of the intended experience watching the other on the big screen.

One pleasant surprise was seeing that Chronicles was directed by Lu Chuan, whose first film I saw at the Boston Film Festival back in 2003 (back when the BFF was pretty decent and just prior to this becoming a movie review blog, which means my review actually wound up on Ain't It Cool under the alias "Paul Revere" because, well, it was AICN in 2003). I liked it, but never really had much opportunity to keep track of the director's career, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that the guy who had made a little movie I liked 15 years ago had worked his way into a position to direct blockbusters about a decade later. And then, his next movie was a nature documentary for Disney, which is an interesting career path.

Anyway, I can't wholeheartedly recommend the new Mojin, but Chronicles turned out to be a really fun discovery, and I wasn't being dumb ordering it practically at random from the other side of the world. Now, if only that place would put a 3D Detective Dee III Blu-ray up for pre-order...

Yun nan chong gu (Mojin: The Worm Valley)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2018 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)

There's a certain look to the actors who replace stars when a series goes from theaters to video or television (or, in this case, gets a budget cut): A little smaller, a little more blandly good-looking, wearing someone else's costumes and hairstyles, neither of which quite suits them. Every single person in The Worm Valley has this look, as does the film itself, and it probably doesn't matter whether you've seen the previous Mojin movie or not; this one's going to feel like a lesser copy of something.

It seems to pick up roughly where the previous film left off, with grave-robber Hu Bayi (Cai Heng), archeologist Shirley Yang (Gu Xuan), and their whole team cursed to die early deaths for having retrieved the Dragon Bone Tome, though that helpfully points the way to the Mu Chen Orb and which, when combined with it, will lift the curse upon them. So off the team - including "Fatty" Wang Kaixuan (Yu Heng), "Gold Tooth" JinYa (Ma Yuke), Professor Sun (Cheng Taishen), and Zhou Linglong (Chen Yuai), daughter of their benefactor (Tang Zhiwei) - goes to rural China, where the clues suggest that the Tomb of Xiangwang is hidden on the other side of an underground river.

It's not a bad group, really, although clearly a step down from the all-star cast Wuershan had playing the same characters three years ago in terms of fame. Cai Heng and Gu Xuan have nice chemistry as Bayi and Shirley, and Yu Heng has a sort of eager charm as Kaixuan (although, for a guy they call "Fatty", he kind of seems more burly than anything). Chen Yuai is doing her level best to be the enthusiastic kid sister of the group, and Cheng Taishen is doing a fair world-weary. Tuo Zonghua chews some scenery as the guy allegedly driven insane on the same quest. They're not wooden or mugging, but all seemingly trying to hit the spot where these characters seem familiar and comfortable rather than putting a stamp on them.

Full review at EFC.

Jiu ceng yao ta (Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4/5 January 2018 in Jay's Living Room #12 (catch-up, 3D Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Tian Xia Ba Chang's "Ghost Blows Out the Light" novels don't appear to be available in English, but I get the idea from the other movies that have been made from them that this takes a few liberties, for better or worse. Fortunately, there's no particular need to force them into any sort of single continuity, and though this particular take is less swashbuckling adventure than monster movie, it's generally a pretty good one.

It opens with a montage of strange discoveries in China during the twentieth century, culminating with the discovery of strange fossils beneath the Yunnan Mountains in the 1970s. Hu Bayi (Mark Zhao You-ting) is doing his military service there in 1979, nursing a crush on nurse Yang Ping (Yao Chen) - whose father (Wang Qingxiang) is leading the excavation - when an explosion in the shaft reveals hidden chambers and passages which are filled with evidence of a lost civilization and lethal creatures. Hu Bayi survives, soon placed in a new job where he's reunited with childhood friend "Fatty" Wang Kaixuan (Feng Li), not knowing that a secret government bureau is holding the Yangs - at least, not until monsters lay waste to an Oil town and he is called in to assist.

The opening segment of this movie is propulsive, fast-paced pulp, probably too fast to be maintained, but it's throwing cool ideas, mysteries, and even a bit of a barbed sense of humor at the audience just fast enough to be absorbed before Hu Bayi and Yang Ping go into the cave and all heck breaks loose. Screenwriter/director Lu Chuan puts the audience in a good position to pick things up on the run, and hits just the right tone. It's a sort of light luridness, combining the excitement of discovering new things with the fact that action of this type does often involve people dying horribly. He keeps just enough of a toehold on the real world that he can eventually dial it back and build back up to more fantasy, although the sharp jump out of this segment is a bit jarring.

Full review at EFC.

Those Weeks in Tickets: 17 December 2018 - 30 December 2018

Christmas smack in the middle of this period, so really no time to do a TWIT for the first week on its own.





Another day off on Monday the 17th, and I pre-purchased tickets for They Shall Not Grow Old in 3D that afternoon so that I could make it to one of a couple 7pm options. That almost didn't work out, since the show started half an hour late and had hiccups enough to necessitate stopping for a moment to pick up a compensation ticket. From there, I caught the Red Line to Harvard Square to see Bombshell at the Brattle with Karina Longworth doing an introduction and slideshow from her book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood. Made it just in time, fortunately, and it's still a very funny movie.

Back to work the next day, and I opted to watch something at home that evening, pulling Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins off the pile of Twilight Time discs. You can see why it's sort of the forgotten weird genre movie of the 1980s - it's just not weird enough to compete with the other crazy things.

The weekend got a bit shuffled from my original plans since both Thursday and Friday were late days at work. That led me to the Coolidge for Mary Queen of Scots on Friday night,and that is pretty darn good. After that, I got home and decided to take another off the Twilight Time pile - Devil in a Blue Dress - to watch while wrapping stuff to send to my brother in Chicago. That we didn't get a series of Easy Rawlins films is a real failure on Hollywood's part.

Saturday was a day poking around craft fairs and the like before arriving at Boston Common for the week's Chinese release, Airpocalypse, which isn't great; I assume the more impressive stuff is being held until after all the logjam in America clears up. Part of that logjam is Bumblebee, a surprisingly decent Transformers prequel/reboot.

Sunday was a lot of Christmas shopping until around 6pm, when I was just done and decided to go for Aquaman, which is pretty decent for a DC movie. Left me shopping and wrapping quite a bit on Christmas Eve before getting on a train for Portland and then out to the 'burbs to see parents, brothers, and nieces. It's a challenge to shop for them on the one hand, but on the other they enjoy building, reading, and solving puzzles, so when I do find something, it's fun.

Back home, I did work a couple days and then hit Kill Mobile on Friday night, and it was kind of not surprisingly not as good as the previous remake of the same source material seen just a month earlier. That gave me just enough time to get back to Cambridge for "Un Chien Andalou" and Army of Darkness at the Brattle. That was part of the "Keaton-esque" series,which led me back there the next day for a couple Jackie Chan pics, Rumble in the Bronx & Project A II.

Then it was almost the end of the year, and since Regal expires points, I went there to see Welcome to Marwen, which is not very good but is the most interesting thing one of my favorite filmmakers has done in years.

This more or less closes the book on 2018, as I'll probably go to the new calendar for 2019. Rough drafts will continue to be on the Letterboxd page.

Bombshell

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (special presentation, 35mm)

My first few Jean Harlow movies had her really rubbing me the wrong way, but I've found myself enjoying the heck out of her in every visit to this often frantic Hollywood farce. It's a fast-paced, funny movie that makes Harlow's Lola Burns as silly and flighty as any of the rest of the characters, but also genuine and easy to like. There's something especially delightful about how Lola seems to subconsciously adopt different accents and characters as the situation develops or an idea enters her head, like being an actress is who she is well beyond her job, though she never sounds like a phony of any sort.

It's an interesting artifact as well as a delightful comedy, working as a sort of record of when movie stars were a strange combination of intensely-followed celebrities and clock-punching employees, with very little leverage in their negotiations. It's almost inconceivable in these days of stars being free agents, and I suspect you couldn't really remake Bombshell for the modern day without a fair amount of reconfiguration.

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins

* * (out of four)
Seen 18 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Blu-ray)

If this thing had even the barest whiff of an actual story, then maybe the adventure might have actually continued, and maybe have become a head-scratching franchise rather than just a misguided-seeming attempt at one. It feels like it should have a cult following, but coming out as it did right between Buckaroo Banzai and Big Trouble in Little China, it just never seemed strange enough to capture the imagination, nor slick enough to be the James Bond competitor it most obviously is trying to be.

There's potential here - scrappy Fred Ward, Joel Grey giving a performance that would be a lot more fun if it weren't yellowface (and how the heck was that every acceptable?), a bombastic score by Craig Safan, and that terrific Statue of Liberty sequence, one of a few times when the action seems big enough that the film seems to be embracing its absurdity rather than trying to play it straight-faced. It's not hard to see what the filmmakers are going for.

But, boy, is the plot utterly forgettable (something about a weapons manufacturer manufacturing weapons), and while the bits with Remo and Chiun are clearly where the film is at its best, it makes the movie something like 80% getting ready and 20% doing the thing. Secret agency CURE feels less mysterious than unimportant, and the great action bits feel like they're just dropped in randomly, not really accomplishing anything.

I don't know if Remo Williams is actually obscure, but it seems like it must have flopped. I remember seeing newspaper ads for it as a kid but never having it cross my path until now, and, honestly, that seems about the path it should have taken. There's just not enough there to make the effort to actually see it.

Devil in a Blue Dress

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2018 in Jay's Living Room (recent acquisitions, Blu-ray)

Between this and Inside Man, it really feels like we should have had a great Denzel Washington crime franchise well before the (questionably great) Equalizer movies. It's a crying shame, because characters like Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins fit him like a glove: Smart, sardonic, charming but also kind of devious. This one feels like The Big Sleep except that the powerful have no way to dip into the African-American community and thus need to hire an amateur like Easy, who himself pulls in his friend Mouse, which at the time introduced audiences to Don Cheadle, who gives this guy enough charm that you forget he's pretty much a thug.

It makes for pretty good noir, the sort of twisty mystery where the filmmakers (and original author Walter Mosley) sacrifice obviously clever construction for a feeling of even someone like Easy having illusions broken and the feeling of being sucked into a morass with no bottom to be found. It's crisp, looks and sounds good with its period detail, and raises an eyebrow or two as the plot twists into another direction. It's the promise of more of these movies with Washington and Cheadle that had me grinning when I first saw this twenty-odd years ago, though, enough that I kind of hope Mosley has been writing more Easy Rawlins novels in the meantime, and there's a producer who might want to give us a movie where they're older, wiser, and still getting into trouble..

Aquaman

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2018 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)

Write for DC Comics long enough, and you'll eventually be given the job of trying to prove that Aquaman is cool at some point; the most successful attempts have generally done so by taking him and his whole milieu not as a superhero comic, but high fantasy. That's what James Wan and company are going for here, with the extra challenge being that their main character was basically the comic relief in Justice League.

It works more often than it should. Jason Momoa's Arthur is the sort of lunkhead that makes you wonder why he's not the sidekick to Amber Heard's Mera rather than vice versa, but he's likable enough to make it work, and he and Heard make a good team. It amuses me that ultimately, the answer to the question of what he can do that she can't is the thing usually derided as what makes Aquaman lame. The pair are at their best when in Indiana Jones territory, swashbuckling through a pulpy quest rather than getting too deep into politics or trying to be superheroes. Truth be told, you could excise the most traditional supervillain (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's Black Manta) and same him for another movie without a whole lot of trouble, and though Patrick Wilson, Dolph Lundgren, and Willem Dafoe are capable enough, the palace intrigue is mostly good for getting Arthur & Mera to hit the road.

Wan never runs out of entertaining things to throw at the screen, with fighting crab people, a trench in the ocean filled with savage mutants, and Arthur & Mera having to find an ancient tape deck because no current technology can play the old format that have. The film can get downright loopy when filled with IMAX 3D effects, although there's also the likes of Nicole Kidman fully committing herself to the silliest thing she's been a part of in her entire career. If it ever really slowed down, it would probably crash hard, but it doesn't, and while you won't mistake it for even a lesser Marvel movie (well, maybe it's on a par with Thor 2), it's enjoyable-enough entertainment, especially when projected big and in 3D.

"Un Chien Andalou

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, 16mm?)

I know this is beloved and probably important for how it brought surrealism to the screen in the person of Salvador Dali, and, man, I tried to get something out of it, but it just never makes the leap from being grotesque and archly unstuck in time to actually doing something interesting with that, story-wise, but try as I might, my brain refused to spark to this. It's striking to look at, and probably disassembles well enough into good parts, but feels like a building block, with a couple artistes pushing some boundaries so that they've got more room to play in later.

Army of Darkness

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, 35mm)

There was a time when I watched this every couple weeks, back in college and just after, a young dork obsessed with its slapstick absurdity and buffoonish lead performance by Bruce Campbell despite not really having seen the things that it was mashing up. I mostly wait for it to show up on 35mm now, but still genuinely love it today, now that I can see the audacity of taking a horror series and not just turning it comedic but mashing it up with Ray Harryhausen fantasy. It's clearly everything that director Sam Raimi loves, and the movie world could certainly do with him just throwing everything in the blender again.

Given how many people I know had this movie memorized at the time, I'd like to give the audience at the Brattle credit for not making it an annoying quote-along. I've generally been lucky in avoiding those aside from the sci-fi marathon, and I think most theaters do a good job of containing that to specific shows, but the threat is always there, lurking, waiting to ruin everybody else's good time.

Full review at EFC from a while ago

Hung fan kui (Rumble in the Bronx)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, English-dubbed 35mm)

Not technically my first experience with Jackie Chan (I saw one of the Cannonball Run movies at the drive-in as a kid but mainly remembered Jamie Farr from M*A*S*H in it), but as with a lot of folks, this was the first time I saw just how nutty and amazing Hong Kong action could be. I don't know that I recognized it as something fundamentally different than American action movies at the time, but I'm pretty sure that when Hong Kong movies and stars started making their way to American screens after that, I tended to be pretty excited.

Does it hold up? More or less. It's just as cringeworthy and basic writing-wise and in terms of performance as I remembered, and I've got the experience to know that it's not just the dubbing any more. The most remarkable thing about the script, in some ways, is how what could be some really ugly, insensitive material comes back around - the Afro-Chinese wedding becomes really sweet and if Stanley Tong formed his idea of the Bronx more from other movies than experience, at least one of them was The Warriors. The fights and everything else not necessarily top-tier Jackie, but I'd never seen anything like it before, and I'm still kind of astounded by the things he pulls off in even some of his lesser movies. He takes more of a beating than usual here, enough to cut into the acrobatics and slapstick, but the action is solid all around.

And though the finale clearly shows signs of being reconfigured because of Chan's injury, it's also a little bit of everything and escalates impressively. Plus, I do kind of love the cops and every spring character getting together to run "White Tiger" down with the hovercraft for the basic reason of "screw that guy". It is not a thing people would ever do, but I suppose that's part of what made this a great introduction to Jackie Chan: It leaves no doubt that the action and mayhem is the point, and don't worry too much about anything else.

'A' gai wak 2 (Project A II)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Keaton-esque, 35mm)

I could not begin to tell you who all the factions are in this movie, and that's got nothing to do with the fact that it's a sequel. Heck, you could argue that the material that is the most obviously held over from the first Project A is the easiest to process, while some of the subplots about rebellion, revolution, and royalty make a n interesting contrast with how that sort of material is handled today When this film was made in 1987 without much expectation of being seen outside Hong Kong and Taiwan, they just assumed the audience knew all this stuff; now that they seek an international audience and it doesn't hurt to frame it in the most patriotic way possible to play China, there's more explanation. Plus, the last act has Jackie and his character Dragon Ma bending over backwards to be apolitical, where he'd now probably wave a flag a bit.

On the other hand, even if I don't understand who all the various groups in opposition to each other are, it makes for a delightful bit of farce when they are all in the same apartment and hiding from each other. Chan and company follow that up with some top-quality slapstick, even before the great big action finale which absolutely earns a spot in this "Keaton-esque" lineup (and not just for the obvious Steamboat Bill, Jr. reference). That's enough for a fun Jackie Chan movie.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Is this kind of a ringer to make sure that my first movie seen in 2019 is a good one? Yeah, a bit, although plan A was for it to end 2018 on a good note, but I got lazy on New Year's Eve. Those random vacation days are for the birds. Maybe I'm better off having do-nothing days in the long run, but it doesn't feel that way when there's a long list of things I want to do and see. Still, the pairing of If Beale Street Could Talk and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse made for a pretty excellent way to start the new year, and you can sell it as a double feature around Brian Tyree Henry supporting performances.

Finally having this movie out in the world does come with an odd feeling that is the opposite of what usually happens, in that at any given time, there is usually some trailer that regular moviegoer either hates from the start or comes to loathe after repetition and which plays before seemingly every film. You celebrate that movie's release even if you never go see it, just because it's the end of the preview. Beale Street, meanwhile, had a fantastic preview, two minutes or so of uplift and anticipation every week. Now you get to see the movie, which we can all agree is a happy result.

One more thing before getting to the review proper: I regularly see a lot of people talk about how awards are worthless/silly/a waste of time, but remember this: There was an eight-year gap between Barry Jenkins's first film Medicine for Melancholy and his second, but only a two-year space between that and Beale Street. That's kind of a big deal, and whatever your personal feeling toward the Oscars may be, it's hard to imagine a case where his nomination and win didn't open a whole lot of doors to make this one.

If Beale Street Could Talk

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2018 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

If Beale Street Could Talk is the sort of film that announces in the first couple of minutes that it's got a chance to be special and then never lets the audience down. Writer/director Barry Jenkins builds a warm cocoon of love around the viewers and characters, enough to make the less perfect examples shock, a bit, as well as remind one that sometimes you need that powerful love to counter pervasive hate. A character all but says as much at one point, and while that moment is not quite so polished as the rest of the film, you can't exactly fault it for having a character see what's going on.

The two young lovers are Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt (Stephan James), respectively 19 and 22, close since childhood, with marriage seeming like a natural next step though they're confident and certain enough in their love not to need it as validation. It will not be as easy as it has been, though - Fonny has been arrested for a rape despite his having Tish and their friend Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry) as alibis, and Tish is pregnant. Her parents (Regina King & Colman Domingo) and sister (Teyonah Parris) are happy for her, though Fonny's family, by and large, is not, putting the onus for trying to mount a defense and free Fonny on Tish and her family.

A different filmmaker might take James Baldwin's novel, see the plot about the falsely-accused man, and fashion it into something more linear, with a courtroom climax, dogged pursuit, and more indignant examinations of the lengths to which members of the white establishment will go to lock Fonny up for petty reasons. That's not Jenkins, though; both of his previous features have been about experiencing extended moments in a life, with the shift that happens as a result the product of the characters' self-discovery. Here, he tells the story of Tish and Fonny along two separate tracks, with the events leading up to his arrest not necessarily in order, and in doing so he makes the film a story of what love can be rather than just how Tish's love saves and strengthens Fonny; their love belongs to each of them, and as a result Tish never feels reduced to a useful rock for Fonny to hang onto or the reason why he attracts attention. It's a constant, and it can make the switching between time periods feel less like viewing cause and effect than alternate realities.

The roots of the characters' challenges are the same in both, and that pervasiveness is the background of the film - the roadblocks, harassment, the fear of incarceration. Jenkins, like Baldwin, allows for little bits of decency to break through, even in this mid-twentieth-century setting always playing as a bit of a surprise without seeming strange, while frustration becomes overwhelming even if it can't be allowed to be. The story is a testament to quiet strength, given form by Tish's narration, which sounds brittle despite the fact that, when she is bowed, it is almost entirely because of the inescapable biology of pregnancy. There are moments of empathy for even potential that filmmaker Barry Jenkins could have avoided had he chosen to do so and make the story simpler, and though they often precede a character disappearing, there's something true and profound to that: You may fight fiercely for your cause, but you don't fight other victims.

The cast is terrific as well. KiKi Layne and Stephan James make Tish and Fonny glow with love for each other (aided by costumers who dress them as a sunny day in the middle of an overcast world), and capture their fears as well. Layne is placed at the center, and makes Tish's growth an impressive sight, youthful nervousness slowly being replaced with wariness, her voice-over going from wistful to wise as the film goes on. James lets the viewer see Fonny pulled between the bliss that being with Tish brings to the fear he has of much of the rest of the world, with Jenkins making sure that James has a chance to plant ideas in the audience's head about what jail can do or the tension in his family before making it clear later on. The rest are precise and focused, giving their scenes exactly what they need while still feeling like fools who have full lives behind the frame. Regina King is especially great throughout as Tish's mother, and Brian Tyree Henry shows up for five or ten minutes that could be a fine short film on their own and gives the audience complex feelings about his absence the rest of the way. It's a genuinely terrific ensemble, deployed where they can have the most powerful effect.

That effect is empathetic in a way that seems rare. I cannot speak to how much the film resonates with the African-American audiences who would be closer to its circumstances than one such as myself, but it's a measure of just how good everybody involved is that the film is able to communicate so very well.

(Formerly at EFC)

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 January 2019 - 10 January 2019

Another post-Christmas week where theaters are basically letting what's been there since Christmas play out, although there are a few interesting new releases.

• There is one new wide release, Escape Room, which is what it says on the tin - a group of high-achieving people get tickets to a high-tech escape room, which turns out to be potentially lethal. Looks pretty capable for an early-January release, playing at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  Fenway has two anime presentations - a preview of Mob Psycho 100's second season on Saturday afternoon and Modest Heroes, an anthology of short subjects, on Thursday evening (that one also plays Revere).
  
  Most interestingly, Boston Common will be playing the entire Oscar Documentary Feature Shortlist over the next week; though only five will be up for the award, all are worthy of attention. The films are Communion (Friday/Monday); The Silence of Others (Friday/Monday); Charm City (Friday/Monday); Free Solo (Friday/Monday); Crime + Punishment (Friday/Thursday); On Her Shoulders (Saturday/Tuesday); The Distant Barking of Dogs (Saturday/Tuesday); Minding the Gap (Saturday/Tuesday); RBG (Saturday/Tuesday); Three Identical Strangers (Saturday/Thursday); Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Sunday/Wednesday); Of Fathers and Sons (Sunday/Wednesday); Shirkers (Sunday/Wednesday); Won't You Be My Neighbor (Sunday/Wednesday); and Dark Money (Sunday/Thursday).
• Boston Common also gets Mojin: The Worm Valley, the third entry in the popular series of pulp treasure-hunting adventures, with the third completely different cast, this one not appearing to be the star-laden cast of The Lost Legend..
  
  Simmba adds Fenway to its dates at Apple Fresh Pond; Fresh Pond also plays Malayalam comedy Njan Prakashan on Friday to Monday, Marathi drama Bhai - Vyakti Ki Valli Sunday, Telugu biography NTR: Kathanayakudu Tuesday to Thursday (at least), and regular bookings for three action/adventures: The big Rajinikanth-starring Petta starts Wednesday (in both Tamil and Telugu), as does Tamil-language flick Viswasam, with Telugu entry Vinaya Vidheya Rama starting Thursday.
• The Brattle Theatre has more Refreshed, Renewed, Restored features this weekend, with double features of Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite & ’Atalante on Friday and Saturday before giving way to late shows of Alex Cox's Highway Patrolman both days. Sunday's main feature is Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, with Cox's Straight to Hell at 9:30pm. Monday is two singles which sound like a double feature but aren't - a new 16mm print of Inquiring Nuns at 7pm and Brian De Palma's Sisters at 8:30pm. There are private events Tuesday and Thursday, but the annual "(Some of) The Best" series starts Wednesday with a twin bill of The Rider & Leave No Trace.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up On the Basis of Sex as both it and If Beale Street Could Talk expand to more screens this weekend, and also have a brace of special features. The midnights in January are an "East Meets West" theme, with this first weekend featuring 35mm prints of Yojimbo (Friday) and A Fistful of Dollars (Saturday). There's a "Science on Screen Jr." show of Song of the Sea on Saturday morning with the New England Aquarium's Kathy Streeter teaching kids about seals and sea lions (and maybe selkies) beforehand. The Big Screen Classic on Monday is a new digital restoration of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, and there's Open Screen on Tuesday.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has their monthly "On the Fringe" screening Friday evening with a 35mm print of Dune. They also continue the January runs of Life and Nothing More (Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday/Thursday) and Border (Saturday/Thursday), plus a screening of Ai Weiwei's Human Flow on Wednesday. Ida Lupino at 100 continues with The Hitch-Hiker (Saturday/Sunday) and Not Wanted (Sunday).
• Cinema Salem has Mamoru Hosoda's latest, Mirai, in their 18-seat screening room with both dubbed and subtitled shows.

It look like Escape Room, On the Basis of Sex, Mojin 3, Sisters, Modest Heroes, and the documentaries will likely keep me from angering myself with Holmes & Watson this week.