Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 22 April 2011 - 28 April 2011

I just finished writing up reviews from the Boston Underground Film Festival, so what's that mean?

Independent Film Festival Boston 2011, obviously. That doesn't start until Wednesday, though, and in the meantime, it's a bit of a calm before the storm as studios hold off the big blockbusters this week, giving audiences a bit of time to catch up or rest up before the festival (or, for those outside Boston or not big on the documentaries, before Fast Five claims to kick the summer off two months early next week). Or to see the special programs and such that will be filling local theaters this week.

• With not a lot to be super-excited for at the plexes, we might as well start out locally, with the Brattle Theatre's Schlock Around the Clock weekend. Rather than doing an overnight marathon as in past years, they're programming the weekend with guilty pleasures: a Bela Lugosi double feature Friday evening (before Battlefield Earth, a Japanese monster double feature Saturday afternoon, a double feature of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Howard the Duck Saturday evening, and an old-school red/blue 3-D¹ double feature of It Came from Outer Space and The Creature from the Black Lagoon Sunday afternoon. There's an argument to be made that many of these films are not schlock, but let's be honest - the real crap is actually crap.
  
  Definitely not schlock is Tuesday's DocYard presentation, 12th & Delaware, a documentary about about the battle between pro-life and pro-choice activists that plays out every day at a Fort Pierce, Florida, intersection. And in a late edition to the schedule, the Brattle will be paying tribute to its recently deceased co-founder Cyrus Harvey Jr. with a number of the films that he played during his time at the theater, starting with a double feature of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, and picking up again next week after IFFBoston.



• Also not schlock, but clearly done as a tribute to movies that sometimes were, is Big Trouble in Little China, the latest entry in the Coolidge Corner Theatre's midnight tribute to the 1980s. John Carpenter directs Kurt Russell as an American lunkhead caught in the middle of a crazy Hong Kong horror movie. It's a blast, and plays midnights Friday the 22nd and Saturday the 23rd. Also not schlock is the month's Science on Screen selection, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds; it plays Monday (the 25th) at 7pm and will feature Dr. Theodore Stankowich, a visiting scientist at Harvard, discussing animals with "mobbing" behavior.
  
  Other special events include a kids' movie screening of The NeverEnding Story on Saturday morning, which will be introduced by folks from the Brookline Puppet Theater. And on Monday through Wednesday (the 27th), they will be running the second half of a series of six documentaries on environmental issues - Planeat on Monday, Bag It on Tuesday, and Urban Roots on Wednesday.
  
  Also opening at the Coolidge is The Greatest Movie Ever Sold². In it, Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock shows how inescapable advertising in the form of "product placement" has saturated our entertainment - and demonstrates, by financing his movie entirely through product placement.



• The Greatest Movie Ever Sold also opens at Kendall Square, alongside Henry's Crime, featuring Keanu Reeves as a man who, after serving a prison sentence for a crime he didn't commit, opts to actually go through with it - a plan that he hatches with former cellmate James Caan. And the one-week warning goes for Circo, a documentary about a family circus in rural Mexico stressed by an economic downturn and family conflicts. Director Aaron Schock will be there in person on Friday and Saturday, introducing the evening shows and doing Q&As after the 7pm screenings.



• Sticking with the circus, one of the mainstream openings is Water for Elephants, in which Robert Pattinson plays a mourning veterinary student who takes a job with a circus, apparently finding romance with Reese Witherspoon. For those who would rather see animals in their natural habitat than under the big top, DisneyNature's annual Earth Day documentary this year is African Cats, which is what it sounds like - two family groups of big cats in Africa. This is a thing that Disney used to be great at, and I gather these docs generally at least look spectacular.
  
  The biggest opening, though, is Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, in which his Aunt Madea character reveals yet another set of relatives, this group of which gathers around when the mother (Loretta Devine) has health problems. I've got nothing to say about this, because despite Perry cranking movies out at a ferocious pace, I've yet to see one, and haven't even seen a preview for this. Mr. Perry and I just don't cross paths.



• A new Chinese flick also opens at Boston Common: The Warring States is a period adventure about rival military strategists during the Warring States period who shared a mentor and would wind up facing each other on the battlefield. It looks like a lot of fun, but may not stick around, as it's already opened in China, and Chinese pirates are fast.



• If India is more your speed than China, you may want to check out Zokkomon, a superhero movie produced by Disney's Indian division about a kid who trains himself to be a superhero. From the showtimes, it looks like it's relatively short for a Hindi movie (probably only 100 minutes or so) and could be a lot of fun. I'm going to have to see it this weekend just because the name sounds fun to say. "Zokkomon. ZOKKOMON! ZOKKOMON!"



• ArtsEmerson serves up Curling on Friday and Saturday. It's the latest by Québecois filmmaker Denis Côté, who is apparently a bit of a rising start north of the border. In it, a real-life father and daughter have the same relationship on-screen, with the father being extremely protective. Sunday night's movie is also from Québec, a repeat of last week's The Far Side of the Moon. And, for the rest of the weekend, it's also in French, as Godard's Une Femme Est Une Femme alternate with Curling, followed by an episode of Godard's Historire(s) du cinema.



• Friday night, the Harvard Film Archive preesnts Foreign Parts by Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, two filmmakers who actually met as part of a Harvard program. It's a documenary about the New York City neighborhood of Willet's Point, and area just outside the Mets' CitiField with a truly astonishing amount of automobile junkyards and chop shops (indie film fans will likely remember it from a film named "Chop Shop").
  
  A series of documentaries rounds out the weekend, the "Middletown" series centered on Muncie, Indiana, in the late 1970s. which run Saturday to Monday (with one more screening next Sunday). Producer Peter Davis is expected to be present each night, and director E.J. Vaughn is scheduled to appear on Saturday (the 23rd).



• The MFA continues their "Animation Celebration" this week, and im kicking myself that I've already missed one of the things I really wanted to see. Still, there's a lot of nifty looking stuff playing as part of the series. There are also a couple of other events: Tuesday afternoon (the 26th), jazz composer and sax player Wayne Shorter will present a screening of The Fountainhead and discuss its influence on his work, and Wednesday evening (the 27th), there is a preview of Queen to Play, with Kevin Kline in his first primarily Francophone role as the tutor for a chambermaid who has just discovered her talent for chess.



• The Independent Film Festival Boston 2011 starts at the Somerville Theatre on Wednesday the 27th, and my first impression from looking at the schedule it's going to be a lot of fun for those that like documentaries, especially ones featuring performers. The Opening Night selection is Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, a look at Kevin Clash, the Jim Henson mentee who has performed the character of Elmo on Sesame Street (among others) for twenty-odd years. Clash, director Constance Marks, and Elmo will all be there for the screening. Thursday the 28th, the festival takes over three more of the Somerville's screens, with a wide variety of docs, shorts, and a fiction feature that night.



• The Arlington Capitol shoulders the bulk of the second-run shuffle this week, picking up Soul Surfer and Hanna. The Stuart Street Playhouse drops The King's Speech but picks up My Perestroika (which also continues playing at Coolidge Corner), with Poetry continuing to play one show a day at 5:30pm

My plans? Well, it's going to be a tight week - I'm committed to IFFBoston (you don't ask for a press pass and then not use it!), so I'll have to get everything in before then. I'll probably check out The Warring States on Friday, maybe Zokkomon over the weekend, and the Monster Zero/Destroy All Monsters Creature Double Feature at the Brattle. Maybe get Curling in there somewhere. Maybe fit Big Trouble in Little China, Rio and/or Scream 4 in there if the late night Sox games don't leave me exhausted.



¹I'm compelled to make the usual comment about how, actually, these movies were originally presented with polarized glasses very similar to the ones in use now, with red/blue used only for lesser cinemas and re-releases when platter systems became more prevalent. So this would be more "middle-school" than "old-school". Back

²Fine, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Just because Morgan Spurlock is going for irony here doesn't mean I have to put a sponsor's name in big, bold letters. Especially since pomegranete juice tastes pretty gross. Back

Boston Underground Film Festival 2011 Day 8: The Beast Pageant and Satan Hates You

Day 8? What happened to day 7? Well, I'd already seen Atomic Brain Invasion and Cold Fish, and though the idea of seeing Sion Sono's new movie again had some appeal, it was nice to have the night off. The other theater was showing the "J. Cannibal's Tapas of Terror" and "Midnight Transgressions" programs, and while I like short films plenty, I can skip the horror and "how far can we push it?" stuff. Plus, new comics day and not feeling like I have to rush home from work made for a nice break.

It's maybe not fitting that the festival ended with one of the more egregious projection errors, but it was disappointing; what happened with The Beast Pageant was roughly as bad as everything that happened Saturday combined. Basically, there were about twenty minutes of shorts before the feature, but apparently the feature started running at about the same time. We saw the shorts, then the projection switched to the feature, which ran to the end and restarted, causing some confusion in the audience - was this some weird achronological editing? Were we seeing deleted scenes? It took a while until someone was sure enough that something was up and went to find festival management.

The festival guys were, naturally, extremely apologetic, especially considering that this was the last day of the festival, so there was no chance to reschedule, or give free tickets to the guys who weren't using passes. It's a real shame that the problems with presentation need to be mentioned - and they do, as they certainly affected my enjoyment of the movies and ability to discuss them - because BUFF runs a fun festival, and even with the problems they had, the general feeling is of things running smoothly.

I didn't love everything at BUFF, but I don't think you're supposed to; if one person were to love everything, they probably wouldn't be as close to the edge as they wanted to be. But they certainly had a slate of interesting movies, and that's what you go to this festival for.

The Beast Pageant

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Obviously, I can't review this movie properly, as I wound up seeing it out of order. However, I suspect that the very fact that those of us in the audience didn't twig to the fact that we were coming in late or quite get what the deal was when the movie looped around suggests that, at the very least, the movie isn't exactly tight.

In it, we follow Abraham (co-director Jon Moses) as he escapes from his machine-controlled life in a city straight out of Brazil or the films of Guy Maddin and starts roaming across the increasingly bizarre countryside. That is, after a miniature singing-cowboy version of himself grows out of his abdomen.

The Beast Pageant is a strange little movie, the sort that often seems built with the primary purpose of having the audience say "huh, that's peculiar". It gets plenty of that, for sure - changing landscapes, dancing trees and rocks, naked doll-sized people baking pies inside their scale-model house, bizarre commercials for fish in cereal boxes. It's also got the sort of obligatory theme of how modern life can be confining and how the machines intended to serve us are actually the ones in control. There's not a lot to it besides its eccentricity and familiar message, really; filmmakers Moses and Albert Birney are just putting ideas on-screen.

There's charm to that eccentricity, though. This is very much a D.I.Y. movie - the camera is salvaged and the sets are spare - but its homemade aesthetic is earnest and playful. The exposed, convoluted machinery of the city is lovingly detailed, while the "best we can do" effects for the cowboy (alternately a doll sticking out of Abraham's shirt and shots of Moses against a background that roughly approximates the shirt's pinstripes) fool no-one but still work.

It's not a great movie. It's scattered and random and I suspect that if I had seen it in the right order I would have grown impatient waiting for things to get started. It's a diverting bit of oddness, and enjoyable enough on that count.

Satan Hates You

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

I must admit - I've completely lost the ability to tell genuine evangelical Christianity from satire of the same. I say this not to disparage the people who find comfort and strength in their faith, just to point out that as with any group with strongly held convictions, you sometimes need to look very close to figure out whether something is being said with the force of true belief or comic exaggeration. For the life of me, I can't figure out which one Satan Hates You is, which may make it sort of brilliant.

We are all sinners, as they say, but Marc and Wendy may have a leg up on the rest of us. Both hang out at the same bar; Marc (Don Wood) is an unemployed alcoholic who is quick to anger when somebody gets the impression that he likes other men, while Wendy (Christine Spencer) is a party girl who is not terribly particular about what she puts in any of her orifices. They are being watched by unseen demons Glumac (Larry Fessenden) and Scadlock (Bradford Scobie), who are not allowed to interfere directly but can certainly whisper encouragement. Still, evil influences aren't the only ones in their lives; the folks at the storefront church next to Mickey's bar make overtures to Marc, and Wendy finds herself drawn to the televised sermons of Dr. Michael Gabriel (Angus Scrimm).

"Christian" doesn't often word-associate well with "bloody horror", but they are not always mutually exclusive. There are both long and recent traditions of apocalyptic art, and Halloween "Hell Houses" are often surprisingly graphic to those who don't realize that God-fearing people often have extremely specific and detailed ideas about sin and the punishments sinners will receive at the hands of Satan, and are dead serious about scaring you away from them. So when the characters of Satan Hates You are involved in nasty, sinful things (on either side), writer/director James Felix McKenney presents it with plentiful blood and gore, often imaginatively so. That back-alley abortion clinic, in particular, is impressively grotesque. The production values are sometimes a bit crude, as befits something made with more fervor than resources or technique.

Full review at EFC.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2011 Day 6: Chop and Profane

If someone going to BUFF had opted for the "recession special" - a $35 pass that got the audience unlimited admission to the second half of the festival, the encore showings which run Monday through Thursday - Tuesday would have been a good night to sample the award winners. Both the "Director's Choice Feature", Chop, and the "Best of Fest Feature", Profane, played that night. I, personally would have recommended what was in Theater #4 instead - I found The Corridor slightly better than Chop and much preferred the gonzo fun of Helldriver to the well-intentioned but ultimately very dull Profane.

I must admit, I had to scratch my head a little when the awards were published (I missed the gala/party, because I was at Phase 7 and had to work the next day) - I had managed to miss (nearly) every single one of the awarded films by taking my first choices over the weekend, with the exception being Hobo With a Shotgun, which won the audience award. I guess that must have been voted on at the party or something, because I don't remember seeing audience ballots. If so, it had a leg up by not having its audience split (it was the only thing playing opening night); it thus had a better chance to be many people's favorite of the fest.

My votes likely would have gone to The Dead Inside, Phase 7, and Cold Fish, but even though I really disliked the Best of Fest selection, it's a reasonable choice given that BUFF is a festival devoted to envelope-pushing, and all four of the Best of Fest/Director's Choice winners and runners up were movies that do that in one way or another. My tastes are fairly mainstream - I like movies where things happen and as a result people do things, generally solving some sort of problem, and the story is told clearly. So, Profane is not for me, but it fits in with what BUFF is about perfectly.

(One other note: Though the director was not in attendance for either of these movies, Usama Alshaibi did send a video message mentioning that he was recovering from being assaulted a couple weeks earlier, an apparent hate crime. I may not like his movie, but that's despicable, and I wish him a speedy recovery and justice.)

Chop

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Earlier in this festival, I saw a film described as a black comedy that played pretty well as a straight thriller. This one, meanwhile, is presented as a revenge thriller, but winds up being presented so broadly that it only really works as a comedy. Fortunately, if you're down with this sort of bloody, wise-ass flick, it can work pretty well.

Lance Reed (Billy Bakshi) is being faced with a really lousy choice - some guy (Timothy Muskatell) has kidnapped him and his half-brother Bobby (Chad Ferrin), then informed him that there's another man back home with his wife (Tanisha Mukerji), ready to kill her after having some fun. Time to choose. Oh, but before you do, there's something you should know. Well, Lance makes his choice, but it's the sort of thing that leads to cops and others asking Lance questions. Lance's question is about who this guy is and what his beef is - Lance was kind of a jerk in his addict days, but nothing about his captor is ringing a bell.

Things, of course, get worse. This is a movie about things getting worse, piling more blood, mayhem, secrets, and depraved behavior on until it blows past tension to absurdity. It's fast-paced and full of both amusing one-liners and abundant gore; the audience is unlikely ever to find themselves bored - the movie seldom allows a tense situation to simmer, always rushing toward the next nasty revelation or mutilation. In a way, it's a good thing that director Trent Haaga and writer Adam Minarovich are so committed to just going for the next worst thing; it gives Chop a consistently irreverent, almost cartoonish tone. This might be a happy accident, and Haaga's and Minarovich's goal might have been to make a nail-biter whose events shocked even as they made a well-hidden part of the viewer snicker, but in cases like this, it may be better to do one thing well than two so-so.

Full review at EFC.

Profane

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Congratulations, Usama Alshaibi. You've managed to make spiritualism, Islamic mythology, and kinky sex boring in one brief eighty-minute feature. That's quite an impressive accomplishment, considering that most of the movie doesn't seem interested in accomplishing much of anything.

Meet Muna (Manal Kara). She moved to the United States from Jordan for school when she was younger, but of late has not been studying. Instead, she's been working as a dominatrix in Chicago, partaking of alcohol and drugs and other forbidden things. She's also been hearing voices, and believes them to be her jinn, a sort of demon of smokeless fire, some of them assigned to individual humans to tempt them toward evil. She discusses this with her friend Mary (Molly Plunk) in the back of a cab, which leads to the driver, Ali (Dejan Mircea) befriending her and offering his assistance.

And... That's mostly it. Despite the early mention of jinns, this isn't really a supernatural thriller. There's a potentially interesting idea to be played with of Mary and Ali being opposing jinns for Muna, with Mary leading her toward the pleasures and temptations of the flesh while Ali represents a spiritual cleansing and perhaps romance. If that's writer/director Alshaibi's intention, though, it's weakly executed. There's never a real sense of Muna feeling conflicted, or there being any particular consequences if she moves in one direction or another.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 15 April 2011 - 21 April 2011

It's actually a pretty quiet week at the theaters. Is it not school vacation week in other states, or just in Maine and Massachusetts where we have the Patriot's Day thing going on?

• I suppose you could say that there are two major openings this week and two-semi-major ones. Among the majors, Rio is the most recent animated picture from Fox and Blue Sky (best known for the Ice Age movies); it features a last-male-of-his-kind bird (who never learned to fly) sent to Rio to breed with the last female. Hijinks ensue. Blue Sky doesn't get quite as much ink as Pixar or DreamWorks/PDI, but they do have a consistently decent track record.
  
  Number two is Scream 4, which has me hoping for good things, because I do like the previous entries in the series, and nobody involved has really had great things in their career since. Still, the previews make me wonder if Craven, Williamson, et al really had more to say or if this is just a way for them to remind the world that they exist.



• And then there's Atlas Shrugged: Part 1. Supposedly, it's the first of a trilogy adapting Ayn Rand's mammoth novel, but IMDB doesn't list any information on Parts 2 and/or 3. The trailer didn't knock me over, either, so I'm wondering if Rand's core fanbase is enough to get the next two parts into production. It opens at Kendall Square, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  Also among the tweeners is The Conspirator, which opens at Kendall Square and Boston Common. Robert Redford directs Robin Wright Penn as a woman who is accused of sheltering Lincoln's assassins. It's an interesting subject, from a company whose aim is apparently to produce accurate retellings of American history, but it seems odd to see Redford working outside the studio system - and odd that this should seem odd, given that he's the guy behind Sundance and all they've done for independent film.



• Also opening at Kendall Square are two foreign films. Perhaps the most noteworthy is In a Better World, the Academy Award winner for best foreign language feature. It's about a Danish doctor who splits his time between an African war zone and a small town back home; guess which one is more potentially treacherous. Also opening is Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times), a quiet meditation on "four-fold transmigration", the idea that the soul passes between human, animal, plant, and mineral forms.



• The Coolidge doesn't shake much up this week, but does add a "Nine Nation Animation" program to the digital screening rooms. It's ninety minutes of festival award-winning shorts from around the world (My Perestroika, Orgasm Inc., and Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune also share these two screens). The 1980s midnight series continues with Red Dawn tonight and tomorrow night; The Room joins it at midnight for its monthly screening on Saturday. Sunday morning, the Goethe-Institut presents Autumn Gold, a German documentary about people striving for a gold medal in track and field - in the 80-100-year age bracket. On Wednesday the 20th, there will be a screening of short films from the first ten years of the 48 Hour Film Project; 5 of the 15 came from the Boston competitions. And on Thursday the 21st, Coolidge members can see a free preview of Morgan Spurlock's The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, courtesy of the Nantucket Film Festival.



• Also featuring animation this week is the Museum of Fine Arts, which begins an "Animation Celebration" program on Wednesday with a screening of Summer Wars; later that evening and on Thursday the 21st, the program will feature Piercing I, billed as the first independently-produced animated feature from China, about a college graduate trying to head back to his rural home after all manner of setbacks in the city.
  
  Before that, though, are a couple of holdovers from last week: Mercedes Alvarez's documentary The Sky Turns, and the remaining three days of the museum's first annual Hollywood Scriptures program, which feature a film followed by a one-hour panel discussion. Lebanon is showing Friday, Armadillo on Saturday, and War Don Don closes the series out on Sunday.
  
  Another quick series runs this weekend, New South Asian Film. Friday night is Life! Camera, Action..., about an Indian-American woman who wants to make movies; Saturday is Cooking with Stella, about a Canadian cook in New Delhi; and Sunday is Bicycle Bride, about a woman who falls for a Swedish immigrant despite her family's plans for an arranged marriage.



• The Brattle doesn't feature animation, but they do present something in the same spirit, with a Jim Henson Weekend. Friday and Monday, there's a double feature of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal; Sunday afternoon and evening, there's a TRIPLE feature: The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan. Kids and families may also want to come to the Brattle on Saturday, with a kids music show at 11am featuring Elizabeth Mitchell and special guest Barbara Brousal. Another music show runs that evening, New York City's Ida.
  
  No shows Tuesday, but Wednesday and Thursday are a True Grit double feature. John Wayne and Kim Darby have the 7pm show on Wednesday, with Hailee Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges before and/or after; the order is reversed on Thursday.



• The Harvard Film Archive welcomes Kurdish director Bahman Gobadi this weekend; he will introduce and take questions on Saturday (No One Knows About Persian Cats, which is pretty great) and Sunday (A Time for Drunken Horses, his first film). Also showing as part of the retrospective are Turtles Can Fly and Marooned in Iraq on Friday and Half Moon on Monday. On Tuesday, VES has a screening of Persepolis (not Gobadi's, but another story of Iran); on Wednesday they show The Passion of Joan of Arc.



• Whoa, more Iran? ArtsEmerson is presenting Offside tonight as part of the Boston Muslim Film Festival. It's about a group of female soccer fans who disguise themselves as boys sneak into a soccer match, only to be caught and detained in a holding area where they can here the crowd but not see the game. The film was banned in Iran, and director Jafar Panahi was arrested during the December protests and sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty year ban on making films, writing scripts, giving interviews, or traveling abroad.
  
  Saturday night, the program features two films by Andy Warhol - "Hedy" and "The Velvet Underground in Boston". Sunday night's screening is The Far Side of the Moon, a surreal movie directed by and starring Robert Lepage as quarreling brothers. Lepage will be presenting something called "The Andersen Project" on stage at the Paramount later in the year, which ties into the Saturday Afternoon family film, Hans Christian Andersen, featuring Danny Kaye as the famous storyteller.



• Saturday afternoon, the Stuart Street Playhouse presents the 4th Annual Moving Images Film Festival, a program of films "by and about those with disabilities". Temple Grandin plays at noon, the short "When I'm Not Alone" at 2:45, and the documentary Unlisted: A Story of Schizophrenia at 3:45. The first two will be captioned and feature panel discussions afterward.



• The Boston International Film Festival opens tonight at AMC Boston Common, and you're welcome to try and extract any information you can from their terrible website. I may try to make it out there for Ay Luv Yu tonight, just because I want to know how Steve Guttenberg shows up in a Turkish romantic comedy. The festival runs through the 24th.



• Another festival is going on at the Arlington Capitol, the Boston International Kids' FIlm Festival. The bulk of the program is matinees from Saturday the 16th to Thursday the 21st, but there is an opening night screening of To Kill a Mockingbird tonight at 7pm. If you've got kids and the afternoon free, it looks like there's quite a bit of good stuff there (including Summer Wars and The Secret of Kells).
  
  
• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has "Sing-Along Grease" this week, every night at 7pm (except Saturday), a 2pm matinee on Sunday, and a 10:30am show on Wednesday. Enjoy, people who like singing along to things!



• The second-run shuffle has Insidious and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules moving over to Somerville, one playing evenings and the other matinees (not a bad plan during school vacation week). The Lincoln Lawyer opens at the Arlington Capitol, and The King's Speech pops up at the Stuart Street Playhouse (which also keep Poetry), although there are no shows tonight (Friday the 8th).

My plans? Well... Baseball! I've got tickets for the Sunday and Monday afternoon Red Sox games, and I honestly feel pretty good about them (the losing can't go on forever; this is too good a team). I will probably try and see Scream 4 and Rio at some point, along with the animation programs at the Coolidge and MFA.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2011 Day 5: A Horrible Way to Die

My plans for BUFF were rearranged a little over the weekend - Monday was going to be a two-movie night, Luster and Twilight People, but I opted out of The Woman on Friday night (combination of a tight window, a sold out show, and not being particularly fond of Lucky McKee), and then opted for Luster over Horrible on Saturday. Based on their listing in the program, I thought that it would be in the same theater as Cold Fish and Helldriver - the ones I really wanted to see - and the best way of making sure that your film festival schedule doesn't get screwed over is to stay in one theater all day. Turned out not to be the case, and I was sweating more than a bit as Luster's projection problems closed the gap between showtimes.

It was a good thing I did, at least in terms of seeing as many movies as I could, as Monday turned out to be one of those days at work, the sort that keep you in an office out in Burlington until 7:30, torpedoing any chance of seeing a show in the early-evening slot. It did leave me with a little time to get dinner, though, and The Friendly Toast was pretty ideal at 8:30, especially after a few days of subsisting on nachos and microwaved hot dogs. The lessons for the film-festival-goer here? (1) Getting one night of decent food is awesome mid-fest, (2) always see the stuff you really want to the first opportunity you can, because stuff comes up, and (3) I think I'll just work from home the entire week of IFFBoston and avoid any T-related anxiety.

---

As to this movie itself, I'm kind of surprised that the review I wrote is so positive, all things considered. I'm not kidding about Wingard and company spending too much time futzing with the camera; I found myself grinding my teeth and really just hating the experience of watching A Horrible Way to Die, almost entirely for the pretentious, frequently out-of-focus cinematography (I think there was some horrible shaky-cam action in there as well, but I'm not sure).

I half-wonder if this would have been a completely different review if I had been able to write it closer to the actual screening, when the bile from staying late at work and getting to the theater only to see this blurry thing was fresh. Heck, I might not have seen the parallels between the characters' addictions otherwise, or not found them compelling enough if that was still fresh in my head.

(And, yeah, it bugged me this much. If I sound like a broken record now, imagine just how frustrated I was while the movie was actually unspooling!)

A Horrible Way to Die

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

I don't want genre filmmaking to become a paint-by-numbers affair, where we as an audience rejoice at basic competence and filmmakers strive to replicate a winning formula. Crime, horror, and the like can be innovative and done with artistry, not just a bit a flourish. That said, I spent a lot of time during A Horrible Way to Die wishing that director Adam Wingard would stop screwing around with the damn camera and trust in a good story and cast.

Sarah (Amy Seimetz) is starting to get her life turned around in a new town. She's not outgoing, but gets on well enough with the staff of the diner where she works as a waitress. She's committed but reticent in the AA meetings she attends, where she meets Kevin (Joe Swanberg), a nice, good-looking guy who offers a ride home and would like to see her again. As that relationship is starting, serial killer Garrick Turrell (AJ Bowen) escapes from prison and starts making his way across the country, blazing a trail of blood in Sarah's general direction.

As Wingard and writer Simon Barrett start mixing in flashbacks, the connection between the two threads soon becomes clear, but the film is not entirely about Sarah's past coming back to haunt her. A Horrible Way to Die is also about addiction and compulsion; just as Sarah and Kevin find themselves joking (but also dead serious) about how the Italian restaurant where they meet for their first date is perhaps a bad idea when they see the walls almost completely covered with wine bottles, Garrick can't seem to resist when an opportunity to kill is placed in front of him. He's not outwardly a maniac, but like an alcoholic, he murders without taking any real pleasure in it, no matter how many lives he literally destroys.

Full review at EFC.

Boston Underground FF 2011 Day 4: Son of God, "Future Imperfect", Atomic Brain Invasion, The Dead Inside, and Phase 7

And here's Sunday. It turned out to be a pretty good day, all told - it included my favorite film of the festival (The Dead Inside), an interesting documentary (Son of God), and a really good thriller (Phase 7). Even the throwback sci-fi movie (Atomic Brain Invasion) was enjoyable enough, although the shorts were a pretty mixed bag. Some just annoyed the heck out of me, but others had some good imagination.

It wound up being a bit of a long day - even with the inevitable delays at the starts of movies that tightened time between screenings, it was still a half hour between them toward the end, which is a bit of a bummer when you're hungry: There's not a lot of fast food around Kendall Square, and the two nearby restaurants that sponsored the fest - The Friendly Toast and Tommy Doyle's - are not quite places you can run into, order, and finish a meal between shows. I'm just glad that the hot dogs at the theater are edible - even though they're microwaved and, you know, hot dogs, it makes the day feel less like one where I'm subsisting entirely on junk food. This is also the only situation where the free refills on those jumbo sodas actually makes sense.

It was cool to see Phase 7 on film, at least - after the previous day's issues, there was something reassuring about seeing the specks and lines that indicate 35mm appear on the screen. You'd think digital would be more reliable without the moving parts, but the simplicity and standardization of film certainly translates into reliability.

This was also the official "closing night" of the festival; it continued through Thursday, but that was repeat showings, and as they were evening-only, much less exhausting. Awards were given out at a party that overlapped with Phase 7, and they make me scratch my head a little, but I'll get to that when I get to those movies over the next few days.

Son of God

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Did Khavn de la Cruz and Michael Noer stumble upon a potentially fascinating movie by pure chance while walking around the streets of Manila? Or did they know about the subject and gracefully insinuate themselves? Or were things somewhat more scripted? On the one hand, it doesn't really matter; the ideas and events of the film are the same either way. And yet, it's worth asking the question, given that this is a movie about taking advantage of faith, whether or not our faith in the film is justified.

As the movie starts, experimental filmmaker Khavn (he's often credited without his surname) and Danish documentarian Noer are shooting in Quiapo, a poor Manila neighborhood, when their path intersects a marching crowd. They're members of the Church of the Black Nazarene. It's a noisy, flamboyant sect, and that seems harmless enough. Then Khavn and Noer find a group claiming that Christ will soon be resurrected, in the Philippines. Not unusual. Then we meet "Son-of-God" (Ali Doron), a diminutive guy with curly white hair who claims to be that resurrection, and who surprisingly lets the filmmakers tag along as he spreads the word.

Is Son-of-God a fraud? Almost certainly. Certain elements come from a standard playbook, and aren't necessarily executed all that well - watch how Doron pulls tumors out of a man during a faith-healing exercise; though it's easy to see those who want to believe falling for it, a closer look makes his hand seem a much more likely source. And yet, it's not all that hard to sympathize with those who believe in Son-of-God; these are people who need to believe in something, after all. And Doron comes across as quite sincere; a confrontation with a believer who lost someone close after having been "cured" by Son-of-God does not play out cynically. Instead, there are moments of guilt and moments that suggest something more like a crisis of faith. Even the skeptical might find themselves very curious about what's going on in Doron's mind here; the pilgrimage that follows certainly seems genuine, rather than something done for show.

Full review at EFC.

Future Imperfect

Seen 27 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

I'll punt this one a little, rather than running down every short, mostly because it's been a couple of weeks and thus many of the details have fallen out the back of my head. Also, a number were very short, and not clever enough to make an impresion in their brief running time.

Still, there were some memorable entries - "Apocalypse Story", for instance, in which a boy and a girl come across each other in a post-apocalyptic landscape. It's interesting for being almost entirely dialogue-free, possibly because language has fallen into disuse when other people are so few and far between. "Spark" is another one featuring a young cast, with a clever conceit - that genetically engineered plants have increaded the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to the extent where people are legitimately terrified of fire. A lot more, though, were like "Robotic Panic", a low-budget but somewhat amusing bit where a robot's requests become increasingly uncomfortable.

Atomic Brain Invasion

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

It's fair to look at a movie like Atomic Brain Invasion and sigh. Another one of these things? After all, to put it bluntly, the people with legitimate first-hand nostalgia for 1950s sci-fi flicks are dying off, and going the spoof route just seems unsporting. Writer/director Richard Griffin splits the difference, making a throwback sci-fi flick that's kind of funny, but occasionally seems to miss opportunities.

It's the 1950s, and this small New England town seems typical. Sure, the occasional mushroom cloud on the horizon probably should make the residents wonder just exactly what sort of velocipedes the army is working on at the Bicycle Testing Ground. That's not the only strange thing going on, though - something has crashed in the woods where the local high school has a field trip. Among those teenagers are misfits Sherman (David Lavallee Jr.), Kevin (Daniel Lee White), and Jim (Colin Carlton); academically inclined cutie Betty (Sarah Nicklin); and Lukas (Michael Reed), son of the general in charge of the army base (David Erin Wilson), who is having a hard time dealing with the fact that Betty doesn't like him nearly as much as Sherman. As slimy aliens infiltrate, another group of aliens lands - good-looking teenage ones (Alexander Lewis, Alexandra Cipolla, and Ruth Sullivan), asking to be taken to the king. They can't mean Elvis (Brandon Luis Aponte), can they?

Look at the credits of Richard Griffin and his cast, and you'll see a lot of overlap. This is a group that has been cranking out horror movies on a fairly regular schedule, and this time around they wanted to make something less R-rated. On that count, they succeed; it's a pretty mild movie, with no swearing, not much even the easily-horrified fifties moms in the cast would find terribly suggestive, and what violence there is more likely to involve puppets and glowing green goo than graphic blood and guts. In that way, Atomic Brain Invasion is a tends more to the pastiche than the parody; it respects the 50s monster-movie conventions much more than it mocks them.

Of course, it can't help but make fun much of the time, and sometimes they could have done with pushing it a little harder. While the kids are often played as kind of broad and maybe oblivious, the characters are at their best when they poke each other with something a little sharp. For instance, Lukas isn't nearly as funny as a dim-bulb bully as he is when he's playing weird, eccentric, and perhaps in a deep, dark closet. A conversation by the ladies horrified that kids might be going to that rock & roll concert rather than their pie-baking contest is a little obvious, but General Bedfellow commenting during a lecture that "we don't know a lot about radiation, and most of what we do know is wrong" is funny because it jabs at present-day scientific ignorance on film and in life as much as it does the past. Heck, Elvis is funnier the nuttier he seems. Basically, every time Griffin, co-writer Guy Benoit, and company go for the screwy, bizarre joke, it works a lot better than just repeating formula.

Full review at EFC.

The Dead Inside

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Films like Travis Betz's The Dead Inside are some of my favorites to write about. Not so much the genre - although, let's face it, you don't pass up a chance to write up singing zombies - but because it's a well-made movie that goes in clever, often funny (but often not), directions. Plus, the surprises start coming early, so there's the challenge of saying just why it's so cool without giving the game away.

We start with the zombies, Harper (Sarah Lassez) and Max (Dustin Fasching), who know that there is a delicious young woman on the other side of a door. However, while they are able to converse well enough with each other, that locked door is too much of a challenge for their zombie brains. And they are not in line for a whole lot of help, as the tiny room beyond contains Fiona (also Lassez). Fiona's a writer of a series of books starring Harper and Max, and the locked door has her stuck. And as her boyfriend Wes (also Fasching) - a wedding photographer growing sick of weddings - soon discovers, it's rather worse than a simple case of writer's block; Fi seems to be having a full-fledged breakdown. Or, as the surprising direction Harper's and Max's story takes indicates, something stranger may be afoot.

Many independent movies confine themselves to a small cast and a single location out of necessity; many horror movies do so to keep the tension up. Few make such a virtue of it as The Dead Inside, where people other than Fi, Wes, and their alter egos are glanced (or heard) only briefly, and the decision not to redress the sets between the Fi/Wes and Harper/Max sequences reinforces both just how similar the couples are and what sort of turmoil Fi is undergoing. Betz moves between the scenarios smoothly, sometimes during songs, sometimes with shots of Fi at the computer, but never with the intent to confuse.

Full review at EFC.

Fase 7 (Phase 7)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

In most zombie/contagion movies, the point where the tension really cranks up is when, after braving the various horrors to get to what should be a safe place, the characters discover that the greatest danger isn't out there; but in here. Phase 7 cuts out a lot of the time used in getting to that point, making for a thrilling siege picture.

Coco (Daniel Hendler) and his pregnant wife Pipi (Jazmin Stuart) don't know anything is up as they're doing the grocery shopping, just buying the usual while the people around them are stocking up. It's not until they get home that they find out that there have been outbreaks of a nasty disease around the world. When one of their neighbors is taken away for displaying symptoms, the Argentine equivalent of the CDC places the entire building under quarantine. As time passes with no news of the restrictions being lifted, tensions begin to form - Coco's neighbor Horacio (Yayo Guridi) seems disturbingly prepared for this situation, and a number of others are already making plans on how to consolidate and distribute assets, starting with elderly neighbor Zanutto (Federico Luppi).

Phase 7 is being presented in some circles as more black comedy than thriller, and I think that characterization does the movie a bit of a disservice. That's not to say that it's not frequently funny - it is - just that its sense of humor is often bone-dry, to the point where it can easily be confused with bad plotting. For instance, the opening scene, where Coco and Pipi are too wrapped up in their own minor concerns to notice that everybody around them is hurriedly buying in bulk - that's smart, satiric, and just gets funnier as the scene continues to play out. As things play out, though, with indications that a fair amount of time is passing, Pipi's continuing obliviousness and Coco's often head-scratching behavior become less amusing than frustrating to watch.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 April 2011 - 14 April 2011

I'll finish the BUFF stuff within a week. I hope. Eight features to go.

In the meantime, some of the new stuff looks decent. Looks like it beats watching the Red Sox, in that pain is not guaranteed.

• Hanna is an action movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana, which I suspect very few people knew they wanted. But the thing to remember is that Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett are always, always, always fantastic, and director Joe Wright is the one who first made us noticed Ronan in Atonement a few years back. Throw in what looks to be a nifty soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers, and this looks pretty nifty.
  
  For those who didn't get enough Russell Brand last week with him doing a voice in Hop, he's got a new movie out this week with Arthur. I want to be cautiously optimistic about this one, as I like almost everybody in it - Martin, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner, and Luis Guzman - but it doesn't look good. Your Highness also has an unusually nice cast supporting a lead who can be an acquired taste (Danny McBride) - James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel. I'm hoping that the previews don't do it justice, which is possible; the name implies a lot of dope humor which just isn't making it into green-band trailers.
  
  And for those who might want something more family-friendly, there's Soul Surfer, featuring AnnaSophia Robb as a teenager who loses her arm in a shark attack and doesn't let that derail her love of surfing. Very PG-rated, characters maybe a little bit more religious than the norm.



• At Kendall Square, Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu star in the new one by François Ozon, Potiche. "Potiche" is apparently French for trophy wife, with Deneuve as the widow whom nobody thought much of that must now run her husband's factory, with Gerard Depardieu as the working-class man who loved her back in the day. Is anybody else surprised to see that Ozon is only 44? I always got the vibe of the older auteur from him.
  
  The one-week warning is for Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary on a guy who appears to be a guerrilla fashion photographer of some sort. It had a recent preview at the MFA, and I gather Cunningham is fairly well-known among people who are up on fashion, photography, and Manhattan personalities.



• Over at the Coolidge, the new film opening in the screening room is My Perestroika, a documentary about five Russians who grew up against the backdrop of of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It looks to be a nifty one, and on Sunday the 10th, director Robin Hessman will be there in person.
  
  Friday the 8th and Saturday the 9th, 80s movie midnights continue with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which is a bunch of fun, in part because, while it's campy in some places, in others it looks pretty darn good. I'm kind of surprised that, with all the other pillaging of vaguely recognizable names that has gone on lately, nobody has announced Buckaroo Banzai and the World Crime League. If you want to go further back and see a movie that generally doesn't have "cult" added to the word "classic" when people talk about it, they will be showing Luchino Visconti's The Leopard on their main screen on Monday the 11th. It's a new restoration and should look beautiful.



• Another very quiet week for movies at the Brattle - Friday and Saturday evening, and Sunday afternoon, the theater will be used for a live performance of Godspell. In a sort of cool move, Sunday's performance will feature ASL interpretation. On Saturday afternoon, for those who want a film musical, you can catch The Wizard of Oz (presumably on film). Oz also runs Sunday night, but it's "The Dark Side of Oz", with the film dubbed with the songs from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
  
  The theater will be closed during the week, except on Tuesday, when the DocYard presents The Order of Myths, a documentary on Mobile, Alabama's Mardi Gras celebration, the longest-running one in America and one which, as of filming in 2007, was still racially segregated.



• It's an in-person weekend at Harvard Film Archive. Friday and Saturday night, experimental filmmaker Morgan Fisher is there for "Morgan Fisher Presents", a collection of his various films. Sunday afternoon, he introduces Under Capricorn, a Hitchock movie that is a formal experiment as well as a thriller. Sunday night, Maple Razsa and Pacho Velez are there to introduce two of their short documentaries, "Occupation" and "Bastards of Utopia" - the first, amusingly, being about a protest leading to Harvard University paying its staff a living wage. And on Monday night, Linda Hoaglund is there to introduce her new documentary, ANPO: Art X War, which investigates how the American military presence in 1950s Japan sparked protest and profoundly influenced the era's artists.



• I got an email from ArtsEmerson mentioning Hadewijch, the new film by French filmmaker Bruno Dumont about a woman whose religious passion is evidently too strong for the convents and eventually steers her to a surprising place. It plays twice each on Friday and Saturday night at the Paramount Center.
  
  The rest of the weekend's program includes Old Yeller, one of Disney's first live-action successes (so ingrained in American culture that even those of us who have never seen it know the ending), as the family film on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday evening Vapor Trail (Clark) runs with director John Gianvito in person. It's a mammoth (4+ hours) documentary on an environmental disaster in the Philippines, traced to a release of toxic chemicals at the Clark USAF base.



• At the MFA, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives has its last shows Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Much of the rest of the weekend is filled with the last days of The Boston Turkish Film Festival. On Saturday afternoon, the museum will run the full two-hour version of Phil Grabsky's In Search of Mozart, and Grabsky himself will be there on Sunday for "An Afternoon with Great Composers", featuring parts of In Search of Mozart, In Search of Beethoven, and his upcoming In Search of Haydn.
  
  On Wednesday and Thursday, the museum will show Mercedes Alvarez's The Sky Turns, a documentary about her disappearing hometown in northern Spain. Thursday is also the first day of the museum's first annual Hollywood Scriptures program, which this year focuses on portrayals of war and soldiers. All four nights will feature a film followed by a one-hour panel discussion; Thursday's is Waltz with Bashir. Both programs will continue into the next weekend.



• The Regent Theater will also have Phil Grabsky on Sunday, for "An Evening with the Great Composers". Their program for this looks slightly different, with the one-hour version of In Search of Mozart, plus footage of the upcoming In Search of Haydn and In Search of Chopin. The documentary showing on Wednesday the 13th and Thursday the 14th is also musical, but in a completely different genre; The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee "Scratch" Perry, which covers the story not of a classical composer, but a trailblazing reggae/dub musician.



• The Hindi movie opening at Fresh Pond this weekend is Thank You, in which a private detective with a reputation for getting philandering husbands to see the error of their ways is set upon three best friends - only to find himself attracted to the woman who hired him. Akshay Kumar is the big name in this one, with Sonam Kapoor the female lead and the ubiquitous Irrfan Khan also having a role.



• The New England Aquarium sees its first real scheduling shake-up in a while as Born to Be Wild opens up for three shows a day. It's a 3-D IMAX documentary about returning orphaned elephants and orangutans to the wild. It gets these shows at the expense of "Hubble" and Tron Legacy - the former has ended its run and the latter is now only showing Saturday night (and looks to be gone completely in a couple of weeks). Morgan Freeman narrates.



• The second-run shuffle has The King's Speech finally ending its run at the Kendall and opening up at the Capitol in Arlington; it's apparently the PG-13 version, and I'm not saying I encourage disrupting the theater by yelling profanities at the appropriate times, especially during the baby-friendly matinee on Monday... just that I think it would be really funny. They also pick up matinees of Gnomeo & Juliet, though not in 3D.
  
  Stuart Street actually picks up an interesting slate. From Friday to Wednesday, they will have Poetry at 4pm, The Elephant in the Living Room at 6:40 pm (if I recall correctly, this documentary on exotic pet ownership played IFFBoston last spring but never had a regular Boston run), and The Fighter at 8:40pm. This is the second Thursday in a row with no screenings; I'm not sure what they do then.



• And, just as an early heads up, there are two festivals starting up next Friday: The Boston International Film Festival at AMC (warning: terrible website), and the Boston International Kids' Film Festival at the Arlington Capitol.

My plans? Hanna. Maybe Born to Be Wild and Your Highness, but probably more catching up than anything else.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2011 Day 3: Frankie in Blunderland, The Corridor, Luster, Cold Fish & Helldriver

It's a little bit fitting that it seems to have taken me roughly forever to get this write-up of BUFF finished. I've had a lousy luck finding time to write - between the end of last week and the beginning of this week, I wound up taking the train to Alewife, just missing the bus, and taking the train back to work from home four days out of five, and since most of my writing gets done on the bus ride... Well, there you go. Things just kept going wrong.

Which was sort of a theme for the day - I don't think I've ever been to a festival that had so many projction problems in a single day. If I had been in more of a note-taking mood that day, I would have marked down every time it happened (I would also have made notes about names for Helldriver and Cold Fish, too). It's annoying enough that the start of almost every movie involved seeing the controls for the projector pop up, with big ol' messages about zooming and aspect ratio right in the middle of the screen, but you know that thing where a DVD freezes up, and you have to restart it, jump to the right chapter, and then try to fast forward over the moment where your lousy piece-of-crap player chokes every damn time? That happened all day. It was especially bad with the shorts, but even the features weren't immune. Heck, we missed the last bit of Luster entirely, because the player just would not go any further.

I think that just amounted to a few seconds, but it made me unsure whether I should write a review of that one. After all, I didn't see the whole movie, and considering that I get a little snippy (in my head at least) when I see film-critic friends of mine on Twitter mention that they were going to watch the rest of a screener later (how can you judge a movie's pacing, really, if you don't see it in one sitting?), I do feel like a bit of a hypocrite. And, actually, the first three movies of the day were all described as being in line for a little touch-up, so perhaps all three should be taken with a grain of salt. I did review them, though, and don't feel that bad about it - the folks from The Corridor at least seemed to appreciate it - though, granted, they got the positive review. And I did have to laugh/shake my head at the predictable comments Frankie in Blunderland and my review got on eFilmCritic - the people who love it for its rough edges, and the people certain that I didn't get it. Guys - I got it just fine. I just didn't like it.

The projection issues were a genuine problem, though. I tend to forgive BUFF because it's generally run well by great people - and hey, it's "underground", so this sort of thing helps the atmosphere - whereas the exact same incidents at, say, the Boston Film Festival in September would lead to sheer hate. Of course, the BUFF folks were very good about communicating with us and solving problems quickly, giving actual reasons. As a viewer, I don't really care that the filmmakers just recompressed their file the day before and didn't have time to test it, but just knowing there is a reason is helpful.

I must admit, I'm kind of surprised that these sort of screw-ups don't happen more often with digital projection. I suspect that the systems in the multiplexes are a lot more standardized - low (if any) compression, a path from the hard drive to the deck's memory, well-tested codecs, much more processing power than necessary, and I suspect they only have to test on one model of machine running one version of software. At festivals - well, it's whatever computer running a software DVD player or video playback software is available. Who knows what can happen.

Frankie in Blunderland

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

It's not uncommon for critics to rate films they see at a festival a little higher than those they see elsewhere, in part because the discussions with the filmmakers afterward help forge a personal connection and often cast the film's shortcomings as things that just couldn't be avoided. In the case of Frankie in Blunderland, however, I found the opposite happening - director Caleb Emerson said "I don't know" so much that the bits that did work started to seem like random accidents.

Frankie (Aramis Sartorio) seems like an inoffensive enough sort of guy, if a bit quick to tears and slow on the uptake. His wife Katie (Thea Martin) does nothing but sit on the couch watching Spanish-language soap operas while hurling insults at him, and his "friend" Spioch (Brett Hundley) has overstayed his intentions to crash on their couch for a couple days by a couple years. One particularly angry morning, Frankie snaps, clouting Spioch but good; dude looks dead. Later, though, Katie and Spioch are gone, a note left implying they've run off together when in fact Spioch has kidnapped Katie. So Frankie heads out to win her back, or rescue her, or, well, something. The characters frequently state that "today is stupid", and they aren't wrong.

There's all manner of other strangeness in the movie - an android girl, a Mormon with the odd tendency to use the phrase "Earth wife", a butterfly with a human body - with writer Marta Estirado basing the cast on her old friends from high school. They enter and exit almost completely randomly, and while some of these characters could be interesting if dropped into an actual story, they're just in a mess here. Nobody does anything for an actual reason, and while to a certain extent that's commentary on the arbitrary and disappointing nature of life (with cruelty to others being the only way to release that aggravation), it makes for a disjointed, nonsensical story.

Full review at EFC.

The Corridor

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

In most horror movies, insanity encroaches slowly, chipping away at the seemingly normal world that the filmmakers had built up at the start. To say that director Evan Kelly and writer Josh MacDonald go the opposite route with The Corridor would not be entirely true, but they do invert expectations enough at the beginning to keep us guessing at the end.

The opening, after all, shows Tyler Crawley (Stephen Chambers) brandishing a knife, his mother Pauline (Mary-Colin Chisholm) on the floor, and his friends Everett (James Gilbert) and Chris (David Flemming) scarred when they try to subdue him. It's a nightmare, but months pass. It's determined that Tyler inherited the same sort of mental illness his mother had, and seeing her overdose caused him to snap, but he's on medication now, well enough to leave the hospital. He, Everett, and Chris head out to Pauline's cabin to reminisce, with a couple other friends joining them - "Bobcat" (Matthew Amyotte), Chris's blading ex-jock cousin, and Jim (Glen Matthews), who's been living in another province with his wife. And when Tyler goes to scatter Pauline's ashes, he sees a strange corridor of light, where the snow and wind stop but voices start whispering to him.

It's a basic "cabin in the woods" set-up, but the main twist of knowing that one of the characters is mentally unstable going in - and how experience may make him better-equipped to deal with what's coming up, one way or another - is a good one. MacDonald stocks the cabin with plenty of tensions, both from Tyler's episode and going back to when the men were younger (Bob tended to bully Jim in high school), while Kelly and the cast manage to bring out the characters' long friendship. It's a good combination of new and old tensions for this corridor to exacerbate.

Full review at EFC.

Luster

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

I'm not saying that it should be an ironclad rule that a movie by the name of "Luster", with a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, should go a little more heavy on the sex, but that would have given it a little something. Instead, it just sort of sits there, not awful but not particularly impressive.

Thomas Luster (Andrew Howard) is tired all the time, although he's got plenty of reasons. He's running a small landscaping business that is fairly stressful, considering that his current client Halo Kennedy (Pollyanna Rose) is dragging her feet on approval and payment. His unemployed actor neighbor Travis (Ian Duncan) seems to be flirting with his wife Jennifer (Tess Panzer) a little too much. The closest friend he's got is Les (Tommy Flanagan), a homeless vet who has parked his car behind Tom's shop. One day, Les offers him some sleeping pills, and though he gets a full night's sleep, he soon finds notes telling him to stop taking the pills. Thinking that someone is breaking in, he buys a security system, only to find on examining the recordings that things are stranger than that.

Director Adam Mason (working with regular co-writer Simon Boyes) sets things up well enough, although at some early points it's hard to tell whether the sleeping pills are creating Tom's other side or doing enough to suppress it that "Luster" feels the need to reveal himself and fight back. The second is more logical, although it raises a question of how Luster had gone more or less undetected for so long. Still, this sort of movie is often more about atmosphere than logic, and Mason does a nice job in terms of seeding little things that take on more significance, and by presenting the movie mostly from Tom's perspective, he gives us a good look at just how unnerving this sort of missing time can be, especially when it's clear that one's alter ego is doing some very bad things.

Full review at EFC.

Tsumetai nettaigyo (Cold Fish)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Clearly, Sion Sono is a guy I'm going to have to pay more attention to going forward. So far, I've seen three of his movies and really liked all three, even though they're frequently the very definition of an acquired taste. Cold Fish, for instance, only seems conventional when compared to Love Exposure, Sono's four-hour epic of teen romance, religion, and kung fu panty photography - it's a mere two and a half hours of tropical fish salesmen, unhappy daughters, and bloody murder.

It starts with the Shamoto family. The father (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) runs a small tropical fish store in a small town off the highway. He has a beautiful young second wife, Taeko (Megumi Kagurazaka), which has not gone over well with his teenage daughter Mitsuko (Hikari Kajiwara). One night, Mitsuko gets caught shoplifting at a department store, but Mr. Murata (Denden), who caught her, talks the manager into letting her go, if she'll work at his tropical fish store. He and his wife Aiko (Asuka Kurosawa) do this for a lot of troubled girls - their "Amazon Gold" fish store even has a dormitory attached - but this doesn't seem to be an attack on Shamoto's store. Murata even proposes a business partnership with Shamoto, acknowledging his greater expertise. However, it's not just breeding rare fish that Murata is involving Shamoto with, but cold-blooded murder.

That's just the start, of course - once things get rolling, Sono and co-writer Yoshiki Takahashi do a great job of keeping the story chugging along, not so much with plot twists but by tightening the screws, bringing the walls in a little tighter on Shamoto. Though Sono is often best known for his twisted characters, bizarre turns of events, and shocking visuals - and there's plenty of both on-hand here, especially once the Muratas drag Shamoto into the bloody process of making murdered people disappear utterly - what's really impressive is just how well he's able to pace a movie. Cold Fish runs 144 minutes, but never feels like an unusually long movie. And though it's a screwy story, it's not until the very end that a character's actions seem strange in context.

Full review at EFC.

Nihon bundan: Heru doraibâ (Helldriver)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Yoshihiro Nishimura's Helldriver is a Yoshihiro Nishimura film, and he doesn't do things halfway. So how a person reacts to the opening scene (and, I presume, any preview they make for the movie) will likely serve as a pretty good barometer for how they'll feel about the movie as a whole: You're either down for a movie about a schoolgirl who fights horned zombies using a sword with a chainsaw blade powered by the engine that's been grafted to her chest in place of the heart that her mother (who was a cannibal serial killer even before joining the ranks of the undead) ripped out and took for her own, or you're not.

That comes pretty close to covering the movie - an asteroid landed in northern Japan and zombified much of the population, which is only separated from the rest by a wall built across the middle of Honshu. Zombie horns are used to make a new addictive drug, despite the fact that they are really explosive. Kika (Yumiko Hara) and some other criminals are given an opportunity to head north on a Dirty Dozen road trip, where Kika's mother Rikka (Eihi Shiina) awaits.

Believe it or not, when Nishimura was in Montreal last summer promoting another movie he was involved with (Mutant Girls Squad), the Tokyo Gore Police director said that he was aiming to make a more serious movie than some of his other productions with Helldriver. One certainly wouldn't think so to read that description. And yet, credit where credit is due: Nishimura and co-writer Daichi Nagisa do spend a fair amount of time playing with their world beyond finding the shortest distance between gonzo set pieces; a chunk of the plot is driven by a difference of opinion among government ministers about whether or not the zombified have civil rights. And maybe Nishimura didn't intend to talk about poaching horns or equate drugs to an unstable material that will blow up in one's brain, but it certainly feels right. He also does much better than these movies often do in building up suspense (even if, as occasionally happens in this sort of movie, it's not clear exactly where where the opening action scene fits into the story).

Full review at EFC.

The Music Never Stopped

Roadside Attractions opened two new movies in Boston this weekend (The Music Never Stopped and The Last Godfather), which seems pretty unusual for a small distributor, and they have been popping up on the radar a lot more often of late. It's a potentially interesting division of the indie-film distribution line-up: IFC and Magnolia seldom get movies into multiplexes the way Roadside does, and it's probably got something to do with the movies they pick. Roadside's tend to have some sort of name that can be put on the poster, even if, as in this case, it's the soundtrack rather than the star or director (although, hey, I came to a movie because it starred J.K. Simmons). Roadside also seems to be a pure theatrical distributor - their films tend to get distributed by others on home video.

What's all this mean? Not much, other than that my unhealthy interest in distribution is still in force.

The Music Never Stopped

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 April 2011 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run)

As near as I can tell, J.K. Simmons has never had a starring role in the movies or on television. He's been part of ensembles, and stolen scenes in supporting parts, but being the first guy listed in the credits here seems to be a first for him. As might be expected, he's up to the job, although there are times when the rest of the movie isn't quite up to his standard.

Simmons plays Henry Sawyer, who when the film opens in 1986 receives a surprising phone call - his son, Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci) is in the hospital. It looks like he's been living on the street - neither Henry nor his wife Helen (Cara Seymour) has seen him in nearly twenty years - and the diagnosis is not good: A tumor has spread throughout Gabriel's brain, and even once it's removed, his memory is severely damaged. When Gabriel seems to respond to music, Henry looks for someone who can build on that, coming up with Dianne Daley (Julia Ormond). Of course, Gabriel regaining his memory is a double-edged sword, as it forces to Sawyers to confront just why Gabriel left home to begin with.

The connection between music and memory is made early, in flashback scenes featuring Gabriel as a five-year-old played by Max Anitsell. It's an obvious but canny move, in that it works to establish this sort of musical therapy as not a miracle cure, but something that Gabriel (and, for that matter, Henry) might respond to particularly well. It also demonstrates what a changeable and context-dependent thing memory itself can be. In many ways, it's a much more effective way of getting the point across than when music actually jolts Gabriel out of his fugue and he starts going on about why certain Grateful Dead songs are so brilliant - after all, musical know-it-alls can be annoying even when they are miraculous.

Full review at EFC.

Cold Weather

I hate not getting a review up until the last day of something's run on general principle, especially in the case of a good movie like Cold Weather, but this one is extra-special annoying because I expected to be able to write something about it a couple months ago. One of the perks of the eFilmCritic gig is that I'm on some publicists' mailing lists, and while 99% of it is stuff I can easily ignore, the one for Cold Weather sounded interesting, because I had liked Quiet City and love Sherlock Holmes. I said I would like to do an interview, but after seeing the movie, but I couldn't make it to NYC for the screening. That's okay, the email came back, I'll send you a screener, what's your address?

I sent it, but nothing came back. And then the filmmaker came for a two-night retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive, but I couldn't go because it was the start of BUFF - the end of which bumped into the Brattle's run of it.

It's not the first screener that never showed, and I can't blame folks for not sending them - I am terrible about actually watching and reviewing the things. It just seems strange to go back and forth a couple times in email and then have nothing happen.

Anyway, the movie is on it's last night at the Brattle today. The 5:30pm show is a double feature with the 3pm Rear Window, which is reason enough to go on its own.

Cold Weather

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 April 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run)

Cold Weather looks like a detective story, but to an extent that's just camouflage. Though it's got more of a definite plot than many of the movies that rightly or wrongly are placed under the "mumblecore" umbrella, the mystery winds up serving as structure for another look at twentysomethings lacking direction. A good one, but if you go in looking for Sherlock Holmes, you may be disappointed.

Doug (Cris Lankenau) majored in criminology and forensic science in college, but never finished. Now he's back home in Portland, Oregon, moving in with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn). He finds a job at an ice factory, where he meets Carlos (Raul Castillo), who also does gigs as a DJ and hits it off with Doug's visiting ex-girlfriend Rachel (Robyn Rikoon). So when Rachel doesn't make it to one of Carlos's gigs, he gets worried and calls on Doug to figure out what's going on. Which appears to be nothing - at least, not until Doug spots someone watching them as they search Rachel's room.

Looking at the plot in retrospect, it really doesn't make a lot of sense - not in terms of being unfair (like how the Sherlock Holmes stories referenced tend to rely on information not given to the reader), but for how none of the actions of the criminal element seem to come together in a way that seems logical on their own - they all seem like set-up for Doug and company to jump through specific detective-story hoops. It's fun to watch them try and go through those hoops; the whole group is amateurs sort of imitating what they've seen in movies or read in books, having to improvise. Fortunately, it doesn't become a spoof, and even dropping references is kept to a minimum.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 April 2011 - 7 April 2011

Next Week in Tickets is officially an April Fools-free zone this year, no matter how much fun that might be. This includes The Last Godfather. I'm crazy behind this week, have stuff needed for work, and I'm even giving "This Week" an off-week [at least, until the double-sized BUFF extravaganza (note: may not actually be an extravaganza) next week]. But, since there's stuff to be excited about here, let's get right to it!

• Source Code opens! All my friends who saw it either at SXSW or critics' screenings came out very excited, which is impressive, because most of them (like me) are big fans of Duncan Jones's first feature, Moon, and thus had heightened expectations. It's also got a great cast (Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright) and a nifty sci-fi storyline. The only thing holding back my enthusiasm is that it seems to be almost-exclusively in DLP cinemas, getting neither 35mm prints (except at Fresh Pond) nor the premium rooms (I'd have paid the RPX prices on this one, Regal). Oh well, you only really notice that during the credits, most of the time.
  
  For those who lean more to the horror side of genre films, there's Insidious, a haunted house story by the makers of Saw. And while Lionsgate beat that franchise into the ground, the first one was darn good and these guys left fairly early in the process. Of course, their other work hasn't set the world on fire, but the same folks I know who liked Source Code had good things to say about Insidious.
  
  For the kids, there's Hop, with Russell Brand as the voice of the son of the Easter Bunny who finds his way to Los Angeles with the goal of becoming a drummer in a band. It looks mostly harmless. The movie at least looks like a nice blend of live action and CGI, and it's not in 3D, which should make the matinee with the kids a little less costly.



• Also playing at the multiplexes is The Last Godfather, and it kind of boggles my mind that it's not just playing at Boston Common, but Fenway and Revere as well. It's the latest from Korean writer/director Shim Hyung-rae, last seen making the pretty darn bad Dragon Wars. Here, he steps back in front of the camera (before trying to conquer the American film business, he was best known as one of South Korea's most popular comedians) as the apparently developmentally disabled son of mobster Harvey Keitel, who has been brought back to 1950s New York to be his heir apparent. I suspect that like "D-War", this was a big hit in South Korea, but will get eaten alive here.
  
  In more encouraging "boutique movies at the multiplex news", Boston Common adds two screens' worth of Win Win (knocking Jane Eyre down to one) and also opens The Music Never Stopped, about a father trying to reconnect with his estranged son, who has a Memento-like inability to form new memories and thus really can't get past their previous animosity. It's a rare starring role for J.K. Simmons, a reliable and familiar supporting actor (I say he's got "That Guy" status).



• For boutique movies in something closer to their natural environment, Kendall Square offers an almost completely revamped slate, with roughly half of the screens taken up by new releases. Likely the most multiplex-friendly is Super, in which a just-dumped nebbish (Rainn Wilson) decides to change his luck by dressing up as a superhero and fighting crime. It's from James Gunn, who made the pretty-fantastic Slither, and has a fun supporting cast - Keivn Bacon, Ellen Page, Nathan Fillion, Liv Tyler, Michael Rooker, and more.
  
  Also opening is Certified Copy, which features an interesting combination of talent: Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and French actress Juliette Binoche, as a bookseller who meets and English writer in Italy. It appears to be a star vehicle for Binoche, and there's nothing wrong with that. Another director in an unexpected place is Tom Shadyac, a guy who is best known for comedies that don't exactly tax the mind, but who after a nasty injury changed his life completely, stripping it of excess and making I Am, a documentary about how to make the world a better place.
  
  Elsewhere, director Julian Schnabel returns with Miral, about a Palestinian girl being drawn into the Arab-Israeli conflict. It's in English and stars Frieda Pinto along with a few other familiar faces (Vanessa Redgrave, Willem Dafoe, Alexander Siddig, and Hiam Abbass, who seems to appear in every single movie made in that part of the world). And the one-week warning is attached to Die Fremde, a German film about a Turkish family in Berlin that still finds itself attached to old traditions with potentially deadly results. Note that there are no 9pm showtimes for this one, for some reason.



• Strangely, Happythankyoumoreplease is not playing in any of the usual spots in metro Boston; to see it, you'll have to head out to the Embassy Cinema in Waltham (which is actually a fairly nice place, but not usually the only spot to see a movie. It's got a nice enough cast, but looks like a fairly weak interconnected-stories picture.



• If you're into Bollywood, Game opens at Fresh Pond today. It's apparently neither a musical version of the David Fincher film nor a take on The Most Dangerous Game, more's the pity, but an action-oriented mystery taking place on a private island in Greece.



• Extremely quiet week for the Brattle - they finish up their run of Cold Weather on Sunday, but if you see it this weekend, there's a chance to see it as part of a double feature - there's a 9pm screening of The Big Lebowski tonight, and a 3pm one on Satruday (replacing Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye on the schedule). The 3pm show on Sunday is Rear Window, which makes the 5:30pm Cold Weather a bonus.
  
  If you haven't gotten enough out-of-the-mainstream material from the Underground Film Festival, they've got you covered - Cinemental and Truth Serum has the latest installment of Bike Porn at midnight on Friday and Saturday, which is what it sounds like. On Wednesday evening (at a time still to be announced), they kick off the 10th anniversary of the 48 Hour Film Project with a screening of Be Kind, Rewind and previous entries in the short-film contest. They're closed the rest of the week, I'm guessing because the live theater playing there next weekend takes some set-up.



• The Coolidge doesn't have any new openers, but they have a whole bunch of special events: Friday and Saturday they kick off their 1980s adventure midnight movie series with The Goonies, which I have somehow never seen. I am amused by them including one of my favorite actors in their credits as "Joey Pants". The Sunday morning "Talk Cinema" screening is Incendies, in which the reading of their mother's will leads a pair of twins to seek out the family they never knew they had. Also playing this week (in the screening room) are three films from Whole Foods's "Do Something Real" Film Festival: Vanishing of the Bees (Sunday the 3rd), Lunch Line (Monday the 4th) and On Coal River (Wednesday the 6th).
  
  Oh, and the stage performance of Frankenstein directed by Danny Boyle on Monday night, this time with Jonny Lee Miller playing the monster and Benedict Cumberbatch playing victor. Sold out right now, although they may release tickets that afternoon. I've got mine and I'm excited.



• F. Murray Abraham is appearing in The Merchant of Venice on the Paramount's main stage, but he will take a moment before that starts to introduce Amadeus in the screening room upstairs on Friday night; the movie also runs Saturday afternoon. Saturday and Sunday evenings, they have a double feature of A Letter to Mother, a classic Yiddish film from 1939, and Mamadrama, a documentary on portrayals of Jewish mothers in Yiddish, Hollywood, and Israeli cinema.



• At the MFA, the Boston Turkish Film Festival continues this weekend with four different films. On Wednesday (the 6th), the MFA starts something that's almost like a regular booking, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It's the new one by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in which a man near death returns to the forest and tells the story of not just his current life, but his past lives. It won last year's Palme d'Or at Cannes and its omission from the Oscar nominations caused a fair amount of confusion in some circles.



• Race to Nowhere pops up again, this time Thursday (the 7th) night at the Arlington Regent. Down the street at the Arlington Capitol, a couple of other movies that played elsewhere open up for second runs: Kill the Irishman in the smaller screening room and The Fighter. Downtown, Stuart Street picks up Even the Rain, but only Friday through Sunday and only at 8:50pm (Black Swan plays at 4:25 and Inside Job at 6:35 all week).



• And, finally... Baseball! I'm writing this while watching Sox-Rangers, and, man, this could cut into my movie watching just a bit (but help the reviewing, because it's great background material).

My plans? Since it looks like the game won't be done in time to see Cold Weather tonight, that's probably on deck for tomorrow. Maybe I'll head downtown for Source Code tonight. Sunday morning will probably be my last chance to catch Hubble 3-D for a second time, as the Aquarium shuffles their line-up next weekend. That'll put me downtown for a cheap show at Boston Common, with maybe something at the Coolidge later.

Or I can just sit, watch baseball, and actually make some headway on all these BUFF reviews.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2011 Day 2: Machete Maidens Unleashed! and The Twilight People

Friday night turned out to be my wimp-out night: I think I nodded off a bit during The Twilight People, and then when it finished, I looked at the half-hour plus until Wound started and had a hard time mustering enthusiasm. After all, I didn't watch it at Fantasia, didn't have any idea whether the title was referring to an injury or emotional state, and, hey, I may have missed an important plot point in the last movie (inasmuch as The Twilight People had important plot points) by being asleep.

Nothing to do with it looking a bit past the amount of nastiness I was looking for. Nope, no sir.

Machete Maidens Unleashed!

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

I wonder where Mark Hartley's next stop will be. Hong Kong? Thailand? Indonesia? After spotlighting the exploitation cinema of Australia in Not Quite Hollywood and the Philippine Islands in Machete Maidens Unleashed!, there must be other spots on the Pacific rim that he can give a look-in. Machete Maidens Unleashed! is maybe a little less informative than Not Quite Hollywood, but it's certainly one of the more energetic movie-history docs you'll see.

As the opening narrative crawl tells us, the Philippines had a thriving film industry throughout much of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1960s, and especially the 1970s, it became a popular place for American exploitation filmmakers for its combination of skilled professionals, cheap labor, and varied environments. Roger Corman's New World Pictures, in particular, shot many of their most famous pictures there, sometimes with American directors like Jack Hill, other times with local talent like Eddie Romero.

Many viewers may come away wishing that the film focused more on Romero. His interview segments are fun to watch - he's one of the directors that looks back on his time working with Corman without shame and laughs nostalgically as he recalls making blood & guts pictures. When others talk about him and his work, though, it's with unusual respect; Corman and others describe how his shots would be beautifully framed and lit, and how he would put more effort into things like story and character development than Corman thought necessary (or even really desirable). His career extends many years in either direction away from his American exploitation pictures, and as the movie points out, he is a grandmaster of Filipino cinema.

Full review at EFC.

The Twilight People

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

The Twilight People is one of the movies featured in Machete Maidens Unleashed!, and it's a good example of how well Hartley cut his picture together - the clips of this film in the documentary make it look fast-paced, fun, and perhaps surprisingly good, especially with all the positive words said about director Eddy Romero. And... It's not good. To be fair, it's got potential. Romero shoots the jungle quite well, and there's both some actual tension to the last act and some well-shot action.

The animal people, in particular, are an entirely watchable combination of cheese and restraint; there is a nice blend of bestial and human to them. Nobody but Pam Grier (who has a more or less silent part) would really go on to bigger and better things, but they're mostly adequate. If the first half of the movie were a little better, it might fit solidly into guilty pleasure territory, but it's not quite there.