Stuff seen in New York: Goodbye to Language, Interstellar (70mm), Mea Culpa

What do you do when you have eight days of vacation to use by the end of the year but really don't have a lot of money to spend? A few days in New York, checking out museums and monuments and then seeing movies in the evening.

I knew two of the ones I was going to see going in - Goodbye to Language is only playing 3D theaters, and while the overlap between those and boutique houses in the Boston area isn't quite one screen, it's close enough that if Kendall Square isn't playing it, you're going to New York. What you should probably not do is try to get to an 7:55pm show at the IFC Center, miss it by five minutes, and then just hang around in the cold for about an hour and a half, not doing much to keep warm other than buying a couple slices of pizza from Joe's around the corner. Pretty good pizza, but it was, as noted, cold outside.

The second one I went for was Interstellar. I'd already seen it in 35mm at the Somerville Theatre, but knew I'd be doing it again with large-format film. There were two 70mm places in New York; I went with the Ziegfield because it sounded a little more up-market.



Help a tourist out, guys - get the lighting even and have the marquee say something about the 70mm presentation!

The place was pretty nifty once you get inside, although it's clearly from a time before wheelchair-accessibility was a thing people cared about (I didn't really need more stairs after the Statue of Liberty!). Nice decoration in the lobby, and the single screen is a good size with a lot of seats in front of it, probably in the 700 range. I sat in the third row, and the rest of the audience was well behind me, which I've seen happen at big, premium screens all the time, and I don't get it. You're paying for extra millimeters and a bigger screen so that the picture looks even better - sit up front so that you get the full effect!

One thing I noticed while buying tickets was that the MoviePass app's behavior seems to have changed on me - where before it would forget my location every day, this week it did not want to look for theaters close to me at all - I'd have to say to do it twice, and stab the theater's name on the screen fast before it reverted to Cambridge. This happened twice - once for the Ziegfield and once for the AMC Empire on 42nd Street, where I saw Mea Culpa.

Why that one? Well, because I'm me, one of the things I did Monday evening after checking into the hotel was scan through which movies were playing that weren't likely to hit Boston. I almost went with the Katie Holmes thing, but I saw Mea Culpa playing the multiplexes, and took a look to see what it was. Oh, a French action thing. I liked Point Blank a couple of years ago. Same director? Fine, take my money while I grumble a bit about how not only is this not playing Boston, but I didn't know it existed..

Not the world's greatest movie-going experience, though. I had two separate groups of talkers behind me - the first just seemed to have chosen the movie at random and seemed to have decided that they didn't really feel like seeing a movie when they sat down in the theater, bailing after a few minutes. Then, a bit later, some theater hoppers come in, and keep up running Spanish chatter all the way through unless an action sequence is impressive enough to shut them up. In their lame half-defense, I was in the second row and kind of slouching, so maybe they thought they had the room to themselves.

Fortunately, I've gotten pretty decent about just looking ahead - part of the reason I sit toward the front is that it puts any phone-checking or other screwing around behind me - and even if one hasn't read stories about people getting violent when being told to shut up or having the ushers called on them, it's not like I was going to have another chance to see this in a theater. So I put up with it and then walked down to the Port Authority to catch an overnight bus back home.

Overall, a pretty successful trip from a movie-seeing perspective, as even the one I didn't much like was at times interesting, and who knows, I might like it more if I was in a less tired/brain-frozen state of mind. I'd play both French selections if I was somehow magically able to open the specialty miniplex of my dreams, hopefully saving some folks a potentially expensive trip for movies.

Adieu au Langage (Goodbye to Language)

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 November 2014 at IFC Center #2 (first-run, Dolby 3D)

My second impulse where Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language is concerned is to write nothing at all about it. That's in large part because my first is to cry that the emperor has no clothes, but I think I've got just enough awareness of what I know and what he's done that recognize that I'm in no position to make such a sweeping accusation. Still, he's made a film that seems to offer very little to those who do not look at cinema as a primarily academic pursuit.

There's a bit of a story, a woman leaving a violent husband and a dog wandering about, and plenty of time for characters to discus history, philosophy, and art. The film alternates between "Nature" and "Metaphor" segments, although they are not necessarily told in order, and much of the action happens off-screen. If you are coming to this film looking for a story, you are going to have to work for it, and likely come away disappointed.

But, I gather, nobody goes to Godard fims for that reason any more, nor have they had reason to do so for decades. Instead, the likes of Goodbye to Language are best approached as a sort of lecture, with Godard demonstrating different types of structure, speaking briefly about ideas that interest him, and experimenting with ways to shoot a scene that may, in their unconventional manner, tell the audience something not evident from a simple direct shot. Godard also cuts to clips of other works, archival footage, and home movies, creating something that while slow-moving, is undeniably dense with information.

Full review at EFC.

Interstellar

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 November 2014 at Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)
Seen 20 November 2014 at the Bow Tie Cinemas Ziegfield (first-run, 70mm)

When folks have asked me how this movie is, I say I liked it a lot, but it is a film made especially for me - reasonably hard sci-fi, a lot of actors I like, and it looks gorgeous to boot. I recommend seeing it in the highest gauge film presentation you can, as well, because that is clearly how Christopher Nolan made and wants it presented. Both times I've watched it, I've had moments where I get caught up, thinking that this is just so, so good.

And it really is. One thing that strikes me, having seen it on film both times, is that digital is going to have a hard time capturing some shots the way Nolan wanted them. There are scenes inside the cabin where the Cooper family lives where the lighting is so low as to almost look like candlelight, and it's something that seems rather rare in this (mostly) post-film world. It's technically a knockout in a number of other ways, too, from the miniature work to the absolutely insane detail put into rendering black holes, wormholes, and the like in order to figure out what they'd really look like.

Beyond that, Nolan keeps the story moving very well. It's not one of those where one says that a three-hour movie really flies, but I seldom felt fidgety, even though Interstellar does feel like a thing of size. Nolan does a neat trick where the film shifts pretty drastically a few times but seldom seems to split into sections. There's a truly fantastic score by Hans Zimmer (which, for some unknowable reason, is not available for purchase in its entirety) and an utterly jaw-dropping climax.

So why, then, do I say I like it a lot but don't love it? I think there's something about Nolan's work (and I'm including Christopher's screenwriter brother Jonathan here, too) - that's a little bit chilly at times. Like many of his non-Batman films, this is something of a puzzle-box of a movie that plays with time in interesting ways, and he almost approaches managing the emotion a bit like managing the science and effects: There's truly gut-punching tragedy in how the Cooper and Brand families combine and tear apart, and that it never quite overwhelms the thrill of discovery and sense of adventure is kind of amazing, as is a robot making HAL 9000 jokes. And yet, when Anne Hathaway has to talk about the power of love, it sounds terribly forced, as to the final few scenes. They are the only real blips in the movie, but they're jarring enough to keep it from seeming a masterpiece.

So it has to settle for being one of the best of the year, especially if you like hard science fiction. And that's pretty darn great.

Mea Culpa

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 November 2014 at AMC Empire #2 (first-run, DCP)

A couple years ago, French director Fred Cavayé garnered some attention from international action-movie fans with Point Blank, a fast-paced thriller that didn't break any new ground but did everything better than expected, adding up to a great little movie. His follow-up Mea Culpa is along the same lines - basic story, impressive action, a satisfying hour and a half.

Simon (Vincent Lindon) and Frank (Gilles Lellouche) were once partners on the police force, before a drink driving accident landed Simon in jail; now he works as a security guard and lets his ex-wife Alice (Nadine Labaki) and son Théo (Max Baissette de Malglaive) down. Frank, meanwhile, is investigating a series of execution-style underworld killings, the type that make sure to leave no witnesses - at least, not until Théo stumbles upon one.

You can guess where it goes from there without much trouble - the gangsters are going to try and eliminate the lose end, Simon and Frank aren't going to let the niceties of proper police procedure slow them down, and violence will ensue. Cavayé and co-writer Guillaume Lemans spend a bit of time on diversions early on - one of Simon's co-workers cruelly hazing the new hire, just enough background detail to give the audience a sense of the two leads - but they keep it very basic otherwise. It's the sort of movie where only one of a half-dozen adversaries is referred to by name, and I had to find a picture to be sure which one it was.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 21 November - 25 November 2014

Short week, and a short list of movies to go with it.

• This weekend, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 opens on a metric ton of screens, and not much else does. Fortunately, the series improved markedly in the second outing, and you're generally going to do alright with a cast featuring Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jena Malone, and more. It's at the Capitol, Embassy, Apple, Boston Common, Fenway (including RPX), Assembly Row, Revere (including "XPLUS"), and the SuperLux.
• Kendall Square and West Newton Cinema open The Homesman, a Western that Tommy Lee Jones adapted, directed, and stars in the story of a wagon train transporting three women driven mad by pioneer life home.
  
  Kendall Square also gets Point and Shoot, a documentary on Matt VanDyke, a priveliged American who wound up fighting in and shooting film of the Lybian revolution. VanDyke and director Marshall Curry will be on-hand for the 7:10pm show on Friday.
• Apple Cinemas keeps The Tale of Princess Kaguya and Awake: The Life of Yogananda and Fenway keeps Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2. They also pick up Happy Ending, a Bollywood romantic comedy. Apple's iMovieCafe also has Rowdy Fellow if you speak Telugu and screening of Kasturi Nivasa on Sunday if you speak Kannada.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up the pretty darn good The Theory of Everything. They also have Tommy Wiseau in person for Friday & Saturday night's 11:30pm screenings of The Room, along with his new film/sitcom pilot The Neighbors. Those nights also have midnight screenings of Lucio Fulci's The Beyond. Both features are on 35mm. There's also a Sunday morning Goethe-Institut screening of Germany's Academy Award submission Two Lives. There's also a 25th Anniversary screening of Roger & Me, with a live Q&A with Michael Moore via Skype afterward.
• The Brattle gives much of their schedule for the next week to a look back at 1939: Hollywood's Greatest Year. It starts with Gone with the Wind on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, but it gets better after that, with a double feature of Gunga Din (in 35mm) & The Hunchback of Notre Dameon Saturday, the 35mm pairing of The Women & Ninotchka on Sunday, The Roaring Twenties on Monday (35mm), Dark Victory on Tuesday afternoon (35mm), a double feature of Mr. Smith goes to Washington & Destry Rides Again, and The Wizard of Oz on Tursday (35mm).
  
  There are also a couple of single shows in the middle of that: The monthly "Elements of Cinema" on Monday is A Report on the Party and the Guests, with an introduction by Dr. Igor Lukes, and the Tuesday IFFBoston Fall Focus film is Low Down. Director Jeff Preiss will be on-hand to discus his movie about a teenage girl's relation to his heroin-addicted musician father.
• The Harvard Film Archive begins Once Upon a Song... Jacques Demy on Friday with separate screenings of the delightful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and wife Agnes Varda's Jacquot de Nantes. Saturday has Model Shop and Parking, Donkey Skin plays Sunday afternoon, and Varda's The World of Jacques Demy plays Monday. All but Parking and World are 35mm. They also have another film featuring last week's visitor Angela Lansbury, the 1947 The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (in 35mm).
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues to screen National Gallery (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).
• ArtsEmerson brings the Black Maria Film Festival tour to the Bright Screening Room at the Paramount Theater on Friday.

My plans? Hunger Games, Homesman, and maybe one or two others.

The Theory of Everything

There's been a lot of talk online over the past couple of years about how the nerds have "won" - video gaming is mainstream entertainment rather than just a thing loners in dark basements do, baseball teams have major analytics departments, the general public gets genuinely excited for new Iron Man movies or seasons of The Walking Dead, etc., etc. But I think it finally hit me when I sat down for this one and got the first trailer.

I mean, sure, it's one thing when the big escapist movies are based on comic books or science fiction and fantasy. That's just going big. But when the late-in-the-year awards contenders are biographies of people like Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing rather than poets and painters, that's when you know there's been a real sea change.

Another sign: There's a great big Doctor Who joke in the middle of this movie, and the entire theater full of Americans laughed at it. That just blows my mind.

The Theory of Everything

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 November 2014 at AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)

Stephen Hawking's life story is extraordinary, but not necessarily cinematic - its milestones are often losing the ability to do things, and his accomplishments can be difficult for laymen to understand. So what do you do? In this case, try and let the audience know a guy whose public face is often inscrutable, as well as hs wife.

The film picks up in 1963, when Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) was a Ph.D candidate at Cambridge; not the most hard-working but one of the brightest. Some things are looking up - he's just met Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), an arts major who may fancy him back, and his thesis advisor Dennis Sciama (David Thewlis) has brought him to a talk that inspires him. But a stumble in the middle of campus reveals the really bad news: He suffers from motor neuron disease, which will eventually destroy his voluntary nervous system, and the usual prognosis is two years.

It's somewhat unfair to frame the story entirely in terms of Stephen Hawking, especially since it is Alice's memoir that is being adapted to film. And, certainly, while it is often Stephen's activities and illness that shape the story, it's often seen from Alice's perspective - the difficulty of caring for a man in his condition, the temptations she would face. It can sometimes feel odd when the perspective shifts, but telling the story from her point of view grounds things, and Felicity Jones does a nice job in growing Jane from the naive student to someone who handles big challenges.

Full review at EFC.

Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2

I've been saying this a lot lately, but it bears repeating: How great is it that one can just go to a regular big-city multiplex, plop down the usual amount of money, and see the new Johnnie To movie with a packed crowd while it's still playing in China? It's fantastic, is what it is. And in a week and a half, we'll get the new Pang Ho-cheung one a day or two before Hong Kong. There's probably a limit to how much American multiplexes can support between rapid arrivals from India, China, and occasionally Korea, but wouldn't it be great to see France or Japan get in on this? Someone should dig into the numbers on Box Office Mojo and later home video sales to make a case to distributors that this sort of global release is a good idea.

This matinee screening wasn't as crowded as the opening night crowds from recent weeks, but it was still a big deal. Not to presume too much, but someone Chinese-looking was shooting video in the lobby and there weren't a whole lot of empty seats around me. Lots of discussion after the movie too, it seemed, and I kind of wish that I understood any Chinese, because even if I wasn't going to interject myself into the conversation, I would have been interested in getting a sense of what people thought of the ending, because...

Well, I'll get into the ending after the EFilmCritic review.

Daan gyun naam yu 2 (Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 November 2014 at Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 repeats quite a bit from part one, from rescuing a weird pet to flirting through facing windows; one character even wryly asks another if she thinks her life is a "to be continued". You might be tempted to deride that as unoriginal, but the idea of a sequel is often to recapture what people liked before, and that's what director Johnnie To and his cast & crew do here - they give us more Don't Go Breaking My Heart, in a way that doesn't have to undercut the original.

It's been about a year since Chang Zixin (Gao Yuanyuan) chose humble architect Fang QiHong (Daniel Wu Yan-zu) over her playboy former boss Cheung Shen Ran (Louis Koo tin-Lok), and they're due to be married in a couple of months, as soon as QiHong completes the building in Suzhou that he is working on. While at a fitting for her wedding dress with brother Paul (Vic Chou Yu-min), she manages to land a new job with "Goddess of Stocks" Yang Yangyang (Miram Yeung Chin-wah) - who, it turns out, has just started dating Shen Ran as the two rent office space across the street from each other. She also meets Paul, and while Shen Ran's assistant John (Lam Suet) says he was over Zixin within moments, that doesn't really seem to be the case.

Following up a hit romantic comedy is a minefield - most of the time, filmmakers wind up either rolling back a hard-earned happy ending or having the characters do something else. So what To and regular writers Wai Ka-fai, Ryker Chan, and Yu Xi come up with is actually a really clever solution - drop the third vertex of a love triangle back into a similar situation with a couple of new characters and find a way for at least one of the previous movie's happy couple to be a strong supporting character, even if the other is mostly there via Skype. And while this could be just cheap repetition, the Milkyway Image crew are pretty clever - there are jokes built on bringing back stuff from before and an undercurrent where Shen-ran consciously or unconsciously recreating what happened before gives his character some weight.

Full review at EFC.

SPOILERS!

What the heck, Milkyway Image guys? What made you thought that ending was a good idea?

For those who just have to know, the film ends with Cheung Shen Ran climbing the 78-story building where QiFeng and Zixin are getting married (the one QiFeng built and used as the huge romantic gesture at the end of the first movie), and Zixin apparent being so astonished at this gesture that she leaves her own wedding with him. QiFeng, who if you remember correctly was an alcoholic at the start of the first movie, meekly lets it happen and sits down to take a drink.

Now, I suppose, within the structure of the movie, it's a happy ending of sorts. Yangyang and Paul are together, and Shen Ran, who never got over Zixin and was either trying to recreate that relationship with Yangyang or couldn't help but notice that it was similar enough to the one with the love of his life, QiFeng is kind of the Baxter for this movie - the nice, dependable guy who doesn't excite his fiancé the way Shen Ran might. Even if this weren't a sequel, this sort of thing would sort of have to be earned. Maybe show QiFeng as boring, not wanting Zixin to continue working after they marry or just otherwise thinking less of her than Shen Ran dose. To, Wai, and company don't really do that, though - he's supportive, funny when we see him, and not turning his head at any big-booped girl that passes his way or crossing creepy lines in expressing how fond he is of Zixin the way Shen Ran is. Even if this were a stand-alone movie, the audience will assume that he and Zixin are together for a reason, and needs a reason to break it off beyond "Shen Ran is sexy and really into her".

But this is a Part II, and we're carrying Part I around with us. We know this building, we've seen how QiFeng supported Zixin when Shen ran was being a jerk, and we just like QiFeng in general. One of the things I was really liking about #2 up to this point was that the filmmakers had found a way to do another romantic comedy with (mostly) the same characters without nullifying the previous one or upending the happily ever after, so why do it at the end, when the audience isn't really thinking in that direction at all. Maybe they'd meant to - maybe we were supposed to get a sense that QiFeng was prioritizing this building over the wedding, or that Zixin realized that she had chosen him because she felt he needed her rather than because she needed him, but it's not really in the final product. Maybe it was cut, maybe they just didn't have Daniel Wu for long enough to do more than what they did, but where the first was in large part about a man who makes himself a better person so that he can become worthy of Zixin, the second doesn't really have that sort of thing going on at all. Shen Ran is the guy he started out as, and the ending isn't earned.

One thing that did kind of amuse me: There was a familiar bit of music that I couldn't quite place going throughout the movie (not the Elton John/Kiki Dee duet that you'd think), at least until Zixin is running off in her wedding dress. I think it's meant to be close enough to "Mrs. Robinson" to not get flagged as copyright infringement but still remind you of the piece.

Anyway, I'm not really angry about this, even if it did wind up causing me to dock the movie half a star for those who care about star ratings. It did mean I came out confused rather than happy, and I just wonder what the thinking was. Did the home crowd want the Shen Ran to win Zixin's heart last time out, leading to this reversal? Is there a third part coming? Were the filmmakers trying to go for surprise in a very predictable genre? I've got no idea, and, again, I kind of wish I could have heard what the folks who are much closer to being the target audience than the one white guy in the room thought.

!SRELIOPS

One non-spoilery question: Do folks say "boops" in Hong Kong? I never actually hear that in the dialog, but it's always in the subtitles when I'd expect to see "boobs". It makes me giggle just a bit more than is probably intended.

The Canal

Hey, haven't been here in a while:



Unfortunately, I didn't get the picture of the marquee earlier in the day, when it said "WED - IRISH HORROR FILM". It made me giggle (and also vaguely curious as to whether it was one I'd seen at Fantasia earlier in the year), but at the same time, I wondered if maybe there wasn't something to doing it that way. Because, to be blunt, The Canal was not on my radar, and I suspect that my radar for this sort of thing is better than that of many. You put that up on the marquee of the Regent, and there is a reasonably good chance that I presume it to be a band. "Irish Horror Film", though? That might get someone in the door.

I didn't have it on the "Next Week" list, even though it apparently played on both the 5th and 12th. The first week, it was apparently very much a last-minute booking, with just enough time for the guys at the Regent to get in contact with the Boston Irish Film Festival and have them send something out to their mailing list (which, I gather, brought a decent crowd for the first screening), and the listing apparently just disappearing at the wrong time for me to see it last week. It wound up being me and half a dozen or so other people, although it was just me until awfully close to showtime.

I did wonder a bit about booking it for a couple of screenings two towns outside Boston, though. One friend suggested that it might have been contractural - it had to get into a certain number of theaters as part of the sale to the distributor, but I'm not sure a tiny label like Orchard is in a position to promise anything, and doing this kind of minuscule release if they'd implied bigger might not be great for the reputation.

My own theory is that, in a weird way, this sort of booking is actually advertising for the video on-demand release. After all, the VOD menu on your cable service or even Amazon (and other services like it) is kind of terrible, a big list of movies that are all close enough in type and quality that they all blur together. So how do you get yours to stand out from the pack? Ads, I suppose, but I half wonder if it isn't cheaper to rent a place like the Regent for a couple nights, let the guys who like going out to the movies enough to comb through those listings find it, pay money, and talk about it later. Heck, I didn't love the thing, and I'm blogging about it, which is more than I've done for the more interesting movies I've found on-demand whilemaking a link to Amazon.

Sure, that's the explanation that boosts my ego a bit, but it's still worth a thought, especially combined with that "WED - IRISH HORROR FILM" marquee. There are a lot of movies available to us these days, and sifting through them is almost impossible. Sometimes a generic description is actually more useful than a title (especially when the canal in question is neat, but not important enough for me to make much mention when reviewing the film), and it's quite possible that word-of-mouth these days may be more important for just presenting a film's existence than its goodness.

The Canal

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2014 at the Regent Theatre (special presentation, digital)

The Canal opens with a bit that's almost too clever for its own good, with film archivist David Williams (Rupert Evans) standing on stage and asking an audience full of unruly children if any want to see some ghosts, finishing the introduction with a sort of "here we go" before the main titles roll. It's an odd thing, because the movie isn't particularly self-referential after that, and while it's nice to see filmmaker Ivan Kavanagh going for honest, relatively undiluted scares, there's a bit of a seems that the movie could use something to grease the rails a bit, and maybe a little more of that could have done it.

Soon after that scene, David is moved into a new house with his beautiful wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra) and, eventually, their son Billy (Calum Heath). He seems to enjoy his work, at least until one bit of film from 1902 crosses his desk. It's from the police archive, and shows scenes from the investigation of a grisly murder that happened at his house. That's unsettling under any circumstances, and just not a good thing to have running through one's head when ones five-year-old soon is hearing noises at night and one's wife is probably having an affair with a wealthy client.

Every once in a while I get the itch to try and write a screenplay, but the middle part scares me off. I'm not saying that clever set-ups or thrilling climaxes come easy, but they seem more likely to be the product of inspiration than what connects them, which seems more obviously like hard work for the filmmaker and can, if he or she is not careful, seem that way to the audience. Kavanagh sometimes seems to struggle with this with The Canal; it runs around in circles as David points cameras at prospective ghosts a lot or panics and sends his son and the nanny (Kelly Byrne) back and forth based on where the last thing to freak him out was. As in a lot of horror movies, elements can seem somewhat randomly thrown together rather than supporting a central idea.

Full review at EFC.

Early Fritz Lang (and Thea von Harbou): Four Around a Woman and The Moving Image

I forget whether these two movies were originally announced as part of the "Complete Fritz Lang" series that the Harvard Film Archive did over the summer or if the schedule at the time was "these are hard to get on film, so we'll pick them up when/if we can". In my case, that means I actually got to see them, since the summer series overlapped the annual Fantasia trip and just generally being busy. Amusing, since these are some of the harder movies in Lang's filmography to see.

How hard? There's basically one print apiece, per the introduction, and we're lucky to have those, since these movies were thought lost for decades until being discovered in Brazil thirty years ago. I idly wonder how many lucky finds Lang's available body of work has benefited from, as on top of this I recall at least two for Metropolis alone.

This meant that the prints were in German, and therefore the subtitles had to be projected separately, but the technology for that seems to have improved - other times I've seen it done, the picture would be a little washed out because the projector hooked up to a laptop doesn't project black nearly as well as a film or even DCP rig, but these movies didn't look like someone was shining a light at the screen. Things got a bit out of sync at times - I'm not quite sure why these spadeful out have to be manually advanced, but it seems to be the case - but it was fairly watchable.

Also impressive: I noticed at the start of The Moving Image that accompanist Jeff Rapsis was stalking two keyboards, playing treble notes on the piano with his left hand and bass on the organ with his right. Now, maybe my brother and others who are really good at playing instruments can correct a misconception from someone who couldn't play a tambourine, but that has to mess with your head, right? At the very least, it seems like it would take a level of concentration that you practice all your life to not need.

Jeff didn't make the usual closing comments he makes at the Somerville, but a short of alternate version of them struck me as I walked out: I am really lucky to live in a city where you can generally see silent movies in a theater a couple times a month on average. Not only did it give me a chance to discover that I like them quite a bit after originally going to them because I figured that I should learn about them as a Guy Who Likes Movies (And Has Opinions), but because, even though I like the things, I still have a hard time watching them at home - I feel like I'd just be under-stimulated. Boston can have is shortcomings as a movie town, but I suspect that this is an area where we do pretty well.

Vier um die Frau (Four Around a Woman

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2014 at the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Fritz Lang, 35mm with live accompaniment)

I've commented before that it seems a shame that Fritz Lang wound up doing fairly conventional crime films in Hollywood when he had made such ambitious fantasies in Germany during the silent era, but it's worth remembering that a great deal of his early work planted the seeds for what would later be called film noir. Four Around a Woman, one of his earliest to survive in near-complete form, is a fine example.

The woman is Florence Yquem (Carola Toelle), the beautiful wife of respected financier Harry Yquem (Ludwig Hartau), a jealous man who has a secret life dealing with counterfeiters and stolen jewelry. Jewels are fenced in a run-down bar's back room, and the place's proprietor Upton (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is feeling flush enough to give newly-returned sailor William Krafft (Anton Edthofer) a quick loan, especially since Upton knows Werner's twin bother Werner. The trouble is, if Upton knows Werner, he's probably into something dodgy himself. William also doesn't seem to realize quite how dangerous the city has become, and there's the little matter of why he left five years ago.

In its present form, the plot to Four Around a Woman can seem a bit murky - the film was lost for decades and the print discovered in the 1980s may still have some gaps. Certainly, those hypothetical gaps might serve to explain why characters sometimes act contrary to common sense or seem to have variable knowledge of each other. Given that Lang and co-writer (and future wife) Thea von Harbou tended to weave social commentary into their scripts, the film may also suffer a bit from being removed from its original context of post-World War I Germany.

Full review at EFC.

Das wandernde Bild (The Moving Image

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2014 at the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Fritz Lang, 35mm with live accompaniment)

It is unfair to review this movie on a certain level; it's incomplete, with roughly an hour remaining from a notably longer running time, and barring yet another remarkable discovery (the film was considered entirely lost until a Brazilian print was discovered in the 1980s), this abridged version is how we must know it. It's worth seeing, but you can't help it winds about what it was.

This version starts with Wil Brand (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) speaking to his lawyer; he was named the prime benefactor of cousin Georg Vanderheit's estate and worries about the man's common-law wife Irmgard (Mia May) trying to stake a claim - at least until he sees her on a train, apparently quite distraught and sincere. He follows, but the pursuit she is trying to evade is that of Georg's brother John (Hans Marr). She flees across a lake to a mountainous area, where she meets a mysterious man (Marr) with secrets of his own.

At least, that's one version of the story. With so much gone and the intertitles having been translated from German to Portuguese and back to German then subtitled in English for this screening (and the whole thing quite possibly altered during that first step), it's hard to know exactly what director Fritz Lang and writer Thea von Harbou were going for; I've seen the film's plot described in different ways. What comes through in this pair's first collaboration, I think, is a story of a man with the sort of unwavering principles that lead him to live an isolated ascetic life, a romantic ideal that nevertheless can also be very selfish and no counter against the actively malicious, as the woman who loves him discovers. It's a bit of a mess, but even this early on, Lang is a natural-enough storyteller that the audience can go with it.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 November - 20 November 2014

Hey, cool, two movies by directors I like playing in places you might not expect and some other good stuff.

• Because Isao Takahata isn't quite so well known as his Studio Ghibli partner Hayao Miyazaki, The Tale of Princess Kaguya is only opening at Apple Cinemas rather than one of the bigger boutique houses, and only twice a day, and probably only the English dub. Still, it's a pretty darn great movie, arguably even better than Miyazaki's The Wind Rises.
  
  Their iMovieCafe program also opens Kil Dil, a Bollywood action-comedy about two killers trained by the same man who meet a nice girl in Northern India. There's also Pilla Nuvvu Leni Jeevitham, a Telugu language movie I couldn't find anything about.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre seems to be the only place with Force Majeure, a pretty darn great Swedish movie about a family on a ski vacation that comes under great stress because of something seemingly small. I believe it's their Oscar submission, and I wouldn't be shocked if it made the cut.
  
  They've got a guest for the Friday midnight screening of Shock Waves, as director Ken Wiederhorn introduces and faces interrogation for his 1970s horror film about a mad scientist creating zombie stormtroopers for the Nazis (it also plays Saturday night, but that one's just the movie). The guests on Monday evening are the director and others from the Huntington Theatre Company's production of Awake and Sing!, there to introduce a 35mm print of Sweet Smell of Success and how discuss how it relates to their play. There's Open Screen on Tuesday, and an NT Live presentation of Skynight on Thursday.
• Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 opens at Regal Fenway, and even if you haven't seen the first - Chinese romantic comedies weren't getting that much play three years ago - it's still a new Johnnie To movie, with the sequel throwing two more characters into the love-triangle mix while still maintaining the across-the-street shenanigans of the first.
  
  Another noteworthy director this week is Jon Stewart; the Daily Show host makes his feature writing/directing debut with Rosewater, the story of Maziar Bahari (Gael Carcia Bernal), a Canadian journalist of Persian descent who was detained when trying to report on the 2009 Iranian elections. It's playing at Kendall Square, the Embassy, Boston Common, and Fenway.
  
  Once-noteworthy directors Peter & Bobby Farrelly return with Dumb and Dumber To, a twenty-years-later sequel to their first movie reteaming them with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, who once again play morons on a road trip. It's the weekend's biggest opener, playing at the Capitol, Apple Cambridge, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Potentially getting lost in the shuffle is Beyond the Lights, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as an up-and-coming singer and Nate Parker as a cop assigned to guard her who fall hard for each other. It's at Apple, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  Boston Common also has a single Friday night show of The Postal Service: Everything Will Change, which is a concert film rather than something about mail delivery; their $6 Sunday/Wednesday rep film is Edward Scissorhands.
• The Theory of Everything opens at Kendall Square and Boston Common; it's a love story featuring Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Jane Wilde, two opposites who attracted even before he had to face a terrible diagnosis and what everyone thought would be a short life. The other biography the Kendall gets this week, The Better Angels, has a one-week booking; it stars Braydon Denney as eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln in a close look at the early forces which shaped him. Local historians Gavin Kleespies and John Stauffer will be on hand for the 1:30pm show on Sunday.
  
  In addition to those two (and Rosewater), there are two special musical presentations: R.E.M. by MTV plays Tuesday night, putting together the story of a band by their appearances on various MTV networks over the past three decades. There's also a Wednesday encore of David Bowie is on Wednesday night.
• The Brattle will be running a Reel Music Film Festival series this week, kicking off with The 78 Project Movie on Friday, with filmmakers and musicians in person, and a live "Presto" recording on-stage. Other films include Urgh! A Music War (Friday & Saturday in 35mm), 20,000 Days on Earth (Saturday & Sunday), This Ain't No Mouse Music (Sunday), Stop Making Sense (Sunday & Monday), Let's Go to the Rat (Sunday with director Andrew Szava-Kovats on hand), Beautiful Noise (Tuesday), and Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (Tuesday).
  
  Heck, one of the Saturday screenings for the Boston Jewish Film Festival is also musical (the other isn't). The other gap in the schedule is filled by DocYard presentation The Notorious Mr. Bout, which attending filmmakers Maxim Pozdorovkin and Tony Gerber built in part from the arms smuggler's extensive home movies. There's also a Thursday-night screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, introduced by Harvard Professor of Archaeology Dr. Rowan Flad, who will certainly tell us how its careful attention to proper archaeological practices and historical accuracy makes it one of the best movies of all time.
• The Boston Jewish Film Festival, as mentioned, picks back up Saturday with Screenings at the Brattle (Saturday), Belmont Studio (Saturday), ICA (Sunday), West Newton (Sunday), AMC Framingham (Monday), AMC Liberty Tree Mall (Monday), and Arlington Captiol (Monday).
• The Somerville Theatre has two special 35mm presentations on the big screen this weekend. Saturday's is a program of six Three Stooges shorts for $7 at 2pm, and on Sunday they wrap 2014's "Silents, Please!" series with Harry Langdon in Frank Capra's The Strong Man, along with classic Buster Keaton shorts "Cops" and "One Week" and Jeff Rapsis on the organ. Apparently this year's selection of deep cuts has been successful enough that they're going to continue selecting less-famous silents next year. I think I've shown great restraint in not pestering them about the recently-discovered 1916 Sherlock Holmes on a daily basis.
• The Harvard Film Archive welcomes Dame Angela Lansbury to Cambridge to intorudce John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down on Friday, and given that she'll be discussing a seventy-year career, that's one not to miss if you're a member (I imagine it will sell out for the rest of us). Much of the rest of the weekend is the second half of their Sergei Lonznitsa retrospective with Into the Fog (Saturday), "Blockade" & "Reflections" (Sunday), and a selection of short films (Monday). Korean artist and Cambridge resident Soon-mi Yoo will present her first feature Songs from the North on Sunday evening, and the VES will have a free screening of Wings on Wednesday with Rapsis accompanying this as well.
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues its screenings of Fifi Howls from Happiness (Friday) and National Gallery (Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday). They also have the tail end of the Turkish Festival's Documentary and Short Film Competition on Friday and Saturday.
• The Polish Film Festival continues at ArtsEmerson's Paramount Theater continues, with documentary The Possessed Years Later (Andrzej Wajda recalling one of his most famous theatrical productions) playing Friday and Sunday and Wojciech Has's The Hourglass Sanatorium playing Sunday. The Bright Lights screening is Mood Indigo on Thursday.
• The UMass Boston Film Series has what looks like one of their more intriguing films/guests this week, as director Darius Clark Monroe brings his documentary Evolution of a Criminal to the student center. It tells how a sixteen-year-old kid - Monroe himself - comes to decide that robbing a bank is his best option, and also features him returning to his old neighborhood several years later.
• The Regent Theatre has a second screening of Inside Metal: The Pioneers of Los Angeles Hard Rock and Metal on Friday, although it's possible something else might slip in through the cracks like The Canal did the past couple weeks.

My plans? Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2, The Theory of Everything, The Strong Man, and a trip to New York because I've got vacation time to use. Princess Kaguya and Force Majeure are highly recommended.

This That Week In Tickets: 20 October 2014 - 26 October 2014

The plan during October: Try to see movies that start early and run short so that you can also catch a full night of playoff baseball.

... And sometimes have work run just late enough that you can't get to the ones you planned to see at all. That's what happened early in the week, with an issue arising at quarter of five scuttling the evening's plans, pushing a couple things forward a day. That meant #Stuck got seen on Tuesday (after the initial special screening I had intended to see a week and a half earlier was canceled), and The Blue Room was Wednesday's flick. They actually pair fairly well, both hitting the fractured timeline idea and relying heavily on the characters' personal perspectives, although the French mystery thriller was much better than the American romantic comedy.

The fixed point on the schedule was Thursday's Revenge of the Green Dragons at the Brattle. It was the opening film of the Boston Asian American Film Festival and had a whole ton of guests. Perhaps more than a ton, as they were in good shape but numerous. Hong Kong director Andrew Lau and his American co-director Andrew Loo were front and center, and it was kind of amusing to see them refer to each other as "Lau" and "Loo" like a Chinese comedy team.

It was back to the Brattle the next night for the first film in their William Castle series, The Whistler, which wound up being the only one I'd see because, aside from the World Series, I sort of wrestle with questions like "is the experience of seeing The Tingler in a theater rigged for Percepto worth seeing The Tingler?" I just don't love B-movies enough sometimes.

Saturday, I went for a double feature because I didn't foresee being too lazy to go far from the house on Sunday. John Wick, happily, did a pretty good job of living up to the buzz that came out of Fantastic Fest, which I had kind of worried was inflated by Keanu Reeves being a thoroughly charming guy. After that, I headed down the Green Line (well, actually, it was a nice enough day to walk, but my conception of Boston geography is T-based) to Fenway to check out Happy New Year, this Diwali's big caper movie. It's okay, but Deepika Padukone takes much too long to show up.

The Whistler

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (William Castle, 35mm)

In 1944, not only was CBS a radio network, but the "C" in "Columbia Broadcasting System" actually indicated an actual connection to the film studio and record label. It was also long enough ago that William Castle had not yet become an independent, iconoclastic film producer and director, but was still working his way up, cranking out B-movies for Columbia Pictures. In this case, it was an adaptation of a popular radio mystery program, disposable by its nature but still fairly enjoyable.

It's actually got a neat little hook: Earl C. Conrad (Richard Dix), whom the whole community has looked at accusingly since his wife disappeared under suspicious circumstances, has taken out a life insurance policy and made sure that his business would be in good hands should he pass - and then gone and hired an assassin to kill him through a cutout so that the plan cannot be traced back to him. Of course, as soon as he's done that, he's given a reason to live, and it becomes impossible to get back in contact with the middleman (Don Costello).

The Whistler himself is a narrator who lurks in the shadows, face unseen, although one whistle from him does prevent things from ending too soon. It's the sort of conceit that anthology shows on the radio (and early television, which also had a Whistler series) would use to craft an identity that carries from one week to the next. It's a bit out of place here, especially with the film playing to an audience of Castle's fans now as opposed to folks who listened to the radio show seventy years ago, but it's not intrusive, even if it is a bit odd.

Full review at EFC

John Wick

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2014 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

I prioritized John Wick low when making my choices at Fantastic Fest, and not just on the basis of "it will play regular theaters later"; it just didn't have much buzz around it, and sort of looked like something that could wind up going straight to video (on demand), much like the last movie Reeves brought to the festival. Instead, it not only hits theaters, but winds up playing the Imax screens as well. Go figure.

And it's kind of surprising, because to a certain extent I cynically expect action this good to get passed over in favor of something bigger in scale but not so well crafted in the details. And the details of this are fun, both in writer Derek Kolstad's world-building and the way directors David Leitch & Chad Stahelski shoot action with exceptional clairty. There's a sequence that has Reeves's title character slicing his way through a nightclub like a hot knife through butter, not quite a single shot but still constant, smooth motion, with Wick moving from one target to another without stopping, kind of like the gun katas in Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium. Leitch & Stahelski come from a stuntwork background, and they are dedicated to showing off that part of the movie in a way that few directors outside of Hong Kong have a vested interest in doing.

Plus, Keanu Reeves. The guy knows his strengths and weaknesses as well as any actor out there, and he's not only quite able to execute physically, but he's got a nice gravitas as Wick, mourning with a cold fury that explodes from his whole body. There's a nifty ensemble around him, all fitting into the heightened underworld that Kolstad came up with. What's particularly nifty (aside from the awesome dog whose brief time with Wick kicks everything off) is how Wick can be built up as larger than life without making him a overblown caricature of badassness.

There's not necessarily anywhere to go with Wick at the end of the movie, but I want more anyway. Kolstand came up with a neat environment, Leitch & Stahelski brought it to exciting life, and Reeves gets a part that fits him like a glove. It seldom comes together this well.

The Lookalike

Another month, another attempt to support indie/world tweeners (too offbeat for the multiplexes, too lightweight for the arthouses) playing the Boston area with money. Sometimes, unfortunately, that means you see a stinker, and you do it with just one other person in the room - and to be totally honest, I kind of suspect he wasn't really supposed to be there from the way an usher honed in on him during the movie.

One thing I noticed while looking at the IMDB listing for it - director Richard Gray and writer Michele Davis-Gray are apparently in pre-production on a remake of Audition to shoot and be released next year. Good luck with that, guys. I mean that sincerely - if that's going to happen, I'd rather it be good, and that applies to any movie - and I can almost see how the problems I had with The Lookalike might seem like assets for this one: Starting odd and offbeat and then going very dark indeed was what Takashi Miike did fifteen years ago and it made his name, but he didn't just go dark but nuts, and there was an idea at the center of Miike's film, and I'm not sure that's the case with The Lookalike. There are connected characters, and various bits that may be shocking, but no central thrust to make up for the letdown when the audience realizes that this isn't really going to be fun after a certain point.

SPOILERS!

There's also a sort of secondary ugliness here in how by and large women and to a lesser extent minorities are killed in a very casual, off-hand way, while the white males fight back and need to be taken down. I don't think the Grays really mean anything by that, but it's the sort of thing that seems like it would be part of a discouraging pattern when you look at a lot of this sort of movie.

!SRELIOPS

The Lookalike

* * (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2014 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #9 (first-run, DCP)

To say that The Lookalike starts out kind of charming overlooks what happens in the first few minutes to set things in motion, but it still does well enough in introducing its cast of characters that it looks like the rare crime movie that makes quirky work despite being built a core of bad people doing bad things. That's hard to sustain for the full length of a movie, though, and this one starts losing steam early enough to be a real drag by the end.

There's a girl out there, Sadie, that retiring crime boss William Spinks (John Savage) will pay half a million dollars to sleep with, and having found her, Bobby (John Corbett) and Frank (Steven Bauer) probably have the inside track to taking over his business. Except, well, they screwed up and she's no longer available. Meanwhile, one of Bobby's best dealers, former college hoops star Joe Mulligan (Jerry O'Connell) is looking to quit, having paid his father's gambling debts to Vincent (Luis Guzman), and although on the one hand he could use a little money to shoot that pilot for a cooking show, on the other he's just met a really nice girl, Mila (Scottie Thompson). Back at Joe's apartment, his brother Holt (Justin Long) has a run-in with Lacey (Gillian Jacobs), one of Joe's customers, and they connect. Of course, they're both hiding something as well.

Writer Michele Davis-Gray shovels a fair amount of stuff into the script, sometimes to seeming excess - not only has Mila recently lost her hearing, but she's got a prosthetic leg, for example; she also just happens to cross paths with Sadie early on in a way that brings another player into the story. Oh, and Lacey is apparently a hairdo away from being a dead ringer for Sadie, which is kind of convenient. Still, in the early going, she and director Richard Gray (and the cast) make it work. Things may be in bad taste, but they'll come with a jolt, or the odd incongruities will amuse. Plus, the fact that Joe is far from the only character involved who really doesn't want to be in the business of hurting people may not push grimness away entirely, but the fact the characters have better natures does make things more fun and a bit unpredictable.

Full review at EFC.

ROAR: Tigers of the Sundarbans

Funny-ish coincidence: The RiffTrax Live encore screening of Anaconda was happening just a few screens down, which popped into my head both because this is a general "go into the jungle and get messed up by nasty animals" film and because there are snakes later on. Not that it was between those two, since I tend to think of those sort of things as kind of parasitic. No, I was thinking Nightcrawler, but figured that would stick around and I was kind of in the mood for something a bit lighter.

Not many others were; I was just the only one in there when I arrived just in time for the movie to start, although a few others arrived soon after. The ad package was winding down, though, and I found myself amused by that. It's about a twenty minute presentation, so it must have started without a ticket having been sold, and the film itself probably would have too, because everything is on a timer now. Seems like kind of a waste of electricity, at the very least, especially since I remember how when I worked in a theater, the show was just off if we didn't get a ticket sale by showtime, although sometimes (if the time between screenings was tight), we might have started the trailer reel but shut it down if nobody came before that was over.

(I half expect this to be used as a justification for theater-hopping sometime - "the film was playing anyway, and I saw no need for it to go to waste!")

That this played for a week (albeit sharing the screen with a held-over Happy New Year - kind of points out what a weird situation movie distribution could be, though. I'll bet I could find a half-dozen movies of similar types and better quality among those that played Fantasia and/or Fantastic Fest which won't play much outside of video on demand, but this one got booked because Regal plays a Bollywood movie or two when they've got room for it, even though the potential audience might be smaller.

ROAR: Tigers of the Sundarbans

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 November 2014 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

I ask this question half in jest, and half out of curiosity: Can you make the equivalent of an R-rated movie in India? If one can, then I'm not sure why Roar: Tigers of the Sundarbans is holding back; this movie wants to be a bloody bit of man-versus-nature exploitation, but something keeps holding it back. I'm not sure what does short of an actual or effective prohibition on excessive blood and guts, because the pulpiest, most enjoyable moments indicate that it's not good taste.

Heck, when wildlife photographer Uday Singh (Pulkit) finds a white tiger cub tied up in the Subdarbans preserve and doesn't just free it but brings it back to the nearest, his guide Madhu (Pranay Dixit) says, in so many words, that this will be disastrous. And it is, as the cub's mother comes seeking her child. That leaves Uday's brother Pandit (Abhinav Shukla) looking for revenge, bringing five of his army buddies in to help hunt the tigress down, with Madhu and local guide Jhumpa (Himarsha) helping them navigate the salt-water canals and dangerous animals of the Sundarbans region.

That's two boats' worth of cast to get whittled down, and considering the circumstances, director Kamal Sadanah and his co-writers seem to take their sweet time getting around to it. What circumstances are those? Well, first, there is that few of the people in the cast are as memorable as Cheena (Virendra Singh Ghuman), a hulking beast of a man who stretches his camo to the breaking point, Crazy Jenny (Nora Fatehi), aka "CJ", who gets the best action scene despite a costume that really doesn't seem combat-ready, or Jhumpa, who somehow makes her bare midriff look more practical than CJ's. She also reminds us of the other thing that might make the audience impatient: Despite understanding Pandit's anger, who among us is really going to root for these guys to kill a mama tigress, not to mention a beautiful one-in-a-thousand variation of a species that is already endangered? I suspect most of us will be rooting for the big cat on a certain level.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 November - 13 November 2014

Not a whole lot opening this weekend, but the movies which are opening are kind of big deals.

• The big one is Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's grand-scale science fiction story starring Matthew McConnaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts searching for a new human home world. Michael Caine plays the head of the project, and Jessica Chastain the daughter who grew up while McConnaughey's character was aging slowly because of time-dilation. Nolan filmed an hour of the nearly three-hour epic using full-sized IMAX cameras, and urges people to see it on film. It's playing on 35mm film at the Somerville Theatre and Boston Common; digital Imax at Jordan's, Boston Common, and Assembly Row; DCP at Apple, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. for Bostonians who want to see it in real IMAX film, the closest place is in Providence (I wouldn't be surprised if the Aquarium eventually, but I wouldn't count on it); the nearest 70mm bookings (supposedly the best) are in New York City).
  
  The other new release is Big Hero 6, Disney's first 3D animated adaptation of a Marvel comic book, although it is not in the same continuity as the other Marvel movies. The comics were fun, although the adaptation looks to take some liberties (such as setting it in "San Fransokyo"). It's playing at the Capitol, Apple, West Newton (2D only), Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  In this week's oddly-small booking, Fenway will be screening On Any Given Sunday: The Next Chapter at 10:10pm nightly; it's a sequel/update to a 1971 feature on motorcycle racing. Boston Common has the first Tim Burton Batman as the $6 show on Sunday & Wednesday.
• Kendall Square has the latest by Lynn Shelton, Laggies, which stars Keira Knightley as a woman who freaks out when her boyfriend proposes, and winds up hiding out with a new 16-year-old friend and her father. It's also at Boston Common.
  
  The one-week booking is Diplomacy, in which the Swedish Consul General in Paris during World War II attempts to convince the commander of the German forces not to execute Hitler's plan to leave the City of Light in rubble should it fall to the Allies. It's based upon a stage play, so I suspect it will be nice and tense. There's also a Tuesday night "Globe on Screen" show of MacBeth.
• Apple Cinemas has a surprisingly busy week, with two indies not playing elsewhere. The Lookalike is a thriller that looks quite frankly bonkers, with a drug lord's men scrambling to find a double for the woman their boss is obsessed with. They're also screening Awake: The Life of Yogananda, a documentary on the man who introduced yoga and meditation to the western world.
  
  The iMovieCafe guys there have The Shaukeens, a Hindi-language comedy about three friends in their sixties who strive to live their lives to the fullest. That's subtitled; you'll need to speak Telugu to understand Brother Of Bommali (an action/adventure) and Malayalam for romantic comedy Vellimoonga.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens IFFBoston alum The Overnighters in their smaller rooms, although it gets a show on the bigger screen Friday night, when director Jesse Moss will be Skyping in for a remote Q&A. It's a documentary about how the oil boom in North Dakota has led to a huge shortfall in lodging.
  
  The weekend's midnight film is a 35mm print of Highlander, which used to be a pretty big-deal cult movie a couple decades ago, but seems to have become a less essential part of the canon lately. There's also a kid's show of the original Hayley Mills-starring The Parent Trap on Saturday morning, a Talk Cinema presentation of Two Days, One Night on Sunday morning, and a Big Screen Classics presentation of Hannah and Her Sisters dedicated to the late Boston Globe film critic Jay Carr on Monday.
• The Brattle has a hodgepodge of a schedule this weekend, starting off with a visit from Kier-La Janisse to launch her new book Kid Power!. She'll be introducing The Bad News Bears on Friday night, while Saturday afternoon has a double feature of the original Escape to Witch Mountain and Return to Witch Mountain. Sunday, the guest is Casey Affleck, who will be introducing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. On Wednesday, a related book signing will be followed by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; all of those will be on 35mm.
  
  IFFBoston has yet to announce their Tuesday "Fall Focus" preview, but another festival - The International Pancake Film Festival will be returning on Thursday at 8:30pm. $7 gets you a program of animation & puppets, as well as a plate of hot, buttery pancakes.
• The Boston Jewish Film Festival takes Friday evening off, because Jewish Film Festival, but picks back up at various theaters afterward - the MFA (Saturday/Sunday), the Coolidge (Saturday/Sunday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday), the Brattle (Saturday), West Newton (Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Thursday), Showcase Patriot Place (Monday), the Arlington Captiol (Tuesday/Wednesday), the Somerville (Tuesday), Framingham (Wednesday), the Warwick in Marblehead (Wednesday), and The ICA (Thursday).
  
  The Museum of Fine Arts has a few more screenings of Listen Up Philip (Friday/Wednesday) and Fifi Howls from Happiness (Thursday), adding National Gallery to the mix on Wednesday & Thursday; it's a three-hour documentary by Frederick Wiseman that takes a look of the titular London institution. They also have selections from the Turkish Festival's Documentary and Short Film Competition on Friday and Saturday.
• The Harvard Film Archive starts a new set of programs this weekend, including one for Malian filmmaker Cheick Oumar Sissoko, the latest Geneviève McMillan/Reba Stewart Fellow, with screenings on Friday, Sunday (no English subtitles on that one), and Monday. On Saturday and Sunday, Ukranian director Sergei Lonznitsa will visit to present Maidan (Saturday) and My Joy. There's also a free VES screening of The Turin Horse on Wednesday.
• ArtsEmerson continues their Polish Film Festival, with Wajda's The Promised Land (Friday), The Wedding (Saturday), and Man of Iron (Sunday); along with Krzystztof Zanussi's The Illumination and The Constant Factor (both Saturday).
  
  The Bright Lights free screenings this week are Finding Vivian Maier (with faculty member Camilo Ramirez leading discussion) on Tuesday and the annual Silversonic music video showcase on Thursday.
• The Regent Theatre has one film presentation this week, Inside Metal: The Pioneers of Los Angeles Hard Rock and Metal. Apparently, the documentary has lots of rarely-seen interviews and concert footage.

My plans? Interstellar, Big Hero 6, Nightcrawler, Whiplash, St. Vincent, Laggies, The Lookalike.

Bitter Honey

I suspect that the way Bitter Honey is rolling out across the country is similar to the way films used to release: Book it in a theater, have someone make an appearance if possible, rely on the venue to advertise it locally. On top of that, I'm not sure I can remember another time when I've seen a director visit and do a Q&A for the very last screening; usually, whether it's a festival or a local booking, they'll come to the first. That way, you start off with an event which hopefully generates some word of mouth for the rest of the run. I guess this is just when director Robert Lemelson could make the trip to Boston and New York easiest.

That the visit seemed almost entirely unpublicized was strange, too - I saw that the film was playing for a week in the usual places, and probably would have seen it earlier in the run but for some bad timing, and then, on Wednesday, seeing a Facebook ad that mentioned Lemelson's visit on Thursday. Nothing on Apple Cinemas' website. Crazy, that; it's often like they're using a standard movie theater site template that includes a news feed that often has little if anything to do with what's actually going to play there (many is the time I've gotten excited for a coming attraction only to have it not show). I want to like them a bit more; they're on my way home, have been upgrading their facilities, and seem to make a genuine effort to play movies that would otherwise slip through the cracks, but they don't make it easy sometimes!



Lemelson did an interesting Q&A, rather different than many I've seen. The format was the same, but Lemelson seems to be a different sort of director, an anthropologist first and a filmmaker second. That was the jargon he would toss off, and there wasn't any sort of moment when someone in the audience with an interest in the subject matter asked about doing more along those lines only to be disappointed that the director who had just spent years on one subject planned to move on to something else. Lemelson is interested in the culture of this part of the world, and that was very clear.

One interesting bit that didn't make it into the film might have put things in a bit more context: Polygamy is legal in Bali because it is part of Indonesia, but it exists in a very different cultural place there than it does in the rest of the country. Most of Indonesia is Muslim, whereas Bali is mostly Hindu, and while both cultures apparently have the option for multiple wives, it seems less strictly regulated in Bali than it would be for the Muslim majority. He described it as a source of friction, which I don't doubt.

It didn't make it into the movie, though, in part because the future of this movie is as an educational tool; he spoke about pieces of it already being used in local community centers and the like. It will probably do quite well in that role, even if it's not quite something you'd bring people to the cinema to see.

Bitter Honey

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2014 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #7 (first-run, DCP)

Bitter Honey opens with a bit of informative text, including the fact that it was filmed over a seven year period. It's an odd bit of information to include, because while director Robert Lemelson does a fair job of expanding upon the statistics about polygamy in Bali and how it affects the people involved, it is not nearly as successful at the storytelling aspect which would make the film's time axis genuinely important. Instead, Lemelson concentrates on being informative and lets the audience handle empathy and anger.

As those opening words inform us, polygamy is legal in Indonesia, and is particularly common in Bali, an island with a mostly Hindu population. Ten percent of all officially registered marriages there include multiple wives, and unregistered arrangements likely boost that number even higher. Lemelson presents us with three: Sadra married Purniasiah when they were teenagers and added a "honey" (Balinese slang for a second wife) later; Darma has five wives and seems a prosperous man about town; and elderly royal descendant Tuaji has had ten wives, with five still living and two sisters.

The film does not wind up spending much time with the Tuaji family past the initial introduction, which may in some ways be for the best; described at one point as a "vicious" member of the Nationalist Party back in the day, his backstory is the sort that could derail Bitter Honey into being a different movie (that movie is The Act of Killing and you should absolutely see it). That still leaves Lemelson with plenty of voices to contribute, and though Sadra's and Darma's families' stories are similar in many ways, they do have different shapes: Sadra seems to have basically left Purniasiah to fend for herself while taking a younger wife and Darma (who says he wants a "lively household") has a home that is divided into sectors, with each wife having her own kitchen and rooms for her children.

Full review at EFC.

This That Week In Tickets: 13 October 2014 - 19 October 2014

Some people claim Columbus Day is a real holiday, but the MBTA didn't even mess with my commute on Canadian Thanksgiving.

Actually, the somewhat lower number of people heading to their reflective offices did make the system somewhat quicker, showing things enough that I won't be recording Monday's trip to Coolidge Corner to see One Chance in my ongoing "66 bus or C Line - which is the best route from Alewife?" experiment. It wound up an enjoyable little movie, although a tiny booking for one which was pretty heavily trailered earlier in the year.

Tuesday's selection, Art and Craft, was another true story, this one told as a documentary, although I kind of wondered what kind of a fictionalized feature you could get out of it. It's a good movie, but also one that clearly focused on the part of the story that the filmmakers had the most access to.

I got some silent movies mixed up in my head on Wednesday, thinking that the King Vidor film playing at the Harvard Film Archive as part of the VES curriculum (to which the general audience is invited) was the same one I missed at the Somerville a week and a half earlier, giving me a second chance. Not quite; it was The Big Parade rather than The Crowd, which is about an hour longer in addition to having very different subject matter. Kind of a long sit, to be honest.

Speaking of long sits, The Golden Era on Friday was just about three hours long, but worth it. I'm kind of enjoying this new situation where Chinese movies play mainstream theaters and people show up, to the point where it's actually crowded. Didn't even feel the need to do violence to the guy who kept checking his phone two seats away. Much. I was back in the same place early the next morning for The Book of Life, a fairly charming animated feature that pulls from Mexican mythology.

The weekend wrapped up with a fairly enjoyable double feature at the Somerville - Gone Girl on the big screen followed by Fury on the next-biggest. That's a pretty good afternoon there, even including a bit of the projectionist mocking David Fincher's love of digital. They are really looking forward to getting actual 35mm for Interstellar over there.

The Big Parade

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2014 in the Harvard Film Archive (VES, 35mm with live accompaniment)

King Vidor was a filmmaker who strove to make serious films within a studio system that wanted crowd-pleasers, likely even harder in the silent era with the Academy Awards still in the future and film criticism still in its infancy. The Big Parade exemplifies that in a lot of ways, wrapping an earnest war movie up in something that wants to make the audience smile.

It opens in 1918, just as the United States is about to enter the Great War. We're quickly introduced to three young men in and around New York City - "Slim" Johnson (Karl Dane), a construction worker building skyscrapers; "Bull" O'Hara (Tom O'Brien), who tends bar in an establishment with a suspicious clientele; and James Apperson (John Gilbert), the layabout son of a mill owner. All three enlist, with James's fiancee Justyn (Claire Adams) expecting he'll look so smart in an officer's uniform, but he winds up a private (Bull makes sergeant). The three become fast friends as they wait for action in Champillon, even if all three do find their eyes drawn to farmer's daughter Melisande (Renée Adorée).

Given how the opening makes no small effort to give this trio very different backgrounds, it's interesting how quickly the filmmakers apparently decide that it isn't important. The idea, perhaps, might be that war flattens social classes, but if that's the case, it's not something the filmmakers go into specifically. This doesn't make the cast of characters completely interchangeable - Bull is going to tend toward the wiseacre and Slim is quite the well-meaning lunkhead, though James becomes much more of an a average Joe than an upper-class twit fairly quickly - but it's odd to see something that appeared to be set up with intent set aside without even an "all men are brothers on the front line". The cast works fairly well together - John Gilbert slides into the leading man's space without making James too square-jawed or noble, while Karl Dane contributes a very good yokel sidekick - so it mostly works out all right.

The somewhat odd thing is that for much of the movie, what they're doing well is comedy. The characters arrive in rural France and face wacky language barriers, uncomfortable but not truly miserable sleeping accommodations, mix-ups with the mail, and a shared interest in Melisande that never exactly scream that war is hell. This material is light enough and occupies a large enough portion of a long movie (as projected at this screening, The Big Parade was about two and a half hours long) that a contemporary viewer may wonder if they are in the right place. Even in 1925, audiences may still have been thrown by how quickly the flirtation of James and Melisande becomes heart-clutching melodrama when he is sent to the front.

(Or not; many in the audience were likely young veterans who had been through something like that.)

That sequence may seem a little drawn-out or overwrought, but there's no question that, from that point on, this is a pretty serious war movie, and a good one. Vidor and company pull out to show the massive march of the title, and suddenly the the film not only has gravity but scale, and when it soon returns its focus to the main trio, the audience's familiarity with them does make sequences that are already fairly intense even more so. It's not exactly the trench warfare that has come to represent World War I in the years since but it's still tense and gets across just how terrifying and horrific the new method of warfare is.

There's even time given to the postwar experience, although the urge to make the something more easily digestible results in an epilogue that seems overlong and tacked-on. To be fair, this is an early film, so the elements that seem drawn out and out of balance here would be refined and pared-down to this very day (I would see some of the elements of this movie in Fury a few days later). So, while The Big Parade may be imperfect and frustrating to a modern audience, it's also foundational.

(Previously at EFC)

Gone Girl

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

Gone Girl is probably David Fincher's best movie since Fight Club, and I suspect that part of the reason for that is from an interview he gave while promoting that movie, where he said that initially, he felt like the only one who realized that Fight Club was a comedy. Gone Girl isn't a comedy, but it does have a vein of dark humor that most of his best movies feature, and while making the audience laugh is far from this movie's primary goal, it actually does kind of get funnier as it goes along, from nervous-making bits of tension to satirical jabs to some outright jokes when we see the missing-presumed-dead Amy Dunne's side of the story rather than that of her husband and presumed killer Nick. The trick is that Fincher knows exactly how far to push things to not undercut the noirish story, keeping things in the realm of the thriller and the guilty laugh.

The other thing that works really well is the cast; there's been a lot of talk about how Ben Affleck works really well here because the public perception of him is in line with Nick - nothing truly objectionable about the guy but something about him just rubs people the wrong way and makes them think the absolute worst. Still, I think that that's less unique than a great example of how nobody in the entire cast of characters, save perhaps Nick's twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) is particularly warm, but everyone in the cast finds ways around that to get across what the character is feeling. Affleck is particularly great as the guy who is acknowledged as not always coming off right, but all around him are very good performances as people react to a disappearance/murder with less than the outright hysteria - David Clennon & Lisa Barnes as Amy's parents, Neil Patrick Harris as an old boyfriend, and Tyler Perry as the lawyer hired to defend him in court and the media. This sort of thriller is just generally more fun when characters can jump in any direction, as opposed to being revealed as playing against type.

SPOILERS!

Of course, I think that what makes Gone Girl great is that rather than teasing the audience for the entire two and a half hours, it switches things up at around the halfway mark, putting the focus on Rosamund Pike's Amy, how she engineered the whole thing, and how she reacts to watching her plan in action. It's the sort of thing that could derail the movie, but Rosamund Pike gets what is probably the best role she's ever had. I like her, but she's often in rather bland roles because she's pretty in a very smooth, unblemished way, and I kind of love the way the movie plays on that before revealing that this persona, even with a bitter and sarcastic edge to it, is a crazy person pretending to be normal, and, surprise, Ms. Pike winds up playing this sort of sociopath really well. There's this fantastic glee to her as she watches her husband twist from afar or relays how much she really despises the people around her that lets the audience join in a bit.

The way the end twists is at times a little out there, making the movie a metaphor for how an insane person like Amy thinks marriage works. But while the filmmakers put it right out there, the fact that Amy is nuts keeps it from being an overbearing equivalence; it works as a dark, ironic end to a thriller that keeps the audience in a scary place all the way out the door, which is pretty great.

!SRELIOPS