The Fantasia Daily 2015.05 (18 July 2015): Teana: 10000 Years Later, Black & White: The Dawn of Justice, The Shamer's Daughter, Extinction, and Deathgasm

Progress: After feeling kind of sluggish to start this morning after Friday's long day and wearing down during Deathgasm, I skipped the midnight. Know your limits.



First guest of the day was The Shamer's Daughter director Kenneth Kainz, pictured here on the right (festival programmer Rupert Bottenberg is on the left). He made a nifty little young adult fantasy picture, although it was an odd Q&A in that it kind of wound up sounding like work-for hire rather than a project he was driving. Like, if there were to be sequels, the studio might very well hire someone else based on availability.

Which isn't to say he wasn't engaged and enthusiastic; he was just very much about making the film and working with people rather than talking about plans.



The screening for Extinction was a bit different; I think they originally planned to have director Miguel Ángel Vivas but wound up with co-star Quinn McColgan, who is something like thirteen, as the film's sole representative. So, not your typical Fantasia Q&A session, although kind of fun; she seems to be one of the child actresses who has it together and can talk about making a movie without sounding like someone being pushed around or a weird miniature adult.

(I hope like heck she's going to a bunch of movies at the festival and having fun, even more than with most cast/crew.)

There were also guests for Deathgasm - author Kier-La Janisse with Satanic Panic and "heavy metal rock god" Thor, whose own documentary would be screening Sunday night - but none for the movie specifically. I kind of ran down during the film, so I didn't stick around for German Angst.

Today's plan: At Hall for The Arti, Possessed, and The Case of Hana & Alice, then maybe a leisurely dinner/writing session since i've seen both We Are Still Here and (T)error (both recommended; I just don't want to steal a seat from someone who hasn't seen them), and wrapping it up with Observance in de Seve.


Yi wan nian yi hou (Teana: 10000 Years Later)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP w/ XPand 3D)

Director Yi Li and his crew worked for seven years on Teana: 10000 Years Later, and its looking kind of rough in spots goes to show how crazy the resources Hollywood has at its disposal are and how developed its tools are. The character animation and motion is a very clear step down from American digitally-animated features, and the story seems all over the place, although that might be less familiarity with Chinese legends on my part and a disappointing dub.

It is, however, 3D as all get-out; if Yi Li's goal was to create a 3D spectacle that would drop jaws in Chinese theaters, especially compared to American productions that are emphasizing the third dimension less, he's certainly succeeded on that count. Teana both leaps off the screen and sinks deep within it, and fills its cube with eye-catching sights from monsters and animal men to strange lands. Even when it's not making a lot of sense, it can still impress on a sheer "just look at this thing!" level.

It is kind of all over the place, though, especially in tone. It's got a mentor character in Arion who spends a lot of time explaining things to granddaughter (and eventual Chosen One) Soma and the audience through her, but is much more violent than you'd expect for a kid's movie - the action is nicely co-ordinated but bloody, and then it will spend a little while going through a landscape of fruits and vegetables. It's also more than a bit weird that the villain's plan - aside from declaring himself a god, as one does - involves restoring a technological world and railing against how mankind has been kept in a primitive state for millennia. It's always weird when someone uses this much computing power to teach audiences that they're better off without all that high-tech stuff.

Full review on EFC.

Pi Zi Ying Xiong 2 (Black & White: The Dawn of Justice)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, DCP)

It feels like it's been a while since I've seen an action movie as dedicated to being all-out nuts as Black & White: Dawn of Justice, a sequel that, from what I gather, goes all-out in topping its predecessor by staging one big action scene on top of another, making the stakes as high as possible, and adding a couple extra dashes of personal melodrama into the final act just to make absolutely damn sure that the audience is invested.

It's bonkers, but it's a lot of fun. The cast is a nice group, with Mark Chao and Kenny Lin playing cops from different districts of Harbor City that come off as entertainingly competitive and the villain being a sort of classic of the type with colorful henchpeople. The action is over the top, but well-executed - it's actually kind of rare to see both big chaotic set-pieces and quality hand-to-hand done this well in the same movie. The filmmakers have a sort of gleeful disinterest in making an action extravaganza where the mayhem is contained so as not to affect civilians.

Funny thing - I have not seen the first one, but I got strangely worried about this sequel nullifying what its predecessor did toward the end, which is either a sign that the folks making the movie are doing well or I'm a wee bit too concerned with structure. I'm glad I made the choice to see this one on the big screen, though - it's meant to be larger than life and delivers.

Full review on EFC.

Skammerens Datter (The Shamer's Daughter)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The concept behind the "Shamer Chronicles" book series is an interesting one, positing a woman and her daughter with the ability to look into a person's soul and pull out what they are ashamed of. What kinds of problems can you solve with weaponized guilt? How does that play in a situation where people can do horrible things without feeling shame?

I don't know that The Shamer's Daughter really manages to handle that around its climax, especially in a medieval setting where the Shamers can be easily ignored or executed as traitors - it backs itself into a pretty bad corner. It's a nifty young-adult fantasy lark around that, though, with dragons in the dungeon, heroines who are quite easy to root for even when setting their outcast status aside, and the chance for both swordfights and a bit of mad science.

Swords & sorcery isn't really my genre, and I can mostly take and leave young-adult material. This is executed pretty well with a nice cast, though, so I can at least recommend it for that.

Full review on EFC.

Extinction

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Extinction starts off problematically, with a prologue that involves three people doing what seems like the same dumb thing in a row, leading to nearly everybody getting killed by zombies. It's the sort of thing that has the audience bracing for a tidal wave of stupidity, especially when the bulk of the movie winds up being two people living in their old houses but not talking until nine years later.

Surprisingly, though, the center of the movie works pretty well. Jeffrey Donovan plays a man trying to raise a daughter after the zombie apocalypse (which seems to have triggered a mini-ice age for good measure). Monsters haven't been seen for a while, but he's still naturally worried about keeping Lu (Quinn McColgan) safe, including from the neighbor (Matthew Fox) he considers deeply untrustworthy. There's a nifty sort of tension in this center even though not a lot is really happening; the audience gets to mull over the isolation of the situation and the way others react: Jack seems to have purpose in bringing up Lu while Patrick has unraveled, and Lu is a kid despite her situation. There's a bitter note to her seeming healthy development as the audience wonders about it being pointless, but its not overpowering.

Then snow-adapted zombies appear and all hell breaks loose, and the last act becomes some pretty great horror action. Blind creatures are always great (spiffy make-up here, too), and director Miguel Ángel Vivas builds a really fine siege in Patrick's house, splitting the crew up to keep things manageable but also giving them the ability to play off each other. The action itself is very well-done, and Vivas really does a great job of cranking things up just a little bit more as things go on.

Full review on EFC.

Deathgasm

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I skipped Deathgasm at IFFBoston figuring it would play here, and wasn't disappointed. I don't know if the crowd would have been quite so metal in Boston, although who knows; that festival brings out its music fans.

It's a fun little movie playing on parental fears of Satanism, especially back in the 1980s, offering up a situation where heavy metal music really can call forth the Devil's armies, and then having the teenagers who unleashed hell to try and put things right by playing it backwards.

Truth be told, I actually found the bits before and around the horror-movie shenanigans a lot more fun. There's a real charm to Milo Cawthorne's Brodie, a metalhead with a heart of gold trying to find his place in a quiet town, and to Kimberley Crossman's Medina, the local beauty who might just get him more than he expects. There's an earnestness to those scenes despite the fact that there isn't one believable teenager among the cast. The gore is fine and over-the-top in a wonderfully tacky way, but it makes the movie into a cartoon. A good cartoon, but one which can seem arbitrary and mean all the way through after the movie started out kind of sweet underneath.

Full review on EFC.

The Fantasia Daily 2015.04 (17 July 2015): Therapy for a Vampire, Bridgend, Cruel, Assassination Classroom, Cooties, and more!

Tuesday - Thursday: Two movies per day, at roughly 7pm and 9:30pm.

Friday: Six movies, first at 12:45pm, last at 11:55pm, and then at it again Saturday. No wonder this didn't get posted until thirteen hours later that I'd like!

Despite it being a long day, it wasn't a big one for guests or "events" until you get to Who Killed Captain Alex?, which also included trailers for a number of other Wakaliwood films and a post-screening Skype to Uganda for a chat with the people involved.

I was in and out during the movie for that one - just too sleepy by then - but that conversation was something else. You kind of only think you love movies and your country until you see folks like this making movies out of nothing because they want something they can be proud of having as home-grown. They may not be achieving anything close to greatness yet, but they're certainly putting a heck of an effort into it.


"The Mill at Calder's End"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in the J.A. de Séve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

As this short started, the initial impression was a Tim Burton or Wes Anderson film, with clever miniature work setting the scene for a quirky presentation. It soon become clear, though, that the miniatures are the presentation, and the audience is in for some fantastic puppet work to go with its spooky story.

That takes place at the turn off the Twentieth century, with a young man returning to his old family property upon his father's disappearance. There's a mysterious contract that an ancestor found that seems to compel mysterious behavior, but the narrator is determined that he and his son will not be bound by it. The evil underneath the property's mill naturally has other ideas.

"Calder's Mill" is a slick job all around, and not just because it took me starting at the characters not blinking to recognize them as puppets. The craft is excellent, with director Kevin McTurk staging some fantastic action with great detail. The narration does get a little heavy at times, and it looks strange when characters actually speak, but the design work is great (Mike Mignola apparently had a hand in it), resulting in a genuinely spooky and exciting little film.

Der Vampir auf der Couch (Therapy for a Vampire)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in the J.A. de Séve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The title of Therapy for a Vampire ("Der Vampir auf der Couch" in the original German) suggests something that may not quite be hackneyed, although I'm sure I've seen a vampire getting psychoanalysis before, but which is a fairly specific, self-referential idea. Thus, it's a surprise and a pleasant one for filmmaker David Rühm to go off in a much funnier screwball direction.

There are vampires in 1930s Vienna, make no mistake, and Graf Geza von Közsnöm (Tobias Moretti) is consulting Dr. Sigmund Freud (Karl Fischer) about how things just aren't the same with Gräfin Elsa (Jeanette Hain) after a few hundred years of marriage. Freud, meanwhile, is working with young artist Viktor Huma (Dominic Oley) to illustrate dreams, although Viktor has an issue of his own, always painting his girlfriend Lucy (Cornelia Ivancan) with glamorous clothes and makeup rather than the simple trousers she prefers. To further complicate matters, Count Geza has decided that Lucy may be the reincarnation of his long-lost true love Nadila.

In the end, fairly little time is going to be spent on the Professor's couch, and that's all for the best. Geza and Lucy in particular have plans, as does everyone else, though they inevitably spin out of control and bounce off each other. It's a fun, twisty screenplay that Rühm keeps moving without having things become too concerned with just getting through to the end. The pairings probably aren't going to change that much, but there's a lot of motion in making it look that way, and the story is built around the Count and Countess being vampires without necessarily feeling like a vampire story.

Full review on EFC.

Bridgend

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in the J.A. de Séve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

There's a moment early in Bridgend when the main character's father, a policeman just transferred back to the title city after having spent about ten years in Bristol, is shown the wall of the at-that-point twenty-three teenage suicides that have happened in the past few years. He stares at it like there's something he can do, a mystery to solve, but it's suicide; there's little folks like him can do but try and pick up the pieces.

That's what ultimately makes Bridgend (telling a story of fictional characters in what feels like a real-life horror story) genuinely disturbing: Young people who end it all are outside the capability of mentally-healthy people to understand, but there are hints that they're not so far outside the mainstream as we might think. After all, if the very happy-seeming Sara (a downright amazing Hannah Murray) can get pulled into this situation, seemingly anybody can. There's a twisted culture of no hope and no leaving, and what other way out is there?

The way filmmaker Jeppe Rønde approaches it is impressive, too - there are the expected melancholy images and frightening scenes, but the balance between malaise and horror is impressively well-balanced. There are several scenes where a cult will be hinted at and then things will swing back to teenagers being dumb, horny kids without undercutting the atmosphere. He also does a great job of hitting the "it's really important people know someone cares" material without it seeming to preachy or facile.

Full review on EFC.

"La Séance" ("The Session")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in the J.A. de Séve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)

"La Séance" starts out with nifty images of nineteenth-century photography, with a shattered piece of glass hinting at how fragile memory is, even with this new technology, and then builds on the idea of this preservation as a Paris photographer (Paul Hamy) faces one last session with a departing customer (Fanny Ardant), musing with the maid (Fabienne Chaudat) about how the march of time is relentless, despite Pierre-Louis's attempts to freeze it. Familiar material, but there's something unusual behind it that the viewer has a bit of trouble putting his or her figure upon.

It's revealed in the final moments, naturally, and I really admire how filmmaker Edouard de La Poëze gets there and lets the moment breathe; it's something that could be a gotcha or could be over-casual, but which instead feels like art and technology finding a place. It's built on a nifty performance by Hamy and a nicely complementary one by Chaudat, resulting in a story that's disturbing without being horror.

Cruel

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in the J.A. de Séve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The best performance in Cruel may be Maurice Poli as the main character's paralyzed father, a man whose life is already so twisted by pain an helplessness that the torment that comes from being in the care of a serial-killer son (Jean-Jacques Lelté) must be too much to bear, but he has no choice in the matter. He can't speak, he can barely move, he's trapped just as completely as the people Pierre kidnaps and locks in the hidden basement that Pierre's grandfather used to hide Jews during the war. It's a horribly twisted sort of helplessness.

Compared to that, the rest of the film isn't exactly dull - there are riveting moments as Pierre spends time with his victims like this is being social in some way - but that's a difficult intensity to match. Otherwise, crime novelist Eric Cherrière builds a decent story of a serial killer who is successful because he takes great care to be invisible, but never really gets a hook in to really make it singular. Why is he starting to leave evidence now? Is his romance with a local musician evidence that this sort of monster may not be so different? Lelté gives nice performance, but the underlying mystery never quite lives up to the film's greatest moments.

Full review on EFC.

Ansatsu Kyoshitsu (Assassination Classroom)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Next time I'm in the comic shop, I'm going to have to give the Assassination Classroom manga a look to see what the average chapter length is; even if it's something like 16 pages, I'll bet they're decompressed and some of the best bits are probably four-panel half-pagers. At least, that's what one might expect based upon the movie, which jumps between short episodes and gags so quickly that it feels scattered and never really coalesces as a story that makes sense.

At least those bits are funny, though, with off-beat characters and a piece of utter insanity at the center - an alien who, to give humanity a sporting chance, agrees to become a middle-school teacher and train the dead-end kids of a school to kill him - that is so ridiculous as to defy belief. It never really becomes a movie more than an assembly of gags, and ends on a "to be continued" that may or may not be serious, but it will at least make the audience laugh fairly hard on more than one occasion.

Full review on EFC.

"Point of View"

* * 3/4 (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Director Justin Harding gives a pretty specific inspiration for his short film, and seeing it listed probably leads me to treat his a bit unfairly. When you openly cop to taking your basic engine (monsters who only move when you're not looking) from somewhere else, you've got to have something new to add, and let's face it, Doctor Who was probably misguided in trying to make The Weeping Angels into more than one-offs.

Still, Harding gives a solid effort, and re-creating them with corpses in a morgue is a solid choice if you're going to do it. The makeup and prosthetics are nicely done, and the gimmick is good enough that when executed well, it yields a lot of good jumps, both because it's built on a visual reveal a and because the viewer can count the distance off in his or her head of the filmmaker establishes the environment well, which Harding generally does.

There's no escaping that this short is basically a remake, and not of something that the audience wouldn't have seen. Maybe it's honesty in crediting the source should be appreciated, but it still can't help but feel like it's piggybacking on someone else's really clever idea.

Cooties

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Allison Pill is carving out a weird niche in terms of sweet elementary school teachers who turn oddly violent between this and Snowpiercer, isn't she? Granted, she's justified here, as tainted chicken nuggets turn kids into zombies, forcing the teachers - a motley bunch including Elijah Wood, Leigh Whannell, and Rainn Wilson - to fight back.

I've got family members and friends who are teachers, and I wonder how many of them would admit to this movie speaking to them. It's a demented, violent, fiercely funny horror-comedy, and probably more fun than many in that genre because just letting loose on kids actually feels a bit transgressive.

Full review on EFC.

Who Killed Captain Alex? Uganda's First Action Film

N/A (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2015 in the J.A. de Séve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)

As I said up top, suddenly going from two movies a day to six, after working in the morning, it's not quite easing into the festival. End result: I hit the wall several times during this movie and really couldn't begin to tell anybody what was going on, though I suspect that may be the case for those who rolled out of bed completely refreshed at 10:15pm.

This Ugandan action movie is chaotic to say the least, and that's before you add in the VJ ("video joker") audio track that is apparently just how folks watch movies at video halls in Uganda, local or otherwise. Put that on top of movies that are really being made on the fly, and is not surprising that these filmmakers are concentrating on action and horror; they need to be pieces of almost pure sensation.

The surprising thing is that in the moment, Who Killed Captain Alex? can do a pretty good job of that. There are some legit fight scenes in there - like a lot of filmmakers in other parts of the world, director Nebwana IGG grasps that this is a thing where a little skill and even less screwing around can make a great impression - and when scenery needs chewing, the cast goes to town in fine style.

I can't say I'll try many other Wakaliwood movies in other circumstances - I am generally more interested in "good" than "evolving" films - but this sure was something, I'll give it that.

The Fantasia Daily 2015.03 (16 July 2015): "L'Etrange Province: Le Sasquatch", Torrente: Mission Eurovegas, and Office.

No guests/horrible photography today, and an early start needed on Friday, so we'll keep this very brief.

As in, just today's plan: Therapy for a Vampire, Bridgend, and Cruel in de Seve; Assassination Classroom and Cooties in Hall; and then back across the street for the Ugandan madness.

"L'Étrange Province: Le Sasquatch"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)

I haven't yet checked to see if the webseries "L'Étrange Province" is generally available with English subtitles or not. I'll be a bit upset if it's not, because this "Sasquatch" episode made me laugh pretty hard at several points, and I would certainly like to see more.

The gag is that Carl & Frank (Mathieu Handfield & Simon Lacroix) are investigating the weird and unusual, and though both tend to be believers to a point, Frank is more likely to call BS on cryptozoology than aliens, ghosts, etc., and do it rather cheerfully. Confronted with a guy in Coaticook who claims to have been abducted by a pair of the creatures, he's sarcastically undercutting everything his partner does.

It's a fun dynamic, and probably even more fun for native Quebeckers who likely get a lot more of the regional humor (and regional legends). The energy to it is fun regardless, and though we were clearly coming into the middle of a TV season, it feels like something that woul be really easy to pick up.

Torrente V: Misión Eurovegas (Torrente: Mission Eurovegas)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The fifth entry in a Spanish action-comedy series is an odd place for a well-known American actor like Alec Baldwin who has apparently not burned that many bridges back home to show up, and his character spends much of the movie grumbling questions about why he's working with these dolts. And, honestly, it's a question that folks who aren't fans of the franchise are going to be asking in a more meta sense, even if there's a bit of Ugly American-ism in wondering why he would bother with this movie which was, actually, a massive hit in Spain.

For those of us coming in late, José Luis Torrente (writer/director/star Santiago Segura) is a former cop of the racist-sexist-moron variety, and he has just spent several years in jail for whatever the heck happened in Torrente 4. Now it's 2018, Spain has been kicked out of the European Union and Catalan has declared its independence, and Torrente has decided he will become an outlaw. Fortunately, the contacts he made in prison include John Marshall (Baldwin), an American security consultant who knows Madrid's "EuroVegas" casino inside out, and has Torrente recruit a team to take it down during the final of the World Cup. Unfortunately, the people Torrente knows are, by and large, idiots.

Truth be told, I don't get much of a kick out of characters like Torrente where the audience is supposed to laugh at not just his bumbling but also his political incorrectness; the story always has them drifting toward being protagonists rather than just objects of ridicule. Comedy doesn't require someone to root for, but it's a natural thing to seek in a narrative, and Mission Eurovegas has too much plot to just point an laugh for its entire length unless the satire is a lot sharper.

Full review on EFC.

O piseu (Office)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I don't know if Office ever really gets back around to the question that kicks it off in a definitive way, or if where it winds up going instead is really as fascinating as the filmmakers would have us think. Its corporate pressure-cooker environment certainly does a nice job of building into a potentially cutthroat situation.

That initial hook has Kim Byung-guk (Bae Sung-woo), a manager at the Cheil Company in Seoul, getting a drink after work, heading home, passing a completely normal evening with his family, and then viciously killing them with a hammer. The next day, intern Lee Mirae (Ko A-Sung) arrives at the same office to find a detective (Park Sung-woong) managing the case and her bosses telling her that the police don't need to know anything that might just embarrass the company. On top of this, a new intern (Son Soo-hyun) is being brought in, and the police have found surveillance footage that suggests Byung-guk returned to the office building after the murders and hasn't been seen to leave yet.

Cheil won't soon be found on any "great places to work" lists; it's cliquy and Director Kim Sang-gyu (Kim Eui-sung) seems to be the type that considers bullying and leadership to be one and the same. It's the sort of office where workplace stress leading to serial murder - and the culture valuing company loyalty and difficulty of landing a new job means that having a murderer lurking in the shadows may not quite be enough to finally quit. While writer Choi Yun-jin sets that up, director Hong Won-chan and crew make sure that the corporate chill appears on-screen, with a tight cube farm that tucks everybody away until they need to show up but does't actually afford any privacy, complemented by an eerie silence that gets drowned out when there's a storm outside. It's corporate hell, with Mirae not just exploited as the young girl desperate to move up from her humble origins, but not even able to look away from the people doing so.

Full review on EFC.

The Fantasia Daily 2015.02 (15 July 2015): Kung Fu Killer, The Hallow, and "The Morrigan".

Dial into the day job, write movie reviews, find you've barely got time to get supper before the evening movies. Not the worst way to stay employed and possessed of a press pass while attending a 22-day film festival, but it didn't leave a lot of time to do much else.

Sad to say, the second visit to the food truck mall at the Quartier des Spectacles wasn't quite so successful as the first with its rib poutine. I got a brisket sandwich which was on the one hand some pretty good brisket on a very nice roll, but which on the other hand had a large pickle and cole slaw in there. Much less impressive once the contaminants are removed. The raspberry lemonade it was washed down with was good, but not much for $4.75 (Canadian).

Still, I did have enough time to plot out much of the festival afterwards, and despite my intitial worries that having seen various selections at Fantastic Fest, BUFF, and IFFBoston over the past year, along with the festival being back down to two screens after using three last year, would leave me with a somewhat light schedule, that's not going to be the case. I may break 85 or even 90 new features seen this year, which is insane, with the afternoons at de Seve likely to be even more packed than usual.

After the relative chaos of opening night, day two was when I was able to reconnect with familiar faces in line. I don't know whether Paul even had time to stop back home in Schenectady on the way here after the New York Asian Film Festival, and Gabriela has four shorts in the Fantastique Week-End this year, which is pretty great. It was nice to hear that I wasn't the only person with recent moving horror stories.

The movies were fun, too - Kung Fu Killer was goofy and probably deliberately so to a certain extent (insert usual rant about Donnie Yen movies not playing Boston here), and The Hallow is a great little horror movie, getting better several times when I expected it to level off.

Tonight's plan: Another night in Hall with Torrente 5: Mission Eurovegas and Office.

Yi ge ren de wu lin (Kung Fu Killer)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, HD)

Kung Fu Killer is what it sounds like and aggressively so, a cross between classic martial arts films where an evil master cuts a bloody path through his rivals and 1980s kung-fu cop flicks. The way director Teddy Chan combines these two does not exactly create something more refined - to torture a food metaphor a bit, it's got all the cheese from both recipes - but it does yield some damn fine fights, so the film can't be accused of not delivering.

In a period-set film, a master like Hahou Mo (Donnie Yen) might have become a monk when his dueling left another fighter dead; here he just turns himself in to the police and is sentenced to five years for something like negligent homicide. Before his sentence is up, though, he demands to speak to Chief Inspector Luk Yuen-sum (Charlie Yeung Choi-nei), who is investigating a man who was brutally beaten to death. Hahou says the victim was a martial arts master, and others will be targeted, although if he is released, he can help find the killer. This serial killer of kung fu masters is soon identified as Fung Yu-sau (Wang Baoqiang), and while Hahou appears to be his ultimate target, something about the way Hahou engineered his release from jail doesn't sit right with Yuen-sum.

Because of course it doesn't. The trouble with that as a plot device, unfortunately, is that this is the sort of cop movie where where the villain's plan being diabolical and the police/writers not really making a lot of sense in how they go about dealing with it. Do they just not have ankle bracelets in Hong Kong, for example, and why such a delay in warning the martial artists Hahou thinks will be targeted (and only doing so in sequence)? Thorough surveillance becomes pourous pretty quickly as well.

Full review on EFC.

"Lake Mahar"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)

Basic Irish horror stuff, "The Morrigan" - young couple goes to a cabin on the shore during the off-season, mysterious girl shows up, and when they call the cops, it doesn't necessarily make things better. Nastiness and trust-no-one situations ensue. Mix it up in a stew of fog and the arcane seeming inevitable, and you're in business.

Is this Morrigan a well-enough known myth in Northern Ireland that writer/director Colum Eastwood can more or less let things go without explanation, or are audiences meant to be as relatively at sea as Richard & Anna? It works either way, I think, although it means that the mysterious girl goes from strange victim to generic monster rather quickly. It's a frequently-striking monster, at least - Eastwood and the visual FX team seem to make good use of being on the wrong side of the uncanny valley, letting the unreality of the big eyes and distorted faces unnerve as much as they might promote some giggles.

Once this is all in place, "The Morrigan" is an effective little horror short. It kind of follows the standard paths and might be a little more interesting with a more individually-tailored story (Eastwood and his cast do their best work when picking at the characters' minds), but it's got good jumps and atmosphere, getting its job done.


The Hallow

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

By way of exposition, there's a bit on the radio early on mentioning that an upcoming deal would make Ireland the only developed country without a national forest, and that just sounds like a bad idea: Anyone who has seen a few horror movies or read some folklore knows that country is so absolutely lousy with sprites of various sorts that there barely sees to be room for people. Don't mess with their habitat, because otherwise something like this initially slow-burning but ultimately intense bit of horror will ensue.

The man being sent to survey this forest is Adam Hitchens (Joseph Hawle); he often takes infant son Finn and their dog Iggy out in the woods while wife Clare (Bojana Novakovic) works on the mill house where they've been set up. The locals - naturally, a superstitious bunch - don't like this, with farmer Colm Donnelly (Michael McElhatton), whose daughter vanished into the woods some years ago, the most aggressive. But maybe the greatest danger isn't superstitious neighbors or the Fair Folk, but a fungus along the lines of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis that Adam finds attached to creatures rather larger than ants.

Certainly, the latter offers a bunch of things any horror movie can use, from being icky to look at to being able to serve as a springboard for other nasty things. Writer/director Corin Hardy finds ways for this stuff to get everywhere, and it's hard to overstate how effective this stuff is at enhancing a scene's yuck factor. On top of that, of course, it's giving a somewhat less mystical than usual grounding to the traditional battle between humankind and its "progress" and wild nature; this stuff gets everywhere. Not that Hardy's script goes for a complete demystification; the flip side of this battle is that iron (which traditionally burns mystical creatures) is still an extremely useful thing to have around.

Full review on EFC.

The Fantasia Daily 2015.01 (14 July 2015): Miss Hokusai, Tangerine, and two shorts.

Welcome to Montreal!



Things got started a little early in Montreal this week in order to accommodate an early show of Ant-Man, which I didn't even try to get into, as there will be plenty of time to see that later. I got up here even earlier, Sunday evening, after a longer-than-expected stop at the border and with whatever ailed me in the Boston area still taking a bit out of me into Monday, which I spent wandering the area near Juste Pour Rire (lots of food trucks and stands) and capping off the day with Terminator: Genisys in 3D. I guess that served as a useful baseline for how dreadfully lifeless a genre film meant to be exciting can be, but is otherwise not recommended.

As has become somewhat usual, morning stretched out a bit long to allow me to do much touristing in the afternoon, so I mostly sat outside, read the program, and got a little more familiar than usual with what was coming up. It's going to be a fun festival, although there are some really tought decisions to be made later on.



First guest was Keiichi Hara (l), director of Miss Hokusai. There were apparently other guests from Production IG and others who worked on the film in the crowd, although I wasn't exactly able to spot them craning my neck back.

One thing worth mentioning about this screening and Q&A was that there were two sets of subtitles - one in English, and one in French. It's something I'm surprised isn't done a little more often, though later on in the festival a film will have one screening with English subs and one with French. Generally speaking, there seems to be a lot more on the schedule where those of us whose high school French is twenty-five years rusty despite coming north for ten years are out of luck. That's cool - this festival is for the people of Montreal first and foremost and monolingual New Englanders something like seventeenth. So we've got not cause to complain when pretty much the entire Q&A is in French.

Sitting through it made it a tight squeeze to get across the street for Tangerine, I wound up in the last seat just as the lights were going down. Close call, but worth it, as it's a pretty nifty movie.

Each feature wound up having a short featuring a parent at his/her wit's end, though I liked the one with Miss Hokusai much more than the one with Tangerine.

So, that's day one. Day two will be another evening-only one to help ramp up, and I'll be going with Kung Fu Killer and The Hallow.

"Calamités Caustiques"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)

This short film by Hughes Provencher takes a clever enough turn midway through that I really would have liked to see it go for a proper ending that plays it out, rather than imply that the protagonist isn't in her right mind. It's more fun, I think, to want to see where a situation is going next than to feel like it doesn't matter.

Getting to that point has a fair amount of laughs for a 14-minute short, happily. Valérie Cadieux is amusingly flustered as Patricia, a single mother who doesn't just always seem to be a little behind, but is mocked by the smiling, capable reproduction of her own face on her real-estate signage. She's sympathetically worn-down but not so much that the situations she's reacting to aren't funny, including and especially a burglar (David Boutin) who decides to make himself at home after seeing just how much Patricia's life and space aligns with him.

That bit is funny enough that I wound up wanting the movie to center on it; there is probably a brilliant romantic comedy to be made about a burglar who believes he has found his soulmate in a woman who really isn't that cool with this being the only guy who appreciates her. It winds up being just one part of the weirdness overwhelming her toward the end, but it's the part that seems to have more to build on.


Sarusuberi: Miss Hokusai

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)

Stories about art and artists are fantastic opportunities for makers of animated films, and I suspect that if I knew more about Japanese art, I'd be even more impressed by how Miss Hokusai uses it to give its sweet but far from sugary story more atmosphere. Even an art dummy like me can still see that the filmmakers are doing neat things here and without being as obvious a style choice as the occasional bursts of rock & roll on the soundtrack of a movie set in 1814 Edo.

That is when Katsushika Hokusai (voice of Yutaka Matsushige) was known as "Tetsuzo" (he had many names over the course of his career), with his adult daughter O-Ei (voice of Anne Watanabe) assisting him, sometimes to the extent of doing the work for him. Another artist, former samurai Ikeda Zenjiro (voice of Gaku Hamada), lives and works with them, and other young artists come around to soak up the older man's wisdom. Tetsuzo is divorced, and O-Ei regularly visits her mother and blind younger sister O-Nao (voice of Shion Shimizu).

Art can appear to have literally spiritual implications in this film's world, and I idly wonder if investigating paranormal activity connected to paintings was the recurring engine for Hinako Sugiura's original Sarusuberi manga; Hokusai father and daughter get involved in a couple different cases over the course of the film. It's an interesting way of keeping a film about historic figures from becoming too much just a recitation of events or speculation about their family life, spacing out the other storylines a little bit. The supernatural elements are never treated as indisputably true, but are given the sort of weight that people in this time and place would have given them.

Full review on EFC.

"Lake Mahar"

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2015 in J.A. De Seve Theatre (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)

Not looking at the program to see this described as a take on the King Arthur myth, I didn't really get it from the short itself, despite the obvious bits. Kind of needs a Merlin on the one hand, and it's not like infidelity of the queen is a strong enough signifier on the other. Without anything to really indicate what's going on until the sword shows up, it's just a few unpleasant things around a guy who doesn't react much.

And that's not particularly clever or funny. Errol Portman is kind of amusing as the worn-down sad sack of an Arthur, but that's not exactly new material. "Lake Mahar" winds up in a rough spot - it's really got nothing new to say about how a guy's botoxed-up-wife's affair with the gardener and daughters' infatuation with rather unpleasant types is emasculating, and it's not the most outrageous version of it, so audiences who have seen this type of edginess before might not havve the needle moved. And even if it was more outrageous, I'm not sure that would actually matter in terms of making some sort of actual point.

Tangerine

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2015 in J.A. De Seve Theatre (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

One almost wants Tangerine to get through its entire length without any sort of real consequences, because the movie Sean Baker has built moves forward with such great chaotic energy that actually slowing down enough for someone to actually accomplish something substantive seems like it could throw everything off the rails. It kind of does, but mostly in the right way.

It starts out introducing the audience to Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), a couple of transsexual prostitutes sharing a donut because they are broke, especially with Sin-Dee just out of jail - and she is not happy to hear that her pimp/boyfriend Chester has been cheating on her with some white girl with a vagina. She's off to find out what's going on, Alexandra saying she wants no part of any drama (although what did she think was going to happen when she let that slip?). Elsewhere in West Hollywood, Armenian cab driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian) plies his trade, although it seems like he would rather have a few minutes with one of these girls with something extra than go back home to where his mother-in-law has set up shop.

Sin-Dee and Tangerine as a film both feel kind of like wind-up toys as they start, something has cranked a bunch of tension into her spring and then dropped her into a situation, sending her bouncing off various obstacles but keeping her pointed in the general direction she wants to go. It might almost be too frantic if it wasn't regularly interspersed with Razmik dealing with various sorts of deadpan awkwardness, keeping the movie from burning itself out too early. Instead, it manages to be pretty explosively funny, and not just because the film has the ability to shock: Situations that get big initial laughs are allowed to recharge their batteries rather than drag out, while new characters being introduced and others going their separate ways keeps things fairly fresh.

Full review on EFC.

Big Game

This blog has been a bit of a flurry of "not seeing/writing about as many movies as I'd like because I'm moving" over the past few weeks, and if it ends with this post, it's mainly because it becomes The Fantasia Daily for the next few weeks, as I really should be back in Somerville, putting everything where it belongs. I kind of apologize for that, kind of don't (it's my blog and that's what's been going on with me, after all), but it's kind of important to the context of seeing this movie, at least for me.

I don't know as I would call this move a disaster at this point - I am in a nice new apartment and nothing, near as I can tell, was broken - but it certainly felt that way at the time. It's an entirely self-inflicted one; I badly underestimated how much I had to move and how much effort preparing to move it would take, leaving me completely unready for when the movers showed and could only take something like a third of what I planned to bring. I wound up making a flurry of phone calls to get the rent on the old house extended a few days, to have my father and brother come down the next day to help move the rest, and to initially resist but ultimately consent to my mother and her husband come down on Friday to get the old place cleaned out.

It felt miserable. Moving is a naturally miserable experience, arguably worse each time because of the amount you've accumulated, but it really feels like something I should be able to handle by now, and the argument that most people moving at my age are generally doing so with someone doesn't particularly make me feel better. I strongly suspect that not going it alone helps immensely for a couple of reasons - aside from just splitting the load, you've got someone to keep you on track, help prevent the paralysis that comes from having multiple things of seemingly equal importance to accomplish, and keep spirits up during the real drudge work (passing boxes along in a sort of bucket brigade almost feels good compared to lugging them yourself). Having to call family in last-minute because you've screwed up is worse than humbling, it's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if I would have lived much past the age of sixteen in an age when it didn't pay to be good at certain types of math, since my basic life skills don't seem terribly wide.

So, the day between these parental visits, I feel like I should probably be doing more and wind up going to see this movie because I've been looking forward to it a long time and it will let me briefly stop by the old place to grab one or two things that had been left behind in the bathroom. It would have been just as easy to see Hard Eight on 35mm at the Somerville (the one Paul Thomas Anderson movie I haven't seen), but this worked out. It's about a kid and a President who are more or less expected to fail, and that's more or less the head-space I was in, and a little fantasy about overcoming that didn't particularly hurt.

It's a goofy adventure movie, and I consume those in quantities that can keep any one from standing out, but this one was certainly the right one at the right time for me.

Big Game

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)

Kids used to ride bikes to the theater to see movies like Big Game; as opposed to dialing up a video-on-demand service, and, man, that's just an indication that most of them wouldn't be able to handle what its young hero goes through, right? Nah, they've got no control over what plays where, any more than their parents or older siblings who might go for the idea of Samuel L. Jackson as the President of the United States forced to team up with a kid to survive in the wilderness.

This comes about because President William Alan Moore (Jackson) is betrayed by the Secret Service Agent (Ray Stevenson) who had previously taken a bullet for him, sabotaging defenses so that Air Force One can be from the sky. It's on the way to Helsinki and goes down in a Finnish wilderness preserve, where Oskari (Onni Tommila), an under-sized boy just turned thirteen, is undertaking a coming-of-age hunt. He stumbles upon the President's escape pod, but both Agent Morris and wealthy psychopath Hazar (Mehmet Kurtulus) are pretty fair hunters themselves.

What they actually mean to accomplish is kind of vague at points - certainly, Morris's motivation is clear enough, but while both the film's title and the way the villains talk indicate that the plan seems to be dropping the President in a "Most Dangerous Game" situation, that mostly seems to come about by accident, and other comments toward the end indicate something more is meant to be going on (maybe original novelist Daniel Smith has bigger plans). It's not exactly revealed back in a Pentagon briefing room filled with underused character actors - Victor Garber, Ted Levine, Felicity Huffman, and Jim Broadbent - that, for all it interacts with what's going on in Finland, could be a bunch of scenes shot later to push the running time closer to ninety minutes.

Full review on EFC.

Love & Mercy

I get the feeling that the summer of 2015 is going to have a lot of movies fall through the cracks for me, between the move and a longer-than-usual trip to Montreal. The real shame is that they won't necessarily be easily-skipped things like Terminator 5 or Self/Less (and let it be known that I'm still kind of shocked that there's enough sci-fi in theaters these days that I can skip the ones that don't look terribly appealing without guilt), but movies like Love & Mercy: Quality films that exist on the line between studio and independent fare that need time made for them.

Thankfully, I made time for this one, carving a Thursday night screening out because I knew that it would likely be long-gone from theaters by the time I got back from Montreal. It's totally worth it, and one of the films I want to strongly recommend to the folks I know who don't go to a lot of movies: It's got an impressive cast and a subject that a lot of people will find interesting. It's made for adults without being crass, including in terms of not being afraid to be a little advanced in how it presents its story. It's the sort of movie that some friends and I were lamenting the lack of during the last awards cycle, the one that manages to be both award-worthy art and popular entertainment. Or at least, would be the latter if it could get through to the mainstream audience amidst a lot of the must-see-on-the-big-screen noise.

Well, it's not gone from the Boston area yet, nor presumably most other cities, so I hope folks give it a little more chance to become a word-of-mouth hit. It's an excellent movie and deserves a good long run.

Love & Mercy

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)

Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys made some of their best songs (and one of pop music's greatest albums) by meticulously - indeed, maniacally - piecing small fractions together that aren't naturally found near each other, inventing what he couldn't pull from a group of talented musicians. Director Bill Pohlad aims to do the same with his two-track biography of Wilson, and he's not quite the sort of genius that can turn these conflicting things into the sort of finished product that feels like they way they must be. There are jarring bits. But that's a good way to approach a man with a mind that misbehaves, and the filmmakers get it to work.

The first clear images come from the late 1980s or early 1990s, where California Cadillac saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) has an unusual walk-in (John Cusack), simultaneously blunt and shy, very soft-spoken but also flirtatious and impulsive in a way that has to make a woman nervous. It's not until his guardian Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) catches up that she finds out who this customer is. She's intrigued enough for a date, where she discovers that Landy's ministrations are excessive and controlling.

In the mid-1960s, a young Wilson (Paul Dano) is already starting to show signs of what Landy would later diagnose as paranoid schizophrenia, although that isn't necessarily linked to his no longer wanting to perform live as opposed to creating new sounds in the studio. So while the rest of the band is touring Japan, he's working with session musicians to create what will become "Pet Sounds" - though that album's critical success but pop-chart disappointment will deepen an already large rift between Brian, the rest of the band, and their former manager - and since most of the latter are family, speed the deterioration of his mental health.

There are two obvious storylines there, both of which wind up having a great deal of room for Pohlad and screenwriters Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner to expand, contract, focus, connect, and contrast, but my favorite winds up emerging from the 1960s scenes, as Wilson becomes a joyously engaged mad scientist, daring his players to try new things, pouncing on "mistakes" and asking to repeat them. Fans of rock history - or just those who saw the long-delayed documentary released last year - will recognize the Wrecking Crew studio musicians even before they are name-checked, and that's just the first sign of the intriguing detail that is bursting out from all corners. This, we see, is where Brian is most functional and engaged, and though it clearly takes a special kind of mind to do this sort of work, Pohlad makes the process itself fascinating and frequently funny - it's actually an unusually clear look at the creative process that treats it as neither mysterious nor obvious. And for as great as the "Pet Sounds" sequence is, it may actually be the creation of "Good Vibrations" that astounds the most - watching Wilson find the song inside an initially-crude bassline is the musical equivalent of a sculptor knowing there's greatness inside a block of marble and chipping the excess away.

Full review on EFC.

Forever Young (2015)

Last show before heading north to Montreal, kind of by accident - I meant to see it Friday night and then something else (probably Self/Less) on Saturday, but got held up late at work and then the Red Sox/Yankees game, as they are wont to do, went gloriously late. Lots of self-inflicted bad planning going into that, which doesn't even count the feeling like crap (which is probably self-inflicted as well, what with the staying up late, going to afternoon baseball without a hat, and generally not slowing down/bailing on work when my body says to take it down a peg.

Still, I was feeling good enough by this point to feel general aggravation toward the people taking their time in line ahead of me and clogging up the escalator rather than numb, and I responded to the film's charm as opposed to just finding it frustrating. That's got to count for something, even if I'm mostly going to view it as a warm-up for a few weeks of really good asian cinema.

Forever Young (2015)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2015 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)

The plot of Forever Young could come straight out of a silly sitcom meant for young adults, although I suspect that this hypothetical Chinese Saved by the Bell: The College Years would probably go to far less drastic lengths to set it up. Oddly, though, it's not so much the light comedy spawned by terrible tragedy that messes this film up, but the things meant to fill it out into a more complete story.

It centers around Xu Nuo (Li Yifeng) and Yan Xi (Zhang Huiwen), boyfriend and girlfriend about to graduate college and perform in "dream night" just prior. Xu Nuo is a talented singer in a band with his three roommates, hoping to be noticed by a label, while Yan Xi and her roommates are ballet dancers with a goal of continuing their studies in Paris. Yan Xi doesn't react well to learning this may be beyond her friends' means, and not only does she not get a chance to apologize before a horrible auto accident, but she winds up in the hospital with a broken leg after pushing herself too hard in response. Seeing her heartbroken, Xu Nuo comes up with a crazy idea: What if he and his friends do the girls' number at the show in tribute? After all, these four guys who have never danced ballet before have a whole month to learn "Four Little Swans".

It's a silly, silly idea, but not really a bad one. The slapstick that's going to come out of it is obvious, sure, and works despite the audience knowing what's coming. The sentiment behind it is just as plain, but writer/director He Jiong sets thing up so that the audience can see the bonds between Xu Nuo, Yan Xi, and their groups of friends (though not individually paired off, the whole group hangs out together) so that it doesn't just feel like one person dragging the rest along with his silly plan. The goofy, inappropriate-seeming comedy mostly works.

Full review on EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 July 2015 - 16 July 2015

Last one of these before heading out to Fantasia. And maybe, just maybe, the sort of time that lets me write stuff other than this

• As much as I like animation and as popular as the films may be, I've yet to see either Despicable Me because they've come out right around the time I head up to Montreal, and the same seems to be the case for the Minions spin-off. Apparently, they weren't something Gru cooked up in the lab himself but have thousands of years of history, including this story where three wind up working for a 1960s supervillain voiced by Sandra Bullock. Like its predecessors, its in 2D and 3D at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, West Newton (2D only), Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Also opening is Self/Less, in which Ben Kingsley plays a dying man who purchases a new young body (Ryan Reynolds) only to discover that it might not be the genetically engineered blank he'd been sold on. That's at Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. There's also high-school-play found-footage slasher The Gallows, playing at Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
• Amy gets an unusually wide release for a music documentary, as Asif Kapadia's film about Amy Winehouse opens at the Coolidge, the Somerville, Kendall Square, the Embassy, Boston Common, and Fenway. It seems to have a lot of all-access footage and also promises never-before-heard material from the much-beloved talent who died far too young.
  
  The Coolidge Corner Theatre also several of its usual special programs, including The Silence of the Lambs (on 35mm) at midnight Friday and Saturday. They've got a Big Screen Classic of another sort on Monday, with the supremely silly Monty Python and the Holy Grail playing as a tribute to late Boston Globe film critic Jay Carr; Joyce Kulhawik will provide an introduction.
• Even setting Amy aside, it's a documentary-heavy week at Kendall Square. They'll be screening Batkid Begins, a look at how San Francisco tranformed into Gotham City for the day when many, many people responded to a cancer-stricken boy's dream for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Much less cheerful is IFFBoston selection Cartel Land, in which director Matthew Heineman jonis vigilantes on both sides of the US/Mexico border aiming to combat drug-related violence.
  
  They will also have a one-week booking of the restored Rebels of the Neon God, one of director Tsai Ming-liang's first features. It has a cram-school student seeking the thief who damaged his father's cab, and looks just as weird and arty as Tsai's later work.
• Very little Indian cinema at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond this week - just a few straggler screenings of Tamil-language Papanasam - but they are the only place locally opening Strangerland, an Australian thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes as parents whose children vanish in the desert just prior to a dust storm; Hugo Weaving plays the detective in charge of the search.
  
  Fans of Chinese film can catch Forever Young at Boston Common, which appears to be a romantic comedy about a would-be pop star and dance student in college.
• Friend-of-The Brattle Theatre Edgar Wright arguably should be having a new movie coming out next week in Ant-Man (he retains a screenwriting credit and developed some of the action design), but the theater will pay tribute anyway with Wright On! Edgar Wright and His Influences. It kicks off Friday with two movies featuring videogame logic - Run Lola Run and Scott Pilgrim vs The World - both in 35mm. Saturday and Sunday will both start off with single-features matinees of the Wright-scripted Adventures of Tintin before triple features: On Saturday, it's the "alternate reality Cornetto Trilogy", with horror rarity Dead and Buried, the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and John Woo's Hard Boiled, all in 35mm. Sunday has the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost films they inspired in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz (35mm), and The World's End.
  
  Monday and Tuesday feature a two-night tribute to Ingrid Bergman with 35mm double features of Casablanca and Gaslight, although Monday also has a 9:30pm screening of To Kill a Mockingbird in anticipation of Tuesday's release of Harper Lee's "lost" book, Go Set a Watchman.
  
  Finally, there's the annual "Trailer Treats" program. Its inspiration, the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino Grindhouse project and its fake trailers (one, to come full-circle, directed by Edgar Wright), plays on 35mm Wednesday, while the night-long party with barbecue, previews from the Brattle library, and the winners of the annual "Trailer Smackdown" contest, is Thursday.
• After a week off for fireworks, the Saturday Midnight Special returns to The Somerville Theatre with Rock & Roll High School in 35mm, as are most of the theater's special events. Not all - Wednesday night's "Summer of Sam Peckinpah" presentation of The Wild Bunch will have them firing up the 70mm projector, which should be just outstanding. Then it's back to 35mm for Thursday night's Paul Thomas Anderson picture, Magnolia
  
  Over at The Capitol , the "Throwback Thursday" program is a not-obvious but still great pairing: Die Hard & Gremlins, apparently in that order. Heck of a Christmas in July routine there..
• Over at The Harvard Film Archive, the Robert Altman retrospective continues with California Split (Friday 7pm), Thieves Like Us (Saturday 7pm), and a double feature of plays he shot for television on Thursday - "The Laundromat" and Beyond Therapy (both on digital video). The Sam Fuller pictures for the week are The Baron of Arizona (Friday 9:15pm on 16mm), Merrill's Marauders (Saturday 9:30pm), House of Bamboo (Sunday 7pm), and Fixed Bayonets! (Monday 7pm). Sunday also has an entry from the Titanus Studios retrospective, Tormento. All are in 35mm unless otherwise noted.
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues the Boston French Film Festival, which includes a broad array of contemporary French films plus a Saturday afternoon screening of The Young Girls of Rochefort justified (as if that were necessary) by the visit to Boston Harbor of a replica of the Rochefort-built Hermione, a ship that played a crucial role in the American Revolution. Note that some films will begin after the museum has otherwise closed, so attendees will need to use the side door.
• The Regent Theatre has screenings of Meet Me in Montenegro on Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, and Thursday (and again on Friday the 17th), in which two ex-lovers meet by chance in Berlin and feel the old attraction despite being about to move to opposite ends of the planet in the next two days, while their friends explore the limits of their relationship as well. It claims to have been shot in five countries over four years, so it's a pretty ambitious independent romance. Two of the gaps in that schedule will be filled with other film events: Sunday evening has a preview of local filmmaker Christopher Di Nunzio's A Life Not to Follow (along with short film "Under the Dark Wing"), with cast and crew on hand for a Q&A. Wednesday night offers The Yes Men Are Revolting, with the satiric activists taking on climate change.
• The West Newton Cinema doesn't open anything other than Minions, but they will continue their series of Wednesday Boston Jewish Film Festival encores with Above and Beyond a documentary on the first days of the Israeli Air Force, which was immediately tested.
• The Institute of Contemporary Art will have a special program of 16mm-with-live-music at noon on Saturday; admission is included with museum entry.
• Free outdoor screenings listed on Joe's Calendar include more of previous years' family-oriented programs: Paddington at the Hatch Shell on Friday, and The Boxtrolls at the Prudential Center on Saturday, among others. Most are on video, but "Coolidge at the Greenway" will be setting 35mm projection up on Tuesday for The Birds.

Well, I'm thinking maybe Forever Young on Friday and then what I can fit in on Saturday around packing for Montreal and seeing the Sox-Yankees game. Then it's off to the North, where the Fantasia Festival gets an early Tuesday start this year.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 July 2015 - 8 July 2015

Well, I went from "going to do this early with the early openings!" to "forget it, I'm just not going to have the time" over the course of this week, what with how badly I made a hash of this move. But, then, the middle of a frenzy is a good time to gather one's thoughts and list things out.

• It's sequels for the fourth of July, starting with Magic Mike XXL. Channing Tatum returns in the title role, a stripper looking to jump-start his furniture business, this time going on a road trip with his buddies to do their thing up and down the southeast coast. No Matthew McCconaughey this time around, and Steven Soderberg is no longer directing (though he does cut and shoot under aliases), but a lot of what made the first a surprisingly good time is apparently still there. It's at the Somerville, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  There's also the latest Terminator sequel no-one wanted, this time resetting the timeline but still building out of the same sort of story. On the one hand, Old Arnold has been a treat, but he's got to have better things to do than this. It's the first movie of the series in 3D and plays the Capitol (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Jordan's Furniture (Imax 3D), Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax 3D), Assembly Row (including Imax 3D), Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Boston Common will also be showing cheap shows of Fifty Shades of Grey this week.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre is one of two places opening Infinitely Polar Bear (Kendall Square is the other), featuring Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana star as separated parents who may be drawn back together as he watches the kids while she goes to grad school.
  
  They'll also be showing Independence Day at midnight on Friday the third, and only then, because who wants to compete with Boston's Fourth of July fireworks? Nobody, that's who. They also have a Cinema Jukebox show on Monday with a double feature of The Decline of Western Civilization & The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years,
• Along with Infiniely Polar Bear, Kendall Square also has Dark Star: H.R. Giger's World for a week. It looks to be what it says on the box, a documentary about Giger and his often grotesque but almost always memorable works, both in the film and art worlds.
• Two Indian movies at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond this week, although I think only Hindi comedy Second Hand Husband has English subtitles. That one features a couple wanting to marry but feeling the need to find a husband for the man's ex-wife (and thus free themselves from alimony) first. There's also the Tamil thriller Papanasam, which has a pretty cheerful poster for something about a man defending his family from overzealous law enforcement.
• It's The Brattle Theatre's turn to show Jaws this weekend, nabbing the actual Fourth of July holiday (I imagine that there's a meeting every spring where the theater programmers decide who shows it which weekend through games of chance or vicious blackmail and politicking). It plays as a double feature with Jaws 2 on Friday & Saturday, both on 35mm, and that kicks off Roy Scheider Revisited, a weeklong celebration of the actor. Sorcerer (DCP) & The French Connection (35mm) play as a double feature Sunday and Tuesday, Marathon Man (DCP) & Klute (35mm) on Monday, 2010 on 35mm Wednesday, and All That Jazz (DCP) on Thursday.
• No midnight at The Somerville Theatre this Saturday (fireworks), but they wil have a "Silents, Please!" screening on Sunday afternoon, The Big Parade. It's odd to watch now, but was an impressive war movie in its day. Because I didn't write this earlier in the week, I missed talking about the first films in their "Summer of Sam Peckinpah" and "Paul Thomas Anderson Thursdays" series, so we'll skip right to the second - Major Dundee on Wednesday and Boogie Nights on Thursday. All three are on 35mm, naturally. Thursday also featuers a musical double feature of Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-1990), a docoumentary whose unweildy title tells you what it's about, and The Family Jams, this doc featuring a band on the cusp of stardom on the road.
  
  Their sister cinema The Capitol in Arlington, meanwhile, starts their "Throwback Thursdays" double feature series. This week's selection: Better off Dead & Say Anything.
• Lateness also made me miss The Harvard Film Archive also programming Thursdays during the summer, but they are. They continue their three retrospectives four nights a week: The Robert Altman presentations are Brewster McCloud (Friday 7pm, including a seldom-seen short), Secret Honor (Friday 9:30pm), Countdown (Sunday 5pm), and Prêt-à-porter (Monday 7pm, also including a short). Sam Fuller is represented by Underworld U.S.A. at 7pm on Sunday, while the Titanus Studios presentation is The White Angel on Thursday. All (except the shorts) are in 35mm.
• The West Newton Cinema: picks up The Overnight, and also has the second week of their "Boston Jewish Film Festival Summer Encore Series" on Wednesday night with Audience Award winner Run Boy Run.
• The Museum of Fine Arts will begin their annual French Film Festival with The Chef's Wife on Thursday the 9th. If you want to shell out for a pricey ticket, there will be an opening-night reception with wine and hors d'oeuvres before the film.
• Free outdoor screenings listed on Joe's Calendar include Rocky (Boston Harbor Hotel, Friday); Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Bloc 11, Monday), The Goonies (The Sinclair, Wednesday), and Ice Age (Seven Hills Park, Thursday).

I've got a cluster of baseball tickets this week, and I do like fireworks, so I'll probably stick to Jurassic World and Major Dundee; maybe Terminator 5 (what, it's got Lee Byung-hun in it!). Maybe sneak something else in, but I got stuff to put away before the annual trip to Montreal, too!

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 26 June 2015 - 30 June 2015

Places are getting a jump on the holiday next week, but the weekend still has some good stuff, including in places you might not expect to find fun summer movies.

• The Brattle Theatre, for instnace, has the local opening of Big Game, which reunites Rare Exports director Jalmari Helander with that film's young co-star Onni Tommila; this time Tommila plays a young Finnish boy doing a solo hunting rite of passage when an escape pod from Air Force One lands in the game preserve, meaning he is the only one who can protect the American President, played by Samuel L. Jackson. That takes up most of the week until Thursday, but there is still time for Tremors on 35mm at 11:30pm Saturday as part of "Reel Weird Brattle: 25 Years Weird" and a free "Elements of Cinema" screening of Jacques Tati's Playtime with Emerson College professor Peter Flynn introducing the film and leading the discussion afterward.
• Another foreign-but-very-accessible-and-fun film gets a small opening at The West Newton Cinema: The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared was one of my favorites at the Fantasia Festival last year. It starts out with the explosives-loving man of the title escaping his nursing home and his adventures - both present-day and in memory - just get weirder from there.
• They and The Coolidge Corner Theatre are also the only places opening A Little Choas (with the Coolidge splitting it between the screening room and big screen #2), despite the preview playing a lot at the multiplexes earlier this year. Distribution is weird! It's a nice-looking movie with Kate Winslet as a landscape designer commissioned to create a garden at Versailles by King Louis XIV (Alan Rickman, who also directs) and falls in love with a married colleague (Matthias Schoenaerts).
  
  The Coolidge also picks up IFFBoston alum The Wolfpack for a week in the 14-seat Goldscreen and wraps up the summer-camp set of midnights with a 35mm print of The Burning, an out-there slasher which has young Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter in the cast. Bet they don't last long. Also on 35mm is Monday's Big Screen Classic, thought by many to be the best movie ever made, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
• Two more IFFBoston movies open at Kendall Square this weekend: The Overnight is a dark comedy directed by Patrick Brice, featuring a young family making new friends in a new city, although things apparently get weird once they start hanging out together. Kind of the same basic idea as Brice's Creep, which for some reason seems to be going straight-to-VOD rather than getting the full trilogy made and released in a year that was expected.
  
  They also get Eden, a drama set against the backdrop of Paris's 1990s club scene, featuring the music of Daft Punk (among others). The folks who liked it at IFFBoston really seemed to like it a lot. There's also a somewhat unusual one-week booking: Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, which will see Pather Panchali, The Unvanquished, and The World of Apu play at various times throughout the week. There's also a one-night presentation of Faberge: A Life of Its Own, a documentary on the famous jewelers and their eggs.
• The week's big opening is Ted 2, Seth MacFarlane's follow-up to his film about a boy whose teddy bear came to life and, like him, grew up to be a lovable but foul-mouthed loser. It gets a bunch of screens at the Somerville (where a scene or two from the first was filmed), Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Also getting a wide opening is Max, whose title character is a bomb-sniffing dog in the US Marines who winds up living with his handler's little brother after being sent home from Afghanistan with PTSD, only to find new troubles/adventures. It was probably the most tonal whiplash I've gotten from a trailer all year, and plays at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. For something more conventionally bizarre, Boston Common has Spongebob Squarepants: Sponge Out of Water back for $5 noon screenings (and late night shows starting Monday).
• The Somerville Theatre begins Saturday "Midnight Specials" this weekend, with Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy the first of eight late-night 35mm prints.
• After the big opening, Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond is the only place keeping ABCD 2 around for a second week, and that just for late-night shows. You'll need to speak Tamil for their other Indian film, Indru Netru Naalai, also playing late nights. They also pick up the Jaws baton this weekend, showing Spielberg's classic at 2pm from Friday to Monday.
• The Museum of Fine Arts concludes The Roxbury International Film Festival, which has a filmmaker or two in attendance on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
• It's Members' Weekend at The Harvard Film Archive, so all you members have probably already received an email saying what secret rarities they will be pulling out of the vaults for you!
• The Regent Theatre doesn't seem to be listing the Spike & Mike's 2015 Festival of Animation programs on-line, but the Spike & Mike website shows it as running through Monday and a little poking around the ticketing system shows "Sick & Twisted" screenings on Friday & Saturday at 10pm.
• Free outdoor screenings listed on Joe's Calendar include The Princess Bride and Yellow Submarine on the waterfront Friday night (with Maleficent in Revere) and Batman at Bloc 11 in Somerville on Monday.

See last week about doing nothing but packing (and going up to Maine to give birthday presents to my nieces in exchange for cake) and then actually moving on Tuesday, but there should be a way to fit Big Game, Jurassic World, The Overnight, and maybe Tremors into the schedule.