Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 16 March 2018 - 22 March 2018

Boston's film festival season begins for real next week, so get ready for binging!

• The Brattle Theatre sort-of-kind-of starts the weekend with a retrospective of the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema, which hasn't been held in 14 years but which would be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. So they're putting together some of the greatest hits - single features of Chocolat (on 35mm) and I Shot Andy Warhol (on 35mm) on Friday; Paris Was a Woman, Baby, It's You, Señorita Extraviada, Divorce Iranian Style, The Watermelon Woman, and Boys Don't Cry (on 35mm) on Saturday; a 35mm double feature of All Over Me (with co-star Alison Folland in person) & The Incredible True Adventures of Two Girls in Love on Sunday; Home Before Dark with director Maureen Foley on Monday; and Whale Rider on Tuesday.
  
  After that, they play host to The Boston Underground Film Festival starting on Wednesday. Both opening night films - East Coast premiere My Name is Myeisha and a 35mm print of Liquid Sky on its 35th anniversary - have directors and other guests and in attendance. None are scheduled for Thursday, when they show the "Touching from a Distance" shorts block, Pin Cushion, and The Theta Girl, but there's plenty of good stuff planned through the 25th.
• The big release in the multiplexes is Tomb Raider, a 3D adventure which resets the film series in the way the games were revived a few years back, with a younger, less physically exaggerated Lara Croft (now played by Alicia Vikander) just getting started on using the family money to fight secret societies by robbing graves. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (2D Imax), the Embassy (2D only), Boston Common (including 2D Imax), Fenway (including RPX), the Seaport (including Icon-X), South Bay (including Imax 2D), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D), Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux (2D only)
  
  A couple other things may have sleeper potential. Love, Simon seems to be getting a lot of good word as, if not the first teen romantic comedy with a gay main character, certainly the first to be aimed so squarely at the mainstream. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere. There's also 7 Days in Entebbe, which dramatizes a 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane and the rescue in Africa; it's at The West Newton Cinema
, Boston Common, and Revere. There's also I Can Only Imagine, which is about the story that inspired the hit country song of the same title, which managed to bag Dennis Quaid and Cloris Leachman in supporting roles. It's at Boston Common, South Bay, and Revere. There's also TCM presentations of Vertigo on Sunday and Wednesday at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere.
• The big boutique picture this week is The Death of Stalin, a new political satire from Armando Ianuncci, who does that sort of thing very well. It's got the rare multiple-screen booking at The Coolidge Corner Theatre (including an "Off The Couch" screening on Tuesday) as well as Kendall Square and Boston Common. The Coolidge also opens Happy End in the smaller rooms, Michael Haneke's "partial sequel" to Amour.
  
  The Coolidge also has a busy midnight schedule this weekend, with the monthly 35mm showing of The Room and a 35mm print of Critters on Friday while New Year's Eve thriller Midnighters and Leprechaun in the Hood (the latter to celebrate St. Patrick's Day) on Saturday. There's Open Screen in the Screening Room on Tuesday, and they show Get Out as the first in a new "Wide Lens" series examining the social issues of a film on Wednesday. Finally, this week's entry in the Francophone Film Festival on Thursday is Corporate.from France.
• Kendall Square also opens Leaning into the Wind - Andy Goldsworthy for a week, a nifty looking entry on the British artist famed for his sculptures that transform the landscape. There's a theoretically more open-ended booking for The Leisure Seeker, which also plays West Newton, featuring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland as a long-married couple going on a road trip despite the latter showing signs of severe dementia. It's a much more limited booking for Sailor Moon: The Musical - Le Movement Final, one show on Wednesday evening. That's a live-action stage musical based on the popular manga and anime, and cosplay is encouraged.
• Apple Fresh Pond gets Kirrak Party, a romantic comedy in the Telugu language about a happy-go-lucky college freshman who falls for a girl in the senior class. That plays all week, Kannada-language thriller Mufti plays Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. In English, they open The Forgiven, the new one from The Killing Fields director Roland Joffé, which features Forest Whitaker as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who meets a prisoner (Eric Bana) seeking redemption for his sins.
• The Harvard Film Archive has the second half of "Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination" in support of the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. It finishes with eXistenZ (35mm Friday), demonlover (35mm Friday), Strange Days (35mm Saturday), Electric Dreams (35mm Sunday), Level Five (Sunday), and Personal Shopper (Monday). They also have a special $5 family matinee on Saturday, showing both parts of "Revolting Rhymes", the adaptation of Roald Dahl's book which saw its first half nominated for an Oscar. Since that only covers half an hour, they'll show some fairy-tale shorts before the main feature.
• The Museum of Fine Arts finishes their run of David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts (Friday/Sunday) and their Femmes Fatales series, which wraps up with Under the Skin (Friday), To Die For (35mm Wednesday), and Dishonored (35mm Sunday). Then, on Thursday, they open their 17th Annual Boston Turkish Film Festival with Sideway, including a visit from director Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, a reception, and a musical performance by Esthema.
• The Somerville Theatre finishes the Sidney Poitier series this weekend, with A Patch of Blue on Friday, a double feature of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner & In the Heat of the Night on Saturday, and then another of The Lost Man & Lilies of the Field on Sunday. They'll be down a screen for a couple days, and then open the Irish Film Festival Boston with Breakout Feature Kissing Candice on Thursday, with actor Ann Skelly there in person.
• Belmont World Film begins their annual series of international cinema, this time with the theme "Bound by Beliefs", at the Studio Cinema in Belmont on Sunday with The Workshop, a French film which sees tensions flaring at the a seemingly agreeable writers' workshop in a Mediterranean town. It's at 7:30; there will be a special dinner and reception in the theater at 6pm.
• Bright Lights has two free screenings of female-led documentaries this week in the Paramount's Bright Screening Room: Tuesday's Sighted Eyes, Feeling Heart tells the story of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, best known for A Raisin in the Sun; director Tracy Strain will be there for a Q&A afterward. On Thursday, locally-produced documentary Unrest pops up again, with a panel discussion about myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome afterward.
• As with last week, if you can't make the Coolidge's midnight, Midnighters is playing in the screening room at CinemaSalem on Friday and Saturday. They give most of that screen's time to Hannah, which features Charlotte Rampling as a woman losing her grip on reality as her husband serves time in prison.

We'll see what fits in before BUFF, most likely Tomb Raider, Death of Stalin, and Entebbe.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2018.05: Space Detective & Darken

The period from mid-February to mid-April, when I'm seeing and reviewing things from the Boston Sci-Fi and Underground Film Festivals, is not necessarily difficult for me as a guy who likes to see and write about a lot of movies, especially the ones that might not otherwise get a lot of digital ink, but it's one where I maybe think about how to phrase things a bit more. It's potentially more important to make clear to the readers that this movie isn't necessarily a mainstream thing for people used to the production values or clarity of a studio film, just in case someone is reading it later without that context. And, on the other side, a large chunk of the readership is actually likely to be the people who made the film, and 90% of the time, I don't want to just be the guy saying "your movie, by the standards of what people usually see, isn't very good". A lot are just starting out or have spent a long time on this labor of love, and contrary to what some folks think, people who write about film don't want to be dream-squashers.


Which brings us to the first movie of the night, Space Detective. Writer/director/many other things Antonio Liapur (center) and writer/star/many other things Matt Sjafiroeddin (right) joined Leandra Sharron from the festival before and after the film, and, guys, don't take it too hard, but you made the sort of movie where the reference is often the entire joke that I really don't like; I probably should have bailed and headed to Redbones or something, but I figured it was just 73 minutes, so I should see it through. If I were smarter and had watched the previews for the festival, I might have hit the shorts instead, but I don't usually bother before festivals. I will almost certainly never watch the web series based upon the movie that has apparently been ordered.

But, you know what? I admire the heck out of them; they worked on this thing for something like ten years, making it rotoscoped animation so that they could shift all the effort and expense onto themselves. They made the sort of movie that they would want to see, that a lot of the people who come to this festival enjoy, and it looks like they might wind up getting paid a little for it. Good on them.

Anyway, even with the post-film discussion, the whole thing was short enough that there was time to stretch our legs, get a snack, etc., before Darken. That's another case where, while the film isn't likely to be a big mainstream deal - I suspect that if I came upon it on Amazon Prime, I'd probably pass it by, and I don't know that I would necessarily recommend it for someone with an hour and a half to kill but plenty of other options. But it's got some interesting elements - if nothing else, I hope people are looking at the costume designer and thinking of hiring her for bigger things - and you can see enough good work being done to want to see what the folks involved are going to do next.

That's undeniably a backhanded compliment - nobody makes a movie, submits it to film festivals, and looks for distribution thinking "this is something that, in twenty years, will be seen as an interesting early-career step in my evolution to being a great filmmaker." But sometimes that's the vibe a film has, and that's the pool this festival plays in most of the time.

Space Detective

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2018 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, digital)

If you're into references that are expected to pass as jokes and visuals hyper-stylized enough to hopefully smother the overall cheapness of the production, you might find some charm to Space Detective, but though it's good-natured and outwardly frantic, it's terribly bland. There's not an original science fiction or hard-boiled detective idea to be found in it, and even the execution of it is extremely generic; there's not a line in it that doesn't seem lifted from the most hackneyed version of the story, like the people making it have watched Star Trek and The Big Sleep, loved the trappings, and put no work into figuring out that these things were iconic because there was some thought put into the science-fictional idea or that chewy, sardonic Raymond Chandler narration.

Instead, the filmmakers come up with jokes about how silly this is, or interjecting crude modern stereotypes into these stylized situations. There's sometimes an amusing bit to be found there, or a moment when the animation jumps from being a way to cover up how the folks involved are shooting it in their garage to something that genuinely looks neat, or briefly hits the sweet spot where a mash-up takes on a life of its own. The cast mostly does pretty good, by and large playing the jokes straight.

Folks who enjoy playing spot-the-reference may dig it, but there really nothing there but mentioning better things and coloring over it. It's the sort of film where all of its inspirations are clear, but few seem to have inspired the filmmakers to do something worth seeing on its own.

Darken

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2018 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, digital)

There's something almost bizarrely endearing about the limited resources visible for the production of Darken, like the filmmakers looked at their script and the vacated building that they had to shoot in and said, okay, we're just going to do this, and if we do this well enough, the audience will supply the reasons why this all makes sense on their own. In this case, they do just well enough to intrigue.

It opens with two women seemingly banished from a cult before shifting attention to Eve (Bea Santos), a troubled nurse who is there when one of them is found outside a seemingly-abandoned building. She goes in and encounters Mercy (Zoe Belkin) and Karisse (Gabrielle Graham), but soon finds that it's hard to find her way back out, and this "Darken" is supposedly learned by one "Mother Darken", although her priestess Clarity (Christine Horne) has been doing the whole thing where she speaks for Mother without anyone seeing her for a while.

Oftentimes an independent genre movie will distract by something being almost comically subpar, but this one almost has the opposite problem: Everybody in Darken is wearing the sort of fantastic post-apocalyptic couture that you only see in comic books and Mad Max movies in marked contrast to the redressed living rooms and basements around them. It's initially a pretty strange contrast, and I don't think that either writer RJ Lackie or director Audrey Cummings quite manages to do all that they could with it, but there's a metaphor about people with sharp, heroic images of themselves in the midst of a run-down, disappointing world that the movie flirts with, with the self-doubting Eve's conventional attire serving as a contrast and Charity's "Arbiter" Martin (Ari Millen) undergoing a wholesale makeover as his role and attitude changes. This may not necessarily be entirely deliberate as much as a case of costume designer Marissa Schwartz being able to deliver more on a small budget than the rest of the film's crew, but it works even as one notices the incongruity.

Full review on EFC

Test-Driving the New Icon Theater in the Seaport with Red Sparrow & A Wrinkle in Time

As mentioned back in December when I spent an afternoon & evening at AMC 12-plex in South Bay, Boston is currently in the middle of one of its biggest theater-building booms in recent memory, and the Kerasotes Showplace Icon Boston (as it is listed on Fandago and the like) is the second of three multiplexes opening up within the city limits within a twelve month period, with ArcLight planning to open one near North Station as part of a retail development on the site of the old Boston Garden sometime later this year. It's taken me a bit of time to see enough there to really get much of an impression of it, but that's partly on my schedule, which has involved the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival and vacation and work and Oscar prep. This weekend, I checked out a couple things there, so I think I've got a good handle on the experience.

The Seaport area has been developed at a pretty good pace over the past few years - it used to be that when I got off the Silver Line or, before that was a thing, crossed the bridge from South Station, it was pretty easy to find the ICA or Harborlights or wherever else I was going from the milk bottle or the Barking Crab. That's not exactly the case any longer; the building this theater is in is one of several retail/entertainment spots that have sprouted along with a bunch of condos. If you're one of those places' residents, it's pretty great to have a neighborhood theater. If you don't, it's accessible enough - as the photo above shows, it is right next to the Courthouse stop on the Silver Line, and the 4 bus also stops nearby. If it looks like the Silver Line is going to be crowded with people going to the airport, it's about a ten minute walk from South Station.

Presumably, the condo-dwellers are young singles and couples more than families, and that's what makes this site particularly appealing for Kerasotes; though at one point the chain was a sort of generic multiplex, these days they specialize in high-end theaters with a full bar and lounge, no children under seventeen allowed to evening shows, and strict rules about them being accompanied during G and PG-rated matinees. It is, unmistakably, a new sort of "adult theater".

And part of that is that it is expensive - from weekday matinees at $11.50 to weekend premium-screen presentations at $21. Fortunately, members of their "Extras" program can drop that range to $10 to $17.50 if they order using the Kerasotes app or online, which is surprisingly competitive with other places, especially on a weekday afternoon, although they don't accept MoviePass. Concessions are kind of pricey as well, especially since the app and website currently only show offers for Chicago and Minneapolis. I have so far found the ordering on the app mostly straightforward, although I had to double-check once the first time I ordered concessions to go along with my ticket (somehow popcorn and a soda became two popcorns). When you order ahead, a button appears in the app to request the folks at the concession stand start preparing it along with an order number. Depending on what you choose, it's worth hitting that button at the front door (for popcorn) or before getting on the silver line (for nachos).

Once you get there, things can get a little counter-intuitive. Often the person working the box office will be standing beside the kiosks rather than behind the counter to show you how to use them - the scanner for the app's QR code is underneath the panel, though there are no indications to put your phone there. There are separate lines for ordering snacks, picking up popcorn & soda, and picking up hot snacks (flatbread pizza, nachos, creme brulee) or drinks. There's also a bar/lounge area, where you can order drinks or a meal that can be brought into the theater with you. Why I can't order a burger on the app and have it ready when I get there but must instead wait at the bar for a basket to bring in, I don't know.

So, the big question is, do you get what you pay for?



That's a view of theater #2, where I saw A Wrinkle in Time in 3D on Sunday; it's similar to #5, where I saw All the Money in the World back in January. It's a familiar enough sort of look by now - good sized screen, power recliners, built-in tabletop to put your food and drink on. These seats are heated, which can be kind of surprising at times - the button for the heater is right next to the one to lean back, and when I went in January, there was at least one moment when I accidentally pressed that button and was kind of alarmed at the sudden warmth at my bottom and (ahem!) slightly below. I'm not sure that's a feature I'm anxious to get used to.

The important thing, though, is that the picture is phenomenal. All of the screens are 4K laser projection, resulting in an impressively clear bright (when that is warranted) image. This was even the case with A Wrinkle in Time, which I watched in 3D without feeling much in the way of ill effect from the standard RealD polarized glasses. Though that is a scope movie, there was no masking of the screen, but it was not terribly distracting - perhaps the laser system doesn't illuminate the unused space the way that conventional digital projection does? In any event, as someone who likes to sit relatively close (I was in row C), it looked a lot better than I'm used to digital projection looking from that distance.

Sound was also pretty good - bass produced a decent rumble, for instance, and the dialogue and music were always crystal clear - but sitting that close probably puts me a little off the sweet spot. As I anticipated in my post about Early Man, something was definitely off in that there were no children in the audience for this movie very much made for them - though kids 7 and up are allowed at matinee screenings, it's not like the policies encourage them to be there (though I did run into an 8-year-old boy in a suit in the men's room, which seems fitting).



The food on Sunday afternoon was the bourbon bacon caramel popcorn, which was kind of strong for my taste, more for the caramel flavor than the bourbon flavor. The regular bacon popcorn I had in January was also pretty good.



The main theater, so far as I can tell, is screen #6, the "Icon-X" screen, seating about 190 compared to the 86 the other ones I was in held. The big screen is, unusually, a full 2.39 times as wide as it is tall, compared to the usual 1.85. It looks just as terrific as the smaller one from my seat in the fourth row, even brighter without the 3D glasses. The opening scenes of Red Sparrow looked downright fantastic.

The other big difference between the regular screens and Icon-X is the sound, with Icon-X having Dolby Atmos. Red Sparrow doesn't necessarily show off that sort of surround the way a big action movie might, but it's very nice. I do wish I'd had the chance to experience this room with a crowd - it's a big room in terms of dimensions, but how truly nuts is it going to get during the next Avengers and Star Wars movies?



Saturday night's food was the Bacon Jam BBQ Burger from the Lobby Lounge, minus the blue cheese and onion rings. It's a good burger, although, as I said before, I'm not sure why I had to get it at the bar.

(The bar is nice, I guess; I don't drink.)


One thing that has struck me is that I've yet to actually see a movie with a crowd at the Seaport theater; part of it is that I haven't exactly been choosing to see Black Panther opening weekend, instead going to things that have either been out for a bit or, like A Wrinkle in Time, really don't fit with the theater's generally-adult clientele. But I also think it's a question of what niche it fills. It shows the same movies as the AMCs at Boston Common and South Bay (two and three stops away on the T), only for more money, and while there are some nice options for concessions, it's also surprisingly limited in terms of the basics, with plain M&Ms, Milk Duds, Twizzlers, and chocolate-covered blueberries your only choices for candy. So far, it hasn't gone far out of the mainstream to cater to those with elevated tastes, and it's not the super-premium experience you get out in Chestnut Hill where they will bring steak tips to your seat and then a half-hour later bring dessert. Yeah, it's cool that someone stands at the front of the theater and welcomes you before the previews, but it seemed kind of awkward both times this weekend.

At a couple months in, they don't seem entirely settled in yet, either. They forgot to give me 3D glasses for Wrinkle, and I figured that they might already be waiting at the seat like in the SuperLux or that there'd be a bin to grab from, but I opted to dig into the bin where you return them after the movie rather than go ask the question. The menu in the lounge doesn't seem to have reached its final form, and things are often set up in a way that is just different enough from the standard multiplex to be confusing.

I'll grant that I don't necessarily go in for the fancy accoutrements at theaters the way some do; a place's beer selection is wasted on me, as is the food to a lesser extent, and those who have read some of my other moviehouse reviews know that I'd kind of rather have people packed in with extra screens showing something unusual than everybody having a little more elbow room and the reaction to what's on screen being diffuse. Ultimately, I think, the question for the Icon will be how important people think it is to keep kids/teenagers/folks who can't drop $20 on a movie out on the one hand and how much premium projection is worth on the other. It's technically the best digital projection in metro Boston - it's a production to reach Newton or Reading on the T, and there's just the one Dolby screen at South Bay - and while I wouldn't want to pay their prices all the time, it's certainly worth considering.

The projection is good enough for me to shift a bit of my business there, especially on busy weekends when I might be exceeding my MoviePass allotment or wanting to see something on a premium screen. It's no bad thing to score high on the most important part of seeing a movie, right?

Red Sparrow

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2018 in Showplace Icon Boston #6 (first-run, Icon-X DCP)

Red Sparrow is a gloomy, grinding machine of a spy film, the sort of thing that feels like a relic of the Cold War from the start and seems to make concessions to the 21st Century begrudgingly, right down to the 3.5" discs exchanged in a pivotal scene. There's purpose to both its throwback and joyless natures - Putin's Russia is arguably trying to return to the years when the world revolved around the conflict between America and the USSR, and this film seeks to dismantle the myth of the seductive Soviet spot - but are those aims enough? Is what's left entertaining enough to be worth it?

It's right on the line. This is a spy story where all of the espionage seems to be the goal in and of itself, not a means to another end, but it's one that keeps all of that cranking along in a fashion that's impressive and intriguing without seeming romantic. There's a fair performance by Jennifer Lawrence, one that seems to hit one dour note until there's reason to remember the moments where she was something else. The opening is beautiful, even if it doesn't really get much out of how it contrasts the precise with the seemingly sloppy.

It's a tricky situation, in some ways - the filmmakers never really find the right way to undercut one fantasy in order to find something more genuinely dramatic underneath. It's a nice, polished try, though.

A Wrinkle in Time

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2018 in Showplace Icon Boston #2 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Boy, I wish there were kids in the theater where I saw this, because as an adult who didn't particularly love the book when I read it in elementary school, it's really not meant for me, and I've got no idea whether the young audience it is for would eat it up or not. The film of A Wrinkle in Time is a whole bunch of things I don't like, story-wise: people talking in deliberately cryptic fashion, protagonists who just sort of get tugged along rather than taking an active role, big science fiction ideas reduced to "feel really hard". It's not what I've grown used to considering good in a story at all, but it could well resonate with its intended audience.

But, on the other hand, just look at this thing. It's gorgeous, whether in terms of there being a lot of great, well-used visual effects and stereoscopy, effort to pull from diverse cultural sources (and be striking in original ways) in the elaborate sets and cosine design, and just framing things well. It's eye-popping. And feel it, especially in the last act; you'd have to have a heart of stone not to love Storm Reid's Meg at the end.

Reid, it turns out, is the best bit of casting in a movie where that seems like it should be a huge strength, but most is just off or seems to be asking too little of the actors. It seems like the adult cast could do a lot more, even before getting to how the Oprah Winfrey, while perfectly cast, seems too much larger than the film (something it almost seems to be commenting on directly). Then there's the poor kid playing Charles Wallace, seemingly giving the filmmakers just what they want despite the fact that what they want is annoying and the kid is entangled in all of the film's worst "this happens for no reason and don't ask questions" impulses.

That stuff drives me nuts, but, again, this movie isn't for me. I just wish I'd seen how it played for the Megs and Charles Wallaces of the world.

Late for Early Man

Maybe I'm selling Peter Rabbit short here, but what the heck, America? Our cousins from across the pond have given us three family movies since the start of the new year, and that's the one we've made a hit, rather than Paddington 2 (a modest success) or Early Man, which I wound up watching in a tiny cinema because it's down to just early matinees fairly quickly?

Ah, well. Even in an 18-seat theater, there were a fair amount of kids, and they seemed to really dig it (I'm kind of ambivalent over seeing A Wrinkle in Time in one of the fancy theaters later today, just because there will likely be fewer members of the movie's intended audience). Hopefully it will find its audience later; I know I'll certainly do my part where that's concerned, having as I do a couple of high-energy nieces who might go for a movie where a bunch of cavemen are useless at soccer until a girl shows them how it's done.

Early Man

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2018 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge #9 (first-run, DCP)

There's a good chance that the children for whom Early Man was made have never heard of its creator's other work - Nick Park's last short work as a director was ten years ago, and his last feature three years before that. He's kept busy as a producer, sure, but if I tell my nieces that Early Man comes from the guy who made Wallace & Gromit, it'll mean nothing to them, even beyond how they may not really get that specific people make movies. Nevertheless, it's good for those of us who are old enough to remember to see him back, and the kids will really appreciate it even if they don't know he's made things before.

It brings its viewers to prehistoric times, when a small tribe of cave-people lived in a secluded valley surrounded by badlands, getting by hunting rabbits (badly). Dug (voice of Eddie Redmayne) is a bit more ambitious, although Chief Bobnar (voice of Timothy Spall) sees no need. It could be a useful trait, though, as a group of people who have mastered bronze move in and drive them out of their valley and Dug, back against their wall and seeing that the group is obsessed with sport, challenges their leader, Lord Nooth (voice of Tom Hiddleston), to a game of football(*). Sure, Dug has only seen a couple minutes of the game and the rest of his tribe hasn't seen that, but he soon makes the acquaintance of Goona (voice of Maisie Williams), a super-fan despite the team's no-girls-allowed policy.

(*) or "soccer"; I'm just going by what they use in the movie.

It's an utterly daft story that fits nowhere in actual history, but it's also delightful; Park and his crew of fabricators and animators have built themselves a world where the familiar and the fanciful can meet up in almost any way, but it's not just a matter of throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. There's a careful balance between the winking comedy of seeing present-day things transposed into a primitive setting and just getting weird, and when Dug first regains consciousness inside the Bronze-Agers' city, what follows is a genuinely delightful sequence as the filmmakers are very careful that he's never too familiar with things he shouldn't understand, even if they're familiar to the audience. Park captures just enough of how genuinely scary finding oneself in a strange new world can be to strike a chord but also lets Dug's curiosity push it back so the audience can enjoy the clever, playful environment on display.

Full review on EFC

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2018.04: Beyond Skyline

Monday was billed as "Local Film Night" at the festival, and those who have been to this festival (and, I suspect, many others) know that this part of the festival can be perilous as heck, so I'm not necessarily disappointed that they brought in something of a ringer.



On the left, Oscar Goff of Boston Hassle; on the right, Beyond Skyline writer/director Liam O'Donnell, who is from the area, which is how a movie which is shot in Los Angeles, Canada, and Laos gets shown on the night for local film. But, hey, why not; it gets someone who has worked on a somewhat bigger film to this small festival, talking about how the script evolved a bit.

And, otherwise, we might have gotten two movies like the second which played, Brute Sanity, which I can't rightly review because I bailed after fifteen or twenty minutes. I hate doing that, but it was slow-moving cheap-looking, and almost worse because a lot of the work wasn't awful, but just very bland, like the cast avoided being too wooden or too hammy and as a result was just getting lines out. I was told later that the audience would start laughing at it, so I'm glad I got out while I did. I may not like bad movies, but I enjoy that sort of mean-spirited mockery less.

Selecting films like that is one thing I really don't care for with the festival - it's a cynical ploy to sell a bunch of seats to the friends and family of the people who involved who come, but I don't know how many of them come back later, and you're giving the audience members who paid money for a pass or a ticket thinking that there would be some basic level of quality this amateur stuff - and, when it's really bad, the director and cast and crew are there just taking it from the audience. Yeah, I feel bad walking out in front of them, but they can at least tell themselves I had intestinal distress or something.

Beyond Skyline

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 February 2017 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, digital)

Give Beyond Skyline credit; it doesn't dink around before getting to the good stuff the way that the first one did. It's still a pretty dumb movie, but it piles stuff on like crazy, and you can't go terribly far wrong combining brains being ripped out of skulls and Iko Uwais fight scenes.

The film actually opens a few hours before Skyline's alien invasion, only this time it's following suspended cop Mark Quarren (Frank Grillo), whose ex-partner Garcia (Jacob Vargas) has given him a heads-up about son Trent (Jonny Weston) being in lock-up again. They're taking the subway home when the aliens arrive, and while their group - including train conductor Audrey (Bojana Novakovic) and blind homeless vet Sarge (Antonio Fargas) try to escape, it eventually becomes necessary for Mark to stow away aboard the alien ship to rescue Trent. While he's doing that, the ship has flown to Laos, where guerrilla fighters Sua (Iko Uwais) and Kanya (Pamelyn Chee) are fighting a local warlord (Yayan Ruhian) as well as aliens.

I don't know to what extent this parallel story/sequel spanning half the globe is meant to be a direct response to audience frustration at the first one taking place almost entirely within one (admittedly roomy) penthouse apartment, but it's an audacious-enough way to shake things up at the midpoint that the audience might be a little more inclined to forgive the fact that writer/director Liam O'Donnell doesn't really do very much new here, stepping through a lot of the same plot mechanics as the first and, when those are used up, extending the story with gimmicks that viewers have seen in dozens of other sci-fi films. It's a bit more interesting than what Colin & Greg Strause did, but even if it weren't a sequel, it would feel fairly derivative.

Full review on EFC

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 March 2018 - 15 March 2018

So, the Oscars are done, Black Panther is starting to leave a little room for other things to breathe, so there's room for some other things to open this weekend.

• The big one is A Wrinkle in Time, a big 3D adaptation of the beloved young-adult novel directed by Ava DuVernay, who has certainly made a great-looking movie from the previews. I've got to root for her, though, and if the book didn't do a lot for me in middle-school, a lot of folks I knew adored it. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (Imax 2D),The West Newton Cinema (2D only), Boston Common, Fenway (including RPX), the Seaport (including Icon-X), South Bay (including Imax 2D), Assembly Row, Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux.
  
  The rest seems older-skewing, with Gringo the one that's been getting the most preview action; it stars David Oyelowo as a man tasked by the pharma company he works for to deliver a formula to a Mexican factory only to run into trouble with the cartels; it's also got Charlize Theron, Thandie Newton, and Amanda Seyfried, with one Edgerton brother co-starring and another directing. It's at the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere. There's also The Strangers: Prey at Night, which appears to share just a general idea of home invasion with the film from 2008, but, hey, it's got Christina Hendricks. It's playing Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere. The Hurricane Heist also hits the multiplexes, with Rob Cohen directing an action flick that is pretty much what it says on the tin. That's got screens at Boston Common, South Bay, and Revere.
  
  There's a preview of Love, Simon at (roughly) 7pm on Saturday in boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere. There's also a Yu-Gi-Oh! movie playing at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere. Revere also has Hey, Arnold!: the Jungle Movie on Friday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with Concert for George taking its place on Saturday.
• Also opening fairly wide is Thoroughbreds, pretty well-received at IFFBoston's Fall Focus and featuring Anna Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke as two teenagers detached enough to consider planning to murder one's stepfather. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Capitol, Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Fenway. The Coolidge and Kendall Square also open Loveless, the Russian entry for Best Foreign Language Film from the director of Leviathan, the preview for which seems to indicate a kid running from home as his parents' marriage disintegrates.
  
  The Coolidge also has a new release at midnight Friday & Saturday with The Cured, which stars Ellen Page as a widow in a small town after the zombie virus has been cured; it also plays at CinemaSalem for those who can't stay up late but can get out to Salem. The other screen has George Romero's The Crazies on Friday and a 35mm print of Tom Savini's remake of Night of the Living Dead on Saturday. They do something neat on Monday, as the Big Screen Classic is silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, with different scores for the 7pm and 9pm screenings. There's Open Screen on Tuesday, a 35mm print of Coolidge Award winner Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God on Wednesday, and Quebecois supernatural thriller Wild Run as part of the Francophone Film Festival on Thursday.
• In addition to those two, Kendall Square has Oh Lucy!, which stars Shinobu Terajima as a Japanese woman taking an English class that involves taking on an English name and persona; she falls for her teacher (Josh Hartnett) and follows him back to America. Producer Han West will visit for a Q&A after the 7:15pm show on Friday. Also from Japan is a Wednesday showing of Free! Take Your Marks, the second film in a series about a college swim team.
• Apple Fresh Pond has more screenings of Sonu ke Titu ki Sweety and Pari, also picking up Telugu movie Ye Mantram Vesave and playing Marathi film Gulabjaam on Saturday.. Fenway has a presumably-subtitled screening of Kannada-language action flick TagaruSaturday afternoon.
  
  Fresh Pond also has Bent, a crime thriller starring Karl Urban, Sofia Vergara, and Andy Garcia; there's an extra show or two on Saturday (the website shows two screens at 5pm, which is odd - maybe a filmmaker visit?).
• The Brattle Theatre gives their screen to a 50th anniversary run of the newly-restored Memories of Underdevelopment, one of the first Cuban films to get international acclaim, from Friday to Sunday. It plays afternoons and evenings, with Have a Nice Day, a dark animated comedy from China that I quite liked when I saw it at Fantasia.
  
  Sunday afternoon also "Shortfish", a collection of short films from the Stockfish Film Festival, part of the city-wide "Taste of Iceland" event. Monday is a DocYard night, with director Kimi Takesue on-hand to discuss his film about a widower whose memories are becoming confused with the screenplay his granddaughter is writing. There's also a guest on Wednesday, with Emily Hubley on-hand for "Fish & Dreams", a program of her animated films. That's the first entry in a repertory series of women's cinema done for the 25th anniversary of the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema, with a 35mm double feature of Manny and Lo & The Virgin Suicides on Thursday; the series continues through next Tuesday.
• The Harvard Film Archive has a pretty concentrated run of cool stuff over the next couple weekends, with "Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination" a solid-looking film series that ties in with an overlapping series at the Institute of Contemporary Art. This weekend's entries include the original animated Ghost in the Shell (Friday), Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (Friday), Southland Tales (Saturday), Blue Thunder (Sunday), Johnny Mnemonic (Sunday), and WarGames (Saturday & Monday), all on 35mm. The Saturday show of WarGames is a $5 matinee, while the Monday one includes short documentary "From yu to me".
• The Museum of Fine Arts has shows of David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts (Friday/Saturday/Sunday) as well as another week of Femmes Fatales: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Friday), Under the Skin (Friday), Double Indemnity (35mm Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday), Dishonored (35mm Saturday), Gilda (35mm Sunday), and To Die For (35mm Wednesday).
• The Somerville Theatre has Brett Dennen on the stage on Saturday, and then two 35mm Sidney Poitier shows for the week - a double feature of A Raisin in the Sun & Pressure Point on Sunday and then The Slender Thread on Thursday.
• Bright Lights returns from spring break with two programs in the Bright Screening Room of Emerson's Paramount Theater that have connections to the school: Professor Robert Todd shows "Matters of Life and Death", a program of his latest 16mm short films, on Tuesday, and MFA candidate Keely Kernan presents her documentary on rural West Virginia, In the Hills and Hollows, on Thursday.
• The ICA has their final screenings of the Oscar-nominated live-action and animated short films on Sunday; they also continue in partial schedules at the Coolidge and Kendall.
• Silent film accompanist Jeff Rapsis will be at the Aeronaut Brewery on Sunday with a double feature of Harry Houdini movies from the early 1920s.
• The Regent Theatre has what they're calling a "Premiere Screening" of Christian Musical Broken & Beautiful on Monday; it apparently played some film festivals back in 2012 but indie films can get stuck in that sort of limbo. Director Erin Dooley will be there for a post-film Q&A.

I will definitely be hitting the HFA on Friday, and figure to use the rest of the weekend catching up on stuff I've let slide and also maybe finally seeing enough at the Seaport to give the place a review.

Happy Chinese New Year from Hong Kong: Agent Mr. Chan

Well, this is too late to help anyone decide whether to see Agent Mr. Chan or not, but sometimes that's how it works out - I get hung up at work just long enough for Monday's plans for seeing movies to fall through, Wednesday really only works out because a less-perilous-than-expected snow storm keeps me home, and the snow actually showing up that night and Thursday means I work from home today and lose quality on-the-bus writing time. Sorry. It's probably way too late for people out of the area, as Boston got it a week into its US run, which came a week after it opened in Hong Kong.

It was a quiet screening, just me with a theater-hopper I've seen there a few times spending twenty minutes or so in the room, but to be fair, there was a Nor'easter on the way and it was 6pm on a weekday. I've mentioned before that Mandarin movies seem to do better than Cantonese ones here (even though the Hong Kong stuff is usually better than the Chinese releases at a similar budget), so that's not entirely unexpected. I did wonder a bit about the circumstances of this one's release - it's the fifth Chinese New Year release to play Boston Common, making me wonder a bit if AMC was loading up on them a little more as part of their battle with MoviePass (if MP not allowing use at that theater is driving people a couple of T stops away, maybe it behooves them to put a few more things you'd otherwise have to go to New York to see in the mix). It's also relatively low-profile in a way that makes me wonder if China Lion has become a victim of its own success; they took a lot of the early risks in establishing the idea of opening Chinese movies in the U.S. at the same time as China, and now that the Chinese movie industry is really booming and the money made from American releases is growing, they see the four biggest Chinese New Year films snapped up by Well Go, Lionsgate, and even Warner Brothers (which has to be kind of galling, considering CL released the first Detective Chinatown in America when it wasn't nearly so sure a thing).

This big spate of releases does seem to indicate a quiet period coming up; the only Chinese trailer that played before this one was Girls vs Gangsters, which Well Go doesn't show as booked for Boston. It's meant that the theater is trying to fill the pre-show with other stuff that may appeal to the same audience, and, man, I don't know that that necessarily includes Isle of Dogs, which I think I've seen before every Asian movie that's played in the past few months, and, boy, it's making me more conflicted every time. The movie looks neat, it's full of stuff I like, but it's also pure twee Wes Anderson, and showing a preview of a movie that seems to gleefully appropriate Asian culture before actual Asian movies… Well, I don't know about that.

Back to this movie, sort of: It's entirely possible that one of the reasons I was less than hugely impressed was that, as part of the Roger Deakins series, the Brattle showed Skyfall the night before. Given that it was part of the Deakins series and being shown on 35mm film (and, let's be honest, it's always kind of surprising to find that there are actual prints of something made in the last five years), it's easy to focus on how incredible it looked, but it does a pretty fantastic job of putting the Bond franchise back together in a more traditional but still modern way after Casino Royale took it apart, good enough to take a bit of the fun out of a movie that's spoofing Roger Moore-era Bond.

Dong du te gong (Agent Mr. Chan)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2017 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)

The taller for Agent Mr. Chan offered the not-entirely-original, but still fun, premise of an obvious James Bond surrogate who got old and lame, which isn't really what it delivers; those scenes are taken out of one segment of the movie, and the actual way that's played isn't nearly as funny as what was sold. It winds up being one of a number of pieces that don't quite fit together, making for a generic spy spoof that just gets a few laughs.

In 1997, Chan Ho Yan ("Dayo" Wong Tse Wah) was Hong Kong's top spy, a charmer who, a mere three weeks after meeting Yu Heung (Charmaine Sheh See-man), is marrying her at the estate of her godfather, a notorious arms dealer. Dedicated to world peace, he destroys the mini-nuke he steals rather than giving it to his superiors, which gets him and tech-minded sidekick Genius (Cheng Sze Kwan) fired. Over the next twenty years, they're bounced from every spy agency until they're working as low-rent private detectives, while Heung has channeled her anger at being deceived into a career with the police (using every opportunity to punish Chan along the way), and she has recently been appointed Secretary of Security. When the Secretary of Finance (Lawrence Cheng Tan-shui) embarrasses himself in public after being given a peculiar drug, the official story and Heung's relation to the victim prevents her from investigating officially, and her best option appears to be hiring Chan, who follows a path that leads to the "Happy Girls" teen pop group headlined by Yuki (Larine Tang Yue-ping) and Angela (Cecilia So Lai-han), of all places.

Even considering that the filmmakers are training their sights on very specific targets, there's still a lot of potentially funny and clever ways this spoof could go, and the bit at the center where the easily-seduced, disposable "Bond Girl" winds up more capable and impressive but still angry may not be the absolute most original but it's at least fun, as is the direction they eventually go with a spy's greatest threat not necessarily being the other side but honesty. There are worse sources of humor than how what's cool is fleeing and what was life-or-death twenty years ago is no longer a big deal. The filmmakers don't often go that route, unfortunately, instead giving the audience a bunch of "hey! Bond stuff!" references that were the laziest part of the Austin Powers movies fifteen to twenty years ago, and snickering at Hong Kong idol nerds (who are, apparently, just like their Japanese analogs) before ultimately settling for being The Nude Bomb, only without the same sense of absurdity.

Full review on EFC

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2018.03: Kill Order

I'm not sure exact lesson to be learned from this Sunday was in terms of planning ahead - I didn't buy tickets to the Oscar documentary shorts at the Coolidge, figuring there wasn't necessarily any need for the early shows, even if they were in the GoldScreen. Well, not the case; I wound up getting to Brookline, seeing that the doc shows were sold out, and thinking that was a bit of a waste. Fortunately, I was able to get some errands done in that time, finish writing up the Oscar animated shorts, etc.

So that was a bummer. But it was also likely a bit of a frustrating day for people who made specific plans around the Sci-Fi Festival: The second show of Junkhead originally scheduled for the late slot was cancelled for a second show of Howl's Moving Castle, which sold out days ahead of time, but I don't know if 9pm is really a great slot to make it up in. Bummer for those planning to see Junkhead, at least until the 4:45 show, Blue World Order, was cancelled. It seemed like you had to be kind of lucky to find out about that, though, as I don't think the festival did anything other than post on Facebook. I was lucky to see that, and I only live a bit less than a mile away, but if I had to drive in or something I'd be ticked.

Fortunately, so far as I know, that was the only notable screw-up for the festival (aside from announcing movies for the marathon and having them disappear off the schedule), which is way ahead of their usual pace. And, most importantly, it didn't wind up disrupting my plans; I was able to get to the Kendall and catch the live action shorts with plenty of time to spare.

Kill Order

* * (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2017 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, digital)

Kill Order is very close to the line between where one stops worrying about the actual quality of a script or the performances because it's the physical action that is going to deliver the return one's ticket price (or rental fee, or time that could be used for something else). It's dumb but occasionally lively, and the fights certainly have a lot more effort put into them than the average Canadian B-movie gets. It's on the wrong side of that line, sad to say, but one appreciates the effort.

It introduces the audience to David Lee (Chris Mark), a teenager living with his uncle Andre Chen (Daniel Park) in the sort of starkly empty apartment that screams "on the run", although from inside it's kind of hard to connect those nightmares with repressed memories and the seizures with brainwashing. He's met a nice girl, May (Jessica Clement), and he's doing all right. At least until a bunch of black-clad goons bust into his classroom to try and kidnap him and a martial-arts switch flips in his head, and then it's time to run.

There is, of course, a shady organization behind this, which for the sake of being cool and hopefully not too cryptic is just called "the Organization", and while that's not the entirety of what the viewer learns about it, the impulse to be generic doesn't do the movie much good. Donald Westlake could get away with "The Outfit" in his Parker novels because half the point was that the mob had become utterly corporate and bloodless, and the John Wick movies can avoid proper nouns because they provided a lot of other interesting details. Here the audience gets none of that, just a few affordable genre pieces put together, and maybe about half of what is going revealed before the movie stops, implicitly saying that a sequel or a series will pick up the threads but not exactly giving the audience any particular reason to care about that.

Full review on EFC

Happy Chinese New Year, Have Another Sequel: Detective Chinatown 2

Not quite the end of my catching the Chinese New Year films - there's still one from Hong Kong to catch up on - but it's kind of funny that I've basically been catching them in reverse order of their popularity in China: Monkey King 3 is a relatively modest success making only $100M, then Monster Hunt 2, then Operation Red Sea followed by this, with the latter two closing in on half a billion dollars of box office each. Those are numbers that amazed a friend in a conversation started by "Black Panther has made $400M and hasn't hit China yet", and it is kind of eye-popping, considering how long Americans were able to get take it for granted that Hollywood was the only place that really spawned these massive things.

It probably shouldn't be surprising - China does have three times the population of the US, so that it could have two Panther-sized hits open on what is a holiday weekend there isn't out of the realm of possibility, and folks have been building theaters like crazy over the past couple of years. Particularly, it seems, the big Imax-3D variety - I think all four of these movies were released in that format. I think they may have staggered which movie gets which screen, explaining why Operation Red Sea suddenly shot up the charts in its second week. Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if big cities like Beijing and Shanghai had enough giant screens that they could afford four wide releases on the same weekend. It would kind of fit in with modern China in general, as well as explain why the movie business has grown so explosively there: There's room for both low-end and high-end versions of the same product, a population that has not only been underserved in the past but is now enthusiastic to get Hollywood-quality releases without dubbing or subtitles, and different business models (I gather studios own a chunk of the circuits there).

Anyway - that's a pretty massive Chinese New Year, movie-wise, taking up enough space at the multiplex that we probably won't get Girls vs Gangsters here, and it appears some of them moved the needle enough in America to get a look. It's small - Detective Chinatown 2 will probably make a couple million for Warner Brothers when all is said and done, which isn't going to get these movies the Imax screen at your local multiplex except on a pretty slow week, but having a major studio presenting this as an option rather than China Lion or Chopflix is going to get more attention, and I suspect that the next thing with Donnie Yen or Jackie Chan (or something like Animal World which has Michael Douglas on the poster) might get a wider release, especially if theaters move to present more options for people with MoviePass.

Tang ren jie tang an 2 (Detective Chinatown 2)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2017 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)

It's been a couple of years since it came out, but I seem to remember the first Detective Chinatown just being kind of conventionally wacky, not quite the over-the-top mess that its sequel turns out to be. Sure, part of that is a matter of how the move from Bangkok to New York lets American viewers like me see more clearly when it's doing some really tacky caricature work, but it really seems like there's nothing here that's not dialed up to 11, making a murder mystery play more like a party game, a step down from a slapstick comedy that had respected the genre.

This time around, college student and crime-solving wunderkind Chin Fong (Liu Haoran) arrives in New York City under the pretense that cousin Tang Ren (Wang Baoqiang) is getting married, but he is instead dragged to a meeting hall filled with sleuths from around the world, where dying Chinatown elder "Uncle Seven" Wu (Kenneth Tsang) has tasked them with solving the murder of his nephew Jason, offering a five-million-dollar reward if anyone in the group can solve the crime in seven days. Uncle Seven is respected enough that NYPD detective Laura Chen Ying (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) will serve as a liaison, especially helpful when the group discovers that this may be the work of a serial killer. Evidence soon points to illegal alien Song Yi (Xiao Yang), with potentially-disinherited godson Lu Guofu (Wang Xun) enlisting American tough-guy detective Wild Bull Billy (Brett Azar) to bring him in, but Chin soon finds reason to believe Song Yi is innocent, leading to them on the run with occasional help from Hong Kong hacker Kiko (Shang Yuxian), though they'll have to break into the office of coroner James Springfield (Michael Pitt) to get some evidence.

The first Detective Chinatown was better than expected, getting Chin and Tang into both a locked-room mystery and simply embarrassing situations with equal ease, making it feel natural even if it's also heightened and kind of nuts. There's not much about the situation they find themselves in this time that particularly rings true; everything about the setup with the detective-ranking app, the lobby full of weird rivals, and the competition makes it feel more like a game than an actual mystery. Returning writer/director Chen Sicheng doesn't craft that part nearly as well this time around. It's still got plenty of funny bits, though, especially when the slapstick gets really crazy, and when the audience has kind of settled into the new mood, from goofy car chases to a spectacularly implausible setting at the end. The jokes on how China sees America and New York are a bit of a mixed bag; it's easy to laugh at the "everyone has a gun" bits even while realizing that the next few years of world cinema dunking on America for electing Donald Trump will lead to as many bad jokes as well-delivered ones. Similarly, the crossdressing gags work better than the leather/biker-bar ones, although both come off as a bit tone-deaf.

Full review on EFC

Short Stuff: The 2017 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

It's a perennial observation, but there's probably no other category in the Academy Awards whose definition dictates the form of the film that gets made, as three of the five nominees are within a minute or two of the maximum length of a short film, leading one to wonder how many of them were cut down from something not quite feature-length and how many arrived at that length and pace naturally.

That all of these shorts have likely been edited to qualify as well as work as films is interesting in that about half of them are leap-of-faith documentaries, so to speak - records of events where the filmmakers came into a situation that, though interesting, had to play out. Documentaries of any length can be like that - how many times have filmmakers not known whether they would have a short, a feature, or something that just doesn't come together when starting?

"Traffic Stop"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2017 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

To a certain extent, director Kate Davis probably knew she had something with "Traffic Stop"; there was likely an active investigation going on even when she started filming. The fact that the wheels of justice can turn slowly at times likely put bounds on how much of the story of Brealion King she could tell; though the audience gets to see the shocking beginning as Ms. King is pulled aside by a traffic cop in Austin, TX and dealt with quite harshly for what is basically a speeding ticket, her civil suit could take years to play out, even if Davis came to the story with things already well underway.

She is able to make that a strength. While the opening scene of this film, taken from the dashcam footage of the office who arrested her, is shocking and visceral, Davis is able to shift the audience's perspective on the film by dedicating a solid chunk of time after that to getting to know King, letting the audience see her as an elementary school teacher, a dancer, and someone who has survived a tough start in life to excel in other ways The incident that gives the film its title may be a major event in her life, but the audience can quickly see that it is not the defining one. It's an impressive balancing act that King manages as director and editor here, as she makes the film about King as a person even as she eventually returns to the incident, giving it more time and some more prominence. It's eventually integrated fully into the film, not so much as its skeleton, but something that must inevitably be part of King's life, a visceral reminder of what she, as an African-American woman, cannot take for granted as she may have done before.

It is, as such, inevitably not neat, and some will likely raise eyebrows at how, if Davis ever tried to follow the story from any perspective other than King's, it doesn't 'make the final cut. But perhaps that's for the best, if the point is uncertainty, and how it can eventually make its way into an otherwise confident person's make-up.

"Edith+Eddie"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2017 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

By contrast, it seems likely that filmmaker Laura Checkoway probably started "Edith+Eddie" knowing that there was a certain amount of risk involved, what with the two subjects of the film being in their mid-nineties even if they are also newlyweds, but maybe not quite seeing that a narrative would develop, as two daughters of 96-year-old Edith clash over her desire to stay in the family home with Eddie, despite her age, relative frailty, and slight dementia. It's a story that feels like it developed before Checkoway's eyes despite what might simply have been a desire to tell the sweet story of two elders who found love despite their age and different ethnicities.

It makes for some interesting situations where access is concerned, as she is able to be on the scene when certain confrontations happen and is able to talk extensively with some members of Edith's family while others - as well as the legal guardian assigned to her - stay away, seemingly unwilling to talk with someone they see as an adversary. There are other notable absences as well - that 95-year-old Eddie seems alone in the world is something the filmmakers never explore on-screen, even if it is interesting that his daughter-in-law seems to be the only person to visit him in the hospital when he is ill. It's a subtext that potentially colors every aspect of Eddie's relationship with Edith and her family, and maybe it's better that the audience is left to ponder that rather than having it all explained.

Whether the conflict over Edith's future was discovered or part of the original brief, the way Checkoway tells the tale evokes the right feelings, a heady mix of the joy that the pair's love brings them and the loneliness and difficulty of age and how it requires pressing on even as body and mind slow down. It never looks easy to be these two, but it at least looks happier as long as they have each other.

"Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2017 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

Sometimes, a documentarian finds a great subject or topic and the film makes itself, with the filmmaker having to choose the best bits; other times, as I suspect is the case with Frank Stiefel's "Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405", it takes a great deal of effort to make it seem that way. Artist Mindy Alper is fascinating, but it must have been tremendously difficult to find the right material with which to present her.

Mindy, after all, has a lot misfiring in her head, and her handicap is the audience's first impression of her, with Stiefel saving the fact that she is a tremendously talented artist for a little bit later, introducing it almost off-handedly, as she starts sketching while doing something else and her lines start forming something interesting beyond just being good draftsmanship. From there, Stiefel starts interspersing the story of Mindy's personal history with more looks at her art, and one gets the sense afterward that he and editor Ting Poo have cut things to very deliberate effect, building up her expressiveness as an artist in a way that is parallel to her difficulties communicating but separate from it. This isn't the story of a savant whose talent is compensation for a handicap or Mindy finding an alternate way to connect; it's the seeming paradox of the thing that gives her story its power.

The filmmakers use both sides of that coin to make something hypnotic. Much of the film is spent talking to Mind directly, and that footage is carefully cut so that the audience can get accustomed to the odd rhythms and quirks of her speech without making it seem like a code or overly simplistic, while her art is occasionally animated to keep the film dynamic without letting the animator's work overpower hers. Stiefel seldom pairs Mindy with other people, which both prevents her from seeming less than them as they talk while also emphasizing just how much she has to plug away on her own. It's sometimes a sadder result than the audience might hope for - one would like to see her and her mother reconnect, for instance - but one that will almost certainly leave a viewer fascinated by this woman who seems to find peace amid trauma just as she can express herself artistically even if verbalization can be difficult.

"Heroin(e)"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2017 in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

Elaine McMillion Sheldon's "Heroin(e)" should likely be pluralized somehow - she builds the film around three women working to deal with the opioid crisis in Huntington, West Virginia - but the English language isn't really built for that to work. It's an admirably no-nonsense look at the situation in the present tense, only tangentially concerned with how opioid addiction became so widespread, why Huntington has an overdose ten times the national average, and what can be done in the future, but far from detached or heartless.

If there's one singular heroine to the story, it's Jan Rader, deputy chief of the local fire department who tirelessly shows up at the scene, does what she and her department can to save a life, and often moves on to the next call directly. Two other women get a similar amount of screen time time - County Drug Court judge Patricia Keller and Necia Freeman, whose "Brown Bag Ministry" delivers lunches with biblical tracts to the local prostitutes - and viewers will likely be impressed with them in the same way: They are compassionate, but firm, none seemingly terribly interested in punishment. Sheldon highlights that they are attacking the problem from different angles, but it's hard to ignore that Rader is the most active and the most likely to both talk about her stance and be shown acting. Freeman explains herself quite clearly, but she's not necessarily shown getting results; Keller does the work but seldom addresses the camera; instead spending her time on the bench.

And for all that Rader's segments of the movie are carefully pieced together to illustrate that it's both necessary and possible to be motivated by hope and pragmatism simultaneously (and quietly making an argument that there are no acceptable losses), it's Keller's drug court that perhaps might merit the deeper dive: Those scenes play like a combination of parole hearing, school, and rehab, and I find myself curious how it works beyond the glimpses given. Still, a short needs focus, and spending time on the attitude that these women bring to bear rather than all of the details makes the film's point without getting bogged down in details

"Knife Skills"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2017 in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

The last film on the compilation program (though with the documentaries often split in two, it's not unusual to see them "out of order", Thomas Lennon's "Knife Skills" makes an enjoyable finale. It offers up a neat situation - the opening of a French restaurant in Cleveland that would be staffed by those recently released from prison who likely had no experience with the business (and as such also served as a culinary school). It's a story that would probably make a good dramatic feature, but works in this format as well.

It does occasionally bump up against the forty-minute wall a bit more than the other films in the package, giving the most time to the restaurant's founder, Brandon, although that may be as much about ease of access as anything. Because the restaurant business and life after incarceration is difficult, some of the other people Lennon follows will drop out, and others reach turning points off-screen, and the result is a story that sometimes feels a bit incomplete, with Brandon's stability and availability the most complete arc to fit into a limited time. That's no knock; it's clear from the start that he's got more going on than simple philanthropy, and Lennon builds a fine film around him, even if it's the employees who have the potentially more transformational story.


It's a solid collection all around. My choice for the award tonight would be "Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405", and it's also the way I'd bet; as much as the whole group is interesting, that one's arresting, grabbing one's attention in the way few films of any length do.

Game Night

So, mildly funny story - I got up at 5:30am Central to fly back home from vacation. The plane lands in Boston at about 1pm, it takes about a half hour for my luggage to emerge, but fortunately a Silver Line Bus shows up pretty quick. I ride that to South Station, transfer to the Red Line, and ride that to Davis Square. From there it's about a fifteen minute walk to my apartment.

There, on the front door, is a tag stating that I wasn't home for a delivery, and it was being held at the local FedEx distribution point. Which, as it turns out, is in the seaport, a couple stops down from South Station on the Silver Line. Well, actually the #7 bus, but I just missed that one on the way back and did have to take the Silver back to downtown.

The extra funny thing - they were my Red Sox season tickets, which will also be loaded onto my phone, so I didn't really need to make the trip. Which is a good way to lead into seeing an absurd comedy, since I'm downtown and near the theaters anyway.

Game Night

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2017 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)

Hey, check it out - a broad comedy where the characters actually, without-a-doubt, like each other! It doesn't seem like such a big deal to say, but so many of these movies are built around bickering and buried hostility that seeing how much the central pair is into one another - from a flashback opening that celebrates their shared eccentricity all the way to the end - is a breath of fresh air. Game Night is so flat-out fond of its goofball cast of characters that it seldom has to slow down to make sure that its many jokes don't get taken the wrong way.

That's mostly Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams), who met captaining opposing barroom trivia teams and have been leading weekly game nights with their friends ever since, though they're currently having trouble conceiving and Max is fretting over the imminent return of his brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) for a visit. And, indeed, Brooks seems to be passive-aggressively shoving his success in Max's face, inviting the regular crew - Kevin (Lamorne Morris) & Michelle (Kylie Bunbury), who have been together since junior high, Ryan (Billy Magnussen), a former co-worker, and Sarah (Sharon Horgan), who is suspiciously less of an airhead than Ryan's usual date - over to his fancy rented house for a mystery party. Next-door neighbor Gary (Jesse Plemons) is not invited, as he's been more and more uncomfortable to be around since breaking up with Debbie, which might be a mistake, as the guys who bust in and kidnap Brooks are not the actors he hired to do so.

There's something a little uneven about how Max's competitive nature has a story behind it which drives the movie - he's never beaten Brooks at anything and the stress is starting to eat him up - while Annie is just as aggressive, kind of getting a kick out of pointing a gun around when the opportunity comes, without it pushing much forward. Both of them could come across as obsessive psychopaths if not handled just right, but the script by Mark Perez is quick to dispense with the notion of them competing with each other rather than being supportive, and the actors make sure they're upbeat without being exhausting. Rachel McAdams seems to be having a blast as Annie, almost aggressively cheerful and sweet but not pushy, smiling wide but not so wide as to seem like she's enjoying something she shouldn't. She seems like a good influence on Jason Bateman, whose flustered everyman routine can often veer toward the sarcastic but here manages the same excellent comic timing with it skewed a bit more to the jovial.

Full review on EFC

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 2 March 2018 - 8 March 2018

Someone offhandedly mentioned that they might let us out of work early for a holiday on Friday, and I can't remember anything this weekend. Then again, two hours gets you one more movie seen before the Academy Awards on Sunday.

• While the art houses are generally holding on to all the nominees, Kendall Square does make room for Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, a documentary about a woman who lived a pretty darn remarkable life, becoming a movie star, fleeing Nazi Germany, and, when her new country put out the call for ideas to help the war effort, she came up with a way to secure radio transmission by shifting frequencies in a way that wasn't practical at the time but which would later become the basis of computer and cellular networks.
• Over at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the only new thing opening up is Mohawk, and that's just for midnight shows on Friday and Saturday. Kind of a bummer, because Ted Geoghegan's follow-up to We Are Still Here is something different, a run-and-gun thriller set against the backdrop of the War of 1812. That's what's late; what's early is 10:30am shows of My Neighbor Totoro on Saturday and Sunday, both dubbed in English. There's also a Goethe-Institut movie on Sunday morning, Wild Mouse, with Josef Hader as a fired music critic getting revenge on his former employers and renovating a roller coaster. On Wednesday, they continue their tribute to Coolidge Award winner Werner Herzog with a 35mm print of Fitzcarraldo. Then on Thursday, they start the annual Francophone Film Festival with two short documentaries from Quebec, "Un Film avec Toi" & "Un Village au Nunavik".
  
  They also switch from showing the Oscar-nominated short documentaries to the live-action shorts and the animated shorts, which also play at the Kendall and The West Newton Cinema, while the ICA has docs on Saturday and the narrative shorts on Sunday.
• Jennifer Lawrence reunites with her Hunger Games sequel director Francis Lawrence (no relation) for Red Sparrow, playing a Russian ballerina recruited to be a seductress/assassin. That one's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport (including Icon-X), South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere. There's also the remake of Death Wish, directed by Eli Roth and starring Bruce Willis in what is being promoted as Willis's big return, because who really wants to advertise it as "angry white man with a gun" in the current climate? It's already been delayed once for that reason, and I guess it's being quietly offloaded at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Fenway also continues Regal's "Best Picture Film Festival", while Boston Common as the second half of their marathon of the nominees on Saturday. There are also screenings of The Dark Crystal at Fenway and Assembly Row on Sunday and Tuesday, while Revere shows Shin Godzilla Friday night and Sixteen Candles on Sunday and Thursday.
• The Chinese New Year stuff keeps chugging on at Boston Common, with Operation Red Sea, Monster Hunt 2, and Detective Chinatown 2 all sticking around and Agent Mr. Chan joining them; that one hails from Hong Kong rather than the mainland, so expect loopy comedy with Dayo Wong as a one-time ladykiller of a spy who is now just a bit past his prime. Jeff Cheung makes his directorial debut after having done a lot of work for Johnnie To and other big-name HK projects.
  
  Over at Apple Fresh Pond, it looks like Padmaavat is on its last week while Sonu ke Titu ki Sweety also continues. The new Bollywood film is Pari, a horror-thriller with Parambrata Chatterjee on his way to an arranged marriage when an auto accident makes his path cross with an abused woman played by Anushka Sharma. They also offer late shows of The Lullaby, an English-language movie from South Africa about a young woman who becomes paranoid and hyper-vigilant soon after giving birth.
• The Brattle Theatre welcome found footage guys Everything Is Terrible for a special show on Friday (that's already sold out) and has their Oscar party on Sunday. Around that, they continue their tribute to cinematographer extraordinaire Roger Deakins: A matinee of Rango (DCP) on Saturday afternoon is followed by a Denis Villeneuve double feature of Sicario (DCP) & Prisoners, shifting to the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? & No Country for Old Men on Monday, and single features the rest of the week: Kundun & Skyfall on Tuesday, The Secret Garden & Passion Fish on Wednesday, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford & Sid and Nancy (DCP) on Thursday. All in 35mm unless otherwise noted.
• The Harvard Film Archive welcomes McMillan-Stewart Fellow Alain Gomis for two free screenings of his films this weekend: His latest, Félicité, plays Friday night, while Aujourd'hui plays on 35mm Saturday. The rest of the weekend wraps up their Agnès Varda retrospective: Separate shows of Documenteur & Jacquot de Nantes (35mm) on Sunday and Happiness on Monday.
• The start of a new month means The Museum of Fine Arts has an "On the Fringe" show - in this case, Miller's Crossing on Friday night - and starts a new calendar generally. The March edition features screenings of David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts (Friday/Wednesday) and Palestinian drama Wajib (Sunday/Thursday), but the bulk of this first week is a repertory program focussing on Femmes Fatales, including Gilda (35mm Friday/Saturday), Double Indemnity (35mm Saturday), Under the Skin (Sunday), Dishonored (35mm Wednesday), La Femme Nikita (Wednesday), and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Thursday).
• The Somerville Theatre has Jonathan Richman on the main stage on Friday, and then the Alloy Orchestra on Saturday, with an unusual double feature - Buster Keaton in The General at 4:30pm and Japanese rarity A Page of Madness at 8pm, the first time they are performing their new score in the Boston area. It means they have just one Sidney Poitier film this week, with The Defiant Ones playing on 35mm Thursday night.
• Bright Lights is off this week for spring break, but ArtsEmerson and the Wicked Queer Cinema Club use the Bright Screening Room at the Paramount Theater to show The Wound on Friday, a Xhosa-language film telling the tale of a forbidden romance contrasted with a traditional ritual.
• CinemaSalem uses their small room for two films apparently not playing elsewhere in the area this week, splitting it between Vietnamese thriller The Housemaid and A Ciambra, an Italian coming-of-age story set in a Romany community.
• For those who want to catch a "cult classic" but don't necessarily feel like they're up to staying up late to do so, The Regent Theatre has The Room at a reasonable 7:30pm on Friday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week, and also welcomes "The MADS from MST3K" for a live show on Saturday evening.

Still got two features and two shorts to catch up on before the Oscars, plus I've not only got tickets the Alloy Orchestra, but I was actually kind of intrigued by Wild Mouse when I walked through the amusement park in Vienna last fall. Which leaves Bombshell, the Chinese films, and Red Sparrow to squeeze in there. Oh, and Skyfall on 35mm!

Happy Chinese New Year, Have a Quasi-Sequel: Operation Red Sea

Under a lot of circumstances, I might not really question how much I enjoyed this sort of gung-ho, pro-military action tale; even though I'm not a violent person, I do love action movies that don't mess around; there's pretty good catharsis in an evil person being blown up and making a conflict physical can heighten a dry debate into something exciting. There's a raw sort of beauty to great action choreography that we can sometimes be loath to admit if we disdain violence in real life.

I lead off with that because I'm actually a little unsure how to process my enjoyment of this in a certain context. This is pretty clearly a recruitment ad for the Chinese military, and, as an American, I don't necessarily want China getting too well-equipped/skilled/confident on that front, and it's kind of weird to be sitting in a theater in Boston and having that message pushed to what turned out to be a reasonably full house, even if the movie itself is mostly pro-China without really being anti-Western in the way that the Wolf Warrior movies are (although, if I were middle-eastern, I suspect I'd give it some side-eye). Still, it was easy enough to look past that and just enjoy the action up until the point where the gore made me squeamish or the sheer volume became too much.

And yet, I feel a bit guilty for enjoying that, considering how I spent a good chunk of the morning I saw the movie on an airplane, reading Liberty's Last Stand by Stephen Coonts, and… Yikes. I've kind of known that the folks who write these sort of military/espionage thrillers are more right-wing than me ever since I started reading them as a teenager and that the gap has only grown wider since then, it's still kind of alarming to see a book by an author I've always liked be so solidly built around conservative paranoia and persecution complexes. I got about 60% done on the flight, so I'll probably finish it, but it's interesting to me that I'm having a lot more trouble putting the politics aside and enjoying the nuts and bolts of the story compared to how well I was able to do that with Operation Red Sea.

Hong hai xing dong (Operation Red Sea)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2017 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)

Give old hand Dante Lam credit - he does not mess around. Less than two years after he had a hit with Operation Mekong, he's got another insanely violent (but impressively mounted) tale of China taking matters into its own hands in theaters, one seem like it may have taken a page not just from actual events but last summer's Wolf Warrior 2 (and why not, since that thing made a billion dollars). It's over-the-top action propaganda like all those movies, but you can't argue Lam doesn't know his way around the material even if he also doesn't exactly know restraint.

It opens with a Jiaolong Marine strike team coming to the aid of a Chinese-flagged freighter that has been boarded by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, a mission that ends successfully but not without casualties. At about the same time, in Casablanca, Chinese-French journalist Xia Nan (Hai Qing) and her assistant Abu have discovered a terrorist conspiracy to build a massive dirty bomb with stolen yellowcake uranium, a trail which leads them to one William Parsons in the country of Yewaire. Yewaire is about to fall apart, becoming dangerous enough for China to evacuate its 130 citizens in the country. Securing this exit falls to the same Jiaolong team - marine captain Yang Rui (Zhang Rui), demolitions expert Xu Hong (Du Jiang), sniper Gu Shun (Huang Jinjyu) and his spotter Li Dong (Yin Fang), gunners "Sitou" Zhang Tiande (Wang Yutian) and Tong Li (Jiang Luxia), comms specialist Zhuang Yu (Henry Prince Mak), and medic Lu Chen (Guo Jiahao) - and while exfiltrating the Chinese nationals in the capital is hard enough, the real challenge will be rescuing the likes of Deng Mei (Huang Fenfen) who work in the interior. Coincidentally, Parsons is one of Deng's co-workers.

That's a lot of people and situations to keep track of, but it's only during an early bit of English-language exposition that the movie really falters, and while that can sometimes be a negative, Lam and his co-writers aren't really going for complicated storytelling here: The story is an excuse for the action and flag-waving, and there is arguably just enough there to justify the military stuff. Lam could have streamlined it even further - you might lose the last big action piece if you removed Xia Nan, but not much else story-wise (which would get the movie down to the two hour mark rather than it dragging a bit at around 140 minutes). Then again, she gives the film a protagonist who can make mistakes, unlike the brave men of the People's Navy - she's not just a civilian, but one with a European background, and while soldiers can fall, it's seldom (if ever) because they screwed up tactically. Lam is careful to show that every potentially questionable mission action is run up the chain of command by the ship's captain (Zhang Hanyu) and commissar (Wang Qiang), with the government of Yewaire - a fictional country standing in for Yemen, where the evacuation that inspired the story took place - not just welcoming the Chinese military but tending to defer to them. As propaganda goes, you're not surprised to see the Navy's slogan and a recruitment video over the end credits, but it's still less ham-fisted than the Wolf Warrior movies.

Full review on EFC